Viking-Age Trade
Silver, Slaves and Gotland
Routledge Archaeologies of the Viking World
Jacek Gruszczynski, Marek Jankowiak and Jonathan Shepard
Published by Routledge, 2022
That there was an influx of silver dirhams from the Muslim world into eastern and
northern Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries is well known, as is the fact that the
largest concentration of hoards is on the Baltic island of Gotland. Recent discoveries have
shown that dirhams were reaching the British Isles, too. What brought the dirhams to
northern Europe in such large numbers? The fur trade has been proposed as one driver
for transactions, but the slave trade offers another - complementary - explanation.
This volume does not offer a comprehensive delineation of the hoard finds, or a full
answer to the question of what brought the silver north. But it highlights the trade in
slaves as driving exchanges on a trans-continental scale. By their very nature, the nexuses
were complex, mutable and unclear even to contemporaries, and they have eluded
modern scholarship. Contributions to this volume shed light on processes and key places:
the mints of Central Asia; the chronology of the inflows of dirhams to Rus and northern
Europe; the reasons why silver was deposited in the ground and why so much ended
up on Gotland; the functioning of networks - perhaps comparable to the twenty-first-century
drug trade; slave-trading in the British Isles; and the stimulus and additional
networks that the Vikings brought into play.
This combination of general surveys, presentations of fresh evidence and regional case
studies sets Gotland and the early medieval slave trade in a firmer framework than has
been available before.
Jacek Gruszczynski was a Research Associate at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford
and now works as an archaeology and heritage consultant.
Marek Jankowiak is Associate Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Oxford.
Jonathan Shepard was University Lecturer in Russian History at the University of Cambridge.
(The text above comes from the back of the book)