Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Northeastern England fell to the Vikings in 865, and they held it for several decades. They not only had what is now Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Durham but points south to the town of Bedale on the way to York.
In 2012 archeologists found a silver and gold treasure hoard in Bedale dating to the late 800s and early 900s CE, and an Oxford team has now subjected it to an innovative scientific analysis. To their astonishment, about a third of the silver derived from dirhams, coins from the Abbasid caliphate in the Middle East, with its capital at Baghdad, which was ruled in the late 800s by al-Muʿtamid ʿalā ’llāh, a son of Harun al-Rashid.
- University of Oxford
Kershaw, J., S. Merkel, A. Woods, J. Evans, V. Pashley, and S. Chenery. 2025. The Provenance of Silver in the Viking-Age Hoard From Bedale, North Yorkshire. Archaeometry 1–21. doi.org/10.1111/arcm.70031
They looked at silver ingots and rings using lead isotope and trace element analysis.
The Vikings melted down silver coins and other silver objects into ingots. But this scientific technique can discover the origin of the silver used in this way. While most of the silver came from Western Europe, they say, “Islamic silver is also present in several large ingots: silver from the east -— the product of long-distance trade networks connecting Scandinavia with the Islamic Caliphate —- permeated Viking wealth sources…”
Historians argue about whether the Vikings ran a mere plunder state, sweeping in and conquering territory and then robbing wealth sources like the precious metals stored in churches and monasteries. Lead author Jane Kershaw and her colleagues argue, however, that you don’t get this much Abbasid silver by raids (the Vikings didn’t raid Iraq) and that it showed that the Vikings had an international trade network that contributed significantly to their wealth and power. There was an “eastern route” (austerveg) for trade with Russia and the Middle East. The Vikings sent furs and slaves south and brought silver north. The slaves were called saqaliba in Arabic, or “Slavs.” That Slavs were trafficked in this way is the origin of our English word “slave.” The classic Abbasid account of Viking trade is that of Ahmad ibn Fadlan, which was made into the film The 13th Warrior.
The Viking state was a trading state as well as a conquest state, which helps make sense of their range and power. In their heyday, they held Ireland and Iceland, made forays to the New World, came down to what are now the Portuguese and Spanish coasts, and even sparred with the North African Muslims over Sicily. There may even have been some Muslim Vikings.
While the Viking state was a complex phenomenon, it seems to me striking that it coincided with the medieval warm period in the North Atlantic around 800-1250 CE, which would have made Norway and Sweden, their home turf, more agriculturally productive. Many Vikings were notables with estates in Scandinavia. The subsequent long little ice age would have thrown up economic and transportation difficulties for them that likely contributed to their decline.
(By the way, I wouldn’t have called it “Islamic” silver. “Islamic” has to do with the Muslim religion, as Judaic has to do with the Jewish religion. I’d have called it Mesopotamian silver or Abbasid silver. Not sure we would talk about “Christian silver” from western Europe.)
One group of Bedale ingots, these scholars write, isotopically resemble the metal in recycled Middle Eastern coins that were found on the island of Gotland in Sweden. Incidentally, the Vikings had to refine some of the western European silver because it came from debased coins, showing a poor economy. They never had to refine the Abbasid coinage, which had the high silver content standards you’d expect of a flourishing empire. Most of the dirhams melted down had been Abbasid (the empire’s dates are 750-1258). A small portion came from the previous, Umayyad Empire (661-750). There were even a few silver coins in the mix from the previous, pre-Islamic Sasanian Empire of Iran (!), which suggests that Muslims went on using them after the fall of the Sasanians and the Muslim Arab conquest of Iran in the 600s, and traded them to the Vikings. There may also have been some very high-quality silver coins in the mix from the Central Asian Samanid dynasty of the 800s then based in Samarqand.
The team can now date the influx of silver coinage into Viking realms from the Muslim empires of the Middle East much earlier than had previously been thought. This finding is also a contribution to Abbasid economic history.
They conclude: “The contribution to the hoard of Islamic silver is thus significant. The nine ingots together weigh 715 g, equivalent to some c. 240 dirhams, roughly the total number of dirhams recorded in hoards and as single finds in England to date (Naismith 2005; Kershaw 2017). The Vikings were not only extracting wealth locally; they were also bringing it into England via long-distance trade networks [my emphasis].
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