The viking trading posts and cities

Even before the Viking Age, Scandinavians have contacts around Europe. During the 700s CE, travel increases. Many Scandinavians set sail for trade or for looting. They come into contact with trading cities. In Scandinavia, similar places are being built, along important waterways.

Together, all cities form a trade network. This is Ottar, he lives on a farm in the northernmost part of Norway. He is a farmer. He owns animals, fishes and hunts walruses. He is also a skilled seafarer and trader.

Walruses only live in the Arctic so their tusks are valuable in the trading posts to the south. Ornaments are made from the tusks. Ottar packs his boat with tusks, furs, ropes made of sealskin and much more and departs on a trade trip. After a long voyage along the coast of Norway, he arrives at the trading post Skiringsal. There is a throng of small wooden houses, workshops and smithies.

Houses here are built without any planning or organization. It is crowded and smells of garbage. Fine pots are made here that Ottar buys to resell. He trades for silver coins, but it is not what’s written on them - the denomination - which is important, but what the silver weighs. Ottar therefore has a scale to weigh the silver coins.

A five days sailing trip south from Skiringsal, between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, is Hedeby. The location is very good. Here, you can easily reload boats and access both the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, without having to sail around all of Denmark. Hedeby is the Danish king's trading post and the merchants pay duty in exchange for protection. Traders from all parts of Northern Europe gather here to sell and buy goods and exchange ideas with each other.

For Ottar, it makes a lot of sense to come here. Hedeby is a much larger, more planned trading town than Skiringsal. The houses are located in rows along streets with wooden sidewalks. There is no garbage collection here either, and the stench is actually even worse than in Skiringsal. The city is full of artisans and merchants who offer objects in bone, iron, glass, leather, wool - and a petrified prehistoric resin - amber.

Almost everything is available, even honey and wine. Enslaved people are also sold here - like any other commodity. Ottar sells his walrus tusks and the pots. Here, the value of the silver coins is what is written on them, and not how much the silver weighs. After Hedeby, Ottar sails to England.

Maybe he visits the trading place Ribe in today's Denmark. Harald, who buys the pots from Ottar, sails back home and will on the way pay a visit to the Swedes' trading place, Birka in today´s Sweden. Like Hedeby, Birka is a well-planned city with small alleys and neighborhoods. Merchants come from near and far even though the city is a bit further north. And it smells bad here too!

Birka manufactures, among other things, textiles in wool and linen and objects in metal and animal horns. They trade in salt, iron, furs and amber. Here, too, enslaved people are sold. At first, the people of Birka trade around the Baltic Sea and the West. Later, they trade more with traders who travel to the East, to present-day Russia, Turkey and the Arab countries.

Many Arabic coins find their way to Birka but also a silver ring where "for Allah” is written in Arabic letters. During the Viking Age, a new religion comes to Scandinavia, Christianity. New cities are built and Birka, Hedeby and Skiringsal are abandoned. The new cities, and the wealth that trade and looting create, together with Christianity, become a prerequisite for larger medieval empires. Empires that later become today's Sweden, Denmark and Norway.