Towns and trade in viking-age Scandinavia
- ISBN: 9781009298094
- Editorial: Cambridge University Press
- Fecha de la edición: 2024
- Lugar de la edición: Cambridge. Reino Unido
- Encuadernación: Rústica
- Medidas: 24 cm
- Nº Pág.: 300
- Idiomas: Inglés
The Viking Age, from c.750 to 1050 CE, was an era of major social change in Scandinavia. By the end of this period of sweeping transformation, Scandinavia, once a pagan periphery, had been firmly integrated into occidental Europe. Archaeological remains offer evidence of this process, which included and intertwined with Christianisation, state formation, and the dawn of urbanisation in Scandinavia. In this volume, Sven Kalmring offers an interdisciplinary and geographically wide-ranging approach to understanding the emergence of towns and commerce in Viking-age Scandinavia and their eventual demise by the end of the period. Using the towns of Hedeby, Birka, Kaupang, and Ribe as case studies, he also tracks the diverging characteristics of these urban communities against the background of traditional social structures in the Viking world. Instead of tracing the results of Viking Age urbanisation, or mapping that process by establishing economic networks, Kalmring focusses on the very reasons behind the emergence of towns, and their eventual decline.
1. Introduction
2. The Viking-age town: Context and academic debate
3. The Viking world
4. Cult, jurisdiction and markets: Things and regional fairs at traditional centres of power
5. Local society and Viking-age towns
6. An urbanisation based on harbours
7. Jurisdiction and taxes
8. Free trade within narrow boundaries
9. Special economic zones of their time
10. Development after the inception phase
11. Discussion: Hedeby's abandonment and the foundation of Slesvig
12. Summary and conclusions