The Viking Island
How Salt May Have Motivated the Vikings’ Westward Raids
Introduction To How Salt May Have Motivated the Vikings’ Westward Raids
From economic causes to social and political ones, historians and archeologists worldwide have put a great deal of energy into exploring the question of what may have caused the so-called Viking Age. One theory centers on the idea that the Vikings had to leave in search of specific resources, such as enslaved people, wine, and salt, to remain competitive in a shifting economic landscape at home. No one argues that acquiring portable wealth–defined as easily transportable goods of value–was the end goal of those who left Scandinavia to rove in the early Viking Age. What is less clear is what kinds of portable wealth they valued the most and how much certain kinds of portable wealth might have motivated them to take the risk of sailing to faraway places to acquire them.
The Salt Hypothesis proposes that the Vikings’ early westward expansion–defined as the first thirty or so years of Viking activity in Western France and the British Isles–was in part driven by one particular form of wealth that motivated them to travel farther and take greater risks than the others. As the title suggests, that form of portable wealth was salt. Unlike silver, enslaved people, and wine, which the Vikings could acquire closer to home, high-quality salt had to be acquired in southwestern France since the inland salt mines at Saltzburg were unattainable due to the Carolingian embargo on trade with Scandinavia.
In the following article, I will lay out the case for salt as a motivating factor for some of the earliest Viking raids. I will start by establishing the Viking Age Scandinavian need for, and lack of access to, salt. I will then explore the not-so-coincidental correlation between the Vikings’ earliest raids and the monastic trade networks present in France and the British Isles. Finally, I will discuss new research on establishing the herring trade in the baltic states that has breathed new life into the Salt Hypothesis and bring all the research into a cohesive narrative of salt’s potential role in the early phases of the so-called Viking Age.
I want to make clear at the outset that in no way am I proposing salt may have served as anything resembling a trigger event for the start of the so-called Viking Age. Attempts to define a single catalyst or trigger event have all proved unfruitful. A 2010 paper by the archeologist James Barrett called such attempts “unrealistic” and proposed the start of the Viking Age could only be defined by combining numerous factors into a broader, more general theory. I completely agree with that viewpoint. The Salt Hypothesis does not claim that the exploitation of salt in France was anything close to a catalyst but rather a phenomenon that emerged within the context of other longue-durée causes. To learn more about these longue-durée causes, check out my article titled What Caused the Viking Age.
Initially, I set out to answer three questions: why did the Vikings attack the monastery of St. Philbert on the island of Noirmoutier, off the coast of France; why so early (they sacked it in 799); and why so frequently (they supposedly returned every year for 30 years)? This article will focus on a localized portion of the Viking Age but also make some broader connections that, ultimately, still need to be fleshed out.
As a former school teacher, I feel compelled to provide the following disclaimer for this article: This is not an academic paper; it’s a blog. While the material will feel academic (because I do publish academic papers) and is inspired by academic research, this article is meant for public consumption and entertainment. If you are a high school or college student looking to cite some of the material in this article, please get in touch with me first so I can help you with the material and citations you are looking to use. Those of you looking to dive deeper into this topic will find the bulk of my citations for my research in my selected bibliography.
History of The Salt Hypothesis
Around 1946, the salt producers of the island of Noirmoutier in France went bankrupt. Soon, the entire industry collapsed. Today, that same salt production has seen a revival of sorts by local artisans looking to make a quick profit off tourists, but the commercial exports of the past have ceased to exist. Why did the salt industry in one of the most lucrative salt-producing parts of the world collapse in the middle of the twentieth century? Because Scandinavia, their primary market, developed refrigeration.
The sudden evaporation of the salt industry in the Southern Brittany region of France ushered in the end of two millennia of violent, bloody history over a resource that, until seventy-five years ago, was considered one of the most precious commodities in the world. Since Roman times, the island of Noirmoutier, though remote and rugged to access, interested the various emperors, kings, clerics, and chieftains who controlled the region not for who lived there but for what they could make. One such party was the Vikings.
The Salt Hypothesis has its roots in a mystery. In 799 A.D., according to the monk Alcuin, the islands of Aquitaine, which include the island of Noirmoutier, were attacked by pagans. Historians have debated ad infinitum whether these so-called pagans were Vikings or if they might have been Saracens from Spain. The modern consensus is that the pagani were Vikings, further reinforced by later overt mentions of Nordmanni, who carried out similar acts. Thus started what the Breton historian Jean-Christophe Cassard called the Century of the Vikings in Brittany. For the next thirty years, the Vikings repeatedly raided the island of Noirmoutier for its monastery, Saint Philibert.
A letter written in 819 by Abbott Arnulf of Saint Philibert complained of “frequent and persistent raids.” They occurred so frequently that the monks who resided there fled to a satellite priory on the continent every spring and summer before returning in winter. A charter from 830 echoes the seasonal nature of the raids, which led to a fortification of the monastery. Nowhere else in Christendom did the Vikings return at such regular intervals, which has begged the question: Why? What did they find so alluring about the island? Especially after the monks started to abandon it in spring, taking their portable wealth with them?
The idea that salt may have attracted the Vikings to the region is well known. French historians have searched for decades for evidence to show that salt played a vital role in the Viking invasions of Western France and Brittany. Dr. Stephen Lewis published a paper in 2016 that best summarizes the scholarship to date. He concludes:
“The theft — maybe even the occasional purchase? — of such a precious commodity as salt, whether for their own use in the preservation of fish and meat, for later on-sale in the many trading towns of the North, or to resell back to the producers, could well have been one of the objectives of their repeated appearances around the mouth of the Loire in the first decades of the ninth century. In the absence of a smoking gun such as a contemporary and reliable Scandinavian or Frankish source telling us, for example, that ‘Danish ships arrived in Hedeby laden with enormous quantities of salt they had pillaged in Noirmoutier’ or that ‘the salt producers of Noirmoutier bought back the salt that the pagans had stolen from them’, the idea of such a salt connection remains a conjecture, yet given all the circumstantial evidence it is, I suggest, a reasonable one.”
Lewis, Stephen M. "Salt and the Earliest Scandinavian Raids in France: Was there a Connection?" Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 12 (2016): 103–136.
Unfortunately, the dearth of archeological and textual evidence for a direct link between the salt trade and the Vikings has left us all wanting. Although plenty of circumstantial evidence does exist, the absence of anything substantive has relegated the entire topic to the reliquary of Viking Age curiosities.
The Salt Hypothesis proposes argues that Lewis’ ‘smoking gun’ may have been found and that the sustained raiding of Noirmoutier in the late eighth and early ninth centuries reflects an early Norse response to structural constraints on the evolving silver economy, specifically the need to acquire high-quality salt to sustain emergent eastward trade in herring to compensate for the inflationary effect of an influx of Islamic silver to Scandinavia.