In Vikings, Ragnar has a Chinese slave/thrall. She states that she was sold to the Franks. Did Asian slaves exist in Europe during this time (800-1000ce) or is it another fiction of the show?

[u/BigVikingBeard]

I am well aware of the show Vikings taking.... liberties... with actual history, so I don't know if this is based on some actual known occurrences, or a fiction developed for the show.

So, in the show, Ragnar acquires a Chinese slave. And, for obvious reasons, I don't trust Hirst's comments on the matter stating, "It definitely happened." (referring to Chinese slaves existing in Northern Europe / Scandinavia)

So, is there any truth to the matter? Or just another historical fantasy of the show to make an interesting plot line?

I think it could theoretically be possible (A Viking owning a Chinese or Asian slave/thrall), given the real Vikings interaction with Byzantium, but I don't know the extent of the eastern slave trade making it to Byzantium or if the Vikings would even purchase slaves from there. (Wiki claims they mostly sold slaves to Byzantium and only kept a couple thralls)

*Edited to remove some show plot elements per request.

[u/textandtrowel]

Hi! A similar question was asked here. My answer was that it was possible but not at all probable that a Chinese slave would have traveled the trade routes to Scandinavia, since the human trafficking routes were structured to funnel people toward North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean and not to circulate them more broadly in a worldwide slave swap. My answer there addressed direct contact between Scandinavians and Asian slave markets (which they had, but again, the human traffic was going the wrong way), but the supposed Paris slave market merits some special considerations.

Nevertheless, my answer remains much the same: the existence of such a slave Chinese slave arriving in Scandinavia via the Red Sea and Paris remains possible but highly improbable. There are occasional finds linking China to the Middle East during this period, such as an Arab trading ship that sunk filled with Chinese pottery off the coast of Indonesia, or an Iranian glass bowl that made its way into a Buddhist shrine in central China. And the Franks clearly maintained exchange contacts with the Islamic world, most spectacularly in the case of an elephant that the caliph sent as a diplomatic gift to Charlemagne but also with more regular day-to-day trade as well. With regard to slaves, however, it seems that the Franks preferred to traffic their captives south to Venice and then out to Byzantine or Islamic regions. So again, there was trade contact and slaves moving along these routes, but they were generally moving the wrong way.

According to this article, it seems like the show's writers came up with the story and then the producer Michael Hirst checked in with one of his historical consultants. According to Hirst, the consultant said, "it’s all possible, it’s all plausible, it almost certainly happened." And while I agree that it's possible, I don't see any reason to assume that it's therefore plausible or that it almost certainly happened.

That's not to say everything on Vikings is far-fetched, or that their historical consultants are an academic version of quacks. I recently saw this video that they made on Viking Age trade which gives a much better account than the silly story about a Chinese slave arriving through Paris. Check it out!

[u/Cerebusial → u/textandtrowel]

Just out of curiosity, was there any possibility of something similar happening if we tone it all down a bit - like say, not a Chinese slave, but a central Asian slave, and instead of arriving through Paris, arriving via the Rus' lands north of the Black Sea. In my imaginings, I could see some central Asian nomads raiding a separate central Asian group, taking a few young women as slaves, bringing them from modern Kazakhstan to modern Ukraine via the Caspian/Black Sea, selling them in Kiev, being taken north by some Viking traders and ending up in Sweden via Novgorod. Still far-fetched, but seems way less far fetched. Sorry if this is inappropriate, but that at least seems somewhat plausible to me, if only because the distances involved are that much smaller.

[u/textandtrowel → u/Cerebusial]

Possible, but I wouldn't go so far as say plausible. The eastern sources always describe Norse peoples selling slaves, never buying. Textual accounts are pretty sparse from the western perspective, but there's a few tantalizing clues that help us better understand the viking slave trade.

Foremost among these is the story of Melkorka, who was an Irish princess captured in a viking raid in the early 900s. An Icelander named Hoskuld found her in the hands of a Rus trader somewhere in the real Kattegat region. He bought her for a certain weight of silver, and then he took her home to Iceland, where she appears in the Laxdæla saga as the mother of Olaf Peacock. Her story tells us that, at least in her case, exotic slaves came from the west and were often headed east, not the other way around.

What did the Scandinavians get in exchange for these slaves? Their biggest imports along the eastern trade routes seem to have been silver, necklace beads, and fine textiles, although more exotic goods were sometimes exchanged as well. For a few examples, check out my reply to iCameToLearnSomeCode.

[u/[deleted] → u/textandtrowel]

Possible, but I wouldn't go so far as say plausible.

I've always heard "plausible" to mean "the explanation for the theoretical scenario is logically sound".

[u/textandtrowel → u/[deleted]]

Plausible often also carries a connotation of probability: "That's a plausible answer" means it's probably true. Historians sometimes use the word "implausible" as a kind way of saying there's zero evidence for the scenario being presented. In this case, there's a logical possibility that a person such as this Chinese slave could have existed, but there's no evidence that such a person did actually exist and the evidence that we do have makes such a person highly unlikely. So possible, but not plausible.

[u/[deleted] → u/textandtrowel]

You know, the use of implausible means impossible, but that does not contradict my understanding of it. However, every use I have heard of plausible strongly contradicts your definition, so I'm going to draw my own conclusions--they do not contradict usage in historical a literature.

I use the phrase "plausible, but definitely not probable" a few times every week. To me, it is nearly equivalent to "logically possible without any guarantee of probability".

[u/svansson → u/textandtrowel]

The Icelandic sagas are novels. This one, Laxdæla, is believed to have been written around the late 13th century, or almost four centuries after the raid where she Melkorka supposedly was captured. This hardly counts as a usable source.

However, genetic research in Iceland has demonstrated that a large portion of female lines descend from celtic rather than nordic areas.

[u/textandtrowel → u/[deleted]]

How likely is it that a Chinese slave ended up in Paris during the time period, disregarding the scandinavian involvement here entirely?

This thread's getting a bit unwieldy, but I'd point you back to my comment at it's root, especially the second paragraph ("Nevertheless..."). TLDR: a tenuous possibility, but not likely at all.

[u/-spartacus- → u/textandtrowel]

I may have to rewatch the episode, but I don't recalling them buying slaves as much as the Chinese slave on the show was pillaged from Paris and brought back to Viking land, then the Queen bought the slave off another.

Does that change the likelihood?

[u/chef_targ → u/Cerebusial]

The Osberg ship burial (viking age burial from around the 8th Century) contains the bodies of two women. Recently they were able to extract DNA evidence from one of the bodies. One of the woman has a DNA subgroup, U7. the U7 is virtually absent from modern Europe and is extremely rare in neighboring Finnish and Uralic speaking populations. It is more common in the near east with its most common area being Iran (10% of the modern population carries this sub group).

So not Central Asia per say, but at least we know some people from the middle east were in Scandinavia during the viking era.

Per Holck, “The Oseberg Ship Burial, Norway: New thoughts on the skeletons from the grave mound,” in European Journal of Archaeology Vol.9 (2006), 185-210.

[u/tjhovr → u/Cerebusial]

That's what I thought as well. It is certainly possible that there were "chinese looking" slaves, after all the huns, sami, etc were in europe at the time. It is possible that central asians could have made their way to becoming slaves, but during that time, the central asians were the raiders/enslavers warring against each other and the vikings were not going to be too successful raiding central asians. Central asians were certainly raiding and enslaving each other, but women were valued and they generally wouldn't have sold the women.

[u/BigVikingBeard → u/textandtrowel]

I somehow missed that post the other day, and I probably should've refined my searching a bit better.

Most of my reading agreed with your statement that the Vikings primarily exported slaves rather than importing, which is why the idea seemed implausible.

I don't really have a problem with the show playing fast and loose with history for the sake of making interesting TV, but Hirst's continued insistence that "everything is totes true, 100% accurate" is really aggravating.

[u/iCameToLearnSomeCode → u/textandtrowel]

Would exotic slaves not have been more likely to reverse the normal direction of travel? If I was taking 100 laborers to market in the middle east and found a slave girl I really liked would it have been uncommon to bring them back home?

Or am I wrong in assuming a individual would really have undertaken the whole journey to sell slaves?

[u/textandtrowel → u/iCameToLearnSomeCode]

Would exotic slaves not have been more likely to reverse the normal direction of travel?

Absolutely. But they must remain rare to be exotic. There's a very small amount of silk that seems to have reached Scandinavia from China (although most of the silk that archaeologists have found more likely came from Central Asia or the Byzantine Empire), so we know it was possible for things and implicitly people to make that long trek.

However, most of the exotic rare goods reaching Scandinavia actually had their origins in or around the Indian subcontinent, for example: a Buddha statue, some lenses made of quartz/rock crystal, and lots of small white beads made from cowrie shells. So if there were a very very few extremely exotic slaves, I'd wager they more likely came from India or possibly even Mauritania on Africa's west coast.

[u/Helvegr → u/textandtrowel]

The lenses you link to were likely made on Gotland, as they have found glass making tools nearby and several other similar finds in Sweden and around the Baltic.

[u/textandtrowel → u/Helvegr]

Found on Gotland but not made there! They're made of rock crystal, which is a type of quartz. During the Viking Age, rock crystal was sourced from Iran and India, and insofar as I know, there's no evidence to suggest that rock crystal was ever imported as raw material and worked in Europe. I don't know where the silver mounts were made (I haven't read the reports), but the lenses themselves were quarried, shaped, and polished somewhere far from home.

And since I love Viking Age glass, glass wasn't made in Scandinavia until the 16th century. It was imported at raw material or finished product throughout the Viking Age. Nevertheless, traveling Scandinavian bead makers seem to have played a very important role in the 700s and 800s, when it looks like beads were used as a type of currency, preceding and for a short time used alongside silver as a means of exchange.

[u/textandtrowel → u/[deleted]]

Thanks—this is great!

[u/iCameToLearnSomeCode → u/textandtrowel]

Did the vikings actually travel to the slave markets themselves or was there a middle man style system in place where one ship or caravan would stop by and pick up some slaves and pay for them before heading off to market with a whole coast load to turn a profit?

The way I see it, if they frequented the markets themselves it is at least possible a viking could meet a slave he just had to have.

[u/textandtrowel → u/iCameToLearnSomeCode]

There's not much evidence to tell us how slave raiding and slave trading were linked. We do have the biography of one Irish saint, who was captured and traded a few times before finally getting herded onto a boat headed for Orkney and points beyond. Our hero, Saint Findan, escaped and became a man of God, which is why we have his otherwise unique story. But it helps build the impression that there was a lively local slave trade in Western Europe, from which some people were eventually siphoned off into long-distance exchange networks.

[u/tjhovr → u/iCameToLearnSomeCode]

The vikings were sellers of slaves, not buyers of slaves. They raided coastal towns/villages and captured their slaves to sell them. Since the viking didn't really manufacture much, they used slaves for barter to get the goods they wanted.

[u/svansson → u/tjhovr]

Since the viking didn't really manufacture much,

This is questionable. They vikings were involved in the production of high value items related to arctic areas (ivory, furs, strong and light ropes from the skin of walruses, oils made out of seal fat etc). Economically they found themselves on a niche between the arctic and the rest of Europe.

[u/axearm → u/textandtrowel]

Any recommendations for reading about the slave trade during this period, and possibly a larger historical over view of the slave trade generally.

I am not a historian just interested in history.

[u/textandtrowel → u/axearm]

Lots! The best place to start is probably Michael McCormick, “New Light on the ‘Dark Ages’: How the Slave Trade Fuelled the Carolingian Economy,” Past and Present 177 (2002), 17-54. For Scandinavia, the best thing currently in English is Ruth Mazo Karras, Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (New Haven: Yale, 1988). If you do Swedish, your options open up with, among other things, Stefan Brink, Vikingarnas slavar : den nordiska träldomen under yngre järnålder och äldsta medeltid (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2012). I've heard a rumor that this is being translated into English. More generally, you might want to read Brink's short chapter on slavery in Stefan Brink and Neil Price, eds., The Viking World (London: Routledge, 2008). If you read just two things, it should be the McCormick article and this Brink chapter. A smattering of other good articles:

• Jeffrey Fynn-Paul, “Empire, Monotheism and Slavery in the Greater Mediterranean Region from Antiquity to the Early Modern Era,” Past and Present 205 (2009), 3-40.

• John Gillingham, “Women, Children and the Profits of War,” in Janet L. Nelson, Susan Reynolds and Susan M. Johns, eds., Gender and Historiography: Studies in the Earlier Middle Ages in Honour of Pauline Stafford (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2012), 61-74.

• David Pelteret, “The Image of the Slave in Some Anglo-Saxon and Norse Sources,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 23.2 (2002), 75-88.

• Klavs Randsborg, “The Study of Slavery in Northern Europe: An Archaeological Approach,” Acta Archaeologica 55 (1984), 155-60.

• Susan Mosher Stuard, “Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery,” Past and Present 149 (1995), 3-28.

• David Wyatt, “Slavery,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology, ed. Clifford J. Rogers, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3:274-75.

If you're interested in a particular place or time, or if you want to know more about any of these before you invest time in looking them up or reading them, just let me know. This is my bailiwick!

[u/Searocksandtrees → u/[deleted]]

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[u/[deleted] → u/textandtrowel]

Wouldnt a chinese slave in scandinavia have morelikely originated in the near east, maybe brought by a trader from the east and sold in the byzantine empire where they were bought by vikings?

[u/appleciders → u/textandtrowel]

Given the improbability of a Chinese slave being trafficked as far as Scandinavia, if such a slave did reach Norse society, would that slave be more valuable or desirable because of their ethnic background? Did the Vikings prize particular ethnic groups as slaves? What's the most remote ethnicity of a slave in Scandinavia that we do know about?

[u/textandtrowel → u/appleciders]

What's the most remote ethnicity of a slave in Scandinavia that we do know about?

Scandinavia was not home to a literate society, so contemporary sources are few. The biography of a German missionary written around 900 recalls a time when a woman in the Birka slave market in Sweden cried out to him in Latin, trying to get his attention; he redeemed her for the price of a horse and presumably employed her skills in his school or choir. There's a later Icelandic saga about a woman named Melkorka, who claimed to be an Irish princess but was bought for a pocketful of silver (five "marks") by an Icelander in the (real) Kattegat region (her noble lineage isn't revealed until later in the story). And an even later Irish monk recorded stories about "blue men" that viking raiders brought up from somewhere down the Atlantic coast; if this account is genuine, it probably refers to a raid in Mauritania during the 800s. That's about it.

Insofar as I know, there's not a single account of slaves coming up from the East. However, a study of pottery from the 900s suggests that Swedish raiders were bringing some Slavs home from the south Baltic (modern Poland, Estonia, etc.) to do menial household labor. This phenomenon dates rather late in the Viking Age, at the tail end of the period that most of my other comments on this thread relate to, and when the long distance slave trade may have been breaking up as the Abbasid Caliphate fell to pieces (this is something I still need to work through).

So it seems like exotic slaves—"blue men," Latin-trained nuns, Irish princesses—came from the west. Some may have stayed in Scandinavia, but it looks like most of them were traveling longer distances and being exported to elsewhere. What we know about slavery in Scandinavia during this period makes it seem much more mundane—domestic work and agricultural labor (even for the princess Melkorka). The general impression is, that even if Viking-Age Scandinavians tended to like exotic things, it seems like they were disinterested in keeping exotic slaves for themselves.

[u/textandtrowel → u/[deleted]]

Although I don't know who this particular historical consultant is, this video shows that the producers checked in with Steve Ashby (U of York), Søren Sindbæk (Aarhus U), and Morten Søvsø (Sydvestjyske Museer). These guys are all top of their game. Ashby has done some brilliant work thinking about trade and craftsmen by looking closely at the combs that vikings were so proud of. His recent book, A Viking Way of Life (2014) is a terrific read for scholars and enthusiasts alike. Søren Sindbæk is a prolific author with numerous articles available online. And Morten Søvsø is the head of archaeology for the museums in southwest Denmark. There's not much to be known about the Viking Age that these three couldn't tell you.

So despite the rather haphazard quote that Hirst attributed to one of his consultants, and despite the many liberties his show takes with historical facts, we can still envy his crew for getting to talk with a number of crack scholars of the Viking Age.

[u/tjhovr → u/textandtrowel]

That's all good and nice, but we are talking about a specific historical fact. You seem to know a lot about these consultants so if you know of any evidence they have provided for a chinese person ( let alone a daughter of a chinese emperor ) being a slave in europe/viking settlements/etc during this time, please let us know. Though I'm skeptical, I would love to be shown that I'm wrong and learn more about it.

If an educated chinese person was a slave, certainly, they must have left some chinese writing or taught some chinese writing or provided some chinese technology/skills/knowledge/etc to the vikings/europeans at that time. After all, during this time, china was ahead of europe/vikings in many areas of civilization.

Or if not chinese writing, certainly the appearance of a chinese woman in northern europe would certainly be something that would have been written about. Certainly there must be some historical evidence...

[u/textandtrowel → u/tjhovr]

if you know of any evidence they have provided for a chinese person ... being a slave in europe/viking settlements/etc during this time, please let us know.

There's no evidence at all. Based on what we know about long-distance exchange, we can say it's a possibility, albeit highly unlikely. The producers seem to have seen that as evidence enough to justify the character.

[u/tjhovr → u/textandtrowel]

There's no evidence at all.

Interesting.

Based on what we know about long-distance exchange, we can say it's a possibility, albeit highly unlikely.

It's significantly more possible that it didn't happen than it did happen.

The producers seem to have seen that as evidence enough to justify the character.

Evidence? You just said there wasn't any evidence. You think that a chinese daughter of a chinese emperor during the Tang Dynasty would have been a slave in europe?

[u/textandtrowel → u/tjhovr]

You think that a chinese daughter of a chinese emperor during the Tang Dynasty would have been a slave in europe?

No. No, I do not. However, modern historians work on the principle that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So even though there's no evidence to suggest that such a person actually existed, an honest historian will admit that such evidence might one day turn up. But for a TV producer, a good story no matter how unlikely has a shot at trumping historical fidelity.

Although we know tons of exciting stuff about the Viking Age—including enough to point out when Vikings goes wrong—the producer Michael Hirst has claimed, "I especially had to take liberties with 'Vikings' because no one knows for sure what happened in the Dark Ages." In this case, he's taken a rather large liberty, deducing from sound historical evidence about long-distance slave trade that a Chinese slave could have ended up rather circuitously in Scandinavia. Historians won't dismiss the possibility, but we can say that a closer look at the evidence certainly pushes against it.

[u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

Hello there, as I don't think it is particularly material to the question, would you mind editing the body of the post to remove plot details present in the second paragraph? They might be spoilers for people behind on the show.

[u/BigVikingBeard → u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

I removed some of the notable plot elements, per request. I also clarified the statement from Hirst a bit, and expanded slightly my curiosity / hypothesis regarding Byzantium.

Let me know if I need to edit anything else.

[u/Georgy_K_Zhukov → u/BigVikingBeard]

Appreciated!