Vikings and the Slave Trade

Vikings were Norse explorers who traveled around the waters of the North Atlantic raiding, trading, pirating, and colonizing lands wherever their boats could travel. They are historically known as a rough group of individuals with raucous personalities and innate brutality. They are credited with having been the first to discover the New World and to have reached locations which had not seen foreign invaders before the arrival of the Vikings. Between the 8th and 11th centuries AD, Norsemen and their Viking warriors traveled far and wide, forever changing history in Scandinavia and the rest of Europe and North America as well.[footnoteRef:1] One of the commodities the Vikings traded in was people. The Viking slave-traders were prolific in their activities, capturing people when they invaded and then selling them. More than any other commodity, slaves were how the Vikings were able to trade for goods and...
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