Some day I plan to collate all the comments I’ve read on the amount of Danegeld and other money accumulated by various Viking raids. In The Vikings, Else Roesdahl provides details on payments to Viking raiders: France: 44,250 pounds gold and silver during 9th century – from context I think this is from the Frankish […]
Consider there was no secure way to store wealth in the time of the Vikings. There were no banks, no marketable securities, no way to establish reliable title to land. In essence, there was no store of value other than bullion or coins. So, if you had a huge amount of wealth beyond your livestock […]
With a shield held in front of you, the most valuable and most exposed area to be protected is your head. Helmets were in used during the entire Roman Era, as well as routinely used by their predecessors and opponents. Researchers have identified five major types of helmets, with large number of subtypes for each. […]
Pay for a legionnaire soldier in the Roman army increased substantially over time, from 225 denarii a year around the turn of the millenium to 600 denarri in the early 200s. The amount of silver in a denarii was also steadily reduced over that same time. That is called inflation, which as we know from other […]
Another indication of average pay for Roman foot soldiers can be found in Wikipedia’s article Imperial Roman Army. This pay rate applied during the reigns of Emperors Augustus and Vespasian, which means until about 81 A.D. After that point, debasement of the currency led to inflation and rising pay for soldiers. More on that later. […]
For some specific data points on hostage payments, tributes, and bribes paid to the Vikings, check out Janet Nelson’s chapter 2, The Frankish Empire of The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, edited by Peter Sawyer. On page 37, she lists some specific tributes and ransoms paid out of the Frankish Empire during the 9th […]
Comments I’ve accumulated from a few other books fit well with the previous post Background on Viking Age – money, trading centers – 2 of 5 In Vikings: Raiders, Traders, and Masters of the Sea on page 99, Rodney Castleden explains much of the trade carried out by Vikings was in barter. For example, swapping […]
In terms of economic life, Viking Age: Everyday life during the extraordinary era of the Norsemen, by Kirsten Wolf, points out geography affected the size of settlements. On the coasts of Denmark and Sweden there were villages, meaning a group of three or more farms. In contrast, across most of Norway, the interior of Sweden, […]
Previous post explored a comment by Eric Metaxas in his book, Martin Luther, The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World, that the first printing of Luther’s translation of the New Testament cost half a gulden for an unbound copy and a gulden for a bound copy. In that post I calculated that the […]