Over a period of about 200 years, beginning in the late eighth century and ending in the eleventh, a warrior civilization emerged among the pagan clans of the farthest northern wildernesses of Europe, and transformed a substantial part of the human race. These were the Vikings, and at the height of their power, their physical presence as traders, explorers and conquerers extended from Baghdad to the eastern seaboard of North America. As their ventures abroad evolved from small scale raids to wars of conquest and settlement, they merged with the populations they overran and birthed entire new peoples: the Normans of northern France, the Russians, and the English.

Before the Viking Age, there was a distinct regional culture in what would later become Scandinavia. First and foremost, the peoples of Denmark, Sweden and Norway were united in a common occult belief system which we would now somewhat inaccurately call a “religion.” But there was not a Scandinavian nation, nor a Swedish, Danish or Norwegian one. These polities weren’t even kingdoms yet. But by the time the Vikings passed from historical view, scattered and absorbed into the various nascent medieval empires of Europe, their homelands were well on their way to becoming what we would come to know as “countries,” as were the foreign lands they had taken for themselves.

The Viking story is one lens through which we can view the emergence of the modern nation-state. It’s a useful heuristic because it was short, discrete and pronounced. The social engines that drove it appear in something like bas-relief against the long and complex background of medieval European history. It is conducive, intellectually, to being reduced to three variables: violence, trade, and religion.

Of the three, violence is perhaps the most fundamental. Indeed, it’s what separated what Western Europeans experienced as the arrival of “the Vikings” from their earlier, long-standing interactions with the people of the North who would come to assume that name. One of the earliest acts of wanton, predatory violence by Norsemen was the pillage and destruction of a monastery on the Holy Island of Lindesfarne off of Northumbria in what is now England. “Behold,” wrote the English cleric Alcuin, “the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as prey to pagan peoples.”

The victims of the Viking massacre at Lindesfarne knew the people who had come to kill them. They had traded with them before. Indeed, it was likely from such trading expeditions that the Norsemen had come to know of the wealth to be plundered from the monastery, and its vulnerability to attack.

What accounted for this sudden, radical change of behavior, from peaceful traders to bloodthirsty butchers and robbers? The answer lay in the North, specifically, on the west coast of Norway. A rising new elite was emerging there, whose power was based not on control of land nor on bloodline — they had neither — but on their domination of the seas. They were, essentially, pirates, but their ambitions were reflected in the name the locals gave them: the sea-kings.

Where the kings of the European continent battled one another for control of land and the right to exploit the peasants who worked it, in Scandinavia, where arable land was scarce, an enterprising warrior could find surer and more lucrative prospects by setting sail for one of the many largely undefended settlements of the lands to their west, south, and east.

One might object here that violence was not an end in itself, but a means to another end: the accumulation of treasure. The desire for wealth, not violence, was thus the principal social engine driving the process of state formation. But that would be to ignore what underpinned that hunger for wealth in the first place. The medieval kings were not hedonists, pining after lives of comfort and luxury. That would come later, with the emergence of court society and absolutist rule. Rather, they sought treasure with which to pay their armies, erect fortifications, build ships, purchase weapons and engage in years-long military campaigns.

Wealth, in other words, was the means by which warlords accumulated the capacity for violence, rather than the other way around. Violence, as the ultimate foundation of all forms of power, was the guarantor of the security of one’s kingdom.

This is what drove the expansionism of the Vikings, as it did the expansionism of all of the noble warlords of Europe and the world over. As Norbert Elias describes in The Civilizing Process, the constant state of warfare that the competition between kings necessarily produced yielded the conditions for the consolidation of power in the state. As petty kings won battles, turning rivals into vassals, annexing their fiefs and agglomerating them into the victors’ expanding domains, their realms grew, individually, larger and, collectively, less numerous. A thousand principalities became, over the centuries, hundreds, and then dozens. Finally, a handful of vast territories, each united under one crown, faced each other: Spain, France, England, Denmark, Russia, Austria, Prussia. The machinery of governance advanced within these kingdoms, meeting the ever-more-challenging needs to administer huge and sprawling populations of subjects, to tax them and to raise them into armies. Kingdoms became nation-states.

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But there were other forces at work, too. Murder, rape and plunder weren’t the only activities the Vikings were engaged in. They also wanted to trade.

As far back as the ninth century, the Rus’ — the Vikings of the east who would become the Russian people — traveled as far as Baghdad, which they reached on camelback, to trade. Some of them even spoke Arabic. These far-flung trading routes reflected the imperative of commerce to the Scandinavian economy and political system.

Trade was driven by the same domestic demand that spurred raiding: the material wealth required for political competition among the sea-kings and other elites back home in Scandinavia. And, in fact, the two were so closely related as to be essentially the same activity carried out through different means. Sometimes, trade exposed the Vikings to the targets they would later pillage, as at Lindesfarne, or, on a much bigger scale, Paris. And the fruit of the Vikings’ raids was also their principal trading commodity: slaves.

Trading, raiding, or a combination of the two established Viking colonies throughout Europe that developed into proto-nation-states. One of them was the French province of Normandy; another was the English region of the Danelaw. When the Normans invaded England from the south in 1066, in the same year that the Norwegians invaded it from the northeast, the victory of the former represented the Scandinavian diaspora’s conquest over the one place left in England that the Vikings had failed to defeat and occupy: the kingdom of Wessex.

In the East, too, both trade and violence spread Scandinavian genes and culture alike throughout Europe. “Rus’” is derived from the Old Norse word for “rowers,” and it likely described the Scandinavian traders who rowed down the Baltic coast and onto the rivers that brought them into Ukraine and to the Black Sea, on their way to Constantinople. They both raided and traded on these routes, and eventually settled in points along them, producing a diaspora, just as they did in the realms of the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons. That eastern diaspora merged with the indigenous Slavic population to become Russians and Ukrainians, both of which, as the decades became centuries, evolved into nation-states in their own right, if just tenuously in the latter case.

Trade also brought foreigners to Scandinavia. Indeed, most of the reliable historical records of Viking culture come from outsiders, including Arab Muslims and Jews. Traders also brought to the Vikings the cultural influence — or contagion, depending on where you stand on the matter — of Christianity.

The earliest Christian converts in Sweden were merchants who did business with their counterparts in the Frankish empire. Likewise, the first communities to adopt the new religion were located in trading villages. Alongside them, the Norsemen learned of Christianity from the raiders who brought it back from Christian lands along with the rest of their plunder, and from captured priests and other slaves.

The Scandinavian pagans resisted Christian conversion for three centuries; indeed, their raids of their Christian neighbors can be read in part as a defense against the encroachment of the Carolingian Empire and the strange evangelical faith tied to it. But ultimately, as in Rome, Christianity prevailed because it was useful to the region’s rulers.

For one thing, as in other polytheistic societies, they regarded the Christian God not as a replacement for their traditional deities, but as a powerful addition to them, who could bring them yet more fortune and glory. And Christianity had other things to offer them, foremost, divine sanction of their right to rule, a political blessing that Odin had only ever offered to those who could claim direct descendence from him. It also provided them with a doctrine that empowered them to regulate the everyday lives of the people they governed. And lastly, it afforded them entry into the club of great powers in Europe that, by now, were almost entirely united under the Vatican. Christianity was a new form of power, one that had been shaped over centuries by Christian kings, with the help of the church, to bolster their reign.

Curiously, it was the religious unification of Europe that paved the way for the secular rationalism of the modern nation-state. The primacy the Reformation put on the separation of church and state, in order to break the political power of the Catholic church and afford Protestant dissenters a measure of religious liberty, freed political leaders to govern according to the rational needs of the administrative bureaucracy, without the messiness of doctrinal disputes that had torn the continent apart for more than a millennium. And as Max Weber has taught us, modernity was not possible without bureaucratic rationality; the two are basically synonymous.

The conversion of the Scandinavian rulers, as they transformed themselves into monarchs, spelled the end of the Viking Age. Europe was becoming an entirely new kind of system: one of sovereign countries with defined borders and novel principles of political legitimacy. The Vikings accelerated the development of that system even as they were carried along by its currents. In the end, the transformation was so complete that their distant descendants, from Kiev to Dublin, are barely conscious of the gossamer threads of their common ancestry. Beginning about a half millennium ago, they became new peoples, divided by national boundaries but united in their broad set of values and political philosophies. This was the age of the nation-state, and the birth of its subject, the modern citizen. It is the world that made us.

Recommended reading:

Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price

Dominion by Tom Holland

Feudal Society, Vol. 1 by Marc Bloch