ABSTRACT
THE TASK OF SHOWING how the heroic achievements of the Scandinavian peoples, in agriculture and trade as well as in warfare, enlarged the horizon of civilization, could best be dealt with in a work devoted to the origins of western economy-or so Marc Bloch declared. 1 We shall do well to bear this challenge in mind as we approach that century during which Western Europe was ravaged by the invasions of the Northmen. The economy of Gaul, of Northern Germany and of Great Britain was seriously impaired by them, but it would be a mistake to pay too much attention to the accounts of chroniclers and hagiographers who have exaggerated the destructive role of the invaders, and above all to forget the decisive contribution made to the European economy by those known by the general name of Northmen. They initiated their contemporaries into the art of navigation on the high seas, and as a historian has aptly put it, their essential role consisted in welding the entire Atlantic front of Europe, from the Neva to Gibraltar, into a single navigational bloc. 2
