The voyages and sagas of the vikings are very interesting, but something I find to also be fascinating is the economic and cultural history that brought about the viking age and then several centuries later ended it. It does seem kind of sudden; there was a niche that suddenly caused vikings to travel everywhere, and then it was just over.
I think mainly it was, that they became civilized/baptized and christians were still free to plunder and enslave non christians, but not fellow christians.
So the vikings did not just stop, but rather became crusaders:
"In 1107, Sigurd I of Norway sailed for the eastern Mediterranean with Norwegian crusaders to fight for the newly established Kingdom of Jerusalem; the kings of Denmark and Sweden participated actively in the Baltic Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries"
(But otherwise of course many factors contributed to the rise and fall of the vikings and there indeed seems to have been a niche, with a temporary weakness, no christian nordic fleets etc.)
How are civilized and baptized comparable concepts? The vikings surely had a civilization before christianity took hold and ascribing sone kind of higher ethics to christianity is also quite a stretch.
So the vikings did not just stop, but rather became crusaders:
"In 1107, Sigurd I of Norway sailed for the eastern Mediterranean with Norwegian crusaders to fight for the newly established Kingdom of Jerusalem; the kings of Denmark and Sweden participated actively in the Baltic Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikings
(But otherwise of course many factors contributed to the rise and fall of the vikings and there indeed seems to have been a niche, with a temporary weakness, no christian nordic fleets etc.)
How are civilized and baptized comparable concepts? The vikings surely had a civilization before christianity took hold and ascribing sone kind of higher ethics to christianity is also quite a stretch.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period