Textually Invisible? Emporia on the Southern Shore of the Baltic in Scandinavian Medieval Sources

The present study focuses on early medieval trading places, so-called emporia , along the southern Baltic coast in today’s territories of Schleswig, Mecklenburg, and Pomorze


Introduction
Exchange, hostile conflicts, but also hospitality have connected the populations of the Southern Baltic region since prehistoric times.For the early medieval period (c.400-1000), the most evocative elements of these processes are no doubt the trading places along the Slavic Baltic coast in today's territories of Schleswig, Mecklenburg, and Pomerania of which, at present, sixteen have been identified. 1 Starting with Janów Pomorski as the easternmost point and ending with Hedeby in the west, these places specialising in craft production and trade were being founded from the early eighth century onwards. 2 Whereas such archaeologically well-researched Viking-Age trading sites as Kołobrzeg, Groß Strömkendorf or Wolin form an excellent source for the presence of Scandinavians on the southern shore of the Baltic and their material culture, the sparse 1 These are, starting in the east, Janów Pomorski (Truso), Gdańsk, Puck, Bardy-Świelubie, Kołobrzeg, Kamień Pomorski, Wolin, Szczecin, Usedom, Menzlin, Ralswiek, Rostock-Dierkow, Groß Strömkendorf, Alt Lübeck and Starigard/Oldenburg.In addition to the classification by Hauke Jöns and Sebastian Messal, I am including Hedeny/Schleswig as a vital emporium in the Slavic territory.See: Hauke Jöns and Sebastian Messal, "Neue Forschungen zur Struktur mittelalterlicher Hafenanlagen an der südwestlichen Ostseeküste," in: Economies, Monetisation and Society in the West Slavic Lands 800-1200 AD, eds.Mateusz Bogucki, Marian Rębkowski (Szczecin: Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, 2013), 26; as well as Hauke Jöns and Anna Kowalska, "Scandinavians on the Southern Baltic Coast," in: Vikings Across Boundaries.Viking-Age Transformations, vol.2, eds.Hanne Lovise Aannestad et al. (London/New York: Routledge, 2021), 47.  contemporary textual sources on Slavic-Nordic relations in the region provide only a few mosaic stones that at first can hardly be assembled into a more illuminating picture.Therefore, it is no surprise that in the latest volume on Scandinavian cultural elements in medieval Poland, textual sources do not feature prominently. 3If the southern Baltic shore is at all studied from the viewpoint of mobility, the focus is rather on the eastern colonisation by German settlers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and to the concomitant processes of acculturation and assimilation of the Slavic populations. 4Those processes, in turn, accelerated the emergence of a peculiar intercultural sphere known as Germanica Slavica, a term coined by the historian Wolfgang H. Fritze in the 1950s, that recently has found a counterpart in the concept of Slavia Germanica introduced by Polish research. 5Whereas the latter term refers to modern history and is preoccupied with the analysis of archival evidence in the field of cultural studies, Germania Slavica serves as a backdrop to investigate the Middle Ages between the rivers Elbe and Saale, and the area's material, onomastic, and textual sources. 6The latter evidence suggests a strong Scandinavian agency for territorial claims and hegemony, visible, for instance, in the report of the Royal Frankish Annals under the year 808.The source reports on how the Danish king Gudfred (Gøtrik) destroyed the Abodrite emporium Reric (i.e., Groß Strömkendorf near Wismar) and resettled its merchants to Sliesthorp/Hedeby in his own sphere of influence. 7However, Scandinavian groups were only one of the many players within the social and trading networks of the early medieval Baltic.From the Anglo-Saxon traveller Wulfstan, who sailed the shores of the southern Baltic for seven days and nights around the year 880, we learn the Old English name for that area: Weonoðland, a term reminiscent of the later Vinðland ("land of the Wends", i.e., Western Slavs) of the Old Norse accounts from medieval Iceland and Norway.What remains puzzling is that Hedeby (in southern Jutland) and Truso (in the Slavic-Prussian borderland, commonly placed in today's Janów Pomorski near  On the terminology, see: Christian Lübke, "Östliches Europa (Kolonisationen)," in: Migrationen im Mittelalter: Ein Handbuch, ed., Michael Borgolte (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 181-192.6   Jörg Hackmann, "From Germania Slavica to Slavia Germanica?",Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana 2 (2017) 22: 132.7   Einhard, "Annales regni Francorum," in: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum Scholarum 6, ed.Friedrich Kurze (Hannover: Hahn 1895), 126; Christian Lübke, "Die Beziehungen zwischen Elb-und Ostseeslawen und Dänen vom 9. bis zum 12. Jahrhundert: Eine andere Option elbslawischer Geschichte?", in: Zwischen Reric und Bornhöved.Die Beziehungen zwischen den Dänen und ihren slawischen Nachbarn vom 9. bis ins 13.Jh., eds.Ole Harck, Christian Lübke  (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001), 24-25.
Elbląg) are the only trading settlements mentioned by Wulfstan on his journey.The same problem arises when studying the Old Norse source corpus: these narratives, too, name only two trading settlements in the Slavic lands, again Hedeby (ON Heiðabýr/Heiðaboer/ Slésvík) and Wolin (ON Jóm/Jómsborg) at the bank of the Oder River.
Why, then, one might ask, both Wulfstan and the medieval writers of the North omitted the other numerous emporia identified by the archaeologists?The aim of this article is thus, first, to review the extant textual sources on the emporia Hedeby and Wolin and to contrast them, in a second step, with archaeological data. 8A third task consists in a more thorough analysis of the abundant Old Norse literary material on Slavic-Scandinavian encounters at the southern shore of the Baltic during the early medieval period.Considering the existence of Western emporia such as Dorestad or Quentovic, 9 further questions arise regarding the economic relevance that can be attributed to the Scandinavian settlements along the Southern Baltic and what additional information we can deduce to that respect from the written sources.In attempting this, it will first be necessary to put a new focus on the Baltic, and second, to overcome the division of sources by combining the rich literary material from the high medieval North with latest archaeological insights, especially the inflow in silver and the trade in slaves.

What were the emporia?
In order to answer the above-outlined questions, it is necessary to discuss the characteristics of the emporia within the early medieval trading networks, and to link them to a broader picture of Scandinavian activities.The Latin emporium and its plural emporia stem from the Ancient Greek τὸ ἐμπόριον, a trading place, especially for maritime trade, and thus a term used already by Herodotus and Thucydides.From the first millennium BC, we know, for instance, of Tartessus on the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula which flourished on the trade in metal with the Carthaginians and Phoenicians until being destroyed by the former around 550 BC.
For the discussion of emporia, and here specifically the sites along the Southern Baltic coast, it appears to be vital to provide a concrete definition of the term which remains, however, to be problematic.archaeological features a place should fulfil to be labelled as an emporium.Following a recent definition by the archaeologist Richard Hodges, an emporium (or wic, as the Western sites were called) was a monopolistic trading centre where merchants and local craftworkers produced and sold their artefacts.10Furthermore, they were often located in naturally protected places at the mouths of rivers, or on the border of a political or cultural community. 11The artefactual evidence of burials and cemeteries points towards culturally hybrid communities that were shaped by new religious and economic practices.12Nodal points characterised by a particularly lively economic activity, such as Hedeby and Wolin, served as centres for the accumulation and distribution of goods, and concentrated an extraordinary number of links within a network of long-distance raiding and trading. 13Those hubs, as has been stressed recently by Søren M. Sindbaek, eventually made the large world of the Viking Age "small."14

A new focus on the Baltic
The contemporary perceptions of the those seafaring Scandinavians labelled as "Vikings" are primarily shaped by Anglo-Saxon texts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or the works of the English cleric Alcuin (735-804), who bemoaned in 797 the terror of a pagan people laying waste to the British shores. 15Based on these accounts, modern scholarship, in particular written in English, determined two pivotal dates framing a period of profound cultural, socio-political, and economic transformation known as the Viking Age, namely the year 793, when Scandinavian pirates assaulted the Northumbrian monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, and the year 1066, the date of the battle of Stamford Bridge between the Norwegian king Haraldr harðráði ("Hard-Ruler", 1015-1066) and the Earl of Wessex, Harold Godwinsson (1022-1066), both claiming to be the legitimate heirs to the English throne.
But where were the seafaring Vikings before the spring of 793?The latest archaeological research has proposed an important corrective to the Anglocentric timeframe of the Viking Age.It instead puts a new focus on the Baltic area and, more precisely, on the coastal village of Salme on the Estonian island of Saaremaa.From 2008 to 2012, rescue excavations led by Jüri Peets of Tallinn University revealed two boat burials which became the final resting place for 41 warriors. 16The richly decorated grave goods complemented by isotopic data suggest that the crew originated in the central Swedish region around lake Mälaren and met a sudden death when exploring the Estonian shores around 750.This unique find leads to nuance the narrative of a Viking Age initiated by Norse pirates raiding the British shores for material wealth and social power.Thus, as richly decorated weapons and two hawks -perhaps diplomatic gifts -suggest, Swedish elite warriors operated in the Eastern Baltic at least half a century prior to the unduly famous Lindisfarne incident.However, to merely shift the beginning of the Viking Age to the mid-eighth century would be "as arbitrary as the plunder of the monastery at Lindisfarne."17Thus, it remains to be explained to what extent the intensive interactions of the ninth century were based on pre-existing trading and raiding networks in the Baltic during the Vendel period (c.600-800) that involved not only Scandinavian and Slavic but also Baltic and Finno-Ugric actors. 18s reflected in several recent publications, the finds from Salme sparked a new interest in the Baltic, 19 an area that had played only a subordinate role in the scientific discourse of the past decades.This neglect -which might be explained by linguistic and political barriers in the context of the Cold War 20 -conflicts with the fact that the southern Baltic coast attracted for centuries mobility of various kinds.It, thus, offers an excellent background for the study of migration phenomena in general 21 and the mobilities of early medieval Scandinavians in particular.Differently from the violent Viking incursions against the British Isles and the Frankish Empire, the rich archaeological evidence as well as a few contemporary textual sources testify to lasting cultural contacts between the populations interacting in the southern Baltic Sea region. 22Archaeo logical finds from Mecklenburg and Pomorze dated to the seventh century indicate that Scandinavians explored the sparsely inhabited southern shore of the Baltic even before Slavic groups migrated to these regions.The earliest landing sites, prefiguring the later emporia, may have served as bases for fur hunting and, thus, as an economic pull-factor, although the coastal areas of the southern Baltic must have constituted a constant sphere of interest for seafarers from the North.23

Silver flows to the North
The emergence of the emporia in the Baltic is associated with an intensified wave of migration from Scandinavia in the second quarter of the eighth century, with recent studies suggesting a long-lasting Scandinavian presence in the polyethnic Viking-Age trading centres of Groß Strömkendorf (Reric), Menzlin, Ralswiek on Rügen, Usedom, and Bardy/ Świelubie.The economic flows that are characteristic to all emporia, are expressed in the numerous finds of silver dirhams that reached northern Europe in enormous quantities in the ninth and tenth centuries, according to Marek Jankowiak up to tens of millions. 24Hoarded as coins, but also recast into necklaces, bracelets and ingots, silver from the Islamic world formed an important economic basis in early medieval northern Europe. 25 Emporia: Hubs for the slave trade?
However, both archaeological sources such as silver dirhams, iron chains and bones as well as written evidence as Rimbert's Vita Anskarii (c.865-876), attest to a darker side of intercultural and economic interactions, namely the trade in slaves that has been used by Marek Jankowiak as the main framework to explain the massive inflow of dirhams to the Southern Baltic shores.As has been earlier evidenced by Jankowiak, this is particularly visible in the form of the Khazar dirham imitations that illustrate the slave trade between Kyivan Rus' and the Islamic world. 26bducted individuals thus provided a major object of exchange, and again, it is the emporia with their harbours, specialised markets, and hinterlands that served as potential hubs for the early medieval slave trade.However, silver coins were also found outside of the coastal trading sites, particularly in the large Feldberg type strongholds built in East Holstein, Mecklenburg, as well as in northern parts of Wielkopolska and Brandenburg in the ninth century.Their distribution deep within the Slavic settlement area indicates that Slavs themselves were important actors in the hunt for and trade in slaves.As Felix Biermann suggested, the threat of being captured, enslaved, and sold might also have contributed to processes of economic centralisation and social stabilisation among the Slavs in the south-western Baltic regions. 27Thus, the massive fortifications appear precisely in those regions where written sources, e.g., the Annales Regni Francorum, indicate a political development with more complex structures, such as among the Abodrites and Wilzi in Mecklenburg and Pomerania. 28In addition to the centres' peculiar economic dynamics, another characteristic is their ethnic diversity resulting from processes of exchange and cultural transfer between populations of different origins.Decisive are here mainly Nordic dress components and jewellery, but also boat burials (Groß Strömkendorf and Ralswiek) and ship-shaped Viking graves (Menzlin).Comprehensive anthropological studies on the latter revealed the stone settings as Scandinavian female graves containing numerous burial goods like Slavic pottery and Scandinavian jewellery which suggests that Slavic and Scandinavian populations practiced a peaceful "convivencia" in the Slavic settlement areas. 29aking this general outline on the characteristics of the Baltic emporia as a starting point, the following discussion will look more precisely into the literary and textual evidence on the cultural and economic importance of the emporium Hedeby, in order to provide a background for data gleaned from the Old Norse sources.

The emporium Heiðabýr in literary sources
Due to its convenient location on the inner Schlei firth, about 40 km from the Baltic Sea, Hedeby played a prominent role in the early medieval trade in the North Sea and the Baltic.At the latter's southern shores, we encounter Polabian tribes such as the Abodrites who bordered with Saxons and Franks in the south and with Frisians in the west.Constant exchange and trade determined the apparently mostly peaceful relations between Slavs and Scandinavians.Nonetheless, armed conflicts repeatedly erupted, such as in the case of the earlier mentioned destruction of Reric by the Danish petty king Gudfred which stands as a symptomatic event for the conflicts of interest in the southern Baltic region between the early ninth and the twelfth centuries. 30Benefitting from the settlement of the abducted merchants from Reric, Hedeby/Schleswig quickly developed into one of the most vital trading centres in Northern Europe where goods of different kinds were exchanged, as reported already by Rimbert in his Vita Anskarii sometime before the year 876: "[…] in portu [...] Sliaswich vocato, ubi ex omni parte conventus fiebat negotiatorum." 31In the northern world, in turn, Icelandic poets, so-called skalds, and writers remembered the importance of the trading centre by applying two different names, namely Heiðabýr and Heiðaboer, interchangeably.These toponyms modified the North Germanic name of the settlement *Haiþa-būwiz ("heath-settlement") and adapted it to its own West Norse placenames with the endings -býr, -boer ("settlement").Less commonly used is the name Slésvík, that -being of West Germanic origin -goes back to the toponym Sliaswich ("bay at the Schlei") 32 and thus a name already attested in Adam of Bremen's Gesta that circulated in medieval Iceland. 33However, when investigating the Old Norse source material, it often remains unclear whether Heiðabýr and Slésvík are designating the same settlement on the southern bank of the river Schlei.Thus, high medieval accounts often amalgamate the emporium Heiðabýr with the later civitas Schleswig that was built after an attack by the Norwegian king Haraldr harðráði, and the destruction by the Abodrites in 1066. 3430 See: Lübke, "Beziehungen," 24.
31 "Rimberti Vita Anskari," ch.The itinerary of the Icelandic abbot Nikulás Bergsson, the so-called Leiðarvísir, is one of the earliest testimonies of Hedeby in Old Norse literature.This work, the title of which translates as "the guide", describes Nikulás' pilgrimage to Rome and the Holy Land between 1149 and 1154.It briefly names the individual stations on his path in their Old Norse form, but also lists places of legendary historical importance. 35In that respect, the guide gives the following information about Hedeby: From Norway, one must first travel to Ålborg, Denmark.So the Rome-pilgrims say that from Ålborg it is a two-day's journey to Viborg, then it is a week's journey to Hedeby, then it is a short journey to Schleswig, then a day's journey to the mouth of the river Eider. 36cording to this directive, pilgrims coming from Scandinavia would have had to travel to the south via Hedeby, in order to arrive again in the northern civitas of Schleswig.This detour might be explained by the fact that the Icelandic abbot does not necessarily report from his own experience but refers to the romferlar ("Rome-pilgrims") as his oral informants. 37This brief mention illustrates the variety of routes to Rome known to Nikulás and other pilgrims, but also shows that Hedeby and Schleswig were just two stations among many, with seemingly no particular importance attached to them.Gísla saga, dating to the middle of the twelfth century, confirms that Hedeby was a station on the pilgrimage route to Rome.In this context, it relates that Auðr, the wife of the protagonist Gísli, travelled from Iceland via Norway to Hedeby, where she and her sister-in-law Gunnhildr accepted the Christian faith (ch.38).Then their paths led them south (suðr = to Rome), from where they never returned to the North. 38Besides of its religious function, Hedeby's political significance is stressed in Njáls saga, the perhaps best-known and most complex Íslendingasaga ("saga of Icelanders"), written down around 1280.During a Viking voyage eastwards from the Swedish region of Gautland, the protagonist Gunnarr á Hlíðarenda and his fellow travellers encounter a man named Tófi who, according to his own statement, was a Dane (danskur maður) and wished to return to his relatives. 39When Gunnar enquires why Tófi was í Austurvegi ("on the Eastern way"), the latter replies that he had been captured by Vikings, who landed him here in Eysýsla (the Old Norse name for the Baltic island of Saaremaa/Ösel), where he had remained since then. 40Equipped with ten ships, the Viking Gunnarr eventually sails to "Hedeby in Denmark" (Heiðaboejar í Danmǫrk), where he is well received by King Haraldr Gormsson (Harald Bluetooth, c. 911-987).Following his invitation, Gunnarr spends half a month at his court, is offered an attractive marriage and influence in the country.However, Gunnarr turns down the king's generosity and explains that he first wants to return to his friends and relatives in Iceland.We can assume from this episode that the author of the Gísla saga was aware of Hedeby's central economic position between Rus', the Baltic, and Scandinavia in the tenth century.This interpretation is strengthened by the fact that the narrative moves the court of the Danish king from its presumed location in Jelling to Hedeby, perhaps in relation with the incorporation of the emporium into the Danish dominion by Haraldr's father, Gormr, in 945.This followed the conquest of the settlement by the East Frankish King Henry I who in 934 had forced the Danish King Gnúpa/Knut to pay tribute and accept Christianity. 41After these events, the Danes were able to defend their rule over the trading centre on the Schlei for almost thirty years, until Emperor Otto II (r.973-983) initiated an offensive against Hedeby in 974. 42The description of Otto's victory over Haraldr Gormsson in Thietmar of Merseburg's Chronicon 43 has frequently been interpreted as an account of the conquest of the settlement and of the annexation of the south of Jutland.However, as a recent interpretation by Laura Gazzoli suggests, this reading probably attributes too much importance to Otto's expedition that "sounds more like a border-skirmish than anything else."44Furthermore, new insights obtained from numismatic material support the hypotheses of Hedeby being the centre for the minting of Danish coins45 which excludes a "German domination" of the site. 46However, Otto II's victory over Haraldr Gormsson did not end the military conflicts in this area until nine years after his expedition when the Danish king Haraldr and the Abodrite prince Mistivoi successfully raised against the Ottonian rule.This conflict is perhaps evidenced by the so-called Skarþi runestone (DR 3) from the vicinity of Hedeby, thought to have been erected immediately after the events of the year 983.Unusually, the monument names a king (Sveinn) as commissioner of the stone in memory of his retainer (heimþega) Skarþi, a high-ranked warrior who had set out west, to England or Normandy, but met a premature end in Hedeby: King Sveinn placed the stone in memory of Skarði, his retainer, who travelled to the west, but who then died at Hedeby.
Both played a vital role in the Danish attacks on Anglo-Saxon England in 1016 and 1070 respectively.Recent runological dating to the 980s supports a connection with the conquest of the settlement by the former, 47 who revolted against his father Haraldr Gormsson and relapsed into pagan beliefs.Sveinn Ástríðarson, in turn, was a supporter of the "true faith" among the Polabian Slavs, and collaborated closely with his son-in-law Gottschalk, the prince of the Abodrites.Seeking to establish a unified Polabian-Slavic state legitimised by the Church, Gottschalk was determined to follow the successful example of the Piast state whose northern territories along the southwestern Baltic coast will be analysed in the following regarding their literary evidence in Old Norse sources.

The burning of Jómsborg
Within the Old Norse text corpus, Hedeby is not alone to serve as a setting for encounters in the Baltic: this role is also taken by the Scandinavian stronghold of Jómsborg, usually located on the site of the Polish town Wolin.One of the most prominent Viking-Age poems featuring the settlement is Hrynhenda, composed around the year 1046/47 by the Icelandic skald Arnórr jarlaskáld Þórðarson.The poem praises the deeds of the Norwegian King Magnús góði who traversed in 1043 Salt it Eystra ("the Eastern Sea" = the Baltic) with warships equipped with girzku reiði ("with Greek [= Byzantine] tackle" = sails).The encomium is clearly biased by Magnús' role as son and successor of Saint Óláfr Haraldsson which explains why his military ventures are translated into divine deeds.Further background is provided by Morkinskinna ("the rotten parchment"), written around 1220, where it turns out that Magnús góði's military campaign targeted Jómsborg.Both sources state how discord between Wends and Danes dominated the relations in the Jutland border region. 48The following spring, King Magnús embarks on his war fleet to Jóm (= Wolin), where he devastates both settlements and people: It is farthest from the Norwegian realm and closest to the Wends and Saxons, who have always waged war on the Danes.[…] Then he sailed across to Wendland and arrived with his army at Jóm.There they landed, harrying and burning both settlements and people. 49e main source for this military campaign is Snorri Sturlusson's Óláfs saga helga in sérstaka (The Separate Saga of St Óláfr, ch.264), with additional information in Magnús saga góða (ch.24) in his Heimskringla.Earlier historiographical records on the destruction of Jómsborg are once more provided in Adam's Gesta and its contemporary scholia, both authored around 1075.They confirm the events in the civitas Sclavorum Iumne for the year 1043: Attended by a large Danish fleet, King Magnus laid siege to Jumne, the richest city of the Slavs.The losses were the same.Magnus terrified all the Slavs and, being a young man holy and blameless of life, God for that reason granted him victory in every enterprise. 50ven though both Adam's Gesta from the eleventh century and the Icelandic Annales regii treat King Magnús' military expedition against Jómsborg/Iumne as a historical event, the legendary tradition around this violent Scandinavian-Slavic encounter swiftly developed its own momentum. 51As most impressive example for this process stands, besides the praise poem Hrynhenda, another poem by Arnórr jarlaskáld Þórðarson, titled Magnússdrápa.Magnús' actions against the pagan people (heiðit folk) of Pomeranian Slavs sunnr at Jómi ("in the south at Jóm") 52 are here embedded in a broader context of Scandinavian military mobility in the Baltic region, which served as a demonstration of power against Jarl Sveinn Ástríðarson as a competitor for the Danish royal throne.In addition, the poem's agenda promoted the necessity to ward off westward raids by the Abodrites as Sveinn's allies. 53

Conclusion
We can conclude that Hedeby was an important, although not unique, station for commercially, militarily, and religiously motivated journeys within the Austrvegr network.This "Eastern Way" led Scandinavian warrior-traders into the vastness of the Rus' with Hedeby and Jómsborg/Wolin in the Oder estuary representing frequent stations on the route that had to be traversed.From the Old Norse literary record as well as archaeological evidence, we obtain a diverse picture of the functions of Hedeby in the long-distance networks of the Viking Age: as trading place for silver, slaves, and not least, as religious centre in the high Middle Ages.This picture is complemented by the evidence of several military conflicts that initiated the decline of the southern settlement starting in the mid-eleventh century and that forced the relocation to the northern successor settlement Schleswig.Further emphasis needs to be put on the fact that the destruction of the early medieval emporia along the Baltic did not disrupt the region's economic dynamism, but, on the contrary, contributed to its acceleration.Even though, by definition, the proto-urban coastal settlements of the Viking Age did not yet fulfil the essential functions of a medieval city, they formed the basis for the emergence of the later trading centres of the Hanseatic League, that dominated the maritime world of the Baltic throughout the late Middle Ages.What the literary sources from the high-medieval North eventually attest to is their literary memory of the Baltic that is, however, restricted to the tenth to twelfth centuries, and clearly attached to royal power, particularly Danish hegemony.Earlier Scandinavian-influenced emporia in turn, like Ralswiek or Menzlin, remain unknown.As the archaeological record shows, this stands contrast to their economic and social importance in the trading networks of the early medieval world in which they have to be considered as equal nodes despite the lack of written evidence on them.
24, in: Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores rerum Germanicurum  in usum scholarum, vol.55, ed.Georg Waitz (Hannover: Hahn, 1884).Hedeby's attraction was only intensified when in 873 the Danish kings Sigfred and Halfdan guaranteed peaceful exchange of goods in between the bordering region between Denmark and Saxony.