Between Pagan Pirates and Glorious Sea-Warriors: The Portrayal of the Viking Pirate in Danish Twelfth-Century Latin Historiography

Abstract

The Latin words for piracy and pirates have traditionally been viewed as exclusively negative, denoting an especially criminal person and a significant threat to the commonality of humans as expressed by Cicero in the first century BCE. In the Early Middle Ages, the terms retained their negative meaning as described by Cicero, and they were used to describe Viking pagan raiders. However, the threat was now to Christendom rather than to Roman civilization. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the negative use of the term was applied to Slavic maritime plunderers in the same vein as it was used to describe the Vikings. However, in the same period, Danish historians, especially Saxo Grammaticus, also used the term in a terminus technicus sense to characterize their Danish heroes, irrespective of whether they were pagan or Christian. Thus the meaning of the pirate terminology in the twelfth century changed from denoting a criminal enemy of Christendom to describe a specific type of seaborne warfare and a wa...