Why is it fashionable nowadays to say viking/mongols were not that bad...

[Barnabas]

Nowadays every documentary you watch about them mentions that vikings were mainly farmers, that they were great merchants and explorers, that mongols were great organizers, the pax mongolica which allowed an increase of exchanges between east and west never seen before, the trade networks developed by both vikings and mongols etc...
Which I guess is fair, but the massacres, the viking raids, the razing of cities, tend to be very underlooked it seems to me, almost disregarded as exagerations..
Of vikings it is said that according to their morals raiding a monastery and killing all the people was not a crime, that all reports were written by people attacked by vikings so the reports so they probably are biased... of mongols that it is not right to judge them according to contemporary standards, that if the city didnt resist, most often it would not be razed.. things like that, not paying attention to how the mongols destroyed forever the irrigation system which had made mesopotamia so succesful since the bronze age, how they devastated completely persia... etc

I think both were particularly brutal people, I think in these days it is not politically correct to say that ethnic group A has a more blood thirsty history than ethnic group B

And I disagree, for example, assyrians, mongols, vikings, turks, germans, have their fame for something, while other nations dont...

what do you think?

It is impossible to criticize A without first criticizing yourself first

[LordShiva]

It's more PC

[Imran Siddiqui]

I think it's because it had gone TOO much over to the side that they were just monsters and barbarians. People weren't paying attention to the fact that they did have a civilization and were great traders.

I see it more as a backlash against going too far to one side.

And, also, the fact that a lot of people now realize that the countries that were being sacked weren't much better in terms of morality themselves. For example, while people go on about Aztec ritual sacrifice and how that shows they were bloodthirsty people, folks rarely see that probably more showed up and cheered for hangings in the public square in, say, London. There is an idea that some European civilizations were are proper and moral, but everyone was kind of nasty in those days.

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
I see it more as a backlash against going too far to one side.

That's 'zackly what I was going to say.

(I love agreeing with Imran. It means I'm going to be right for a change. )

[Imran Siddiqui]

(I love when Zkribbler agrees with me. It means someone will say I'm right for a change. )

[ískallin]

I dont understand why people say vikings were nice farmers/merchants. They were utter and total bastards!
One thing they did was to throw small kids in the air and catch them with spears .
The ones who emmigrated to Iceland were the lazy ones did not want to pay taxes to Haraldur Hárfagri (Harald the fair haired). So they left and on the way they thought: "Hey we do not want to work". Then they took a little detour to Ireland and stole all the bautiful women the saw and voila, a nation born. Lazy vikings and Irish chics.

Vikings=Bastards

[Kropotkin]

Vikings where hardly worse than their contemporaries.

[molly bloom]

The Vikings had a bad press because of monkish chroniclers- in Ireland, rival monasteries had been fighting each other before the Vikings came, yet of course once the Vikings raided and settled, all the blame could be devolved to them.

It's very amusing to read Anglo-Saxon monks' accounts of the fury of the Northmen- after all, it had only been a few hundred years since the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had been the terror from across the sea.

If you look at Normandy, at the art of Ireland after the Vikings settled, at the art and literature of England and Scotland once the Danelaw had become an accepted fact, they all show that the Vikings were not simply a destructive force, but could and did provide new visual and literary art forms, new words (the English of the north east of England and Scotland still has Viking loanwords) and long distance trade routes.

They were less destructive than the Mongols- no city was ever sacked by Vikings to the extent that Baghdad or Herat or Nishapur were by the Mongol hordes, and unlike the nomadic Mongols they were indeed interested in farming and settling down.

To the Mongols' credit, they did provide a link between the Western world and the Far East- albeit a relatively short-lived one.

The myths of the Far East were replaced by documentary reports made by Papal envoys who were able to profit from the 'Pax Mongolica' and make the journey safely across to the courts of the khans.

Irish/Viking gold from the Temple Bar excavations in Dublin (itself a Viking settlement) :

[Lord Avalon]

Vikings got a smiley!

[Proteus_MST]

All nations have their dark sides.

Lookm for example the romans which nowadays are seen as so civilized.
But most of the time it is forgoten that they had slaves, razed whole cities and waged wars not for defense but for conquest (although they normally tried to make it seem like their war was justified because the attacked nations would have attacked rome if rome had´t attacked first)

Look at the european countries during the medieval ages weare as Imram said, public executions were seen as some kind of public spectacle (btw. hanging was one of the milder forms of executions, all european countries had much more cruel forms of execution which were used till late in the 18th century, for example drawing and quartering, impaling or breaking on the wheel [and the asian countries weren´t any less cruel, just thinking og Lingchi]).

Or look at the 30 years war in germany, were more than half of the population was erazed and were you saw atrocities like in Magdeburg which was a flourishing city until the catholic army besieged it and conquered it, resulting in burning down the whole cities and massacring most its civilization [but the protestants weren´t much better]).

Nope I agree with the people who say that the mongols and vikings weren´t so different from the europeans at this time. Valueing life so much that you try to minimize losses in the civilian population is a rather novel invention which was developed mostly in the second half of the 20th century.

[One_more_turn]

I think Mongols and Vikings were more successful at making wars, therefore causing more damage.

People under stress are always evil, but some have more capabilities than others to spread their evils.

[RGBVideo]

every generation wants to rebel and rewrite history

Originally posted by Brachy-Pride
Nowadays every documentary you watch about them mentions that vikings were mainly farmers, that they were great merchants and explorers, that mongols were great organizers, the pax mongolica which allowed an increase of exchanges between east and west never seen before, the trade networks developed by both vikings and mongols etc...
Which I guess is fair, but the massacres, the viking raids, the razing of cities, tend to be very underlooked it seems to me, almost disregarded as exagerations..
Of vikings it is said that according to their morals raiding a monastery and killing all the people was not a crime, that all reports were written by people attacked by vikings so the reports so they probably are biased... of mongols that it is not right to judge them according to contemporary standards, that if the city didnt resist, most often it would not be razed.. things like that, not paying attention to how the mongols destroyed forever the irrigation system which had made mesopotamia so succesful since the bronze age, how they devastated completely persia... etc

I think both were particularly brutal people, I think in these days it is not politically correct to say that ethnic group A has a more blood thirsty history than ethnic group B

And I disagree, for example, assyrians, mongols, vikings, turks, germans, have their fame for something, while other nations dont...

what do you think?

It is impossible to criticize A without first criticizing yourself first

It's part of moral relativism, which has been developed during the last 10 years in western Europe to rationalize for not feeling so bad about the rape and pillage happening within them. Proteus_MST is a brilliant example of this.

To put it another way, people are trying to rationalize the invasion they're facing by telling themselves previous invasions weren't so bad. Their "goodness" is best improved in areas of society which are subjective but have highly positive connotations. Thus, mongols were actually "highly cultural" and had "progressive law enforcement". You can't really deny claims like these since both of those terms are subjective. And then there's always the "they unified the warring tribes of the time. Yes, unified under a rule of continous terror. Stalin and Hitler are great rulers too with this logic, for they unified divided and crumbling nations, Stalin even several nations, while providing "cultural links" between the remote areas of their vast lands. "Pax Sovieticus" did end the instability in the Eastern Europe, making travel through the trans-siberian railroad without the constant fear of anarchist and peasant uprisings once again a realistic possibility.

I agree that the bad press Vikings' received at the time in western Europe was mostly the propaganda of the time -- crumbling societies need bad guys to unify them, and half-heathens coming with weird ships from the north serve as a convenient scapegoat. When you look at the facts, Vikings did not really destroy a single nation, a single tribe. The western European stories (which quickly reached mythical proportions) about Vikings pillaging everything wherever they went were hearsay which did not exist on the other side of the continent (Russian rivers: Volga, Don, Dnieper), where Vikings were mostly known as traders with willingness to reach even far lands with their ships.

But the claim that Mongols were somehow "good" and "noble" for the large cities they burned, for the libraries they razed, for the tens of thousands of people they murdered within week-long orgies of violence, for the entire nations they wiped clean?

That is a bunch of bull****. You've got a better case in making Hitler "good" and "enlightened" if you want to play radical revisionists for whom the frames of history are too narrow-minded.

[Zkribbler]

Why is it fashionable nowadays to say viking/mongols were not that bad...

The real reason:
Vikings = hot blond chicks
Mongols = hot Asian chicks

[Dr Strangelove]

I don't think I've ever heard of the Vikings or the Mongols described in apolegetic terms. The Vikings did settle down in some places - Ireland, Northern England, Normandy, Kievian Russia but elsewhere they simply plundered. If they never managed to sack a major city like the Mongols, it's only because there weren't any great cities in their main area of activity, and their raiding forces generally weren't that large.