Vikings are famous for raping and pillaging, and undoubtedly more than one woman must have given birth to a half-Viking child who was a product of rape. How did societies treat these children?

Rape was the fear, expectation, the weapon, the reward for soldiers, and the terrible reality of medieval (ancient, early modern, modern) warfare. And by warfare, we're talking about short raids, longer "campout" raids that could last a week or a month, the stereotypical protracted siege culminating with "taking the city," an enemy army passing through a village, a "friendly" army passing through a village or demanding quarter, or just two feuding lords sending out parties to wreak havoc on the land with an eye towards ruining their enemy and/or claiming it for themselves. It was a given on all sides. In his version of the call to Crusade, Robert of Rheims has Pope Urban say, "What can I say about the evil rape of women [by Muslims], of which it is worse to speak than to be silent?" For his part, Ibn Hayyan writes of the rape and plunder by Christian soldiers rampaging through Barbastro (Iberia) in 1063: "There is no pen eloquent enough to describe them."

This diffidence in the sources is insightful. All sides face first the difficult reality that condemning their opponents as rapists is a quick and dirty way to cast them as barbaric and evil, but their own side's soldiers are just as guilty. (Legal decrees trying to reign in a wayward lord or lord-bishop, and, from the early modern era, firsthand accounts tell us that the accounts of devastation are not just propaganda.) But second, Latin Christians in particular could never quite shake the belief that while being a rapist was proof of a man's barbarity, being raped polluted a woman forever. Augustine had argued passionately c. 400 that as long as a woman didn't "enjoy it", rape did not pollute her soul. But his passion was directed at the argument he was actually making against suicide. Augustine was as concerned with the lives and emotions of women as the 10 commenters and 112 upvoters in this thread who think a question about the experiences of women who were brutally raped, and their children is best answered by the distribution of haplogroups in the 21st century.

On the other hand, Augustine looks postiviely cushy from a modern standpoint next to his sometime-correspondent and translator of the Vulgate Bible. Jerome took the position that virgins should kill themselves rather than "let" themselves be raped. The Latin Middle Ages inherited both of these traditions, and...well, they didn't quite know what to do. In theoretical mode as a safely-ensconced university scholar, Thomas Aquinas followed Augustine in accepting that a woman could still be pure so long as her will had remained pure. For vehement promoter of religious women Jacques de Vitry, ranging all over Christendom but always coming back to his beloved acolytes/spiritual mothers in Liege, the dilemma for his flock--and himself as their publicist--was anything but theoretical. And so he could recount with zeal, but also relief, that when Liege was sacked in 1212, the beguines (semi-nuns) of the city flung themselves into sewers and canals to drown rather than suffer rape--but, "miraculously," they were all spared.

So the Western chroniclers of life and war will tell us that the Earl of Buchan led an arm of the Scottish army on a rampage of raping "women dedicated to God as well as married women and girls, either murdering them or robbing them after gratifying their lust" (even here, rape is an afterthought of the chronicler). They will tell us that Abbess Ebba of Coldingham monastery, knowing her community would be raided by Vikings on the morrow, led her nuns in slicing off their noses and lips with a razor to make themselves too ugly to rape. (Of course, Roger of Wendover continues, the Danes were so upset at having their prizes ruined that they slaughtered everyone--thus averting the theological problem of rape and pollution.)

What we don't see from the male chroniclers are women's lives after. There are a couple of medieval women writers who touch on rape. Margery Kempe (15th century England) is scared to sleep alone at night in a town for fear of intruders; Christine de Pisan (14th-15th century France) describes the aftermath of rape as grieving, as mourning the death of a dearly beloved. They don't tell us about the "after", either. So can we pull anything out of the sources?

Gwen Seabourne and Jeremy Goldberg both make the point that over the course of the Middle Ages, the older practice of "kill the men and kill or enslave the women and children" more and more often gave way to "ransom the men and leave the women behind", although there are plenty of exceptions. Women who stayed in a town under siege were typically treated as enemy combatants and slaughtered if the town fell, for example. Or women might be seized (rapio) and held captive temporarily, for ransom and/or repeated sexual abuse. (To be clear, this is average towns- and village women, not the elite nobility). That sets out some of the guidelines for how sexual violence could affect women survivors of war: captivity and (typically) concubinage/servitude, temporary captivity and possible to probable rape, rape amidst devastation.

We have hints, first of all, that theological ideas about pollution in the case of rape, or a woman's perceiving "wanting it," had such deep roots they tore apart families. A group of raiders in Chester and Lancaster in 1378 were accused of operating a ransom scheme in which they would kidnap a woman from across jurisdictional boundaries, then demand a ransom from her parents. But it wasn't for the life of the daughter--it was for the life of the parents. They would die if they didn't pay. But if they did, they would be "forced" to take their daughter back. Let that sink in a moment.

It's undoubtable that rape would have resulted in pregnancy sometimes. Due to a combination of lack of sources and disinterest among scholars (no, really), we don't actually know that much about illegitimate children in the Middle Ages. There are plenty of articles about the illegitimate kids of an individual noble, or an individual natural child's life. But these are elite nobles. Illegitimacy mattered to the child when it came to inheritance, or possibly (for men) becoming a priest. (Although the ban on illegitimate sons taking holy orders had more to do with enforcing clerical celibacy by preventing natural sons from inheriting their fathers' trades, and was basically guaranteed an episcopal waiver anyway). We don't "see" illegitimate children on the average level.

One source I thought of checking was cases of infanticide. Margaret Lewis looking systematically at the more plentiful early modern German cases matches what I observed in reading some secondary scholarship on medieval English records: women just don't talk about rape in the context of infanticide. That obviously doesn't mean it didn't happen (Lewis calls it "extremely rare"), but we can assume that women who were raped and found themselves pregnant did not all kill their children (before or after birth), and, statistically, did not all miscarry.

Given the intense stigma on rape, and the potential for a rape case to turn into an adultery allegation (especially if pregnancy was involved, because there was an association of sex that led to pregnancy and having an orgasm, so being pregnant was often taken as a consent of the will), it seems likely that many rape survivors claimed the child was their husband's, if they were married; or found a husband, if not. The frequency of men's deaths in warfare-type situations may have abetted this. We know, after all, that flurries of marriages after a battle or a period of army encampment were not uncommon, and that this was treated as an especially crucial action for women. That would have legitimated a child, reduced public (certainly not internal) shame for the woman, and ideally created a more stable financial situation for her and her baby. The prospects for single mothers in medieval (and early modern, where we have more data) Europe were not great. They show up on poor rolls and in poverty-related petitions with sad frequency.

I want to caution against interpreting modern haplogroup percentages and geographic spreads as flat-out indications of rape. Contact, including sexual contact, and including between enemies or "enemies", took many forms in the Middle Ages and beyond: trade, raids, cohabitation, open warfare, embassies, encounters on pilgrimage, prostitution. Just looking at Iberia, for example, it's clear that Muslim, Christian, and Jewish women all entered into consensual relationships with men of other faiths despite their own religion's laws against it. Especially with a topic as hard-hitting and modern as rape in warfare, we can't let emotionality strip away all agency from women who made choices under differing amounts of pressure, to go to Iceland with that hot Viking or take that job as the crusader knight's "cook." But we also can't ignore the testimony of soldiers like the Thirty Years War's Peter Hagendorf, who threw a lavish wedding for his second wife and went to great lengths to secure an education for his beloved son. Hagendorf noted in his meticulous diary:

[In Landshut] I got a pretty lass as my plunder. [...] I took a young girl with me from Pforzheim, too, but I let her go...I was sorry about this because at the time I had no wife.

Some Further Reading:

Jane Tibbets Schulenberg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, 500-1100
Gwen Seabourne, Imprisoning Medieval Women: The Non-Judicial Abduction and Confinement of Women in Medieval England, 1170-1509
Mary Elizabeth Ailes, "Camp Followers, Sutlers, and Soldiers' Wives," in A Companion to Women's Military History
John Gillingham, "Crusading Warfare, Chivalry, and the Enslavement of Women and Children," in The Medieval Way of War