Yes, churches, but even more so, monasteries were lucrative prey during the Viking era. Monasteries were particularly attractive to raiders for several reasons: they were intentionally remote from towns, they had no militia to protect them, only walls at best, and they were full of accumulated portable wealth in the form of liturgical vessels made of gold or silver and, especially, reliquaries (containers for saints’ relics) which were usually made of gold or silver and decorated with jewels.

The story of the Irish monk Blathmac illustrates the point. I’ll summarize the account of his death related by the 9th-century Carolingian chronicler Walafrid Strabo. He relates how in c. 825 “a pagan horde of Danes . . . armed with malignant greed” attacked the island of Iona off the western coast of Scotland where the shrine of St. Columba (d. 597) was located in the monastery there. After killing most of the monks, they approached Blathmac demanding that he reveal the location of the “precious metals [i.e., reliquary] wherein lie the holy bones of St. Columba” which the monks had buried as the Vikings approached. He refused: “I know nothing of the gold you seek.” At that, the Danes hacked him to death. It’s notable here that the Danes had been attacking Iona periodically for 30 years since 806, yet it still had wealth enough to attract them. This may have been a strategic decision: don’t completely destroy a place; just ransack it, let it recover, then attack it again.

A more well-known example is the case of the Canterbury “Codex Aureus” (Golden Book), a book of the Gospels written in Latin and lavishly decorated at Canterbury in the 8th century and stolen (presumably along with other treasures) from the monastery by the Vikings in a raid in the late 9th century. It was ransomed by a pious couple who described their act in an Old English inscription added to the book:

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I, Alderman Alfred and Werburg my wife obtained these books from the heathen army with our money; the purchase was made with pure gold. We did it for the love of God and for the good of our souls, and because we did not wish these holy books to remain any longer in the possession of heathens. And now they wish to present these books to Christ Church [Canterbury] to the praise, glory, and honor of God.”

Sometimes, Vikings didn’t need to physically attack churches, relying instead on “protection money.” Thus, according to the 9th-century annals of St-Bertin, when “Danish pirates” attacked Paris in 856, they sacked and burned many of the city’s churches “except for the cathedral of St-Stephen, the Church of Sts-Vincent and Germain and also the church of St-Denis: a great ransom was paid in cash to save these churches from being burned.” Ransom money was also a source of Viking income. These same annals report that another group of Danes “captured Abbot Louis of St-Denis [near Paris] along with his brother Gauzlin, and demanded a very heavy fine for their ransom. In order to pay this many church treasuries in Charles’s realm were drained dry, at the king’s command.” This latter episode reminds us that taking prisoners and either demanding ransom for them or selling them as slaves was another source of Viking income.

Tribute money was the preeminent way the French crown tried to placate the Viking raiders. One estimate suggests that, between 845 and 926, the Vikings collected 685 pounds of gold and 43,000 (yes, thousand!) pounds of silver from various French regions, sometimes by royal taxation but often gotten through church treasuries, willingly or not (Somerville and McDonald [2013], 21).

Finally, pretty much off the subject but interesting as an insight into the popular view of monastic wealth, the Benedictine monk David Steindahl-Rast suggests that the fairytale of Snow White may be a peasant outsider’s view of the inside of a monastery. He speculates—and I stress speculates since there is no proof of this—that the story of hints at monastic life. Among other things, the seven dwarfs living together in common suggest the communal life of monks. Their mining of gold suggests the accumulated wealth in precious metals in monasteries (the very things that attracted Viking raiders), and Snow White’s glass coffin suggests the reliquary of a venerated saint (whose death-like sleep was caused by a poisoned apple—like the apple in the Garden of Eden). Unlikely, but fun to think about.

Sources: The Viking Age: A Reader ed. Angus A. Somerville & R. Andrew McDonald (2010) and The Vikings and Their Age by Angus A. Somerville & R. Andrew McDonald (2013).