7. Being captured as a slave during a Viking raid, especially if you were a literate male monk, likely resulted in your castration
As mentioned, the slave trade formed a significant component of the Viking culture and economy; contemporary historical investigation has suggested that, at least in part, the cruel trade was motivated less by internal than external economic factors. During the Viking Age, both the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate equally partook in the barbaric practice of slavery but maintained a unique preference for their male slaves being eunuchs; whether this was in a misguided belief that it made the slaves more submissive, for some religious inclination, or most commonly the “massive need for trustworthy guards” of the expanding harems, these eunuchs were so highly prized by these civilizations.
During the Early Middle Ages, among the foremost goods traded from Western Europe into Asia Minor and the Middle East was human slaves. A recent study by Mary Valente of Appalachian State University proposes that one of the primary motivations behind the increasing Viking raids on monasteries in northwestern Europe was to “capture literate young males who could be turned into eunuchs and sold off into the east”. Those captured would be transported to economic hubs like Venice, whereupon they would be castrated and shipped off for sale in the east. The 10th-century biography of St. Nian records the capture of 200 churchmen by the Vikings, with Valente’s investigation revealing that these “slaves may have been taken for precisely that purpose – feeding the eastern markets for young, educated castrates” and that “the expanding uses for slaves during the time of the early Abbasids, including the need for large numbers of enslaved eunuchs, drove much of the slave trade around the Mediterranean basin. The Viking raids, which began barely a generation after the Abbasid dynasty seized the Caliphate, met part of that need.”