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Norse riders of the 9th and 11th century AD were not considered pirates but rather, were called Vikings. They were composed of Danes, Swedes and Norwegians travelling from Scandinavia via the Hebrides and the Shetland Isles to the coasts of Western Europe and beyond. They regularly harassed the commerce of the Baltic Sea and the English Channel attacking ships and inland Monasteries and (poorly defended) villages. Sometimes they even settled on parts of the coasts. The first recorded Viking raid was a seaborne assault in 793 by Vikings on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast of England. Growing evidence indicates that considerable overseas Viking migration occurred long before then. Vikings went deep into the Russian hinterland, founding city-states and opening the way to Constantinople (Istanbul). Vikings also fought the Carolingian Empire until in 911 they accepted by treaty the area of Normandy in northern France and settled there. In 937, Irish pirates sided with the Scots, Vikings, Picts, and Welsh in their invasion of England. Athelstan drives them back. In the 11th century Vikings briefly established a Scandinavian empire of the North Sea, composed of England, Denmark, and Norway. Emerging in the 13th cent., the Hanseatic League succeeded in curbing the piracy of its era.
On the other hand piracy was also the problem in the Far East. With the decline of central authority in China toward the end of the 13th century, piracy began to increase along the China coast. Using ships large enough to carry 300 men, the pirates would land and sometimes plunder whole villages. For instance during the 1550s corsair fleets looted the Shanghai-Ning-po region almost annually, sometimes sending raiding parties far inland to terrorize cities and villages throughout the whole Yangtze Delta. Originally mainly Japanese, in later times the pirates were of mixed origin; by the early 16th century, the majority of them were probably Chinese. Basing themselves on islands off the Chinese coast, the pirates eventually made their main headquarters on the island of Taiwan, where they remained for over a century.
By the 14th century, piracy had reached serious proportions in Korean waters. It gradually declined after 1443, when the Koreans made a treaty with various Japanese feudal leaders, permitting the entry of 50 Japanese trade ships a year, a number that was gradually increased. Although coastal raiding was not totally suppressed, it was brought under control in the 1560s.
Pirates are called Lanun by both the Indonesians and the Malaysians who form the nations bracketing the Straits of Malacca. Originally a culture of seafaring people, their name became synonymous with piracy in the 15th century.
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