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Entry 101 of 240War

The Viking Age

793–1066 CE/Europe/Norse Scandinavia
Today Scandinavia, and everywhere their ships reachedSpan Viking Age · 793–1066 CE

Norse raiders in shallow-draft longships that could cross an ocean and then row up a river appeared off English monasteries and, for two centuries, wherever water led. But raiding was the smaller half. They settled Iceland and Greenland, reached North America around 1000, founded Dublin, took York, ruled Normandy, and rowed the Russian rivers to Constantinople and Baghdad to trade furs and enslaved people for Arab silver. Arab silver coins turn up in Swedish farm fields by the tens of thousands. They were a trade network with a reputation problem.

◆ Worth knowingNorse traders reached Baghdad, and an Arab diplomat sent to the Volga in 921 wrote a detailed account of the Norsemen he met there — admiring their physiques and appalled by their hygiene. The furthest-travelled Viking graffiti is a name carved into a marble balustrade in Constantinople's Hagia Sophia.
◆ The mechanismMigration pressure

Large movements of peoples — pushed or pulled — reshape the societies they leave and the ones they enter.

Also: Trade-route shift · Military-technological disruption

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