The Viking Age

793–1066 CE — Europe, Norse Scandinavia

Today: Scandinavia, and everywhere their ships reached

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 knowing: Norse 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.

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

Entry 101 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.