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Saxons riding to battle, apparently without either armour or helmets. From a contemporary manuscript.

having a profound efFect on the making of modern Europę. ‘A furorę normannorum libera nos, Dominę’ (‘From the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord’), prayed Christians throughout Europę but it was to be two and a half centuries before their prayers were answered.

Where did the Vikings come from, and why? They were Swedes, Danes and Norwegians, Scan-dinavians from a self-contained northern society which spoke a common language and shared a common culture. Originally traders, whose trading posts in foreign lands frequently grew into colonies, they leave us evidence that just prior to tire beginning of the Viking Age there was a marked population explosion. The limited farming lands of Scandinavia could not support the inereased population, and large-scale expansion began: as early as 810, raids were being co-ordinated to obtain not just loot, but land.

It was the Norwegians who began the raids, but the Danes and Swedes soon followed suit. Sweden 1’aces the east, and the Swedes naturally thrust across the Baltic and into the steppes of Russia, following the rivers and lakes, down the Volga and Dnieper towards the great trading centres of Baghdad and Byzantium. Their own main trading centres were established at Novgorod, Kiev and Smoleńsk, and their leaders ruled here as princes. The Vikings called these lands Greater Sweden, but the Arab and Byzantine writers of the 9th and ioth centuries, in their freąuent mentions of the Vikings, referred to them as the Rus (probably a corruption of the Finnish worcl for Sweden, Ruotsi), and thus the Vikings both created and gave their name to Russia.

Those who settled in the great cities traded furs, honey, amber, wax and slaves to the East, and brought back the perfumes, spices and silks for which the East was famous. But the fighting men soon grew restless and moved on to go a-viking once again. Four times Rus fleets sailed across the Black Sea to attack Constantinople, which they knew only as Miklagard, the Big City, a legendary source ofenormous wealth at the edge of the known world. The Byzantine emperors, impressed by the fighting ability of these warriors, reeruited a special corps of Vikings for their army—the Varangi'an Guard and so harnessed much of this surplus energy for their own good, a typical Byzantine manoeuvre. For