The Vikings and their World: A Global History

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, economies, politics, information and travel are becoming inextricably global. This book is a history of the Vikings for the new century, providing a wide-ranging account of their part as Europe's first global actors between c.750 and c.1500 AD. It spans the vast horizons of the Norse, stretching from the borderlands of the Islamic world and the Asian steppes in the east, to North America in the west. The founding of the Norse colony at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, the first documented contact between humans in Eurasia and the Americas since the last Ice Age, was a spectacular world event. But this achievement was balanced and perhaps even surpassed by the everyday and largely anonymous activities of the Swedish Rus in the east. By creating a system of trade that linked the Baltic with the Caspian and Black Seas, the Rus made themselves into the mediator between Dark-Age Europe and the riches of Asia, stretching from the Islamic Caliphate of Baghdad to the borders of China. This global perspective provides the large-scale framework into which the more familiar episodes of Scandinavian raiding and settlement are integrated, offering to the reader an understanding of the Viking world as an interconnected whole, shaped by processes sprawling across three continents. Based on new research, and including history, archaeology, human genetics, linguistics and literary studies, the book follows Viking raiders, colonists and traders from their Scandinavian homelands to Carolingian Francia, Russia, Ireland and the British Isles, before striking out with them into the North Atlantic, to Iceland, Greenland, and the still-mysterious Vinland. The story is punctuated and given depth by detailed case-studies based on my original research and the latest historical thinking on key Viking activities and experiences, such as bloodfeuds, town-building, the world of Norse women, and the conversion from paganism to Christianity. While offering new material and detailed interpretations, this book is also one of the first works of early medieval stereography to be influenced by the relatively new discipline of 'world history". This is an exciting and innovative approach to the past exploring large-scale themes over broad geographical and chronological frameworks and has recently achieved mainstream attention through Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel' (Chatto & Windus, 1997) and 'Collapse' (Viking Penguin, 2005). While more focussed in approach, this book will use some of the ideas and methods of world history to reassess the Norse across Eurasia, the North Atlantic, the Arctic and the eastern seaboard of North America over some seven centuries. Norse settlers, traders and explorers need to be understood as Europe's first global actors, not only physically linking together three continents (Europe, Asia and North America), but also mediating between world-systems, roles that led to Indian buddhas being found in Sweden, silver from Iraq in Ireland, central Asian silks in York, and ivory from Greenland and the Canadian Arctic in Christian Europe. Finally, global processes, such as climate change and ecology, are also brought into the narrative in a more integrated way than has been done before in a single-volume history.