While Viking fleets assaulted the English, Franks, Irish, and other western Europeans in the mid-800s, Norse adventurers moved on to southern and eastern Europe and well beyond. In 844 a Viking fleet of more than a hundred ships left the base on the Loire and approached the northern shores of the Iberian Peninsula (now occupied by Spain and Portugal). Defenders of the Christian kingdom of Galicia and Sturias rallied and repelled the attackers, who then sailed southward to the Muslim kingdom of Cordoba. There they sacked Lisbon and Cadiz and sailed up the Guadalquivir River and captured Seville before being defeated by a local Muslim army.
In 857 another Viking fleet from the Loire, this one with sixty-two ships, passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean Sea.
The marauders ravaged the coasts of Morocco (in North Africa) and the Balearic Islands. Three years later they reached Italy, where they sailed up the Arno River and sacked Pisa and Fiesole. On their way home they were defeated by Spanish Muslims once again, and fewer than a third of the original pirate vessels made it back to the Loire.
The Norse were no less active in eastern Europe and western Asia. By 830 they had explored the major components of Russia's vast river system, including the easily navigable Volga, Dnieper, Lovat, and Dvina rivers. They also established strong trade contacts with Arab states south of Russia and the
Greek-ruled Byzantine Empire centered in Constantinople, on the southern rim of the Black Sea. The local Slavic peoples called these eastern Vikings the Rus (from which the name Russia derives). These were the Vikings whom the Muslim traveler Ibn Fadlan observed up close and wrote about.
As had happened in western Europe, vigorous trade proved a prelude to raiding and attempts at conquest. Sometime in the 850s or 860s a group of Rus established a permanent base near the site of the later city of Novgorod in northwest Russia. Not long afterward, they traveled down the Dnieper River and captured the hilltop town of Kiev,
The present-day capital of Ukraine. Kiev became the capital of a large Rus kingdom that eventually stretched from Finland in the north to the Black Sea in the south. The Rus also tried but failed to capture Constantinople and attacked and looted the Muslim lands situated around the Caspian Sea.
Over time most of the Rus settled down as farmers and blended with the local Slavs. A few, however, remained more traditional Viking warriors. Known as the Varangians, or "ax-bearers," they became an elite force within the Byzantine army—the Varangian Guard, charged with protecting the Byzantine emperors.
World History
