Gone Medieval - Vikings in Medieval Baghdad

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

In the ninth century, the Vikings earned a fearsome reputation by wreaking chaos on the coasts of western Europe. But what is perhaps less well known is that they also travelled eastwards. By sailing along the great rivers of north-eastern Europe, they reached Constantinople, the Caspian Sea and even Baghdad, the bustling heart of the mighty Islamic Abbasid Empire. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis welcomes Dr. Cat Jarman back to the podcast to explore why Viking raiders traded the frozen hinterlands of Northern Europe for the heat and hubbub of the Near East. Senior Producer: Elena GuthrieAssistant Producer: Peta StamperScriptwriter: Peta StamperEditor: Joseph KnightThis was a special collaboration between Ubisoft and History Hit. The content and story was inspired by Assassin's Creed Mirage. To learn more about 9th century Baghdad and the historical characters in the game, listen to Echoes of History here.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. The year is 820 AD. You've just stepped out from the shade of a side alley into the sunlit street. This is one of the four main roads leading to the city centre. On either side of the road a rows of merchant shops and bazaars. All around you can hear people bargaining, laughing, children calling out to each other. In the chaos of the street, there are wealthy, men and women dressed in fine silks. There are merchants, scholars, slave traders and the enslaved. You're in Baghdad, the capital city of Iraq and the bustling heart of the Islamic Abbasid Empire.

This is a place where people from Persia, Africa, India, Greece and beyond are all mixing together. They're resting in tea shops, making deals under canopies, exchanging news and gossip on street corners, sharing scientific theories in front of the mosques. The crowd jostles you pass the shocks and stalls, the smells of rich spices tingle in your nose. You strain your neck above heads and shoulders to see what's on offer. Ivory and precious metals from Africa.

Porcelain and silks from China, furs from Europe. And unlike any other city of this age, there are stalls overflowing with books. In a small pouch on your belt jingle a handful of newly minted silver coins. They're dirhams inscribed with Arabic verses from the Quran. The date on the coin tells you that the reigning caliph is Al-Mamun. During his reign, there is a great library known as the House of Wisdom.

In the library, a man named Al-Qarizmi writes a book about algebra. He's one of many scholars who've come to Baghdad to study, translate and invent. The scholars here are making advancements in all areas of knowledge, from medicine and astronomy to poetry and mathematics. Their discoveries will shape the world a thousand years into the future. Meanwhile, at the same time, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex fight bitterly amongst themselves in the West. King Egbert, grandfather of Alfred the Great, is steadily taking over land and power across southern England. In Francia on mainland Europe, Louis the Pius reigns as Holy Roman Emperor, having succeeded his father, Charlemagne, who died just a few years earlier.

To the east in China, Emperor's Yang Zhong of the great Tang dynasty has just died under suspicious circumstances. His reign saw imperial forces wage war against China's powerful warlords. Above the rooftops of shops and houses here in Baghdad, You can see the great city walls reaching 30 metres high. These walls were designed by Al-Mansur, the first caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, who built Baghdad in a perfect circle. He chose the location of the city very carefully. Unlike the surrounding desert, it has a mild climate,

and there's lush farming land nearby to feed the city's growing numbers of inhabitants. Those who come and go from Baghdad use the four city gates, heading out to the distant reaches of the empire. They go to Mecca on pilgrimage or to take their wares to join the famous silk roads via the camel caravans. A network of canals beyond the city walls further supplies Baghdad with food and goods,

linking the city to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where Viking traders steer their ships to Constantinople, eastern Europe and to the world beyond. Welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. In today's episode, I'm joined by a friendly face who some of you will surely remember. Dr Kat Jarman. Kat is a leading bioarchologist and field archaeologist specialising in the Viking Age.

She's the author of The Bone Chests and River Kings, both exploring the Viking Age in Britain and beyond, using the latest research technology and archaeological discoveries. It's a great thrill to have Kat back on Gone Medieval to talk about today's topic, the Vikings in the East. Welcome back to Gone Medieval Cat. Delighted to be back, Matt. Thanks for having me again. You can never escape too far. We keep dragging you back for a little bit more.

Always nice. I do miss you all a lot. Well, we miss you too, and it's great to have you back for any excuse. So the idea that we could talk about Vikings visiting the Near East as a kind of connection between the Assassin's Creed Valhalla, passing the baton to Assassin's Creed Mirage. It was almost like the perfect excuse to get Cat back to talk about Vikings, going to the Near East. Fantastic. Yeah, no, I was delighted to hear about that because it's absolutely one of my favourite topics and it's one where worlds really do collide and worlds that people sometimes don't realise were quite as connected as they really were. So if you can give

us kind of a really brief overview, what are the Vikings up to in the 9th century when Assassin's Creed Mirage is set as Baghdad is beginning to flourish? What does the Viking world look like? Right, so this is a really intriguing part of the Viking Age really, because it's properly started. So it starts really mid to late 8th century. But by the time we're in the 9th century, the movements out of Scandinavia have properly established, and as we'll see in a moment, to lots of different parts of the world. And especially when we get to the sort of mid and late 9th century, we have all these settlers going elsewhere. So Iceland is settled. We have people in what becomes Normandy. And of course, in Britain and Ireland, we have not just raid

anymore. They're not just sort of going out to get loot and come back again, but they are starting to look for political conquest and find new territories. So we have this really quite widespread reach of the Vikings already in the 9th century. And that, of course, also has a huge impact on Scandinavia as a society back home. People don't just go out. They come back as well. And they've been coming back with things and not just things, but also ideas for a really long time. And so a lot of those influences are coming back. They're impacting on the society back home. So it's really developing and changing. So this is sort of a really proper established part of the Viking Age. But we're not yet into the late 10th century when it starts to go more

inwards again. And we have the countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden forming properly as nations, that doesn't really happen until sort of late 10th and into the early 11th century. So this 9th century thing, this is very much still about going out, reaching out, finding new settlements, finding new impulses. And I guess as I'm based in the UK, we probably have a view of the Viking world as quite focused on Britain in terms of their raiding and all of that kind of thing, particularly north-western Europe, as you mentioned Normandy, the British Isles. obviously everyone should have read your book River King so they should understand that the Vikings were heading in other directions as well

but can we think about the Vikings having a main sphere of influence or are they really reaching out in every direction? I definitely think there is a sort of huge widespread reach so you do have this very western, this I'd be used to, the bit about Britain and British Isles, especially that we were very used to so there is of course a huge part of it and especially those more westerly parts of Scandinavia or perhaps Norway and Denmark traditionally have been seen us going mainly westward.

So that was hugely important. That definitely is true. But, and as I say in River Kings, I wrote about this quite a lot, that is a huge bias of the sources that we've been looking at as well because that's very much based on the written sources, things like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. And also some of the later sagas, the medieval sagas as well, do talk quite a lot about this.

But we have this idea that that is really where all the attention is going, And to really understand what was actually happening, we have to go much more into the archaeology, to the unwritten stuff, to the material culture. And some of those sources that haven't really been that open to us, because actually, I think if we look at it, the aspects of the Viking influence eastwards is immense and actually possibly so much more important than what we might previously have thought. So why do we see the Vikings beginning to look east? What draws them east in the first instance?

I think it's very much the same things that draws them west, really. So there's a combination of pushes out of Scandinavia. Scandinavia is quite challenging to live in. It's issues with overpopulation. There's issues with agricultural land. And there's also a sort of sense of exploration that's clearly really important to society. Some of them are looking quite simply for riches. But also to trade, really, not just to sort of rob and steel.

we tend to have this idea of these vicious, ruthless, just grabbing and stealing whatever they can, but a huge amount of it is all about trade as well. So they've already been trading since about 700s around big parts of northwestern Europe and in the Baltics as well. So these sort of pushes outwards are clearly important, but also seeing what things are available in other places. So it might be, as I said before farmland, it might be political power and also objects. Again, that trading is hugely key, as we'll see in the East, trade almost more than raiding, actually, in that part of the world. And do we see the Vikings being viewed differently in the Near East to the way they are in Western Europe? So Western Europe very much views them as something to be terrified of, something that's coming to steal all your stuff, to kill you if they possibly can.

Is there a different reaction to them in the Near East, or is there the same sort of fear? But this, again, is very difficult to tell because the sources we have for that are so extremely biased. And very few of the sources are contemporary, so we don't have many actual 9th century sources. And if we look at the ones in the West that we rely on, the ones that we get all of those messages from, they're from the enemies. So they're from the ones who are using the Vikings to actually create their own nation. So it's people like Alpha the Great, who really is responsible for things like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the sort of contemporary aspects of that, where he's sort of saying, well, because we have this brutal, horrific. enemy, we have to stand together and actually you all have to be under me so that I can be the king

and create this country that we can fight. So if you sort of understand where they're coming from those sources, that's key. And in the East, we don't actually have anything from the 9th century. All the Eastern sources relating to the Vikings are much later. And they tell another story, which again gets really tied up in politics, especially of what becomes Russia. is a storyline that's still being used by Putin. In fact, he used part of this to justify his invasion of Ukraine, this deep history going back to the 9th century. And there it was the idea that actually the Scandinavians came in to help Slavic people who were just fighting amongst themselves and couldn't sort themselves out politically. They called out, apparently,

to these people of the North who came to help them. And so there's this origin story that actually involves people we recognize and call the Vikings as coming in as sort of saviors almost. And that's a really interesting one. I'm pretty certain that that is not a true reflection of the story. But actually, if you look at things like the archaeology, it seems like there is a lot of trade going on. There are sort of settlements expanding, going down those eastern rivers gradually. That's not to say that they were all lovely and cuddly and nice, because they definitely weren't. They were pretty vicious and brutal and took advantage of people, especially with a slave trade. And as, you know, I'm sure we'll get into this in a moment, but they go further east to

Constantinople and places like that, it becomes pretty violent as well. But actually, if you look at those sources, it does seem like there's a sort of quite positive trading element. And I mean, we have to question, is that the case in the West as well? We know huge parts of Britain were settled quite peacefully, actually, by, you know, thousands. of Scandinavians, and they can't all have done that by force. Some must have been peaceful as well. I mean, when they get to Constantinople, there's clearly a recognition of their martial prowess alongside their interesting trade, because they make it into things like the Varanian Guard, don't they? They become a key part of the military equipment of Constantinople

and the Byzantine Empire. Absolutely. They become their sort of top, high-level military forces who are literally that sort of closest bodyguard of the emperor, which is quite a high-status thing to do. But by that point, this has been happening for a little while, really, And we also know that there's been really positive trade, and these trade connections going down those rivers. We've got other record trading agreements. There is clearly a very positive element to it, and this military power is a key part of that as well.

It's interesting, though, that we don't have sources from either the Near East or the Vikings that tell us about their experiences there and what each side thought of each other. We kind of utterly rely on these Western sources that say these guys were terrible, and they turned up and stole everything and killed us all. We only have really that one perspective of them in the written sources, don't we? Yeah, pretty much.

I mean, there is one I want to mention, though, a really interesting one, because I think what happens, also in terms of who these people are, are they Vikings, are they Scandinavians? Because quite quickly we give them a different name. So in the East, they're known as the Russe. And this question of whether the Rus are Vikings, if they are Scandinavians, if they're exactly the same thing, that's been a huge topic for debate. Of course, the name Rus is what goes into Russia.

The Rusians, Belarus, and all of those terms. So that's come from these same people. And that's a term we don't actually quite know the origin of. We first hear it in one Western source, actually, which is a contemporary source. And bizarrely, it comes from Francia, and it comes from the court of Louis the Pius, where on 18th of May 839, he is apparently visited by this group calling themselves the roots. And they've come with a letter from Constantinople, so from the emperor. and he vouches for them and says, please allow these men to travel safely through your country.

They're going through dangerous territory and they need to safe travel. And of course, the emperor is really unsure. He doesn't know. He doesn't trust them. And he interrogates them and eventually finds out that they are related to the Swedes because that's what they tell him. So they seem to be people with some kind of a state. They talk about them having a leader.

So we have this group, the Rus, who clearly got positive, contact with the emperor of Byzantium, and they're sort of having this diplomatic relationship and they're related to Scandinavians. So I think that is really key because there's something going on that that's clearly positive with this group of people. It's weird to think of a diplomatic entourage appearing for the Vikings. It's just not what you expect at all, is it? Exactly. But I think that's important to know, because that is so much of our perception of what goes on in the Viking Age. Are these images that we have, but if you look at those sources and you think of all the sources that we've lost, all

stuff we don't know about, we have to recalibrate a little bit, I think. And what examples do we have of objects that can connect the Viking world to the Islamic world and perhaps particularly thinking of 9th century Baghdad? I mean, famously, River Kings follows this Carnelian bead, but do we see lots of items kind of flowing along that path? Yes, so this is the real key, I think, actually, to understanding that question you were asking earlier on about how important this influence, this Eastwood influence was. And it's all in the objects and the artefacts and not the written sources. Because what we see starting actually late

8th century, so right at the start of the Viking Age, is a huge amount of silver coming in from the east. And that silver is coming in the form of dirhams, so coins, Islamic coins that come from the Islamic Caliphate. So they come from Baghdad or the areas around it. And they find themselves in Scandinavia pretty soon in vast quantities. And I mean, we're talking hundreds of thousands of these coins. And that's, of course, only the coins that are found by us and the ones that are left whole. Because we know that they're not using these coins in Scandinavia as currency. The dirama isn't usable currency in Scandinavia.

But they're using the silver. So silver becomes a hugely important commodity in the Viking Age. Everybody wants it. You can use it to pay with. but it's melted down. So this east and silver is normally, it comes in, melted down, turn into all sorts of beautiful artefacts or just these little ingots or sort of payment bars. And so, you know, the quantity of that is actually staggering if we look at it. There are bords from places like Gotland, this island off the coast of Sweden, where I think there's something like about 60 kilos

worth or something of silver, of coins, which is absolutely staggering. And we see that also. going all the way across to Britain. So when we have the Great Army, for example, coming in, the sort of hugely important force, they bring with them silver, they bring with them these Durham coins that we know comes directly from the east and from those river routes. And that is really, really key to understand because we're talking a lot. You know, there's not just the old random little, so when I wrote about this Cornelian feed that came from India, that's one of four, but, you know, this is thousands. And it's also new. We're only finding out about this really now in the last sort of 10, 15 years through metal

detectorist work actually mainly being plotted. So it's completely altering the picture. But the silver, I think, is really what drives a lot of that interest. I was going to ask, what would the Vikings find of value in the East? But I guess silver, you know, is universally valuable. And even if the silver dirham coin can't be used, you say you can melt it down and it makes dual repayment bars. It is a commodity in itself that is universally of interest. So what do the Vikings take East in order to trade for these items in this silver?

So there are definitely items we know come from Scandinavia, but it's slightly harder because they don't tend to be things that last in the same way. So things like furs and amber and even iron and swords have got exceptionally good technology for sword and metal works. More desirable items, they're more high status items, really. But it's not necessarily a completely even transaction in that sense, because the other things that they do and that they do very well, unfortunately, is that they get involved in the slave trade. And certainly in Baghdad and in the East and in the Islamic Caliphate, slaves are extremely valuable and desired because there are rules about who you can enslave and you can't enslave

other Muslim people. So you're not allowing to have Muslim slaves, which limits you a little bit because it means you have to go outside and you have to find them. Again, also in Constantinople, slaves are very valuable. And this is part of the key for what the Vikings essentially get in on. So they become involved in the slave trade on a really massive scale. Not necessarily taking slaves from Scandinavia or places like Britain, although that did also happen. We've got other sources to suggest that that happens, but it's not that profitable to transport people because you have to keep them alive, you have to keep them fed, you have to keep them dressed and then have transport for them. So that's, it's not great. You don't really want to take them from Ireland to

Baghdad because this doesn't make financial sense. But what they do is they take Slavic populations. So there's huge numbers of people living along these routes along the east that they travel down anyway and when they set up new settlements. And they become part of the, that, a trade that's probably also been going around a little bit before them, but it seems like these people, the Russo or the Vikings are very good at it, and they can take these people and trade them down those river routes and get silver in return. But it's difficult to know the quantities. Slave trade is something that's very difficult to document archaeologically, but we have other sources to suggest that that is definitely what's happening. And how were the Vikings

getting to the Near East? So how do they make it from somewhere like Sweden and those really far northern regions. How do they make it all the way down to the near east to get somewhere near somewhere like Baghdad? And do we know if they ever actually visited Baghdad? Yeah. So it's kind of easier than you might think, actually, surprisingly, because they take the rivers down through Eastern Europe. And if you look at a map and you look at all the river routes, and it's quite exceptional, actually, they're sort of these spidery veins that stretch all across. And they can connect you quite straightforwardly from the Baltic. and all the way down to the Black Sea.

And that is the main route. So we've got a couple of really big routes. So we've got the Volga, of course, which is one of the huge big communication routes and the Nipa as well, which goes through what is now in Ukraine. And those are the key places that they want to get to. And what we see from the 8th century onwards

is a number of settlements springing up right from the north. So you have places like Stareolauga, which is where St. Petersburg is today, starting as the first one, the earliest one, and eventually they just spread, like this network that you can travel through. We know that the maritime technology of the Vikings is really crucial to their success really across the world, the ships that can go across the North Sea, the North Atlantic,

but also down really shallow rivers, they can also drag them across portages. So if the river is too shallow, or if there's a particularly nature of waterfall, or anything like that, they can drag these ships quite far distances. And we have some later brilliant sources actually in the east from Constantinople explaining how they do this and explaining a lot of these different places where they have to drag their ships overlawn.

And their slaves apparently were then being used as part of that work as well, that labour. So that's really quite useful. That takes you down to the Black Sea. We know that they can also go across to the Caspian Sea, which again takes you that further bit east. And then finally, if you are going to go to Baghdad, that's where you have to go over land. And that's where we've got a little bit less knowledge. But we do have some of the Arabic sources actually that tell us that they do go over land.

They get to the nearest coastal regions to something like Baghdad. And then they join camel caravans and go overland. So that's probably the hardest part of the journey. But certainly getting down to Constantinople, Black Sea, relatively straightforward. It's quite interesting to think about the Vikings having this really strategic approach to their expansion, particularly down those river routes, that they're building these outposts and then moving forward. Because I think we just have this idea of them being quite chaotic. They just explode on the sea and cause as much damage as they possibly can and then go away with no plan.

But it seems like in the east, at least, to build these trade routes. They had a real strategy to make sure that they could get there safely and then get back and forth as and when they wanted to. Yeah, definitely. I think there's an awful lot more to how all of this was arranged. I mean, I think it's important to know that this doesn't come from one big source. You don't have one big Viking king or emperor. It's not like in Byzantium, it's not like in Francia or anywhere like that. This isn't one kingdom or empire at this point.

So there's lots of smaller petty kings. Again, that's what sort of happens in the East as well. And these people, the Rus, quite quickly, become intermingled with the local population. So we have some of the Slavic elites that are clearly joining them, and certainly in those origin stories that come from what later becomes Russia, that actually give this in some details and give names, people like Rurik, who's one of the founding fathers, as it were. These are people who are sort of linked to both the local Slavic elites

and Scandinavian elites. And we see things like names. There's later 10-century trading agreements where we have Scandinavian names and Slavic names. And so they seem to do a lot of clever things by creating these local elites and then actually dividing the land, dividing the rulerships between themselves somehow. So there's clear sort of systems that are working really well here in that who rules what and how they work together. And I think if you know that you're very dependent on these vast distance trading networks,

you need to know that you can trade with the village or the town or settlements. that's how many miles up the road. There's even walrus ivory coming from Greenland in Watts than Kiev. So you have extreme long-distance trading going on. So for that to work, you have to work to the same rules. You have to be able to cooperate and collaborate. It's much more thought through and much more politically savvy than perhaps people might think. Do we have any evidence for the role that Viking women might have played in this contact

between the east and the west. Yes, this is a really interesting one, actually, because again, that tends to be one of those things that people think, well, they just stayed at home, and that was the traditional narrative, was that women stayed at home, and all the men folk went out and did all the brave things and brought them back nice trinkets from abroad.

And if you look at the actual evidence, if you look at the archaeology, that really isn't the story at all. And one of the things I find really fascinating is when you look at the Scandinavian artefacts in the east, in Eastern Europe, and especially in what is now Russia, there's actually an awful lot of female objects and female artifacts.

And leading back to a question that you asked earlier on about the sort of East-West comparison, there's actually more Scandinavian artifacts found in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. So although we think that there's a lot more of them in somewhere like Britain, in terms of the actual Scandinavian artefacts, way more in the East. So if we can use that to actually quantify things, that's really interesting.

But among those, an awful lot of female objects. And they are definitely things that are not just taking us gifts. You know, it's not just somebody going, well, you know, I want to find myself a nice Slavic wife and so I'm going to bring her some jewelry from home as a gift. It's not like that. You've got graves that are clearly family groups together. And the women are involved in things like trade, it seems, because weighing equipment, scales, it's always hard to tell from grave goods if that really reflects what people did in life.

but we have to assume that there's some connection there. And there's actually quite a lot of women with trading equipment. So they were clearly involved in those activities. We then have names. So I mentioned those treaties earlier on with Scandinavian names in them as the sort of high-up individuals who were in charge of different territories and somehow or diplomatic elements from those territories. They include female names as well.

So there are some sort of high-powered women with Scandinavian names when these eastern territories are properly established. And then of course we have things like the very infamous Birka warrior woman, richly equipped grave of somebody with lots of weapons, clearly a high-status individual from Burka in Sweden, DNA testing showing that this was somebody who was biologically female. She was wearing a hat, a cap of an eastern type of a type that's typically thought only to have been giving to the highest retainers who are working for or with. essentially the chief or the king of the Slavic kingdoms. So the fact that we've got some of really high status in Scandinavia, a woman with the sort of high status Slavic elements, that's also really quite interesting. So they're clearly part of it. And again, our vision, I think, is always of Viking raiding parties full of men. And we don't think these could be family endeavors,

that there was actually a community movement for these things. It's not all about just men with big beards and big axes jumping off boats and hacking and slashing. And this becomes a migration thing. So there is some of that as well. And I'm absolutely not one of those who says, no, no, it's all equal opportunities for everyone. And we have vast armies of Lagerfers or whoever. It just wasn't a free for all for women. Absolutely not. But there were certainly some that had military functions, some that had high status. But I think this community element, the fact that we have families migrating, this isn't just a sort of high-powered military operation. It's a migration process. And that comes with families. And these families are going east as well as west. And as this contact with the Islamic East is growing, we're in the Islamic Golden Age here around Baghdad. Are the Vikings bringing back with them more than just goods from the Near East?

Do we see them engaging at all with the culture, the science, the religion perhaps? Yeah, that's such a good question. And unfortunately, it's one that we haven't got a very good answer to because we don't see it. I mean, we don't have a lot of written records from that time, so we don't really know what they are thinking of all of that they see. So we don't really know that very well. And there are some questions,

and there certainly are a few researchers who have questioned this, whether we have Muslims coming up and being based in Scandinavia as well. There are quite a lot of artefacts that have, of course, Islamic writing on them, the coins have got writing on them. It does seem like a lot of the Scandinavans know that, they might know and understand that because there are coins that have got graffiti on them. We see graffiti all over the place in the Viking world. There are certainly some coins where the inscription, the Islamic inscriptions,

refer to religious elements. And there are some that have Thor's Hamas inscribed on top of that. So you must think, you know, are you just doing that for fun or you're actually trying to say, well, this isn't the message that we believe in. So here's our message. So that's one sort of element that perhaps they are understanding things. But then also we have other objects. So in a place called Helga in Sweden, which is near Birka, for example, there's a Buddha statue that was found during an excavation.

And that's probably come from what is now Pakistan or sort of India-Pakistan border. And it had a sort of leather string wrapped around it. So it seemed like it was suspended and it was carried. And that's really intriguing. you know, what is it doing there? Are these just curiosities? Or are there people there going, okay, well, this is what this statue means. This is what it's all about. There are other people buried with rings, again, with the sort of inscription. Actually, some that are pseudo-Islamics, so they're not actually quite right, so they seem to be almost fakes. But, you know, there are little

elements there, and you have to question, are there actually people living in Scandinavia who might be of other religions who might be trying to spread that. We know missionaries come in. We've got Arabic sources saying that we've got missionaries traveling up. They've all got there traveling to places like Hedaby and Denmark, writing and observing things. It obviously wasn't taken up because we would have known if that was taken up by large scale at all.

But certainly those people could have been there. And we know they have all this knowledge about science, about technology. Again, we don't see it directly, but I like to think that a lot of that knowledge is circulating. I don't think that the Scandinavans are just coming down as completely dumbwitted people not taking in what they are observing for those that do come to Baghdad, but they will be coming back with the stories. But yeah, we can't quantify it. We can't say anything more specific than that at the moment. Yeah, I think even without too much evidence of it, this is a time when the Vikings are beginning to engage with Christianity far more than they ever have. And I don't think

it's beyond the realms that they would have thought about Islam as another potential, you know, if they're looking for a new religion, if they're looking to engage, Islam must have had an attraction in the sense that that's where a lot of their trade was as well. That was where they were getting their goods and their riches from. So there must have been as much of an interest in Islam as there was in Christianity for them in this period. Yeah, I mean, they certainly would have been curious. I mean, they must have been. And I think part of the year that we do have to remember is the reason why these people from Scandinavia were so successful was that they were very open to observing and understanding that the communities that they are working and trading with,

when we get beyond that sort of just looting, grabbing stuff from a monastery or whatever and get into the political conquest that they do so well, they must understand things. So they understand a lot of it. And in fact, actually, one of the references to trading down in Baghdad relates to religion as well. And we know that there are places where there were rules about who you could trade. with. And if you were Christian, for example, you may or may not be allowed to trade with. I can't quite remember the rules now. But we know that there are stories about various

of the Russo, the Vikings, lying about their religions in order to be able to trade. So that does show that there's a really quite good understanding of what's important and how you interact with that. So, yeah, I mean, they must have seen it, ultimately decided that it wasn't for them, but certainly had those influences. As someone who's literally written a book on this subject. Why do you think it's important for us to better understand the role the Vikings played in connecting the Islamic world to Western Europe? Should we view the Vikings as the kind of primary conduit between these two different regions? I think so, absolutely, because what they did so successfully was really tapping into those networks and especially the Silk Roads,

which were bringing all these goods in. So we do quite literally see Silk coming in and coming up to Scandinavia and up to the north. And in doing all of this, they're really kick-starting a lot of other things. So actually, you know, a lot of what's happening in 9th century England, where England is forming as a nation, and especially kingdoms like Wessex expanding Alfred the Great, that is very much in response to those Vikings and what they're doing. So a lot of the towns we have to do with the burs being built against the Vikings. And I think a lot of the same thing is happening in the East. So there's this development of Rus and these Russe, nations that later are created, starting as sort of smaller kingdoms, again, that is related to all

that trade. And so I'm not going to say that, you know, we did it. It was all the Scandinavians. It was us who sort of founded everything. But they act as a catalyst for other political developments. And they clearly are fueling a lot of things in the Islamic world as well, because that trade is so lucrative. And if that is mainly the slave, it has possibly, but those slaves are essentially helping that Islamic golden age to really thrive. That's a huge part of the economy. This is globalization, actually, what we like to think of as a bit of a 21st century term, but this is when it starts to happen. So things are being brought together and it's not all about the Vikings, it's not all about them, but it's about everything else that they open for and how it can sort of

essentially start to make connections on a bigger scale that continues later on. So I think that really is the key to understanding and also understanding that actually we have had the connections to the East for much longer. You know, that isn't something new. They haven't been detached. We had influences even though they're not that direct and obvious. And do you think that kind of almost the beginning of a more globalised world, is that the long-term legacy of the connectivity that the Vikings brought to us? I would think so, yeah, actually, because they are really opening up so many of those connections. And that is something that becomes, very important later on and keeps on going without them. So even though into the 11th century,

there's all these deep connections between Scandinavia and especially those eastern territories, even though the royal families, there's lots of royal connections, there's lots of marriages and things continuing through time. And then, of course, we go into the crusades and you've got connections between East and West, which go in a slightly different direction. But I do think that starting point, that ability to open for the trade and establish things that go on later is an absolute key legacy. And I think there still is an awful lot to learn actually about the East. And I think we can do that in two ways. One is focusing on what we find in the West, so looking for those traces, for seeing how much contact and connection and trade there is.

And we're doing that with things like analyzing silver, for example. So I said earlier on that a lot of the silver gets melted down. And of course, when it's just a lump of silver, you don't necessarily know that it's come from the East. But we can now use things like isotope analysis, which is looking at the chemical composition of the silver, that can give us some really good clues to where it's coming from and which parts of the Islamic world, even if that's where the silver comes from. So with that, we can start to quantify it a bit more and see how much is going to be. coming out of the East, going into the West.

There's things on the chronology, you know, what happens earlier on, for example. And then obviously, all the way through the East, we can do more work, more excavations, look and more artefacts. There's a huge part of this, which I didn't really go into, but I write about in River Kings, which is to do with what's happened since, and especially the Soviet Union and the understanding and the sort of use of that link to Scandinavia, which has been quite controversial and still less today to some degree. So there's still a lot of material there that hasn't been properly studied. But going further east, so somewhere like Baghdad, we have these written records.

We know they must have been there, but we've never found them. There's no Scandinavian artifacts, no graves or burials or anything like that, that we've ever found. Does that mean they went there? Or is it just that we haven't found them? And by one source, one of the sort of later Arabic sources, is saying that when a lot of these ruse people have died further east, so around the Caspian Sea, for example, they were buried with their weapons and things like swords. And the local people very much valued those swords and would later come and dig them out of the ground. So it's quite possible that we have what we would recognize as Viking graves or roost graves that have since been lost. So I would be really intrigued in seeing if there are ways we can

look at that material more in the East. But I think overall, just sort of putting this all together, looking at what we've got, of course there's DNA, there's all the bio-archology, which we haven't even touched on, really. That's starting now to bring up some really interesting evidence, certainly from parts of Ukraine, there are burials there with definite Scandinavian ancestry in some of these graves that are classified as ruse graves. So watch that space, really. Hopefully we'll get access to more material and try. So I think it's an exciting feel. I think 20 years time, if you'll still have me in 20 years time, and hopefully this podcast is still going, I can give an exciting update. Definitely. We will definitely have you back in 20 years time.

Well, thank you so much for having me, Matt. Absolutely delighted to be back. And thank you for letting me ramble on about my favourite topic. Always a pleasure to be back and gone with you all. It's been an absolute pleasure and you are very welcome back anytime. Thank you very much, Katz. Kat's previous book, The River Kings, is a wonderful exploration of the wide web of the Viking world. Kat's latest book, The Bone Chest, is a great way to meet some Anglo-Saxons and consider the emergence of England as a nation during the Viking Age. You can also catch Kat on her podcast, The Rabbit Hole Detectives, with Charles Spencer and Reverend Richard Coles, wherever you get your podcasts, and they're also doing live versions of it now, too, that you can buy tickets for.

To celebrate the release of Assassin's Creed Mirage, you can also catch two new series of Ubisoft's Echoes of History podcast that will bring you even closer to 9th century Baghdad. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday. So please join us next time for more from the Greatest. millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts as it really does

help new listeners to find us. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.