Vikings in the East

We commonly consider the Viking Age to be a westernEuropean phenomenon. This is not surprising, given the Viking impact oncommunities either side of the North Sea and the English Channel and across theBritish Isles. However, it also had a crucial eastern aspect that was a keycause of the Viking raids in the first place. Changes takingplace in the distant Islamic Caliphate disrupted the flow of silver toScandinavia. For years, Islamic merchants and their middlemen had carriedsilver to northern Europe. There, they traded it for slaves, furs and amber. Facing this change, raiding in the West offered the Vikings an alternative wayto get their hands on precious metals and slaves. At the sametime, the forest products of the eastern Baltic and the supply of slaves fromthere drew Swedish adventurers eastward. For several reasons, the Vikingphenomenon increasingly had an eastern front. Utilizing the river systems, these Vikings soon became active on the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and in theByzantine Empire. In this brilliantly timely book, historianMartyn Whittock explains how it was a Viking-Slav dynasty that created thefirst Russian state and how a rivalry between Viking leaders set up the statesthat would later become Russia and Ukraine, with consequences we are stillliving with today. Since the sixteenth century, rulers inRussia have referenced these origins to enhance their power and secure controlover the Ukrainian lands, most recently demonstrated by Vladimir Putin as hisjustification for the seizure of Crimea and then the Russian invasion ofUkraine.