Vikings in the East

We commonly consider the Viking Age to be a western European phenomenon. This is not surprising, given the Viking impact on communities either side of the North Sea and the English Channel and across the British Isles. However, it also had a crucial eastern aspect that was a key cause of the Viking raids in the first place.

Changes taking place in the distant Islamic Caliphate disrupted the flow of silver to Scandinavia. For years, Islamic merchants and their middlemen had carried silver to northern Europe. There, they traded it for slaves, furs and amber. Facing this change, raiding in the West offered the Vikings an alternative way to get their hands on precious metals and slaves.

At the same time, the forest products of the eastern Baltic and the supply of slaves from there drew Swedish adventurers eastward. For several reasons, the Viking phenomenon increasingly had an eastern front. Utilizing the river systems, these Vikings soon became active on the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and in the Byzantine Empire.

In this brilliantly timely book, historian Martyn Whittock explains how it was a Viking–Slav dynasty that created the first Russian state and how a rivalry between Viking leaders set up the states that would later become Russia and Ukraine, with consequences we are still living with today.

Since the sixteenth century, rulers in Russia have referenced these origins to enhance their power and secure control over the Ukrainian lands, most recently demonstrated by Vladimir Putin as his justification for the seizure of Crimea and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine.