4553–4826 AM · 793 CE — 1066 CE · world history
The Viking Age
Scandinavians in longships reach from Baghdad to North America.
It begins with the sack of Lindisfarne and lasts three centuries, but the Vikings were traders as much as raiders. They founded Dublin, settled Normandy, sailed Russian rivers to the Black and Caspian seas, colonised Iceland and Greenland, and landed in Newfoundland around 1000—five centuries before Columbus.
Sources
Documents of the period
- documents and inscriptions of the period — the rune stones and Ibn Fadlan’s account of the Rus
Scholarship
- Arabic and Ottoman chronicles — the routes of the Vikings from Baghdad to Vinland
Basis: documents and evidence.