Vikings in the South: Voyages to Iberia and the Mediterranean, by Ann Christys

Abstract

Ann Christys has provided a tremendous service to students of the Viking Age with this short book, which aims to integrate viking activity in the South with the much better known theatres of war and peaceful exchange in western Europe, Byzantium, and the East. Christys’s knowledge of early medieval Iberia and its Arabic writers, Latin charters and Romance chronicles is not shared by most students of the viking world, and her study is a very welcome addition to the field. While vikings made themselves ‘part of the history of Iberia’ (p. 95), details of what they did, and where, have been elusive. Christys lays out what is known: that Northmen raided the northern and western coasts of the Iberian peninsula, attacked Lisbon and Seville, and may have threatened the Umayyad capital at Cordoba; studies of mouse DNA (sic) suggest that their ships travelled as far as Madeira (p. 7). The most significant episodes seem to have taken place in 844–5, 859–62 and the 960s. Motives are uncertain: in contrast to other regions, there is no archaeology of trade (in the form of camps or trading sites, for example) and no physical or onomastic evidence of more than ephemeral settlement. Christys wonders whether slaves were in fact the greatest draw (pp. 11–12). Her verdict is that viking activity was ‘probably small-scale, although perhaps more frequent than our sources admit’ (p. 95).