Viking Trade Routes: From Scandinavia to the Silk Roads

Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads

While much is talked about Viking activity westwards into the North Atlantic, their journeys eastwards are just as – if not more – varied and intricate. From Scandinavia, they travelled across the Baltic Sea, then down a network of rivers through Central and Eastern Europe to reach the Black and Caspian Seas. In doing so their trade made it not only to the Byzantian city of Constantinople – known as Micklagard amongst the Vikings – but even further to the Islamic caliphate and the trading routes that formed part of the Silk Road.

The bioarchaeologist Cat Jarman, Phd, details the Vikings’ unexpected networks of travel and trade in her book River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Road. Starting with a carnelian bead found at a Viking gravesite in Derbyshire, England, she retraces its journey all the way back to its likely origin in Gujarat, India. Using forensic techniques like isotope analysis, carbon dating, and DNA analysis on human remains, she pieces together the path the bead took, in doing so untangling the experiences of the Vikings and their ventures.

The result is an upturning of the general consensus that the eastern trade routes played little part in the western Viking tale. Instead, the presence of a Middle Eastern or Asian carnelian bead in rural England points to an integration between the Eastern and Western worlds, linked through both trade and migration.

This article draws on the key information from Cat Jarman’s book to explore the extent of the Viking connection between east and west. It Is intended as background reading for Odyssey Traveller’s Scandinavia Guided Tour for mature-aged and senior travellers, during which we uncover a Viking past in the Scandinavian peninsula. Travelling from our centrally located hotel, we catch a glimpse of the world’s biggest fjords and some fabulous scenery on a journey through the countries of Scandinavia: Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

A Bead is Found at Repton, England

In the 1970s and 1980s evidence of a 9^th-century Viking army camp was unearthed at Repton in Derbyshire, England. It is believed to be the camp of the Great Heathen Army, which first appeared on English soil in the winter of 865. Over the next thirteen years, the army would move across the country. A new Viking thirst for long-term political conquest had replaced the smaller, hit-and-run raids they had been carrying out on English shores for almost a century.

The Viking camp at Repton has remained one of the most significant Viking sites in England for more than forty years. Excavations carried out by Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle initially focused on the village’s Anglo-Saxon church, St Wystan’s. While excavating the cemeteries around the church, the team came across a large ditch, cutting through earlier graves and abutting the church wall. Nearby, they found several distinctly Scandinavian-style burials. The ditch was interpreted to be part of a defensive enclosure, showing that with little doubt here was the historically attested winter camp of the Great Heathen Army.

Amongst the burials was a double grave of two men (G511 and G295). G511’s grave is significant because his is the only such Viking warrior grave in the whole of England that has been properly excavated. There are no comparative graves with the bones intact. Strontium dating shows that he originated from southern Scandinavia, most likely Denmark.

The most remarkable discovery in Repton, however, lay next to the church, in the vicarage garden. Here, Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle excavated a shallow mound to find a partially destroyed two-roomed Anglo-Saxon building underneath containing the jumped remains of at least 264 people. Amongst the bones numerous artefacts were found linking the mount to Repton’s Viking occupation, including several knives, an axe head, and five silver pennies dating to between 872 and 875 – precisely the time when the Great Army had camped in Repton.

Somewhere among all of this, one of the excavators discovered the tiny orange carnelian bead that would end up in Cat Jarman’s possession some forty years and set her on the trail to discover the Vikings’ east-west links.

Analysing the results of radiocarbon dating methods, Jarmon was able to show conclusively that the individuals buried in the grave dated to the 9th century. Everything thus pointed to this being a burial site associated with the Viking Great Army. The bones were presumably those of the war dead: warriors who had died in battle and been given a communal grave.

Crucially, thought, the results demonstrated that the people in the mass grave hadn’t come from a single origin, like a raiding party hailing solely from Norway or Denmark. Along with evidence emerging from other Viking Age sites, this suggests that Viking groups were composite forces under joint leadership that could pick up and lose members from widespread origins along the way. This could explain how Jarmen’s bead made it all the way here from the east. But what was its exact route?

Dirham Silver Coins

More evidence of the Vikings connecting England to the east has been unearthed just a few miles downriver from Repton, in the form of several fragmented Islamic dirham coins. With a typical diameter of around 2.5 cm, these coins are significantly larger than the Anglo-Saxon coins that were in circulation in the same time period. Made of silver, dirhams have several lines of text on both sides and usually an inscription in Arabic (Kufic) script along the coin’s outer edge and in the centre.

They are important because they are direct evidence of contact and trade with one of the most powerful empires in the world at the time of the Vikings: the Islamic caliphate. In the late seventh century, the increasingly prosperous Islamic caliphate led by Caliph Abd al-Malik began creating these silver versions of its gold coinage, the dinar. The new silver coins quickly became an established currency as the Islamic government sought to improve and establish control over its monetary system.

It doesn’t seem to have taken long before the coins started to circulate far beyond the spheres in which they could be used as legal tender and in the ninth century they were beginning to appear in large quantities in Scandinavia. Yet this was a world with which, according to our traditional understanding, early medieval England had very little contact, and certainly not in areas like this, in the middle of rural Derbyshire.

Coins such as these dirhams would have been of little use to regular Anglo-Saxon farmers in the ninth century and consequently there is no obvious reason why they should be found in those contexts. Jarman writes, “Their presence in England appears to be entirely related to the Vikings and demonstrates not only the vast networks that they were part of, but also something crucial about the global stage on which their actions were played out.”

Reaching England

Jarman’s carnelian bead, the Dirham silver coins, as well as other commodities such as silk have been shown to have reached England from the east. But how did they get there? Back on the trail of the bead, Jarman assumes it travelled through Torksey. From here, she traces the River Trent north to bring us to the Humber. Here she then comes to another junction, an exceptional meeting point of three rivers: the Trent going south, the Ouse going north – an artery connecting all the way to York – and the Humber, which takes you out to the coast and to the North Sea.

From the mouth of the Humber, as the crow flies, the distance to the coast of Denmark is around 550 kilometres. It is possible to reduce the time spent in open water by hugging the coastline north around Scotland, stopping off in Orkney, then Shetland. From there, the distance across to Norway is only 300 kilometres.

Whichever route you chose, Jarman argues the Viking ship would have been more than capable of making these crossings. In principle the journey could have been completed in under a week in a ship sailing at full speed. Nevertheless, it isn’t immediately obvious the beans and other goods arrived this way.

There’s also the plausible route of having travelled via the Mediterranean. We know from historical records that there were numerous Viking raids along the western coast of France, in Spain and the Iberian Peninsula, and that they reached the western Mediterranean through the straits of Gibraltar, raiding the coastline of North Africa in attacks on Morocco. From there they may also have travelled across to the eastern Mediterranean to obtain goods or even to go inland.

However, there exists no direct evidence of this connection. We might, for example, expect to see dirhams that had been minted in Islamic parts of Spain, but so far none have been found in the ground in England. Equally compelling is the fact that there are very few known artefacts from the Iberian Peninsula or the western Mediterranean in England. So, Jarman concludes, the more likely option is that the goods, including her bead, did in fact arrive via Scandinavia.

Eastern Objects Found in Scandinavia

Various exotic objects that once travelled long distances from the east have been unearthed in Scandinavia dating from the Viking Age. One particular curious and unexpected find occurred in 1956 on the small island of Helgö, not far from Stockholm. Here a small bronze Buddha statuette was pulled out of the ground in an early medieval context. Also at the site was a bronze ladle from the eastern Mediterranean, possibly Coptic Egypt, and a fragment of an Irish or British crozier adorned with a slithering beast and a man’s head – a representation of Jonah and the whale, symbolic of the resurrection.

Carnelian beads too began to appear in small numbers in Scandinavia in the first half of the ninth century. Then suddenly they were everywhere, their popularity increasing due to higher demand and a new means of supply. In the 1970s, Swedish archaeologist Johan Callmer painstakingly gathered, studied, and classified the shapes and colours of almost fifteen thousand Viking Age beads from graves across Sweden. In doing so, he was able to place the different types of beads in a chronological order.

In her own research, Cat Jarman checked the chronology for beads that matched that from Repton and quickly noticed a trend. Of 879 carnelian beads, the first arrived in Scandinavia in the period between 820 and 845, in a very small number: only fifteen beads found. A few decades later came a dramatic increase, with a total of 450 dated to between 860 and 885. This is, in fact, almost a quarter of the entire collection of carnelian beads that have been found across the Viking Age.

The distribution of the beads then fluctuated, but this was exactly what Jarman was hoping to find. That brief twenty-five-year period matches the timing of the Repton bead’s burial in 873 perfectly. What’s more, it fully supports the suggestion that the bead could have reached England via Scandinavia. While all those beads classified by Callmer had been found in burials, in recent years many more beads have been discovered at trading sites. Thus, Jarman argues they were most likely brought over by traders.

Trading Sites in Scandinavia

In the 8th and 9th centuries, towns started to develop in Scandinavia as trading centres established by local kings. They were designed to ensure traders and their valuable goods were safe, so that the kings could tax the traders’ goods for the use of land and protection. This led to concentrations of populations not seen before in Scandinavian history. Indeed, before the Viking Age, there were no real proper towns in Scandinavia, in which a large permanent population made a living fashioning and selling a variety of non-agricultural goods. Rather, people tended to live and work in small farming or fishing villages.

The Norwegian kingdom was based on the town of Kaupang, established around 800. Its location is no coincidence. The western side of the fjord forms the chief sailing route along the coast, while just a few kilometres east of the town lies the mouth of the River Lågen, the main route inland. This coastal zone is among the most fertile regions in the whole of Norway. Further inland, you could reach areas that were big producers of trading goods important for export, like soapstone, minerals for whetstones, and iron.

There’s plenty of evidence for craft activities having taken place in Kaupang, like blacksmithing and glass bead production, with the land divided into individual plots including permanent buildings that would have been in use for several years. Another area was used more temporarily; tents may have been set up there whenever markets were held, giving space for transient seasonal traders. Finds from Kaupang include dirhams and carnelian beads, even if only a few.

Interestingly, the Norwegian settlement of Heimdalsjordet, which was more or less contemporary with Kaupang, contained far more objects with links to the east, including imported beads like carnelian and rock crystal. Carman conjectures this could mean different people were based here, with more of a direct link with eastern networks.

Indeed, increasing urbanism had its roots in trade both to the west and to the east – and, importantly, in seaborne networks. Proto-urban trading sites known as emporia had developed in the period leading up to, and in the earliest phases of, the Viking Age, always near water, either a river or sea. There is a string of these around the Baltic Sea, especially on the northern coast of what is now Germany and Denmark, sites like Hedeby and Ribe, and along the coast of modern Poland. In these places you could sell your goods or get hold of the provisions needed for the onward journey, stop to make repairs to your ship. or maybe even recruit new members for your crew.

One of the most significant towns in Viking Age Sweden was the bustling trading town of Birka. Located on a small island in Lake Mälaren, the town could be reached by boat from the Baltic Sea. It emerged around 750 as an important site linking inland places like Uppsala with the vast trading networks that could be reached across the Baltic both to the east and west. It also appears to have been supported by a considerable hinterland beyond the lake, with plenty of opportunities for agriculture, the collection of raw materials and the exploitation of wild game, especially animals from which furs could be produced and exported.

Birka’s contacts with areas around the Baltic were extensive. In its earliest phases, in the late 700s, these seem to have been focused to the south-west, trading with Denmark and beyond to the Rhineland. Around the end of the 800s, something changed dramatically at Birka and contacts with the east were clearly established.

There is a series of objects from Birka with undeniable links to the east. Finds include metal brooches, beads, silk, silver, ornaments, coins, and even a ring with an Arabic inscription (the only one ever found in Scandinavia). Jarman explains that such objects acted as markers of the exotic, “showing that you had links with those external worlds and an ability to travel, or to obtain imported goods”. Emblematic of experiences and new influences, they served to symbolise elite status, acting as a means of securing or even elevating one’s social position.

Migration of Women

In the Viking Age objects from the outside are thought to have been brought in almost exclusively by raiders or maybe traders returning home. Jarman, however, argues that items may have also travelled through the migration of people – women as well as men.

Until recently, it has been assumed exotic and imported artefacts buried with women were gifts from men. The assumption is that all these exotic goods came to Scandinavia through violent raids that women would surely not have been part of. Many of the foreign objects in women’s graves, however, are not things that must necessarily have been stolen. In fact, graves often contain items like bowls, ladles and serving equipment, objects that related to feasting and to social occasions. These would have been suitable as gifts bestowed in the making of alliance, for example as a dowry. The women with whom the objects were buried could have travelled as well.

Isotope evidence of Norwegian skeletons, for example, have revealed a number of non-local immigrant women, some of whom may well have come from Britain. Finds in England too suggest that the Viking or Scandinavia migrants who came to settle were not exclusively men. Numerous Scandinavian-style female jewellery and dress accessories, for instance, have been found in eastern England. Over time, the sort of designs and fashions that were available very closely mirrored changes seen in Scandinavia, which is something that would be far more likely to have happened if the brooches arrived along with the women themselves, rather than on the ships of a trading merchant.

Jarman, therefore, asks the question of what roles these women had? She argues they were more than “just” wives and daughters, or slaves and concubines. Warfare may have involved some women – certainly as camp followers and maybe as fighters. Scales and weighting equipment found in graves also show that women were involved in trade.

As Jarman explains, “Combined with the scientific evidence that women were part of the migration both into and out of Scandinavia, we really can’t exclude their agency from those worlds any longer… they were undeniably there, an active and instrumental part of the phenomenon, and especially the part of it that was heading east.”

Gotland and the Baltic Sea

Outside of Scandinavia, more artefacts of Scandinavian origin have been found in the east than in the west. This implies that the movement of people and goods east from Scandinavia may have been far greater in magnitude than that moving west. The reasons for why and how this happened lay in Scandinavia’s location on the Baltic Sea.

It was the Viking’s thirst for silver that fuelled so many of their exploits across the Baltic – and the island of Gotland demonstrates this more than anywhere else. The total amount of silver dating to the Viking Age found buried hidden underground on Gotland now exceeds a thousand kilograms and includes 168,000 coins. Among these is a rare discovery of twenty-three coins from Persia, linking the island directly to the Silk Roads.

Gotland is strategically located just off the coast of Sweden. Some 90 kilometres from mainland Sweden and about 130 kilometres from Latvia in the east, the military importance of the island would have been obvious, as would its usefulness as a steppingstone between east and west. Gotlandic society was remarkably stable and wealthy, showing no sign of a king or an aristocracy, but with a population that knew how to take advantage of their position as middlemen in a well-adjusted and fine-tuned trading system.

When an analysis of ancient DNA was used to study the Gotlandic Viking Age, it showed that the island environment displayed the greatest genetic variation compared to the rest of the Viking sites studied. This means that the island had far more diverse communities, with a bigger influx of people from the outside, than had been seen in most of contemporary Scandinavia. It is likely that enslaved people too passed through Gotland and the Baltic port regions. Thus the Baltic served as the true connector of both goods and people between east and west.

Towards the Silk Roads

The process of the Scandinavian’s eastwards expansion didn’t happen in isolation. Instead, the Scandinavians skilfully tapped into the Silk Road networks which had been established with the Asian empires of Persia and China in the first millennium BCE.  The large network of roads, paths, trading posts, and market. connected East Asia and Southeast Asia with South Asia, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, and Southern Europe.

As the name suggests, the major commodity traded was Chinese silk, but this was just one of many commodities that were traded far and wide along the routes. Importantly, the Silk Roads were instrumental in transporting not only goods but also ideas, culture, and religion from east to west and back again.

The Vikings weren’t the first northerners to connect with the Silk Roads or the regions in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet what is clear is that this inroad from the Baltic formed a route east that had not been previously utilised by western European powers to any degree. The connection came at the beginning of the Viking Age in the late 8th century.

The east at this time was experiencing an age of prosperity. Particularly important was the foundation of the city of Baghdad as the capital of the Abbasid caliphate, which had overthrown the Umayyad caliphate just over a decade earlier. Baghdad rapidly became a central hub for the Silk Road trade. The west soon engaged with this culture and extensive trading and exchange networks across Europe came into existence.

The finds of Dirham silver coins in Scandinavia are the manifestation of the beginning of Viking expansions to the east. The earliest coins are mainly those struck by the Abbasid dynasty, coming from a range of places in the Middle East and central Asia, as well as form North Africa.

The very first Islamic coins found in the border zones of Europe, though, are from the Caucasus, i.e., southern parts of modern-day Russia and what are now the countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. This may well have been the first link in what was to become the chain of exchange between the Islamic caliphate and eastern Europe. This, then, is where the expansion eastwards began. The reason it occurred in the second half of the eighth century is due to a more a stable political situation, with peaceful relationships developing between the Khazars in the northern Caucasus and the Arabs of the caliphate.

The Rus Vikings and the Steppe Roads

As the Vikings journeyed eastwards, they followed the rivers that snake through the landscape, reaching inwards to the vast expanse of land from the Baltic Sea in the north and the Black Sea in the south. It appears unquestionable that these realms belonged to those who controlled the rivers and, importantly, to those who knew how to navigate them. But in both the east and in the Arabic accounts, the northerners are no longer known as Vikings. They have morphed, seamlessly, into a group with a new identity: the Rus’.

By the late 9^th century, the Rus’ had formed a state known in modern historiography as Kievan Rus’. This was initially a multi-ethnic society, where the ruling Norsemen merged and assimilated with Baltic, Finnic, and Slavic tribes, ending up with Old East Slavic as their common language.

The regions here contrasted starkly with the territories the Vikings would come across in the west. Most importantly, these plains did not contain the same kinds of riches as could be found in France or in Britain. Here were no wealthy churches or unguarded monasteries rich with gold and precious jewels. Instead, the Rus’ turned their attention to lucrative resources that could be traded and exploited in return for silver from elsewhere. The trade in slaves and furs particularly attracted and propelled the Rus’, ultimately causing vast quantities of silver to flow northwards.

The lands to the south of Lake Ilmen, Novgorod and Staraya Ladoga have a different geography; the forests peter out and are replaced by a belt of grassland known as the Eurasian Steppe. The region reaches as far as Hungary to the west and continues through Ukraine and central Asia, stretching all the way east to Mongolia and China, a distance of some 2500 miles from Europe to Asia. On horseback, you can travel relatively unhindered from west to east over the grassy territory. For this reason, for thousands of years the steppe allowed for extensive travel and trade along the so-called Steppe Roads.

The Rus’ in these regions would have encountered and traded with the Slavs, who had already settled in large parts of eastern Europe, as well as a wide range of nomadic groups. The major trading partners, and often enemies, were the Khazars, but the Rus’ also frequently interacted with other culturally Turkic groups like the Volga Bulghars, the Pechenegs, and the Magyars.

The Khazars were originally a Turkish people, with the Khazar state emerging as the main successor of the Western Turkic Khaganate – the predominant power of the western steppe since the 550s. At its high point the Khazari empire stretched all the way from the lower Dnieper region in the west to the Volga Bulghar state in the north. With a capital in Itil at the north-western corner of the Caspian Sea, the Khazars were able to take advantage of all the traders coming through the lands that they controlled. Ultimately, they became crucial connectors between parts of Europe and the Muslim world, and the Vikings were part and parcel of the growing trade links.

Rus’ Trading Posts and Commodities

The Rus’ created a number of trading posts along the river routes in order to control movement along the rivers and thereby to oversee and manage the expansion of the Kievan state. These posts also served as toll and re-supply stations for travellers and merchants. These weren’t so much permanent settlements or towns, more like staging grounds or transit hubs created to move and administer people. By doing so, they could control trade and taxation.

A particularly profitable operation at these trading posts was obtaining and selling slaves. Here the success of the venture was so great that the very name of the people captured – the Slavs – has given rise to the word slave. Enslavement here was seasonal and certain times of year were used to go out to the hinterland and capture people who could be sold when moving along the Volga and Dnieper to markets in the south or north. This could mean that slaves would have to be held for weeks or even months at the trading posts.

The fur trade was also a lucrative business for the Vikings. Furs from the north were luxury items among the elite in Baghdad, just as beads and other exotic objects were luxuries in the north. While some furs would have come all the way from Scandinavia, many could be obtained throughout eastern Europe, which meant that those travelling the rivers could easily acquire them along the way. Merchants and tradesmen also moved other commodities, like walrus tusks, from the far north, perhaps through this route.

Tar too is an example of a locally procured commodity that became extremely important for the Vikings. Extracted relatively simply from most types of trees, it was used to treat and seal wood in order to waterproof their ships. It might also have been used for treating sails and ropes, to make them better able to withstand the difficult conditions at sea

One major Rus’ trading site that has been excavated is Vypovzyv, located around 75 kilometres north-east of Kyiv. The location makes sense: a long, thin peninsula juts onto a floodplain where the River Desna once flowed. At some point in the late ninth or early tenth century a hillfort sprang up on the prominent tip of the peninsula. Here evidence has been found of palisades and fortifications, making this a highly defended tower right on top of the hill: a place where you could easily have spotted enemies.

Objects found on the hillfort are of a high status and many come from elsewhere: things like silver dirhams and a minute fragment of chainmail – items that only an elite would have possessed. Here too a tiny orange object was uncovered during the excavation: a carnelian bead perfectly matching that found in Repton.

This bead is amongst significantly growing evidence that objects were coming to England from the east in the 870s. Another particularly interesting type of object is falcon scabbard chapes. These small metal ornaments that fitted at the bottom of a sword’s scabbard are very distinctive: a falcon in flight represented in bronze. The vast majority have been found in Sweden, around the Baltic, and down to eastern Europe. Looking at the metal detectorists’ database in England, Jarman found another four, with reference to at least two not on the database. The implication is that they have a direct link either to Sweden or to the east – or maybe to both.

This evidence goes against the prevailing narrative that the Danish and Norwegian Vikings only headed west, and the Swedes only went east. It suggests that there was actually a much more direct connection between the east and west than previously thought – whether through trade, migration, or warriors travelling in both directions.

Miklagard: The Vikings Reach Constantinople

In the earlier periods of the Rus’, most travel took place between Rus’ sites and the north, back and forth towards Novgorod and beyond. In a later phase, this changed as the focus shifted to the south. Eyes were increasingly turned towards a megalopolis located a few weeks’ sailing along the rivers and filled to the brim with riches and trading goods: the Byzantine capital, Constantinople.

Constantinople, or Istanbul as it is better known today, was the capital of the Byzantine Empire, the place where east met west. The Vikings referred to it as Miklagard, the ‘great City’, from mikil (‘big)’ and gardr (‘wall’ or ‘stronghold’).

To make their way there, the Vikings followed the Dnieper River as it snaked its way down to the north-western edge of the Black Sea, where it ends in the Dniprov’ska Gulf. From here the route would have been straightforward. Sail along the coast of the Black Sea, keeping south-west until you come to a strait some four kilometres across: the Bosporus – the gateway to the west. The 30-kilometre strait separates the Black Sea from the Sea of Marmara, which connects with the Mediterranean. At the western end of the strait lies the modern city of Istanbul.

Scandinavians not only made contact with Byzantium, but even established diplomatic relations, from the early ninth century. In fact, a coin of Byzantine Emperor Theophilus (reined c. 812 – 842), along with a Byzantine official seal dating to the first half of the ninth century, has been found at Rurikovo Gorodische by Lake Ilmen. The find suggests that trade moved between Constantinople and the Vikings along the Dnieper Route. Similar seals have been found at Scandinavian trading sites like Hedeby, Ribe, and Birka, which shows that movement and trade went in both directions. All of this suggests that Scandinavians may well have been present in Constantinople for quite some time before Theophilus’ reign; these seals may not represent the first encounter.

While those earlier contacts appear to have been peaceful, for some reasons things seem to have changed fairly rapidly. The first recorded attack on Constantinople by the Rus’ took place a few decades later, on 18 June 860, with a fleet of around 200 Viking ships. In this instance, the Rus departed after a few weeks and left the city in peace.

In the early 940s, the Rus’ returned with an even stronger Viking force, along with other local warriors joining them in their mission. While their first naval attack in 941 was driven off, a successful offensive followed in 944. The attack triggered the Byzantine empire to offer a treaty to establish friendly relations between the two sides, leading to trade-pacts and promises of supplies for merchants and warriors leaving the city.

To the Caspian Sea, Baghdad, and Beyond

From Constantinople, the trail further east becomes hazier. We have only a few hints of Rus’ or Viking journeys in the Middle East, in descriptions of expeditions to the shores of the Caspian Sea and of later attacks on Persia.

One such route started at the point where the Dnieper enters the Black Sea. If you travelled eastwards by boat, you could enter the Sea of Azov, from which you could follow the River Don to the town of Sarkel. Continuing the journey, you could connect to the Volga River or travel overland to Itil, the capital of the Khazars, on the shores of the Caspian. Alternatively, you could travel more directly overland by coming ashore in the eastern part of the Black Sea, in what is modern-day Georgia.

The presence of Rus’ and Scandinavians, however, did not leave an enduring legacy in this part of the world. Nevertheless, it was not the end of the journey for everyone. Although we have not found any physical evidence, the Vikings did make it all the way to Baghdad with their trade of furs and swords.

It’s through here – the city of trade, knowledge, and culture, and a vital steppingstone on the Silk roads – that Jarman’s carnelian bead found in Repton would have most likely travelled.  By the ninth century, the time when this carnelian bead would have passed through here, Baghdad had grown to vast proportions. The city was surrounded by fertile agricultural land and could therefore easily sustain a large urban population. In just over a century it had grown to become the world’s largest city.

Its location, which had been strategically chosen by Caliph al Mansur, placed it on the Tigris and at the closest point to the Euphrates, in the heart of what was once Mesopotamia (the land ‘between two rivers’), ideally placed for trade. Here you could receive supplies by ships from Egypt and Syria in the west via the Euphrates. Sailing downriver around 500 kilometres, meanwhile, would take you directly to the Persian Gulf, from which you could connect through to the vastly significant Indian Ocean trading networks, and further onwards to India and China. Upstream, you could travel through a string of towns as far as what is now Turkey.

The range of goods you could find at the Baghdad markets was mind-blowing: everything from silks from China, Japan and Korea to paper and silver from Samarkand, ebony and ivory from East Africa, copper and gold from Egypt, rugs and leathers from Bukhara, and saffron and horses from Azerbaijan, to mention just a few. And from India came spices, tigers, elephants, coconuts, and minerals – including gemstones like carnelian, sourced from the hills of Gujarat.

Scandinavia Viking Tour

During Odyssey Traveller 13-day tour in Scandinavia, we explore Denmark’s, Sweden’s’ and Norway’s ancient Viking heritage, World Heritage Sites, and charming Nordic cities, with some truly spectacular scenery along the way.

What these Scandinavian countries share in common is their natural beauty, and vibrant, unforgettable cultures. In low-lying Denmark, we visit meticulously maintained urban centres, including the vibrant capital of Copenhagen. We then continue our sightseeing tour and adventure in Sweden and its capital, Stockholm, now the financial capital of the region. Finally, after Sweden, we travel to Norway, famous for its breath-taking Norwegian coastal voyage favoured by tourists. Here, we journey over magnificent mountains and skirt picturesque fjords of Norway to reach Bergen.

Our Scandinavian tour also visits the Christiansborg Palace (outside visit), housing the Danish Parliament; the Vasa Museum; Vigeland Sculpture Park; and the old canal area, Nyhavn, with its picturesque houses and vessels and beautiful landscapes. This and more are all waiting to be explored on one of Odyssey’s small group tours of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Designed for the senior traveller, and led by experienced, and enthusiastic likeminded people.

We also explore Viking history during our tours in the lands of Viking settlements, including our:

• Discover Greenland Small Group Tour (5 days)
• Faroe Islands Small Group Tour (5 days)
• Iceland Cultural and Wilderness Small Group tour (17 days)
• Vikings in Britain Small Group Tour (28 days)

Odyssey Traveller has been serving global travellers since 1983 with educational tours of the history, culture, and architecture of our destinations designed for mature and senior travellers. We specialise in offering small group tours partnering with a local tour guide at each destination to provide a relaxed and comfortable pace and atmosphere that sets us apart from larger tour groups. Tours consist of small groups of between 6 and 12 people and are cost inclusive of all entrances, tipping and majority of meals. For more information, click here, and head to this page to make a booking.