Warrior woman: Ella Al-Shamahi on the female Viking fighters who held their own on the battlefield The Viking sphere itself arced from today’s Canada in the west to Turkey and Ukraine in the east. Both the length and strength of the period’s routes can still amaze us. Around 1000, we know the Viking adventurer Leif Erikson landed in Newfoundland, where Norsemen briefly settled.
Hansen argues that regional networks linked to form a potential “global loop” that included the Americas.
In return, China and its Asian neighbours sucked in massive quantities of aromatics – perfumes, spices, scented woods – from as far afield as the Mediterranean. A cargo vessel sunk off Java around 970 carried 600,000 export ceramics from China’s industrial-scale kilns. The sea routes that bound southern Chinese ports to the Persian Gulf served as the world’s busiest superhighways for many centuries before Christopher Columbus. Inevitably, Chinese know-how, industry and commerce tie many points along the “network of global pathways”, which Hansen traces here. Recent studies have restored China – which accounted for perhaps 100 million of the 250 to 300 million people alive in 1000 – to the centre of the early-medieval map. But Asian horsemen in relays might cover 300 miles in a day, Viking ships could touch 17mph, and knowledge of oceanic currents cut journey times. Of course, most people lived within narrow confines. Hansen, a professor of history at Yale University, gathers cutting-edge research into a modestly sized work studded with mind-expanding gems. Hence her headline claim that this is when “globalisation began”. She maintains that, around the year 1000, new trans-oceanic contacts ensured that “for the first time an object or a message could have travelled across the entire world”. Valerie Hansen’s book, however, takes a familiar argument much further. It is hardly news, perhaps, that the Chinese elites of a millennium ago stood at the heart of a trading and information system that spanned distant continents. Excavated in the 1980s, her grave contained luxury items sourced in Egypt, Syria, Iran, India and Sumatra – along with carved amber imported from the Baltic shores, almost 5,000 miles away. In 1018, the Princess of Chen – a member of the Liao dynasty that ruled northern China – was buried in a treasure-filled tomb in Inner Mongolia.
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