River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  Routes further east are described in Arabic records, like the adventures of Sallām, an interpreter who was sent by a caliph in Baghdad to inspect the so-called ‘Alexander’s wall’, and whose accounts were later incorporated into Ibn Khurradadhbih’s ninth-century Book of Roads and Kingdoms. It is clear that this wall was, in fact, the Great Wall of China, which demonstrates that overland routes to the far east were open and usable, something the trade in goods has also shown. These routes may have been used by intrepid travellers from the north, but such journeys would have been rare – it was the trade connections that were important. In the words of Danish archaeologist Søren Sindbæk: ‘What caused the Viking Age in the North Atlantic and Baltic seas was, literally, global economic incentives.’[7]

  THE UNEXPECTED EFFECTS OF GLOBALISATION

  Globalisation really is an appropriate term for what happened in this period, with spidery veins stretching out across the world, further than they had before. The increasing adoption of advanced maritime technologies in the north was coupled with a renewed hunger for prestigious and exotic commodities and a steady flow of silver from the Islamic caliphate. Tracing the objects and materials that went back and forth, the routes they travelled on, and the people who took part in the transactions, is a bit like watching a drop of water running down an uneven windowpane: flowing downwards with gravity, changing path and direction if it encounters a flaw in the glass, stopping when it reaches an insurmountable obstacle until its path is taken up again when joined by further drops that add the necessary momentum.

  There is, however, one less desirable effect of this globalisation that we are only now beginning to shed light on. In the spring of 2020, when the world was in the midst of a global pandemic, a group of scientists published a research paper on the origins of the variola virus, better known as smallpox. The team had managed to extract the virus’s DNA from ancient skeletons. This, they claimed, demonstrated that it was around possibly as early as AD 600. In a sample of 525 individuals from Eurasia and the Americas, they identified thirteen who had likely died with a smallpox infection. And it just so happens that this had everything to do with the Vikings and – I strongly believe – their connections to the Silk Roads.

  The smallpox study showed that of the individuals identified with the virus, eleven dated to the Viking Age or up to two hundred years before, while the last two were modern. The samples came from Scandinavia, England and Russia. Radiocarbon dates from three of the samples suggested the virus had been prevalent before the Viking Age by almost two hundred years. But just as at Repton, the scientists had failed to take into account marine reservoir effects, despite at least two of the individuals sampled showing evidence of high marine diets. If you make the appropriate corrections, this pushes the dates forward, meaning that the virus was identified only in samples from the Viking Age, even though the researchers examined DNA spanning almost thirty-two thousand years of history. This is remarkable in itself, but digging deeper into the material reveals even more about the possible mechanisms. To understand what, we must look at a grave from Oxford.

  In 2008, archaeologists were called in to excavate before the building of an extension to St John’s College. They found something entirely unexpected: a mass grave containing thirty-five male skeletons, all seemingly having been thrown in a pit, with multiple injuries including blade wounds. The men had been robust and tall, most of them aged between sixteen and thirty-five. Some of the bodies showed evidence of charring, suggesting that they had been exposed to burning before they were buried. There were no grave goods. This, clearly, was the result of a massacre.

  Radiocarbon dates placed the grave around AD 900–1000 and it was suggested that it could belong to victims of the so-called St Brice’s Day massacre that took place in Oxford on 13 November 1002. On that day the English king Aethelred the Unready had ordered the killing of ‘all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat’. One of the eleven samples with the smallpox virus was from a man who was found in the middle of this mass grave. The man had several blade wounds to his upper body, including one to the back of his head and several to his ribs and shoulder blade. This was most likely what killed him, not the smallpox infection.

  Prior to the discovery, there had been no evidence that smallpox was present in England at the time. So where had this man picked up the virus? It’s unclear if the men in the grave were recent arrivals or residents, but their diets suggested the former. By comparing isotopes in their ribs and femurs, the team that analysed them could show that they had recently adopted more marine diets. This is because ribs ‘turn over’, forming new bone more quickly, so any change in diet shows up in the bone within two to five years. Femurs, on the other hand, are large and thick and reflect an individual’s average diet over up to fifteen years. For this reason, the researchers concluded that the group as a whole had likely changed their eating patterns in very recent times. This could be consistent with having travelled, and that is exactly where we may, rather unexpectedly, find a clue to the source of the virus.

  The geneticists who studied the Oxford grave were initially looking at ancestry across the entire Viking world, working on samples from across Europe. Surprisingly, they found a match between another man buried in the mass grave and someone much further afield. This second man’s half-brother (or other second-degree relative like an uncle and nephew or grandfather and grandson) was discovered in a cemetery in Denmark at a site called Galgedil. And it just so happens that this half-brother in Denmark also carried the smallpox virus. What this could indicate is that the men in Oxford – likely part of a raiding party or military group – had lived in close proximity to each other and may recently have come over from somewhere like Galgedil. Just as with a modern pandemic that we are now all so familiar with, widespread travel and a high level of mobility – comparatively speaking – was likely a crucial factor explaining why smallpox seems to have appeared in north-western Europe during the Viking Age.

  While there is no definite evidence of where this virus was picked up from in the first place, when we look at the samples of those who had it something is very clear. Many of the individuals came from locations that displayed a very high level of mobility and an influx of international traders; several were from the island of Öland near Gotland. One Swedish sample had strong connections with the Baltic, as strontium isotope data suggested that she had grown up on Gotland. Another individual buried in Sweden was a man who, the excavators stated, had been buried in Slavic fashion, suggesting he too was a migrant. The final two came from Gnezdovo, the Rus’ site in the upper Dnieper region.

  But that is not all. Digging through the archaeological reports of these eleven skeletons reveals that in the past, two of those with the virus were interpreted to have been slaves because of the way they were buried. While we should be careful about interpreting unusual burial rites as indicative of enslavement, if this really was the case, the two could plausibly have travelled from far further afield. They may also have been exposed to conditions that were very conducive to the spread of the disease. This isn’t the first time a virus has been linked to Viking movements either. In 2017, the spread of a particular strain of leprosy was traced from Scandinavia to England through the discovery of Mycobacterium leprae in a female skeleton. The following year researchers discovered that leprosy in Ireland in the medieval period had also came from Scandinavia. Both these cases may have been linked to the trade in squirrel fur.

  The links to the east or to Baltic trading posts are striking in the smallpox example. Perhaps that should not surprise us, because this is precisely where global connections to parts of the world that were previously inaccessible could now be found. Pathogens could, in particular, be transmitted through goods like furs, one of the key elements of the eastern trade. The riverine networks allowed for goods and people to flow from east to west, and from south to north, with unprecedented speed, meaning that stowaways like the variola virus could ea
sily have moved along with them.

  So much of the story appears to have been driven by a thirst for luxuries and for wealth: both the silver, silk, beads and jewellery that flowed north and the furs, amber and ivory that flowed south and east, not to mention those slaves that were so desperately needed to help the blossoming towns to maintain their high-status lifestyles. The Vikings blended in, and they became part of the fabric, part of a cultural mosaic in the west and in the east, as entrepreneurs and political players, or simply as ordinary settlers. Yet there was an enormous human cost: not just that of the oft-remembered, unsuspecting monks at Lindisfarne, but also those unknown slaves who left behind no trace but whose lives were traded for a shiny silver coin, or for a translucent orange bead.

  The thirst for silver played a big part in this exchange, right to the end: by the beginning of the eleventh century, the supply of silver in the east had become so exhausted that Vikings had to look elsewhere. As a result, they started turning their backs on Islamic coins, now diluted by other metals, and looked instead to the west, where new silver resources were discovered in the Harz Mountains in Germany. This led to an increase in the minting of coins in Anglo-Saxon England and the kingdoms of continental Europe. It has even been suggested that the intensification of attacks on England in the 990s may have been a direct result.

  Throughout the Viking Age and beyond, contact and movement continued north, south, west and east for hundreds of years, and over time cultural identities blended and evolved as migrants and locals interacted. But at the same time certain identities were maintained and perpetuated, such as that which we now call Viking, resulting in what’s best described as a diaspora. We also need to remember how much events in one region would have affected those in another: ripples from the stone thrown into the water near Baghdad travelled all the way to Repton, albeit diffused, diminished and deconstructed. But they were still there. I believe that it is those earliest trade networks along the rivers, the vital arteries of Europe and central Asia, that are the evidence we need to investigate to truly understand Viking expansion in the west. But before the River Kings’ journey can come to a close, there’s one more destination to reach.

  EPILOGUE

  GUJARAT

  I stand on a concrete rooftop in central Ahmedabad, India, on a sunny morning in January, eight years almost to the day since I first travelled to Oxford and started my Repton research. Up here, I get momentary relief from the madness that is the bustling twenty-first-century Indian city with its incessantly honking horns from cars, motorbikes and Uber-powered auto-rickshaws; all rather a lot to take in. Birds of prey circle overhead, and below monkeys play in a lush garden as I look out over yet another river. I am struck by the fact that there is not a single boat in sight and today this waterway serves no purpose in trade, commerce or the movement of people. I have come here because this is where my River Kings story ends, but also where it began.

  I am a long way from home and this history is a long way from that of my Vikings. Yet to understand that carnelian bead’s presence in England and what made it possible for this extensive trade in the exotic to flourish more than a millennium ago, I want to understand this part of it too. For the trade in these minerals represents a system of supply and demand that was so well established that it continued for almost five thousand years and is still alive today. The Vikings merely tapped into something that had been taking place for millennia on the routes along the Silk Roads, and it makes no sense to consider them in isolation; it’s necessary also to reflect on the other end of the network.

  It’s unlikely that Vikings came this far, but many went from Sweden with Ingvar to the Caspian Sea; many thousands travelled to Miklagard and, probably, many too to Baghdad. Perhaps some did travel further east. Runestones tell of some who went both west and east, so it’s not impossible that someone may have gone to Repton as well as to the Black Sea and beyond.

  Clearly, in some spheres of the early medieval west there was a knowledge of these regions in the east – and of India, to be precise. In the year 965, while the Khazarian empire was being brought to its knees by the Kyivan Rus’, the Jewish-Arab merchant Ibrahim al-Tartushi travelled to Magdeburg in Germany. There he was received at the court of Otto the Great, the Holy Roman Emperor. While on his travels, al-Tartushi also visited Mainz and made observations on what he saw in this very large city situated on the Rhine, in the land of the Franks. He noted with surprise that he could see dirhams in circulation that had been struck in Samarkand fifty years before, but there was something even more remarkable to him: ‘It is extraordinary that one should be able to find, in such far western regions, aromatics and spices that only grow in the far east, like pepper, ginger, cloves, nard, costus and galingale. These plants are all imported from India, where they grow in abundance.’

  Evidently, there were more things than carnelian that made it this far west, and the Vikings weren’t the only ones to covet exotic objects and flavours. Other Arab travellers made journeys to the far east too: Al-Masudi – who wrote in the tenth century and who also described the Rus’ attacking the Caspian Sea – travelled from India to Ceylon and then on to China, describing India in quite some detail based on both his own information and other compiled sources. If you reached Baghdad, there was a fair chance you could also find out about India.

  But there is also evidence that India was well known in ninth-century England: a reference in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 883 – ten years after the Repton winter camp – mentions an embassy sent to the shrine of St Thomas in ‘India/Indea’ by none other than Alfred the Great.[1] Having successfully fought off a Viking raid in London, Alfred vowed to send alms to both Rome and India, although many have argued that the latter was merely a mistranscription of Judea.

  However, both St Thomas and St Bartholomew, who is also mentioned in the entry, appear to have been martyred in India according to other ninth-century sources. There are documented Christian communities in southern India from the fifth century onwards, so it certainly is not impossible. Spices like those described by al-Turtushi had been imported from both India and Sri Lanka since as early as the seventh century, according to charters and documentary evidence, which could well suggest that people travelled the whole way too. At the very least, India may have been on some people’s radar – in the higher echelons of society.

  The most exciting information about this possible journey for our purposes, though, comes from a later source. A twelfth-century document written by the chronicler William of Malmesbury claims to have identified the bishop who travelled on the mission to India ordered by Alfred, stating that he returned safely and brought with him ‘exotic, precious stones’. These may well have been carnelian.

  Trade across the Indian Ocean was nothing new. Transport and exchange from the Red Sea to India exploded in the decades that followed the Roman occupation of Egypt in 30 BC, with the Roman historian Strabo reporting that as many as 120 Roman boats made the journey each year. Gemstones and spices were just two of the commodities the Romans were looking for alongside other goods that could be found in the region. This trade evidently took place throughout the first millennium, but it is notable that during the eighth century the fringes of the Indian Ocean – specifically, East Africa – saw a spread and development of emporia, much like those found in the Baltic and North Sea region.

  At the same time there is evidence of direct sea voyages between the Persian Gulf and China. Ibn Khurradadhbih described ninth-century trade routes from the Mediterranean to Egypt and the Red Sea. From there, you could travel to Medina and Mecca and eventually to India and China. During the Viking Age, the Golden Age of Islam expanded and extended the influence of the Middle Eastern regions and along with it strengthened the paths of the Silk Roads, paths that had been created millennia before. And the carnelian trade from India is a perfect example of this.

  To the south-west of Ahmedabad is the archaeological site of Lothal. It is one of the most significant ancient citi
es of the Harappan or Indus Valley civilisation, and here archaeologists have found the earliest evidence for beautifully crafted carnelian beads dating back as far as 2700 BC. This, then, is the starting point for the trade that continued into the Viking Age and beyond: there’s evidence that goods from here were traded across the Indian Ocean and to Mesopotamia, with artefacts having been discovered in ancient cities not far from what would later become Baghdad. The first step, of course, was by river from Lothal to the Gulf of Khambat.

  In Lothal, I meet Anwar Husain Shaikh from Khambhat. He is an award-winning, fifth-generation bead-maker, and the only person in the world who makes carnelian beads in the Harappan style using traditional methods. The craft has been passed down in his family for well over a century. Anwar takes me to one of his workshops, a small house on a plot off the main road leading south to the coast. There’s a clearing outside a brick-built, one-roomed house with a corrugated metal roof, and trees providing shade from the sun that will no doubt be scorching the sandy ground come summertime. He has brought the raw material he needs, several large lumps of carnelian and agate, which he expertly knaps into a rough shape by placing the stone against an iron rod pushed at an angle into the ground, hitting it with a soft wooden hammer. Chipping off pieces around the edges, he transforms the raw material into a shape that he will gradually manipulate into a long bead. Afterwards, when the bead has been polished smooth, the hole is drilled.

  I get to try, my legs carefully positioned around a simple wooden prop, with water fed from a clay pot to keep the bead from overheating. The drill is tipped with tiny diamonds from nearby Surat and moved by a bow pushed backwards and forwards. Holes are bored from each end until they meet in the middle. I have spent so long studying the Repton bead that I know this is exactly the way that was made too.