Sublime

In particular, many Scandinavians hired out as mercenary auxiliaries in the forces of the later Empire, organised along ethnic lines and thus forming units of warriors from the same point of origin. The constant movement of these potentially violent groups back and forth across the frontiers not only contributed to the importation of Roman

After the beginning of the raids in the eighth century, foreign loot was sometimes repurposed as jewellery—book mounts from ecclesiastical volumes turned into brooches, English sword fittings similarly remade, coins pierced and hung on necklaces. In Norway there is an Irish or Scottish reliquary, almost certainly plundered from a monastery, that

Muscovy’s struggle to transform itself into a dynastic regime able to absorb the North Russian states, resist Poland–Lithuania and overawe the Volga khanates marked a decisive phase in the eventual emergence of Russia as the engine of Europe’s expansion into Northern Eurasia.

The famous ship burial at Sutton Hoo, dated c. 625, contained a helmet, regalia, and weapon set that would not have been out of place in Sweden, and indeed seems at least in part to have been imported from Uppland. One of the picture plaques on the helmet was even pressed on a matrix made in the same workshop as one from a royal grave-mound at