Lex Fridman and Lars Brownworth dissect the Viking Age (793–1066 AD), contrasting their terror tactics, clinker-built longships, and Valhalla mythology with Byzantine bureaucratic stability. They trace the shift from raiding to state-building via the 911 Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte and Leif Erikson's 1000 AD North American arrival, while analyzing how systemic forces and "great men" like Cnut the Great shaped history. Ultimately, the discussion highlights that despite differing cultural approaches to chaos and order, human nature remains constant, urging hope amidst inevitable imperfections. [Automatically generated summary]
The following is a conversation with Lars Brownworth, a historian and author of many excellent history books, including The Seawolves, A History of the Vikings, and The Normans, From Raiders to Kings.
He's also the host of two history podcast series.
The first, called 12 Byzantine Rulers, the History of the Byzantine Empire, is one of the first, if not the first ever history podcast launched over 20 years ago in June 2005.
His second series, Norman Centuries, explores the remarkable rise of the Normans from Viking raiders to the rulers of kingdoms stretching from England to Sicily.
In this conversation, we focus primarily On the Vikings, the seafaring Norse warriors and explorers who, over a period of just 300 years, reshaped the medieval world and the trajectory of Western civilization as we know it.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on.
And now, dear friends, here's Lars Brownworth.
Your writing and podcast take us from the Vikings to the Normans to Crusades to the collapse of the East Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire.
There's a thread, I think, that connects the Vikings through all of it.
So let's start at the beginning.
Let's start with the, with the Vikings.
So the age of the Vikings was intense and violent as you write about, often dated from 793 AD to 1066 AD.
He was Charlemagne's favorite scholar, and he is largely responsible, as much as one person can be, for the Carolingian Renaissance that had done so much to elevate the early medieval world.
In fact, the spaces we have, the punctuation we have, spaces between words are likely a result of Alcuin's work.
He was an extremely literate man, and you can hear the terror creeping into that.
And part of that has to do with.
Monastic communities, the church, uh, and the, what they thought a monastic community was.
So the church was viewed as a sacred place.
Everyone in Europe, everyone in quotes, is nominally Christian and the church is an area of safety.
It's a literal arc from the troubles of the world that you can flee to.
I believe there are even rules in England, for example, that if you had killed someone, you could flee to a church, uh, and the civil authorities were not allowed to enter for up to 40 days.
So you could have sanctuary there.
And To violate this would have been the worst possible offense you could have given, which is why Thomas Beckett's murder is so horrible in England.
The monks had dedicated themselves to a life of studying the Bible, to copying scriptures, to prayer, to removing themselves literally from the temptations of the world.
They would seek monasteries that were remote.
The most remote locations you could find were islands in the North Atlantic because it's just so difficult to get there.
The ocean was considered a place of safety.
Not sailing on the ocean, but these islands were literal havens of peace and security and closeness to God.
And so the fact that the Vikings hit this place of all places you could hit was the worst, the most terrifying kind of offense against medieval sensibilities.
So there's a kind of line that you understand you don't cross.
Like everybody agrees.
It's the kind of thing that there's a social contract that most societies, most civilizations sign.
There's a line that we don't cross.
Let the scholars do their scholarly work.
That's one line.
The other line is more kind of from a military perspective, from a mobility perspective, you just assume the sea is not a place from which a threat could come, especially the north.
Sort of your conception of the world is shattered by one, the brutality that can come, two, that the sea can bring a threat, and three, that you don't give a damn about any of the lines that we as a society, as a Christian society, Have established.
Now, that's a very good question because, and it brings up a central problem of looking at the Vikings, which is the story is almost always told from somebody else's perspective.
Largely from the pens of those they're attacking.
So they're not going to come across well.
They're often portrayed as demonic and inhuman.
The Vikings themselves, though, as much as we can piece together from archaeology, from the stories they wrote later, that was another problem.
Their written alphabet, the runes, it was mostly used for spells, name your sword, things like that, curse someone, but it wasn't really useful for writing long poetry or literature.
So the only Norse literature we have comes.
At the end of the age when they had adopted the Latin alphabet.
So it's, you can almost never see the Vikings in their own words as they saw themselves.
Um, but we can piece certain things together.
Most importantly, Viking was not their day job.
Um, they were, they were mostly merchants and farmers, mostly farmers, uh, who lived in little bays called viks in Old Norse, which is probably where we get the word viking, Viking from.
Um, one other note about how hard it is to, to tease apart what's happening here is the, The English and the Frankish and the Irish writers all called them Danes, no matter where they came from.
They didn't stop to ask, now, excuse me, are you from Norway or are you from?
So they're all called Danes or pagans, heathen or Northmen.
So this is not very helpful in figuring out where they came from.
The language was interchangeable.
Old Norse was spoken in all three of those Scandinavian countries.
But living in the north, so far up near the Arctic Circle, is that's at the very limit of where technology of the time could allow humans to survive.
That kind of harsh climate bred, I think, very hard people.
Mercy was not a quality they seemed to favor, value.
There's a very famous story of a Swedish Viking putting a sword in the crib of his newborn son and saying, May you have nothing in this life but what you can gain with this.
I mean, I can't imagine doing that.
Any of my children, putting a gun in the crib, I'd be carted away.
But I think that kind of underscores the kind of violent life that you could expect as a Viking.
I mean, strength was valued more than anything else.
So, the understanding of the world is harsh and that strength is the way you must face that world.
So, when you have those people, especially the ones that self select to get on a boat, to face the ocean, all the uncertainty, that results in the kind of brutality that we got to see.
I mean, the way they would build their ships, they were clinker built.
So, they were overlaid like planks overlaying.
So, they were undecked.
As well.
And so they have tents.
So can you imagine crossing the Atlantic, the northern Atlantic, with these huge waves splashing over with an inch of oak between you and the ocean?
I mean, the amount of bravery that must have taken to, to undergo is astounding.
Plus, they didn't have a compass.
They, they navigated by, where's the sun?
Where are the stars?
What are there birds in the sky?
Do I see different color of water?
Do I see leaves floating?
I mean, it's terrible for traveling 2000 miles.
It's, uh, that's not great.
So it's kind of an intrepidness to them, uh, that I think is part of the reason why they're so fascinating to us in our sanitized, more or less sanitized world that this, this incredible courage to, To do this and some horror at what they did on the other end when they arrived.
But we'll talk a little bit more about their religion, but they do not view the Christian God in particularly flattering terms.
I mean, to them, he's a weak God who won't protect his adherents and they can just come in and plunder as they.
I mean, they'll.
One Viking famously says, On land, I'm a Christian.
When I'm on the sea, I worship Thor.
It was very much the kind of pragmatic take that the Vikings had.
They built different types of ships, obviously for different purposes, but the thing that blows my mind is that they built these ships that could cross an ocean, cross the Atlantic Ocean.
And at the same time, when they had a draft of less than two feet, so they could sail up rivers that were two feet deep.
And if they came to in, you know, a block or something, uh, 20 men could pick up the ship and port it around.
They were incredibly portable, uh, and, and their speed, the speed was the most frightening thing about the Vikings.
So, they're pretty sufficiently robust to handle the ocean and sufficiently mobile to travel on rivers and do so really fast.
So, you mentioned speed.
That seems to be, from a military perspective, the great advantage of Vikings because they can move much faster than the land armies can.
So, not just the element of surprise, which they often had, but the element of speed was the thing that gave them an extreme advantage against the British armies.
So, an English army, if it had access to a good Roman road that was well maintained, which frankly there weren't tons of them, but they could average something like 10 to 15 miles per day on a good day if they didn't have a large baggage train to slow them down.
If you had a cavalry unit that didn't have to travel with the army, they could average about 20 miles a day.
The Viking longships could average 70 to 120 miles a day.
So they're just moving in super fast motion.
They could hit a place, raid it, drag off whoever they wanted, and get away before you could get your army there.
Were the Vikings aware of the fear that they had caused?
So, did they use fear as a kind of weapon, or was this just a side consequence of their actions, or did they understand and use it?
Like the Mongols, Genghis Khan, the Mongols used the fear and the terror on purpose to increase the chance that they wouldn't have to avoid fights, basically.
High holy days like Easter, Christmas, because they knew there'd be higher value targets there with richer clothing, richer offerings, and there'd be a lot of money available.
So they were rather sophisticated, which I think is something also that they don't get much credit for.
It's like they were just dumb brutes attacking and just destroying.
But they were, it was very sophisticated.
They would show up.
This is what I mean when I say Viking wasn't their day jobs.
They would be traders in, say, an English port, kind of looking around.
They'd get everyone's schedule, then they would sail away and Come back as Vikings, and they knew exactly where to go.
They knew where all the money was held.
They knew where all the churches were, when to attack.
They knew the entire Christian calendar.
They knew when someone's baptism was, when someone's confirmation.
I mean, they were aware of all of this, and they would definitely attack to increase terror.
One of the signs of the intelligence of the Vikings is that the Viking Age is so short.
So, what happens is these explorers and these Rough men who do the raids, they very quickly are good at conquering and then start state building or conquering and then establishing trade routes and stop being the quote unquote Vikings.
So basically, they just they conquer and then they start doing the usual institute, build the institutions, start a state, and now they're normal kind of nation, civilization kind of thing.
So, this kind of force that is the conquering, raid, violent, Intense explorers is like a short lasting thing, a couple of generations at most.
I mean, the Vikings were ultimately a pragmatic people who, if it worked, they would keep it, which is frustrating because they disappear so quickly because of that.
And I think it's not a coincidence that it happens when it does.
I mean, you have both.
So there's two main theories about why the Viking Age starts.
The first Will Durant puts it, I think, the best.
He says, The fertility of the Viking women outstripped the fertility of the Viking land, basically overpopulation.
And then they're searching for food.
And then the second is there's this technological breakthrough with the keel and maybe pressure put on Charlemagne's consolidation and a little worries like that.
I don't see why both can't be true, but I do.
I do also think Europe, like Charlemagne, puts together this vast empire that fairly approximates the Western Roman Empire.
If you squint, it looks like the Western Roman Empire.
He's calling himself the new Roman Emperor.
This will eventually mutate into the Holy Roman Empire.
But it's very much this idea that it's back.
The Roman Empire is back.
He's crowned on Christmas Day in the year 800, and the empire is back.
Unfortunately, it was sprawling.
It hadn't been thought through.
There was the communication, it was terrible.
You just couldn't do it.
And so it was wealthy and weak.
And that kind of attracts predators.
By the time the Vikings crash into it, you also have the added bonus for them of really feckless rulers.
And we should say, going to perplexity here, that Charlemagne, also known as Charles the Great, is the Frankish king who became emperor in 800 and ruled much of Western and Central Europe in the late 8th and early 9th centuries.
And there's a theory that the Viking Age was also a reaction to the South expanding north, as you're talking about.
You tell the story of Charlemagne weeping because he foresaw the evil his descendants would suffer.
Did the Franks accidentally wake the sleeping giant by crushing the Saxons and removing the buffer zone between them and the Vikings?
I think, I think a lot of the early raids are probing raids.
Let's see what's there.
Definitely when they're, when Ragnar Lothbrook, for example, sacks Paris in 845, that definitely results in waves of Viking attacks throughout the 860s.
Trying to copy that.
And he actually is the template which everyone wants to follow.
And so that provokes large scale invasions.
And they hit England.
They kind of switch off.
When France is pretty much exhausted, they switch over to England.
Then when England is pretty much conquered, they switch back to France.
So I think a lot of these are just probing raids at first, but they're proof of concept and then they come in force.
For example, there was one king in England.
His name was Ethelred the Unready, which is A pretty funny pun on his name.
But he paid in one year 7.5 million silver pennies to the Vikings to get them to go away, which is a bit like someone's mugging you, so you pay them more money so they go away.
So, Charles the Great widely acknowledges sort of one of the great leaders of the Frankish Empire, aka Charlemagne.
So, what else do we know about him?
So, there's going to perplexity Ragnar is portrayed as a Scandinavian warlord, often called a Danish or Swedish king, like you were mentioning, active in the 9th century during the height of the Viking raids.
And then descriptions of the raids and the exploits.
Medieval traditions link Ragnar to famous raids on the Frankish realms, especially the attack on Paris in 845, where he reputedly sails up the Seine and extorts a huge ransom from King Charles the Bald.
He's also associated with repeated attacks on Anglo-Saxon England, embodying the archetypal Viking chieftain, charismatic, brutal, and focused on wealth, fame, and honor in battle.
So, those are the ideals of the Vikings charisma, brutality, and focusing on wealth, fame, and honor, especially honor and battle.
So, he gets about 7,000 pounds of silver from Charles the Bald, which essentially destroys Charles the Bald's kingship.
But he goes back home to Denmark, and the Danish king doesn't want him around because he's too powerful, he's too rich, he's a ring giver.
You know, think Beowulf here, right?
He's got this large personal army which wants to join him for it.
They can do, you know, they'll follow him and he is a threat.
And so he is, he kind of is encouraged to go elsewhere.
He ends up raiding England for something like 15 years.
And then there's a, probably the most famous bit of the story is he, he's shipwrecked and King Ayala of Northumberland captures him and decides to kill him by throwing him into a pit with vipers.
They throw him in this and the snakes are biting him, but he's got his hairy breeches on.
So it's not working.
So he's singing a hymn to Odin.
And he gets pulled out and he's asked why he's not dying.
And he explains rather foolishly that he has these hairy breeches.
So they take the pants off and throw them back.
And his last words are, when the boar bleats, the piglets come.
By which he means, I have sons.
He had 12 of them.
And they will avenge me.
And they do.
They lead the great heathen army to invade and eventually conquer England.
Ayala, fun fact, not so fun for him, is the.
Supposedly, he was captured by the son of Ragnar.
His name is Ivar the Boneless, which is somewhat terrifying of a name.
And he's the first person that a blood eagle was performed on.
Well, there's this famous scene in the Viking Siege of Paris in 845, which is really the Europeans' introduction, or Europe as a whole, to a Viking army, not just a raid, and then what it could do.
And the king, the emperor Charles said, you know, let's find out what they want.
And how much do I have to pay to get them to leave?
And so his ambassador went to a Viking and said, who is your king?
And the Viking looked at him, didn't understand.
And he said, we have no king.
We are all kings.
So they're very like decentralized, tough.
They only valued leaders who could prove that they had, they had won, you know, could give out the rings.
Basically, there seems to be a very rapid evolution of a Viking in every part of the world they touch.
You go explore, yeah, and trade routes, and always maintaining a grand ambition, but no longer doing the violence and always being sufficiently programmatic and flexible where you can accept.
Accept conversion to Christianity, for example, if it's useful.
And then accept the culture, accept the language.
So that's why they integrate, and the thing that we think of as Viking kind of dissipates and disappears pretty quickly.
And I think the best example of this is France, right?
So the Vikings, we'll talk about this more probably with Rollo, but the Vikings settle in France and the Northman's Duchy, which is shortened to Normandy.
And they, within a generation, I mean, Rollo, whose real name is Is Hrolf, Eric.
He names his son William.
That's not a Viking name.
And within a generation, the language is gone.
The Viking names are gone.
The worship of Odin is, as far as we can tell, gone.
And the Normans are building churches and marrying into the local aristocracy.
And they're essentially, their Vikingness is gone except for one thing their incredible vitality.
The Normans essentially conquer kingdoms that.
Both ends of Europe, Sicily and England, and found two of the foremost powerful states in medieval Europe.
Well, first, I should say, as someone of Norwegian descent, I'm going to fall down on the Norwegian side of the argument here because Norway and Denmark almost came to blows over which was the birthplace of Rolo.
But the consensus seems to be Norway, not just biased.
So he was the only thing we get of Rolo as a young man is he was very tall.
So he's called Hrolf Walker, Hrolf Granger, because he was so tall he couldn't ride the little Viking ponies.
So you have to walk everywhere.
But Of poor, probably raised on stories of Ragnar and the other Viking lords.
And he goes, he may have participated in some of the earlier, like the 860 raids that the Vikings did on Paris or the Seine, you know.
And then he eventually ends up plundering what will become the Norman coast.
And in the year 911, he makes a treaty, the Treaty of St. Clair Sarept with.
The Frankish king, Charles the Simple, which is not stupid.
It's more like straightforward.
There's no guile in how he talks.
And Charles makes a really interesting deal with Rollo, which is why don't you settle here, integrate into the local aristocracy, and defend the French coast against the Vikings?
Which I don't know, it's like putting a burglar in charge of your security or so.
I don't know, but it works.
It works.
And Rolo, by the time he makes that deal, he's probably in his mid 50s to mid 60s.
It's unclear when he was born, but the point is he's lived the Viking life.
He's got something like 20 or 30.
If you add up all the sagas, they say they gave him this many coins or whatever.
He has probably 20 or 30 tons of silver that he has acquired and then probably given out to whatever.
Yeah, it's hard to overstate Normandy's impact on Europe in the Middle Ages.
Of course, they'll go on to conquer England as well.
But Rollo, when he signs the treaty, it's an ambiguous treaty.
He's given a title.
Which is rather ambiguous.
He's not a duke and it's not clear.
He's not an earl.
He's not a duke.
He's just subservient to the king, which means Normandy is not a duchy.
It's not a principality.
It's kind of this ambiguous, no one really knows what it is.
And so, Rollo, being a good Viking and his descendants being good Vikings, despite becoming French, they just call themselves duke and they essentially seize whatever power they want.
There's one Norman duke, I think he's the grandson of Rollo.
I'm a romantic, so when I read history, I Usually end up rooting for the losers.
I want Harold Godwinson to beat William the Conqueror.
I want Hector to beat Achilles.
Never works, no matter how many times I read it.
But I was always interested in the Normans because of the Norman conquest of England.
And I have a twin brother, and he asked me, we were taking a walk, and he asked me, how did Europe, because I was reading about the Dark Ages at the time, the early Middle Ages, how did Europe, this kind of backwards place, become the dominant force in the world?
And I started thinking about that.
And my answer really is the Normans.
The Normans, that's the great change between Europe as a backwards, inward looking place and Europe as a kind of confident, outward looking place.
And that change happens under the Normans.
I mean, the Normans, it's not a coincidence that they lead the charge in the First Crusade.
Um, they create the state of England.
Uh, if you look at England before the Vikings arrive, there are seven, it's the Heptarchy.
There are seven kingdoms in England and the Vikings destroyed all but one.
Only Wessex is preserved and they've conquered about half of Wessex.
And there's a young king.
What's he going to do?
But that king is Alfred the Great and he conquers the rest.
And then his grandson, Aethelstan, is the first man called King of England, King of all Angles.
Um, and then they do, they do the same thing almost wherever they go.
They, they, Helped create modern France by ripping apart Charlemagne's empire, which was unwieldy.
It looked good on paper, but it was unwieldy.
It was replaced by this leaner, meaner, compact thing.
They figured out how to deal with the Vikings by essentially building fortified bridges, changes to their army, and so forth.
The Vikings, I like to call it creative destruction.
By destroying the things they destroyed, they cleared the ground for something stronger to grow.
The creative destruction engine that created Europe.
Was the Normans and Vikings.
And then you also have another book that talks about the Byzantine Empire.
So you have the creative destruction that resulted in Europe, that Europe led to this Western quote unquote civilization that we think of now.
And the thing that protected Europe for centuries was the existence of the Byzantine Empire, the East Roman Empire, because of all the threats that came towards Europe.
This.
Strong, stable empire that is the Byzantine Empire protected the forces from everything that came from the East.
So Constantine is the guy who moved the capital of the empire from Rome to Constantinople, thereby giving a lot more focus to the East, thereby protecting.
From the gigantic threats that loomed in the East.
So rewinding back, what was the religion, the religious beliefs, the gods that the Vikings believed that we've mentioned a little bit of, Thor and Odin?
Vikings followed a polytheistic, ritual heavy religion centered on a pantheon of gods and spirits with no single holy book or unified church, and practices varied a lot by region and family.
And so the major gods were Odin and Thor and Freya.
Odin was his domain was war, kingship, wisdom, death.
Thor was.
Protection, thunder, fertility.
Freya was love, magic, battle dead.
Typical worshippers for Odin were chieftains and elite warriors and poets.
Typical worshippers for Thor were farmers and, quote, ordinary people.
And typical worshippers of Freya were women, magic practitioners, and lovers.
I mean, by creating corpses, which ravens feed on, You are doing the work of Odin.
And, you know, the Viking view of the afterlife was unique.
There weren't really punishments, not really, for doing bad things, uh, unless you did something really bad, uh, then you ended up as basically a, an evil spirit, uh, haunting your grave.
Uh, but if you were brave, then you got taken to the house of the dead, which was Valhalla, uh, to, and you were resurrected every day you would fight and whatever wounds you got would be magically healed that night.
And the next morning you'd get up and do it again.
So you're essentially practicing for Ragnarok, the, uh, the final battle.
If you think of religion as a kind of technology, a social technology that stabilizes or helps guide the evolution of a society, it's interesting to see what the Vikings came up with.
And you ever think from a history, the grand view of history, How effective these different technologies of religion have been?
Hospitality is very important in a northern climate where food is scarce, winters are long and harsh, and if you don't share what your hearth with someone knocking on your door, then someone else might not share it with you.
You could be facing death.
So in this case, hospitality becomes a core belief.
And the idea was that Odin would travel.
Incognito, knocking on people's doors, and he would remember if you let him in or not.
And if you were hospitable, he would bless you.
And if you were unhospitable, he would murder you.
And, you know, I think these rituals are obviously intended for how do we survive this winter?
And the beautiful thing about religion is it interplays with human nature and it guides humans.
But then, of course, human nature and human spirit.
Project themselves onto the religion.
Sometimes they use that religion.
It's to accomplish goals in a pragmatic sense, in a political sense, in a geopolitical sense, in a military sense, in a social sense.
And so there's that dance of, uh, How religion invigorates and guides the peoples, and then how the peoples use the religion to guide the direction of the world.
And that's certainly the history of Christianity, it has a big role to play in the history of Europe, the history of the Byzantine Empire, and that part of the world.
And it was an incredibly effective religion.
Once Constantine converted, it spread extremely quickly, relatively speaking, across a couple of centuries.
Just to linger on the Viking views of the world and the afterlife.
So, we mentioned Valhalla.
There's the Norns, which are the three spirits that represent the past, the present, and the necessity.
They spin the fates of all men and gods at the roots of Yggdrasil.
I don't know if you know, there's this video of the deranged penguin with the Warner Herzog documentary.
Where Werner Herzog is like overdubbing, explaining the thinking of the penguin, but the penguin leaves the tribe and he just goes out into the mountains.
I have to show you this video.
This is my favorite video of all time.
There's this low key documentary where they're talking about penguins, and then there's one penguin that leaves the tribe and just goes towards the mountains, and as Werner Herzog says, towards certain death.
It always reminds me of this kind of Viking spirit or the monk spirit.
There's something one human or a small group of humans just decide to go.
So, this, there's two ways, there's multiple ways, but you just highlighted two ways to explore.
One is because you're this hardcore dude that just is looking to raid and just goes and goes and just you have the resilience and the will to keep going.
And then there's the monks that just want to leave.
It really is the best way to support this podcast.
Go to lexfriedman.com slash sponsors.
We got Laredan.
For measuring AI adoption in your business, BetterHelp for mental health, Element for electrolytes, Finn for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Perplexity for curiosity driven knowledge exploration.
And now back to my conversation with Lars Brownworth.
All right, we're back.
Let's talk about this incredible fact of the Vikings that Leif Erickson, who was a Viking explorer, Was the first European to reach North America around the year 1000, five centuries before Columbus reached North America.
It's hard to miss, which is not to take away anything from the Extraordinary danger, the certain death of going further west.
But there was this, by this time, there was this idea that enough people had become famous by sailing west into the unknown and discovering things that I think there was a general idea of there's more out there to the west.
And so he had talked to someone who had seen Greenland and reported that there was this good land further west.
And so he hired the ship's crew of that Viking.
So it's kind of the deck was loaded and he went to Greenland where he was able to.
Settle two different colonies.
One was called the Western Settlement in the west, and one was called the Eastern Settlement in essentially the extreme south.
That was essentially the edges of where Viking technology could be.
A cool factoid is that the Vikings practiced husbandry, raised animals, and obviously this is not an option in Greenland, although they couldn't have known it at the time, but they brought plants with them.
Then they were able to trade with the native Inuit for walrus blubber and things like that.
They made a go of it, but what's obvious, you know, anyone who's seen Greenland, there are no trees.
It's almost impossible to survive by practicing husbandry.
It is impossible to survive, as it turns out, just practicing husbandry.
And by this point, I think this extraordinary Viking pragmatism is beginning to be played out because one of the reasons the Greenland experiment fails ultimately in 300 years is they fail to adapt.
It's clearly they should focus more on fishing, on other sources than just raising pigs and cows.
He's made his home here, and this is where he wants to be.
But his son, they're running out of resources.
There's no wood.
You know, there's limited food, et cetera, et cetera.
And so his son proposes going west because he's heard stories that there are There are other lands.
So, another Viking had gotten lost, aimed for Greenland and missed, and had seen something.
He said he saw clouds and mountains, and there's land there.
And then he had turned around, and Leif, again, did the same thing.
He hired the man's crew.
He asked his dad to come.
His dad wouldn't.
He went with his half sister, Freitas, who was a whole other story by herself, and a bunch of other colonists.
And they went and they landed in a place.
He called it Vinland because he found.
Things that he could ferment.
So, of course, the Vikings, they made wine or wine like alcohol.
So, Leif Erickson is he's landed, he doesn't know this, but he's landed on a new continent with essentially inexhaustible stores of food and timber and everything he needs.
It's the perfect place.
Unfortunately for him, it's also inhabited by some natives, probably the Algonquin tribe.
He calls them the Skralings, which is Just Norse for screechers because he can't understand their language.
They just yell at them and attack immediately.
They stay there for three years and then give up and go back home.
So ultimately, and then really don't tell anyone about it.
I think there are a number of things working against them.
Of course, I would like to believe there's an alternate history where the Vikings successfully make it down, you know, maybe down to Maryland or something, and there's a Alternate history of the US and Canada here, but I think there's a number of things working against them.
The first is they stubbornly refuse to give up husbandry.
So they're trying to make this work.
Lansome Meadows, I think, is where they were in Newfoundland.
It doesn't work.
The climate's too cold.
The grasses aren't appropriate.
It's just not going to work.
And they do not adapt, number one.
Number two, they're 2,000 plus miles away from Norway and getting resupplied.
And although they are Extremely good sailors and explorers and traders.
I think this is a little too far.
And then, thirdly, is the native resistance.
It's just too incessant.
They are outnumbered millions to one, and the Algonquin do not want them there.
I mean, had they known, had he known what he had found, that there's more south, maybe their intuition was like, there's not, it's just all northern land, it's void of resources.
People from Norway, you know, or Iceland or whatever, you know, a sizable enough colony and build some kind of defenses to fight off the incessant attacks, then I think that's a different story.
Because there's certainly the resources are all there.
Or just keep staying on the water, keep going down the coast, not necessarily camp out until you get further south.
It is fascinating to think about that alternate history where they would have discovered America and settled there.
So this is 500 years before Columbus.
There's First of all, they could have done a lot of the stuff we think about the European nations doing, including brutality towards the natives.
But there could have been a coexistence also.
And some of the diseases that come with them could have done the damage that they did 500 years later.
But now it would have stabilized the populations to where the Europeans, the full, the Spanish, and so on, will come.
The natives would be more ready.
So they would, Europe would then encounter a sizable population of the Viking descendants and the natives to where the two could hold on to the land and bring a different kind of civilization there.
Because ultimately, Europe with the European ways of the Western civilization expanded out into North America.
But there could be this whole Scandinavian vibe that would have taken over.
This whole just period of thousands of years of exploration that we no longer can do, so it's kind of geographic exploration of the world, is fascinating.
It takes true courage, it takes true wonder.
Of the kind of exploration we could do now, is more in the scientific realm and the realm of ideas, and then maybe in terms of geography, out into space and exploring the universe.
So, like we mentioned, the Vikings really went all over.
And one of the directions they went that ended up touching the Byzantine Empire and Constantinople is they went east.
What can we say about the 8th century journey east in the river networks that the Vikings did, the Swedish Vikings, the Varangians, as they began to explore the river systems of Russia?
And these are major river systems in the East that take you all the way down to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
Because the Vikings, you know, such seaborne people, they can sail up rivers.
This allows them access to the caliphates in the East, uh, and to the Byzantine Empire, where they, being Vikings, immediately decide to attack the city.
The Byzantines, Essentially, set the Sea of Marmara outside of Constantinople on fire and burn up all the Vikings' ships.
So then the Vikings decide, okay, we can't take Constantinople, so we might as well join them if we can't beat them.
And they end up as probably the most famous guard in Byzantine history, the Varangian guard.
Varangian means the men of the oath, the men who've sworn an oath.
This is kind of an analog of the Praetorian guard in ancient Rome.
They were famously loyal to the throne, but not necessarily to the person sitting on the throne.
They're major power players.
The last of the great Byzantine emperors, Basil the Bulgar Slayer, forms them in the late 900s.
And they're there with the history all the way up until the end of it.
In fact, many of our famous Vikings, Harald Herdrada, serve in the Vranging Guard.
If you go to Constantinople today, inside the Church of the Hagia Sophia, on the second floor, there's a marble balcony.
And on the railings, you can find Norse runes that are carved in by Vranging guards who were bored during a Particularly long sermon in a language they didn't understand, but they had to stand there.
So that's a fascinating thing, which is the Vrangian Guard guarding the emperor of the East Roman Empire is made up initially for quite a bit of time of Vikings.
But this whole thing, you fast forwarded the story, we should mention that Stare Ladoga in 753 AD is when it was established, opening the connection to the two rivers, and they began trading on the rivers and establishing more stable states along the rivers, including the Kievan Rus in 862, 882, where the Varangians, so it's the Swedish Vikings,
they took Novgorod, they took Kiev, and they established the Kievan Rus there.
And that is what led to.
The connection to the Byzantine Empire, where they started to again, the Vikings went from being Vikings, they go through this process of trading and then establishing a state.
Now they're doing treaties of different kinds, and they're also waging or trying to wage war and going all the way to Constantinople and having a deep admiration for Constantinople.
Enough to then begin to dream of sacking Constantinople.
But it was this very flammable material that would ignite on contact.
So the Byzantines would fill it into clay pots and then throw the clay pots.
As soon as it's exposed to oxygen, it would start burning.
They also had siphons.
They would carry like flamethrowers on their back and they would just spray it at enemies.
And the really devious thing about it is that if you launch this clay pot at a ship and the material, you know, pooled across the wood, And then dripped off into the water.
Being oil, it would float on top of the water and continue to burn.
So that if you were a sailor and you jumped off the ship because it's on fire and jumped into this oil patch that's on fire, you'd be coated with it and you'd burn underneath the water.
It was a horrible way to go.
So this was a state secret, closely guarded secret, so closely guarded it remains a mystery to this day of what exactly it was.
Because not only do you, do you get paid very, you get compensated very well, obviously for defending the emperor, particularly if you do a good job, but you also have opportunities because the emperor sends you, let's go attack, you know, this tribe and you get to keep whatever you take.
So there's tremendous amounts of war profiteering you can accomplish.
And the other great river system, the Volga, that brings you to the great enemy of the Byzantines, the Abbasid Caliphate.
Uh, and they had a lot of trading links with The north.
So you get things like fur and amber, lots of slaves from the Islamic world going up.
You even have in a Swedish coin hoard, there's a Buddha that's been found.
And if you look at the kingdoms the Vikings created, I'm thinking particularly of like Eric Bloodaxe in York.
He's controlling parts of Ireland, parts of Scotland, Wales, England.
Like there's no, that doesn't make sense unless you're a Viking.
That also added tremendously to the terror that the Vikings brought.
Because, I mean, you should probably be a little careful with absolute statements here, but I can't think of a major European city that's not on a river, which meant now with the Vikings, because they could travel up rivers, shallow rivers, and then carry their boats whenever they would.
Everything was on the table now, even hundreds of miles inland is on the table.
So, going to perplexity, Knut the Great was an early 11th century Danish ruler who became king of England, Denmark, and Norway, creating what historians call the North Sea Empire.
He's often regarded as one of the most effective kings in Anglo Saxon English history for stabilizing the realm after decades of Viking warfare.
Again, an example of a destroyer becoming state builder.
He, although a Viking war leader, Cnut ruled as a Christian king, patronizing churches and monasteries and going on pilgrimage to Rome in 1027, where he attended the Holy Roman Emperor's coronation.
Yes, he was recognized by his contemporaries as something special, right?
You don't get invited to those coronations if you're a nobody.
But the most famous story of Canute that I know, my favorite story, is being in positions of power, being famous, a lot of people sucking up to you, a lot of people telling you whatever they think you want to hear.
And so people are telling him all the time how wonderful he is.
And he takes his whole court down to the seashore and orders his courtiers to carry him on his throne into the water.
And then he commands the seas to stop, the waves to stop and to retreat.
And they don't, obviously.
And everyone thinks he's little.
But his point is that you're all saying how great I am.
I have no control.
Obviously, this is an act of humility to kind of embarrass.
I have no control over anything.
Stop telling me I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread.
So, in the other part of the world, you've written a book and you did a legendary podcast series on the Byzantine Empire, the East Roman Empire, AKA the Roman Empire.
Well, let me actually just, this is a tangent of a tangent, ask you about the podcast.
You've created what is widely considered to be the first history podcast.
This is before Dan Carlin, before all the amazing podcasts that we all know and love.
So, the podcast series, of course, is The 12 Byzantine Rulers, The History of the Byzantine Empire.
What motivated you to explore this medium of podcasting?
What in the early, it's supposed to have been 2005, something like this.
And people should go listen to it because it's still, I mean, it's like we're talking about like ancient times or something because it is now a long time ago, but it's still an incredibly good podcast.
At the time, there's a series that I would, Get at the library called the Great Courses.
I don't know if you're familiar, but there was one particular professor, his name was Bob Breyer, and he's an Egyptologist, lives on Long Island, where I'm from.
And he's a massive thing, it's like 24 hours of lectures about the entire history of Egypt.
And it was fascinating because you see, such a good storyteller.
And I was reading as a kid, I could never figure out if I liked the medieval period better or the Roman period better.
It was constantly going back and forth.
And I stumbled across a book which referred to the medieval Roman Empire.
And it was a bit like discovering your favorite TV show had 12 extra seasons you didn't know about, and they were just as good.
So it really was a labor of love.
I couldn't, I would not shut up about the Byzantine Empire.
So my older brother, We would go on walks together and I would be like, and then Justinian, you know, da da.
And he stopped me.
He said, I have no idea what you're talking about.
I have no idea.
Like, I need a framework.
Give me a framework for this.
So I went home and I recorded myself giving a framework, which turned out to be episode one.
But, um, I, I think I, I said it, I did it in a British accent, a really bad British accent.
I was just messing around.
And I gave him the, luckily I did it in my regular voice as well as this goofy accent.
And I gave it to him.
And then I forgot about it.
And that summer, I was on a dig in Petra, excavating the Temple of the Winged Lions, which was like a dream come true for me.
And I get this email from my brother, and he said, Oh, I just submitted it as a podcast.
So he had to tell me what that was.
But I was going for, to the extent that I had put thought into it, I was going for kind of a longer form lecture.
Great course series on the Byzantines.
And then a bunch of people started emailing me saying, When's episode two coming out?
But like looking back now, what do you think about that medium?
Why do you think it connected so much to people?
Because you've also written several amazing books.
One of them is on the Byzantine Empire.
Just looking back in a retrospective kind of way, because that from there blew up an entire industry of incredible other history podcasts and podcasts in general.
I've been trying to think for the past 20 years, like why it's such a niche field, right?
Why would people be interested in it?
I think number one, it's a great story, and people are people, and we haven't changed much, which is one of the reasons why it's accessible because it's very, these are people you could meet today.
But I think podcasting in general, because there's such a low bar to get in, or there was at the time, I mean, there's nobody else.
So just by virtue of being first, you know, it attracted attention.
Whatever its merits, being first was the strongest one.
I don't understand, maybe, and then you articulated this well, but it doesn't get the love that it maybe deserves in history.
I think the framing of the book you wrote on the topic is the reason we have Western civilization, as we know, or European based Western civilization, in a sense, because you have they let's see, maybe you can articulate the different ways they connected the thread.
But one of them is they preserved the knowledge when Europe was going through a dark period, they protected Europe in all those ways.
And then eventually they jumpstart the Renaissance.
Because people are, Constantinople is going to fall.
It's inevitable.
It's surrounded by hostile powers.
And so they start migrating, uh, to Italy.
Um, just at the moment, Italy is receptive to its Greco-Roman past.
Uh, Greek had died out in the, in the West.
Actually, as early as the time of Justinian in the 500s, 560s, they needed, if you wanted to travel between the eastern and western parts of the empire, you needed You know, guidebooks with helpful Latin or Greek phrases.
So Latin had died out in the East and Greek had died out in the West.
By the 14th century.
So you needed Byzantine teachers to be able to read Plato and Aristotle.
I mean, outside of Great Britain, all European legal systems are based on ultimately based on the Code of Justinian.
And then, weirdly, because of the French connections, the state of Louisiana.
Actually, if you want to be a lawyer, you have to pass a different bar in Louisiana than in everywhere else in the U.S. Why do you think the Western Roman Empire and then the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed?
Just looking at the grand picture of the history of the Roman Empire's 2200 years, starting from the kingdom to the republic to the imperial period to the East Roman Empire period, why do societies rise and fall?
That's a really interesting question, and there are probably as many answers as there are different kingdoms.
But just the Roman Empire.
My take on it is that the collapse really starts at the end of the reign of Basil II.
So, the year is 1025.
Basil is the last monarch of the Macedonian dynasty, which had seen the empire become the most powerful state in the Mediterranean, much more powerful and advanced than its Muslim or Christian neighbors.
He had expanded the empire essentially as large as it was going to be after Justinian.
It was wealthy.
It was glittering.
It was educated.
I mean, courtiers had to memorize the works of Plato by heart.
The emperor, one of his favorite activities was to go and he would begin a quote and you would have to finish it, but you didn't know where he would begin or what he was thinking that day.
Uh, this is kind of what amused him.
So incredibly literate.
I mean, inside Constantinople itself, the literacy rate was close to a hundred, which is crazy.
But when he died, the court, which had been this magnificent court, this bureaucracy which had been running the empire, which is vital to the workings of the empire, they convinced themselves that they could run the empire.
They didn't actually need the emperor.
And so they specifically selected weak rulers.
And then that led directly to the disastrous Battle of Manzikert in 1071, where the Turks enter the story and defeat, destroy the Roman army under Romanus Diogenes.
Who's attempting to break free of the bureaucratic constraints?
And then Anatolia gets flooded by these nomadic warriors, and the Byzantine gets pushed out of them.
So once they've lost the heartland, they've lost their source of troops, they've lost their source of taxation, they've lost their source of food.
At this point, it's impossible to recover.
And the Crusades are an attempt the First Crusade, anyway, is an attempt by the Eastern Emperor Alexius to recover.
Asia Minor, more than Jerusalem.
He wants to recover Asia Minor, and obviously it doesn't work out.
So I think at that point, it's on a trajectory that can only end in collapse.
And I think that's you can see that same kind of thing in the Viking world that we talked about this stultifying, bureaucratic inflexibility.
You sort of mentioned the Macedonian period, the dynasty where the East Roman Empire flourished once again, but like they've gone through so many periods like that and they lasted.
Some of it is timing, some of it is the environment, the system around it.
But yeah, I've just seen so many incredible humans.
That persevere through things that would break basically everybody.
And the power of the belief they have.
We were talking offline about Napoleon.
Here's a guy who was a student of all the great military generals of the past, extremely competent in being able to micomanage every aspect of military affairs of a nation, but also extremely confident.
In his vision of the world and ability to conquer anyone.
And you have the same thing with Genghis Khan.
This boy that came from nothing, that everything was taken away, united all of Mongolia and then conquered most of the known world to them, including eventually China.
And it's like, well, can you possibly have the great.
Like the Vikings, everyone has this very clear picture of what a Viking looked like and also has no idea what a Viking looked like somehow at the same time.
Like almost everything about them is wrong that we think of.
You know, almost everything about it is wrong.
They didn't wear horned helmets.
Their hair probably was blonde disproportionately, but that was more because they used lye to dye it because it would kill the lice.
And then they would take baths on a more regular basis.
I mean, this depended on where you were.
So in England, for example, they were mocked as being soft, which always blows my mind.
Like, really?
You're going to mock the Vikings for being soft because they took too many baths.
But then in the Muslim East, uh, one Muslim traveler writes that they were God's filthiest creatures because of their habits of kind of disgusting shared bathing.
I read that this could be propaganda, but I read that in England there was worry that the Vikings were a bit too attractive to the women of England because of how much the Vikings took care of themselves.
Yeah, I think like a couple of years ago, there were all these debates about statues.
Make sure we pull these statues down.
This person did a bad thing.
Let's pull these statues, you know, and, and I always thought they were kind of silly.
I mean, I understand the point, but like we don't, when you have a statue of Christopher Columbus, for example, you're not glorifying every single thing the man ever did and all the bad stuff that comes from this or that.
You're honoring something about him, like the spirit it takes to cross an ocean, not knowing what's on the other side and, and, That's that spirit of exploration.
I think with the Vikings, it's the same.
There's this way you approach the world, this fearless, pragmatic approach.
I think as an American, too, it's the ultimate rags to rich.
It's the myth we tell ourselves.
The man who starts with nothing and ends up as a sea king, well respected and sung about by poets.
I mean, that's it right there.
This is.
And when you're a society and you stop doing this, You run into trouble as well.
And it's also what I think is so cool about the Byzantines that in the ways that they are like us and the way that they are unlike us, in some ways, they're very analogous to the United States.
The kind of polygon nature of their inhabitants, you know, the.
Their roots, the Greco Roman, Judeo Christian roots.
And yet it was a place of incredible alien things as well men sitting on top of pillars, a king, an incredibly hierarchical system which abhorred democracy.
So I think it's a way, it's a way we, it's a route we could have taken.
Like what happens to a human when you give that human essentially absolute power?
Cause the Byzantine emperor stood halfway to, I mean, he was more autocratic than anything other than, I don't know, the pope that we, you know, we have in the modern world.
What happens when you give someone that level of power?
Like I love Justinian, but I wouldn't have liked to know him.
You know, I wouldn't like to be one of his subjects.
During grad school, I was reading Frederick Douglass's autobiography, and he said, I could sit with Plato and Cicero and they would not flinch, by which he meant that the great conversation was for everyone, no matter what your skin color, no matter what your level of income, and even no matter your intelligence.
I think that's actually what that's why history comes alive for me, is because these are not alien people.
How similar are ancient people to us psychologically?
What their goals were for life?
And I think the short answer is they were identical to us, which is why we can understand them.
It's why you should read things, it's why you should read the meditations, because this is not just some dry whatever talking to himself in a culture that you cannot understand and can never recreate.
It's a human talking about being human.
And I think human nature has not changed, and I don't think human nature will change.
So, we are flawed and broken, and that's the human condition.
We're going to be flawed and broken.
So, I don't think, I actually think that's the great question of history.
If you want to understand history, you have to know about human nature.
What is our human nature?
If you think it's a blank slate and we can kind of educate ourselves to a utopia or, you know, like the Marxists said, then okay.
Hasn't really worked out, but okay.
If you believe we're basically bad, there's a whole set of things that come with that.
If you believe we're basically good, there's a whole set of, right?
So you won't learn the appropriate lesson if you misdiagnose human nature.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lars Brownworth.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on.
And now, let me leave you with some words from the Valsanga Saga, a 13th century Icelandic prose epic that tells the story of the Valsanga clan, a legendary Norse dynasty of heroes and dragon slayers.
Fear not death, for the hour of your doom is set, and none may escape it.
And another powerful quote from this saga is better to fight and fall than to live without hope.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.