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4,500 years ago, Arctic Greenland's Paleo-Inuit made terrifying ocean voyages. Why did they risk it?
Archaeological evidence from one of the High Arctic’s most dangerous marine environments reveals that the region’s earliest inhabitants were expert seafarers who undertook perilous open-ocean journeys
Archaeologists have repeatedly underestimated the seafaring abilities of prehistoric peoples. From the maritime traditions of Polynesia to the first crossings into the landmass known as Sahul – the prehistoric continent that once connected Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania – over 60,000 years ago, claims of early ocean travel have often been met with raised eyebrows. After all, it can be difficult to imagine how these humans crossed vast spans of dangerous water with such limited technology. The prehistoric people who inhabited the Arctic have been no exception to this scepticism. Archaeologists refer to these early Arctic inhabitants as Early Paleo-Inuit: small and mobile hunting communities who lived across northern Greenland and Arctic Canada between roughly 4,500 and 2,800 years ago. For much of the 20th century, archaeologists assumed these communities were a land-based people, edging into frozen landscapes as ice sheets retreated, opening up new inland routes, rather than venturing across open water. This view was shaped in part by the scarcity of evidence for boats and marine hunting technology, because organic materials such as boats, paddles and skins rarely survive in the archaeological record. This lack of preservation is still a problem faced by archaeologists today. As a result, the true extent of prehistoric maritime activity in the Arctic – and across the globe – has long remained uncertain. But a new discovery from northern Greenland is now challenging this long-standing view, providing the strongest evidence yet for something some Arctic specialists have long suspected. How the Early Paleo-Inuit reached northern Greenland In the far north of Greenland, beyond the limits of permanent modern settlement, sits a small archipelago called Kitsissut. More than 700 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, this cluster of islands sits at a similar latitude to Norway’s Svalbard; one of the coldest and most ice-bound places on Earth. Reaching these islands by water is still a risk today, due to perilous currents and extreme weather conditions. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/A-view-of-the-crossing-between-Kitsissut-and-shores-of-Avanersuaq-NW-Greenland-with-a-minimum-of-distance-of-53km.-The-archaeological-beach-ridges-at-Isbjorne-Island-can-be-seen-in-the-foreground-6971dd7-e1771339327508.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Cold, open water separates the Kitsissut archipelago from the Greenland mainland. Even today, crossing this stretch of Arctic sea is hazardous — yet archaeological evidence suggests Early Paleo-Inuit communities were making journeys of more than 50 kilometres here nearly 4,500 years ago." title="A view of the crossing between Kitsissut and shores of Avanersuaq (NW Greenland), with a minimum of distance of 53km. The archaeological beach ridges at Isbjørne Island can be seen in the foreground" /> However, new archaeological research published in the journal Antiquity shows that almost 4,500 years ago – in the early Bronze Age, when the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt was still at the height of its power – ancestors of modern Inuit populations were making this journey using nothing more than small boats constructed from animal skins stretched over lightweight timber frames. The discovery challenges long-standing assumptions about how the Arctic was first inhabited. The region’s earliest peoples now appear to have been highly skilled seafarers, capable of repeated long-distance open-water voyages. Read more | Who owns Greenland? Why the island's history is more complicated than you think Reaching Kitsissut from the nearest known Early Paleo-Inuit settlement would have required an extraordinarily risky journey of more than 50 kilometres across open water. According to the researchers, this is the longest sea journey that can be confidently inferred for this period anywhere in the Arctic. “That’s an extraordinary voyage in small skin-on-frame watercraft,” says Matthew Walls, the study’s lead author and an associate professor at the University of Calgary. “It would have required facing erratic weather, strong crosswinds, powerful currents and very high risk of being swept into the expanse of Baffin Bay.” Why did the Early Paleo-Inuit head for Kitsissut? But the question is not just how these people reached Kitsissut, but rather what could have drawn these people so far north, into such treacherous places. The answer can be found in the Kitsissut islands’ location within Pikialasorsuaq, also known as the North Water polynya – a vast stretch of ocean between northern Greenland and Canada that remains ice-free even during the harsh Arctic winter. Polynyas form when ocean currents, winds and temperature differences prevent sea ice from forming despite sub-zero conditions. They are rare zones of open water amid otherwise frozen seas. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/Archaeological-beach-ridges-and-field-camp-at-Isbjorne-Island-Kitsissut.-The-nesting-cliffs-for-AppatThick-Billed-Murre-Uria-lomvia-towers-in-the-background-7c63598-e1771339680320.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An archaeological field camp sits below the steep nesting cliffs of thick-billed murres on Isbjørne Island. Such seabird colonies, sustained by the nearby North Water polynya, would have provided a dense and predictable food source for Early Paleo-Inuit visitors." title="Archaeological beach ridges and field camp at Isbjørne Island, Kitsissut. The nesting cliffs for Appat_Thick Billed Murre (Uria lomvia) towers in the background" /> Unsurprisingly, polynyas are ecological hotspots. They provide refuge for huge numbers of fish and marine mammals, as well as vast seabird colonies – a rare concentration of food in an otherwise extremely challenging environment. Commenting on the news to HistoryExtra, Professor Robert W Park, a specialist in Arctic archaeology at the University of Waterloo, explains that the seasonal importance of polynyas to Inuit communities would have been critical, especially in the coldest months. “During the cold part of the Arctic year, prey species need access to open water, and the polynya is the only place that stays open,” he says. “Every other part of the ocean is completely frozen.” As a result, resources become highly concentrated around polynyas in winter and spring. “That’s when people would be there,” Park adds, “not during the summer, when resources are widely distributed across the land and ocean, and when there are long stretches of open water.” But the same forces that make polynyas rich in wildlife also make them exceptionally dangerous to cross. Navigating these zones would have meant accepting the risks posed by freezing water temperatures and drifting sea ice capable of crushing small boats. Read more | A thousand years ago, the Vikings had a shock encounter with Native Americans that ended in disaster For all the danger, Park notes that these journeys may not always have involved crossing uninterrupted stretches of open water. Instead, boats may have been used “not to traverse 50 kilometres of open water, but rather to travel and hunt in the patches of open water (called ‘leads’) between broken ice, [with people] hauling their boats up onto the ice when the leads close.” The archaeological evidence of repeated Arctic voyages No matter how far the open water crossings were, the evidence makes it clear that Kitsissut wasn’t reached by chance – for example, by a lone boat knocked off course. Instead, generations of people returned to the islands again and again, over many centuries. These conclusions are based on an extensive archaeological survey conducted on the central islands of the archipelago. Researchers documented nearly 300 archaeological features, including Early Paleo-Inuit tent rings and hearths. Tent rings – circles of stones used to anchor skin tents – are among the most common structural traces left by highly mobile Arctic cultures. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/archaeologist-standing-over-rocky-beach-with-tent-ring-evidence-e1771340346171.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Stone tent rings — circles once used to anchor skin tents against Arctic winds — remain scattered across raised beach ridges in Kitsissut. Despite their modest appearance, such features reveal generations of repeated seasonal visits." title="archaeologist-standing-over-rocky-beach-with-tent-ring-evidence" /> Many of these features cluster beneath towering seabird cliffs, where thick-billed murres nest by the thousands, creating a rich and predictable food source. Radiocarbon dating of seabird bone recovered from one dwelling places human activity at the site between roughly 4,400 and 3,900 years ago, coinciding with the early formation of the polynya itself. This overlap suggests that human movement into the region occurred as this emerging ecological system became stable enough to support dense wildlife populations – highlighting the depth of Early Paleo-Inuit environmental knowledge. “The fact that these early communities made this journey regularly, transporting families and supplies to access seasonal resources like seabird colonies at the islands, demonstrates a level of maritime skill that reshapes our understanding of this period,” Walls says. As he adds, “reaching Kitsissut required skills that would have been a defining part of social life, passed down and refined as each generation re-learned by going out into the sea to travel and hunt.” Arctic seafaring in a global context This discovery fits within a broader pattern of archaeology’s long struggle to accurately capture early sea travel. Comparable distances once seemed implausible in other prehistoric contexts as well. Archaeological estimates of Polynesian voyaging ranges, for example, were routinely underestimated until experimental archaeology and indigenous knowledge demonstrated the true capabilities of early sea vessels. Read more | What happened to the people of Rapa Nui? Speaking to HistoryExtra, Professor Sue Hamilton, former director of the UCL Institute of Archaeology, says that any comparisons between the Early Paleo-Inuit and Polynesian ocean crossings “are too separated in time, place, and environmental context to compare” – other than in terms of “the vastness of their ocean contexts.” She explains that “the Polynesians travelled vast distances across the Pacific in double hulled canoes, using complex navigational observations relying on the stars, ocean swells, bird flights, and wind patterns.” These journeys involved crossing up to 300 kilometres of open ocean for up to three weeks, often against prevailing winds. However, what does link the significance of the new research to this broader pattern, Hamilton says, is that in each case “watercraft had a central role in subsistence, social and ecological structure and survival.”
It was an "extravaganza of brutality": how the Vikings menaced the Mediterranean
Killing, burning, pillaging, enslaving. Even when heading to sunnier climes, Viking raiders deployed the same tactics that they had used along the shores of northern and western Europe, reveals Thomas Williams
The poor citizens of Al-Jazira al-Khadra never knew what hit them. In 859, an unfamiliar fleet sailed into the bay separating this Muslim settlement – which later evolved into the city of Algeciras, now in southern Spain – from Gibraltar. Making landfall nearby, the alien ships disgorged their fearsome crews: Vikings. In a sequence of events terrifyingly familiar to victims in more northerly parts of Europe, these formidable marauders wreaked havoc. They occupied the city, burned the mosque, ravaged the countryside – and then moved on to the next target, and the next. The campaign later known as the ‘Great Raid’ was well and truly underway – part of a chapter in Norse history that’s less known today, but no less bloody. Stone cold killers The Vikings of our imagination are emphatically creatures of the north – avatars of cold climes and bleak weather, manifestations of ice and snow made flesh and steel. Dragon-prowed ships slice through the frigid waters of steep-sided fjords swathed in midnight-green pine forests. Fur-clad adventurers hunt walrus amid the crashing icebergs of the northernmost seas. Giants haunt the ice-capped mountains in an unreal world of midnight sun and northern lights. We are used to reading tales of Viking rampages through lands both near and far from home: around the Baltic coastline, in Britain and Ireland, in what’s now northern France, Russia, even Canada. But none of these places seem so different from Scandinavia, in climate at least; indeed, some boast similar extremes of latitude. Even in the most temperate of these places, a sharp north-easterly or a rare winter snowstorm may come and go without raising an eyebrow. Likewise Vikings in times past. But, like the ice, it can feel jarring to find Vikings in places where we feel instinctively they don’t quite belong. Like Mallorca, southern France, even Egypt. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/CreditCopyright--Museo-San-Isidoro-de-Leon-Derechos-reservadosFRT2114webready-75aa086-e1768832592182.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A cylindrical wooden box with ornate patterns carved into it" title="An elaborately carved box made from reindeer horn around the turn of the 11th century and discovered in Spain, hinting at Viking contact there (Image by Museo San Isidoro de León-Derechos reservados)" /> Of course, summer does come to the north. Vikings didn’t spend the whole year swaddled in bearskins. Still, like many of us, the inhabitants of those northerly climes might well have dreamed wistfully of a sun-soaked break in the Med – not least those hardy souls beyond the Arctic Circle who endured weeks of crushing midwinter darkness. We don’t know exactly what sparked the Great Raid of 859–60, but we have a fair idea of at least some of what transpired. The expedition was supposedly led by Björn Ironside, son of the larger-than-life Ragnar Loðbrok (‘Hairy pants’), and Hastein, who was later involved in campaigns in Brittany, the Loire Valley and King Alfred’s Britain. Having entered the Mediterranean and started as they meant to go in Al-Jazira al-Khadra, the Viking fleet next hit the kingdom of Nakur (or Nekor) on the north African coastline. There, in the words of one Asturian chronicler, they killed “a vast number of Muslims” and captured many others for ransom or for sale as slaves. The raiders headed back north via the Balearics, molesting Murcia, Mallorca, Menorca and, perhaps, Ibiza and Formentera. Touching down on what’s now the Côte d’Azur, they pillaged their way through Perpignan, Narbonne, Nîmes, Arles and Valence. After a winter spent in the Camargue, the Vikings moved on to Italy, where they sacked Pisa. Thereafter, things get a little muddled. One far-fetched narrative has them aiming for Rome but getting confused, instead plundering the small port of Luni (a surprising mistake, given that Rome was far inland and to the south, and still possibly the largest and most architecturally impressive city in western Europe). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Greekfire-public-domain-CMYK-64ac2bc-e1768832114133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration showing two black boats filled with men facing each other, with the group on the left shooting fire towards the ones on the right" title="A 12th-century manuscript illustration shows the use of ‘Greek fire’, an incendiary weapon wielded by Andalusian forces against Viking attackers to devastating effect" /> Whatever the truth of that tale, from Italy the fleet seems to have moved on to the eastern Mediterranean, and regions under the sway of the Byzantine empire. One chronicler even places Viking ships at Alexandria, near the mouth of the Nile. We do know that the campaign nearly ended in disaster – for the Vikings. En route home through the Straits of Gibraltar (or, as it was known in Old Norse, Nǫrvasund, ‘Narrow Sound’), longships were intercepted by the formidable galley fleet of Muslim al-Andalus under the command of Qarqashish ibn Shakruh and the admiral Khashkhash. Andalusian forces decimated Viking crews with arrows and incinerated ships with bursts of ‘Greek fire’ – the nautical napalm of the early medieval world – belched across the water. The Andalusians sailed close enough to engage the Vikings hand-to-hand across the ships’ bows: Khashkhash himself “fought them from the prow of his ship until he met a martyr’s death, may God have mercy on him”. Only a handful of Viking ships escaped the maelstrom – but those men who survived had gathered tales enough to fill many a long Nordic night. Read more | Forget the longships: this is the overlooked story of how the Vikings dominated eastern Europe Capital ideas The Great Raid was one of the largest, most dramatic and best remembered of the Viking adventures in the south, but it was far from the only such excursion. The sources rarely explain what inspired individual expeditions but, broadly speaking, adventures to such distant lands were animated by the same impulses that drove the Vikings to sail waters closer to home. The main driver of raiding – and, indeed, military employment overseas – was the acquisition of capital. This was both economic, in the shape of plunder and extorted wealth, and social, in the form of fame and prestige. Both could be leveraged to gain political power back home. Stories of awe-inspiring deeds, and possession of the wherewithal to reward and retain a warband, provided the basis for power in early medieval Scandinavia. Viking exploits around the storied and wealthy Mediterranean rim had the potential to provide generous helpings of both. Sometimes they could provide a springboard to the pinnacle of power and fame. When Harald Hardrada (more on whom later) returned to Scandinavia via what’s now Russia after a brutal mid-career sojourn in the employment of the Byzantine emperor, the poet Valgard of Voll said that: Harald, you launched your vessel Laden with a cargo of riches Freighted with hard-won honour And gleaming gold […] Through storm and gale, great king, You sailed your plunging vessel; And as the sea-spray was thinning You sighted at least Sigtuna. Inside a year, Harald was king of Norway. First fleet It was some 15 years before the Great Raid, and half a century after the pioneering attack on Lindisfarne, that Vikings first sailed into the Atlantic and steered determinedly south. The first known sortie to the Iberian peninsula was made in 844. The 54 ships that undertook that journey blazed a trail that others – the Great Raid included – would follow and greatly extend over centuries to come. Setting out from Brittany, the Viking fleet harried the Atlantic coast of Iberia, landing at A Coruña and launching raids inland, but ultimately came to grief at the hands of Asturian stone-throwers and the stalwart resistance of the Christian king Ramiro I. Thwarted there, the remaining Vikings cut their losses and headed south towards the Muslim emirate of al-Andalus. Their first stop was Lisbon, where they tarried for a couple of weeks to resupply their ships and terrorise the locals. Sailing on, the fleet sailed up the Guadalquivir river to menace the great city of Seville. Many of the inhabitants fled at the approach of the Norsemen, the reputation of these exotic marauders having preceded them. What followed was an extravaganza of brutality that was grimly familiar in Britain, Ireland and France, but which was terrifyingly novel in southern Iberia. Viking raiders disembarked from their ships to pillage and despoil the Andalusian countryside, slaughtering men, kidnapping women and children, and burning settlements. Seville itself was largely ransacked, only the walls of the inner citadel halting the attackers. Terrified citizens huddling for refuge within the great mosque of Ibn Abbas were massacred. Eventually, the emir, Abd al-Rahman II, got his act together. He mustered an army that confronted the Viking warband at an unidentified place recorded as Talyata where, according to the sources, 1,000 Viking warriors (or Majūs, ‘fire-worshippers’, as they are referred to in Arabic writing) were slain. Some 400 Norsemen were captured and executed in spectacular ways – decapitated or strung up on palm trees. According to the later source Ibn Idhari, Abd al-Rahman sent “the heads of the general, and of 200 of the noblest Viking warriors” to the tribes under Andalusian dominion in Africa. It was a warning and a reminder that his power, however much it had been tested by this novel threat, remained intact. Though they didn’t make it into the Mediterranean on that occasion, the Vikings had delivered a nasty shock to the Andalusians. As a result, city and coastal defences were strengthened and naval patrols were enhanced – as the returning ships of the Great Raid discovered to their cost on their way home 16 years later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/WIKICredit-Didier-DescouensArsenaleVenice-FirstAncientGreeklionwebready-5971df2-e1768832842209.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a large stone lion, with a brick crenellated wall and black railings behind it" title="Runic inscriptions on the shoulders of this ancient Greek lion, now in Venice but originally in Piraeus, are believed to be 11th-century graffiti inscribed by Norse mercenaries serving in the Byzantine army" /> Suburban terrorists At around the same time that the Vikings of the Great Raid were pillaging their way around the western Med, another group were unleashing violence to the east. This was a sudden irruption of Rus – the adventurers of Scandinavian origin who settled between the eastern Baltic and Black Seas. Later establishing their epicentre in Kyiv, they sparked a long political and economic transformation of predominantly Slavic eastern Europe. In 860, these marauders launched an attack on the suburbs of Constantinople. The earliest account describes the Northmen burning and plundering their way to the walls of the mighty capital of the Byzantine empire, terrifying the inhabitants. Later sources describe the raiders spreading out around the Sea of Marmara south of the city, and pillaging and burning monasteries on the archipelago now known as Princes’ Islands. Capturing 22 of the exiled Patriarch Ignatius’ servants, the Rus took them “aboard their ships and cruelly dismembered them with axes, demonstrating their barbarity”. These attackers were the people whom Patriarch Photios of Constantinople – who lived contemporaneously with the events of 860, though didn’t record them directly – described as “a fierce and barbarous people, worshipping no gods and living in constant strife. Their coming brings destruction and sorrow to those lands they visit.” Sadly for the locals, it wouldn’t be the last time the Rus made their presence felt in the Bosphorus. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/PrinceOlegtheProphetridesonshipsputonwheelstoConstantinople2webready-ad9a5ea-e1768832311475.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration showing several groups of men in boats with wheels on the bottom. They are all dressed in red robes with blue hoods" title="Warships of the Kyivan Rus, the eastern European realm settled by Scandinavians, are fitted with wheels to attack Constantinople in 907, as imagined in a 16th-century Russian chronicle" /> In 907, for reasons unstated, the Rus again assaulted Constantinople. The events were recorded in detail by the compilers of the Russian Primary Chronicle; though open to sceptical assessment, their words certainly paint a vivid picture. The attack was led by the Rus warlord Oleg, whose name was recorded as a Slavic form of the Old Norse Helgi, and comprised “Varangians [ie Scandinavians], Slavs, Chuds, Krivichs, Meryans, Polianians, Severians, Derevlians, Radimichs, Croats, Dulebs and Tivercians” – various East Slavic tribes. According to this account, the Rus fleet comprised 2,000 ships, though Greek sources give the rather more credible figure of 350. Having landed outside the city, Oleg disembarked and led his army on another rampage through the suburbs, killing inhabitants, burning houses and razing churches. Prisoners were, so the chronicler recounts, “beheaded, tortured, shot or thrown into the sea”. Read more | "A Viking wedding involved a bed and eight people", plus four other facts about the Vikings you might not know... The most remarkable episode in this otherwise fairly typical account of Viking atrocities was the order that Oleg allegedly gave “to fit the ships with wheels. When a favourable wind rose up, they set sail and bore down upon the city by land.” The residents were, quite understandably, “frightened to see this”. It is difficult to understand how this would have worked in practice, attempted at short notice by a raiding army speaking disparate languages and who, we must assume, had never done such a thing before. The smouldering ruins of the suburbs would also have presented challenging terrain for Oleg’s marauding land-fleet. Whatever the true details of the assault, it’s recorded that the terrified city-dwellers “agreed to pay tribute, provide provisions and grant the Rus the right to trade in Constantinople tax-free”. A Rus-Byzantine treaty was indeed duly signed – and the Old Norse names of the Rus signatories leave no doubt as to their Viking origins. This treaty included provisions granting the Rus access to Constantinopolitan markets, provided they adhered to certain restrictions. They were to use only one designated gate; their numbers in the city were limited to 50 at any one time; they were to be accompanied by Byzantine guardsmen; and their weapons were to be left outside the walls. In return, they received food and an allowance for six months. If the attack had been a coordinated strategy to wring economic concessions for Rus traders in Europe’s greatest marketplace, then Oleg’s campaign – land-ships or no – had been a resounding success. Unruly contractors For all that the Vikings represented a menace, it was clearly preferable to have them working in the service of the Byzantine empire rather than camped belligerently outside the walls of its cities. So, for at least 200 years, Scandinavians were employed as mercenaries, hired to prosecute the empire’s wars in all quarters of the eastern Mediterranean. Northmen who served in this way, known as Varangoi by the Byzantines, were prized for their skills as sailors and fighters, and the empire’s far-flung interests took them all across the greater Byzantine world. From 902, when the first direct reference to Varangians appears in Greek sources, they could be found fighting the empire’s wars in Sicily, Italy, Crete, Croatia, Lebanon, Anatolia and Syria – not to mention Armenia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Georgia. And they left their mark in Constantinople: runic inscriptions in the stonework of the Hagia Sophia – the city’s great basilica, now a mosque – seem to be Varangian graffiti. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/dreamstimexl29748298webready-ab8436b-e1768832432639.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a red stone building with several floors, a domed roof and a narrow, pointed tower at each corner" title="Istanbul’s sixth-century Hagia Sophia. Around the time of the Rus attack on the Byzantine capital, Scandinavians were hired as ‘Varangian’ soldiers, leaving runic graffiti in this basilica, now a mosque" /> The Varangian phenomenon was turbo-charged in 988 when Vladimir the Great of Kyiv despatched 6,000 men to Emperor Basil II Porphyrogenitus (the ‘Bulgar Slayer’). The Rus leader issued the revealing advice to “not keep them in the city, for then they will only give you trouble, as they have given me”, finishing with the weary plea to “not let one man come back here again”. Undesirable citizens they may have been, but these eastern Vikings quickly proved their military worth in Basil’s wars. Under pressure from within the imperial military hierarchy and from fractious neighbours in Bulgaria, Syria and Mesopotamia, the emperor was grateful for Vladimir’s assistance. He put his new recruits to immediate and effective employ, and Rus warriors were instrumental in crushing a revolt by the Byzantine general Bardas Phokas in 989. Thereafter, Varangians became increasingly commonplace in the Byzantine military, serving in the imperial bodyguard – though the significance of their contribution may have been exaggerated in some sources. This policy was an extension of a long tradition in the imperial army of employing foreign fighters of diverse origins, from within and without the boundaries of the empire. Read more | Reading the runes: what we can learn about everyday life in the Viking Age A legend in his lifetime No Varangian was more celebrated – particularly by himself – than the future Norwegian king Harald Hardrada (‘Hard Ruler’). British readers will remember Harald best for his part in the events of 1066, when he led a Viking force to defeat – and his own death – at Stamford Bridge at the hands of the English king Harold Godwinson. The demands of that clash exhausted and diverted English forces, easing the path to Norman victory at Hastings a few weeks later, and the subsequent conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy. A legend in his own lifetime, Harald travelled to the Byzantine imperial court via Kyivan Rus, and distinguished himself in campaigns fought on a number of fronts – most notably in Sicily, but also in the Greek islands and Bulgaria, and possibly north Africa, Syria and Anatolia. The most eye-catching of Harald’s postings was to the Middle East. In verses ascribed to Stuf Thordarson, who supposedly heard it from the lion’s mouth: With courage sharp as a sword-edge The all-triumphant warrior Left Greece to conquer Palestine – An easy task for Harald Tempting though it is to imagine Harald seizing control of the Holy Land with ease 60 years before the knights of the First Crusade achieved the same feat, in truth this is characteristic hyperbole. The future king seems rather to have been engaged in some sort of joint security operation designed to police the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem under the terms of a deal between the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt and Emperor Michael IV. Nevertheless, while he was there Harald took opportunities hitherto open to very few Scandinavians: he bathed his weary bones in the river Jordan and paid his respects to Christ at the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre. The Viking Age was coming to a close; the Age of the Crusades was near. But, as Harald’s tale shows, the boundary between these two epochs was not as clear-cut or impermeable as modern historiographical terminology implies. When the Norwegian king Sigurd Jórsalfari (‘Jerusalem-farer’) set sail in 1107 in search of adventure in the Holy Land, he followed in the slip-stream of his Viking forebears. He sailed down the coast of Iberia, through the straits of Gibraltar and on via the Balearics, pillaging as he went. The longships that arrived in 1110, and which blockaded the Fatimid controlled Levantine city of Sidon (now in Lebanon) as an ally of the Frankish king Baldwin of Jerusalem, bore all the hallmarks of the Viking fleets that had terrorised the Mediterranean in centuries past. On his return journey, during a pitstop at the old Varangian staging post of Constantinople, the Norwegian king made a gift to Emperor Alexios I Komnenos: “A very ornate dragon-head from the prow of his ship.” Thomas Williams is a historian of the early Middle Ages. His new book God’s Hammer: A History of the Viking Crusade is due out in October 2026 This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
From krakens to serpents: 5 fearsome sea monsters from history
Sea monsters have haunted human imaginations for millennia. From the kraken to killer serpents, Prema Arasu explores what five mythical creatures reveal about our deepest fears
1. Armed and dangerous The writhing tentacles of the kraken inspired horror and disgust Sea monsters have fired our imaginations – and chilled our blood – for as long as humanity has sailed the seas. The Babylonian epic Enūma Eliš, which dates back to at least 1200 BC, describes the creation of the world from two fearsome primordial beings: Apsû, the embodiment of subterranean fresh water, and Tiamat, the sea. Like the many mythical aquatic creatures that have occupied our dreams and our nightmares, Apsû and Tiamat reveal much about how the Babylonians saw the world, acting as projections through which their anxieties about nature could be expressed, examined and, perhaps, mastered. Fast forward more than a thousand years and, in Naturalis Historia (c77 AD), the earliest extant work of natural history, the Roman author Pliny the Elder argued that the largest animals found in the sea “exceed in size any of the terrestrial animals” because of the “superabundance of moisture with which they are supplied”. One such giant creature is the kraken, its origins lying in Nordic mythology and folklore. In his 1752–53 proto-scientific work The Natural History of Norway, Danish bishop Erik Pontoppidan described the “Kraken, Kraxen, or, as some world name it, Krabben” as an island-sized creature, “round, flat, and full of arms, or branches”. Alfred, Lord Tennyson was so energised by reports of this monster of the deep that, in 1830, he wrote a poem in its honour, describing an ancient, giant-armed creature slumbering “Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea.” British naturalist Henry Lee offered a more rational perspective. In Sea Monsters Unmasked (1883), he stated that kraken sightings by sailors were most likely exaggerated reports of giant squid (Architeuthis dux), described a quarter of a century earlier by the Danish biologist Japetus Steenstrup. Even after that, though, kraken and other squid-like monsters proliferated in literature. Herman Melville dedicated a chapter of Moby-Dick (1851) to the giant squid. Ishmael, Moby-Dick’s narrator, references The Natural History of Norway in his description of the creature, offering up the possibility that the kraken might not be a mythological beast but a taxonomically recognised species. Myth and reality continued to amalgamate in the science-fiction genre. Jules Verne’s battle with a giant squid in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–70) was based on reports of an encounter between a French corvette, Alecton, and a squid in 1861. As Verne puts it: “Before my eyes was a horrible monster worthy to figure in the legends of the marvellous. It was an immense cuttlefish, being eight yards long… Its eight arms… were twice as long as its body, and were twisted like the furies’ hair.” The uncanny undulations of kraken continue to fascinate. Roger Luckhurst, a scholar of the field of horror, links this to our innate “response to things that overwhelm our senses, stick too close, ooze across borders, or refuse to keep a stable shape”. Read more | Water gods and sea goddesses: 17 water deities from world history 2. A feminine fantasy Aquatic half-humans enchanted men and attracted women seeking new freedoms Sirens, tritons, nereids, merfolk, nymphs… part-fish, part-human creatures have gone by many names over the millennia. These alluring beings have glided gracefully into cultural traditions across the world for thousands of years – particularly those with strong histories of seafaring. And, unlike many of the aquatic beings on these pages, they haven’t always done so with malign intentions. In Naturalis Historia, Pliny described “tritons and nereids” as creatures in which “the portion of the body that resembles the human figure is still rough all over with scales”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/AKG342658webready-934ba2a-e1767351773509.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A stone relief showing a ship full of men sailing towards three women lined up on the left" title="A fourth-century BC urn shows Odysseus sailing towards the sirens, who, he reported, “sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers” (Image by AKG)" /> Sirens had appeared in Homer’s poem the Odyssey nine centuries earlier. But in the case of this ancient Greek epic, they were never physically described. Rather, we’re told that they “sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers”. Interestingly, they tempt sailors with knowledge, rather than – as other, later, depictions would have it – luring them to their doom. “When we had got within earshot of the land, and the ship was going at a good rate,” the fictional Odysseus recalls, “the sirens saw that we were getting in shore and began with their singing: ‘No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song – and he who listens will go on his way not only charmed, but wiser’.” In medieval art, Homer’s sirens are interpreted as both aquatic and non-aquatic creatures. In contrast, the nereids of Greek myth were explicitly spirits or embodiments of the sea, albeit often visually depicted as human women. In the Romantic and Victorian imagination, they became synonymous with mermaids, frequently depicted with tails. Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe conjured a fish-tailed ingénue in her 1794 poem The Sea-Nymph, as did Hans Christian Andersen in The Little Mermaid four decades later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/gr0031911Hwebready-444c4de-e1767352384901.jpg" width="1500" height="1001" alt="A drawing showing a mermaid with a black, orange and yellow tail and long blonde hair, laying on her front on a rock, with a sea plant in the background" title="A 1930s depiction of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, which did so much to popularise the fish-tailed ingénue (Image by TopFoto)" /> Radcliffe’s poem marked a turn to the mermaid as a feminine fantasy: an aspirational symbol for young women who might otherwise feel confined by the gendered expectations of public life. This manifests today in the enduring visibility of the mermaid in popular culture and in the burgeoning pastime of mermaiding – cosplaying by swimming with a decorative monofin. 3. Terror in the deep For millennia, giant, ravenous sea serpents have played on humanity’s primal terrors It didn’t pay to get on the wrong side of the gods in ancient mythology. Just ask Laocoön, a Trojan priest who offended the deity Minerva – and didn’t live to tell the tale. As the Roman poet Virgil relates it in the Aeneid – his epic first-century BC poem telling the story of the foundation of Rome – Laocoön committed the cardinal sin of throwing a spear into the Greeks’ wooden horse to show that it was hollow. It was an act that so enraged Minerva that she unleashed two giant sea serpents to eat him. “Taking swift course; their necks were lifted high,” Virgil writes of the ravenous creatures. “Their gory dragon-crests o’ertopped the waves; all else, half seen, trailed low along the sea; while with loud cleavage of the foaming brine, their monstrous backs wound forward fold on fold.” Poor Laocoön didn’t stand a chance. As the priest’s grisly fate proves, the sea serpent had established itself as a terror of the deep by the time the Greeks and Romans dominated the Mediterranean. But they weren’t the first to live in fear of this creature. In fact, the ancient Greeks’ diverse bestiary of monsters likely derived from earlier prototypes. Sea serpents recur in the folklore traditions of a range of coastal and lake cultures, from the black, hairy Nile-dwelling monster Aman Doger of ancient Nubia to the rainbow snake of Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime myth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1288491221webready-92f8e54-e1767351878133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An engraving showing a naked man with curly hair and a beard, with a large snake wrapped around his body, holding him down, alongside his two sons" title="Laocoön and his two sons are attacked by serpents, as shown in a 16th‑century engraving. Could megalophobia – the fear of large objects – be a factor in humanity’s obsession with sea monsters? (Image by Getty Images)" /> For the Victorian naturalist Henry Lee, tales of colossal sea serpents were a case of mistaken identity, likely originating in sightings of other marine phenomena – perhaps large pods of porpoises or whales. “I believe that… the supposed coils or protuberances of the serpent’s body, were only so many porpoises swimming in line in accordance with their habit before mentioned,” he wrote. Read more | Liquor, loot and death on the high seas: 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the history of pirates The anthropologist David D Gilmore has offered an alternative interpretation of our sea serpent obsession. He has suggested that the recurrence of such creatures in literature down the ages points to three primal human fears: of the sea; of what might lurk in the unknown; and of large objects, otherwise known as megalophobia. 4. The theory of de-evolution Early Christians feared that the Leviathan would propel the human race back to its watery past To some, it has been a benign presence. To others, a terror-inducing harbinger of doom. Ever since the Leviathan emerged from the depths of the oceans and floated into the human consciousness, it has meant different things to different people. Jews and early Christians were certainly fearful. In the Hebrew Bible – where it appears in the Old Testament books of Psalms, Job and Isaiah – the Leviathan is a female sea serpent who will bring about the apocalypse together with her male counterpart, the desert monster Behemoth. Such ancient beasts played on the enduring fear of regression, reminding us of our uncomfortable origins in the oceans. David D Gilmore suggests that the water that so often drips from primal monsters as they emerge from the deep “symbolises not only the amniotic fluids of the womb, but also the primal element from which all life emerged”. These creatures threaten us with the possibilities of de-evolution – a stripping of what modern science has decided makes us human. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-534969411webready-723169d-e1767352029623.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A drawing depicting a large black whale being held under a boat, while several people and other sea creatures surround it in the water" title="An illustration from a 14th-century manuscript shows Alexander the Great being lowered into the sea to explore the ocean bed – a place populated by aquatic humans, dogs and a huge whale (Image by Getty Images)" /> For Renaissance cartographers, the Leviathan meant something different. Medieval maps of the world abound with monstrous-looking whales, depicted in ornate detail. According to historian Chet van Duzer, these illustrations served two purposes: to warn sailors of dangers that awaited them at sea, and as decorative elements designed to show off the artist’s talents. By the time the American writer Celia Thaxter penned her poem Leviathan in 1876, the creature had shape-shifted again. For Thaxter, it was a largely peaceful presence, who triumphed against the rage of nature: “For her worst fury he nor stayed nor turned. ‘Twas joy to think in such tremendous play, Through the sea’s cruelty, all unconcerned. Leviathan pursued his placid way!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/CPA0030665webready-7c5c3eb-e1767352254831.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration showing a large grey and orange fish with a man laying next to it, covered in flowers" title="A 14th-century depiction of Jonah with the giant fish that spat him out. Huge sea creatures make numerous appearances in biblical texts (Image by TopFoto)" /> 5. Visions of Atlantis Tales of an aquatic city populated by hyper-intelligent Atlanteans enchanted authors from Plato to HG Wells “A strange vertebrated animal.” That’s how Elstead, the narrator of HG Wells’s 1897 short story In the Abyss, describes the lifeform he encounters on a journey into a deep ocean trench. “Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils,” reported the intrepid submariner. “The vertical pitch of its face gave it a most extraordinary resemblance to a human being.” In introducing Elstead to this strange creature, HG Wells was joining a long list of writers to conjure the inhabitants of a mysterious underwater civilisation into fictional life. In fact, the possibility of an intelligent, almost godlike race of aquatic beings living on the ocean bed has captured the imagination for centuries. Mentions of the submerged island Atlantis date back to Plato’s fourth-century BC dialogues Timaeus and Critias, in which the Greek philosopher described a land sunken by a devastating earthquake. Renaissance scholars such as Francis Bacon linked Atlantis to the Americas, a notion he further explored in his utopian novel The New Atlantis (1624). In 1931, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists Henry Bryant and Columbus Iselin embarked upon a research cruise in search of the lost continent around the Azores. It was unsuccessful. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/the-shape-of-water9lp0tuwebready-2ed216e-e1767352125833.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photo of a woman with her hands pressed up against a glass tank, looking into the eyes of a large green sea creature behind the glass" title="2017 dark fantasy film The Shape of Water, which traces the relationship between a mute woman and a captured humanoid amphibian (Image by MovieStills)" /> Tales of Atlantis made a resurgence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1929 novel The Maracot Deep features a team of scientists who descend into the ocean, become trapped in a deep-sea trench and are saved from disaster by descendants of Atlantis. Other underseas peoples in popular fiction aren’t quite so benign. American horror writer HP Lovecraft described an undersea race of creatures called Deep Ones who worship the deities Dagon and Cthulhu. In The Shadow Over Innsmouth Lovecraft projects his own prejudices about racial purity and miscegenation (sexual relationships between people of different ethnic groups) onto a fictional coastal town. Here the residents interbreed with marine beings and become corrupted in form and character. Read more | Tails from the deep: separating the real folklore of mermaids from Disney stories The denizens of cities under the sea continue to capture our imaginations today. Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning 2017 film The Shape of Water tells how a mute cleaner working in a high-security government laboratory falls in a love with a green-skinned humanoid amphibian. This enduring interest in aquatic beings speaks to a wider fascination with how great civilisations might fall. This is an intriguing and alarming prospect. After all, if a creature is to knock us off our self-appointed perch at the top of the evolutionary ladder, then surely that creature could come from the same primordial soup as we once did? Prema Arasu is an adjunct research fellow at the University of Western Australia, and author of The Book of Sea Monsters: Leviathans of Literature (Adlard Coles, 2025) This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Star witness: how the Royal Observatory transformed our understanding of astronomy and time
From the moment it was founded 350 years ago, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich drove our understanding of astronomy, navigation and time. Louise Devoy explores eight milestones in the history of this pioneering scientific institution
The big bang moment 1675: Charles II sparks a star-gazing revolution In the 17th century, the great maritime nations were vying to solve a puzzle that had confounded philosophers for many centuries: how to determine exact positions on the Earth’s surface. And in Britain, Charles II took a major step to ensure his realm’s position at the head of the pack. On 4 March 1675, the king signed a royal warrant appointing John Flamsteed as the first “astronomical observator”, tasked with “perfecting the art of navigation”. Flamsteed’s specific objective was to devise a method by which sailors could establish their longitude (east–west position) at sea – which involved measuring the positions of celestial bodies – and of knowing the time at a ship’s local position. And Flamsteed would get to carry out this vital research from the surroundings of the country’s first state-funded, purpose-built scientific institution: the Royal Observatory. It was urgent work, because England’s great rival, France, had stolen a march: Louis XIV had established an observatory in Paris nearly a decade earlier. Flamsteed was, in effect, playing catch-up. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/T809MT-CMYKWeb-Ready-7606aa3.jpg" width="2663" height="1775" alt="an illustration showing a large crowd looking at several artefacts including a globe, a map, and a satellite dish" title="King Louis XIV visits the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1671. The creation of an observatory in the French capital had left England playing catch-up (Image by Alamy)" /> The size of the task facing the astronomer clearly wasn’t lost on Charles II, for the king appointed none other than the celebrated architect Christopher Wren to design the observatory. Wren’s chosen site was the hilltop ruins of Greenwich Castle – and it was here that the foundation stone was laid on 10 August 1675. With its lofty windows, royal portraits and accurate pendulum clocks, the octagonal ‘star chamber’, completed in 1676, was grand in appearance. Unfortunately, it was also unsuitable for mapping the stars, as it was 13.5° askew from the meridian, an imaginary north-south line connecting the poles. So Wren designed another building nearby. This one would last for the remainder of Flamsteed’s tenure, before being demolished, rebuilt and extended as the Meridian Observatory. As for Flamsteed, he went on to conceive Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), by which he produced an average (‘mean’) 24-hour day that could be tracked using a mechanical clock year round. And that would have ramifications across the planet. Read more | A brief history of astronomy Dressed for success 1767: How a man in a padded suit transformed the art of navigation No one could accuse Nevil Maskelyne of not being dedicated to his job. In the dead of night across the mid-1760s, the fifth Astronomer Royal could be found staring up at the sky for hour upon hour, while straining his ears to hear the beats of a nearby clock. Dressed in an extravagant padded suit made from wool, silk and linen, Maskelyne was prepared for all that a British winter could throw at him. Not even perishing temperatures could stand in the way of the task in hand: to devise a ‘lunar distance method’ to calculate longitude at sea. This technique required mariners to measure the angular distance between the moon and a specific star, then compare it to Greenwich time. And they all used data gleaned from Maskelyne’s meticulous study of the movement of the stars. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1767-L4962-001-CMYKWeb-Ready-30917ec.jpg" width="1709" height="1139" alt="Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne wore this wool, silk and linen suit to ward off the perishing cold while studying the stars (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" title="Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne wore this wool, silk and linen suit to ward off the perishing cold while studying the stars (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" /> This was, however, far from a one-man endeavour. Maskelyne was joined on his freezing vigils by his assistant, David Kinnebrook, and enlisted a network of mathematicians – dubbed ‘computers’ – to work remotely on calculating the predicted position of the moon over the year ahead. The Astronomer Royal even had a team of ‘comparers’ check the computers’ work (which paid off when two of them were found to be copying one another’s work). All this enabled Maskelyne to produce the Nautical Almanac, the first edition of which was made available on 6 January 1767. It quickly became an essential tool in navigation, reducing the time taken to make longitude calculations from hours to minutes. Updated annually, the Almanac became a required element of navigators’ training, and set the trend for mariners to calculate their position relative to Greenwich. High standards 1833: A curious metal sphere regulates clocks It can be seen from miles around – and with good reason. Sitting atop the Royal Observatory is a large red, metal ball that rises to the top of a mast at the same time every day, and drops a few minutes later. For those who haven’t set eyes on it before, it makes for a strange sight. But what is it there for? To answer that question, we need to rewind to 1764 when John Harrison, the celebrated English clockmaker, sent his fourth marine timekeeper, later known as ‘H4’, on a trial voyage to Barbados. The clock performed exceptionally well, losing a mere 39.2 seconds over 47 days at sea. To Harrison’s delight, it proved that such devices could provide mariners accurate reference times for calculating longitude. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/dreamstimexxl73355384-CMYKWeb-Ready-1ba1cb2.jpg" width="6567" height="4378" alt="A photograph of a large red brick building, with a domed roof on the right. There is a tower with a red ball on the top. Behind the building there is a purple and orange cloudy sunset" title="The time ball was installed on the turret of Flamsteed House at the Royal Observatory in 1833. It dropped at 1pm each day, enabling mariners to check their on-board chronometers (Image by Dreamstime)" /> Other clockmakers developed Harrison’s innovative ideas into a standard design that was cheaper and easier to reproduce. By the 1820s, the ‘marine chronometer’ was being used on both commercial and Royal Navy ships. But these chronometers only worked if they were telling the correct time when ships left port. That’s where the Greenwich ‘time ball’ came in. A time ball is a large spherical device that drops at a predetermined time of day, enabling mariners to set their clocks by it. The first modern example of this technology was erected in Portsmouth in 1829. Greenwich’s, however, would be the most famous. It was installed in 1833 on Flamsteed House, at the heart of the Observatory, providing maximum visibility from the Thames. Ever since, it has risen halfway up the mast at 12.55pm, climbed to the top at 12.58pm and then dropped at precisely 1pm GMT. Soon time balls were appearing at harbours and observatories around the globe, meaning that mariners could check their chronometers against accurate clocks, even during the longest of voyages. Timetable drama 1852: Greenwich rides to the railways' rescue Take a stroll down Corn Street in the heart of Bristol and you’ll come across a clock mounted to the wall of the city’s old corn exchange. There’s nothing unusual about that, you may think. But take a closer look and you’ll notice that this elegant 1820s timepiece has two hands for minutes: a red one for GMT and a black one for local Bristol time. The clock is a curious snapshot of a bygone age, and also a marker of a technological conundrum that the Royal Observatory played a central role in solving. The mid-19th century was very much the age of the railways – by the 1840s tracks were snaking across the country. This was all well and good. But when, in 1847, the railway companies decided to coordinate their timetables across Britain using GMT, they ran into a problem. Back then, Britain’s cities relied on local times set by sundials, varying by as much as 30 minutes between west and east. So how could the railway companies ensure that these times were perfectly aligned? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-170477153-CMYKWeb-Ready-b814769.jpg" width="2589" height="1726" alt="With its three hands, the clock on Bristol’s Corn Exchange offers a snapshot of an age when Britain’s cities relied on a variety of local times (Image by Getty Images)" title="With its three hands, the clock on Bristol’s Corn Exchange offers a snapshot of an age when Britain’s cities relied on a variety of local times (Image by Getty Images)" /> Enter George Biddell Airy, the seventh Astronomer Royal. Airy reasoned that a new technology – that of sending impulses via telegraph wires to a series of synchronised dials – could provide a solution. And so he ordered a new timepiece – the Shepherd Motor Clock – to be installed at the Royal Observatory. From 1852, the clock began sending daily time signals to railway stations across London and Kent, along with hourly signals to the Electric Telegraph Company on London’s Strand for national distribution. Train travel would never be the same again and, by 1880, GMT had been embraced as Britain’s legal Civil Time. Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period A moment in the sun 1874: Greenwich leads the race to record the transit of Venus For astronomers everywhere, 9 December 1874 was like Christmas come early. Star gazers counted down the days to this landmark date, while George Biddell Airy ordered expeditions to Egypt, New Zealand and the Indian Ocean to observe the amazing event unfolding overhead. That event was a transit of Venus, a rare astronomical phenomenon in which the planet appears to cross the Sun as a slow-moving black dot. This was the first time that the transit had occurred since 1769, and the first such event since the invention of photography in the 1820s. Little wonder astronomers were excited. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/T4323-001-CMYKWeb-Ready-44133fe.jpg" width="5686" height="3790" alt="An observation hut is set up in Greenwich ahead of the transit of Venus in 1874. This astronomical phenomenon enabled star-gazers to accurately calculate the Sun-Earth distance (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" title="An observation hut is set up in Greenwich ahead of the transit of Venus in 1874. This astronomical phenomenon enabled star-gazers to accurately calculate the Sun-Earth distance (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" /> And their excitement was justified. By timing the transit’s key moments as seen from different locations on Earth, star gazers can measure the Sun–Earth distance, known as the ‘astronomical unit’. This yardstick (just under 93 million miles) is still used by scientists today. Ahead of the 1874 transit, Airy ordered special telescopes known as photoheliographs to project the Sun’s disc onto glass plates. However, his teams struggled with the kit, and the photoheliographs failed to capture the transit with any great accuracy. Despite those issues, the transit of Venus inspired a renewed interest in sun studies. Greenwich assistant EW Maunder started to compile a daily record of sunspot observations. In 1904, Maunder and his wife, Annie, assembled 30 years of sunspot data into the ‘butterfly diagram’ that still underpins our understanding of the Sun’s 11-year magnetic cycle. A degree of certainty 1884: The world aligns itself to Greenwich John Flamsteed had been dead for more than a century. Yet, on 13 October 1884, his great brainchild, Greenwich Mean Time, truly went global. On that day, delegates at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC voted in favour of making Greenwich the world’s prime meridian, or 0° longitude. The decision was influenced by a combination of technological supremacy and pragmatism. Greenwich was one of only four observatories with a suitably accurate telescope – the Airy Transit Circle Telescope – to define a meridian. And more than 70 per cent of shipping companies by tonnage already relied on the Greenwich meridian. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2YXWWWX-CMYKWeb-Ready-602ff19.jpg" width="3242" height="2161" alt="Delegates at the 1884 International Meridian Conference agreed to use the Greenwich meridian as 0° longitude (Image by Alamy)" title="Delegates at the 1884 International Meridian Conference agreed to use the Greenwich meridian as 0° longitude (Image by Alamy)" /> The delegates also agreed that the Universal Day – a 24-hour period to be used as a common reference to record events around the world – should begin at midnight GMT on the Greenwich meridian. This would hardly have come as a surprise: a year earlier, railroads in the US had already agreed to use standard time zones based on hourly meridians from Greenwich. The delegates assembled in the American capital that October day voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Universal Day, and countries started to define their own standard time zones as hourly intervals before or after Greenwich. The result was the familiar time-zone system we use today. Seeing double 1893: The Royal Observatory makes its biggest statement yet Was Greenwich under threat? The International Meridian Conference of 1884 might have confirmed the Royal Observatory’s primacy in the world of astronomy. But, within a year, the eighth Astronomer Royal, William Christie, was voicing his concerns that the principal telescope at Greenwich was being overtaken by newer, better instruments at rival observatories across Europe and North America. Determined to keep Greenwich out in front of the chasing pack, Christie persuaded the Admiralty to fund a new instrument, and that 28-inch diameter lens telescope – still the largest of its type in Britain – came into use in 1893. Most other telescopes at Greenwich were designed to be fixed into position to ensure the accurate measurement of the stars for timekeeping and navigation. The Great Equatorial Telescope – named after its mount, which kept the instrument moving parallel to the Earth’s equator – was part of a new generation designed for astrophotography. With a clockwork drive that kept the instrument moving in sync with the stars from east to west, it could be used to take photos with very long exposures stretching to several hours, capturing impressive views of faint gas clouds (nebulae). However, astronomers struggled to configure the heavy glass lens for photography, and so the telescope was reassigned to the study of double stars. By measuring the changing angle between an orbiting pair of stars, the astronomers could now calculate the mass of these distant suns. All that came to an end in 1971 when the Great Equatorial Telescope was finally retired. However, you can still see this extraordinary instrument – housed in its distinctive onion-shaped dome – at Greenwich today. Read more | A brief history of daylight saving time Pip pip hooray 1924: GMT is piped into homes across Britain If we want to know the time in 2025, all we have to do is check the phone in our pocket, or glance at the digital watch on our wrists. Across most of the 20th century, of course, that wasn’t an option. If Britons sought an accurate time-check that they could, quite literally, set their clocks and watches by, then they had to turn on their radios and listen out for the familiar strains of the ‘six pips’. The six pips first entered the public consciousness on 5 February 1924, when the ninth Astronomer Royal, Frank Dyson (below), announced a collaboration with the BBC. The Royal Observatory would start sending electrical impulses down a telephone wire to the newly created broadcaster. These would then be converted into a series of six audio alerts – or ‘pips’ – that would go out on the radio on the hour, every hour. But while some technologies were underscoring Greenwich’s enduring relevance, others were undermining it. In the 1930s, scientists developed clocks based on the natural vibration of quartz crystals; then, a decade later, the first atomic timekeepers began to appear. Both offered reliability and accuracy that the system of measuring time by the stars couldn’t match. This wasn’t the only threat to the Royal Observatory’s pre-eminence in the 20th century. As the march of industry impacted visibility across London’s skies, so Greenwich’s suitability for the practice of astrophysics declined. Soon it became clear that the Observatory would have to move. And it did so twice – first to East Sussex in 1957; then to Cambridge in 1990. Eight years later, it shut altogether. Time had finally caught up with the great old scientific institution. But its huge contribution to the fields of astronomy, timekeeping and navigation cannot be doubted – as the many thousands of people who visit the Royal Observatory museum that now occupies the famous Greenwich complex will no doubt testify. John Flamsteed would surely be proud. Dr Louise Devoy is senior curator at the Royal Observatory and author of Royal Observatory Greenwich: A History in Objects (October, 2025) This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on the struggle of memory against forgetting | "Place names are signposts to the past"
"Place names are signposts to the past. And how revealing they are", writes Michael Wood
I was recently back in Devon. Long ago, on childhood holidays from the industrial north, this seemed to me the ‘real’ England. Still today, a rusting cast-iron signpost peeping through the foliage in a sunken lane gives me an inexplicable thrill. It’s the idea that the deep past might still be touched, just around the corner. Place names are signposts to the past. Chulmleigh, Woolfardisworthy, Nymet Rowland… what names! And how revealing they are. Take Ipplepen, a village with Roman and Iron Age roots in the hills near Torquay. A recent dig here turned up a small post-Roman cemetery, in use till the eighth century, and a Roman butchers shop, with coins and broken amphorae that once held olive oil, wine and fish sauce imported from the Mediterranean. The name Ipplepen was first recorded in the 10th century, and contains a personal name that appears to be Roman-British or Celtic: Epilus or Ipela. In a region where the Celtic (pre-Welsh) language may have died out only after 1066, the name of the pre-English landowner was, incredibly, passed down. Read more | The Romans were blamed for massacring these Iron Age warriors. But did they actually murder themselves? In the Home Counties, ancient British (or Welsh) place names are mainly gone – except for river names. Here they linger, from the Thames to smaller watercourses such as the wonderfully named Rib, Beane and Maran (or Mimram) in Hertfordshire. Sometimes English newcomers didn’t understand these words. Avon, of course, has the same derivation as afon, Welsh for river. Bredon Hill includes no fewer than three words with the same meaning: bre is Welsh and dun is Old English, both translating as ‘hill’. So: Hill-hill Hill! Some place names tell of events. You can track the first phase of Viking settlement in hybrid names such as Grimston, denoting an English settlement (or village) taken by Grim, a leading member of the Great Army that invaded Britain from 865. Then, with the second wave of migration, came the names ending in ‘by’, meaning farm – Grimsby, for example. Finally, there are the ‘thorp’ names, meaning homestead, as in Scunthorpe. These names were left by third-wave immigrants who were forced to open up poorer land on the fringes. Place names show how the dominant language takes over, in whichever way it happens. Across the world, the pattern was the same – especially in the age of imperialism. Think of the overlay of English names in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand or the US. There the indigenous inhabitants were wiped out or pushed into corners, yet place names associated with them still populate the landscape, from Alabama to Wyoming. Take Michigan, which is ‘big lake’ in the speech of the Ottawa tribe; or Mississippi, ‘Big River’ in Algonquin. From Malibu to the Napa Valley, telltale signposts remain, despite ethnic cleansing by European settlers and colonialists. In Ireland as recently as 2005, the Placenames Commission issued a list of 2,000 Gaelic equivalents to English place names. And, of course, people in power are still at it – witness Donald Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Read more | The real Viking Age: when did the era of Norse expansion start and end? A revealing example is told in Sacred Landscape (2002), a remarkable book by the Israeli writer, historian and political scientist Meron Benvenisti. His father was an Israeli geographer on the Government Names Commission tasked after 1948 with giving Palestinian villages and landscapes names linked to Israel’s biblical homeland. New Hebrew place names, resonating with the biblical story of the Holy Land, replaced the Arabic names of more than 9,000 natural features, villages and even ruins in the new Israel. Benvenisti’s story shows first-hand how place names were used to help change an earlier Arab landscape into the modern Israeli state. Of course, such things have happened throughout history. Centuries after the Moors were expelled from Spain, today’s tourists can still detect the contours of Muslim Spain, from the Alhambra to Granada’s Zacatín (clothes-sellers) Street – still a clothes market. Yet a Palestinian returning now to his ancestral landscape after seven decades away would often be hard pushed to identify the sites of his erstwhile home. The signposts are gone. The story Benvenisti tells is about a battle over the “signposts of memory” that are essential to all human beings. As the novelist Milan Kundera said, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Often slowly, imperceptibly, over time – but sometimes at a stroke – history is erased. But sometimes it still magically endures, even over millennia. People have long memories. Ask the folk in Ipplepen. This column was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Do The Travels of Marco Polo belong in the non-fiction section, or fantasy?
Marco Polo’s adventures in Asia in the 13th century earned him everlasting fame, with his very name now synonymous with the excitement of exploration. But are his accounts of his travels essentially works of fiction? Peter Jackson asks if we can trust this medieval travel-writing superstar
Life had taken a turn for the worse for Rustichello of Pisa. In the dying days of the 13th century, the Italian romance writer found himself locked up as a prisoner of war. Over the previous years, Rustichello had made something of a name for himself as the first author to pen an Arthurian romance in Italian. Yet he had got himself captured while fighting for his native city in the Genoese-Pisan War. And so here he was, denied his freedom, languishing in a Genoese jail. Yet if Rustichello was searching for some sort of salvation, he didn’t have to look far. It lay in the identity of the curious individual with whom he shared his cell. That man began telling Rustichello an extraordinary story. It was a tale of an epic journey to China – of encounters with unimaginably rich and powerful rulers, of strange and exotic lands, of brushes with creatures that would make your heart race and skin crawl. And it triggered in Rustichello an idea. The Italian writer soon saw the potential of turning the memoirs of his well-travelled cellmate into a book. And so he set about writing them up in the default language of medieval romance: Old French, but with a smattering of Italian. The result – The Travels of Marco Polo, or Le Divisament du Monde (‘The Diverse Parts of the World’), as it was originally known – was Rustichello’s crowning achievement. And it would turn his cellmate, Marco Polo, into one of the most famous figures of the entire Middle Ages. Can we trust The Travels of Marco Polo? Le Divisament transformed perceptions of the far east across medieval Europe, introducing generations of readers to a world that they could barely conceive of, let alone visit. But look beyond its remarkable impact, and how much credence should we give to the text that Rustichello committed to paper following his incarceration with Polo? How useful is the book in understanding life in Asia – especially China – in the Middle Ages? In short, can we really trust Marco Polo’s word? Read more | Why are Marco Polo's travels so famous? To answer this question, we first need to untangle what kind of book Le Divisament was, and what it aimed to do. At its heart is the tale of how – in the early 1270s, at the age of just 17 – Marco embarked on an extraordinary journey to China with two other Polos: his father, Niccolò, and his uncle Maffeo. The trio, so Le Divisament tells us, travelled to the far east at the end of a superlative period of imperial expansion triggered by the rise of the great Mongol leader Genghis Khan (c1162–1227). So formidable was Genghis as both a warlord and a conqueror that the empire he established would, at its peak, extend all the way from eastern Europe to the Sea of Japan. However, by the time Marco and his companions arrived on the scene, the Mongol empire had split into a number of virtually autonomous states – and the age of rapid expansion was all but over. Only to the east – in the dominion of Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan – were major wars of conquest being fought, notably when, in 1279, Kublai extinguished the rule of southern China’s indigenous Song dynasty emperors Sadly, the original text of Le Divisament, describing the world that greeted Marco and his companions on their arrival in China, is lost. But there’s enough consistency between the various manuscripts to indicate that what we’re reading is essentially the same book. However, this is not necessarily the book you might expect. For all that its English title talks of Polo’s travels, Le Divisament is emphatically not a travelogue. Rather, it is a description of the known world, based loosely around Marco’s experiences. As descriptions go, it’s often an unsatisfactory one. The text is rambling and discursive. It is also given to maddeningly artificial changes of direction, such as when it embarks on a description of the Black Sea, before – having recalled that Marco has already given an account of this – heading off abruptly in another direction. There are other irritations. Despite repeatedly promising to confine himself to describing lands he had seen – and to distinguish personal observation from hearsay – the book includes regions, such as the coast of east Africa, that it’s highly unlikely Marco ever visited. For the most part, there is little sense of an itinerary. And yet, despite these limitations, there are extraordinary details to be found. What do we learn about the Mongols in the book? Le Divisament states that, having arrived at the court of Kublai Khan, Marco swiftly made a favourable impression on the Mongol ruler, who recruited him into his service. The Great Khan apparently despatched Marco as his representative on missions within China – and, in a number of cases, around the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. The Venetian was often charged with securing exotica for Kublai’s collection, such as the alms-bowl of the Buddha, and drafting interesting reports on these journeys. Marco’s accounts of his interactions with the Great Khan are remarkable. Read more | What was life like under the Mongol empire? Yet arguably more astonishing to his contemporaries were his descriptions of the marvels he had witnessed on his travels. Some of these are undoubtedly in the tradition of the fantastic – take, for example, the giant bird called the ruc, which could drop elephants from a great height. Many others, however, use exaggeration – and explore the remarkable within nature – rather than employ pure fabrication. So we read of a king of Champa (the southern part of present-day Vietnam) who has 326 children, and of a giant ruby in the possession of the king of Ceylon, a jewel Marco allegedly saw at first hand. Marco also describes huge Chinese ships, and invites us to marvel at the enormous populations of Chinese cities – not to mention the vast number of islands to be found in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. The book sings the praises of a great island lying due east of China, named Cipingu, which abounds in gold and pearls. That island is now known as Japan – and Marco’s book was the earliest western source to mention it. Marco (or Rustichello) seems to take a positive pleasure in demolishing common misconceptions about the east back in western Europe. The mythical salamander is not a living creature but asbestos, an incombustible substance mined from earth. The corpses sold in India as dead pygmies are, in fact, dried monkeys. The unicorn is identified as a rhinoceros – not at all the kind of creature, the book assures us, that allows itself to be ensnared by virgins. Timeline: the life and travels of Marco Polo c1254 Marco Polo is born in Venice to a wealthy merchant. His mother dies when he is young and he is raised by extended family 1269 Marco’s father, Niccolò, and uncle Maffeo – both merchants – return to Venice after having visited the court of the Mongol leader Kublai Khan 1271 Niccolò, Maffeo and Marco set out on a new expedition. It’s believed that their journey east takes them through Iran, Afghanistan and on to China c1275 According to Marco’s account of his travels, the Polos arrive at Kublai Khan’s summer capital of Shangdu in modern-day north-eastern China c1275–c1292 In Marco’s words, he is appointed to serve as Kublai’s foreign emissary and spends the next 17 years travelling extensively across China c1292 The Polos escort a Mongol princess to Persia, visiting modern-day Vietnam and Sri Lanka en route. They eventually return to Venice c1298 Marco is captured by Venice’s enemies the Genoese. His cellmate in Genoa – an author called Rustichello – begins writing up (and embellishing) Marco’s memoirs c1300 Copies of Rustichello’s book The Travels of Marco Polo proliferate. It will help make Marco arguably the most celebrated explorer of the Middle Ages 8 January 1324 After living out the final years of his life in his native Venice, Marco Polo dies Did Marco Polo make up details in his Travels? So Marco witnessed some extraordinary sights on his travels – and he was all too happy to share them with his readership. Yet, to return to the question posed earlier: can we trust Marco’s word? When he lectured his fellow Europeans on the intricacies of life in the far east, how far was he dipping into the well of lived experience, and how much was make-believe? Certain details in the Le Divisament are undeniably questionable on historical grounds. Prominent among these is the claim that the Polos rendered invaluable assistance to Kublai’s forces in the capture of the city of Xiangyang. This is known to have occurred in 1273, a year or two prior to the Venetians’ arrival in China. In fact, Chinese sources give Muslim siege experts the credit for assisting Kublai’s assault on the city. This is not the only passage that stretches credulity. Niccolò and Maffeo had already travelled to China (in the early 1260s), and Le Divisament tells us that, during this first visit, they had been commissioned by Kublai to bring back to China 100 Christian missionaries together with some holy oil from Jerusalem. Read more | Your guide to the Silk Roads The book also claims that Pope Gregory X appointed the Polos as his ambassadors to the Mongol Ilkhan in Iran following a meeting in Acre. Both are great stories; neither is likely to be true. Many historians have also questioned the credibility of Marco’s co-author. Rustichello was known from his other writing to have been a habitual name-dropper – once claiming, for example, that the Lord Edward (the future Edward I of England) had lent him a book of Arthurian romance. Were Marco Polo's Travels believed at the time? Such scepticism has a long history. Le Divisament started making waves across western Europe from as early as the second decade of the 14th century – and it wasn’t long before rave reviews were being counter-balanced by the voicing of doubts. In particular, Marco’s contemporaries struggled with the contrast between the received image of the Mongols – a people customarily portrayed in 13th-century Europe as nomadic barbarians – and the book’s depiction of the wealth and impressive organisation of Kublai’s empire. In short, while Europeans could accept the existence of a sophisticated polity in the east, the idea it was presided over by the Mongols was far more difficult to swallow. Europeans were all too willing to lap up the fictional story of the Christian king Prester John, who, according to the traditional legend, ruled over a kingdom in the east. However, the version of Prester John’s life in Le Divisament – which described him as a minor prince overthrown, paradoxically, by Genghis Khan with the help of astrologers – was much less to their liking. What is the modern assessment of The Travels of Marco Polo? Modern critics are more troubled by what seem like glaring omissions from the Venetian’s text than his depiction of the Mongols. Marco’s failure to mention the Great Wall of China shouldn’t be held against him because, contrary to popular belief, the continuous structure that exists today had not yet been built. But it is more difficult to account for his silence regarding tea-drinking, the use of fingerprinting for authentication of documents, or the way Chinese women bound their feet. Other critics have pointed to the fact that, although Marco is at great pains to depict himself as a highly valued agent of the Great Khan, no reference to him has been found in Chinese sources. In the eyes of some modern academics, such omissions fundamentally undermine Marco’s entire story. One has even gone as far as to claim that he never made it further east than the Black Sea. Do I agree with this assessment? No. In my opinion, there is nothing intrinsically improbable about a Venetian finding employment in China under the Great Khan. Kublai is known to have recruited men of diverse talents to serve him. In fact, this seems to have been a trait of Mongol rulers: by 1289, the Ilkhans were employing Italians as envoys, interpreters and mercenaries. Marco’s maritime voyages on the Great Khan’s behalf fit easily within the burst of diplomatic activity that took Kublai’s representatives to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and peninsular India between 1278 and 1294. One explanation for the Polos’ absence from Chinese sources is that they would simply have been classed in the same category as all the many other foreign agents drawn from lands to the west of China. So numerous were these visitors that the Chinese had two terms for them: xiyu (‘westerners’) or semu (‘people of various nations’). What of the accusation that Marco grossly inflated the role he played in Kublai’s court and exaggerated his adventures? Even his most vigorous of defenders would have to concede that it’s highly likely that he did both. Yet he’d hardly be the first traveller to be guilty of such a ‘crime’. This doesn’t mean that he didn’t have any adventures at all. Read more | A knight's (tall) tale: why medieval traveller Sir John Mandeville was more popular than Marco Polo Maybe the best way to make any significant headway in the quest to determine the veracity of Marco’s writings is to locate documentary evidence to support his presence in the Mongol world. Unfortunately, this is in vanishingly short supply. Marco’s later life, in which he became a successful merchant, is comparatively well documented. But firm proof of his travels remains elusive. In fact, the nearest we get to documentary evidence is his uncle Maffeo’s will. This refers to “the three tablets of gold that were from the magnificent Chan of the Tartars”, a term that could mean either the Great Khan or one of his relatives. It is presumably one of these tablets that is mentioned in an inventory of Marco’s property drawn up decades after his death, during a dispute among his notoriously litigious kinsfolk. Why were Marco Polo's travels so significant? Ultimately, given the difficulties of the sources, and the doubts swirling around Marco’s account, perhaps we have to make an admission – that the most remarkable thing about the Polos’ travels is not so much that they happened, but when they happened. Their long journey to China fell several years before an Italian presence in Asia is even documented. It would be up to 30 years before the great age of Italian settlement in China’s coastal cities would get under way. That makes the Polos true pioneers. In the 13th century, Venetian and Genoese traders established footholds in Crimea and the chief camp-cities of Mongol princes in Iran and in the western steppes. Yet no one ventured nearly as far east as Marco and his two relatives. Is it any wonder, then, that generations of western Europeans read his accounts of his travels with slack-jawed wonder? As the 14th century went on, European voyages to China began to decline. Then, in 1368, a native Ming dynasty less ready to welcome foreign merchants kicked out the Mongol rulers from China. But the western imagination never lost sight of the image of a fabulously wealthy empire lying to the east. When Christopher Columbus embarked on his transatlantic journeys in the 1490s, which led to the ‘discovery’ of the New World, he was seeking an alternative route to ‘Cathay’. Before he boarded his ship on one of his famous voyages, Columbus packed an indispensable guide. It was a copy of Marco Polo’s book. Peter Jackson is emeritus professor of medieval history at Keele University. His books include The Mongols and the West (Routledge, 2018) This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The real Viking Age: when did the era of Norse expansion start and end?
When did the Viking Age begin and end, and why is it so difficult to define? Explore when and how the era of Scandinavian raiders shaped history in Europe, and beyond.
For a long time, the period after the fall of the Western Roman Empire was known as the Dark Ages. Supposedly, it was a time of cultural and economic decline, when the continent was splintered into numerous fiefdoms with warlords vying for control in the power vacuum that the Romans left behind. The term ‘Dark Ages’ has been rejected by a growing number of historians, but there is still much from this era that remains difficult to bring to the light. This includes a clear definition and timeframe for the Viking Age. Attracted by the wealth in other lands, especially fortunes held by relatively defenceless monastic communities, Scandinavian seafarers left their own shores to raid, trade and ultimately settle in these fertile – and more hospitable – territories. By preying on kingdoms across Europe, and then assimilating with them, the Vikings helped shape centuries of history, and their legacy echoed through the medieval period. Yet defining when the Viking Age began and ended, exactly, is a difficult task with no simple answers. When was the Viking Age? The dates most typically given for the start and end of the Viking Age are 8 June AD 793 and 25 September 1066 – bookended by the raid on Lindisfarne and the Norman Conquest. These dates mark nearly three centuries of continuous Viking influence across much of Northern Europe, and beyond. But they also represent a limited, Anglocentirc perception of the Viking Age and how it unfolded. As Viking expert Dr Eleanor Barraclough explained on the HistoryExtra podcast, these dates do not tell the whole story. Norse activity in Europe started sooner than AD 793 and continued well after the Norman Conquest of 1066. A wider-ranging interpretation is that the era of Viking influence might have begun in the eighth century and ended as late as the 15th. When did the Viking Age begin? Traditionally the event that was said to launch the Viking Age in Europe was the raid on Lindisfarne in AD 793. As recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Norse warriors plundered the wealthy monastery, off the coast of the kingdom of Northumbria, and slaughtered many of those they found inside. The raid on Lindisfarne shook the Christian world. This was not only a calamity for the church in England, but across Europe: the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin was serving in the court of Charlemagne at the time and so helped spread the news. But it also marked the beginning of an intensification in Viking attacks, establishing their reputation as notorious, bloodthirsty heathens willing to desecrate religious sites and plunder coastal settlements in their hunger for wealth and territorial expansion. Read more | Old Norse poetry: how the Vikings viewed the world However, Dr. Barraclough notes that the Lindisfarne raid was just the latest example – albeit a headline-grabbing one – in a broader trend. "It's a very useful date, but we have to be aware that it's quite an Anglocentric one," she explains. In fact, Viking activity had been developing well before AD 793. “We have to have dates to anchor ourselves,” argues Dr Barraclough, “but at the same time, we have to be aware that those dates are imperfect, and they don't necessarily reflect the reality on the ground.” Evidence of Scandinavian expansion has been found dating to nearly half a century earlier than AD 793, including ship burials from around AD 750 on the island of Saaremaa in modern-day Estonia. These reveal that Vikings from the area near Stockholm had attempted to engage in diplomatic and trading missions in Eastern Europe, only to meet a violent end. When did the Viking Age end, and why? The most commonly used end date for the Viking Age is 25 September 1066 with the death of Norwegian king Harald Hardrada – the ‘last great Viking’ at the battle of Stamford Bridge. On 25 September of that year, just weeks before the battle of Hastings, the invading forces of Norwegian king Harald Hardrada were defeated by Harold Godwinson, the Anglo-Saxon king of England. Hardrada’s death saw the end of large-scale Norse invasions of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which make the battle a fitting full stop on the Viking Age. Away from England, however, Viking activity continued across the continent. For instance, the islands of Orkney, off northern Scotland, remained a Norwegian colony until the 15th century. "You can take the Viking Age up to the 1400s if you're considering the Norse expansion into Greenland,” says Barraclough. Read more | A thousand years ago, the Vikings had a shock encounter with Native Americans that ended in disaster Elsewhere in Europe, a definable end date for the Viking Age becomes even harder to find. In the Slavic kingdoms are now part of Russia and Ukraine, Vikings settlers would become the Kievan Rus. Steadily, a distinct ‘Viking’ identity faded, giving way to a cultural melting pot of influences and assimilated peoples. Why the Viking Age might be longer than we think During the Viking Age, Norse populations occupied a vast geographical reach that spanned much of Europe, sandwiched between the extremities of North America and Eastern Eurasia. This could not be described as a single continuous territory, however. Instead, according to Dr Barraclough, it's critical to view the regions of Viking influence as "connected pockets" rather than a monolithic block. "There's a strong sense of shared identity within these pockets, but the character of Viking activity changed depending on where you were." In Britain and Ireland, Norse settlers left behind enduring legacies in cities like York and Dublin, while the Vikings in Normandy became the Northmen, or Normans. They integrated so thoroughly that the Norman Conquest of 1066 – which brought William the Conqueror to the throne of England – could be said to be partly a Viking invasion. On the eastern front, Scandinavian traders and warriors moved along the rivers of modern-day Russia and Ukraine, forging deep connections with the Slavic and Byzantine cultures. While in the North Atlantic, Viking ships sailed even further and established colonies in Iceland, Greenland and, briefly, in Vinland (now Newfoundland, Canada). The Vikings | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | Join Professor Ryan Lavelle for our four-week course on the Viking period, covering everything from trading and raiding, to daily life. Explore the course now
Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs traces the life and legacy of the Native American interpreter famed for her involvement with the Lewis and Clark Expedition
Sacagawea is remembered in US history as the Shoshone Native American woman who acted as interpreter to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the early 19th-century mission to chart territory in the American West after the Louisiana Purchase. But what impact did her contributions have on the success of this eventful journey? How did her presence influence interactions with the various Native American tribes the expedition party encountered? And how has her legacy been interpreted and commemorated in the years since? Speaking to Rebecca Franks, Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs delves into the life of Sacagawea – from what we know about her early years to what her story can reveal about broader cultural attitudes toward Indigenous people in American history.
How the compass became a political weapon
Jerry Brotton takes us on a journey through the unexpected history of the four cardinal directions
Why did early Islamic cartographers place south at the top of their maps? Who invented the magnetic compass? And why has 'the west' become an intensely political term, as well as a geographical one? Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Jerry Brotton answers the most intriguing questions on the history of the four cardinal points: north, east, south and west. Jerry Brotton is the author of The Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction (Allen Lane, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon Hear more from Jerry Brotton on the life and legacy of extraordinary cartographer Marie Tharp
“Like ancient Greece, India is one of the seedbeds of civilisation” | William Dalrymple on putting India back at the centre of global history
Danny Bird talks to historian William Dalrymple about why we need a greater understanding of how Indian ideas and culture have shaped global history – a story too often obscured by colonial narratives
Danny Bird: Your book, The Golden Road, addresses the influence of ancient India on the myriad cultures and civilisations of Eurasia. What was it that attracted you to this topic? William Dalrymple: When I first arrived in India, aged 18, I visited the early Buddhist sites at Sanchi and Ajanta [which were at their peak in the first and fifth centuries AD, respectively], and was astonished by them. They were so sophisticated, yet created at a time when in Britain – including Scotland, where I’m from – there were Picts scratching symbols, and an Anglo-Saxon putting up a wobbly church tower. During the same period in India, beautiful murals were being painted in cave temples, and profound philosophies developed. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time on archaeological excavations in Scotland and England. I always thought I’d be an archaeologist, dealing with early history. I’m now on the verge of turning 60, and I think my teenage self would be very surprised to find that I ended up spending most of my adult life writing about the 18th century. That 18-year-old would be very disappointed in the middle-aged version ‘selling out’ to modern history and writing about India, which in my teens was way beyond my horizon. In fact, this is a period about which I’ve written before in From the Holy Mountain, which is set in the same monastic milieu [as Ajanta and Sanchi], though from a Mediterranean vantage. But for the past 20 years I’ve been writing about the East India Company and the Mughals, so this is my first non-Mughal book after two decades of research in that area. It feels very nice to be writing and thinking about a different topic, although there’s also that slight anxiety when you’re dealing with something that you don’t know so well. Read more | “This was a corporation that could topple kings”: William Dalrymple on the East India Company What do you hope readers will gain from reading this book? I wanted to have a very broad, wide-angle focus spanning over 1,000 years. Each of my previous four or five books was a micro-history of a couple of years in a single Indian city. This is a very different book, stretching from 250 BC to AD 1200, over a whole continent. It looks at the way that Indian ideas spread: first, with Buddhism going up through Tibet and central Asia to China, and then Hinduism going to south-east Asia. Notably, the largest Hindu temple in the world is not in India but in Cambodia – Angkor Wat, a Vishnu temple built in the 12th century. When I was halfway through my work on this book, the Berenike Buddha was discovered on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. This extraordinary statue, sculpted around the second century AD, was discovered at an ancient port where Indian traders were landing, highlighting the reach of Indian influence. Today, everyone’s waking up to the fact that India was, for most of history, the richest country in the world. Turning to mathematical numerals and the concept of zero, these came out of India, first to the Arab world, then passed on from there to Europe via the Italian mathematician Fibonacci in the early 13th century. We know these figures today as Arab numerals because we got them from the Arabs, but the Arabs got them from the Indians. Read more | Digital revolution: the evolution of Hindu-Arabic numerals My book makes the point that India is like ancient Greece, in that it’s one of the seedbeds of civilisation – but it has been totally eradicated from our consciousness and our education systems. This is surely a lingering legacy of colonialism and, more specifically, Victorian Indology, which undermined, misrepresented and devalued Indian history, culture, science and knowledge from the period when Thomas Babington Macaulay confidently proclaimed that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”. If India were acknowledged to already have been a powerful, cosmopolitan and profoundly sophisticated civilisation, then what justification would there be for Victorian Britain’s civilising mission? How would you set out to bring civilisation to a part of the world that you recognised has been supremely civilised for thousands of years and which indeed was spreading its influence all over Asia long before the coming of Christianity? What is the ‘Golden Road’ of your book’s title? It’s an idea that is deliberately pitched in contrast with the concept of the Silk Road. My book argues that almost all intercontinental activity and trade during this period occurred by sea, with much less over land. This was primarily because of the hostile land borders separating the Roman world from Persia. One of the fortunate aspects of geography for India was the monsoon winds. These are predictable and regular, reversing directions every six months: they blow cold from the Tibetan Plateau in winter and warm from the south-west in summer. Once the monsoon winds were understood, sailors could travel efficiently from regions such as Kerala, Gujarat and the coast of Sindh to the Red Sea coast of Egypt or the Persian Gulf. Similarly, it was easy to sail across the Bay of Bengal to Thailand, Laos, the Mekong Delta, Cambodia and beyond to China. The ‘Golden Road’ refers to a trade route, mentioned by Strabo and Pliny the Elder around the time of the early Roman empire, that exported luxuries from southern India. Pliny disapproved of the expensive luxuries flowing into Rome at great cost, remarking that India was “the sink of the world’s precious metals”. This lucrative trade route brought significant amounts of Roman gold to India in the early centuries AD. Conversely, my colleague at All Souls College in Oxford, Andrew Wilson, who specialises in the history of the Roman economy, has estimated that possibly as much as one-third of the entire Roman military budget was powered by the customs take on the Red Sea ports. However, events such as the Justinianic Plague [from around AD 541] and raids by nomads such as the Blemmyes on southern Egypt led to the decline of this trade by the seventh century. This had consequences including curbing the arrival of garnets – which were popular in places like the Merovingian kingdoms and Anglo-Saxon England, where they were found at Sutton Hoo – from Rajasthan and Sri Lanka, signalling the end of this trade. You introduce the notion of an ‘Indosphere’. How did ancient India influence the lands and cultures beyond its territory? In India, the decline of its trade with Rome led to a crisis in gold supply. Although India had gold reserves, they hadn’t been fully discovered in the early centuries AD. As a result, Indian traders set off to Suvarnabhumi [a general term for south-east Asia], the ‘Lands of Gold’. This shift led to civilisational transformation in the region. Before that time, south-east Asia had no writing system. Suddenly, everyone there started using the Brahmi script, particularly the Tamil forms. Hinduism and Buddhism took root and produced even more dramatic monuments in that region than in India. The Khmer empire, with its million-strong urban population centred around Angkor Wat, produced the world’s largest Hindu temple. The most sophisticated Buddhist monument was built at in Java. Hindu forms of kingship and literature spread through out the region, and reminders of this influence endure to this day. The name of Thailand’s old capital, Ayutthaya, came from Rama’s kingdom in the Hindu epic Ramayana, for example. And Indonesia’s national airline is named Garuda, after Vishnu’s mount. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/marble-Buddha-body-found-in-2018-and-head-in-2022-d0b59ec-e1731335783128.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The marble Berenike Buddha, carved around the second century and unearthed in Egypt, is the first Buddha statue found west of Afghanistan (Photo by E Sidebotham and S Poplawski)" title="The marble Berenike Buddha, carved around the second century and unearthed in Egypt, is the first Buddha statue found west of Afghanistan (Photo by E Sidebotham and S Poplawski)" /> The mythical battle of Kurukshetra, fought just north of Delhi, is depicted at Angkor Wat, along with images of Krishna cavorting with consorts and devotees in Mathura [that god’s traditional birthplace]. These ideas, originating from specific areas of India, were sculpted on a vast scale thousands of miles away. This was a fascinating moment in history, when south-east Asia became an extension of the Indian holy land. Even more dramatically, Indian ideas conquered China. In the 660s AD, Wu Zetian took power, becoming the only ‘female emperor’ in Chinese history. This was viewed as a dark period by the patriarchal Confucians. To bolster her power, Empress Wu imported Indian monks who proclaimed her to be the Bodhisattva Maitreya – the long-foretold future Buddha – giving her a divine right to rule, and Buddhism, an Indian faith, became the state religion of China for a time. That did not last, but it brought a massive wave of Indian ideas: literature, cosmology, mathematics and more. Though Chinese civilisation eventually rolled back some of these influences, Buddhism remained a significant presence. To this day, China has more Buddhists than any other country. Who are some of the other figures that you highlight? There’s a motley crew of murderous empresses, Buddhist wizards and tantric magicians. One of the first figures in the book is Saint Thomas – an unexpected presence. According to legend, he travelled the spice route between Berenike and Muziris [on India’s Malabar Coast], arriving in India as part of the Jewish merchant diaspora. He converted Brahmins (the priestly caste), built seven churches and was reputedly martyred in Mylapore [now part of Chennai] in AD 72. Though the legend is recorded in the Acts of Thomas, written around the turn of the third century, early conversion to Christianity in Kerala is documented from the second century, with Indian Christians seeking bishops, patriarchs and relics from Alexandria. One of my favourite figures is Vajrabodhi, a tantric wizard from the Pallava dynasty of Tamil south India – akin to a Buddhist Merlin. In the early eighth century, during a period when Buddhism was competing with Hinduism, Vajrabodhi – with his magical powers and Vajra staff, like a kind of magic wand – was sent on a diplomatic mission to Tang China. Detailed hagiographies describe his journey to Sri Lanka, a centre of tantric Buddhism, and his possible role in the construction of Borobudur, a monumental Buddhist site designed as a spiritual ‘power generator’ reflecting the void and nothingness central to tantric Buddhism. Another notable individual is the wandering Buddhist monk Xuanzang. He realised that the texts in his monasteries were corrupted and missing advanced tantric and Mahayana Buddhist scriptures, which were unavailable in China. Despite a travel ban imposed by Tang authorities, Xuanzang secretly went to India. There he spent 10 years at Nalanda, a renowned monastery equivalent to the Library of Alexandria with an exceptional educational institution, where he copied many manuscripts. Though some were lost on his return journey in a mishap while crossing the Indus river, he brought back enough to fill the Great Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an, which still stands today. Xuanzang’s generation faced prejudice against Indian learning, which was dismissed as ‘barbarian’ by the Confucian and Taoist elite. Buddhism in China peaked under Empress Wu, who was a spiritual follower of Xuanzang. She entered the imperial harem as the fifth concubine at the age of about 15, around the time Xuanzang returned from India, and the two became allies. Recognising her influence, Xuanzang regarded Wu as a key figure in advancing the Buddhist cause. Thus there was a growing awareness in China of India’s sophistication, driven largely by Buddhists who comprised one of several competing factions at court. How was ancient India’s cultural influence spread? Indian nationalism often promotes the idea of a ‘Greater India’, a concept popular with the current regime. This narrative suggests that the spread of Indian epics and gods throughout south-east Asia was the result of the actions of imperial warriors – an idea that gained traction in the 1930s with the Greater India Society. However, this notion seems unfounded. The spread of Indian culture was more likely driven by merchants and the appeal of Indian ideas, in much the same way as Hellenistic ideas spread to ancient Rome. Indian concepts in mathematics; architectural manuals such as the Shilpa Shastras; and jyotisa – a Sanskrit word encompassing both astronomy and astrology – spread widely. This happened not through conquest but via trade and the movements of Brahmins, who, despite legal restrictions, travelled across the Bay of Bengal. They brought with them ideas of Indian kingship and governance, influencing regions such as the Mekong Delta, Thailand and the Malay Peninsula. You’ve mentioned colonialism already, but are there any other reasons why ancient India’s impact on the history of human civilisation has been overlooked? I do think that the number one reason is colonialism. Britain went to India, conquered it and dismissed it as a barbaric civilisation. And the attitude I mentioned earlier – reflected in Macaulay’s disregard for India’s cultural sophistication – lingered. But in addition, history itself has been split up. The spread of Buddhism, Sanskrit and Arab numerals are treated as separate stories by different academics and museums. China, on the other hand, has done a better job of advancing its version of history, especially the romantic idea of the Silk Road. Read more | The chaotic conquest of India In my view, the Silk Road as an east–west phenomenon didn’t really exist until the Mongols punched an enormous hole through Eurasia, connecting the Mediterranean to the sea off China. This then enabled the likes of Marco Polo to travel with a single passport. Before that, trade was more of a relay, with goods gradually moving from one merchant to the next, sometimes taking 100 years to reach places such as Rome or Antioch from China. The idea of a single, ancient road connecting east and west simply wasn’t based in fact. India, as shown by a new map of the distribution of Roman coin hoards just published by Professor Wilson, was the primary long-distance trading partner of the Roman empire. Rome had only an extremely vague under standing of the location of China. This changed in the 13th century when the Mongols created a hostile border with India, effectively snapping the Golden Road. Then, as Persian intellectuals fled the Mongols and settled in Delhi from around the 13th century onwards, the cultural landscape of India shifted from a Sanskrit-speaking world to a Persianate one. India is on track to become a 21st-century superpower. Is this region predisposed to be a geopolitical and cultural powerhouse? Yes. It’s a great civilisation, with several unique traits. China was largely a single political unit throughout most of its history, though there were periods like the Warring States [c475–221 BC] when it fragmented. India, by contrast, experienced brief moments of unity under the Guptas, Mauryas and Mughals, but mostly remained a cultural unit divided into many small political fragments. When Xuanzang arrived in India, he described it as a region of 70 states bounded by the ocean and the Himalayas. India doesn’t share China’s history of centralisation but has always had a strong sense of itself as a civilisation, a geographical unit and a spiritual centre, as evident in its earliest literature. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/J47ND1web-7dbd217-e1731335656408.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A painting of the monk Xuanzang, who went to India to copy Buddhist texts. Such travellers returning to medieval China increased awareness of India’s sophistication (Photo by The History Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A painting of the monk Xuanzang, who went to India to copy Buddhist texts. Such travellers returning to medieval China increased awareness of India’s sophistication (Photo by The History Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> India, like Greece, has always been one of the places where humanity’s fundamental questions have been addressed: what are we doing here? Why are we here? How should we live? How do we count? How do we pray? What’s the point of life? Over half of the world’s population today lives in countries that were influenced by Indian religion and philosophy, including China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia and Siberia. Despite this, the European perspective on civilisation overwhelmingly focuses on ancient Greece, overlooking India’s contributions. As far as we do know about India, we tend to know about the Mughals or the British in India. We don’t learn in our schools about the civilisations of ancient India. This book aims to correct that omission, placing India back at the centre of global history. India has almost always been one of the world’s richest areas, alternating with China as the wealthiest. By the end of this century, India is expected to be one of the three largest economies, alongside the US and China. And it’s time we learned this stuff. We need to know this stuff. It’s a whole chapter of high civilisation that colonialism removed from the curriculum – and it’s time to put it back. William Dalrymple is a historian, broadcaster, writer and cultural critic. He is currently a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury, 2024) This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine