The Year 1000

I’ve written a lot about the year 1000. The Far Traveler charts the voyages of a Viking woman to North America (and later, to Rome) around the year 1000. The Abacus and the Cross profiles the pope in the year 1000, Gerbert d'Aurillac, the leading mathematician and astronomer of his day. My latest book, The Real Valkyrie, tells the story of a woman warrior who died a little before 970, and whose adventurous lifestyle would have been less likely after the North was Christianized in the year 1000.

In The Year 1000, Valerie Hansen, a professor of history at Yale, covers all that in her first 100 pages. She then proceeds to open up a medieval world I had no idea existed.

What was the "Viking Age" like in Sri Lanka? Who was the world's richest man? (Hint: He lived in Africa.) Who were the "far travelers" of the Pacific? What was the "most globalized place on earth"? (China.)

For me, Chapter Three on "The Pan-American Highways of 1000" was the most exciting. It begins, "In the year 1000, the largest city in the Americas was probably the Maya settlement of Chichen Itza, with an estimated population of some 40,000."

That's about the estimated population of the entire country of Iceland at the same time. Just think if we had as many stories about the people of Chichen Itza, in modern-day Mexico, as we have about the Icelanders.

Some 40 Sagas of Icelanders exist, written down on parchment in Old Norse in the 1200s or later. These sagas provide much of what we know about daily life in the Viking Age. They also chronicle the Vikings' travels from the Scandinavian homelands east through modern-day Russia and Ukraine to Istanbul and maybe even Baghdad, and west into the Gulf of St Lawrence and possibly much farther,

What the Maya left behind were pyramids and ball courts and temples, decorated with wall paintings depicting Maya conquests. And it's here that Hansen's history made my eyes pop. She writes:

"Across a doorway in the Temple of Warriors is a truly unusual painting. Although it's on the same wall that shows the conquest of a village, it depicts people totally unlike the warriors in other murals because they are so lifelike.

"With yellow hair, light eyes, and whitish skin, one victim has his arms tied behind his back. A second has beads woven into his blond hair, as is common for captives in other Maya paintings (both are shown in the color plates). Yet another, also with beads in his hair, floats naked in the water as a menacing fish, mouth open, hovers nearby. The artist has used Maya blue, a pigment that combines indigo with palygorskite clay, for the water. These unfortunate prisoners of war have all been thrown into the water to drown.

"Who were these light-skinned, blond-haired victims?

"Could they have been Norsemen captured by the Maya?"

Scholars have debated that identification since the paintings were discovered in the 1920s. Currently, the answer is tipping toward "yes," even though no verified Scandinavian artifacts have been found in Mexico or, indeed, anywhere else in North America south of Newfoundland.

Notes Hansen, "This isn't as serious an objection as you might think; the archaeological record is far from complete."

At L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, a Viking-style bronze pin clearly identified the site. Lacking a similar "diagnostic artifact," scholars will continue to debate how far the Vikings penetrated the Americas. But for now, Hansen says, "we have to conclude that the Vikings could have arrived in the Yucatan."

They had the means: When the replica Viking ship Gaia sailed down the American east coast in 1991, it made it all the way past the mouth of the Amazon to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

And there is, indeed, a story in the Icelandic sagas about a voyage to what might be Mexico, according to the 1999 research of Icelandic historian Þórunn Valdimarsdóttir, which she recently posted in English here: http://thorvald.is/. It is further discussed by Alex Harvey of the University of York here: https://theposthole.org/read/article/486.

In Eyrbyggja Saga, the famous Bjorn the Breidavik-Champion sails west from Iceland to avoid a feud and is not heard from again until, many years later, another Viking ship sailing west is blown off course, coming to land in an unknown country. There, the Vikings are captured, bound, brought before a council, and doomed to death or slavery.

They are saved by a grand old man, to whom the locals defer, who speaks to them in Norse. Before sending them back out to sea, he singles out the Icelanders in their crew and asks for news. He refuses to give his name, but sends home with them a sword and a ring for a boy and his mother in Iceland.

He tells them not to let anyone try to find him, for (in the translation of Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards), "This is a big country and the harbors are few and far between. Strangers can expect plenty of trouble here unless they happen to be as lucky as you."

Trouble, perhaps, like that experienced by the blond and blue-eyed men depicted on the wall of the Temple of Warriors in Chichen Itza: bound, decorated with beads, and drowned.

The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World--and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen was published in 2020 by Scribner. Be sure to take a look at those color plates. (Or see http://valerie-hansen.com for some examples.)

For more on my latest book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

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