Vikings Influence

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The Vikings were a very influential culture, their influence stretching across the Atlantic Ocean due to their constant travelling and exploring. A lot of their influence was on one of the countries they spent years extorting, England. The very first recorded viking raid was on January 6, 793 on the monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, off the east coast of England. However it is unclear about what first started these raids. Some historians suggest maybe it was due to the Medieval Warm Period.(MWP) A period of history between 950 AD - 1250 A.D. in which the climate in the North gradually warmed. This would have allowed the people in the north regions to be able to have longer and better growing seasons which would in return cause a population …show more content…
A motive for their expansion may have been to acquire wives. Instead of bringing the females back to Scandanavia, they settled elsewhere. The males buried in a cemetery on the Isle of Man had mainly names of Norse origin, while the females there had names of indigenous origin. Irish and British women are mentioned in old texts on the founding of Iceland, indicating that the Viking explorers were accompanied there by women from the British Isles . Genetic studies of the population in the Western Isles and Isle of Skye also show that Viking settlements were established mainly by male Vikings who mated with women from those places. Whatever the reason for the expansion, the Vikings chaos and destruction led to the establishment of Normandy, after this they set out to conquer England, and later southern Italy and Sicily. They also went eastward and settled the first russian state centered around Kiev and later the Byzantine empire. The Byzantine empire brought Christianity, architecture and the Cyrillic alphabet. All of this is elements of the russian culture. To the west, they founded a state in Iceland, continued across the Atlantic and discovered Greenland and North America. Although these settlements did not

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