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Viking: North America
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In addition to their role as invaders of settled, Christian lands, numerous bands of Viking adventurers reached Iceland in the mid-9th century, and by 900 their new home had become a center for settlement by Norwegians and Danes. Iceland was a launching point for expeditions and ventures farther out into the North Atlantic. Around 982 Erik the Red led an expedition from Iceland which settled in Greenland. His son Leif Eriksson later landed on North America, which he called Vinland, or Wineland, because of the large numbers of grapes that he and his men found. Archaeological work indicates that the original Vinland settlement was probably at what is now L’Anse aux Meadows in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Literary and archaeological evidence supports the existence of colonies in North America, supplied and populated for several generations before distance and climate proved too much.
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The word Viking comes from the Old Norse word "vikingr", lit. "one who came from the fjords", from "vik", meaning a bay, creek, fjord or inlet. By the end of the Viking period, the term both referred to pirates of robbers operating by sea, known as "vikingr" in West Norse, and was used as a term for sea-born warfare and harrying in the West Norse "viking." These names were common mainly in Scandinavia itself... and many other terms were used in the wider world. These included heatens, northmen, the people from the north, the Danes, rus, or the "foreigners." These terms, however, were used for the Viking peoples as a whole, and thus never accounted for the variation between those that originated from different areas of Scandinavia.[4]
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The motives for the Viking raids are not stated in any explicit or authoritative text. The wealth of the south, long known from trade and travel, was an obvious attraction. By the 8th or 9th centuries population growth was taxing Scandinavia’s limited resources for food, unclaimed land, and opportunities for social mobility and internal migration. Additionally, it is possible that the brutal wars conducted by Carolingian ruler Charlemagne against the Saxons in Germany in the 8th century may have warned the Northmen of a powerful enemy to the south.
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Viking sailors explored much of the North Atlantic Ocean. Their ships carried settlers to Iceland and Greenland. Viking explorer, Leif Ericson, landed in North America about 500 years before Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Vikings established at least one settlement in North America, but it lasted only a few years.
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In the Islamic south, the first navy of the Emirate was built after the humiliating Viking ascent of the Guadalquivir in 844 when they sacked Seville. Nevertheless, in 859, Danish pirates sailed through Gibraltar and raided the little Moroccan state of Nakur. The king's harem had to be ransomed back by the emir of Cordoba. These and other raids prompted a shipbuilding program at the dockyards of Seville. The Andalusian navy was thenceforth employed to patrol the Iberian coastline under the caliphs Abd al-Rahman III (912 – 61) and Al-Hakam II (961 – 76). By the next century, piracy from North Africans superseded Viking raids.
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The first European to land in America was Leif Ericson, a Viking seaman from Greenland (see Ericson). The ancient sagas give different accounts of this voyage made in the year 1000. Leif landed on a forested shore, which he called Vinland. He did not realize he had found a new continent, and Europe heard nothing of his discovery.
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