Ebook: Byzantium and the Viking World

Byzantium needed the military service of foreigners as much as the Scandinavians needed the empire as a foil for constructing their own cultural identity. 'Byzantium and the Viking World' brings together scholars from the very different worlds of Byzantine and Scandinavian studies, and from the different academic disciplines of archaeology, history and literature. They offer a snapshot of recent findings on the material evidence and the reasons for contacts between Byzantium and the Viking world, and on Byzantium's image in the Old Norse sagas and Rus chronicles, while presenting new interpretative models of cultural transfer between these worlds.