Mercia. Devon and Cornwall were still independent British kingdoms. By 900 there was only one English kingdom left, that of the West Saxons, whose kings were already calling themselves 'kings of the English' and starting to 'liberate' the rest of Britain. Liberation was not welcomed by all; some enemies of the West Saxons, such as the Northumbrians, or the Britons of Devon and Cornwall, could see the Vikings as useful allies. But it is difficult to imagine how England could have emerged by the late tenth century as a wealthy, powerful, and united kingdom had not the Vikings destroyed all native dynasties except that of the West Saxons. The English nation was, in a sense, created by the Vikings, with the help of the West Saxon propagandists.
Our contemporary written sources deal almost exclusively with the literate world of western Europe. But thanks to later traditions, to reports by Arab travellers, and to archaeology we can see how much larger the Viking world was. Vikings travelled from the Scottish Isles north-west to Iceland. They first landed there, by accident, in around 870, and colonization of this empty and inhospitable land began almost immediately, with settlers coming from Ireland (not just Vikings, but Irish too, as slaves or as wives), from Scotland, and from Norway. Further expansion westwards, to Greenland and Newfoundland, took place in the following century and a half. More significant in the long run was the movement east, primarily from Sweden, to found trading-places all round the Baltic and deep within Russia. Thanks to the writings of the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenites we know about one of the trade routes; he describes how the Rus traders from Novgorod and elsewhere gathered at Kiev, and then travelled down the Dnieper to the Black Sea and thence to Constantinople. In 860 and on other occasions these fleets decided to attack Constantinople rather than trade with it, but to little effect. Arab traders met these Rus also, and leave us in little doubt that they were Scandinavians. Sometime in the late ninth century Rurik led some of these Rus to take Kiev and found a princedom which, a century later, was the most powerful in Russia. Rune-stones in Sweden record the deaths
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