Kievan Rus'

Harold was forced to leave the island, bound for lands where Norsemen could find new purpose beyond the sea.

He fled east into the realm of Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise in Kievan Rus, a state that itself was a product of Viking settlers trading along rivers that ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

It gave Harold his first taste of continental warfare and the complex politics of an empire that balanced pagan and Christian pressures.

After about two years with Yaroslav's army, the Norse mercenary was lured further still by tales of wealth and power in Constantinople, where in ten thirty-four or so he joined a band of Vikings who would become the elite Varangian Guard for the Byzantine emperors.

The turning point arrived when Magnus the Good died in ten forty-seven.

Harold was left as sole king of Norway, and for the first time he could marshal his own court without interference from other monarchs.

He pushed north and east, suppressing internal opposition, instituting coinage, and promoting trade routes that had once brought him back to Kievan Rus.

Despite his success in consolidating Norway, Harold still longed for a larger empire.

Harold Hardrada was a king who spent more time as a mercenary than in the royal court.

He served under Kievan Rus and even became commander of Byzantium's Varangian Guard.

Through those campaigns, he accumulated wealth and a reputation that would make him one of the last great Viking warriors.

After returning to Norway, he set himself up as king in ten forty-six.

They traveled as far apart as the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America.

The Vikings had a profound impact on the early medieval history of many of the places they went, including Scandinavia, the British Isles, France, and Kievan Rus, a state which encompassed East Slavic, Norse, and Finnic peoples, and covered parts of modern Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

This was the Viking Age.

The Vikings were expert sailors and navigators and dominated the waterways of Europe.

Birka was abandoned around 975 when Sigtuna, a Christian town, was founded just 35 kilometers to the northeast of the island city.

Other important Viking trading ports included Hedeby, a village in modern-day Denmark on the Jutland Peninsula, and Kaupang, meaning marketplace, which was the first market town in Norway near modern Oslo.

There were also thriving Viking trading bases outside of Scandinavia, such as Jorvik, modern-day York in England, Staraya Ladoga on the Volkhov River around 100 miles from modern St. Petersburg, and Novgorod, the old capital of Kievan Rus.

The Viking trading network, which spread across the waterways of Europe and beyond, was even vaster than the raiding one for which the Vikings were to be better known.

On the other hand, we see that Russia itself has its heartland in Ukraine.

In fact, it was the Kievan Rus who basically formed the core of Russian Orthodox religion and the Russian identity.

over the centuries.

So it's like saying, well, we're going to create a new multiple countries in the United States, and we're going to carve out, for example, Virginia and Washington and say that that's not part of the United States, when if you look at it historically, those are areas which are culturally and psychologically the core of the United States.