VIKINGS PEOPLE

Vikings people has been selected by Roberto Amati in relation to the real history of european integration, then enlisted in the EUROPEAN PEOPLE category, accompanied by own fact SHEET useful to the comprehension, completed of historical MAPS AND IMAGES or with a direct linking to the related Blog contents dedicated to the entire history of european integration and the future of Europe.

The international name for the Vikings people is a german term wîkan meaning a nautical usage of distance of Old Norse peoples for sea mile. Their common identity was rather expressed through the geographical and linguistic Old Norse terms Norðrlǫnd of "northern lands" inhabitants (Nordmenn) usually applied for early Norwegians, similar to the term norrœnir menn (northern men). So the norsemen people were known as Ashmen by the Germans while Slavs, Finns, and Byzantines knew them as the Rus' (or Rhōs), a name probably related to rowing.

Vikings were seafaring people originally from Scandinavia and Norsemen is a target applied to pagan pre-modern peoples by the other european peoples that met them from the VIII century A.D., when they started voyaging to raid, pirate and settle throughout parts of Europe as far as the Mediterranean coasts, Iceland and Greenland isles and Vinland area (in Canada). Among the early North Germans peoples, kinship ties played an important role in the social organization divided into three classes (chieftains, free men and slaves): aristocracy was distingued for wealthy and owned large estates with huge longhouses, horses and slaves, usually buried with them and their most prized possessions, and for the Jarl title that usually was owned by Norway kings men. Their dna was similar to the Alpines, the Nordics, the ancient Celts and in general the Mesolithic people.

The thunder god Thor was popular with the Norsemen peoples, related to Odin ruler of Ashgard according to their cosmology and chief god in the North Germanic pantheon to whom were associated Runes and the magic riths, typical of the pagan Viking Age such as the fast ships "knarr" or "drakkar", farming, land and cattle breeding, the wooden coloured houses built along the Norwegian sea coasts and the fjords valleys. Though the Vikings economy was primarily based on basilar agriculture and trade, aside a warrior culture similar to related Germans and ancient Celts made of blitz and raping, plundering and fires, slaving and exploitation of the villages submitted.

Terrific warriors, expert sailors and navigators of their characteristic longships, Vikings established settlements and governments in the British Isles (Shetlands, Orkneys, Hebrides, Man), the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Yorksrhire and Normandy, as well as along the Dnieper and the Volga trade routes across modern-day Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, where they had been also known as Varangians. At one point, a group of Rus' Vikings went so far south that, after briefly being bodyguards for the Byzantine emperors, they attacked their capital Constantinople and after that received the establishment of their first Principade in Kiev (founded by vikings people) under the Ortodox Church hegemony.

The history of european integration was deeply signed by Vikings, both at the time they were terrible enemies to fight and repel and when they entered the political system of Western Europe in early Middle Age in England and France as well as in Sicily and South Italy where they founded the first indipendent kingdom with capital in Palermo, participating to the christian Crusades and sharing the leading power with the others european genealogies. Nowadays the biggest vikings communities are present in the nordic countries and among the scandinavians linving in USA after the great migration of the XX century A.D..

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