s was now being forgotten. It was only in upland Russia and in the
farthest North that the Norsemen sensibly enlarged the Western world to
east or north-east, as they did through their Iceland settlements on the
north-west.

On the south and south-west no Vikings or Royalist followers of Vikings,
like Sigurd the Crusader, sailed the seas beyond Norva's Sound and
Serkland,[19] and as pilgrims, traders, travellers, and conquerors in
the Mediterranean, their work was of course not one of exploration. They
bore a foremost share in breaking down the Moslem incubus on southern
Europe; they visited the Holy sites

"When sacred Hierosolyma they'd relieved
And fed their eyes on Jordan's holy flood
Which the dear body of Lord God had laved";[20]

they fought as Varangian body-guards in the armies of the great
Byzantines, Nikephoros Phokas, John Tzimiskes, Basil II. or Maniakes;
but in all this they discovered for themselves rather than for Europe.

[Footnote 19: Unless White Man's Land and Great Ireland are the
Canaries. See above, p. 63.]

[Footnote 20: Camoens, _Lusiads_, (Barton's trans.).]

But Russia, that is, Old Russia round Novgorod and Kiev, the White Sea,
the North Cape and Finland coasts, as well as the more outlying parts of
Scotland and Ireland, were first clearly known to Europe through the
Northmen. The same race did much to open up the modern Lithuania and
Prussia, and the conversion of the whole of Scandinavia, mother country
and colonies alike, in the tenth and eleventh centuries added our
Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, with all the Viking settlements, to the
civilised world and church of Rome.

First, on the eastern side, it was in 862 that the Russians invited help
from their less dreaded neighbours around Upsala against their more
vexatious neighbours around Kiev, and in September of the same year
Ruric arrived at Novgorod and founded the Mediaeval Kingdom of Russia,
which in the tenth century under Oleg, Igor, and Vladimir was first the
plunderer, then the open enemy, and finally the ally in faith and in
arms of the Byzantine Empire.

All through this time and afterwards, till the time of the Tartar
deluge, the intercourse of Swedes, Danes, and Northmen with Gardariki
was constant and close, and not least in the time of the Vinland
voyages, when Vladimir and Jaroslav reigned at Novgorod, and the two
Olafs, the son of Trygve and the Saint, found refuge at their court
before and after their