Vikings in the South-libre

7/21/2019 Vikings in the South-libre

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The Vikings in the south through Arab eyes

Ann Christys

Modern historians of the Viking Age have paid little attention to the activities of the Norsemen in Spain and

the Mediterranean. There were significant attacks in the 840s and 50s, between 964 and 971, and raids

continued into the twelfth century.1 The impact of these attacks was documented in a wide variety of literary

sources, some contemporary with the events described, and toponyms hint at Viking settlement in Galicia.2 In

2002, Mariano Campo claimed that this evidence was of more than local significance, since it was an

Andalusi, born in Jan in the eighth century, who was the first person [Campos emphasis] to offer a

fascinating, almost ethnographic portrait of the customs and geography of the men of Northern Europe in the

Early Middle Ages 3 Campos witness was the poet al"Ghaz#l, who headed a delegation from the

Umayyads in Cordoba to the court of an unnamed Viking king.

Several scholars have treated this episode as a true story.4 Yet the celebrated scholar of al"Andalus,

variste Lvi"Provenal, raised a number of problems in accepting its historicity5 and Sara Pons"Sanz found

1 John Hayward, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings (London, New York, 1995), pp. 58"59; Jn

Stefnsson, The Vikings in Spain. From Arabic (Moorish) and Spanish Sources, Saga Book of the Viking

Club, 6 (1908"9): pp. 31"46.

2 Eduardo Morales Romero, Historia de los vikingos en Espaa. Ataques e Incursiones contra los Reinos

Cristianos y Musulmanes de la Pennsula Ibrica en los siglos IX " XI (Madrid, 2004).

3 Mariano G. Campo (ed.), Al"Ghaz#l y la embajada hispano"musulmana a los vikingos en el siglo IX

(Madrid, 2002), p. 9 .

4 W.E. Allen, The Poet and the Spae"Wife. An Attempt to Reconstruct al"Ghaz#ls visit to the Vikings

(London, 1960); Abdurrahman A. el"Hajji, Andalusi diplomatic relations with the Vikings during the


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additional reasons to question it.6 This paper considers al"Gh#z#ls embassy as one of a number of the ways

the Vikings in Spain were remembered in the early Middle Ages, which have pushed them to the margins of

modern histories of the period. In general, the Vikings in Spain seem to have been neglected because

historians have found it difficult to evaluate the sources. A central core narrative, remembered by authors

writing both in Arabic and in Latin, appears to point to what really happened, but it was simply the starting

point for a wide variety of retellings in both traditions. Christian clerics deployed the Vikings as extras in

battles between rival bishops, arriving on cue to punish bad bishops, and providing the opportunity for a good

bishop, Gonzalo of Mondoedo to demonstrate his sanctity; at the appearance of a Viking fleet he began to

pray, and with every Ave Maria a Viking ship sank or caught fire.7 Accounts of the Vikings written in Arabic

can be even more dramatic. In a description of the attack on Seville in 844, we can see the Viking fleet

approaching:

they had, as it were, filled the ocean with dark red birds, in the same way as they had filled the

hearts of men with fear and trembling. After landing at Lisbon, they sailed to Cadiz, then to Sidona,

then to Seville. They besieged this city, and took it by storm. After letting the inhabitants suffer the

Umayyad period (AH 138"366/ 755"976 AD), Hesperis Tamuda, 8 (1967): pp. 67"110; Bernard Lewis, The

Muslim Discovery of Europe (London and New York, 1982, reprinted London, 1994), pp. 93"5.

5 variste Levi Provenal, 'Un change d'ambassades entre Cordue et Byzance au IXe si cle', Byzantion 12

(1937): pp. 1"24.

6 Sara Ponz"Sanz, Whom did al"Ghaz#l meet? An exchange of embassies between the Arabs from al"

Andalus and the Vikings, Saga Book of the Viking Society, 28 (2004): pp. 5"28.

7 Reinhart P. A. Dozy, Les Normandes en Espagne, in ibid. Recherches sur lhistoire et la littrature

dEspagne, (2 vols, Leiden, 1881) vol. 2, pp. 250"315, at p. 292.


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terror of imprisonment or death, they remained there seven days, during which they let the people

empty the cup of bitterness8

The terror which the Vikings inspired in the Arabic sources echoes Christian responses to the sack of

Lindisfarne. As is often the case with Arabic sources, however, this passage was written in a far country and

centuries after the event in this case, by the Maghrebi historian Ibn Idh#ri at the turn of the fourteenth

century. It is not clear where Ibn Idh#ri got his information, or how much creative freedom he allowed

himself; he may have added a description of the defeated Vikings being hung from palm trees. Yet his work

should not be dismissed out of hand. Embellishments of a story whose details may have been forgotten help

to locate the Vikings within a common culture of scholarship disseminated across the Islamic world, creating

a set of sometimes contradictory preconceptions that influenced how this threatening group of outsiders was

named and characterised.

A passage from a Book of Geography attributed to al"Zuhr$illustrates several aspects of the Arabic view of

the Vikings; this is another late source but perhaps better"informed, since the author seems to have lived in

Granada in the twelfth century.9

Formerly, over [the great sea in the West] says al"Zuhr$, many big ships sailed, which the people

of al"Andalus called qar #q$ r . These ships were capable of sailing backwards and forwards and had

square sails. They were crewed by the people they called the maj%s, who possessed a strength,

courage and tenacity without equal for navigating the sea. When they appeared off the coast, the

inhabitants fled towards the interior, in the grip of pure terror. These maj%s put to sea every sixth or

8 Ibn Idh#r$al"Marr#kush$, Kit #b al"bay#n al"mughrib, ed. Georges Sraphin Colin and variste Lvi"

Provenal (2 vols, Leiden: Brill, 1951) vol.2, pp. 96"7.

9 Halima Ferhat, Al"Zuhri, Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd edn, Leiden, 1958"2007), vol. 11, p. 566a.


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seventh year. They assembled fleets of at least eighty ships, sometimes more than one hundred. All

those whom they encountered at sea they overcame, took prisoner and carried off..10

Al"Zuhr$, in common with most of the Arabic writers, called the Vikings maj%s. This term has generated

unwarranted controversy as modern scholars look in vain for terminological precision. Although used

originally of Zoroastrians, the term maj%s was in time applied by the Arabs to all northern nations, as the

Spanish Arabist Pascal Gayangos noted as long ago as 1840. 11 The details of al"Zuhr$s description confirm

these maj%s as Vikings. Some scholars have tried to sweep all the references to maj%s in Spain into the same

basket. They have identified groups of maj%s who allied with Alfonso II of Len against the emir Hisham in

79312 and with the Basques against the emir Muhammad in 81613 as the first Vikings active in the peninsula.

The earliest reference to maj%s in Spain who are likely to be Vikings, however, comes from the Eastern

geographer al"Yaq%b$, writing in 889"90 about the raids of 844.14 From al"Andalus, the earliest surviving

narrative of this attack is probably the History of the Conquest of al" Andalus of Ibn al"Q%t$ya (d.977),

compiled in the generation after his death. Ibn al"Qutiyas characterisation of the raiders as maj%s was

10 Al"Zuhri, Kitab al" Djarafiyya. Mappemonde du calife al" Mamun reproduite par Fazari (IIIe/Ixe s.),

rdit et comment par Zuhri IVIe/XIIe s.) ed. M. Hadj"Sadok, Bulletin dEtudes Orientales, 21 (1968): pp.

1"346 (not consulted), cited in Alexander Seippel, Rerum Normannicarum Fontes Arabici, (2 vols, Oslo,

1896) vol. 1, p .11, my translation.

11 Al"Maqqar$, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties of Spain, trans. Pascual de Gayangos (2 vols,

London, 18403, reprinted London and New York, 2002), vol. 1, p. 323, n. 48.

12 Ibn al"Athir, Al"K #mil f $l"tar$ kh,, cited in Seippel, Rerum normannicarum, vol.1, p. 20.

13 Ibn Hayyan, Muqtabis II. Anales de los Emires de Crdoba Alhaqem I (180"206h./796 "822 J.C. y

Abderramn II (206 "232/822"847) (facsimile, Madrid, 1999), fol.103r., trans. Mahmud Ali Makki and

Federico Corriente, Crnica de los emires Alhakam I y Abdarrahman II entre los aos 796 y 847

[ Almuqtabis II "1] (Zaragoza, 2001), p. 54.

14 A&mad ibn Ab$al"Yaq%b$, Kit #b al" Buld #n, ed. Michael Jan. de Goeje, (Leiden, 1892), p. 354.


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repeated by later authors and the same label was attached to the protagonists of later attacks. Yet another

tenth"century Andalusi, al"Bakr$, talked about the land of the maj%s known as al"Ingl$z, which is probably a

reference to Britain. 15 Ibn ' awqal, who visited al"Andalus in 949, and noted that from time to time, the

peninsula has been attacked by the fleets of the maj%s, included among them the Turks, Pechenegs and

other races such as Saq#liba [possibly slaves of Eastern European origin] and Bulgars.16 Omeljan Pritsak, an

eminent scholar of the Vikings in Eastern Europe, proposed a new way out of this confusion.17 He started

from Ibn Idh#r$s description of Septimania as the land of the maj%s .18 This cannot possibly mean Vikings

and must, argued Pritsak, mean the land of markets from a Celtic suffix magos that appears in place names

in southern France. Therefore, when Alfonso II asked for help from the maj%s in 793, they were traders, not

raiders, following the same profession, but perhaps not of the same ethnicity as the men who were active in

the emporia of Eastern Europe, and not related to those who harried the coast of al"Andalus fifty years later.

This hypothesis is too creative. Pritsak, like Ibn ' awqal, missed the point that although nearly all Vikings are

labelled maj%s, not all the maj%s are Vikings.

Characterising the Vikings as maj%s had a number of implications. Maj%s derives from the Greek !"#$ ,

magician or %"#$ magus. It was used of the Zoroastrians of Iran, whom the Quran classified as one of

the Peoples of the Book protected under Muslim law. By the period of the Viking attacks, however, the

category maj%s had been widened to include peoples other than the three monotheistic faiths, and in a twelfth"

15 Al "Bakr$, Jughr # f $ yy#t al"andalus wa"ur %bba min kit #b


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century Latin"Arabic glossary now in Leiden, maj%s is glossed as pagan.19 There are several references by the

historians of al"Andalus to maj%s in this context. To quote the Maghrebi Ibn Idh#r$again: It is said that the

first [people] to settle al"Andalus after the Flood were called al"Andalush . and it was named al"Andalus

[after them]. And it is said that they were maj%s.20 In the tenth century, al"Masudi (of whom more

later) illustrated the scope of this usage by using maj%s both for the kings of the Franks before their

conversion to Catholicism and for the Vikings: indeed, in the same passage.21 The association of the term with

Zoroastrians persisted, however, even in contexts where it is clearly inappropriate, and where greater

precision might be expected. A legal judgement made in the tenth century in al"Andalus refers to maj%s.22 A

fifteenth"century Maghrebi collection preserves a ruling against lighting a fire at night, which [says the

judge] is the custom of the maj%s.23 There is no other evidence for Zoroastrians, or pagans, in al"Andalus or

the Maghreb at this period and maj%s was often simply a term of abuse.24 Echoes of all these meanings of

maj%s could be incorporated into descriptions of the Viking maj%s, as we shall see.

There were also other ways of labelling the Vikings, although it was surprisingly rare for these pagan warriors

to be called simply pagans. Ibn Idh#r$occasionally used the terms kafirun (unbelievers) and mushrikun (idol

worshippers) of the Vikings, but in the works of other Muslim authors these terms were much more often

19 Federico Corriente, A Dictionary of Andalusi Arabic (Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1997).

20 Ibn Idh#r$, Kit #b al" Bay#n, vol. 2 p. 1.

21 Al"Mas%d$, Les Prairies d'Or (Mur % j al"dhahab), ed. and trans. C. Barbier de Meynard and Pavet de

Courteille (9 vols, Paris, 1864), vol. 2, p. 68"73.

22 Ana Fernndez Flix, Cuestiones legales del islam temprano: la Utbiyya y el proceso de formacin de la

sociedad islmica andalus (Madrid, 2003), p. 414.

23 Vincent Lagard re, Histoire et societ en Occident musulman au Moyen ge. Analyse du Miyar dal

Wansharishi (Madrid, 1995), p. 49.

24 Esperanza Alfonso, Islamic culture through Jewish eyes. Al" Andalus from the tenth to twelfth centuries

(Abingdon and New York, 2008), p. 32, n. 118.


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applied to Christians, particularly the enemy in Northern Spain. The Arab authors sometimes used of the

Vikings a term similar to that used by the Latin authors, who called the Vikings Northmen, Nordomanni,

Normani or Lodomani;25 they were, says the Chronicle of Alfonso III , a pagan and extremely cruel people

previously unknown to us.26 This terminology may have been picked up in al"Andalus as a result of

embassies from the Asturias; an account of one of these was concerned with the Viking threat.27 An eleventh"

century writer, Ibn ' ayy#n, perhaps reliant on a tenth"century source, linked the designation Northmen with

maj%s when he called the raiders al"maj%s al"ardum#niyy$ n.28

Whereas the term maj%s was geographically imprecise, the designation of the Vikings as men from the North

fed into the Arabic authors knowledge of the great sea to the west of al"Andalus and the lands that lay

beyond it, which was derived from classical Greek geography. Al"Zuhri said that the maj%s ships that

harassed the Straits came from the land of Galicia which is on the shores of the great sea in the West. A

century later, Ibn Said al"Maghribi [d.1286] said that the maj%s came from the islands of the North, which

included Britain.29 Other authors said that they came from the Great Sea in the west, which formed part of an

25 Anales Complutenses 2, ed. Enrique Flrez, Espaa Sagrada (50 vols, ed. Flrez and others, Madrid, 1754"

1879), vol. 20 (1765), p. 311; Anales Toledanos 1, ed. Manuel Risco, Espaa Sagrada, vol.30 (1775), p. 382.

26 Chronicle of Alfonso III, 15, 2, ed. Yves Bonnaz, Chroniques Asturiennes (fin IXe sicle) (Paris, 1987), p.

54; trans., Kenneth Baxter Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain (Liverpool: Liverpool

University Press., 1990) p. 174.

27 Ibn Hayy#n, Muqtabis, trans. Garca Gmez, Anales palatinos del califa de Cordoba al"( akam II, por Is#

ibn A) mad al" R#z$ Madrid, 1967, p. 50.

28 Ibn Hayy#n, Muqtabis, trans. Garca Gmez, Anales palatinos., pp. 48, 88, 101, 116.

29 Juan Vernet,, Textos rabes de viajes por el Atlntico, Anuario de Estudios Atlnticos, 17 (1971): pp.

401"427, at p. 415.


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Encircling Ocean (al" Ba) r al" Muhit ) that girded the world like a green sash (al"* awq al" Akhdar ).30 . An

alternative name, the Tenebrous Ocean (al" Ba) r al" Muzhlim), invoked the Greek division of the world into

seven latitudinal zones that began slightly north of the Equator and ended in the perpetual darkness of the far

North.31 Although, by the time of the second wave of Viking attacks in 859, the Andalusis were apparently

able to assemble a fleet to go out into the ocean after them,32 the classical view of the Western Ocean

prevailed over actual experience of sailing on it. In 1154, al"Idr$s$, was still insisting that al"Andalus was the

end of the known world; beyond was the Tenebrous Ocean, where no"one dared to venture. Or almost no"one:

al"Idr$s$recounted the story of the Adventurers of Lisbon;33 he believed it to be a true story, because a street

in Lisbon was named after them. The Adventurers sailed into the Western Ocean, but were advised not to sail

into the total darkness to the North. They confined their exploration to some of the islands, where they found

giant, strangely"inedible sheep.34

Al"Zuhr$claimed to have derived his Geography35 from a work of the caliph al"Mam%n,36 celebrated for

sponsoring translation from the Greek,37 although the description of the world attributed to him does not

30 Christoph Picard, Locan Atlantique musulman. De la conqu te arabe lpoque almohade. Navigation et

mise en valeur des ctes dal" Andalus et du Maghreb occidental (Portugal"Espagne" Maroc) (Paris, 1997), pp.

29 and 31.

31 Al"Mas%d$, Kitab at "Tanbih wa"l" Ischraf , ed. Michael Jan de Goeje, (Leiden, 1894), pp. 72"77.

32 Vernet, Textos rabes, p. 404.

33 Al"Idr$s$, Nuzhat al"musht #q fi ijtir #q al"af #q, ed. Dozy and de Goeje (Leiden 1886), pp. 184"186; Al"

Himy#r$, La peninsule ibrique au moyen ge dapres le Kitab al" Rawd al"mit #r fi habar al"akht #r , ed. and

trans, Lvi"Provenal (Leiden 1938), text p. 16, trans. p. 23.

34 Perhaps the first sighting of polar bears? Robert Hoylands observation.

35 Andr Miquel, La gographie humaine du monde musulman jusquau milieu du IIe sicle. Gographie et

gographie humaine dans la literature arabe des origins 1050 (4 vols, Paris, 1967), vol. 1.


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survive. The geographers, however, were polymaths, and open to a number of other influences. One of the

most important of these was the Quran, and there was a tendency to try to make the world conform to the

Quranic picture, however unlikely the result. The famous tenth"century geographer al"Muqaddas$was

puzzled that the maps of the sea that stretched from China to Africa did not correspond with his experience of

sailing on it. He consulted several scholars, including a sheik, who was both a learned man and the owner of a

merchant fleet, for a more credible description.38 When it came to the number of seas in the world, however,

al"Muqaddas$thought that, since only the two seas mentioned in the Quran could exist,39 the Encircling

Ocean and the other seas of which the geographers wrote had to be redefined: we do not include the

Encircling Ocean because it is the boundary of the world, with no limits.40 Another pool of knowledge was

adab, a common cultural heritage of secular scholarship that included poetry and fantastic ethnography, such

as the description of the island of Waqwaq where men grew on trees. A poetic image comparing a ship to a

dark"hued camel with wings like a bird may have been in Ibn Idh#r$s mind when writing about the

Vikings.41 There seems to have been no orthodox way of combining these influences and each individual

author made his own synthesis.

36 Al"Mas%d$, Kitab at "Tanbih, p. 53; ibid., Les Prairies dOr , vol. 3, pp. 191, 193; Miquel, La gographie

humaine, vol. 1, p. 73; Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought and the Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early

'Abbasid Society (2nd "7th Centuries) (London, 1998).

37 Ferhat, Al"Zuhri.

38 Al"Muqaddas$, The Best Divisions for knowledge of the regions; a translation of Ahsan al"Taq#sim fi

M #crif #t al" Aq#l$ m, trans Basil Anthony Collins and Muhammad Hamid al"Tai (London, c.1994), pp. 10"11.

39 Al"Muqaddas$, The Best Divisions, pp. 17"19.

40 Al"Muqaddas$, The Best Divisions, p. 20.

41 Jal#l Abd Algh#ni, The Poet and Daughter of the Sea: Animated ships in Andalusian Arabic Poetry, Al"

Masaq 19/2 (2007): pp. 121"130, at p. 122.


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Some of this may be recognised in the work of an author who was, unlike most of our sources, contemporary

with the Vikings. Al"Mas%d$, born in Baghdad in the 890s, was a prolific author and travelled widely in the

Muslim world, although he did not visit al"Andalus. He was more interested in non"Muslim peoples than his

contemporaries and made several interesting statements about the Vikings in the South. Al"Mas%d$adopted

the Ptolemaic world"view, in which the movement of the planets governed the physical conditions in each

zone of the sublunary world and in turn, the character and language of their inhabitants, though he

supplemented this information from his own observations and enquiries and from books he discovered on his

travels. Al"Mas%d$accepted the Greek idea that the world ended near the straits of Gibraltar( and noted that

there was a colossus at Cadiz with its arm raised towards the West, warning travellers not to go any further.42

Beyond here, in the very vaguest of terms, were the North and the West..43 Al"Mas%d$included among

the peoples inhabiting the North not only the Turks, R%s, Slavs and Franks but also the Christians

of northern Spain and the Lombards (al" Nukubarda), of whom he says that their country extends to the West

and their location is in the North.44 He was little clearer in describing the adverse effect of the climate of the

North on its peoples:

. in the extreme North,.. where the influence of the sun is rather alleviated and the regions

abound in cold, moisture and snow, the people are characterised by good physique, rude behaviour,

slow speech, harsh tongues, white complexion, thick flesh, blue eyes, thin skin, curly and red hair.

All these characteristics are found due to the predominance of moisture in their lands, and their cold

nature does not encourage firmness of religious belief. Those living further North are characterised

by dullness of mind, harsh behaviour and barbarism.45

42 Al"Mas%d$, Kit #b al"tanbih, pp. 68"69.

43 Ahmad M.H Shboul, Al" Masudi and his world: a Muslim historian and his interest in non" Muslims

(London, 1979), p. 177.

44 Al"Mas%d$, Les Prairies dOr, vol.3, pp. 76"77.

45 Al"Mas%d$, Kit #b al"Tanbih, pp. 23"24.


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Al"Mas%d$thought that it was from this region that the people came who attacked al"Andalus:

Before the year 300 ships returned to al"Andalus by sea bearing a thousand of the Aghart/Faghart

people to her shores. The people of al"Andalus believed that they were a people of the maj%s who

successfully raided them from this sea every two hundred years. [They also believed] that they came

to their country from a bay/gulf lying on the opposite coast of the Uqyans sea (possibly the Atlantic)

and not from the gulf where there is a copper lighthouse. And I think but God alone knows that

this gulf is connected to the Mayutus sea and Buntus and that this people are the R%s whom we

mentioned earlier in this book for they are the only people who sail across those seas, which are

connected with the Atlantic Ocean..46

Although al"Mas%d$was not the first to link the attacks of the maj%s on al"Andalus with the R%s,47 he may

have been the first to suggest that these maj%s came from beyond the Encircling Ocean. Al"Mas%d$knew the

R%s from his travels in the eastern Islamic lands and in the Caucasus. 48 . They were pagans who travelled by

boat, and traded with Byzantium; he thought that they owed no allegiance to any law or king.49 Like the

Turks, they consisted of different peoples (ajn#s, the plural of jins, the Arabic gens). Al"Mas%d$labelled one

group of the R%s as al"lawdh#na, perhaps an echo of the term al"ardum#niyy$ n, that some authors used for

the maj%s in Spain: al"Mas%d$said that this group traded with al"Andalus, Byzantium and the land of the

Khazars.50

46 Al"Mas%d$, Les Prairies d'Or , vol. 3, p. 193.

47 Al"Yaq%b$, Kit #b al"buld #n, p. 354.

48 Al" Mas%d$, Les Prairies dOr , vol. 3, pp. 143, 214, 216, 218; Shboul, Al" Masudi, pp. 172"178.

49 Al" Mas%d$, Les Prairies dOr , vol. 2, p. 15.

50 Al" Mas%d$, Les Prairies dOr , vol. 2, p. 18.


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It seems that there is a core of direct observation, but at every point we can see al"Mas%d$s reading

triumphing over his personal experience, as in this passage [the attribution to al"Mas%d$is not certain]:

Concerning the maj%s who worship the sun. They live by a pleasant sea that runs from the

region of the North to the South and also a sea that runs from the West to the East until it meets

another sea that runs from the direction of the Bulgars. They have many rivers which are all in the

North and they do not have a salt"water sea because their land is far from the sun, and their water is

sweet. No one lives in the North because of the cold and frequent earthquakes. Many of their tribes

are maj%s whose bodies are burned by fire which they worship. There are many towns and fortresses

and they have churches with bells hanging in them which they strike like al" Nuw#qish. Among them

is a people between the Saq#liba and the Ifranja [Europeans] of the faith of the Sabians who profess

worship of the stars..51

Al"Mas%d$probably knew that these maj%s were not Zoroastrians, whose beliefs he describes in some detail,

having travelled in Iran, talked with Zoroastrian priests, read their religious texts and visited their fire

temples.52 Nevertheless, false etymology and the desire to include all the information at his disposal led him

to attribute some of their practices to the men of the North just because they too are labelled maj%s.

This portmanteau ethnography provides the background to the story of the poet al"Ghaz#ls embassy to the

Viking court with which I began. It survives in an encyclopaedic collection of adab composed in Egypt in the

thirteenth century by an Andalusi, Ibn Dihya; his source for the embassy is a ninth"century history of al"

Andalus up to the reign of Abd al"Ra&m#n II (822"852) by Tamm#m ibn Alqama, now lost, which Ibn al"

51 Al" Mas%d$or Ibr#h$m ibn W#( if Sh#h, Kit #b al"aj#ib unpublished MS Paris, Biblioth que Nationale,

cited in Seippel, Rerum normannicarum, pp. 127"8, my trans.

52 Al" Mas%d$, Les Prairies dOr , vol.2, pp. 123"126; ibid, Kit #b al"Tanbih, p. 95; Shboul, Al" Masudi,, pp.

61, 107"108.


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Q%)$ya also used. In fact, the account of the embassy is probably based on another mission reportedly

undertaken by al"Ghaz#l, to Constantinople.53 The episode related by Ibn Dihya is clearly meant to relate to

the Viking attack on Seville in 844, since in begins: A maj%s ambassador came to make peace with the

SultanAbd al"Rahman, after they had left Seville.54 Abd al"Ra&m#n equipped al"Ghaz#l and his

companions with a ship and they sailed to the maj%s king, who lived on a great island in the ocean, three

days journey from al"Andalus. Ibn Dihyas account must have been composed, or interpolated, in the

eleventh century or later, because it says : the maj%s were heathens. but now they follow the Christian faith.

It would be nice to be able to read it in the spirit of Michael McCormicks remark that imaginary travellers

shed real light on early medieval travel and communications.55 The account of the embassy, however, was

not written as an essay in ethnography. The section of Ibn Dihyas encyclopaedia devoted to al"Ghaz#l

concentrates on two aspects of the poets biography: his works, which Ibn Dihya cites extensively, and his

wit. One episode shows how al"Ghaz#ls quick response saved him from imprisonment after he had accused a

waz$r of hoarding grain at a time of shortage, forcing up the price. The embassy to the Vikings illustrates both

these aspects of al"Ghaz#l.56 When the poet arrived at the maj%s court, their king tried to demean him by

making him enter the court through a very low door; the Byzantine emperor had supposedly presented al"

Ghaz#l with the same dilemma. In both cases, al"Ghaz#l went in feet first, a perennial insult. Three poems

punctuate the account of the embassy to the Vikings. Ibn Dihya emphasised the poets skill and interrupted

53 Ibn Hayyan, in al"Maqqar$, Analectes sur l'histoire et la littrature des arabes d'Espagne, ed. Reinhardt

Dozy, (2 vols, Leiden and London, 185561), vol., I, pp. 223, 631ff.; Lvi"Provenal, Un change, pp. 10"

14.

54 Umar ibn Hasan ibn Dihya, Al" Mutrib min ash#r ahl al"maghrib ed. Ibr#h$m al"Abiary, '# mid Abd al"

Maguid and A&mad A&mad Badaw$, revised by Taha ' ussein, (Beirut, no .date), trans. Allen Poet and Spae"

Wife pp. 19"25.

55 Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy. Communications and Commerce AD 300"900

(Cambridge, 2001), p. 237.

56 Miquel, La gographie humaine, vol.1, pp. 495"497.


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the narrative to lament the neglect of Andalusi and Maghrebi poets compared with those in the eastern Islamic

world: the published translations omit this section of the text, thus skewing the meaning of the whole. More

than half the passage describes al"Ghaz#ls flattery of the queen of the maj%s to whom he improvises a poem

that begins: You have to resist, Oh my heart, a love that troubles thee, and against which you defend yourself

as a lion. You are in love with a maj%siyya, who never lets the sun of beauty set, and who lives at the rarely

visited extremity of the world. His portrayal strays little from the standard representation of the barbarian

as the inversion of normality.57 It is hardly surprising to find that the religion that the maj%s have abandoned

in favour of Christianity is fire"worship. A discussion of marriage and divorce among the maj%s women

shows them as the object of the type of textual strategy housing both barbarian and female otherness that

Walter Pohl has analysed.58 Sexual freedom for barbarian women and the lack of jealousy of their men were

topoi of this genre. Another example is Bertha, the queen of the Franks who is supposed to have proposed

marriage to a caliph.59 Neither of these stories contributes to the discussion of barbarian ethnography which

was, in a slightly less garbled fashion, taking place in the work of geographers such as al"Mas%d$.

Al"Mas%d$and perhaps al"Zuhr$knew quite a lot about the real Vikings, but this sort of knowledge

contributed little to their picture of them. The Vikings remained resolutely Other, both geographically and

as pagans. Scholars writing in Arabic put the Vikings into a category maj%s with which they were already

familiar. In doing so, they tried to put in everything they knew about this category, no doubt gaining

credibility with their readers as they lose it with us. Later readers were more interested in the anecdotes than

geography; descriptions of the peoples from the beyond the western ocean began to lose their precision,

57 Aziz Al"Azmeh, Barbarians in Arab Eyes, Past and Present , 134 (1992): pp. 3"18.

58 Walter Pohl, Gender and ethnicity in the early Middle Ages, in Leslie Brubaker and Julia Smith, (eds),

Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300"900 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 23"43, at p. 40.

59 Ann Christys, The queen of the Franks offers gifts to the caliph al"Muktafi, in Wendy Davies and Paul

Fouracre, (eds.), The Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Ages, (Cambridge, forthcoming).


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becoming descriptions of marvels which transport us from tangible reality to the realm of fancy constituted by

the oriental tales .60 It is there that we must leave the story of al"Ghaz#l.

60 Csar E. Dubler, Adjaib Marvels, Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol I, pp. 203"4.

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Vikings in the South-libre