THIS CHAPTER IS dedicated to the sea separating the northern and eastern parts of the world, that is, the Baltic Sea, which bore the name of “the Eastern Sea” in Old Norse literature. Travel in various forms and to increasingly remote and challenging destinations is taken for granted in contemporary society. In the Middle Ages it too was an indispensable (sine qua non) condition of life. Travel was a substantial part of medieval life. It is undoubtedly true that a great many people may have been born, lived, and died in the same place. However, there were groups of people who did travel, and given the conditions of the time, they travelled most adventurously and sometimes very far. Traders, warriors, fortune hunters, missionaries, messengers, and many others moved from one place to another trading, harrying, carrying out their missions of different kinds. These people served as vital links, connecting distant corners of the world and spreading both fables and news.

Baltic traffic in the Viking age and the Early Middle Ages was at the core of life within one of the European subcontinents— namely within the vast territories of northern and northeastern Europe around the Baltic Sea. The peoples who lived there belonged to different families of languages: they were of Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, and Finno-Ugric origin, but there had always been manifold economic, social, political, and cultural connections among them, and the Baltic Sea played the role of means of communication. In the eighth and the ninth centuries people living in this subcontinent witnessed the period of formation of a network of international routes that connected typologically similar trade centres. The exchange of goods, the so-called “Baltic trade,” increased on the basis of common currencies— this currency first being glass beads, then Arab silver, and later German and English silver coinage. Proto-urban centres of the Baltic Sea region (such as Kaupang, Birka, Hedeby, Ladoga, and others) developed the “Baltic urban culture” which was quite uniform. This “community” of towns, peoples, and countries of the Baltic region in the eighth through the eleventh centuries is referred to in Russian research literature as the “Baltic subcontinental civilization” (Lebedev 1985).