ABSTRACT
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 850s, 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 Jaén in the eighth century, who was the first person [Campo’s 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 Campo’s witness was the poet al-Ghazāl, who headed a delegation from the Umayyads in Cordoba to the court of an unnamed Viking king.
