Speaker
Lars Brownworth
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
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Quotes & moments
Vikings from Norway attacked the holy island of Lindisfarne, slaughtering monks and plundering its treasures — the first major Viking raid and the terror-defining opening of the Viking Age.
Viking longships averaged 70–120 miles per day, while English cavalry could only manage about 20 miles per day, giving Vikings an overwhelming speed advantage.
Viking longships had a draft of less than 2 feet, allowing them to sail rivers only 2 feet deep, and 20 men could physically carry the vessel around obstacles.
English King Æthelred the Unready paid 7.5 million silver pennies in a single year as Danegeld to make the Vikings leave, equivalent to 48,000 pounds of silver — which only attracted more raiders.
Erik the Red called the icy island 'Greenland' to attract settlers, claiming salmon were so plentiful you could scoop them by hand — a deliberate lie Lars Brownworth calls the greatest real estate scam in history.
The Viking colonies in Greenland survived until the 1400s, eventually failing because colonists stubbornly refused to abandon animal husbandry and adapt to the Arctic environment.
At its height, inside Constantinople itself, the literacy rate was close to 100%, reflecting the Byzantine Empire's extraordinary emphasis on education and classical culture.
The Byzantine (East Roman) Empire lasted roughly 1,000 years — one of the longest-running states in history — never experiencing a single year of complete peace on all frontiers.
Over the course of his reign, Æthelred the Unready paid approximately 20 tons of gold and silver in Danegeld, taxing his own population to fund payments that only encouraged more Viking raids.
Erik the Red established two settlements in Greenland — the Western Settlement and the Eastern Settlement — taking 25 ships from Iceland, of which 14 made it.
Norse runes carved by bored Varangian Guards can still be seen on the marble balcony railings inside the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople today.
The Battle of Manzikert in 1071, where Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantine army, was the decisive event that set the empire on an irreversible trajectory toward collapse by stripping it of Anatolia.
By the time of the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the largest single landowner in France, explaining why monasteries were such lucrative Viking targets.
King Aella of Northumberland, who killed Ragnar Lothbrok by throwing him into a pit of vipers, was allegedly the first victim of the blood eagle — a ritual execution performed by Ragnar's son Ivar the Boneless.
In 911, the Viking leader Rollo signed the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte with Frankish King Charles the Simple, receiving the land that became Normandy in exchange for defending the French coast from other Vikings.
After Greek fire destroyed their fleet on the Sea of Marmara, pragmatic Vikings pivoted from enemies to guardians of the Byzantine emperor. The Varangian Guard — 'men of the oath' — served Byzantine rulers for centuries, and bored guards even carved Norse runes into the marble balcony of Hagia Sophia.
Ragnar's last words — 'When the boar bleats, the piglets come' — were a promise that his 12 sons would avenge him. They did: King Aella, who had Ragnar thrown into a viper pit, became the first recorded victim of the blood eagle, a ritual execution where the lungs were removed while the victim still breathed.
On June 8, 793, Vikings stormed the holy island of Lindisfarne — a place where the ocean itself was supposed to be a shield. The monks had no weapons; the sea had no enemies. In one morning, both assumptions died, and the Viking Age began.
Rollo — so tall he had to walk because Viking ponies couldn't carry him — went from penniless raider to founder of Normandy in a single lifetime. His 911 Treaty with Charles the Simple put a burglar in charge of coastal security, and it worked brilliantly. Within a generation, his descendants would conquer England.
Viking longships averaged 70–120 miles per day — up to 8x faster than English cavalry. With a draft under 2 feet, they could penetrate every city in Europe via its rivers, and 20 men could carry the vessel around any obstacle. Speed was the Viking superpower.
Vikings would arrive at English ports as traders, map the wealth, memorize the Christian calendar, then sail away and return as raiders — hitting on Easter or Christmas for maximum value. Terror wasn't a side effect. It was the strategy.
Ragnar Lothbrok sailed up the Seine, extorted Paris, and became the model every Viking raider sought to emulate. Whether real or mythic, Ragnar defined what a Viking was supposed to want: wealth, fame, and glory — and the sons to avenge your name if you died badly.
Berserkers were Odin's chosen warriors who felt no pain, attacked friend and foe alike, and kept fighting after catastrophic wounds. They were considered possessed by the divine madness of Odin — the god of both battle and poetry — and they gave the English language the word 'berserk.'
In Viking cosmology, the highest honor was Valhalla: a hall where brave warriors fight all day, have their wounds healed each night, feast on unlimited food and drink, and repeat — forever — preparing for the final apocalyptic battle of Ragnarök. It's a heaven built entirely around the love of combat.
When a Frankish ambassador asked Viking raiders who their king was at the 845 siege of Paris, the answer was: 'We have no king. We are all kings.' Radically decentralized, purely meritocratic — leadership went to whoever proved themselves. It was also what made them terrifying.
Around the year 1000, Leif Erikson landed in Vinland — now identified as Newfoundland — 500 years before Columbus. He found inexhaustible timber and food, but also relentless native resistance from the Algonquin. After 3 years, the Vikings left, told almost no one, and the discovery vanished into northern sagas.
At its peak under Basil II, Constantinople had near-100% literacy and courtiers who memorized Plato. But when Basil died, his bureaucracy decided it didn't need a strong emperor — and deliberately chose weak rulers. The disastrous Battle of Manzikert in 1071 followed, and the empire never recovered its Anatolian heartland.
In 2005, Lars Brownworth recorded himself explaining Byzantine history to his brother — who then secretly submitted it as a podcast without telling him. By the time Lars found out (while on a dig in Petra), listeners were already demanding episode 2. The history podcast genre was born by accident.
While Norwegian Vikings went west and Danes went south, Swedish Vikings went east — using the Volga and Dnieper river systems to reach the Black Sea, the Caspian, and ultimately Constantinople. Along the way they founded Novgorod and Kiev, establishing the Kievan Rus, the ancestor of modern Russia.
Exiled from Norway, then exiled from Iceland, Erik the Red landed on a glacier-covered island and called it 'Greenland' — then fabricated stories of salmon so plentiful you could scoop them by hand. It worked: he lured hundreds of settlers across 2,000 miles of open ocean to a place where all their cattle died the first winter.
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