The later story of the Greenland colonies, interesting as it is, and traceable to the year 1418, is not part of the expansion but of the contraction of Europe and Christendom. And the voyages of the Zeni in 1380-95 to Greenland and the Western islands Estotiland and Drogeo, belong to another part; they are the last achievements of mediæval discovery before Henry of Portugal begins his work, and form the natural end of an introduction to that work.
But it is curious to notice that just as the ice and the Esquimaux between them were bringing to an end the last traces of Norse settlement in the Arctic Continent, and just as all intercourse between Vinland, Greenland, Iceland, and Norway entirely ceases—at any rate to record itself—the Portuguese sailors, taking up the work of Eric and Leif and Thorfinn, on another side, were rounding Cape Verde and nearing the southern point of Africa, and so providing for the mind of Columbus suggestions which resulted in the lasting discovery of the world that the Vikings had sighted and colonised, but were not able to hold.
The Venetian, Welsh, and Arabic claims to have followed the Norsemen in visits to America earlier than the voyage of 1492, belong rather to the minute history of geographical controversy. It is a fairly certain fact that the north-west line of Scandinavian migration reached about A.D. 1000 to Cape Cod and the coasts of Labrador. It is equally certain that on this side the Norsemen never made any further advance, lasting or recorded. Against all other mediæval discoveries of a Western Continent, one only verdict can stand:—Not Proven.
The other lines of Northern advance, though marked by equal daring and far greater military exploits, have less of original discovery. There was fighting in plenty, the giving and taking of hard knocks with every nation from Archangel to Cordova and from Limerick to Constantinople; and the Vikings, as they reached fresh ground, re-named most of the capes and coasts, the rivers and islands and countries of Europe, of North Africa, of Western Asia. Iberia became "Spanland"; Gallicia, "Jacobsland"[18]; Gallia, "Frankland"; Britannia, "England," "Scotland," "Bretland"; Hibernia, "Irland"; Islam, outside "Spanland," passed into "Serkland" or Saracenland. Greece was "Grikland"; Russia, "Gardariki"; the Pillars of Hercules, the Straits of Gibraltar, were "Norva's Sound," which later days derived from the first Northman who passed through them. The city of Constantine was the Great Town—"Miklagard"; Novgorod was "Holmgard," the town of all others that most touched and influenced the earlier, the Viking age, of Northern expansion. For was it not their own proudest and strongest city-state, and "Who can stand before God, or the Great Novgorod?" except the men who had built it, and would rush to sack it if it turned against them?
But all this was only the passing of a more active race over ground which had once been well known to Rome and to Christendom, even if much of this 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 relievèd
And fed their eyes on Jordan's holy flood
Which the dear body of Lord God had lavèd";[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.
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 Mediæval 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.