God’s Hammer

From the bestselling author of Viking Britain, a stunning new perspective on the medieval world. When we think of the Crusades, the image is usually squarely medieval: an era of pageantry, knights, castles and cathedrals. An age of violence, certainly, but one glossed with faith, chivalry and Christian derring-do. When we think of the Vikings, we most often see barbarism and pagan menace: Norse warriors drenched in blood-sacrifice and presided over by grim, brooding gods. Both images are false, of course, created by centuries of cultural baggage. This book sets that history right, showing how the Vikings and their descendants embraced Christianity and the mores of mainstream Western Christendom – and how that Western medieval world imbibed the values and attitudes of the Vikings’ northern home. Telling the story of how the Vikings took up arms and the cross, this is a book that leads to extraordinary places: from Jerusalem and Istanbul to Novgorod and Tallinn, via cold northern seas and ice-shrouded northern forests. It tells stories full of adventure, horror and madness, of pilgrimages and war-paths, bodyguards and princes, holy missions and rapacious greed. That which transformed the bounds of Christendom forever was a hammer forged in the pagan fires of the Viking Age.