Byzantine emperors had come to envy the martial abilities of the Northmen so much that they maintained a personal bodyguard known as the Varangian guard, recruited from Viking stock. (Norse rune graffiti can still be found at the Hagia Sophia, possibly etched there by guardsmen called Halfdan and Ari.) From Byzantium, a few intrepid Northmen even reached Abbasid Persia; according to the Arab scholar and geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih, the Viking Rus’ traded in Baghdad in the 840s, bringing goods overland on camelback and posing as Christians to take advantage of a tax regime that offered
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