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 preferential rates to People of the Book over pagans.54 Soon, silk and enslaved people were being exchanged between the Viking world and the Abbasid caliphate at a record rate, and silver Abbasid dirhams were flooding into the Scandinavian west.
