Menace in the Mediterranean

Killing, burning, pillaging, enslaving. Even when heading to sunnier climes, Viking raiders deployed the same tactics that they had used along the shores of northern and western Europe

- Thomas Williams

The poor citizens of Al-Jazira al-Khadra never knew what hit them.

In 859, an unfamiliar fleet sailed into the bay separating this Muslim settlement - which later evolved into the city of Algeciras, now in southern Spain - from Gibraltar. Making landfall nearby, the alien ships disgorged their fearsome crews: Vikings.

In a sequence of events terrifyingly familiar to victims in more northerly parts of Europe, these formidable marauders wreaked havoc. They occupied the city, burned the mosque, ravaged the countryside- and then moved on to the next target, and the next. The campaign later known as the 'Great Raid' was well and truly underway - part of a chapter in Norse history that's less known today, but no less bloody.

Stone cold killers

The Vikings of our imagination are emphatically creatures of the north - avatars of cold climes and bleak weather, manifestations of ice and snow made flesh and steel. Dragon-prowed ships slice through the frigid waters of steep-sided fjords swathed in midnight-green pine forests. Fur-clad adventurers hunt walrus amid the crashing icebergs of the northernmost seas. Giants haunt the ice-capped mountains in an unreal world of midnight sun and northern lights.