Tore Skeie

“The time around the year 1000 appears to be a kind of ground zero, an era during which centuries of stagnation were gradually giving way to a dawning growth and development in Western civilization. The Vikings in the north were becoming Christians. The expanding Moors in the south no longer set out on plundering raids through the Pyrenees. The Magyars, the nomadic Hungarian horse people who had wrought chaos in Eastern Europe, had settled down and become farmers. Relieved of the foreign invasions that since late antiquity had disturbed and reversed societal developments, over the centuries that followed Europe’s population would increase, generation by generation.”
― Tore Skeie, The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire