Modernity Got Going with the Vikings

>The North Sea is small, but its cultural influence spread from Dublin in the west to Poland in the east, says author.

well, even further east - Kievana Rus, the starting point of Russian state, was founded by Vikings as kind of forward operating bases in their dealings with Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean. Before Vikings, it were just some Slavic tribes in the forest, and under Vikings it became a small state making raids south on Constantinople and to Caspian Sea/Iran. Basically it was put on the map of Europe, and the rest is history :)

Anyway, Vikings and Caliphates (as well as Roman Empire before) are great examples how climate changes affect, sometimes to the point of really driving, the history.

I think every medieval historian thinks that their subject is the root cause of the renaissance. I have read that modern world exists thanks to

… the Arabs who preserved Roman learning and reintroduced it to the west … the Mongols who fostered world wide trade routes … the Turks whose conquests of the Eastern Roman Empire caused wealthy and educated Greeks to flee to the Italian city states and kick start the renaissance ….etc

This time it’s the North Sea Vikings. I don’t think I buy this one. Yes trading was easier by water. But that was true everywhere and not just in the North Sea. Others have already mentioned the problems the currency claims.

There's a lot of stuff in that article that I don't quite believe, such as: "When the Roman Empire fell apart, there were no coins in circulation, just gold. But you didn’t pay taxes with gold. What the Frisians did was reinvent cash. Not just coins, but cash—money you carried with you in order to do business. They were trading between different kingdoms and territories, so they had to have something that made sense to everybody. Outside Friesland, there’s very little evidence of the minting of silver coins until much later. "

A little bit of googling turns up evidence that lots of people were minting silver, here's some 6th century Goths doing it: http://www.romancoins.info/Ostrogoths.html and Charlemagne too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aachen_penny_of_Charlemagne

>The Frisians seemed to have started cash and spread the habit through trading.

Does he point to any specific account in his book? From what I've read it was the Chinese that first used paper currency, not the Europeans. The whole article could use a parenthetical "in Europe."