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The Eastern Settlement (Old Norse: Eystribygð [ˈœystreˌbyɣð]) was the first and by far the larger of the two main areas of Norse Greenland, settled c. AD 985 – c. AD 1000 by Norsemen from Iceland. At its peak, it contained approximately 4,000 inhabitants.
Viking expansion was the historical movement which led Norse explorers, traders and warriors, the latter known in modern scholarship as Vikings, to sail most of the North Atlantic, reaching south as far as North Africa and east as far as Russia, and through the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople and the Middle East, acting as looters, traders, colonists and mercenaries.
Norse settlements in Greenland were established after 986 by settlers coming from Iceland. ... The eastern settlement is the oldest Grænlendingar settlement ...
It is probable that the Eastern Settlement was defunct by the middle of the 15th century, although no exact date has been established. A European ship that landed in the former Eastern Settlement in the 1540s found the corpse of a Norse man there, [25] which may be the last mention of a Norse individual from the settlement. [26]
Norse Greenland consisted of two settlements. The Eastern was at the southwestern tip of Greenland, while the Western Settlement was about 500 km up the west coast, inland from present-day Nuuk. A smaller settlement near the Eastern Settlement is sometimes considered the Middle Settlement. The combined population was around 2,000–3,000. [12]
The Vinland map first came to light in 1957 (three years before the discovery of the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland in 1960), bound in a slim volume with a short medieval text called the Hystoria Tartarorum (usually called in English the Tartar Relation), and was unsuccessfully offered to the British Museum by London book dealer Irving Davis on behalf of a Spanish-Italian ...
Old Norse did not exert any great influence on the Slavic languages in the Viking settlements of Eastern Europe. It has been speculated that the reason for this was the great differences between the two languages, combined with the Rus Vikings' more peaceful businesses in these areas, and the fact that they were outnumbered.
986: Norse Settlement of Greenland begins. 1000: Eastern Settlement and Western Settlement established. 1000: Leif Eiriksson departs Greenland for his voyage to what is now Labrador. By now, Christianity is well established on the island. 1263: Greenland then becomes crown dependency of Norway.