From the close of the eleventh century, when the people of England and the inhabitants of the western and southern districts of continental Europe began to consider themselves exempt from the periodical inroads of Northmen, Sweden and Denmark obtained little notice from the pens of foreign chroniclers. This fact may possibly be explained by supposing that the oppressed, once freed from their oppressors, were but too glad to consign them and their name to oblivion: yet the memory of those early navigators, for whom their descendants have claimed the discovery of America, was long retained in England by an unpopular land tax, the Danegeld, and it must have lingered traditionally for centuries after that imposition had ceased to be a grievance. Ancient chroniclers told how the pirates had once established a dynasty in this country, and every religious house which dated its foundation previously to the Norman Conquest, had its stories of sacrilege, of murder and of desecration perpetrated by these "enemies of God and man." Whatever may have been the cause of this indifference to the affairs of Scandinavia on the part of English writers, it is well known to every student of the early chroniclers, that they rarely allude even to the countries on the Baltic. So entirely indeed did the affairs of Sweden in particular cease to create any interest, that it was not until the seventeenth century, when the cannon of Gustavus Adolphus were battering the fortresses of northern Germany, that Europe, while it affected to pity the rashness, was again disturbed by the prowess, long externally dormant, of that then poor and thinly peopled kingdom.
It will be gathered from these remarks that we are indisposed to believe the Swedes did not embark, after the Danish fashion, on predatory voyages: that part of the subject is scarcely worth discussion; both were maritime people, governed at times by one sovereign, and it must be admitted that under certain conditions and at certain stages of civilization, the tendencies of nations, as of individuals, are the same. Still we are ready to admit that the Swedes had from a remote period directed their attention more to the east than to the west of Europe. Oriental coins of early date, and relics of eastern workmanship, still found in that kingdom, attest the existence in ancient times of intimate relations with the northern countries bordering on Asia, relations which may have had their origin either in warlike or commercial enterprise. It should be observed also that
