— an independent history publication
Luxury of the Past
Luxury of the Past starts from things — a silver coin, a sword, a length of silk, a feast remembered by a chronicler — and follows them to the people who made, traded, gave, displayed and buried them. Our current focus is early medieval Eastern Europe and the Baltic, c. 750–1250: the world of the Rus', Scandinavia, Byzantium and the Islamic silver trade that connected them.
— features
Features and catalogues
Each piece has its own page and, where it helps, its own interactive form — filters, catalogues, tables. Sources are cited where they are used.
Eurasia · 8th–11th centuries
The Dirham Road
Hundreds of thousands of Islamic silver coins have been found around the Baltic. How did they get there, what were they exchanged for — and what changed when they stopped arriving?
Read the featureUpper Dnieper · 9th–11th centuries
Gnezdovo: Thirteen Finds from a Dnieper Trading Settlement
Swords, dirhams, Scandinavian ornaments, Byzantine amphorae, silk and seals from one of the largest early medieval trading settlements of Eastern Europe — with filters by type of object and by where it came from.
Open the catalogueOutside views · 9th–13th centuries
Rus' Through Foreign Eyes
An Abbasid envoy, a Byzantine emperor and a Byzantine historian, German chroniclers, a papal envoy and Icelandic saga writers: what outsiders wrote about the Rus' — and what each of them was looking for.
Read the feature— how we work
Readable, and checkable
Every piece cites its sources — primary texts in scholarly editions and translations, excavation reports, museum catalogues and peer-reviewed research — at the point where they are used. We try to make clear what the evidence shows, how specialists interpret it, where they disagree, and where a piece offers its own reading. Corrections are published on the page they concern. Editorial standards