What an interesting life to have lived.

> Evidence of his craft was seen in his tactics, which included feigned retreats, ambushes and the use of false information.

Reminds me of "Intelligence in War" by Keegan, which discussed the use of such strategies, mostly in naval battles, from antiquity to the modern era.

> In the 30 years that he served as a captain, Hawkwood's earnings ranged between 6,000 and 80,000 florins annually (in comparison, a skilled Florentine craftsman at the same time earned 30 florins a year).

Quite the pay for a soldier, even if a mercenary!

There were a lot of these guys around that time. England imported a ton of soldiers into France for the Hundred Years War, then just didn't take them back home when they signed a treaty, so they all took up residence as mercenaries, brigands, and extortionists basically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_company In a feudal era where power structures were less centralized and more about personal relationships, it was easier to smoothly transition between a 'proper' noble and somebody who 'just' owned a fort and a bunch of soldiers to collect rent with, and there was always somebody willing to pay to make you their neighbor's problem.

You mean the Varangian Guard, personal security detail of the Emperor?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard

TL;DR: in the beginning mainly Kievan Rus and Norse (but apparently no Finns), later mainly Anglo-Saxons.

Red hair appears to have originated in Central Asia. Blue eyes and blonde hair likewise also originated in Central Asia or the Middle East (but not necessarily the same places). All of these phenotypes used to be more widespread in Eurasia and North Africa. Today they're associated with Northern Europe because of the very high prevalence, but you can still find clusters of populations elsewhere with significant prevalence, and (because of their recessiveishness--it's complicated) it's not uncommon for them to pop up randomly in populations we today would never associate with those phenotypes.

Blonde hair also emerged independently in the Indo-Pacific where today you can find it among some populations in Oceania with people who have very dark skin and tightly curled hair.

Before the most recent waves of migration from Central Asia and the Middle East into Europe over the past several millennia, "native" Europeans are believed to have had very dark hair and somewhat darker skin, similar to what we might associate with some modern day Mediterranean populations.

If you’re interested in an accurate description of the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه و سلم look into a translation of “Shama’il Tirmidhi”, you’ll only have to read the first chapter or so.

I have nothing to add to this except that the single Unicode character for PBUH looks cool: ﷺ

Trade routes passed through the British isles long before the Romans. Cornish tin was highly prized for making Bronze. Burials around Stonehenge have been excavated by archeologists and tests showed the people buried there spent extended periods in the Alps. Stonehenge predates the Romans by thousands of years.

> Romans had contacted Britain by the 1st century BC (the history buffs amongst you may have heard of the leader of this expedition).

Eh, wasn't that...? I think more than the "history buffs" amongst us may at least have heard of that guy.

> Isn't it a historical fact that the eastern and western roman empires used "barbarians" in their armies?

Yup.

> If the vikings fought for these empires, then why not the anglo saxons and other germanic peoples?

That's not even in question any more, it's also a historical fact.

The Varangian Guard in Constantinople started out, as the name implies (or at least used to imply[1]), with mainly Swedes come down via the Rus rivers, but a century or three later was very mixed with Franks and Anglo-Saxons, and towards the end may have consisted mainly of the latter.

[1]: I was taught, in history class in Sweden looong ago, that "Nordic raiders faring west from Norway and Denmark were called Vikings, and those faring east from Denmark and Sweden were called Varangians." But given that the name 'Varangians' seems to come primarily precisely from the Byzantian Imperial Guard, maybe the definition should follow that, and acknowledge the shifting ethnic composition of their origin.