As is well known in contemporary scholarship, the medieval world - however delineated and defined - was much more interconnected than has commonly been acknowledged. While few individuals travelled vast distances, goods and ideas did so very frequently. Moreover, the interconnectedness of the medieval world existed in sprawling networks of contacts - whether diplomatic, mercantile, religious, intellectual, cultural or military - and movement could occur in many different direction.
There are several medieval sources that demonstrate and even embody this interconnectedness, and today I was reminded of one such example as I was browsing through some old photos. The object in question is currently housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It is a game piece - possibly for checkers - carved in the Rhineland region around the year 1200. The material from which the piece is carved is walrus ivory, which was an important trade commodity of the twelfth century. It is likely that the ivory was brought from Greenland, possibly via ports in Norway, as this appears to be the most common route by which walrus ivory travelled to the European continent in the period.
Aside from the materiality of the game piece, the image carved into it is an example of how widely stories travelled in the Middle Ages. The scene depicted on the game piece shows Alexander the Great borne aloft by two griffins, one of the most iconic and common scenes from the Alexander legend, as it travelled westward throughout the medieval period through adaptations and retellings of the legend by Pseudo-Callisthenes. Those who played with this game piece were most likely of the secular nobility or perhaps the upper echelons of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and they are likely to have been very familiar with the Alexander legend - perhaps more familiar with the ideas of distant India conveyed through that legend than the northern waters in which the walrus was hunted.
The ideas about distant lands entertained by those who used this game piece were most likely very inaccurate and based on legends and distorted reports that had travelled through many stages to arrive in the Rhineland around the year 1200. However, even if they were wrong about the wider world, they knew the wider world existed, and they knew that it was possible to travel back and forth between the familiar and the unfamiliar, yet known, parts of the world
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