The Arabs get a foothold in Sicily and begin a slow process, not complete till AD 965, of squeezing the Byzantines out of the island

The Venetians, acquiring from Alexandria some bones believed to be those of St Mark, build St Mark's to house the valuable relic

Vikings from Norway capture Dublin and establish a Norse kingdom in Ireland

The iconoclastic controversy ends when Theodora, widow of the emperor Theophilus, officially sanctions the veneration of icons

The division of western Europe into three kingdoms for the sons of Louis the Pious is agreed at Verdun, with lasting consequences

Kenneth king of the Scots is accepted also as king of the Picts, providing the traditional founding event of the kingdom of Scotland

The central Frankish kingdom, Francia Media, becomes one of the great fault lines of European history

On the orders of the T'ang emperor, 4000 Buddhist monasteries are destroyed in China and 250,000 monks and nuns are forced into secular life

Vikings are by now securely established in the Orkneys, Shetlands and Hebrides, and in much of the Scottish mainlaid down to Loch Ness

Strip-farming gives each member of the village a stake in the communal crop, while also sharing out the good land

As a gesture of unity, Kenneth MacAlpin brings to Scone (a Pictish royal site) a sacred coronation stone associated with the Scots

Communal gatherings, the thing and the larger althing, are the distant origins of Scandivian parliaments

The three-field system, introduced by the Franks, increases agricultural yield by 33%.

The caliphs in Baghdad begin to employ Turkish slaves, or Mamelukes, in their armies

During refurbishment of the mosque at Kairouan, in north Africa, a high fluted dome is added

The missionary brothers Cyril and Methodius arrive in Moravia, where they introduce the Greek Orthodox faith in a special Slavonic liturgy

The Bulgarian king Boris I is baptized in the Greek Orthodox faith, bringing his people within the Byzantine fold

The eastern part of the Persian empire comes under the control of the Saffarid dynasty

A great army of Danes captures York - the first step in the establishment of Danelaw in eastern England

The world's first known printed book, a Diamond Sutra, is commissioned by a Buddhist monk in honour of his parents

The Diamand Sutra has as a frontispiece a printed woodcut depicting an enthroned Buddha

Ahmad ibn Tulun, a Mameluke, seizes power in Egypt - establishing his own Tulunid dynasty

Cyril and Methodius translate the Gospels and parts of the Old Testament into Slavonic for the Moravians.