900 A.D.

Going back to around the time Madame Wu was traveling in western China, and further West, to Asia Minor.....I've been trying to eat more fiber lately, because old people tend to get constipated. And I remembered a story about that sort of thing I had read a long time ago, when I was reading all I could find about the Byzantine Empire, because I found it really interesting.....the story was that some Rus, or Russian Vikings, came across the Black Sea from the Volga River and landed in one of the provinces of the Empire. The local Imperial official went out and met them, and they told him they wouldn't plunder his provence if he paid them some amount of tribute. He told them that they had already paid tribute to the Rus, and named whatever King it was they had signed a deal with. Well, this was somebody the other Vikings knew of, so they decided to maybe honor the deal. But they said that they had just sailed all the way across the Black Sea, and could they at least get something to eat. Well, the oranges were ready for harvest right then, and it was a real bumper crop, so the locals didn't know how they were going to get a decent price for them anyway, so they showed the Rus how to eat an orange, and told them they could have all they wanted. They didn't have oranges in Russia, so they were really well pleased with the novel fruit, and they stuffed themselves with them. In fact, they ate so many most of them got the shits, from all this foreign fiber they had consumed. Most of them were up all night shitting in the orange groves, so when the sun came up and they saw the cohorts that the Empire had called in from the countryside arrayed in military fashion with their pikes and shields, and with the gentry of the provence formed up as horsemen, they just got back in their ships and sailed away.