Vikings in the Mediterranean
If the Anon who was asking about vikings is interested in the earlier period, then I suggest Ann Cristys' Vikings in the South: Voyages to Iberia and the Mediterranean and Anders Winroth's The Age of the Vikings, which will provide a good overview of the involvement of the vikings in the Mediterranean and viking society as a whole. For daily life, I recommend Kirsten Wolf's Viking Age: Everyday Life During the Extraordinary Era of the Norsemen, while the only well regarded book on viking warfare that I’ve been able to find is Kim Hjardar and Vegard Vike's Vikings at War - fortunately it’s very reasonably priced and contains a wealth of drawings and images in addition to the text.
For Sicily, Leonardo C. Chiarelli's A History of Muslim Sicily is your best bet for understanding Sicily under Muslim rule - it goes down to the Norman invasion, so it’s worth reading even if you want to go the later Norman route. I recommend supplementing it with James E. Lindsay's Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World.
The ones most likely to hire viking mercenaries are the Byzantines, so John Haldon's The Byzantine Wars and Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565-1204, and Marcus Louis Rautman's Daily Life in the Byzantine Empire are also worthwhile reads if you want to look at the world and structure the mercenaries would be working within.
For a general overview of Europe and the Mediterranean in the 9th and 10th centuries, I also recommend Chris Whickham's The Inheritance of Rome.
Hergrim at it again with good submissions.
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