Well the Viking age ended. I didn’t learn in in a Kalmar Union or Danish school either.
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They, uh, came from more than just Norway 
It’s a fun one because Vikings are very enshrined (often mistakenly!) in popular culture. I’d have no issue in them being called “the Norse”, but equally it’s hard to refute that describing what is still in referenced terms (see: Wikipedia citations) named “Vikings”, as “Vikings” in AoE IV, makes a level of sense.
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Totally understand why they did it. I will say, speaking from a modern perspective post romanization: many use and understand Viking in a casual sense. It is inaccurate from a historical perspective though, the word Viking became popular in the 19th century because of books made by English historians.
So, being taught about ‘Vikings’ in the 20th or 21st century means learning about them as a Viking people or Viking culture. Genuinely, the term existed soley to describe a job until the last 100 or so years.
If you know anything about the Victorian era and its revisionist history practices, ie the romanticization of the past, you can understand why some people might be going ‘hmmmmm’.
It does fit into the same category of complaint as the Jin Dynasty having shared voice lines, the naming convention of Zhu Xi Legacy, or many other instances of style over substance in design. It’s a fantasy history game, not a historical record!
From the earlier wikipedia page:
The word was not regarded as a reference to nationality, with other terms such as Northmen and Dene ‘Danes’ being used for that. In Asser’s Latin work The Life of King Alfred, the Danes are referred to as pagani ‘pagans’; historian Janet Nelson states that pagani became “the Vikings” in standard translations of this work, even though there is “clear evidence” that it was used as a synonym, while Eric Christiansen avers that it is a mistranslation made at the insistence of the publisher.[35]
‘Hmmmm.’
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There are two problems with calling them “Vikings” in aoe4. First is the one that’s gotten the most attention in many threads: that it simply wasn’t the name of a culture but of the people who were doing the raiding. We all know this, and it’s a problem that aoe4 shares with aoe2.
The other problem is unique to aoe4. If we do accept the false premise that “Vikings” is the modern name for the culture as a whole, it would still be an inappropriate name in aoe4, because aoe4 civs aren’t cultures, they’re political entities. We don’t have India, we have the Delhi Sultanate. We don’t have Arabs, we have Abbasid Dynasty. We pushed back against nonsense names like “Sultan’s Army” to get the Ayyubids. We should be pushing back against “Vikings” for the same reason.
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Do you have a source for this? because to the best of my knowledge there were words similar to this in Norse (vikngr) and Old-English (wicing), but the word does not appear anywhere in middle english or modern english until its current meaning where it describes the entire culture.
Most names for cultures, units, etc are not from the actual middle ages, because the names we use are in modern english, a language which didn’t exist in the middle ages.
“Vikings” is just as appropriate as “Byzantines” (early modern word) or “Chinese” (something the Chinese never called themselves)
some of the civs are called “Byzantines”, “Chinese”, “Japanese”, “Mongols”, “Rus” and not for example “Byzantine Empire”, “Tang/Ming/etc dynasty”, “Ashikaga/Tokugawa Shogunate”, “Mongol Empire”, “Muscovy Duchy” respectively.
Civ naming is a huge mess in aoe2, but it’s only marginally better in aoe4
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I hadn’t thought about that until now.
Many civilizations in the game actually have names closer to our “current” definition of the same kingdoms or entities than they had back then.
I didn’t know that the Chinese didn’t originally refer to themselves as Chinese in the Middle Ages. I just looked it up that they called "“Zhonggguo” to the country or region where most of the medieval dynasties were located. “China” comes from a conversion of the “Qing Dynasty” of 200 BC (Qing → Ching → Chine → China), which was popularized by a Portuguese person around 1516.
In that respect, I think “Vikings” is a good name, considering they’re simply adapting that time period (793-1066 AD) of the current Scandinavian countries.
On the other hand, they haven’t yet confirmed how the Vikings will advance through the ages:
- Some theorize on other networks that in the 3rd or 4th age there might be the option to choose which kingdom to form (Denmark, Sweden, Norway), and there will be Edicts like the Golden Horde, or Landmarks.
- The fact that they mention the civilization itself will have a transition from its raiding period to one where they can train knights and militia crossbowmen sounds very interesting, and it would make sense for the name of the civ.
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Yes, I don’t know why they didn’t call them Norse like in AoM/AoEO…
Not to diminish your experience, but schools at early age are a bit notorious for simplifying history for kids to understand 
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I would argue the only one of those examples that actually works as a counter is the Rus. Though the rulers changed, China and Japan were each viewed as a single continuous political entity. All that happened was different people came in and took over the leadership of it. Similar to how Anglo-Saxon England and Norman England are viewed as the same kingdom. Byzantines and Mongols are even clearer: they just straight up refer to one specific thing.
The Rus though, you have a point. The Kievan Rus and the Principality of Moscow are two of the most prominent examples of actual polities that the civ could represent. As a civ, this is the closest we get to the more aoe2 style.
you claimed that aoe4 civs are political entities. “Japanese”, “Chinese”, etc aren’t political entities, they are peoples/cultures. Japan and China are political entities.