Europe: A History (68 page)
Their women, when married, do not commit adultery. But a girl when she falls in love with some man or other, will go to him and quench her lust. If a husband marries a girl and finds her to be a virgin … he says to her, ‘If there were something good in you … you would certainly have found someone to take your virginity.’ Then he sends her back.
The lands of the Slavs are coldest of all. When the nights are moonlit and the days clear, the most severe frosts occur … When people breathe, icicles form on their beards, as if made of glass …
They have no bath-houses as such, but … they build a stone stove on which, when it is heated, they pour water. They hold a bunch of grass in their hands and waft the steam around. Then their pores open, and all excess matter escapes from their bodies. This hut is called
al-istba
…
Their kings travel in great carriages, on four wheels. From the corners of the carriage a cradle is slung on chains, so that the passenger is not shaken …
The Slavs wage war with the Byzantines, with the Franks and Langobards, and with other peoples …
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Interestingly enough, Ibrahim-Ibn-Jakub did not appear to regard the Rus as Slavs, presumably because they were still seen as Norsemen. What is not in doubt is that this diplomat from Muslim Spain looked on the exotic peoples of the European interior with the curiosity of a modern anthropologist surveying the tribes of Papua (see Appendix III, p. 1264).
In 965, in the same year as Ibrahim-Ibn-Jakub’s visit, Mieszko I, prince of the
Polanie
or Polanians, who lived on the River Warta, allied himself with the Czechs. As part of the alliance he married the Czech princess Dubravka and accepted Christian baptism. He was responding to the rise of the Saxon Empire after the defeat of the Magyars, and to pressures for accepting Christianity from Germany. The first Latin missionary bishopric was created at Poznañ in succession to an earlier see of the Slavonic rite, probably at Sandomierz. Dependence on the German Empire had been avoided. The ecclesiastical province of ‘Polonia’ was launched some thirty years later, in conjunction with a rapidly consolidating Polish state. When the Emperor Otto III visited the newly created metropolitan see at Gniezno in
AD
1000, and embraced the Polish prince as his ‘friend and ally’, the
Wielkopolska
(Great Połand) of Mieszko had already been joined to the
Małopolska
(Little Poland) of the south. Benedictine monasteries had been established at Miçdzyrzecz and at Tyniec. Bolesław Chrobry ‘the Brave’ (r. 992–1025), who stormed Prague in 1003 and notched his sword on the Golden Gate of Kiev in 1018, was rewarded by the Pope with Poland’s first royal crown. In 1037 a great pagan revolt marked the death throes of the old order. Thereafter the royal capital moved to Cracow; and the well-established Piast dynasty slowly turned Poland into the prime bastion of Catholicism in the East.
Hungary followed very closely in the path of Poland. Its first Christian contacts were with Byzantium. A captive Greek monk, Hierothos, was consecrated ‘Bishop of Turkia’ c.950. But the battle of the Lechfeld brought German influence in its wake. The Magyar Prince Géza (r. 972–97) was baptized with all his family into the Latin rite in 975. Géza’s son István (St Stephen, r. 997–1038) consolidated the imperial link by marrying a Bavarian princess and by accepting a royal crown from Rome. Stephen’s coronation at the new see of Esztergom (Gran) took place in 1001, only one year after Emperor Otto’s visit to Gniezno. The abbey at Pannonhalma opened in the same year as its sister house at Międzyrzecz.
[BUDA]
All these primitive kingdoms were patrimonial states, where all rights and property were held by the ruling prince. The adoption of Christianity, which brought in literate clergy, has to be seen as a move to strengthen the infant monarchies.
Kievan Rus’ adopted Christianity from Byzantium in 988 as part of a comprehensive political settlement. Rus’ had been growing closer to Byzantium for over a century. Dnieper trade, Varangian raids, and the wars of the steppes had established contacts of all sorts. The Prince of Kiev, Volodymyr or Vladimir (r. 980–1015), was ‘a doughty heathen’, a fratricide, and a polygamist. But Orthodox baptism, and marriage to Anna, sister of the Emperor Basil II, was the necessary price for persuading the Emperor to hire the 6,000 warriors of the famous Varangian Guard. Though the Prince’s grandmother, St Olha (Olga), had been a Christian convert, he had weighed various alternatives before taking the same course. Envoys were sent abroad to report on the competing attractions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The envoys who reported on their impressions from the church of St Sophia in Constantinople carried the day, having been treated to the ecclesiastical equivalent of Liutprand’s audience with the Emperor. Only then did the Kievan Prince receive his christening. He ordered his people to the banks of the Dnieper, where they, too, were baptized
en masse
. He took the children of his nobles from their parents, and educated them in the new faith. Missionaries were later sent into the country to teach the variant of Orthodoxy popularized in Bulgaria by St Clement, together with the Old Church Slavonic liturgy, the Cyrillic alphabet, and loyalty to the Patriarch of Constantinople. Churches were built, heathen shrines demolished. Christianity reached Novgorod, Minsk, and Polotsk in the early eleventh century. Henceforth, Rus’ was to be an unshakeable member of Christendom.
[NOVGOROD]
Volodymyr or Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, is frequendy likened to Charlemagne, creator of another vast but ephemeral realm.
20
The parallel is apt enough, not least because both men became heroes of later national legends. Of course, Volodymyr the Rus was no more a Russian than Charlemagne the Frank had been a Frenchman. ‘Russia’ did not exist in his day, any more than ‘France’ existed in Charlemagne’s. Unfortunately, when the Russian Orthodox Church came on to the scene five centuries later, it laid monopoly claims to the Kievan heritage; and modern Russian propaganda has done everything in its power to suppress rival claims and traditions, notably among the Ukrainians. Meanwhile, just as
Charlemagne was turned into the national hero of the
chansons de geste
, so the saintly ‘Prince Vladimir’ was turned into the central figure of medieval Russian
byliny
. Roland, Oliver, and Bishop Turpin have their counterparts in Alyosha Popovich, Dobryna Nikitich, and the valiant peasant Ilya Popovich—the companions of the
Krasnoe Solnyshko
, ‘our beloved little Sunshine’. No one would have laughed more rumbustiously at this epithet than the very unsaintly saint himself (see Appendix III, p. 1249).
NOVGOROD
A
NCIENT
Novgorod lay in the centre of the forest zone, and hence was built almost entirely from wood—with wooden houses, wooden churches, wooden streets, wooden drains, even a wooden, birch-bark writing system. It began life as a trading-post on the banks of the River Volkov, at the northern end of the Baltic-Black Sea and Caspian-Baltic trade routes. Timber must always have been one of its staple commodities.
When Novgorod was comprehensively excavated in 1951–62, in one of the showpieces of medieval archaeology, the science of
dendrochronology
or ‘tree-ring dating’ was presented with one of its major challenges. The waterlogged ground had preserved the wooden remains in a remarkable state; and in thirteen seasons of excavation the team, led by A. V. Artikhovsky and B. A. Kolchin, opened up a site of 9,000 square metres, uncovering 1,150 log buildings. Most surprisingly, no fewer than 28 layers of wooden street-levels were identified on the former high street, from the top level 1 of
AD
1462 to the earliest level 28 of 953. On average, the roadway had been renewed once every 18 years over 5 centuries, simply by laying a new layer of pine logs over the old ones damaged by cart-wheels and sledge runners. Extensive coin hoards, two from eighth-century Central Asia, showed that Novgorod’s far-flung trading contacts had never been seriously interrupted, even by the Mongol invasions.
[DIRHAM]
Of 400 birch-bark letters, all but one Finnish specimen were written in an early form of Russian. In No. 17, which was found at level 5 (1409–27), the bailiff from an estate outside the city writes to his lord:
Mikhail makes obeisance to his lord, Timothy. The ground is prepared and we rhustsow. Come, sir, for everyone is ready, but we cannot have rye without your command.
1
In a fragment of No. 37, found between levels 12 and 13 (1268–99), there is a proposal of marriage:
From Nikita to Ulyanitsa. Marry me. I want you, and you me. And Ignatio will act as witness.
2
Walking the wooden streets of old Novgorod, whose inhabitants were slaughtered by the agents of Moscow, some people wonder how the world would have changed if Russia could have grown under the leadership of this peaceable republic.
3
A Novgorodian Russia would clearly have been very different from the Muscovite Russia which triumphed over its rivals. But such thoughts
x
are unhistorical. In any case, medieval archaeology offers no clue.
Scandinavia was not taken into the Christian fold without a struggle. A missionary bishopric, directed to the conversion of Scandinavia, had been active at Bremen since the 780s. But the Vikings’ way of life was not readily compatible with the Gospel, and a determined pagan party existed in the court of each of the three kingdoms. In Denmark, Harald Bluetooth (r. 940–86) accepted Christianity c.960, only to be expelled after founding the bishoprics of Aarhus and Schleswig. His son, Swein Forkbeard (r. 985–1014), once the leader of the heathen resistance, became the leading christianizer of the Danes. Under Canute the Great (r. 1016–35), who ruled England as well as Denmark, Anglo-Saxon missionaries set sail for Scandinavia.
In Norway, too, the drama took place in two acts. One attempt by Olaf Tryggvason (r. 995–1000) faltered, whilst the second, by Olaf Haraldson (r. 1016–28), succeeded through a mixture of bribery, coercion, and zealotry. This second Olav, who was killed defending his country against the Danes, was buried in the cathedral at Nidaros (Trondheim), and in due course was canonized as the national saint. In Sweden, Olaf Skutkonung (r. 995–1022) was baptized in 1008; but the resultant civil war between Christian and pagan factions continued for more than a century. Like St Olaf, St Eric of Sweden (d. 1160), who died in battle, and St Canute IV of Denmark (d. 1085), who was assassinated, came to be revered as martyrs of the faith. Metropolitan
sees
were established at Trondheim, Uppsala, and Lund in the 1140s by the then Cardinal-Legate, Nicholas Breakspeare, destined to be the only English Pope,
[EIRIK]
The unsaintly character of all the national saint-kings from Wenceslas to Eric may well point to the superficiality of the conversions; but it also points to the process whereby Christianity was used to foster a sense of community within the state. Poland alone of the neophyte nations failed to produce a kingly saint or a martyr-king at this stage. Instead, it produced a martyr-bishop. Stanisław Szczepanowski (1030–79), the turbulent Bishop of Cracow, was literally cut to pieces in front of the altar by the knights of the king whom he had defied. His death, which set an uncanny precedent for the better-known martyrdom of St Thomas à Becket in England, indicated the growing power of the Latin Church, and the consequent conflicts between Church and State. In later days it was taken to symbolize the dismemberment of the sinful Polish kingdom into warring feudal fiefs.
Throughout this long second stage of conversions, the Greek and Latin Churches had coexisted in a state of strained separation. There was little co-operation; but
equally there was no formal divorce. In the mid-eleventh century, however, the point of parting was reached. In Constantinople, the Patriarch Michael Kerullarios, promoted in 1043, entered into a dispute with the Byzantine governor of southern Italy. In the process he closed all the Latin churches in the capital, and wrote to the Latin bishops denouncing their schismatic practices, in particular their use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist. At the same time the Roman Papacy passed for five dramatic years into the assertive hands of Leo IX (1049–54), formerly Bruno von Egisheim, Bishop of Toul, and a cousin of the German emperor. Pope Leo was driven by a strong belief in his own mission, and was no more inclined to brook the pettiness of the Greek Patriarch than to tolerate the abuses of the bishops and kings in the West. In January 1054 he dispatched a legation to Constantinople under Cardinal Humbert de Moyenmoutier, and ordered them to obtain confirmation of his claims to papal supremacy. Not surprisingly, disaster ensued. The Patriarch refused to recognize the legates’ powers and pressed on with the publication of an aggressive manifesto, notwithstanding news of Pope Leo’s death. On 16 July the legates replied by excommunicating the Patriarch in a Bull which they placed on the hallowed altar of St Sophia itself. The insult was unforgivable. A synod of the Greek Church was convened to condemn the Latin heresies in creed and in practice, and to excommunicate the papal legates. It was the point of no return,
[MISSA]
EIRIK
S
OMETIME
before 1075 King Svein Ulfsson, nephew of Canute the Great, received a man called Audun, who had sailed from Greenland to Denmark to present him with a polar bear. The episode is recalled in a saga called
Audun’s Story
. Shortly afterwards, the King received the German priest, Adam of Bremen, who was collecting information for his monumental history of the Archbishopric of Hamburg, under whose jurisdiction Scandinavia then fell. According to Adam, the King told him ‘that there was another island in that ocean which had been discovered by many and was called
Vinland
because vines grow wild there and yield excellent wine, and moreover, self-grown grain grows there in abundance’.
1
It is the earliest European reference to North America. Archaeological evidence, notably from northern Newfoundland, confirms the fact that Norsemen did indeed found transatlantic settlements.
2
The exploration of ‘the Glacial Sea’ extended over several centuries. Iceland was known to the Irish in the eighth century. Norse settlement began there c.870. Greenland was known some eighty years before it received its earliest colonists, c.985/6, the date which is also given to the first sighting of ‘Vinland’.
3
The central figure in the explorations was the adventurer Eirik the Red (c.940–1002). Eirik left his home at Jaederen in Norway after a series of murders; but he then started a feud in Iceland when his slaves engineered a landslide to demolish a neighbour’s farm. Outlawed by the Icelandic Assembly at Thorness, he sailed away to found a colony on the western coast of an island ‘which he called
Greenland
, so that others would be tempted to go there’. This was fifteen years before Iceland officially adopted Christianity in
AD
1000. Eirik’s younger son, Leif Ericsson ‘the Lucky’, sailed on from Greenland c.1001 to test reports of land to the west, and returned with descriptions of
Helluland
(‘Slab-land’, probably Baffin Island),
Markland
(‘Forest Land’, probably Labrador), and the elusive
Vinland
, ‘the Land of Grapes’. It was Tyrkir the German, a member of Leif’s crew, who found the vines; and it was Thorfinn Karlsefni, the wealthy second husband of Eirik’s daughter-in-law, Gutrid, who twice organized expeditions to site permanent settlements on the American shore. Eric’s bastard daughter Freydis also visited Vinland twice. On the first occasion, she was said to have repulsed an Indian attack by baring her breasts. On the second, she murdered all her companions. In the autumn of 1009, Gutrid, Karlsefni’s wife, and widow of Eirik’s elder son, Thorstein, gave birth in Vinland to a boy called Snorri, the first Euro-American.
The exact location of Vinland has caused endless scholarly headaches. The consensus now leans towards Newfoundland and a site at L’Anse-aux-Meadows. The
vinber
or ‘wineberries’ found by Tyrkir may well have been wild cranberries and the ‘self-sown wheat’ lyme grass. The subject has produced much ‘Skandiknavery’. Among the sensations one must list a runic inscription for M1 or
AD
1001 carved by some joker on a boulder at Martha’s Vineyard in 1920, and Yale’s Vinland Map produced in 1965.
4
The main sources remain the Norse sagas, especially
The Graenlandinga Saga
(c.1190)
Eirik’s Saga
(c.1260) and the
Islandingabòk
(c.1127), a history of the Icelanders commissioned by a bishop who was the great grandson of Snorri Karsefnisson.
5
Except for Iceland, the outermost Norse colonies did not last. Vinland was abandoned after a few decades. Greenland, once prosperous from the trade in walrus ivory, furs, and snowy falcons, declined in the fourteenth century. Rickets and a deteriorating climate took their toll. The last ship from Greenland reached Iceland in 1410. ‘The last Norse Greenlander died some time later, “unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown”.’
6
His frozen remains, or those of one of his last companions, were discovered near the Greenland shore in 1586 by the Elizabethan explorer John Davys (1550–1605). Like Eirik the Red and Leif Ericsson exactly 600 years before, Davys was sailing to the far north-west in search of his fortune in mysterious lands beyond the ‘Great Passage’.
7
