The Northern Crusades (32 page)

The contrast between the way the war was fought, and the way the Order justified it became increasingly apparent after 1386, and by 1409 was one of the strongest weapons in the hands of Witold and Wladyslaw. Between these dates, the Order followed a policy that has been called ‘illusionist’: pretending that Lithuanians were Saracens, for the sake of keeping up the influx of crusaders and gaining territory from Christian powers. However, it should not be forgotten that all the combatants made use of illusion to gain their ends. In the case of Poland, it was the political illusion that the king had ultimate sovereignty over all the lands that his predecessors had alienated, and that the interests of justice and Christianity would best be served by the expansion of the Polish state. In the case of Lithuania, it was the illusion that Witold was concerned more for the souls than the territory of the Samogitians, and that he had not, in the past, co-operated with the Order whenever it suited him. All his insistence on the immortality of the Order’s occupation of Samogitia could not conceal the fact that it was the Order’s support which had compelled Wladyslaw to recognize him as a grand-duke of Lithuania in 1392. The real question was, which illusion had the strongest army?

While the Teutonic Order was waging a war without end on the frontiers of Livonia and Prussia, the princes and merchants of north Germany and Scandinavia were involved in a complicated and uneasy relationship with the Russian ‘schismatics’ of Novgorod and Pskov, and this, for limited times and purposes, turned into another kind of crusade. Chapter
5
has related how the thirteenth-century popes came to entrust the waging of this crusade to the kings of Sweden in particular; this chapter tells the story of how these kings saw fit to carry out their mission in the fourteenth century.

The Swedish conquest of Finland brought the frontier of Catholic Europe to the edge of the sub-Arctic region. In the immense land-mass that rings the Gulf of Bothnia from the Lofoten Islands in the west to the White Sea in the east, the battle for survival continued to take precedence over all other conflicts, even the war between the Catholic and the Orthodox faiths, and the rivalry between Novgorod and the kingdoms of Norway and Sweden. Disadvantages of climate, soil and vegetation made it difficult to expand the political and religious structures that were needed for the waging of full-scale wars. Nevertheless, the attempt was made, and the crusade played an essential part in nerving these kingdoms to fight each other continuously and unprofitably over some of the most sterile and desolate country in Europe.

Both Novgorod and Sweden derived an increasing share of their wealth from the Far Northern hinterland, and depended for their prosperity on contacts with affluent traders from more favoured regions. They therefore stood to gain by jockeying for position along the main routes of access in both directions, and, once Sweden had got Viborg (Viipuri), the
jockeying grew fiercer. It became possible to wage war for possession of Lake Ladoga, and even for Novgorod itself. And, if neither side had the resources to conquer and annex Far Northern territories beyond Ladoga, it was still feasible to get more out of the system by which these territories were exploited.

This system was a way of getting animal products from a region beyond the reach of the merchants who paid high prices for them in the main Baltic markets. It involved great hardships, and several intermediary stages, but it was worth it because, the colder the climate, the better animals are protected against it by fur, skin and fat; and, the smaller the human population, the more numerous the beasts and birds. Arctic varieties of fox, hare and weasel are found even on the mountains where the snow never melts, with whiter, denser and finer fur than their downhill cousins’. There, also, lives the glutton, whose pelt ‘gleams with a tawny blackness, variegated with figures like cloth of Damascus; and is made more beautiful to look at by skilful artifice, and coloured to match whatever kind of garment it be joined to. Only princes and magnates use this fur as winter clothing, and they have it made up like tunics.’
¹²⁸
Lower down the mountains there were sable, marten, otter, beaver and ermine – the last also a mark of noble ostentation, as when St Bridget of Sweden’s son Charles was presented to the pope wearing ‘a mantle on which were sewn whole ermine skins from top to bottom, so that when he walked it looked as if ermines were running all over him; and each ermine’s head had a little gilded bell hung about the neck and a gold ring in its mouth.’
¹²⁹
‘You are a son of this world’, said the pope – accurately, no doubt, but ermine was a lot cheaper in Sweden. The beaver gave a more serviceable pelt, was good to eat and easy to catch; it was being trapped and hunted to extinction in the Scandinavian lowlands in this period, and the pursuit of fresh stocks was what brought dealers and trappers to the Far North in greater numbers about the turn of the thirteenth century. As all furs, except plain squirrel, grew harder to find further south, these pioneers increased in number and importance.

The immense summer congregations of birds on Enara (Inari) and other lakes, which had been plundered for meat and feathers at least since King Alfred’s time, continued to supply a valuable secondary staple to fur, and met an increasing demand from affluent burghers aping the noble preference for soft mattresses, eiderdowns and cushions. The northern gyrfalcon was sought after all the more as the techniques and
elaboration of hawking spread among the knightly classes. The seals and whales of the Arctic Ocean became the only cheap source of oil for Northern Europe when the offshore fisheries of the Baltic and North Sea were hunted bare. And the teeming fish of the Bothnian rivers and Lapland lakes, which had formerly been exportable in a small way when wind-dried, smoked or soused, became a profitable food-crop once a new method of salting had been brought to the Bothnian gulf by the Dutchman Benkelszoon towards the end of the fourteenth century. In the course of the next hundred years, Tornea (Tornio) became a great international fish-market, where Russians, Lapps, Karelians, Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, and Germans came with or for their herring, mackerel, pike and salmon: the herring small, the salmon sometimes seven-foot long; the pike dried hard, and broken up with hammers.

As these animals preyed on each other, so did the men who got their living by them, each group exploiting and being exploited for the ultimate satisfaction of the fur-clad pickled-herring eaters lolling on the feather-beds of Western Europe and Russia. At the lowest end of the scale came the Lapps, who were classified into sea-, forest- and fell-Lapps, according to whether they lived on the Arctic Ocean, the Bothnian rivers, or the mountain range that came between them. As immigrant settlers edged them away from the coasts of the Bothnian Gulf and the White Sea, which they had inhabited before the fourteenth century, more of them took to living off the reindeer as herdsmen and hunters in the interior, and increased the range of their migrations to get access to the now more valuable fisheries and hunting grounds of the Far North. They moved over a wide arc stretching from the Dovre Fjell in central Norway to the tip of the Kola peninsula, a distance of some 1200 miles, wherever climate and altitude made life too arduous for others, but they were bound by economic interest to the settled communities on the fringe of this area. For centuries they had paid tribute to, and exchanged furs for cloth and metal with the northern Norwegian landowners who ran the
Finnferth
, under licence from their king, and the agents of Novgorod in the east; then in the thirteenth century the
Finnferth
was discontinued and a new wave of entrepreneurs moved in, among whom the Karelians were dominant. These intruders could offer improved hunting techniques, and better prices for furs, in return for higher yields and a closer personal dependence. Those Lapps who visited lands on the edge of the wild were bound to immigrant farmers as a kind of
intelligent livestock, paying furs and meat in exchange for the use of nearby grazing grounds and some form of protection. Thus their lives were changed both by the demands of the European market and by the influx of newcomers to the fringes of the arable world. These contacts also changed the way in which the neighbouring peoples looked at the Far Northern world – no longer as the alien wilderness of Adam of Bremen’s geography, but as a reserve of potentially valuable land. To the Norwegians the whole region was still their Finnmark, open to Norse traders and fishermen and coastal settlers because the Finns, as they called the Lapps, were in some sense their men. But in the thirteenth century the citizens of Novgorod began to call the Kola peninsula their province of Ter, and the Lapps, or Sam, the dependants of their Karelians. In the fourteenth century, contacts between Swedish middlemen settled at the mouths of the Bothnian rivers – the
birkarlar
– and their Lapp clients led Swedish kings to refer to the upriver region as their Lappmark, over which the crown had those mysterious rights which European rulers had pretended to possess over wilderness since Merovingian times. But Finnmark, Lappmark, Karelia and Ter were not defined areas: they were names applied to roughly the same area by virtue of a common pursuit carried on within it – exploiting the Lapps.

Next in the scale of exploitation came the Karelian Finns, the people able to move most freely in and out of Lapland and compete as trans-humant grazers and hunters with the Lapps. While out on their seasonal journeys, the Karelians appear to have taxed, and traded with, dependent Lappish groups all the way from the Norwegian mountains to Kola; but the homesteads from which they came lay on the edge of Swedish Finland and Novgorod, and by 1295 were subject to either one or the other tributary system. Like Lapps, they handed over furs and other produce to their overlords, but unlike Lapps they were well-enough armed and organized to conduct raids on each other and on neighbouring settlements, and could bring their gains direct to market in Finland, Sweden or Russia. In 1252 the king of Norway and the prince of Novgorod agreed to leave the Far North open to tax-collectors and traders from both countries, but the result was not concord: Norwegians were under sporadic attack from Karelian raids from then onwards, and the competing Russian and Swedish interests within settled Karelia gave marauders increased scope for action. Thus the Karelians served as an electric current passing between the colonial settlements and the sub-Arctic
world, transmitting shocks from one to the other whenever local conditions gave rise to friction.

Alongside the Karelians, from the late thirteenth century onwards, came frontiersmen of other nations: land-hungry peasants from Finland and Sweden, pushing up the eastern and western shores of the Bothnian Gulf; Germans on the rivers at the northern end; Norwegian fishermen, farmers and traders along the Arctic Ocean (as far as Vard⊘ by 1307); Russian ‘boatmen’ and peasants making for the shores of the White Sea by way of lakes Ladoga and Onega. Hunger and greed drove them into a region so inhospitable that their hopes of survival were always more or less bound up with the running of the fur, fish and Lapp trade, as trappers, hunters or dealers.

Therefore they were inextricably bound to the more organized and stratified societies they had left behind them, which provided them with their only profitable markets and asserted political mastery by taxes and military obligations. They paid less in
skatt
and tithe, and could claim free ownership of the land they brought under cultivation; they could recoup by such levies as the
birkarlaskatt
, contributed by the Lapps to the
birkarlar
; but, still, they paid, and could only maintain their position on the fringes of Lapland by virtue of the grain, butter, salt and metals that came in from the south.

While the Novgorodian, Swedish and Norwegian realms were prime consumers of sub-Arctic produce, and were governed by prosperous elites most of whose wealth was securely based on arable farming, they were not at the top of the hierarchy of exploiters. By 1300 all three were to some extent dependent for their economic survival on the goodwill of the Hansa, the association of German traders based on the cities of northern Germany and the south-east Baltic, which had gained a privileged position – in Norway a monopoly – as importer and exporter of the main international commodities. Hanseatic merchants were the essential middlemen between the North and the consumers of England, France, Flanders and Germany, and in the course of the fourteenth century they were able to safeguard their privileges by naval and military action. As lords of the Baltic trade-route, they were courted by Russians and Swedes, and resisted in vain by the kings of Norway and Denmark; they alone had the organization, the resources and the credit to bring the great trading-areas together.

This system worked, but not smoothly or peaceably. There were
many possibilities of conflict, from the casual ambushes of trappers and tax-collectors round the North Cape to the full-scale war of armies and fleets in the Baltic. There were two main types and areas of warfare. One was the result of competition between the basic suppliers of produce, fought out by small raiding parties over the whole of Lapland, Karelia and Bothnia; the other was a battle for control of the territories at the head of the Gulf of Finland, fought by the techniques of devastation, siege, castle-building and amphibious invasion. These territories were the provinces (
volost
or
gislalagh
) of Savolaks (north-west of Lake Ladoga), Jääskis (between Ladoga and Viborg) and Ayräpää (the coastland from Viborg to the Neva), which were peopled by Karelians; Ingria, or Izhora, south of the Neva; and Vod, or Watland, on either side of the river Luga, sometimes known as the province of Koporye. These lands were the gateway through which Lapland produce and the Baltic trade reached Novgorod and Novgorod exported to the West. Whereas the battle for the Far North was for access to hunting grounds, fisheries and nomadic camps, and could not be simplified by the drawing of boundaries, the battle for the Neva and Ladoga did involve a fixed frontier between empires and the imposition of political control on settled populations.