The Northern Crusades (4 page)

The Baltic was not always a sea. In its underlying ooze there rest the shells of a little mollusc,
Ancylus fluviatilis
, which lives only in fresh water. Seven thousand years ago, the sea-bed was a lake, formed by water draining off the Scandinavian and Central European highlands: ‘Lake Ancylus’ to geologists. Round it was a marshy plain, stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, until the ocean drowned the western area to form the North Sea. Then Lake Ancylus drained into this new sea through two channels. One, now blocked, is marked by the great lakes of central Sweden; the other consisted of the passages between the Danish islands and Scania, called the Sound and the Belts. Then the salt water began leaking into the lake through these channels, and it became the sea which has been known since medieval times as the Baltic, after the Belts.

But the salt water has never succeeded in filling it, because of the volume of river water being discharged into it from the south and the east. The Baltic drinks up four huge continental rivers: the Oder and the Vistula, which flow from the Bohemian and Carpathian mountains, 300 miles away, and the Niemen and Dvina, which drain off the Russian Plain. In the north, where the Baltic forks into the Bothnian and Finnish gulfs, the water comes off the Fenno-Scandian highlands in numerous
smaller rivers, and remains almost fresh. So you have a brackish, mostly landlocked, half-sea, where the tide ebbs and flows very feebly, intruding sinuously into a region so austere that in very cold winters the ice has been known to cover almost the entire surface of water. As a result of this intrusion the region possesses several natural features which have influenced and partly determined the way local civilizations have developed.

In the first place, the link with the ocean through the Belts has softened the climate so as to make it possible to lead the sort of life we call civilized. If you trace the 60th parallel, which bisects the Baltic, round the world, you will go through Siberia, Yakutsk, Kamchatka, Alaska, Hudson’s Bay – horrible places where until the nineteenth century no one was able to survive according to the rules of European (that is, Mediterranean) culture; and the sad story of the Norse colonies on Greenland shows what happened when they tried. Yet east of the Sound and the Scandinavian mountains there were peoples who were already recognizable members of the European family in the ninth century. They were enjoying a privileged climate, however harsh by Mediterranean standards. Thanks to their sea, they could raise crops, keep cattle, and live in homesteads and villages right up to the Arctic Circle.

At the same time, they lived on the edge of an intensely cold area, where animal life has to be thickly furred, and where large tracts of land are useless for agriculture; only the nomad can live there, and when the agriculturalists pushed north they had to learn some of the arts of survival in a cold climate from the hunters and gatherers who were there first. The Baltic provided easy access to these regions in summer, but the newcomers could only go so far, and then they had to stop or change their ways.

Climate made a frontier. In the early Middle Ages it ringed the Gulf of Bothnia, about a hundred miles from the coasts of northern Sweden and northern Finland. To the west it doubled back up the ‘Keel’ of high mountains in Norway to the Arctic Ocean; to the east it struck south-east to the tip of Lake Ladoga, then on across the North Russian Plain. On one side of this line, human existence depended on the plough and the tilled field and the grass meadow; on the other, the area called Finnmark by the Norse, it was the skills of huntsman, trapper, and herdsman which counted. Up there – or down there, since Bothnian means ‘bottom’, both to Finns and to Swedes – everything was different: there were no fixed
villages, no harvests, no wheels, no kingdoms and no churches. The people moved with their reindeer and portable huts across areas that could not be fitted into political geography until modern times; they were Lapps, for the most part, with trading and hunting parties of Norwegians, Swedes and Finns moving among them in winter, and bargaining for their furs, their feathers and their children – or robbing them, for it was the southerners who were the human wolves of the sub-Arctic. The Vikings knew these wanderers well, and the authors of the sagas sometimes sent their heroes skiing across the Far North to do battle or business with the nomads or with other interloping frontiersmen; but they were never at home in Finnmark, and were convinced that the inhabitants were magicians, who could control the weather, change their shapes, and bring the dead back to life. Less northerly medieval writers peopled the Far North with freaks: amazons who made themselves pregnant by sipping the water and produced dog-headed male children, sold yapping on the Russian slave-market; white-headed savages defended by monstrous hounds; green men who lived a hundred years; and cannibals. Thus Adam of Bremen, in the 1070s; not until 1555, when the exiled Swede Olaus Magnus published his work
Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus
(‘History of the Northern Peoples’) at Rome, was educated Europe given a credible account of the Lapps.

The climatic frontier was a barrier to understanding, because those who lived beyond it had worked out a system of survival that meant organizing their lives in ways outsiders found alien. Small groups of families, amounting to 100-150 souls, would lay claim to a ‘home’, or
sit
, which consisted of a route and its resources between summer and winter camps. The reindeer-droving, trapping, fishing and fathering along the route were regulated by a council of heads of families, the
naraz
, and the adjustment of boundaries between each
sit
was left to a meeting of delegates from each
naraz
of the adjacent groups. Some fisheries and hunting-grounds would be exploited by teams from more than one
sit
, and such joint enterprises would establish bonds between the family groups they came from, but the cohesion was weak. Outsiders liked to think of kings, strongholds and armies among the Lapps, but they were using the wrong words; it was too difficult to explain.

However, the settled communities living on the edge of the frontier were deeply affected by the closeness of the alien world. It was a constant source both of profit and of danger: of profit, through trade and the
direct tapping of animal resources by fishers and hunters who had learned their skills from the nomads; of danger, through hard winters that led to crop failures and death by starvation, and through depredations on their livestock by bears, wolves and smaller beasts of prey. In the Novgorod Chronicle we read how this often prosperous city too near the edge of the wild was brought to its knees by starvation again and again – in 1128, for example, when last year’s frost had killed the winter corn:

It was just as bad in 1230, when 3030 were alleged to have died of starvation, out of a population that cannot have exceeded 5000, and the chronicler related how

And in 1413–14 the roving Burgundian knight Ghillebert de Lannoy discovered that ‘in winter, no foodstuffs come to the market of Novgorod the Great, be it fish, pork, or mutton, and no game, because everything is dead and frozen’.
³

It could be just as bad in all the Northern countries: the Baltic climate had brought grain-eating peoples to live on the edge of destruction. On the other hand, it was a region which was not ignored by the rest of Europe – again, thanks to its sea.

For the draining into the Baltic of five great rivers brought immense tracts of southern and eastern territory within reach of the Far North. In the Middle Ages, the Saxon marches of Brandenburg, Meissen and Lusatia, the Polish principalities and duchies of Silesia, and the Bohemian land of Moravia were all linked to the Baltic by the Oder. There were repeated contacts. For the Saxon princes it was a matter of expansion and alliance. The margrave of Brandenburg was trying to seize Stettin as early as 1147, and was raiding the surrounding territories in the 1190s; the duke of Saxony established a colony at Lübeck in 1158, and married two of his children to the offspring of the Danish king; the margrave of Meissen married his daughter to the king of Denmark in 1152. The bishop of Moravia went north to preach to Baltic Slavs in 1147, and the Silesian princes became regular crusaders in the ensuing two centuries. For the river was an economic artery, and the more of it a ruler controlled, the richer he got; the more he competed for power and wealth along its sources and tributaries, the more he was interested in the affairs of those who lived beyond its mouth.

The Vistula brought in the Polish rulers at an early date: Boleslaw the Terrible was already hoping to control its estuary at the turn of the tenth century, and this ambition remained a cardinal point in the policy of all his more active successors, even though the centre of their power lay hundreds of miles upstream, at Cracow on the edge of the Carpathians. But the Vistula also involved the Russian principality of Volhynia, and the world of the steppe; in 1241 it even brought an army of Mongols into the forests of Prussia.

Similarly, the Niemen involved the Russians of Minsk, as well as the Lithuanians, the Dvina brought in Polotsk, and the Lovat- Volkhov -Lake-Ladoga-Neva waterway brought in the whole area of Novgorod’s influence, stretching to the Urals. The prime importance of river communications throughout Russia meant that here porterages between tributary streams extended the ‘human catchment area’ of the Baltic for immense distances – to the Arctic Ocean via the northern Dvina, to the Black Sea via the Dnieper, and to the Caspian via the Volga. All over this network Baltic commodities flowed outwards, and goods scarce in the North flowed in, and princes and merchants concerned themselves with what was going on in the region where the rivers ended. The prince of Polotsk had a marriage alliance with the king of Denmark in the twelfth century; the prince of Smolensk made a treaty with the merchants
of Riga and Gotland in 1229; and with the rise of Moscow in the fifteenth century her landlocked rulers were irresistibly drawn to the Gulf of Finland and the Bay of Riga. By 1555, according to Olaus Magnus, ‘Muscovite Russian’ was one of the five current languages of the sub-Arctic world – like German.

The basins from which the great rivers flowed were penetrated by Latin and Byzantine civilizations far earlier than was the Baltic coast, and the differences between upriver and downriver societies were never greater than in the early Middle Ages. River contacts reflected the difference. Attempts at exploitation, conversion, conquest, even assimilation were added to the exchange of goods, immigration of colonists, and casual raids, which had been going on since Neolithic times. But it was the flow of water that made it all possible.

This leads to a third sea-determined constant of Baltic culture. The mixing of fresh and salt water in a large sheltered pool creates conditions that are very congenial to fish, and to fishermen. In spring, the Baltic becomes an inviting soup of plankton. Water from the middle of the North Sea flows in along the bottom and brings in the mackerel about May – in the Middle Ages, accompanied by seals, bigger fish and the occasional whale. Bank water, from the Dutch and German flats, comes in above this, and the herring ride with it. Until the fifteenth century they arrived in April or May, to spawn, and they stayed until November. The top layer of water, the brackish Baltic current, attracts salmon and eels from the rivers; and all the lakes and waterways of the surrounding countries once teemed with every kind of freshwater fish, from perch to pike. Olaus Magnus devoted a whole book within his work to fish, and another to monstrous fish, and all throughout the Middle Ages the catching, processing and vending or eating of these creatures played a large and growing part in the lives of the Northern peoples, radically affecting their economics and politics.

According to a fable in Knytlinga Saga (ch. 28) the harsh king Canute IV of Denmark (see below,
p. 26
) had tamed his Scanian subjects by threatening to take away their fishing rights in the sound, even before 1086. They submitted because they could not live without the herring; and by c. 1250, when the saga was written, that was a credible story. However, archaeology reveals a comparatively low fish consumption in Viking Age sites round the Baltic (compared with Norway), as well as rather sparse coastal settlement, and no sign of ‘fishing communities’,
despite many hooks and traps. In the twelfth century and later, there was a change: stretches of coast in the western Baltic were transformed every summer by the setting up of bothies and tents in the temporary camps known as
fiskelejer
, where fishermen, driers, merchants and king’s men came together and held markets. The most famous of these were situated on the south-western tip of Scania, at Skanör and Falsterbo, and in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries they formed a virtually independent commonwealth, ruled by their own customs and laws and attracting buyers from all over Europe. The king of Denmark and his archbishop took their cut, and left the fishermen and merchants to run their own business; and meanwhile, every spring, the herring migrated south through the Sound in masses so dense that at times a man had only to scoop them out of the water in a pail.