The Northern Crusades (5 page)

Other fishing methods had changed the look of river mouths and shallow coastal waters. Off Scandinavian shores there were ‘eel-yards’, lines of stakes supporting platforms from which the eel-catcher could set and manage his traps, and herring-weirs, or enclosures of stakes which could be made secure by sealing them with nets or wickerwork (there is a surviving example at Kappeln). In the running water of the great Slav river mouths there were fish-fences and weirs (
jazy
) so numerous that the Danish raiding fleets of the 1160s and 1170s were continually obstructed by them, and destroyed them as they advanced; in Danish and Swedish rivers there were V-shaped salmon-traps (
laxakar
).

The organization and development of fisheries was a matter of politics. It meant competitive exploitation of water resources and manpower, and here the princes and the landowners stepped in; already in the twelfth century the
piscatura
was a form of lordship along the coast, on rivers and lakes, jealously guarded against encroachments by poachers, and protected from overfishing by bans on certain kinds of net. The fish itself was an acceptable token of power, and could be paid in tribute or tithe; the islanders of öland, off south-east Sweden, made their sole acknowledgement of loyalty to the king at Uppsala by sending him an annual present of herring, and in the 1170s Bishop Absalon of Roskilde let the Slavs of Rügen present him with a single fish in recognition of his sea-patrols, which enabled them to bring in their catch unmolested. When the warriors of the king of Poland reached the Pomeranian coast in 1107 they sang of their conquest in these terms:

Thus the introduction of new fishing and preserving methods, and the rise and fall of demand on the international market, were matters of life and death to the Northern peoples – for Lapps, Finns, Balts and, later on, Germans were as concerned in the business as Scandinavians and Slavs.

The last point worth stressing in this survey of the natural peculiarities of the North concerns transport and communication; and for the most part that meant boats.

It was possible to move over North-East Europe by land, even at this date, but the fewness and badness of the trackways made it slow going and left large tracts of country out of reach. In the 1070s Adam of Bremen reckoned that the overland journey from Hamburg to Wollin took a week; it was something over 200 miles. The sea-voyage from Oldenburg to Novgorod was five times as far, and was expected to take only twice as long. If you went from Denmark to Sigtuna, in eastern Sweden, and took the land-route, the journey was estimated at four weeks; by sea, five days. In winter the difference might be more, or less, depending on whether the snow was deep – since it was then possible to take short-cuts across rivers and lakes, and the traveller might well be equipped with skis or a sledge; but, on the whole, nobody travelled in winter unless he had to, or was drawn by the profits of raiding or hunting. May to October were the months for moving, and during that period the sea was preferable to the land.

It was a very navigable sea, once the ice melted. Nowadays Danish coastal waters freeze only one winter in three, and never for longer than three winter months. The average duration of ice in south-Baltic harbours varies from three days in Flensburg Fjord to three weeks at Stralsund. Riga and St Petersburg are closed by ice about six months a year, the Estonian ports about four, like the Bothnian coast. Then the good weather begins, with easterly winds frequent from April to midsummer, and prevailing Westerlies from July to September. The mariner then faces a long stretch of water, never more than 200 miles across, along which his course is made easy by numerous islands and shallow anchorages.

The art of navigation was the art of staying within sight of the coast,
knowing the landmarks and taking soundings of dangerous shoals; above all, of reading weather from the sky. Compasses were not used in the Baltic until the sixteenth century, and were hardly needed then, except by strangers, for the previous 300 years had seen the coastline punctuated with tall spires and crosses, immediately recognizable ten miles out to sea, and the difficult channels marked out by ‘booms’ and stakes. The dangers were dense fogs, sudden high winds, and pirates; and the proximity of shelter made it easier to avoid at least the first two of these than in the North Sea, the Channel or the Mediterranean.

The earliest Baltic sailors were probably the Finns, who erected birch-bushes in skin boats to catch the wind. The Germanic peoples developed the techniques of oar and sail, until the ‘Viking ship’ became the dominant sea transport over the whole of Northern Europe, both for warriors and for goods. Whoever controlled the men who knew how to build and manage such craft got wealth and power, and from the ninth to the eleventh century Viking leaders tended to apply this rule in the regions where wealth and power were greatest the British Isles, Western Europe and the Russian riverways. By 1100 the opportunities for this kind of adventure were much reduced, but, within the Baltic region, power and the warship still went together, and a ruler’s importance depended on the size of his fleet. The kings of the Danes and Swedes had attempted to provide themselves with vessels by imposing military duty on their more powerful subjects. They met with little success, and had to appeal for the crews of their raiding fleets. After
c.
1170 Danish kings relied on a public contribution by ship-districts to man defensive levy-fleets, and for this the whole kingdom was assessed at some 860 ships. No more than 250 could be expected for offensive campaigns.
⁵

However, there were many varieties of ship, and each one brought a different reward to its owner and crew, and influenced social organization in a particular way. There were at least two classes of warship: the large sixty-oar ‘dragon’, or
skeior
, which the Norwegians had perfected, and which was usually too deep in the water for effective use in shallow seas and river wars, and the ordinary forty-oar levy ship,
snekke
to the Danes,
snakkja
to the Swedes, which the Slavs built somewhat lighter and lower than the Scandinavians. These needed crews of trained warriors, provisions for overseas expeditions, and a complicated technique of building and maintenance; therefore the kings and pirate chiefs who
controlled them had to be landowners, lords of retinues, the masters of populous communities. Their ships had room on board for slaves, cattle and loot, but it was restricted, and such cargoes limited the movements of the crew. When it came to trading, there was another kind of ship, long, but wide and deep amidships, with fewer or no oarsmen, relying on wind power – the
byrthing
. Behind the
byrthing
was the partnership of two or more owners, pooling their resources and risking shipwreck and piracy for gain; and in the twelfth century the makers of such partnerships appear to have been associating into guilds and companies to protect themselves against a hostile world. The men of Gotland, or those who enriched themselves by trade, ran their island through an association of this kind, without the interference of the Swedish king; in the 1150s the landowners and merchants of Zealand safeguarded themselves from piracy by maintaining a small fleet of raiders under a privateer called Wedeman. The vulnerability of the
byrthing
made self-help a necessity, until princes could be got to assume responsibility for its safety.

Then there were the small ships, a whole variety of types used by families or groups of neighbours for raiding, ferrying, trading, fishing and transport: the four- to fifteen-oared
skude
of the Danes, a keeled vessel that could accompany warships, carry bowmen, scout upriver, or be used for small-scale depredation on its own; the flat-bottomed
pram
of the Slavs, for riding over marshes and lakes – not found in early sources, but soon to be imitated all over the Baltic; the small keeled sailing-boat that plied between villages with local produce; the
haapar
, built for speed and resilience on the rivers flowing into the Bothnian Gulf, held together with green roots, poplar twigs and deer sinews; the
strug
and
ushkui
of the Russian rivers; and the
bolskip
, the
skute
and the
kane
, which carried merchandise up and down the Peene. For every shore- and river-dweller in North-East Europe, the boat was a vital part of his life and livelihood; changes in the technique of boat-building, and in the balance of sea-power, would have momentous effects.

‘Sea-power’ is the wrong term. It has come to mean the hegemony that depends on the naval power of a state; but what concerned the medieval North was more like ship- or boat-power, the ability of any group, from an individual to an association of traders or a king, to achieve a variety of ends through ownership or control of the appropriate type of craft. At no time could a fleet of big warships dominate the whole
range of Northern waterways; at most they could patrol certain areas, routes and harbours, such as when Canute the Great and Valdemar the Great policed the waters of Denmark, but such periods of limited sea-power were exceptional. At most times, pirates, levy-ships, slavers, traders, fishers and river transports carried on their various businesses in a state of wary co-existence, with battles, pursuits and deals recurring as occasion served. In the 1070s the king of Denmark had an arrangement with the pirates who infested the Great Belt: they robbed, he took a cut and looked the other way. At the turn of the fourteenth century things were not much better: the queen of Denmark waged open war with an association of pirates based on the north German coast, the
Vitalienbrüder
, but Danish, Swedish and Mecklenburg landowners connived at their robberies and bought and sold with them. Nobody could rule the waves when nobody could rule more than a share of the coasts and rivers that hemmed them in so closely.

In these various ways, the conjunction of a temperate sea and intractable hinterlands of forest, mountain and bog, of mild summers and dreadful winters, of nomad and farmer, had given the Baltic and North-Eastern world of the early Middle Ages a character of its own, which marked it off from other regions and compelled the people who lived there to work, eat, fight and even think in similar fashions. It was a world to some extent separated from others by natural barriers, although, even in the case of the brutal climatic frontier, there was a way in and out for those who knew the rules. To the south, east and west, access was more open, but there were still difficulties, and these difficulties could be greatly heightened by peoples interested in keeping intruders out.

The coastal areas of the North German Plain, for example, were detached from the big rivers that ran through them, and riddled with small streams flowing directly into the sea from sodden infertile plateaux – the Mecklenburg lakes, the Masurian lakes and the bogs of Hither Pomerania. Here are the Danes trying to get through the ‘wide, obstructive and filthy marsh’ north of Demmin in 1171, as described by Saxo Grammaticus:

South of these marshes, and south of the barren highlands of Outer Pomerania, stretches a belt of sandy forest and heathland, also interspersed with lakes and bogs, leached, acid and intractable. It runs from the North Sea to the Vistula, and baffled the cultivator until modern times. The missionary Otto of Bamberg crossed it on his way to the coast in 1124 and 1127. On the first occasion, going from Poznan to Pyrzyce, his disciple Herbord claimed that.

That was about ninety miles in six days; and in 1127 Otto took five days covering the thirty-five miles between Havelburg and Lake Müritz. It was not surprising that most travellers kept to the riverbanks, or went by boat.