The Northern Crusades (7 page)

The process of assimilation to Western models took longer among the Swedes – there was a time-lag of about fifty years – but it went in the same direction. The last openly heathen king died at the end of the eleventh century, and until then the shrine of the old god Frey stayed open at Uppsala; the backwoodsmen of Småland were said to have been untouched by Christianity in the 1120s, and pockets of resistance survived much longer in other remote areas. However, in about 1120 a papal scribe was able to list seven out of the nine main districts of Sweden as bishoprics, and in 1164 the kingdom was granted an archbishop of its own, albeit subject to Lund. The consolidation of royal power also took longer – partly as a result of the weakness of the Church, partly because of the rivalry between competing dynasties between 1156 and 1250, and at first because of the continuing division between Swedes and Götar. Sparser settlement, poorer communications, colder winters and huger forests made control harder to establish; but the essentials were there.

Christianity had not pacified these peoples. They were still dominated by fighters, brought up to kill and be killed, whether they lived as princes, landowners or swordsmen; and between the fighting classes and the rest there was a barrier of birth, breeding and outlook reinforced by
heroic tradition and law. ‘By law shall the land be built’ ran the new saying, but the landowners made, remembered and administered the law, and foreigners found it brutal and un-Christian. When Canute IV had tried to soften it in the 1080s, he had met with fierce hostility; it was not until the second half of the twelfth century that it could be written down and humanized to some extent. It was not solely a matter of legalized oppression. The outrageous offender, even if he were rich, could be outlawed – as with King Nicholas’s son in 1131; the king had an interest in settling cases of open violence and feud, since he stood to gain his fine; and the procedures by which feud, pursuit of stolen goods, and inheritance could be carried on, were governed by notions of right. Until the 1130s there were no walled towns, private fortifications or extensive private jurisdictions to favour the strong yet further. Church law had to be modified and justified before it became binding in the courts for the Scandinavians, who had accepted Christ without rejecting their ancestral voices. They showed it in many ways. They persisted in using the old names: among the Danes, Sven, Erik, Harald, Aki, Toki, Bovi were still much commoner than Nigles, Pæter, Kristoffer. They listened to the old poems and paid Icelanders to recite. They continued to practise divorce, and, above all, displayed ruthlessness in revenge. Between 1131 and 1135 the numerous Danish royal family was almost wiped out in a war of vendetta, and on one occasion King Eric ‘the Unforgettable’ is reported to have had eight children, his own nephews and nieces, murdered in cold blood to round off a quarrel with his brother, whom he had already killed;
¹⁰
six bishops had died in battle against this Eric, yet he gave land to the canons of Lund and the monks at Ringsted, he was said to rule ‘by the favour of divine clemency’
¹¹
and he was reckoned a righteous man by the historian Saxo at the end of the century. Such men worshipped success; Christ would grant it, and give shelter to the blood-stained soul after death, and in return he expected baptism, liberality to his priests, penance, burial in hallowed ground – little more.

Landowners and hired swords who lived by these rules were as much a terror to their neighbours across the Baltic as had been their Viking ancestors, but by 1100 the pattern of their overseas enterprises had changed. In the East there was employment for warriors at the Russian and Byzantine courts, and war-bands continued to take that road; but opportunities for acquiring hegemony and land were fewer. We read of
no Swedish kings leading raids into Finland between the 1050s and the 1140s; the Russians kept an increasingly tight hold on the trade-routes and on the tributary peoples who supplied the furs, and the Swede who hoped to make his fortune had either to engage in trade as a merchant or to serve his time as a paid mercenary in the Varangian Guard, along with Danes, Norwegians, Icelanders and Englishmen. The money was there, but the competition was stiffer.

In the West, the alluring prospects which had led so many Danes to put to sea between 800 and 1075 were no longer so inviting. In 1069, 1075 and 1086, Sweyn II and Canute IV made serious attempts to begin the reconquest of England, but each attempt met with diminishing success; the last never sailed at all. The recalcitrant crews disbanded without permission, and, rather than pay a fine for neglect of duty, rose up and hunted their king to his death. As an English chronicler put it, ‘the Danes, who were once regarded as the most loyal of all peoples, became guilty of the most faithless and treacherous conduct imaginable’.
¹²
There may have been many reasons for this, but it will be enough to consider three.

In the first place, the captains were probably able to profit as much by staying at home as by risking a dangerous voyage to a well-defended island. The great families had accumulated too much land and money at home to go on adventures; the man who could get his own way in the
ting
, work his peasants or finance a trading-ship had no need to go to England for gain, and the hungry fighter would find ships enough to prey on in home waters. Even the fleets which reached England in 1069 and 1075 behaved as if they were out for a quick profit and a safe journey home, rather than the territorial conquest of 1016.

Secondly, Danish kings were no longer rich enough to keep pace with the cost of effective warfare in the West. Sweyn Forkbeard and Old Canute had kept a large mercenary army, but, when Canute’s successors lost England, they lost their main source of revenue, and were only able to maintain a small retinue of trained fighters. Sweyn II had begged Edward the Confessor for the loan of fifty ships’ crews in 1052, and had been refused. When his son Canute IV was killed at Odense in 1086, he had only twenty warriors about him. The great fleet that had deserted him had been a fleet of the wrong sort, its crews not trained in siege warfare, or equipped for a cavalry campaign. Other kings were wiser: his brother, Harold ‘the Soft’, and his Norwegian contemporary, Olaf ‘the Quiet’.

Thirdly, there were more immediate military problems at home: the coasts and frontiers of Denmark were being regularly raided and despoiled by the Baltic Slavs. The Danes had become a
Herrenvolk
on the defensive.

Of the three remaining groups of Northern peoples, the closest to the Scandinavian was the Slavonic, and in particular those West Slavs who occupied the coastlands and hinterland from the bay of Kiel to the Vistula, including the islands of Fehmarn, Poel, Rüigen, Usedom and Wollin. They were divided into a number of nations. From the Saxon and Danish frontiers to the Trave were settled the Wagrians, and from the Trave to the Warnow the Abotrites – two kindred peoples loosely united with the Polabians of the Elbe basin under one dominant dynasty. From the Warnow to Rügen, round the Oder mouths and up the Peene, was an unamalgamated group of tribes which was given the collective name of Liutizians or Wilzians – ‘terrible’ or ‘wolf’ people; the northernmost, on Rüigen and the coast facing, were the Rugians or Rani. The languages spoken by the Abotrites and Liutizians were somewhat different from those of their Sorb and Lusatian neighbours to the south, and are classified as the West Lechic; the East Lechic include the languages of the Poles and the nation which peopled the remainder of the West Slav coastland from the Oder eastwards to the Vistula – the Pomeranians, or ‘dwellers on the shore’, later differentiated towards Danzig by the names Pomerelian and Cassubian (‘shaggy-coatmen’).

The Baltic Slavs were the most recent arrivals in the North. They had moved in from the south-east, and occupied areas left vacant by migrating Germans at various dates from the first to the sixth centuries. By the eighth their boundaries were stable, although the struggles for supremacy within each nation led to some adjustments later. Adam of Bremen recognized that they were related to the Bohemians and Poles, and could therefore be described as forming part of the population of the large Central and East European area he called Slavia. Latin writers called them Slavs, but distinguished them from the Poles, Russians and Czechs, whom we also call Slavs; Scandinavians and Germans called them Wends. At this period they differed in some respects from all their neighbours, but they also had much in common, and this deserves to be emphasized.

For the Wends were mostly peasants, like the Scandinavians: tillers and herdsmen living in small villages and raising corn, flax, poultry and
cattle, with fishing, bee-keeping and trapping as side-lines. The common unit of land value was the
kuritz
or ploughland (always
uncus
in Latin, as opposed to the
mansus
, or German
Hufe
); the peasant paid a grain tax on this, and additional renders on any other kind of work he was engaged in. He appears in the early charters as a thrall, appendant to the
unci
he worked, or a contributor to the many payments owed by his village; and other evidence suggests that he was often a captured or purchased prisoner, held in hereditary servitude.

As in Scandinavia, the agricultural surplus maintained a landowning class: either country magnates living in forest strongholds with their retainers, or communities of warriors and burghers settled in towns. Slav society was intensely militarized. It had developed in the ninth and tenth centuries under pressure, between the hammer of the Vikings and the anvil of the Reich, and for long periods the Abotrites and Wagrians had been obliged to pay tribute to Danish kings and German bishops and marcher lords. The dominant class that emerged had held on to its territories and peasants by learning from the enemy and exploiting its own people to maintain effective armies, fleets and fortifications. The wider settlement areas were subdivided into small territories organized round one or more earth-walled, stockaded and moated forts, usually under the control of the ruler’s governor, or
voivot
. The
voivot
exacted military service from the warriors, and taxes from the peasants, and supplied the prince with hospitality when he came on his visits, which could be either occasions of prolonged feasting and public assembly, or shows of force and punitive intimidation. The prince was called
knes
, and as in Scandinavia acted as the leader of his people in general, and as the chief of an extended family of princely kinsmen, all of whom had claims of some kind to land and jurisdiction; but his power was limited.

For there were territories and territories. Some were hinterland forest areas, where the
knes
had land of his own and his
voivot
was unchallenged; others lay along the great waterways and inlets, and formed the ‘town-lands’ of thriving communities with a will of their own and the power to assert it. Alongside the geography of tribe, territory and principality lay the geography of urban communities. In the tenth century the Wends had already been grouped round small circular or oval earthworks, which early texts refer to as
civitates
. The effects of war, trade and reclamation tended to favour a small number of these at the expense of the rest, and the result, in the eleventh century, was a line of precocious
town communities lurking crab-like a few miles up every estuary from Denmark to the Vistula. They reveal the stages of their growth in their plans. At the highest points came the
gard (grod)
or
palatium
, a barracks, citadel and residence, usually reinforced with a moat, earth-wall and wooden towers. Below it, within a ring-wall, was the
urbs
, or
suburbium
, originally a place of refuge for the district, later a space crammed with the houses of nobles, artisans and merchants, except for one or more patches of holy ground where there were small timber temples. Outside the walls there was often a further concentration of dwellings, for fishermen, peasants and small traders, and a market. The pattern varied according to local terrain (the three hills of Stettin, for example) and according to the stage of development reached, but it formed a marked contrast to the simple quadrangular town-plotting of Denmark.

None of these towns was built directly on the coast; they were on inlets, rivers and lagoons – on top of a cliff, in the case of Arkona – where the balance between accessibility and security had allowed them to grow. Following the line from west to east, we begin thirty miles from the Danish and Saxon borders, with the ‘old fort’ of the Wagrians, Stargard to them, Brandehuse to the Danes, Oldenburg to the Germans. This coast was far too exposed to raiders for settlement, and Oldenburg could only be approached from the sea by going round to the east and sailing in along a fifteen-mile series of interconnecting lakes. Nevertheless, it was a sizeable port, and the inhabitants had grown rich on trade and piracy. A Saxon bishop had lived there in the tenth century, but the people had rejected his faith, and in the twelfth century the church was a ruin outside the walls and the temple served as the cult centre of the Wagrians.

From there a track ran southwards – not by the coast, but inland, through dense forest – for thirty miles, to the Trave, where an embryo town, Liubice or Old Lübeck, was beginning its existence under the protection of the
knes
, it was no more than a fort, some huts and an anchorage at this date, when the chief Polabian ‘city’ was the lake settlement of Ratzeburg, connected with the Baltic by a tributary of the Trave. The ‘great city’ of the Abotrites was Mecklenburg (Veligrad), five miles upstream from Wismar Bay, dominating the outfall of a wide network of lakes and rivulets. On the next large inlet to the east, the Warnow, there were the beginnings of the future city of Rostock – a temple, anchorage and merchant settlement seven miles upriver that
was soon to outgrow the large fortifications where the Kissini took refuge nearby.