The Northern Crusades (9 page)

East of the Vistula a dense deciduous forest stretched most of the way from the Baltic coast to the west Russian uplands. In the Wendish woodlands, the going was difficult; here, for the most part, there was no way through at all. Layers of dead wood, luxuriant undergrowth, lakes, bogs and hills confined human settlement to the coastal strip and the valleys of the Vistula, Niemen and Dvina; and among the oaks, ash, elms, linden-trees and maples that hemmed in the cleared ground grazed the aurochs, the bison, the bear and the elk.

This area, of some 400 miles from north to south, 300 from east to west, was the home of a group of peoples known nowadays as Balts. They seem to have arrived as the earliest westward migration of the Indo-European family, and by 1100 had lived there for at least 3000 years, during which they had lost ground outside the forest to later immigrants. Their languages were archaic, and are divided into an East and West Baltic group; their common civilization and religious belief make it possible to treat them as a unity similar to that of the West Slavs, but whether they considered themselves in this light is uncertain. From the earliest times, they had lived as separate peoples, occupying defined geographical limits. They were

These larger nations were associations of smaller groups, which may be termed tribes, and which were the effective political units until historical times. The tribe could mobilize as an army (
karya
in Prussian,
karias
in Lithuanian) and assemble in a meeting (
wayde
); it had its own defensive refuge forts, and took collective responsibility for keeping its frontiers. Some tribes were remarkably ancient (Ptolemy mentioned two south-east Prussian tribes, the Galindians and Sudovians, in the second century AD, and they survived into the thirteenth century), but their ability to maintain their autonomy and manpower was evidently unequal. Some tribal armies had bigger forts and more effective war-leaders than others. Some combined, as did the Zemaiciai (Samogitians) and Aukstaiciai, who made up the Lithuanians. Some throve at the expense of their neighbours. Some lost land to outsiders – as the Pomesanians and Pogesanians of Prussia had been pushed back from the Vistula by the Poles before 1200, and the Letts of Jersika had been subjugated by the Russians. Tribes could combine in warfare, but there is no evidence that the whole collection of tribes we call a nation ever came together for a common purpose until after the twelfth century. The Prussian tribes never acted as one, perhaps because until the crusades any one or two were able to deal with outside aggression; the Lithuanians were welded together by the vigorous leadership of a line of rulers that came to power in the early thirteenth century. What gave the nations their identity before that was their exploitation of broadly homogeneous settlement areas, a common language and common religious cults. The discernible social developments of the period 1000–1200 – militarization, lordship, class-distinction, accumulation of heritable wealth – were not necessarily leading to greater cohesion or solidarity between the tribes. For example, the five ‘jurisdictions’ we find among the Curonians in the ninth century had become eight in the thirteenth century, and as late as 1219 the Lithuanians obeyed five great chiefs and sixteen lesser ones.

Like the Slavs, the Balts were farmers, clearing land by burn-beating and tree-cutting, ploughing it both with wooden and with iron-tipped
ploughs, and raising crops on a two- or three-field rotation: mostly inferior wheat (spelt), rye and millet, but they knew about legumes, oats and barley. They harvested both with sickle and with scythe, raised cattle and horses, grew flax and wove linen. They had been settled in this region so long that they had little to learn about getting a living from it, and they had mastered the art of winning valuable commodities and foods from the surrounding forest and sea: from the forest, honey, wax and furs; from the sea, amber, the petrified resin of the fir-tree washed ashore along the coast of the Prussian peninsula of Samland. Since Neolithic times this substance had been exported to southern Europe and exchanged
en route
for Mediterranean artefacts; it remained for centuries the most profitable product of the Baltic. The exhaustion of rival deposits on the west coast of Jutland left the Prussians a monopoly, and Scandinavian merchants, also interested in furs and slaves, dealt with them, and even settled among them, at the ports of Truso and Wiskiauten in the period 700–900. During those years the Vikings may have secured the sort of lordship over some Prussians that they were to gain over Slavs and other Eastern peoples, but the evidence for this is slender, and King Alfred’s informant Wulfstan reported the Prussians to be a strong and independent nation. The Curonians appear to have been tributary to the Swedes in the ninth century, but, long before 1100, both they and the Prussians had emerged as redoubtable seafarers, trading and raiding on their own account, in vessels not unlike those of the Vikings.

The leaders of the coastal Balts took to the sea; but all the Balt nations were strengthening their defences by building large earthworks topped by wooden walls and towers, and by accepting the authority of warlords. These leaders – ‘kings’, ‘captains’ and ‘dukes’ in foreign sources – were the organizers of the tribal aristocracy, the warriors who could equip themselves with horses and weapons, or knew how to use them. Such fighters, at least before 1200, probably consisted of most of the able-bodied men of the tribe, and must therefore have included small cultivators who would have been classed as unfree or unmilitary peasants among the Danes and Slavs; they went to war in clothes of linen and wool, their bodies protected by shields and helmets, and were familiar with both the stirrup and the spur. Their leaders decked themselves in more elaborate equipment, and enhanced their position by accumulating loot and slaves, but it would appear that in 1200 the building-up of large
private estates of land had not got very far among them. According to Wulfstan, the Balts of his day competed for a dead man’s wealth by horse-races after his death; in the thirteenth century landownership was vested in extended kin-groups rather than in individuals.

Slave-ownership and accumulations of silver currency bars were the most important differentials of wealth; perhaps wives were as well. The Curonian chiefs appear from the archaeology of their graves to have enjoyed as high a standard of living as any other Northern social group at this period; they could certainly dispose of iron, precious metal, jewellery, women and manpower in as much profusion as the Scandinavian landlords whom they preyed on and bargained with, and the size of the great earthworks at Impiltis (12½ acres) and Apuole attest their military potential. The price for this prosperity was paid mostly by the peasants of Sweden and Curonia, who for fear of raids and captivity were unable to live along their fertile coastlands, and by the prisoners the Curonian chiefs imported for ransom, forced labour or trade.

The Lettish chiefs maintained their hold on the Dvina valley by setting themselves up in similar huge fortifications, which served as settlements and trading-posts for their dependants; their remains can be seen at Lielupe, Tervete, Daugmale, Jersika and elsewhere. They had recently learned how to conserve fuel by using stone or clay stoves rather than open hearths, and the Dvina supplied them with a constant flow of customers for their wares, and of the silver, wool and weapons they took in exchange. There were Russian tribute-posts at Jersika and Kauguru (Kukenois, Kokenhusen), but the Letts were not Russified, and for the most part they held their own against all comers. It could be said of them, as Bartholomew the Englishman wrote of the Lithuanians in the 1230s, that they were

This tendency to dig in, fight back and grow rich had not endeared the Balts to Christendom, or opened their country to Christian missions. Boleslaw the Terrible of Poland had sent St Adalbert of Prague to the
Prussians in 997 and they had martyred him; Sweyn II of Denmark told Adam of Bremen that he had had a church built among the Curonians, but nothing more is heard of it. The cult of holy places, plants and animals, the cult of the dead (
veles
) and the cult of gods were the essential guarantees of the health, security, success and identity of the family, village and tribe, and the wise men and women who understood the rites were treated with the utmost respect. Festivals of fecundity, and funerals involving the sacrifice of horses and humans, were the high-points of the year, and the lesser domestic rituals were to survive in some areas down to the eighteenth century. And, just as the paganism of the West Slavs appears to have gained in vigour under assault from outside, so the paganism of the Balts was to reveal remarkable powers of development wherever it was saved from the first impact of the Church Militant by determined war-leaders. The sacrificial fire-place and four-headed pillar under the cathedral cemetery of Riga were not the end of the story.

North of the Dvina valley, the country changes. First come the boggy highlands and rocky coasts of Estonia, where the oak, the ash and the elm no longer predominate, and pine grows thicker; ‘the glebe thereof bereth menelich corne’, wrote Bartholomew. ‘This lond is moyste with waters and pondes. There is plente of fyshe of the see, and of layes and pondes: there ben many flokkes of bestes.’ East of Lake Chud (Peipus, Peipsi), where the last swans nested, and then north, lies the great coniferous forest, drained by wide rivers in north-western Russia and threaded by a complicated pattern of bogs, lakes and streams in Finland. We approach the climatic frontier, where arable soils dwindle and the calendar defeats the farmer; flour is eked out with ground pine-bark, there are no bees and no orchards, hen’s eggs are a delicacy. Gathering, trapping and hunting play a much larger part in the life of the farming communities. Summer is sometimes brilliant, always brief; the shadow of winter lies over the whole year.

In this region, Swedes and Norwegians came and went, and the Slavs had settled; but the true natives were the nations speaking Finno-Ugrian languages, the least numerous of the old Northern peoples, though the ones spread over the widest homeland, a belt 500 miles deep running a thousand miles from the Bothnian Gulf to the Urals, interrupted only by a Slavonic finger pointing north from Polotsk to Pskov and Novgorod. These peoples appear to have migrated westwards before 1400
bc
and
to have reached Finland via Estonia in Roman times; at least, some went there, and others, the Livs, pushed south to the mouth of the Dvina, while the Estonians (Chuds to the Russians) kept to the highlands and southern coast of the Finnish Gulf, and settled the islands of Dagö and ösel (Hiiumaa and Saaremaa). They settled in tribes with defined territories, like the Balts; there were three among the Livs, fifteen or sixteen among the Estonians, and each territory encompassed groups of settlements called
kilegunde – Kilegund
being the word later used for ‘parish’.

At the head of the Gulf of Finland, between Novgorod and the river Narva, lived the Vods. North of the Gulf were four separate peoples, usually named Finns by later Western sources. The
Kainulaiset
were settled round the Bothnian Gulf. On the south-west tip of Finland were found the
Suomi
, or Finns proper (called
Turci
, as in the port of Turku, by Adam of Bremen), a partly baptized and semi-tributary
gens
of experienced tillers and fishers keeping to the edge of the great inland forest. To the east of them came the Hämäläiset (Tavastians to the Swedes, Yam to the Russians), who lived by the lakes of middle Finland and used the empty southern coast for their summer hunting trips. Then came the Karelians (Korel to the Russians, Biarmians to the Norwegians), who settled and hunted along a wide strip from Lake Ladoga to the White Sea and the north end of the Bothnian Gulf. They moved north in summer for the fishing and fur-gathering from tributary Lapps, and south again in winter to trade with the Russians.

These were the westernmost members of the great Fennic family; but even Adam of Bremen was aware that further east came a whole new Fennic world, which, by the twelfth century, Russian writers liked to regard as their own. The author of the Primary Chronicle, a monk of Kiev, tells us their names: the Ves, the Eastern Chud, the Pechera, the Perm, the Cheremis, the Merya, the Mordva and others – all these were reputed tributaries of Novgorod, as were the Vods, Estonians and Karelians in the west. It appears that they did sometimes pay tribute – and sometimes they killed the collectors; but what bound them to the Russians was the attraction of the Novgorod fur market, and the goods the Novgorodian concessionaires were able to offer in exchange for furs when they met them at their trading-posts. It was a relationship that left both parties to go their own way for most of the year; indeed, it depended on their doing so. And this was the kind of link that most
Fennic peoples accepted either with outsiders or with each other; in no case, by this date, does it appear to have hampered their autonomy or interfered with their distinctive cultures.