Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (51 page)

Decisive success came in 1168, when Valdemar plundered and burned the cliff-top sanctuary of the Wendish high-god Svantovit at Arkona on Rügen. The shocked Rugians surrendered, accepted Danish rule and submitted to baptism. Now joined by the Rugian fleet, the Danes destroyed the Liutizian pirate stronghold of Dziwnów on the island of Wolin near the mouth of the Oder in 1170, so removing another threat to their security. After the Danes defeated a Wendish pirate fleet in a sea battle off the island of Falster two years later, Wendish pirates never ventured into Danish waters again. By 1185 the Danish tactic of devastating Viking-style raids had forced the submission of the Liutizians and the Pomeranians to give them control of the entire Baltic Sea coast from Rügen east to the mouth of the River Vistula. Conquest was not followed by military occupation or settlement, however. The Wends simply became tributaries of the Danes, who counted on the threat of punitive raids to keep their vassals loyal.

The Livonian Crusades

Crusading in the Baltic region received a new impetus in 1193, when pope Celestine III called for a crusade against the Livonians, a group of tribes who lived in what is now Latvia and Estonia. The papacy’s motive in this crusade was not simply the conversion of pagans, it was also to prevent the area coming under the influence of what it saw as the heretical Orthodox church. The Livonian Crusade was dominated from the outset by German crusading orders such as the Livonian Knights, the Sword Brothers and the Teutonic Knights, but the Danish king Valdemar II (r. 1202 – 41) saw an opportunity for territorial expansion and in 1218 he won full papal blessing for an invasion of Estonia. Valdemar landed at the Estonian trading place of Lyndanisse (modern Tallinn) in June the next year with a fleet of 500 longships. Longships were becoming decidedly old-fashioned by this time and this was probably the last occasion that they were used on such a large scale in the Baltic. Apart from the adoption of the stern-post rudder in place of the less-effective side rudder, longships had changed little since the Viking Age and they had long exhausted their development potential. German crusaders were now sailing the Baltic in cogs, a type of ship that probably originated in Frisia in the Viking Age. Unlike longships, cogs had no oars and relied entirely on a single square sail. Though they could not compete with longships for speed and manoeuvrability, cogs were sturdy and seaworthy, with broad, deep hulls and high sides, and were cheaper and easier to build. Cogs were first built to carry bulky cargoes – even the smallest cogs could carry twice the 20-ton cargo of a Viking
knarr
– but they proved surprisingly well-suited to war. Especially when fitted with wooden fighting platforms at the bows and stern, cogs towered over longships, giving their crews a clear advantage in a sea battle. Scandinavian technological conservatism helped the German-dominated Hanseatic League of mercantile cities – early adopters of the cog – to supplant the Scandinavians as the main trading and naval power in the Baltic in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Scandinavians continued to build longships for the coastal defence levy fleets until the early fifteenth century, but their ineffectiveness in battle against cogs had been demonstrated many times by then.

It is thought that Valdemar set up camp on the Toompea, a steep-sided flat-topped hill rising around 100 feet (30.5 m) above the harbour at Tallinn, giving excellent views over the sea and low lying coastlands. As well as being a good defensive position, the hill had religious significance to the Estonians, who believed that it was the burial mound of their mythological hero Kalev. Apparently overawed by the strength of Valdemar’s fleet, the Estonian chiefs agreed to submit and a few even allowed themselves to be baptised. However, this was all a ruse to lull the Danes into a false sense of security and the Estonians achieved complete surprise when they attacked the Danish camp a few days later. The battle of Lyndanisse achieved legendary stature in Danish historical traditions as the place where the country’s national flag, the Dannebrog, fell from Heaven as a sign to encourage the embattled Danes to fight on and overcome the pagans. Some historians have tried to rationalise this story, explaining it away as the sighting of an unusual weather phenomenon, but it is more likely to be pure fiction. The legend cannot be traced back any earlier than the sixteenth century, and the earliest known the use of the Dannebrog dates only to 1397, nearly 200 years after the battle. After his victory, Valdemar built a castle on the Toompea which, despite being incomplete, held out against an Estonian siege in 1223. It is from Valdemar’s castle that Tallinn’s name is derived, from Taani-linn, meaning the ‘Danes’ castle’: rebuilt many times, it now houses the Estonian parliament. After Valdemar’s final victory over the Estonians in 1224, a stone cathedral was built near the castle and the Toompea became the main centre of Danish secular and ecclesiastical government in Estonia. Tallinn has the best harbour on the Estonian coast and it soon attracted German merchants, who settled on the lower ground between the Toompea and the harbour, creating a commercial Lower Town. In 1285 the city, known to the Germans as Reval, joined the Hanseatic League and Germans continued to dominate the city’s economy until the twentieth century. Outside Tallinn, most of the land was parcelled out not to Danes but to Saxon lords, who paid a land tax to the Danish crown.

The failure to follow up conquest with occupation and settlement quickly doomed Denmark’s Baltic empire. Denmark’s increasingly obsolescent fleet could not dominate the Baltic sea lanes, and neither could it challenge the power of the Germans on land. The lands won during the Wendish crusades were conquered by German princes even before Valdemar’s death and in 1346 Denmark sold Estonia to the Teutonic Knights after a native uprising.

The
Swedish
Crusades

Swedish involvement with the crusades was, if anything, an even more naked land-grab than was Denmark’s. Like the Danes, the Swedes had a pirate problem: in their case the pirates were Estonians from the island of Saaremaa (Ösel in Swedish), Finns from Karelia (eastern Finland), and Curonians from modern Latvia, all of them pagan peoples. The Swedes, in turn, raided their persecutors, plundering and gathering tribute Viking-style, much as they had been doing for centuries. The Swedes were also competing for influence in the region with Novgorod, which was the most important centre for the lucrative fur trade. Swedes were as welcome as any other merchants to visit Novgorod to trade, but the city was powerful enough to prevent them raiding in Russia and gathering furs as tribute as they had done in the Viking Age. The Swedes now sought to profit from Novgorod’s fur trade by controlling the Gulf of Finland, which gave the city its ‘window on the west’, and by plundering Novgorodian ships, as happened in 1142 when a Swedish fleet captured three ships from Novgorod and killed 150 merchants. To secure its access to the Gulf, Novgorod began the conquest and conversion to Orthodox Christianity of the Karelian Finns, and retaliated against Swedish raids on its territory by raiding the shores of Lake Mälaren. After one raid they carried the church doors of the royal town of Sigtuna back to Novgorod. The Swedes countered Novgorod’s influence in Karelia with their own wars of conquest and conversion in Finland, which they justified by using the terminology of crusading. Because of its desire to limit the influence of the Orthodox church, the Catholic church supported the Swedish expeditions, but they were never given papal sanction like the crusades to the Holy Land or the Wendish and Livonian Crusades, and the Swedish crusaders were never offered the same spiritual rewards.

Later tradition has it that the first Swedish crusade in Finland was led by King Erik IX (r. 1155 – 60), some time around 1157. Erik is said to have brought the whole of the south-west of Finland under Swedish rule and to have converted the conquered Finns to Christianity. When Erik returned home he left behind a missionary bishop Henry of Uppsala who was later martyred by the Finns. Erik may well have campaigned in Finland, but the story of the crusade was probably invented as part of the cult that developed around his memory after he was murdered by rebel nobles as he left church after attending Mass on Ascension Day (18 May) 1160. Sweden was by that time the only Scandinavian kingdom without a royal saint, so it suited his successors to encourage his veneration as a martyr. The Swedish conquest of Finland was probably begun a long time before Erik’s reign, as place-name evidence suggests that Swedes had colonised the south-west coast around Turku (Swedish Åbo) as early as the mid-eleventh century, and was a slow process marked by frequent campaigns and many reverses. Even in the late twelfth century Sweden’s hold on south-west Finland was not secure. In a letter to a Swedish archbishop, Pope Alexander III (r. 1159 – 81) complained that: ‘the Finns always promise to obey the Christian faith whenever they are threatened by a hostile army... but when the army retires they deny the faith, despise the preachers and grievously persecute them.’

Because of their frequent backsliding, Pope Gregory IX called for a formal crusade against the Finns, but the Swedes ignored it and instead attacked Novgorod in 1240 only to be defeated by Alexander Nevsky at the Battle of the Neva. The Swedish conquest of Finland was finally secured by the so-called Second and Third Swedish Crusades. The Second Swedish Crusade (
c.
1248 – 50), led by the mighty aristocrat Birger Jarl, brought the Tavastia region of central Finland under firm Swedish control, while the Third Swedish Crusade (1292 – 3), aimed unashamedly at Christian Novgorod, conquered Karelia, ended the activities of Orthodox missionaries there, and established a castle at Vyborg (now in Russia). The Swedes hoped this would be a base from which to extend their conquests to the mouth of the Neva and cut Novgorod off from the Gulf of Finland. Years of raid and counter-raid followed until the Treaty of Noteborg in 1323 established a frontier between Swedish Finland and Novgorod, which left Novgorod in control of the Neva. The Swedes did eventually achieve their ambition of winning control of the Neva and cutting Russia off from the Gulf of Finland in 1595, only to lose it in 1702 to Peter the Great, the founder of St Petersburg. Unlike the ephemeral Danish conquests in the Baltic, the Swedish conquest of Finland had long-lasting consequences. This was in large part because here conquest was followed by settlement. In the wake of the crusaders, large numbers of Swedish peasant farmers, fleeing the imposition of serfdom at home, settled in southern Finland. Even though Russia ended Swedish rule in 1809, Finland still has a Swedish-speaking minority and recognises Swedish as one of its official languages.

CHAPTER 12

L
ARGS
, R
EYKHOLT AND
H
VALSEY

T
HE
V
IKING
T
WILIGHT

If the growth of state power had brought the Viking Age to a close in Scandinavia by 1100, it enjoyed a lingering twilight in areas where royal authority was weak or non-existent. In Orkney and the Hebrides, Norse and Norse-Gaelic chieftains still supplemented the income from their estates by leading Viking raids, while in Iceland and Greenland an essentially Viking Age society of local chieftains and free tenant farmers continued to make their own laws and settle disputes at the representative things. However, by 1200 these societies were an anomaly in a Europe of increasingly centralised kingdoms and were living on borrowed time.

Magnus Barefoot’s legacy

Magnus Barefoot’s reign marked the peak of Norwegian power in the Northern Isles and the Hebrides. Magnus’s campaigns more than paid for themselves with a great hoard of plunder and his conquests provided a potential source of revenue and manpower for the Norwegian crown but, and this was a big ‘but’, only if they could be controlled in the long term and at acceptable cost. Magnus was only able to assert royal authority in the isles because he was there in person with an army and a fleet at his back. This was not a situation that could be maintained indefinitely. Garrisoning the isles would have been prohibitively expensive and there still remained much to be done to establish royal authority firmly in Norway itself, never mind the remote islands around Scotland. Magnus’s achievement, therefore, proved ephemeral and did not long survive his death in battle in Ireland in 1103.

The only measures that Magnus had taken during his short life to consolidate royal authority in the Northern Isles was to depose the joint earls of Orkney, Paul and Erlend, in 1098, and appoint his eight-year-old son Sigurd in their place. In 1102 Magnus added the Kingdom of Man and the Isles to Sigurd’s nominal domains. If this arrangement had endured it might have helped create a tradition of loyalty to the Norwegian royal house, but Sigurd would have none of it. Once his father was dead, Sigurd sailed home to Norway to claim his share of the kingdom alongside his brother Eystein and he never returned. While Sigurd crusaded, his brother Eystein was focused entirely on building stable government and prosperity in Norway, so the islanders were left to fend for themselves. When Sigurd died in 1130 (he had ruled alone since Eystein’s death in 1123), a civil war broke out – a consequence of the Viking Age laws of succession that so often left kings with too many heirs – and only twice in the next 150 years did Norwegian kings visit their western dependencies. In the absence of the kings, royal authority predictably withered, creating a power vacuum that no one else was in a position to fill. The kings of the Scots certainly aspired to rule all the islands around Scotland’s coast, but there were still many areas of the mainland, such as Argyll, Caithness and Galloway, which they considered part of their kingdom but did not actually control. England was too distant and the Irish kings were too preoccupied with their struggles over the high kingship to try to impose any authority in the region. Within a few years of Magnus’s death, the Earldom of Orkney and the Kingdom of Man and the Isles reasserted their traditional autonomy, but neither of these polities was strong enough to prevent Norse and Gaelic Norse chieftains continuing to lead Viking raids for decades to come. Despite the establishment of Christianity, even monks could not feel secure: Iona was sacked by Norse pirates as late as 1240.