The Northern Crusades (10 page)

Consider the life of the nations living in Finland. The Tavastians and Suomi had adopted a pattern of settlement that consisted of a log-hut and smaller buildings, surrounded by a stockade, where an extended family and its slaves lived under the authority of its head, the
talonpoika
. A group of such family hamlets would have a common identity as a clan,
suka
, and a group of clans would share the use of a hill-fort and call themselves a tribe; but the word used,
heimo
, was borrowed from the Balts and did not represent the same all-absorbing unity as among the Letts, or even the Estonians. It was an association for more limited purposes, including war; and, in so far as invasions by the Swedes and Russians seem to have been unsuccessful before the twelfth century, these purposes were achieved. There were no kings or chiefs to rule the tribes; but in each
suka
the heads of families convened to make the necessary distribution of arable, hunting and fishing rights in the home fields and extended range of forest and lake exploited by the clan. A rich paterfamilias with a horse and armour might be deputed to lead a war-band drawn from a whole tribe, and a ‘chief father’,
isäanta
, would head the more restricted associations of hunters who went north in search of game, furs and slaves. This was a system not dissimilar to that of the nomadic Lapps, described in the first section of this chapter, and among the Karelians the resemblance was more marked, down to the use of the bark or skin wigwam. It represents a cunning adaptation of the group existence necessary to farmers to meet the exceptional asperities and opportunities of the Finnish landscape, unable to provide the regular grain surplus that would be needed by a caste of military specialists. It was not primitive.

Both the Suomi and the Estonians had been raided and enslaved by Swedish Vikings, and had learned how to defend themselves, retaliate, and trade on their own account. The Norwegian hero Olaf Tryggvason was supposed by his twelfth-century biographers to have been held in Estonia as a slave while he was young; he fell to the share of an Estonian Viking called Klerkon, along with another boy and an older man, and ‘Klerkon thought Thorolf too old to be a thrall, and unable to do slave work, and killed him; but the boys he took with him and sold them to a man called Klerk, in exchange for a good goat. Still a third man bought
Olaf, purchasing him for a good cloak or garment.’
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Henry of Livonia reported how in the early thirteenth century the Estonians on ösel ‘were accustomed to visit many hardships on their captives, both the young women and the virgins, at all times by violating them and taking them as wives, each taking two or three or more of them’.
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Slaves and furs came to market at Reval (Tallinn) on the coast, or at Dorpat (Tartu) inland, already noted as important places in the geography that Al-Idrisi wrote for King Roger 11 of Sicily in 1154; or they could be carried across to Gotland and marketed at Visby. There were also trading-posts in Finland, and Al-Idrisi described one of them as a ‘great and flourishing town’; but his informant was not impressed by the prosperity of the people round about; and he thought the Estonians spent the winter in caves. They did not, but some had underground refuges, and they were notoriously difficult to attack. ‘The men were sometyme strange, fyerce, and cruelle, and unsemely,’ wrote Bartholomew the Englishman, ‘and far from good beleve’;
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for most Estonians were resistant to Latin Christianity until the twelfth century, worshipping trees, ancestors, and the army of spirits with which they peopled the woods. The wise-man of the family, and the shaman, held the gates of the invisible world; sacrifice brought health and success.

All these peoples were linked to each other primarily by the exchange and purchase and transportation of goods and slaves. The volume of portable wealth which it paid to carry depended to some extent on local demand and consumption, but also on the appetites of a much larger world; hence the dominance of the Danes, Wends and Russians, who held the gates to Western, Central and Eastern Europe. They carried the furs, wax, amber, dried fish, and slaves to the markets of the borderlands, or attracted foreign merchants to their own, and they accumulated the biggest share of silver and imported luxuries.

Their contacts with each other, and with their richer customers, had therefore to be peaceable – up to a point: the point at which trading of goods ended, and competing to obtain them began. Thus we find certain places and conditions in which merchants and others agreed to live and deal together according to established rules, despite the fact that when they travelled between these places they had to go armed and ready to
fight all comers. At Schleswig, for example, there were fixed communities of Danes and Frisians, and a continual coming and going of Saxons, Wends, Swedes, Norwegians and Russians; at Stettin market you would meet Poles, Germans, Danes, Rugians, and at Wollin, according to Adam of Bremen, these and ‘Greeks’ as well – it was the same on Gotland, at Sigtuna, and at Novgorod. In these places there was a market-place embracing all comers, whether by arrangement among merchants, as with the old Swedish Law of Birka (named after a market town abandoned after 1060), or by negotiation with the territorial ruler, as with the Law of Schleswig and the commercial sections of the earliest Russian codes. At Schleswig the king’s agent exacted certain law-fines, tolls and annual renders from the settled artisans; in exchange the burghers could fix the weight of their money, admit any foreigners not at war with the king, and have peace; skippers had full rights over their crews and cargoes.

The intervention of the king is significant. Rulers stood to gain by increase of trade, and in the twelfth century they took an increasing share in it. They patronized foreigners who could bring them wealth, information and military skills or entertainment, and tried to create conditions which would attract them and favour their own merchants. The adventurer from Iceland, Norway or Saxony would usually get a welcome at the court of the Danish king; the
knes
of the Abotrites was surrounded by Saxons. The Russian princes insisted that, if a Russian borrower went bankrupt, his foreign creditors were to get satisfaction first, and that rates of interest for long-term loans should be low, to suit the long-distance trader, who would have to travel far before he got a return on the money he had borrowed. If a trader lost his goods through shipwreck, he was allowed to make good his debts in instalments, instead of having to sell up at once. And already, by 1117, the Danish king claimed a right to wrecks on his coast, rather than letting them be broken up and pillaged by the shore-dwellers as in ancient times.

This common pursuit of wealth was the privilege of a small class of specialists, the international trading elite which could provide itself with transport, goods, languages and weapons. Between them and their less-privileged suppliers of wealth there was continual suspicion and hostility, tempered by occasional compromise.

Such, for example, was the case with the link between the Scandinavians and Russians on one side, and the fur-providing tribes of the Far North; this was formalized by the Norwegians in the arrangement known
as the
Finnkaup
, a monopoly granted by the king to one of his northern magnates, who was entitled to travel into Lapland with a small army each winter and collect a tax from the nomads while selling them goods (
finnferth
). The army was necessary to punish the Lapps for defaulting on their
skatt
payment and to drive off Karelians who were attempting the same kind of exploitation with an eye to the Novgorod and Finnish market. By such means, the Norwegians were reputed to have made enormous profits; but it was a business that involved continual robberies, burnings and killings, and had to be kept going by punitive expeditions, sometimes led by the Norse king. It was the same for Novgorod: to reinforce the Russian trade monopoly with the surrounding Fennic nations, the prince would periodically have to go out and slay, burn and terrorize until the chief men bowed the knee and sent in the
vykbod
of fur bundles. There was no love and little trust on the fur trail. In 1193 the Chronicle tells how a force under Captain Yadrei rode all the way to the Yugra, on the lower Ob, took a fort, and camped by another settlement to wait for the submission of the Yugrians; but one of Yadrei’s men, Savko, conspired with the Yugra chief, and the captain was persuaded not to attack.

Then more were killed, at Savko’s own request, and the weak and exhausted remnant was cut to pieces by an attack from the fort; eighty men got back to Novgorod the following spring, but misfortune had turned them against each other:

On the Baltic and its coastlands there was a no-less-deadly state of war brought about by competition between the elite slavers and traders
of Denmark, Sweden, Curonia, Slavia and Estonia. In the period 1100 to 1250 this was to escalate into a series of full-scale wars involving the whole military resources of these countries and the permanent subjugation of peoples. The reason for this escalation is not altogether clear, but in the case of the Danes and the Wends an unequal distribution of resources between the nations appears to have much to do with it. The Slavs were increasing in numbers, as the size of their cities testifies, and therefore needed either more abundant crops or larger territories; but their soils were for the most part markedly poorer than those of lowland Scandinavia, and their land boundaries could be neither held nor pushed back without constant exhausting warfare against Saxons and Poles. To bring more land under cultivation they needed the cheapest form of labour – prisoners of war; to increase the supply of foodstuffs to their towns they needed the profits of trade and pillage, which included cattle, sheep and grain as well as bullion and slaves. Moreover, they had to fill the gaps in their own herds and workforce left by Danish raiders. More and more, the Slavs were compelled to keep their economies going by overseas raiding; while the Danes, who had better land and a population more evenly distributed over it, were finding that the balance of power was turning against them. Danish traders could compete successfully with Wends in the market, but they could not defend their coasts; this needed concerted action by king and landowners, preferably with the assistance of the Saxons, and required a greater degree of political cohesion than they possessed in 1100.

Thus trade was leading to a new kind of war; but war was an old story in the Northern region, and at all times it tended to follow a pattern, even rules. This pattern must be examined as the second most important interaction between the peoples.

Like trade, it was the pursuit of elites, and in its simplest forms could be merely an extension to a family feud. In the early 1040s an Abotrite prince sent his sons on a raid to Denmark; they were captured and killed. To avenge them, he collected a large army and marched overland to devastate Jutland. The invaders happened to be intercepted by the Danish king Magnus the Good, and were destroyed in their thousands on Lürschau Heath, north of Schleswig. In the 1120s another Abotrite prince, Henry, had a son killed by the Rugians. He marched to avenge them with a force of Slavs and Saxons, but there was no fighting: the Rugians paid compensation and the army marched home. In 1152 the
Swedish king’s son abducted the wife of a Danish noble, and her sister, and slept with both of them in turn. The king of the Danes, Sweyn III, decided that the dishonour was national, and led a full-scale invasion into Sweden with the intention of conquering the country, despite the fact that the king of Sweden was suing for peace and his son was dead. These examples indicate how normal modes of upper-class behaviour – private raiding, wife-snatching – could in certain circumstances generate enough heat to bring about full-scale war; but not always. To turn a private into a public quarrel, there had to be a shared interest between the war-leader of a people, his magnates and the available trained manpower, and this was not always there. It had not been present in 1086, when Canute IV of Denmark wanted to attack England; nor, a generation later, when King Nicholas wanted to invade the Abotrites, and his chief officer, Elef, stood by at Schleswig with his horses and let him be defeated. With these loosely organized countries, wars tended to be transient intensifications of the constant and casual friction between ruling classes, and rarely produced long-term effects.

Even when rulers were able to organize armies to serve political ends, they were seldom able to gain territory or subjugate populations. Canute the Great had seen Norway slip from his grasp before he died, and his son Hardacanute lost first England and then Denmark. The devastating campaigns led by the Polish rulers into Pomerania from 1090 to 1128 led to nothing more than an uneasy arrangement between the two sides, with the Poles keeping their distance in future. They fared no better on the right bank of the Vistula; ‘let us leave the Prussians with the brute beasts’, wrote the first historian of Poland.
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