The Northern Crusades (33 page)

Political control meant religious affiliation, since there were few other forms of cultural identity between rulers and ruled. As has been described earlier, the conversion of the Vods, Ingrians and Karelians had been a way of staking political claims. The types of Christianity to which they had been converted remained the sign of whom they belonged to, and both sides followed up the thirteenth-century missions with attempts to incorporate the neophytes into their distinctive church organizations.

With the Latins this meant attaching as many Karelians as possible to the very few frontier churches that were founded outside the fairly tight grouping of forty to fifty parishes in south-west Finland, and subjecting them to a fixed food rent in lieu of tithe under the arrangement known as the ‘Law of Kyrö’. What part the Dominicans of Åbo played in this can only be surmised; neither friars nor bishops appear to have been adventurous in taking their authority and doctrines to the periphery of the diocese, once the forms of allegiance had been accepted. If a new bishopric had been established for the Karelians and Ingrians, as had been planned in the thirteenth century, the picture might have been different; but, as it was, Finnish Catholicism concentrated its resources
in one corner of the country, where the population was densest, and maintained its hold on the frontier lands largely through its administrative machine. There were no new religious houses until the Franciscans appeared at Viborg in 1402–3.

With the Greek-Orthodox Russians, on the other hand, the winning of new underpopulated lands meant an opportunity for fulfilling the monastic and missionary vocations experienced by many believers in the centuries of Mongol supremacy. There were already at least seventeen monasteries in or near Novgorod by 1250, not including the abbey of St George at Old Ladoga, and in the succeeding years the number grew, especially in the provinces. Before 1329 a community was established on the island of Valamo (Valaam), at the north end of Lake Ladoga, and other ‘black clergy’ had moved into Karelia, Ingria and Vod. By the end of the fifteenth century there were ten monasteries among the Russian Karelians, and seven parishes; the total number of churches was twenty-six. As Novgorod grew increasingly independent of princely authority, the archbishop took on more of the powers of head of state, and was well placed to bring the provinces into his fiscal system. The groups of powerful boyars who shared the government with him were concerned both with exploiting the frontiers economically, and with enhancing their prestige by church-building and endowments. As in the West, conversion and colonialism went hand-in-hand.

Thus the distinction ‘Greek’ and ‘Latin’ which had been somewhat arbitrarily imposed on the political divisions of the thirteenth century by popes and crusaders, took on greater significance in the subsequent period, especially in the debatable lands between the castellany of Viborg and the Novgorodian outposts of Ladoga and Koporye.

The raids that plagued these lands in the period 1295 to 1314 resulted from Marshal Tyrgils Knutsson’s determination to use his new fort of Viborg as a springboard for the conquest of the whole Neva-Ladoga region, and were conducted for the purpose of bringing each district under the rule of new military outposts.

In 1295 the marshal sent a fleet up the Neva and into Ladoga, where the Swedes built a fort at Keksholm (the Finnish Kekkisalmi, now
Priozersk) on the western shore; the whole garrison and its captain, one Sigge Loba, was wiped out by a Novgorod counter-attack the same year, and the site was taken over by the Russians. It was clearly impossible to maintain a force some 200 miles away from Viborg castle by water (although only fifty by land) and the next Swedish thrust was better conceived. The marshal led over a thousand warriors to the mouth of the Neva, near where St Petersburg was to stand, and made a new fort which he called Landskrona. That was in 1299; the following year the Landskrona garrison sent out raids north and south, into Lake Ladoga, Karelia and Ingria, but again the Swedes were beaten by the problem of supply, and in 1301 the fort was besieged and taken by Novgorod. Tyrgils fell from power in 1305, and was later beheaded. The site of Landskrona remained unoccupied by either side; but the Novgorodians safeguarded themselves to the north and south of the Neva by new fortifications at Koporye (1297) and what had been Keksholm, where a new ‘Karelian town’ was built in 1310. Then a new prince, Dmitri Romanovich from Briansk, led a seaborne Russian raid along the coast of Swedish Finland to a point halfway between Helsinki and Viborg, and ravaged the settlements along the connecting land-route. Another raid westwards in 1313 brought the Swedes back to Lake Ladoga, plundering and burning, and for a brief period in 1314 an anti-Russian rising among the Karelians enabled them to reoccupy Keksholm; but they were soon driven out, and the ‘Karelian town’ remained a Novgorodian outpost in the hands of a friendly Karelian boyar. Marshal Tyrgils’s design remained half-completed, with Viborg as the easternmost bastion of Swedish power, the Neva open to all comers, and Novgorod firmly in control of Lake Ladoga and the adjoining coastlands.

In the Far North there was no opportunity for a parallel consolidation of power by either side, since there were no sea-routes along which to supply outposts, and the population remained too mobile and small to pin down or dominate. There were merely inconsequential raids and retaliations by roaming war-bands of Karelians, Russians and Norwegians, such as are noted in the Icelandic Annals under the years 1271, 1279, 1302, 1303 and 1316, with Karelians asserting their prowess in the mountain-region of Lapland, and Norsemen defending their settlements along the northern coastline.

Then in 1319 simultaneous political changes in Russia and Scandinavia began to prepare the way for further hostilities. On the deaths of King
Birger of Sweden and King Håkon V of Norway, both kingdoms were inherited by Håkon’s grandson and Birger’s nephew, Magnus II and VII. As he was only two years old, for the next ten years power lay with the regent, his mother, Ingeborg, and with the councils of Norway and Sweden. By the time he was proclaimed of age – a carefully educated Swedo-Norwegian monarch – his nobles and bishops had secured a controlling interest in government which he was never quite able to dislodge. There was conflict throughout his reign between king, or regent, and these great men; but one of the issues over which they were least divided was the pursuit of war with Novgorod, and the continuation of this struggle therefore became especially important for the stability of the dual monarchy.

The Swedish archbishop and bishops favoured aggression in the East for several reasons. One was the prevalence of the crusading ideal: the belief that it was their spiritual duty to bring Russians, Karelians, Ingrians and Vods into the Catholic fold, in accordance with the abortive papal policy of 1223–57. Another was the prospect of increasing their revenues and patronage, of enriching the see of Åbo, and possibly creating a new diocese for Karelia; more converts meant more tithe – in 1329 the council of Sweden ordered all Karelians and Tavastians to contribute – and more territory meant the chance of more estates. These opportunities began to seem particularly attractive after 1309, when the Avignon papacy began a series of fund-raising campaigns which meant levying crusading tithes on the clergy of Northern Europe ostensibly for the purpose of financing a new crusade to the East. The money was actually used for a variety of political purposes, such as fighting the Visconti in Italy, and the popes were realistic enough to pay for the privilege of getting it by conceding a share of the proceeds to the kings within whose realms the collecting nuncios and financiers were allowed to operate. These agents were tireless and sometimes very effective, drawing taxes from as far off as Iceland and Greenland; it was natural that the clergy should begin to feel that, if they were paying money for general crusading purposes, the king and his warriors should be encouraged to undertake that particular sort of crusade which would bring them some immediate advantage.

The magnates and lesser nobles of Sweden also stood to gain by the increased number of fiefs and offices which might follow from a war of conquest. Finland was already a source of profit and power for the great
and the adventurous. There was the prefecture of the Duchy, and the captaincies of Åbo, Tavastehus and Viborg; there were advocacies, bailiwicks and fiefs. Such men as Lyder of Kyren, the brothers Sune and Peter Jonsson, Matthias Kettilmundsson, Karl Näskonungsson and Gerhard Skytte were doing well out of areas conquered in the thirteenth century, where there was little chance of too much interference by the Crown; they would do even better further east. Moreover, landowners were now interested in promoting settlement within the hunting and raiding grounds still crossed regularly by Karelians under Russian rule. Under the regency, Archbishop Olof of Uppsala granted hereditary tax exemption on all land newly brought into cultivation by settlers in Lapland, and the king’s high steward freed all settlers on the Ulea river from tax until the king came of age.
¹³⁰
Such concessions would only be worthwhile if the new lands were brought under effective Swedish rule, and this meant military action.

Norwegian settlers and crown officers in the Far North were eager to retaliate against what they saw as Russo-Karelian poaching within their Finnmark, and to compensate themselves for the unfavourable economic conditions which increasingly beggared their country from the mid thirteenth century. Norway had lost half of her western dependencies to Scotland in the 1260s, and drew little profit from Iceland, Greenland and the Orkneys; Finnmark could still be retrieved, however, as the German trade monopoly was not effective in the Far North. Moreover, the most powerful baron in the country, Erling Vidkunnson, was a great landowner and trader in Hålogaland, the most northerly province, and had a direct interest in promoting Norwegian concerns in this direction; as high steward from 1323 to 1332, and as a friend of the regent and King Magnus, he was in a position to get things moving.

Meanwhile, there were changes at Novgorod which made the city’s rulers more than ever determined to defend and if possible expand their colonial dependencies. In 1318 the Mongols appointed Prince Yury of Moscow great-prince of the Russians, and Yury sent his brother to Novgorod, presumably to claim the allegiance of the city in preparation for the war for supremacy with the prince of Tver. In the ensuing years, Yury had to prove his worth to the suspicious Novgorodians by giving them military assistance and leadership when they needed it. This gave the boyars and archbishop the chance of waging war with larger and better equipped forces than they could raise on their own account, and
their own levies had already proved themselves able to match the Swedes at raiding by land and sea. In 1318 they had got as far west as Åbo, where they landed, pillaged the district and burned down the cathedral. There was no immediate retaliation from Sweden, but it was evident that neither the Novgorodian nor the Swedo-Norwegian regime was prepared to rest content with the
status quo
of 1292 much longer.

The first signs that something amounting to a crusade was under way came in 1320, when the regent reaffirmed Sweden’s ties with the Teutonic Order by granting a generous immunity to the Swedish estates of the Order, which were grouped under the commandery of Årsta on the coast south of Stockholm. Soon after this the pope was asked to allow his annual revenue from Peter’s Pence to be used for the defence of the realm against the Russians and their allies, and in 1321 a Swedish force made another unsuccessful attempt to recapture the Karelian town on the site of Keksholm. Reinforced by Prince Yury, the Novgorodians reacted with an imposing show of strength. In 1322 they arrived at Viborg, laid siege to the castle for a month, hanged a number of captives and went home; the following year they secured Lake Ladoga by building a new fort on Orekhov island (Nöteborg in Swedish, later Oreshek, now Petrokrepost), where the Neva leaves the lake, and dispatched a raiding force from Karelia across Lapland to harry the Norwegians of Hålogaland. Earlier that year, Pope John XXII had encouraged the Norwegians to fight back by promising full crusading privileges to all who fell in battle against the ‘pagans called Finnar’.
¹³¹

However, the building of Orekhov put an end to the fighting on the Neva. Prince Yury decided he had done enough, and the Novgorodians had more pressing quarrels (with the Lithuanians and the tribes on the northern Dvina) to pursue; the Swedish council and the regent found that in future their raiding parties would be unable to sail into Lake Ladoga without first besieging the new fort at Orekhov, and thus there was no hope of a cheap victory. They had evidently launched their futile raid on Keksholm in the belief that Prince Yury would be too busy fighting the prince of Tver to assist Novgorod; now that they had been proved wrong, it was time to make peace, and on 12 August 1323 a treaty was concluded which now goes by the three names of Nöteborg, Orekhov and Pekkinsaari (Pähkinäsaari).

The Swedes and the Novgorodians agreed to stop fighting and to observe peace ‘on the old terms’, and versions of these terms survive in
Swedish, Russian and Latin transcripts of a lost original charter.
¹³²
The Novgorodians ceded to King Magnus the three western provinces of Karelia (Savolaks, Jääskis and Ayräpää – see
map 6
), and both sides agreed to build no more castles anywhere in Karelia. They also agreed to observe what looks like a frontier, a line running in a northerly direction from the Gulf of Finland, near the mouth of the Neva, towards central Finland, and then over to the north end of the Gulf of Bothnia. But what this frontier represented was not specified, and remains obscure. It can be precisely reconstructed only at the southern end, where it delimits the Karelian provinces recognized as Swedish, but it does not correspond with the existing and future limits of Swedish and Russian overlordship towards the north. If it is a territorial boundary in the political sense, it gives Novgorod a vast area of northern Karelia already penetrated by Swedes and by Finns under Swedish lordship. In 1323 it probably represented the limit of the open country within which Russian Karelians had free access to their traditional hunting and fishing grounds, regardless of territorial ownership. By 1500 the Swedes had built the new castle of Olufsborg in Savolaks, and had established territorial claims well inside this country; but for the time being there was some sort of truce.