The Northern Crusades (8 page)

Here the Abotrites ended; here the Rugians began, and the traveller would look in vain among their marshy and forested continental domains for places larger than villages and forts. However, on their island fastness of Rügen there were two remarkable townships: Arkona, on the very north-eastern tip of the island, looking out to sea over tall white cliffs; and Karenz (modern Garz), a lake town in the southern part of the island. Arkona appears to break the normal rule of keeping away from the shore, but the appearance is deceptive: the cliffs were too steep and the shore too dangerous for a direct approach from the sea, and all shipping had to go round by the shallow inlets which flood the central part of Rügen, or risk a landing to the south, where the cliffs are lower. Much of this town-site has since been eroded, but excavation has borne out the description of it given by the twelfth-century Danish historian Saxo. It needed no
castrum
or citadel, thanks to the headland on which it stood, but this was cut off by an earth and timber wall rising to some 100 feet, penetrable only through an even taller fortified gate-tower. Then came a curved sector of housing; then an open space; and then – probably on ground now washed away – the temple of the god Svantovit, which served as an international centre of pilgrimage and contribution, and a treasury, as well as the focus of public worship. Here came merchants from all over the Baltic; here the Rugian warriors met in council, and took their orders from the high-priest and his miraculous horse, which no man was allowed to ride. The defences of Karenz, in the south, were lake, river and marshland, reinforced by a more conventional ring-wall. By 1168 it appears to have been developing from a refuge fort into a populous settlement; Saxo describes densely packed housing, stinking to heaven, and archaeologists have found three small spaces left clear for the temples on the higher part of the town.

The Liutizians settled along the Peene had several well-protected towns, of which the most important was the furthest upriver, Demmin (the ‘smoke-place’). That was where three rivers met, and where overland traffic from Mecklenburg and Holstein could embark on the thirty-mile downriver voyage to the sea; a key stronghold of the Pomeranian dukes and princes after they conquered it in the early twelfth century, it had been formerly the citadel and cult centre of the Redarii, the home of the god Radigost.

The mouth of the Oder was dominated by the old city now called Szczecin (pronounced ‘Schet-sin’) by the Poles, Stettin by the Germans; it may have been Szcztno to the Pomeranians, and the Danes called it Burstaborg, ‘Bristle-borough’. This was ‘the mother of the cities of the Pomeranians’,
¹³
with walls enclosing three temple-crowned hills in pagan days (before 1127), and a reputation for impregnability: ‘as safe as Stettin wall’ ran the proverb, according to Saxo.
¹⁴
Here the missionary, Otto of Bamberg, found a community of 900 families, and among them a great man rich in relations and retainers, Domislav, who was reckoned to have a household of 500 and laid down the law for his fellow citizens. Another magnate was able to put to sea with his own fleet of six ships, and the multitude of slaves brought in by such adventurers must have swollen the population to several thousand, among whom the temple priests formed a powerful clique. For this was a place to grow rich, where four trade-routes met and river boats met sea-going vessels and exchanged cargoes; a city that in 1127 could fight, and win, a war with the Rugians.

The daughters of this mother were Wolgast (Vologost), Usedom (Uznam), Lebbin (Liubin), Wollin (Wolin) and Cammin (Kamien), to put the German forms first. They lay on the reedy channels by which the Peene and the Oder push out to the sea from the Gulf of Stettin – all defensible places with markets and ports, competing with each other for trade and able to defend themselves with fleets and armies. Wollin had once been the greatest of them, the Jomsborg of the Vikings, ruler of the Oderine islands, but had declined with the silting up of the Dziwna outflow and the diversion of overseas trade to Stettin, and by 1100 was rivalled by Cammin. Nevertheless, the earliest missionaries baptized 2156 citizens there in 1124, and founded two churches to serve them. Wolgast levied toll on the Peene traffic, and controlled the surrounding districts both on the mainland and on the island of Usedom; the
viovot
had a two-storey house in 1127, and there was a temple, a city magistracy and conspicuous riches.

East of the Oder, along the empty Pomeranian coast, and up the river Perseta, you came to Kolberg (Kolobrzeg), a town of unique importance on account of its salt-works, and, further upstream, Belgard (Bialogard), where the Polish ruler had established a short-lived bishopric in the tenth century, and where the
knes
of the Pomeranians now had his chief residence. From there to the south of the Vistula the coastlands were empty, and a track ran through hill country towards the port of Danzig
(Gdansk), then overlooked by a
grod
and
suburbium
on an offshore islet, and governed by an agent of the duke of Poland.

This catalogue includes the most important of the Wendish towns, and, even if their average population may not have been comparable with the numbers of Rhineland or Flemish boroughs in this period, it was most impressive by the standards of the thinly settled Baltic region. Only Schleswig (Slesvig), in Denmark, could compare with these places, and other ports and market-places among the Scandinavians would have looked small beside them. Moreover, they had a special influence on the societies in and round them.

Consider the power of the prince once more. He was a great landowner in the countryside, the lord of the biggest retinue of mounted warriors in the land, and receiver of taxes and food supplies from his people; he also appears to have commanded abject reverence, in excess of what a Dane or Swede would have shown his king, with kneeling, acclamation and foot-kissing. His blood was sacrosanct, and in the case of the Abotrite princes had been inherited from a line going back at least to the early tenth century. Yet the powerful men who accepted his authority, and served him with their own retinues, were often town-dwellers, who met together either with the whole citizenry in open assembly, or in the ‘senates’ and ‘magistratures’ mentioned by Latin authors, to settle their own affairs, even to decide on peace or war. The business of these magnates was often raiding foreign coasts or rival cities, and it could lead to warfare involving the whole nation. In such cases the
knes
would be summoned to help, and give command of the city forces, but normally it appears that the relationship between urban communities and princes – especially between the Liutizian cities and Pomeranian princes – was a fairly loose one. The prince sent in his
voivot
to hold the fort and gather the tolls, taxes and services; the strong men of the city minded their own business and followed policies dictated by local interests.

Among the Abotrites, it would appear that in the period 1083 to 1127 the
knes
was able to build up such a strong private army, with the help of Saxon and Danish mercenaries, that his hold on the towns was a tight one. It is noteworthy that this ruler, Henry, was a Christian, educated abroad. And, when his dynasty was overthrown after his death, civil war, Danish and Saxon incursions, and losses of territory in Wagria made the warlord an indispensable leader. By contrast, among the Rugians, the
knes
was merely a landowner deputed to lead the troops whenever
the ‘senate’ decided; and the senate was dominated by the high priest of Arkona.

For the paganism of the Wends was bound up with their civil organization. Their whole country was studded with holy places – groves, oaks, springs and rocks – where the peasants made offerings and held rites of propitiation and festivity; and they envisaged the world as peopled by a numerous holy family of gods, subordinate to a divine patriarchal spirit in the sky. Such rural shrines were also to be found among the Danes, Swedes and Saxons, in out-of-the-way districts, and were able to co-exist for centuries with the official Christianity of the parish church; it was too deep-rooted to erase completely. What gave a different dimension to Slav paganism was the existence of a priesthood able to elaborate and intensify worship by constructing images, cult objects and temples, and the development of master cults within the cities, where special skills in augury and ritual made the priests leaders of the community. Out in the woods, they cannot have done too well; Otto of Bamberg found one of them living almost entirely on the fruit of his single sacred nut-tree.
¹⁵
But in the city temples it was a good life. The men of Gützkow had spent 300 marks on putting up a temple to their god, and regarded it as so beautiful that they could not bear to pull it down, even after they had accepted baptism. At Stettin there were four temples, and sacred houses where the nobles met to feast off gold and silver. And at Arkona the shrine of the four-headed idol Svantovit was enriched by a tax levied on all the Rugians, and by voluntary contributions from overseas, from worshippers seeking luck or advice. The whole nation was said to attend the harvest festival in front of his temple, bringing cattle to sacrifice; and the high-priest – the only Slav allowed to grow his hair long – decided whether they were to have war or peace. He had his own war-band of 300 horsemen, all the bullion taken in war, and his own estates.
¹⁶

This rampant idolatry was to receive a setback when the Pomeranian princes accepted baptism and authorized German missionaries to destroy the temples and build churches; the missions of 1124 and 1127 administered a shock from which the temple organizations of the Oderine cities never recovered. And in the same period,
knes
Henry of the Abotrites was allowing Saxon priests to attack some of his people’s shrines with axe and fire. But, after Henry’s death, the rising war-leader Nyklot fully identified himself with the old faith, and remained heathen until his
death in 1160; and the Rugians, strong and independent, kept up their cults, temples and sacrifices till 1168. In no case did a city abandon its gods without pressure from the prince, and even with this pressure the reaction was sometimes fierce and bloody.

Why then should some princes have attacked paganism, and others favoured it? They all wished to increase their power; and substituting a princely church, and priests who were in their service, for city-run temples and local priesthoods would be an obvious advantage to them. Nevertheless, as they said in Stettin, the new god was a German god, and a prince who was holding the frontier against the Germans might well object to letting him through; the Wagrians and Abotrites probably remembered the dark days of the tenth century, when they had been made tributary to Saxon bishoprics and forced to pay ‘Slav tithe’. Behind the somewhat unassuming Saxon missionary Vizelin (active among the Abotrites
c.
1125–54) there was a land-hungry crew of Saxon frontiersmen, who were now trying not merely to tax the country of the Slavs, but, further, to steal it. The old gods who had inhabited it for so long might prove better allies than enemies to a
knes
who had determined to fight for his independence. The military situation made paganism attractive to Nyklot; on Rügen the prince appears not to have been important enough to interfere with the religion of his people. Not until the Danes had destroyed the idols in 1168–9 do the Rugians appear to have accepted the sole leadership of a secular ruler and his family.

Thus, by 1100 the West Slavs living along the Baltic were a vigorous and thriving people with a peculiar form of political organization which represented a compromise between the interests of town communities and the interests of territorial princes. The compromise appears to have been successful, in that both powers continued to grow, and were able until the 1140s to defeat foreign aggression. The princes needed the long ships of the cities to wage war, and the cities needed the protection of the princely land forces; when they combined, the other Northern peoples had reason to fear. A Slav war-fleet looked very similar to a fleet of Vikings, and might, as in 1135, range as far north as the southern Norwegian town of Konghelle, and be mistaken for an armada of Danes.
¹⁷
But, when the ships got near, the onlookers would recognize the cropped heads of the crews, and hear the characteristic shrieking and jeering of the Wends preparing to fight; it was time to run, or be brave. On land, they were experienced cavalrymen, wheeling and charging unexpectedly
on small horses which would be called ponies nowadays; the magnates appear to have owned studs and stables of these animals – as they owned the ships – and to have mounted their dependants on them in time of war. These horsemen were not as heavily armoured as Saxon or Danish cavalry, and relied on speed and surprise rather than on sword- or spear-play in close combat. The lack of heavy horse was to prove a disadvantage, but, for the purposes of raiding, ambushing, and pillaging, the Wendish ‘rough-rider’ was good enough.

Four hundred miles east of Danzig, another branch of the Slav people had settled in the Northern world and become an important political and economic force. The ‘East Slavs’ of Polotsk and Novgorod had entered the region before the ninth century, cleared themselves a space for settlement in the forest and along the great rivers, and accepted ruling dynasties and Christian missions from Kiev in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The name of ‘Rus’, whatever its origin, was applied to them in this period (Adam of Bremen calls them Ruzzi), but they themselves saw Russia as the country to the south, where the great prince lived and the bishops came from. For what distinguished them both from the Baltic Slavs, and from the surrounding peoples, was their Christianity, symbolized by the cathedrals of the Holy Wisdom at Novgorod (built 1045–52) and at Polotsk (
c.
1100), and the Holy Trinity at Pskov (
c.
1137). As Christians, as city-dwellers and as subjects of a prince (
kynaz
), the Russians of the North were representative of Byzantine civilization; as traders and farmers they depended on what they could extract and sell from the forest peoples that surrounded them: slaves, fur, wax and honey. Novgorodian society at this period was already more complex than that of the Balt and Fennic peoples in the same region, involving the organization of peasant labour on large estates, and dominant cadres of nobles, landless warriors, merchants, monks and priests. It was an expensive complexity, which could not have been sustained solely on the proceeds of the arable land, which the Slav peasant was tilling and slowly enlarging, along the rivers and lakes. Regular imports of foodstuffs and forest products from the entire North-East region were a necessity, and the Russians had established themselves as the economic masters of this region by peopling the vital points where all trade-routes met and crossed. The Novgorodians round Lake Ilmen commanded the porterage to the upper Volga, with a hold on lakes Ladoga and Chud through the towns of Ladoga and Pskov; the Polochians
on the upper Dvina commanded the porterage to the Dnieper. By holding these corridors they ensured that the whole volume of Baltic-Black Sea-Caspian trade would pass through their hands, and that the products of the whole surrounding region would come to their markets. It was a hegemony built on communications by a smaller nation of monopolists. Their wealth depended on the river boat and the sledge. So far, they had established no firm political control over the peoples living round them; but their hold on the eastern threshold made Novgorod potentially as dominant a force in the eastern Baltic as the Saxons and Poles on the southern shore.