The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Maybe, then, Pytheas was really a commercial spy. But, by way of Diodoros and Pliny, he offers brief glimpses of the Atlantic world, and above all of its unfamiliarity compared to not just the Mediterranean but the Black Sea, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. For the Atlantic coastline of Europe was still the outer edge of the known world, whereas the Indian Ocean was already functioning as the link between the Mediterranean and the South China Sea, between the high cultures of the Roman Empire and those of the Far East.

  18

  North Sea Raiders

  I

  Descriptions of northern waters by Mediterranean travellers ignore the perspective of its own inhabitants. Although writing spread northwards across the Alps, in the form of the runes, which may be derived from Etruscan or another north Italian script, no texts survive from the shores of the Atlantic in the first centuries AD. Archaeological evidence is patchy: it is richest in those areas where waterlogged and boggy soil has preserved the remains of wooden boats and even sacrificial victims, such as the ‘Bog People’ studied by Professor Glob in Denmark. Denmark provides some of the richest evidence, with its many islands and its profusion of inlets that could be used as harbours; the land had lifted out of the sea in the seventh and sixth millennia BC as Arctic ice had melted and sea levels had risen. Setting aside the interior of Jutland, this was a land that was best traversed by sea, with easy connections across to the Scandinavian peninsula as well. The first boats were made out of limewood, alder or oak tree trunks, hollowed out and turned into small fishing boats, maybe only suitable for a handful of passengers; but by the middle of the fourth millennium BC boats were heading out into open waters, to judge from a jar fished out of the Baltic twenty kilometres off the outlying Danish island of Bornholm.1

  As well as fish, these boats carried amber, ‘the gold of the north’, which was used as jewellery but also for offerings to the gods – a pot from the fourth millennium BC contained 12,849 amber beads, though none was large (the total weight of all these beads was only four kilograms). It has been seen that Jutish amber supplies were diminishing by the first century AD, but this stimulated a greater interest in Baltic amber instead; the Baltic was stirring into life, after long centuries as a backwater. Amber was the gift of the sun, and by the second millennium it had become a favourite article of trade along overland routes that, stage by stage, carried goods back and forth between the Mediterranean and northern Europe.2 Denmark and the Baltic world would long be tied to lands far to the south by way of the central and east European rivers as much as, or more than, by long-distance sea routes; this was still the case in Viking times.3 Roman goods did seep into ancient Scandinavia, with Denmark receiving well over half of what has been found, Norway just over a fifth and Sweden a little over a sixth; however, these goods did not travel very far by sea: they were brought northwards from major Roman cities such as Trier and Cologne.4 But within the Baltic the island of Bornholm, conveniently situated astride sea routes that linked eastern Denmark to lands further east, was a notable centre of shipping, to judge from the practice of burying local notables in boat-shaped graves.

  Around the time of Pytheas’ voyage evidence comes to light for the use of small ships in warfare. That is not the same as naval warfare, which even in the age of the Vikings was rare: in this part of the world, ships were used for transport, whether of warriors or merchants, or they might be used in the pursuit of enemies (a task entrusted to the disconcertingly named Ulf the Unwashed in one of the greatest works of medieval Icelandic literature, Njál’s Saga), but they did not often engage in battle at sea.5 A battle took place on the island of Als in the late fourth century BC following a raid that may have been launched from northern Germany (Als lies on the eastern side of Denmark, just north of the modern German border); at least three, and maybe as many as six, war canoes about twenty metres in length pounced on the Danish coast, each carrying twenty or more warriors, all armed with spears, lances, javelins and swords, and some dressed in chain mail armour. It is likely that the invaders were soundly defeated, because what survives from the battle is a mangled pile of their weapons, sacrificed in a bog into which one of their boats was also dragged.6 Owing to the physical configuration of the region, boats were an important feature of everyday life in early Scandinavia; carvings showing long and narrow boats survive from the second millennium BC, and sometimes, as an example from Östergötland in Sweden shows, the figures on board seem to be engaged in sexual intercourse – what this signifies is a mystery, and these scenes may be drawn from myths about the gods.

  The impression remains that even in the earliest centuries AD sail power was little used and not very effective, and power was generated by oars or paddles. In the first century AD Tacitus refers in his Germania to the boats of a people called the Suiones, apparently living somewhere around southern Sweden and Denmark; these boats were paddled:

  Next come the communities of the Suiones, situated in the Ocean itself, who, besides their strength in men and arms, also possess a naval force. The form of their vessels differs from ours in having a prow at each end, so that they are always ready to move forward. They make no use of sails, nor do they have regular benches of oars at the sides: they row, as is practised in some rivers, without order, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, as occasion requires. These people honour wealth.7

  Only with the development of higher freeboards, stronger keels, and the larger masts and sails that the new keels could support did wind power fully come into its own, possibly as late as the Viking age. But ship design was certainly changing in the early centuries AD. A warship found at Nydam in Denmark (very close to Als) was sunk as a sacrifice, along with plenty of weapons, by about AD 350, after several decades of service; it was made out of oak and possessed an anchor. Its prow and stern were less steep than those of the famous Viking ships built five centuries later, but this was no longer a hollowed out tree-trunk: as was so often the case in northern waters, the boat was clinker-built, constructed out of overlapping strakes of wood; it is the oldest clinker-built boat to have survived. It was twenty-three metres long, and four metres wide at its widest point, and was constructed using five large strakes of wood on each side, each about fifteen metres long. Iron nails were used to fix the strakes to one another, though the strakes, rib and keel were bound together by fibre, which created greater flexibility in the hull. The vessel had space for fifteen pairs of oars and a side rudder.8 There is no way of knowing whether the sinking of the ship indicates that the vessel was captured in war, or whether this was seen as the best way to dispose of a worthy sea companion after years of loyal service; but it had been built not far away around AD 320, for it was made of local wood, from Jutland or Schleswig.

  A second ship, made from pinewood, was found only in fragments, and this too appears to date from the fourth century AD; it was not quite as long or broad, and it may have arrived from Norway, Sweden or even Britain, since fir trees were few in the area surrounding Als.9 On the other hand, it would be a mistake to assume that, just because the inhabitants of the Danish marshes did not make much use of sails, no one did so. A flat-bottomed boat found at Bruges, dating to the second or third century AD, was most probably a merchant vessel, well suited to North Sea conditions, with plenty of room for cargo and a large central sail; its lack of a keel made it suitable for sailing over sandbanks, where it would rest when the tide was out. The remains of Rhine barges from this period often include stepped beams into which a mast was inserted, and the Romans certainly used sailing vessels in their Rhine fleet based at Cologne.10 The problem with wind power was that it was more difficult to control when one could set out and where one could go. The use of paddles or oars made more sense if the aim was to launch an unexpected raid.

  The finds at Als and Nydam conjure up a world in which raiding across the sea was a frequent scourge. The question that then arises is whether these were, by and large, local raids or much more ambitious expeditions that could range right across the No
rth Sea. And this takes one into the vexed question of the identity of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who crossed from the region where these ships have been found to settle the land that became known as England. They themselves were the successors to Germanic raiders who were active from the first century AD. Indeed, the first references to Germanic pirates come from Tacitus’ account of the pacification of Britain by the Roman general Agricola; some rebel Germans, from the tribe Tacitus called the Usipi, mutinied, seized some galleys, and fled northwards, circumnavigating Britain, clashing with other Germans and ending up somewhere near their native territory, which lay a little way down the Rhine in Frisian territory. The Frisians enslaved those whom they spared. But the Usipi were not skilled navigators, and it had been a miserable journey; they ran out of food and ended up eating one another.11 The mouth of the Rhine had a very different configuration to later centuries, with many inlets poking deep into what are now Belgium and the Netherlands; and to the east of that, all the way to the borders of Denmark, stretched sandy shores and lines of small islands. These wetlands could only be made habitable by building up mounds, or terpen, above the likely floodline, and some of the villages along this coast prospered not just as fishing ports but as trading centres that received Roman glassware and metalwork – after all, one of the major Roman cities in northern Germany, Cologne, lay on the Rhine, and Roman Britain also lay a short distance away across the North Sea. This was an area where the Frisians, who became very active in North Sea trade during the early Middle Ages, lived side by side with other Germanic groups, notably those whom Tacitus called the Chauci.12

  What tribal labels such as ‘Chauci’ really signified is a puzzle that ancient and medieval historians have enjoyed chewing over, but it is likely that the Chauci were one of the groups that eventually became part of the still larger wave of migrants we know as the Angles and the Saxons. In the first century AD their piracy was an irritant and Roman fleets were sent against them – the Romans even mobilized their shipping based at Cologne. For a time the Chauci were led by an ambitious Germanic warlord named Gannascus, whose bold sea raids against the province of Gallia Belgica culminated in his capture and execution by the Romans in AD 47.13 However, his defeat stirred the emotions of the Chauci still further, and trouble in the lands bordering Gallia Belgica flared up again and again in the second half of the first century; nothing is heard of them after raids in 175, no doubt because they were now subsumed in the general category of ‘Saxons’. In one engagement the Germans arrived aboard a medley of different ships, some captured from the Romans, some powered by oars in the traditional German fashion; but they also strung up their colourful cloaks to convert their vast array of boats into simple sailing craft.14 Tacitus, who tells us about these events, took a not very secret delight in the energy and freedom of the Germanic peoples, and in the failure of the Roman emperors and their generals to tame them. Nonetheless, there is no reason to disbelieve his insistence that the Romans were time and again defeated by Batavians and other peoples living on the edge of the Roman Empire, often following the defection of Germanic auxiliaries to the naval forces opposing Rome.15 The simple reality was that by about AD 200 it was not safe to live by the sea. Villas in Brittany that were burned to the ground, coin hoards buried at spots along the Breton coast, and severe damage to Chelmsford and to nearby villages in the part of Britain that the Saxons would call Essex all strongly testify that raids from the sea, rather than internal strife, rendered the coastlines unsafe.16

  By the third century, raiding had become severe enough for forts to be constructed along the coast of eastern Britannia and along the shore of Gallia Belgica. The ‘Saxon Shore’, under its commanders, or counts, was the first line of defence against Germanic raiders who came by sea, although there were plenty too who raided across the limes, the frontier dividing Roman Germany from neighbouring peoples. These raiders might sometimes be persuaded to become confederate allies of the Romans, but might instead become confederate allies of one another, notably the large groups known in later history as the Franks, or ‘free people’, and the Saxons. The Saxons were then living close to the North Sea, and their confederation (including the Chauci) came into existence after Tacitus wrote his Germania in the first century AD, since he mentions a great many tribes but omits the Saxons, who were, however, known to Ptolemy in the mid-second century. Whether or not these tribes had become greedy for the wealth of the Roman lands across the border in Gaul and across the sea in Britain, they were under constant pressure from the third century AD onwards: rising sea levels were eroding their habitable lands along the shores between Flanders and Frisia, a phenomenon of uncertain cause grandly known as the Dunkirk II Marine Transgression. The loss of land prompted migration out of the territories that had been settled by the Chauci and their Saxon descendants; meanwhile the emergence of swamps and marshes encouraged the Romans to pull back from their forts in Gallia Belgica, allowing what land there was to be occupied by Frankish tribes.

  Piracy became a means to a livelihood for those who were increasingly forced to depend upon the sea for their existence. Sometimes land raids and sea raids were combined, as during the first major Frankish raid on the Roman Empire in the mid-third century, when Franks reached as far as Tarragona in Spain and then appropriated the ships they found in the harbour, after which they raided north Africa. Later, another Frankish party even reached the Black Sea. These people were certainly highly adaptable. Such high-profile adventures captured the imagination of Roman writers, but what really affected the North Sea and the English Channel was the sequence of raids on Brittany and Gallia Belgica that saw the continuing destruction or destitution of dozens of villages, or vici, traceable in the archaeological evidence.17 How effective the forts built along the shoreline at places such as Portchester in southern Britannia and Nantes in western France actually were is a moot point. What is striking is the sheer range of the raids, if they could penetrate as far as Nantes. Admittedly, the purpose of these forts was not simply to act as watchtowers: they were bases from which Roman fleets could be launched against attackers, and from which the neighbouring seas could be policed. All the same, large stretches of the eastern flank of Britannia lay exposed to lightning raids, and it has been suggested that only in the Strait of Dover could anyone realistically expect to control movement across the sea, and even then not very successfully: the construction of the great fort at Pevensey near Hastings in the early to mid-fourth century indicates that stronger defences were needed to protect southern Britain.

  Defence of the sea was, however, a matter of deep concern: when an experienced naval commander named Carausius set up active patrols in the North Sea and seemed to have stemmed the threat from piracy, the emperor turned against him in a fit of jealousy, even accusing him of collaborating with the Franks (and no doubt diplomacy as well as warfare was used to achieve such good results). Carausius responded by declaring himself emperor in Britannia and northern Gaul in 286, and the Roman army and navy struggled hard to reconquer Britain during the next ten years. This did, however, prompt the Romans to build a substantial fleet, and they seem to have kept it in operation after the recovery of Britannia, since piracy ebbed, though it did not disappear – around this time the inhabitants of Godmanchester, near Cambridge, were massacred by raiders who must have penetrated the river network of East Anglia from the sea.18 By the late fourth century there was no let-up in raids on Britain launched by the Saxons and their neighbours, while overland raids by the Picts and the Scots increased still further the misery of the inhabitants of Britannia; Ammianus Marcellinus, the late Roman historian, wrote of the ‘continuous vexation’ of the borderlands of the entire Roman Empire, including Britannia; and once the raiders began to work together in 367, in what Ammianus saw as a great ‘barbarian conspiracy’, Roman authority in Britain was stretched to breaking point.19

  There are grounds for believing that Saxons arrived as settlers as well as raiders, and, with the help of fragments of pottery in a S
axon style, it has even been suggested that the title ‘Counts of the Saxon Shore’ conferred on the commander of the defence network against the sea raiders reflects the fact that this was a shore inhabited by, rather than attacked by, Saxons.20 In reality, though, Roman power was crumbling and the Saxons were raiding with greater and greater impunity, even reaching the Orkney islands some way beyond the borders of Roman Britannia. So with the withdrawal of Roman legions in 410, and the recognition that Rome could no longer control the destiny of Britannia, the door was left open: Angles from the south of Denmark and the north of Germany, as well as Jutes from Jutland, joined the Saxons in colonizing Britain, a process that was accelerated by the continuing depletion of their own lands as the sea claimed more territory along the coasts of northern Europe.21 There are still many unanswered questions about the Anglo-Saxon settlement of what became England, and evidence from DNA suggests that the invaders often took British wives or perhaps had children by enslaved British women, while an underclass of British slave workers known as wealhas persisted for some centuries – the term wealhas meant ‘foreigners’ and was applied by speakers of Germanic languages to any number of outsiders, notably the inhabitants of what became known as Wales. But, outside the areas in the west and far north that became Celtic refuges, the invaders were numerous enough to impose their Germanic language and pagan religious beliefs on what had been a Celtic-speaking and increasingly Christianized population.