The Boundless Sea
Page 55
At this point one can see how the saga-writer or his source added colour to the story. Eating grapes does not make one drunk, though those living so far north of wine-producing lands might be forgiven for imagining that this could happen. The naming of the land and the story of Tyrkir have set off a debate about where the Norse explorers landed and whether vín in Vínland really means ‘wine’; the term vin for ‘fertile land’ is sometimes presented as the true etymology, but in Old Norse the vowels i and í were quite distinct, and it really does seem that the travellers reached a land where fruit that at least looked like grapes grew in profusion. One suggestion is that they actually found gooseberries, which do resemble a rather hairy grape, or that Old Norse confused currants and grapes. If, on the other hand, they did find wild grapes, they must have arrived in southern Nova Scotia or the borderlands of Canada and the United States, while it is possible they reached as far south as modern Boston.52
A second expedition, led by Leif’s brother Þorvald, returned to Leif’s houses in Vínland, and the prospects for settlement seemed good, until they found three skin-covered boats that lay upturned on a beach, with three men underneath each boat. There is no evidence these men meant any harm, but they killed eight, though one escaped; and then they realized that there was some sort of settlement not far off, and before long they came under attack from a swarm of skin-boats, manned by people they called ‘Skrælings’, a term that they also came to apply to the Inuit. Its meaning was something like ‘wretches’.53 Leif was known as ‘Leif the Lucky’ after he rescued a shipwrecked crew off Greenland; but Þorvald might have been called ‘the Unlucky’, because, while he was away from Leif’s camp, he was hit by an arrow that passed through a narrow opening between the gunwale of his ship and his shield. Þorvald died in Vínland; and this was a portent of future trouble between the Greenlanders and the native Americans.54
Soon after, back in Greenland, Þorfinn Karlsefni, a successful Norwegian trader, went to stay with Leif Eiríksson and fell in love with the beautiful widow Guðrið, whom he married. They became a formidable pair; stories of Vínland continued to be told, and Guðrið urged her husband to fit out an expedition – in the end he recruited sixty men and five women. ‘They took livestock of all kinds, for they intended to make a permanent settlement there if at all possible.’ They based themselves at Leif’s camp, cutting a cargo of timber and living comfortably off the land. Only after one winter did they encounter the Skrælings. At first things went badly. The Norse settlers had brought a bull that became excited by the great number of Skrælings who suddenly appeared out of the woods. Bellowing at them and charging, the bull frightened many of them away.
Curiosity and the wish to trade (rather than fight) gained the upper hand, and the Skrælings returned, offering furs and pelts in return for weapons. Karlsefni, sensibly anticipating the trouble that trade in weapons would bring to much later generations of settlers in North America, insisted that the Norse could only offer milk, which the women in the colony carried out to the Skrælings, who were delighted by this – ‘the Skrælings carried away their purchases in their bellies.’55 Just in case relations turned sour, Karlsefni had a palisade built around the settlement, and Guðrið gave birth to the first European known to have been born on American soil. However, the Skrælings were turning troublesome; they were caught trying to steal weapons, and before long a battle broke out between the Norse and the Skrælings. Karlsefni decided that the time had come to load his rich cargo of furs and pelts on his ship and return to Greenland; his instincts as a trader came to the fore. Eventually he took his cargo all the way to Norway, where he sold his wares, ‘and he and his wife were made much of by the noblest in the country’.56
As he was about to sail back towards Iceland a German from Bremen called on him. He wanted to buy a decorative wooden carving that was displayed on Karlsefni’s ship. ‘I do not want to sell it,’ Karlsefni replied. ‘I shall give you half a mark of gold for it,’ said the southerner. Karlsefni realized what a good offer this was and agreed. But he did not know what type of wood it was; however, ‘it had come from Vínland’.57 Maybe it was the work of a native American, and that was why the Bremen merchant thought it so remarkable.
Another attempt at settlement in Leif’s camp followed later, and now Freydis, the illegitimate daughter of Eirík the Red, went out with the colonists. However, this time the trouble that flared was between the settlers themselves, with one group being reproved for storing their wares in the houses Leif had built. They went off and set up their own settlement not far from Leif’s original one, but Freydis, whose brutality places her at the other end of the spectrum from the firm but good-natured Guðrið, had them killed, and when she found that none of her male companions would kill her victims’ womenfolk, she took an axe and murdered five women as well, a ‘monstrous deed’ for which she was never punished in Greenland, but which brought her disgrace. Maybe one reason she escaped punishment was her heroic behaviour diring a Skræling attack, recounted, perhaps fancifully, by the Saga of Eirík the Red: ‘when the Skrælings came rushing towards her she pulled one of her breasts out of her bodice and slapped it with the sword. The Skrælings were terrified at the sight of this and fled back to their boats and hastened away.’ She was a latter-day Brünnhilde. However, the saga says, ‘although the land was excellent they could never live there in safety or freedom from fear, because of the native inhabitants. So they made ready to leave the place and return home.’ On the way they captured a couple of Skræling boys in Markland and took them home, learning something about the ways of the people they had encountered. These boys may well have been Inuit, but further south they had probably met the Mic-Mac Indians, who would see Europeans once again when John Cabot landed in Newfoundland in 1497.58 Guðrið had a much more honourable life than Freydis, and eventually went on pilgrimage to Rome, and the longhouse where she lived after her return from Vínland and Greenland has been plausibly identified. She ended her life as an anchorite living in Iceland, celebrated for her Christian piety. Through her American son, Snorri, and another child, she was also the ancestress of generations of distinguished Icelanders.59
So much for the information contained in the Greenlanders’ Saga, and to some extent the Saga of Eirík the Red. Even so, the fantastic elements throw the reader off balance. Did Þorstein Eiríksson and his wife, Grimhild, really sit up in bed after they had died of a plague that ravaged Þorstein’s crew – maybe some disease they had picked up in America?60 And that is a story from the less fanciful of the two sagas about Vínland. This is where archaeology has once again come to the rescue, even if the physical remains are rather less impressive than those still standing in Greenland. In 1960 Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, who had spent many years scouring the areas of North America within reasonable range of Greenland, identified a site on the northern tip of Newfoundland as a Norse settlement, even though it became obvious that it was only occupied for a score of years at the start of the eleventh century. It would be tempting to identify L’Anse aux Meadows as the place where Leif Eiríksson struck camp, although the location does not match the description in the sagas: this is some way north of the area where wild grapes can be found, and questions have been raised about its suitability as a harbour and about the mildness of winter weather, which was a point made in the saga description of Leif’s camp. A harbour it must have been, though, as the finds included boat sheds in which rather small boats could be stored, the sort of vessel that, as has been seen, was often used by Norse hunters travelling north from the Western Settlement in Greenland.
There can be no doubt that this was a Norse site. As well as a bathhouse, there was a charcoal kiln and a forge; the site contained a deposit of bog iron, which may be why the Norse stopped here – this was certainly something the native population never used, and yet access to iron and to smelting facilities would make a settlement much more viable: ships could be repaired, tools could be made, altogether the settlers would become less depende
nt on Greenland, which in any case could not offer them iron. A spindle whorl indicates that women inhabited the site, as spinning was women’s work. It is certainly possible that the buildings were constructed by another group of Greenlanders than those we hear about in the sagas; but the best bet is that the sagas were optimistic about the resources of Vínland, or at least the area around Leif’s settlement, and that this was indeed where the explorers created a base. From this base they did travel further south, as remains of butternut squash, which does not grow at such a high latitude, were found on the site. Thus, even if it originated as Leif’s camp, it became a service station on the route south; but whether the Norse built other settlements in the south, or simply travelled down for trade (as they travelled up Greenland for hunting) is an open question, as is the question whether they would have counted this area as Markland or Vínland.61 The obvious conclusion is that, for a brief period, there did exist trade in American furs and pelts, against which the Norse increasingly preferred to offer strips of cloth (according to the sagas); but dealing with the Skrælings was not straightforward, and the risks were rapidly seen to outweigh the advantages. On the other hand, the Norse stay was so short that there was no need to create a cemetery: no skeletons have been found on the site.
Whether or not Norsemen reached as far north as Ellesmere Island, it is certain that Markland supplied the Greenlanders with wood. It was easily reached by following currents that headed north from the two Greenland settlements and then curved round, taking ships themselves built out of Markland wood past Baffin Island to the coast of Labrador and, eventually, the forested areas close to the sea. Unlike the voyages linking Greenland to Iceland and Norway, then, the Norse voyages to Vínland and Markland did not become regular, and settlement among hostile native inhabitants was not an option. The Norse traders’ presence in America did not transform the maritime world in the way that the expeditions of Columbus, Cabot and Vespucci would do 500 years later, yet links to North America did not cease. This is not to claim that the Norse traders knew that Markland and Vínland were anything but large islands comparable to Iceland and Greenland – or maybe part of Asia, but this was not something about which they greatly cared.
22
From Russia with Profit
I
During the centuries of the Iceland trade and the Greenland trade, much more intensive maritime networks were developing further to the east, in the connected space of the Baltic and the North Sea, the ‘Mediterranean of the North’, into which, by way of Bergen, the Arctic luxuries discussed in the previous chapter were fed.1 This became an organized space; that is to say, the activities of merchants were controlled with increasing attention by a loose confederation of towns that had itself emerged out of corporations of merchants. During this period, from about 1100 to about 1400, the Mediterranean became a theatre for contest between the Genoese, the Pisans, the Venetians and eventually the Catalans, who were often as keen to challenge one another as they were to join campaigns against the real or supposed enemies of Latin Christendom in the Islamic lands and in Byzantium.2 In the ‘Mediterranean of the North’, by contrast, the unity of purpose of the merchants is striking – there were, of course, rivalries, and efforts were made to exclude outsiders from England or Holland, but co-operation was the norm.
This confederation of merchants from towns along the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea, and across great swathes of the north German hinterland, is known as the German Hansa. Hansa or Hanse was a general term for a group of men, such as an armed troop or a group of merchants; in the thirteenth century the term Hansa was applied to different bodies of merchants, German or Flemish, from a variety of regions, for instance the Westphalian towns that gravitated around Cologne, or the Baltic towns that were presided over by the great city of Lübeck; but in 1343 the king of Sweden and Norway addressed ‘all the merchants of the Hansa of the Germans’ (universos mercatores de Hansa Teutonicorum), and the idea that this was the Hansa par excellence, a sort of super-Hansa embracing all the little Hansas, spread thereafter.3 The phrase dudesche hanze (Middle Low German – Deutsche Hanse in Modern High German) was used informally; but the official term that the early Hanseatic (or, as they are sometimes called, Hansard) merchants used for themselves in places where they successfully installed themselves, such as Bergen in Norway or the Swedish island of Gotland, was rather different: in Latin mercatores Romani imperii, or in Low German coepmanne van de Roemschen rike, both meaning ‘merchants of the Roman Empire’.4 For, even in German lands far beyond the Rhine and the Danube that had never fallen under Roman rule nobles, knights and merchants took pride in the imperial authority of the medieval German kings, most of whom received the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The major Hansa city in the Baltic, Lübeck, was elevated to the special status of a free imperial city by Emperor Frederick II in 1226, having already received privileges from his grandfather Frederick Barbarossa in the twelfth century. Since the Danish king had been making his own bid to gain control of Lübeck and the neighbouring lands of Schleswig, the German ruler understood how important it was to win the loyalty of the Lübeckers.5
To a striking degree, accounts of Hanseatic history have been moulded by modern political concerns. In the late nineteenth century, Bismarck and the Kaisers dreamed of making Germany into a naval power capable of confronting the British at sea. The difficulty was that Great Britain appeared to possess a naval tradition that Germany lacked; with a little probing, however, just such a tradition was discovered, in the fleets of the Hansa cities. That the Hansa was a German, or at least Germanic, phenomenon was easy to demonstrate: there were, it was true, Flemings, Swedes and other non-Germans whose towns took part in Hanseatic trade, but these people shared a common Germanic ancestry, and German merchants in such centres as Visby and Stockholm formed the core of the original merchant community. Such ideas were taken still further by historians writing under the Third Reich. By now the Hansa was associated not just with racial purity but with German conquest, because the cities founded along the shores of the Baltic by merchants and crusaders, of which more shortly, could be presented as glittering beacons of the ‘Drive to the East’ that had subjugated, and would once again subjugate, the Slav and Baltic peoples. Even after the fall of the Third Reich, the politicization of Hansa history continued, though in new directions. Since several of the most important Hanseatic towns, such as Rostock and Greifswald, lay along the shores of the now vanished German Democratic Republic, East German historians took an interest in the Hansa. They were wedded to Marxist ideas about class structure, and they made much of the ‘bourgeois’ character of these cities, which were by and large self-governing communities, able until the fifteenth century to fend off the attempts by local princes to draw them into their political web. East German historians also laid a strong emphasis on evidence for political protest among the artisan class in the Hansa towns, and they asked themselves whether these were places where a precocious proto-capitalism came into existence (whatever that term might mean).6
Following the collapse of the discredited East German regime, interpretations of the history of the Hansa have swung in a different direction, with German historians once again taking the lead. The Hansa is now held up as a model of regional integration, an economic system that crossed political boundaries by linking together Germany, England, Flanders, Norway, Sweden, the future Baltic states and even Russia. Andrus Ansip, Prime Minister of Estonia, celebrated the entry of his country into the Eurozone by declaring: ‘the EU is a new Hansa’. Modern German accounts of the Hansa barely conceal their authors’ satisfaction that German economic dominance within Europe has what appear to be inspiring precedents going right back to the Middle Ages: the German Hansa encouraged free trade among its members and constituted a ‘superpower of money’.7 There was even a degree of political integration, since commercial law followed a limited number of models; at first many maritime cities followed the sea law of Visby in Gotland, but over time the commercial la
w followed in Lübeck became standard. However, a leading French historian of the Hansa, Philippe Dollinger, took exception to the common term ‘Hanseatic League’, because the German Hansa was not one league with a central organization and bureaucracy, like the European Union, but a medley of leagues, some created only in the short term to deal with particular problems. He very sensibly suggested that the term ‘Hanseatic Community’ fits best of all.8
All these ways of reading the history of the Hansa distort its past in a broadly similar way. The German Hansa was not simply a maritime trading network. By the fourteenth century it had become a major naval power, able to defeat rivals for control of the waters where its members traded. Less often noticed is the significance of the inland cities that played a very important role in Hanseatic trade with England, operating under the leadership of Cologne.9 Of its three major trading counters outside the network of Hanseatic cities, places where the Hanseatics were permitted to create their own towns within a town, one, Novgorod, lay inland, though the other two, Bergen and London, were only accessible by sea. The Hansa was a land power (or maybe one should say river power) as well as a sea power, and its ability to draw together the interests of cities in the German hinterland and cities that gave access to the sea lent it enormous economic strength. It was a source of supply for luxury goods such as furs from Russia, spices from the Levant (by way of Bruges) and amber from the Baltic; but its members were even more active carrying uncountable barrels of herring, vast supplies of wind-dried cod, or the rye produced along the shores of the Baltic on the lands of the Teutonic Knights. Indeed, the link to this crusading order of knights, lords of large parts of Prussia and Estonia, was so close that the Grand Master of the German Order, to give the Knights their correct name, was a member of the Hanseatic parliament, or Diet. As well as supplying a good part of the food the Hansa cities required if they were to survive and grow, the Grand Master was overlord of several towns that the German merchants had set up along the southern shores of the Baltic.10