The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The presence of a crusading Military Order in the deliberations of the German Hansa acts as a reminder that the medieval conquest of the Baltic was not simply the result of merchant endeavours. Just as the Genoese, Pisans and Venetians took full advantage of the crusades in the Mediterranean to install themselves in the trading centres of the eastern Mediterranean, the arrival of German merchants in Prussia, Livonia (roughly Latvia) and Estonia was rendered possible by the victories of the ‘northern crusades’, wars against pagans and sometimes against the Orthodox Russians in which two German Military Orders, the Sword Brethren and the Teutonic Knights, played a leading role, as did the Danish and Swedish kings. The Sword Brethren came into existence at the start of the thirteenth century, when Albert von Buxhövden, an enterprising cleric with close family links to the archbishop of Hamburg–Bremen, arrived in Latvia with twenty-three ships, carrying 500 crusaders. His aim was always to create a permanent German presence in the area, and so he established a trading centre at Riga in 1201. This also became the base for the crusading brethren, whose mission was to convert the local Livs (a people related to the Finns and the Estonians), if need be by force. The ‘northern crusades’ borrowed concepts and vocabulary from the more celebrated crusades to the Holy Land, portraying their wars as the defence of lands dedicated to the Mother of God, just as the expeditions to Jerusalem were conducted in defence of the patrimony of the Son of God; in due course the Teutonic Knights would name their command centre in Prussia Marienburg, ‘the fortress of St Mary’. Without constant supplies of state-of-the-art weaponry brought across the Baltic on Hansa ships, these campaigns against wily, well-trained, obstinate native peoples had little chance of success; as it was, the ferocity of the German onslaught did more to unite the opposition than to break it down.11

  Very soon the conquest of Livonian territory became an end in itself, and interest in the spiritual life of the Livs waned, if indeed it had ever been strong. A contemporary writer named Henry, who wrote a chronicle of the conquest of Livonia, insisted that all the violence against the Livs was in a good cause; as pagans, they had robbed, killed and committed sexual depravity, including incest, but after baptism they were subject to holy correction, which often seemed to work. On one occasion Sword Brethren fighting Estonian pagans maintained a siege of a heathen stronghold for several days, calmly killing their prisoners in sight of the besieged, until the Estonians had had enough: ‘we acknowledge your God to be greater than our gods. By overcoming us, he has inclined our hearts to worship him.’ As at the time of the conversion of the Scandinavians, the message was that Christ was a warrior to be respected above all other leaders.12 The Brethren formed part of the bishop of Riga’s entourage until they began to interfere in the Danish lands that had been carved out of Estonia, including the trading city the Danes had created there – Reval, or Tallinn (which may mean ‘castle of the Danes’).13 By 1237, this and other scandals had reached the ears of the papacy, with the result that the Sword Brethren were incorporated willy-nilly into the larger and better-organized Teutonic Knights; but by then the Sword Brethren had already extended the German military presence, and by extension the German trading presence, far along the southern shores of the Baltic.14

  As the foundation of Tallinn suggests, the thirteenth-century conquest of the Baltic was not solely achieved by Germans. The political ambitions of the Danish and Swedish kings, often in competition with one another, also transformed this area, and offered yet more opportunities to German merchants. From the foundation of Stockholm, around 1252, German merchants were made welcome in the island city, because the Swedish rulers understood that the resources they needed for their wars of conquest had in large part to come from the profits of trade. Scandinavian raids brought the Finnish coast under the rule of the Swedish kings, and Estonia fell under Danish rule for a time, until it was handed on to the Teutonic Knights. Without violence to the evidence, these attacks can be seen as a continuation of the wars fought by earlier Danish and Swedish rulers, and by Viking raiders, in the days when Haithabu and Wolin were major trading bases perched on the edge of pagan principalities.

  The history of this period, known largely from German and Scandinavian writings produced by Christians who were fiercely critical of their pagan neighbours, is too easily presented as a one-way movement of ruthless crusading armies and navies eastwards into the Baltic lands. The reality on the ground was more complex. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Slavs, Balts and Finno-Ugrians who inhabited the Baltic shores, mostly pagan, were launching their own Viking-style raids against German and Danish ships and settlements. Just as the Anglo-Saxons had once prayed for deliverance from the wrath of the Northmen, so in medieval Denmark prayers were uttered beseeching deliverance from Curonian raiders, the pagan inhabitants of what is now the west coast of Latvia; in 1187 Estonian raiders reached as far as the important trading base of Sigtuna, on Lake Mälaren, which they sacked, having outwitted the Swedish defences. It was a feat worthy of those Vikings who in earlier centuries had navigated down the Seine or the Guadalquivir with the aim of sacking the rich towns of France and Spain.15 Looking further ahead, the Swedish king, Birger, informed the Hansa in 1295 that he had conquered the Karelians, in southern Finland, and had converted them to Christianity; this was perfectly just, he argued, since they had been launching pirate attacks on Christian shipping, and had routinely disembowelled their victims. He had also constructed a castle at Viborg ‘to the honour of God and the glorious Virgin, both for the protection of our kingdom and for the safety and peace of seafarers’. From Viborg, King Birger proposed to keep a watchful eye on trade towards Russia, even limiting the number of Russian merchants who could board Baltic shipping. What he really wanted was a stake in the fur trade out of Russia, and to extend his political control over the southern shores of Finland.16 As trade across the sea grew in volume, German and Scandinavian ships became more obvious targets for raiders of all descriptions. Imposing order on these dangerous seas would, however, produce handsome returns. Trade and crusade were intimately entangled, whether in the Baltic or in the Mediterranean; but political ambitions also counted for much in the calculations of the crusading kings of Sweden.

  II

  Why the Germans became dominant in the Baltic and the North Sea is a good question. After all, around 1100, German ships were not seen as often in the North Sea or the Baltic as Scandinavian ones, while the Flemings were a notable presence on the river routes of northern Europe, and further south in Germany there were busy communities of Jewish merchants, especially active in the wine trade; whether deliberately excluded or simply not interested in the far-flung north, the German Jews took no part in the transformation of the Baltic and the North Sea led by the Hansa.17 Until Lübeck began to flourish in the twelfth century there were no German towns on the Baltic, and the area that became the German Democratic Republic did indeed have a different identity to the rest of Germany: its inhabitants were pagan Slavs, notably the Wends, or Sorbians, who still survive in the Spreewald near Berlin. The predecessor of Lübeck, Liubice, or Alt-Lübeck, consisted of a fortress established by a knes, or prince, of the Polabian Slavs, while not far off another very small Slav settlement lay at Rostock, in Abotrite territory; beyond lay Rugians, Wagrians, Pomeranians – Szczecin (Stettin), close to the modern German–Polish border, was famous for its three pagan temples and its strong walls.18 There was an enormous variety of different peoples speaking different languages or dialects, and the fragmentation into small groups rendered all of them much more vulnerable to the organized onslaughts of the Germans and the Danes. But there was plenty of peaceful contact too; several of these Slavonic peoples were happy to trade across the sea, which was also visited by Russian merchants, who were arriving in Gotland off Sweden, and reaching Schleswig in 1157. There can be no doubt that they were arriving much earlier, because links to Russia went back to the period when Scandinavian princes had become rulers of Kiev; Varangian merchants from Sweden had long been familia
r with the river routes that extended far to the south, through Ukraine and, with a short hop overland, to the Black Sea. However, the twelfth-century Russian merchants came from Novgorod rather than Kiev, selling furs and pelts from the edges of the Arctic that had filtered down to Novgorod itself.19

  The transformation of this region was, however, the work of Germans, by which one means speakers of a group of languages which (in their late medieval written form) goes under the name of Middle Low German, and which, at first glance, looks more like Dutch than the High German of further south, meaning that relations with Flemings and Hollanders were easy to maintain. Two places dominated the Baltic in the early days of the Hansa: Gotland, particularly its largest town, Visby; and Lübeck. It might seem odd that one of these places was not in German territory at all, but on a Swedish island; but, as has been seen, Lübeck too was barely in Germany, if by Germany is understood the area inhabited by German-speakers. Lübeck was not on exactly the same site as the old town of Liubice, which was more exposed.20 The foundation of the new city happened in stages, first with the destruction of Liubice in wars between Slavs and Germans, and then with the creation of a new town by the ruler of Holstein, Adolf von Schauenburg, in 1143. This was a bad moment, since soon afterwards the papacy declared a crusade on three fronts – not just the Second Crusade, which took the French and German kings off to Syria in the vain hope of conquering Damascus, but encouragement to the Christian armies fighting the Muslims in Spain, and a war against the pagan Wends which the pope would have preferred the German king to join.

  The pope was rightly worried that two kings on crusade to the East would only obstruct one another, which is exactly what happened. In 1147, during the war against the Wends, the Abotrite ruler, Niklot, attacked Lübeck; but it was already well enough defended to resist him. On the other hand, it proved more difficult to resist the growing power of Henry the Lion – the duke of Saxony and one of the greatest princes in Germany – who refounded Lübeck in 1159, and granted it the iura honestissima, ‘the most honourable charter of town rights’, rights that were confirmed by the German emperor, Barbarossa, even after he had destroyed the power of his rival Henry in the 1180s. This gave the leading citizens power over law-making, and established them as the city elite.21 A German chronicler, Helmold von Bosau, was strongly of the view that Henry was only interested in making money, and did not really care whether the Slavs in the surrounding countryside turned Christian; but Henry certainly had a good sense of what was needed to make his new city flourish:

  The duke sent envoys into the northern towns and states, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Russia, offering them peace and free right of access through his town of Lübeck. He also established there a mint and a market and granted the town the highest privileges. From that time onwards there was ever-increasing activity in the town and the number of its inhabitants rose considerably.22

  He was particularly keen to attract merchants from Visby, for he understood that a network linking Gotland, situated right in the middle of the Baltic, and Lübeck, with its access to the interior, would be extremely profitable. From 1163, Gotlanders were allowed to come to Lübeck free of tolls, though Henry expected reciprocal rights for Lübeckers visiting Gotland. Lübeck grew and grew; although the size of its population before 1300 is pure guesswork, the city is thought to have had 15,000 inhabitants at the start of the fourteenth century, and in the late fourteenth century – a time when plague had depopulated much of Europe – the population may have reached 20,000.23

  Lübeck looked in two directions. Westwards, a short overland route connected the new city to Hamburg, giving access to the North Sea, and this was guaranteed by a formal agreement between the towns in 1241; by the fourteenth century, the narrow sea passage through the Øresund, or Sound, between Denmark and what is now southern Sweden, took priority. Naturally, use of that route depended on the approval of the king of Denmark, and relations between Lübeck and the Danes were not always easy. In the very early days, Henry the Lion boosted Lübeck by working closely with King Valdemar of Denmark to conquer the coastline that stretched east from Lübeck towards the large island of Rügen, where the statue of the Slav god Svantovit was ‘hacked to pieces and cast into the fire’. That done, the Danish king seized the temple treasures he found there. There was always the danger that the king of Denmark would come to regard these shores as his own little empire. One important result of these conquests was the foundation of satellite towns within the commercial orbit of Lübeck, towns that followed the Lübeck legal code; Rostock has been mentioned, established at the start of the thirteenth century, and a similar story of foundation, with the blessing of local territorial lords, applied at Danzig and elsewhere. These princes, whether German or Slav, were keen to draw in the profits of expanding trade; but the new towns acted as agents for the growing population of the German heartlands, who took the opportunity to settle the countryside alongside or in lieu of the existing Slav population – Netherlanders arrived as far afield as the Upper Elbe, where they introduced drainage schemes they had learned in their own boggy homeland, and left behind Dutch dialects that were still to be heard at the start of the twentieth century. This ‘Drive to the East’, Drang nach Osten, was both maritime and terrestrial.24

  Only defeat in 1226 checked the apparently irresistible rise of the Danish coastal empire, which for a time even included Lübeck. The German emperor, Frederick II, looked on, but those who led the assault were the count of Schwerin, one of his often troublesome subjects, and the Lübeckers themselves.25 However, the Danes refused to stop interfering, and the ambitions of Valdemar IV Atterdag, the Danish king, who reigned from 1340 to 1375, drew together the Hansa cities. His relentless attempt to overwhelm Visby and Gotland, and to create a base there for Baltic expansion, was checked amid massive slaughter in 1361; the hideously wounded skeletons of the besiegers are a ghoulish motif of Swedish museums.26 When they at last made peace with the Danes at Stralsund in 1370, the Hansa cities were even able to insist that Valdemar’s successor would need to meet with their approval before he could be crowned king. That was a prestigious prize; but there were other prizes that were more valuable still: the Danes were forced to cede to the Hansa the towns that controlled traffic through the narrow passage of the Øresund – Helsingborg, Malmö and other places.27

  This, then, was a glorious future, whose triumphs were expressed in the handsome Gothic buildings that the Lübeckers constructed at huge expense out of brick; there were grand churches, such as the Marienkirche and Sankt Petri in Lübeck, but also streets of gabled merchant houses, and these became the model copied by the masons of Rostock, Greifswald, Bremen, and of city after city along the great arc that stretched from Bruges to Tallinn. The design of these houses was determined by the simple need to incorporate a warehouse as well as an office and living quarters, because the Hanseatic merchants looked after their own goods rather than depositing them in central warehouses, as often happened in the Mediterranean. Yet the most successful merchants also sought to show off their wealth with Gothic frills and other touches of grandeur, such as a façade coated in imported stone to distinguish their home from the frontages on either side.28 Artists from Lübeck such as Bernt Notke and Hermen Rode, the creator of massive carved altarpieces, were in great demand as far away as central Sweden, so that cogs sometimes carried not just rye and herrings but carefully wrapped masterpieces destined for the churches of Stockholm and elsewhere.29 A common legal standard, the maritime law of Lübeck, ensured that commercial disputes would be solved by similar means in places very far apart. A common language, Low German, took over from Latin as the medium in which to record business transactions. The middle classes in the Hansa towns did not learn letters in order to dispute the ideas of St Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, even though Lübeck and other cities had their share of wealthy convents, and both Rostock and Greifswald acquired universities that still survive, founded in 1419 and 1456; an ability to read and write oiled the wheels of commerce.30
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  III

  Late medieval Lübeck gloried in the title Caput Hanse, ‘head of the Hansa’, but in the early days of what was to become the German Hansa, Visby exercised more influence than Lübeck, benefiting from its excellent position in the middle of the southern Baltic.31 A self-governing community of German traders began to coalesce; on its seal it proudly proclaimed itself to be the universitas mercatorum Romani imperii Gotlandiam frequentantium, ‘the corporation of merchants of the Roman Empire visiting Gotland’. This word universitas had not yet become a term of art for places of advanced learning, and retained its generalized meaning of ‘community’, ‘corporation’, not so different from the vernacular term Hansa. In the thirteenth century, enough Germans had settled permanently on the island to form a second, parallel, self-governing group, using a similar seal, but with the word manentium, ‘remaining in’, replacing frequentantium, ‘visiting’. The Germans had their own very magnificent church, St Mary of the Germans, which now serves as Visby cathedral; the Germans also, as was typical at the time, used it as a safe place to store goods and money. In addition to a quite formidable line of walls, more than two miles (about 3.5 km) in length, Visby contains over a dozen sizeable medieval churches, but following the city’s decline at the end of the Middle Ages all but St Mary’s fell into disrepair. Birka may have been the first town in Sweden, but Visby was its first city.

  One of Visby’s grandest churches, Sankt Lars, betrays the influence of Russian architectural styles, and a small church in the south of the island contains frescoes in a Byzantine–Russian style; there was also a Russian Orthodox church in Visby, though this is now buried underneath a café. For Gotland was the great emporium where Russian goods such as furs and wax were received, having travelled part of the way by river, through Lake Ladoga and up the Neva into the Baltic, and then across what could be dangerous waters to Gotland itself. At the other end of the route, in Novgorod, the Gotlanders possessed their own trading colony, or ‘Gothic Court’, which included a church dedicated to the Norwegian king, St Olaf, in existence by about 1080.32 Novgorod was not an ancient city, as its name, ‘New City’, suggests: tests carried out on the wooden streets of medieval Novgorod, excavated in the 1950s, take the city’s history no further back than 950.33 The Baltic connection was thus of great importance to Novgorod, just as the Russian connection was of great importance to Gotland; and Henry the Lion and the Lübeckers were keen to tap into that. At first, the Germans rode on the backs of the Gotlanders. In 1191 or 1192 Prince Yaroslav III of Novgorod entered into a treaty with the Gotlanders and the Germans, but it mentions an earlier treaty, now lost – whether this included the Germans is unknown.34