The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  7. Pálsson and Edwards, transl., Orkneyinga Saga, pp. 28–31.

  8. Ibid., p. 34.

  9. Ibid., pp. 36–8; Crawford, Northern Earldoms, pp. 125–8; Forte et al., Viking Empires, p. 270.

  10. Pálsson and Edwards, transl., Orkneyinga Saga, pp. 50–53.

  11. Ibid., p. 84.

  12. Crawford, Northern Earldoms, pp. 68, 198–212; black-and-white plate 1.

  13. Pálsson and Edwards, transl., Orkneyinga Saga, pp. 85–6.

  14. Ibid., p. 85.

  15. R. A. McDonald, ‘The Manx Sea Kings and the Western Oceans: the Late Norse Isle of Man in Its North Atlantic Context, 1079–1265’, in B. Hudson, ed., Studies in the Medieval Atlantic (New York, 2012), p. 150; P. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings: Scandinavia and Europe AD 700–1100 (New York, 1994), p. 111; A. W. Moore, A History of the Isle of Man (London, 1900), vol. 1, p. 102.

  16. Crawford, Northern Earldoms, pp. 166–7.

  17. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings, p. 110; Logan, Vikings in History, pp. 27–8; M. Barnes, The Norn Language of Orkney and Shetland (Lerwick, 1998).

  18. Logan, Vikings in History, p. 29.

  19. Ibid., pp. 30, 32–5; D. Meier, Seafarers, Merchants and Pirates in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2006), p. 108.

  20. Logan, Vikings in History, pp. 38–40.

  21. C. Sauer, Northern Mists (2nd edn, San Francisco, 1973), pp. 84–6; R. Painter, transl., Faroe-Islander Saga (Jefferson, NC, 2016).

  22. Jesch, Viking Diaspora, pp. 48–9.

  23. Ibid., p. 22; S. Auge, ‘Vikings in the Faeroe Islands’, in W. W. Fitzhugh and E. I. Ward, eds., Vikings: the North Atlantic Saga (Washington DC, 2000), pp. 154–63.

  24. Jesch, Viking Diaspora, p. 30.

  25. Cited from Logan, Vikings in History, p. 44 (with slight amendments); G. Turville-Petre, The Heroic Age of Scandinavia (London, 1951), pp. 95–6; G. J. Marcus, The Conquest of the North Atlantic (Woodbridge, 1980), pp. 22–3.

  26. V. Szabo, ‘Subsistence Whaling and the Norse Diaspora: Norsemen, Basques, and Whale Use in the Western North Atlantic, ca. AD 900–1640’, in Hudson, ed., Studies in the Medieval Atlantic, p. 82.

  27. Marcus, Conquest of the North Atlantic, pp. 16–17.

  28. Irish Life of St Brendan in the Book of Lismore, in S. Webb, ed., The Voyage of Saint Brendan (2014), doc. 1.

  29. Navigatio Brendani, in Webb, ed., Voyage of Saint Brendan, doc. 2.

  30. Marcus, Conquest of the North Atlantic, pp. 19–20.

  31. D. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), p. 41; M. Egeler, Islands in the West: Classical Myth and the Medieval Norse and Irish Geographical Imagination (Turnhout, 2017).

  32. Forte et al., Viking Empires, pp. 304–6; Logan, Vikings in History, pp. 43–5.

  33. Logan, Vikings in History, p. 45; also Jesch, Viking Diaspora, p. 182.

  34. Jesch, Viking Diaspora, pp. 194–8.

  35. Citations from the twelfth-century Landnámabók, in Logan, Vikings in History, pp. 47–8; Turville-Petre, Heroic Age of Scandinavia, pp. 97–8; Sauer, Northern Mists, pp. 86–94.

  36. J. Byock, Viking Age Iceland (London, 2001), pp. 48–51 (citing the Saga of the Foster-Brothers), and p. 56; Jesch, Viking Diaspora, p. 22; also Sauer, Northern Mists, pp. 94–6.

  37. Jesch, Viking Diaspora, p. 40.

  38. Byock, Viking Age Iceland, pp. 10–11.

  39. Jesch, Viking Diaspora, pp. 34–5, 56–7.

  40. Logan, Vikings in History, p. 51.

  41. Jesch, Viking Diaspora, p. 39; Byock, Viking Age Iceland, pp. 57–62.

  42. Logan, Vikings in History, pp. 45–7; Turville-Petre, Heroic Age of Scandinavia, pp. 100–101.

  43. Marcus, Conquest of the North Atlantic, p. 26.

  44. Byock, Viking Age Iceland, pp. 10–11, 82–4, 86.

  45. Ibid., pp. 14, 174, 294; Logan, Vikings in History, p. 53.

  46. Turville-Petre, Heroic Age of Scandinavia, pp. 101–2.

  47. Byock, Viking Age Iceland, pp. 292–301; Logan, Vikings in History, p. 54; Turville-Petre, Heroic Age of Scandinavia, pp. 101, 107.

  48. ‘Egil’s Saga’, in The Sagas of the Icelanders (New York, 2000; edition based on The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, vols. 1–5, Reykjavík, 1997), ch. 27, pp. 46–7.

  49. Ibid., ch. 33, p. 54

  50. Ibid., ch. 39, p. 61.

  51. Ibid., ch. 46, pp. 71–4.

  52. Ibid., ch. 63, p. 120; B. Gelsinger, Icelandic Enterprise: Commerce and Economy in the Middle Ages (Columbia, SC, 1981), p. 126.

  53. Ibid., p. 31.

  54. S. Bagge, Cross and Scepter: the Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation (Princeton, 2014), p. 137.

  55. The major work on vaðmal, unfortunately only in Icelandic and with no summary, is: H. Þorláksson, Vaðmal og Verðlag: Vaðmal í Utanlandsviðskiptum og Búskop Íslendinga á 13. og 14. Öld [‘Vaðmal and prices: vaðmal in the foreign shipping and farming of 13th and 14th-century Iceland’] (Reykjavik, 1991); but for its arguments see O. Vésteinsson, ‘Commercial Shipping and the Political Economy of Medieval Iceland’, in J. Barrett and D. Orton, eds., Cod and Herring: the Archaeology and History of Medieval Sea Fishing (Oxford, 2016), pp. 71–9.

  56. Gelsinger, Icelandic Enterprise, pp. 34–6, 46–7, 77–8.

  57. Ibid., pp. 69–76.

  58. E. Carus-Wilson, ‘The Iceland Venture’, in E. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers: Collected Studies (2nd edn, London, 1967), pp. 98–142.

  59. Gelsinger, Icelandic Enterprise, pp. 127, 154.

  60. D. Abulafia, Frederick II: a Medieval Emperor (London, 1988), p. 268.

  61. Gelsinger, Icelandic Enterprise, pp. 83, 151.

  21. White Bears, Whales and Walruses

  1. K. Seaver, The Last Vikings: the Epic Story of the Great Norse Voyages (2nd edn, London, 2015), fig. 2, p. xxiii, and p. 3; K. Seaver, The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America ca AD 1000–1500 (Stanford, 1996); also F. Gad, The History of Greenland, vol. 1: Earliest Times to 1700 (London, 1970), pp. 1–7; and now the often acerbic A. Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland: Viking Peasants in the Arctic (Abingdon, 2019).

  2. H. Pálsson and M. Magnusson, ed. and transl., The Vinland Sagas: the Norse Discovery of America (Harmondsworth, 1965), pp. 15, 39; Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 14–15.

  3. Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 8; Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland, pp. 21–30.

  4. Estimates from the ‘Book of the Settlements’ (Landnámabók), in G. Jones, The Norse Atlantic Saga, being the Norse Voyages of Discovery and Settlement to Iceland, Greenland, and North America (2nd edn, Oxford, 1986), p. 157; Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, pp. 14–15.

  5. Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 16; Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 27.

  6. Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 73–7; Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 29.

  7. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 103–4.

  8. ‘Greenlanders’ Saga’, in Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 187; Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, p. 50.

  9. Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 15–16; Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 77.

  10. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 33–4, 42–5.

  11. Objects in the Greenland room, Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen; Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 104; Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 85; B. Star et al., ‘Ancient DNA Reveals the Chronology of Walrus Ivory Trade in Norse Greenland’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol. 285 (2018), 2018.0978; Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland, pp. 170–72.

  12. Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 102–3; G. J. Marcus, The Conquest of the North Atlantic (Woodbridge, 1980), p. 92; D. Abulafia, Frederick II: a Medieval Emperor (London, 1988), p. 268.

  13. Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 101; Marcus, Conquest of the North Atlantic, pp. 91, 96; J. Arneborg, ‘Greenland and Europe’, in W. W. Fitzhugh and E. I. Ward, eds., Vikings: the North Atlantic Saga (Washington DC, 2000), pp. 304–17.

  14. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1,
p. 172; G. Davies, Vikings in America (Edinburgh, 2009), pp. 130–38, discounting the arguments about metalworking.

  15. Ari Frodi, Íslendingabók, cited in Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 19.

  16. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 20–21.

  17. Ibid., pp. 23–4, 91–3, 97–102; Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 93–5; H. C. Gulløv, ‘Natives and Norse in Greenland’, in Fitzhugh and Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 318–26; V. Szabo, ‘Subsistence Whaling and the Norse Diaspora: Norsemen, Basques, and Whale Use in the Western North Atlantic, ca. AD 900–1640’, in B. Hudson, ed., Studies in the Medieval Atlantic (New York, 2012), p. 83; Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland, p. 328.

  18. Warp weight in the Greenland room, Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen; Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 84–5; Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 35; Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 39, 84–5.

  19. Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 23.

  20. ‘Eirík the Red’s Saga’, in Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 216–17; Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, pp. 85–6; Brattahlíð church: Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 41–2.

  21. G. Turville-Petre, The Heroic Age of Scandinavia (London, 1951), p. 138; Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 26–9.

  22. ‘Authun and the Bear’, in G. Jones, ed. and transl., Eirík the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas (Oxford, 1961), pp. 163–70.

  23. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 57, 62–3; Marcus, Conquest of the North Atlantic, p. 92.

  24. Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 114.

  25. Ibid., pp. 111, 118–19.

  26. Ívar Bárdason, cited by Marcus, Conquest of the North Atlantic, p. 98; also Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 89–92.

  27. Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 95; Nedkvitne, Norse Greenland, pp. 343–9.

  28. J. Berglund, ‘The Farm beneath the Sand’, in Fitzhugh and Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 295–303.

  29. Objects in the Greenland room, Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen; Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 154–61; Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 110–11; Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 112.

  30. B. Fagan, Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World (New York, 2007); Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 161–2, 181–2; Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 143.

  31. T. McGovern, ‘The Demise of Norse Greenland’, in Fitzhugh and Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 327–39.

  32. Text in H. Ingstad, Land under the Pole Star (London, 1966), pp. 329–30; Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, pp. 158–9.

  33. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 164; Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 112–13.

  34. ‘Ungortok the Chief of Kakorttok’, in Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, Appendix iii, pp. 262–7.

  35. McGovern, ‘Demise of Norse Greenland’, p. 338.

  36. N. Lynnerup, ‘Life and Death in Norse Greenland’, in Fitzhugh and Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 285–94.

  37. Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 159, 163.

  38. Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 87.

  39. Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, pp. 29–35.

  40. Rune-stone and carvings in the Greenland room, Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen; Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, p. 21; Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 80; Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 42, 112.

  41. R. McGhee, ‘Remarks on the Arctic Finds’, in Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, Appendix v, p. 283; P. Sutherland, ‘The Norse and Native North Americans’, in Fitzhugh and Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 238–47.

  42. P. Schledermann, ‘Ellesmere: Vikings in the Far North’, in Fitzhugh and Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 248–56; Davies, Vikings in America, pp. 89–104.

  43. Marcus, Conquest of the North Atlantic, p. 92; T. Haine, ‘Greenland Norse Knowledge of the North Atlantic Environment’, in Hudson, ed., Studies in the Medieval Atlantic, pp. 110–16.

  44. Displayed in the Greenland room, Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen.

  45. Skálholtsannáll, cited from Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 136; K. Seaver, ‘Unanswered Questions’, in Fitzhugh and Ward, eds., Vikings, p. 275; Seaver, Last Vikings, p. 59.

  46. Cited in Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, p. 15.

  47. Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 285; M. Egeler, Islands in the West: Classical Myth and the Medieval Norse and Irish Geographical Imagination (Turnhout, 2017).

  48. Among the justifiably incredulous: K. Seaver, Maps, Myths, and Men: the Story of the Vínland Map (Stanford, 2004); among the unjustifiably defensive: Davies, Vikings in America; among the supporters of the map: R. Skelton, T. Marston and G. Painter, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (2nd edn, New Haven, 1995); see also S. Cox, ‘A Norse Penny from Maine’, in Fitzhugh and Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 206–7.

  49. Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, pp. 53–4.

  50. Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 117.

  51. Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, pp. 55–8.

  52. E. Wahlgren, The Vikings and America (London, 1986), pp. 139–46, 158; cf. Davies, Vikings in America, pp. 74–5, and Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 124.

  53. Sutherland, ‘The Norse and Native North Americans’, pp. 238–9.

  54. Wahlgren, Vikings and America, pp. 74, 92–3.

  55. Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, pp. 64–5.

  56. Ibid., pp. 66, 70–71.

  57. Ibid., pp. 70–71.

  58. Ibid., pp. 67–70, 100.

  59. N. Brown, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (New York, 2007); Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, p. 71.

  60. Pálsson and Magnusson, ed. and transl., Vinland Sagas, p. 63.

  61. H. Ingstad, Westward to Vinland: the Discovery of Pre-Columbian Norse House-Sites in North America (London, 1969); B. Linderoth Wallace, ‘The Viking Settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows’, in Fitzhugh and Ward, eds., Vikings, pp. 208–16; B. Linderoth Wallace, ‘The Anse aux Meadows site’, in Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, Appendix vii, pp. 285–304; Seaver, Last Vikings, pp. 50–52; Jones, Norse Atlantic Saga, pp. 129–30; Davies, Vikings in America, pp. 76–81; P. Bergþórsson, The Wineland Millennium (Reykjavik, 2000).

  22. From Russia with Profit

  1. P. Dollinger, The German Hansa (London, 1970), p. 3; H. Brand and E. Knol, eds., Koggen, Kooplieden en Kantoren: de Hanze, een praktisch Netwerk (Hilversum, 2011).

  2. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a Human History of the Mediterranean (London, 2011), pp. 287–369.

  3. Dollinger, German Hansa, pp. xix–xx.

  4. G. Graichen et al., Die Deutsche Hanse: eine heimliche Supermacht (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2011), p. 115.

  5. D. Abulafia, Frederick II: a Medieval Emperor (London, 1988), p. 229.

  6. J. Schildhauer, K. Fritze and W. Stark, Die Hanse (Berlin, DDR, 1982); J. Schildhauer, The Hansa: History and Culture (Leipzig, 1985).

  7. Graichen et al., Deutsche Hanse, p. 6.

  8. Dollinger, German Hansa, p. xx.

  9. See the EU-funded Hansekarte: Map of the Hanseatic League (Lübeck, 2014).

  10. J. Sarnowsky, ‘Die Hanse und der Deutsche Orden – eine ertragreiche Beziehung’, in Graichen et al., Deutsche Hanse, pp. 163–81.

  11. A. Kasekamp, A History of the Baltic States (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 12–13.

  12. E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (2nd edn, London, 1997), pp. 94–5.

  13. Kasekamp, History of the Baltic States, p. 200 n. 37.

  14. Christiansen, Northern Crusades, pp. 79–82, 99–103.

  15. Kasekamp, History of the Baltic States, pp. 9, 11.

  16. Christiansen, Northern Crusades, pp. 54–5, 120.

  17. Dollinger, German Hansa, p. 4.

  18. Christiansen, Northern Crusades, pp. 29–31.

  19. Schildhauer, The Hansa, p. 20.

  20. Dollinger, German Hansa, doc. 1, p. 379.

  21. Ibid., p. 22.

  22. Ibid., doc. 1, p. 380; Schildhauer, The Hansa, p. 19.

  23. R. Hammel-Kiesow, ‘Novgorod und Lübeck: Siedlungsgefüge zweie
r Handelsstädte im Vergleich’, in N. Angermann and K. Friedland, eds., Novgorod: Markt und Kontor der Hanse (Cologne, 2002), p. 53.

  24. Dollinger, German Hansa, pp. 31–5; R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1300 (London, 1993).

  25. Abulafia, Frederick II, p. 229.

  26. G. Westholm, Visby 1361 Invasionen (Stockholm, 2007), and exhibits in the Gotland Museum, Visby, and Historiska Museet, Stockholm.

  27. Dollinger, German Hansa, pp. 70–71.

  28. Schildhauer, The Hansa, pp. 73–4.

  29. Hermen Rode’s work is both in Sankt-Annen-Museum, Lübeck, and in Historiska Museet, Stockholm; M. North, The Baltic: a History (Cambridge, Mass., 2015), pp. 77–80.

  30. North, Baltic, pp. 80–82.

  31. D. Kattinger, Die Gotländische Gesellschaft: der frühhansisch-gotlandische Handel in Nord- und Westeuropa (Cologne, 1999).

  32. Dollinger, German Hansa, pp. 7–8, 27; North, Baltic, pp. 43–6.

  33. M. W. Thompson, eds., Novgorod the Great: Excavations at the Medieval City 1951–62 directed by A. V. Artikhovsky and B. A. Kolchin (London, 1967), p. 12; Hammel-Kiesow, ‘Novgorod und Lübeck’, p. 60; E. A. Rybina, ‘Früher Handel und westeuropäische Funde in Novgorod’, in Angermann and Friedland, eds., Novgorod, pp. 121–32.

  34. Dating revised from 1189: A. Choroškevič, ‘Der Ostsee Handel und der deutsch-russisch-gotländische Vertrag 1191/1192’, in S. Jenks and M. North, eds., Der Hansische Sonderweg? Beiträge zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Hanse (Cologne, 1993), pp. 1–12; also B. Schubert, ‘Die Russische Kaufmannschaft und ihre Beziehung zur Hanse’, in Jenks and North, eds., Hansische Sonderweg?, pp. 13–22; B. Schubert, ‘Hansische Kaufleute im Novgoroder Handelskontor’, in Angermann and Friedland, eds., Novgorod, pp. 79–95; E. Harder-Gersdorff, ‘Hansische Handelsgüter auf dem Großmarkt Novgorod (13.–17. Jh.): Grundstrukturen und Forschungsfragen’, in Angermann and Friedland, eds., Novgorod, pp. 133–43.

  35. Dollinger, German Hansa, pp. 27–30.

  36. North, Baltic, pp. 40–43.

  37. G. Hoffmann and U. Schnall, eds., Die Kogge: Sternstunde des deutschen Schiffsarchäologie (Hamburg, 2003); also S. Rose, The Medieval Sea (London, 2007), pp. 16, 21–2.