The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings

by Lars Brownworth

  The colony had been saved, but it was only a matter of time until it was attacked again. Thorfinn tried to avoid this by relocating, but once again the winter was brutal, and the colonists gave up. Even Thorfinn was exhausted, unwilling to stay longer. As soon as the weather cleared enough to sail, they all left.

  Freydis’ thoughts on the matter aren’t recorded, but judging from her next actions, she was probably disgusted that her kinsman had given up. Clearly, if there was going to be a new colony set up she would have to do it herself.

  Her husband, as usual, was no help. He lacked both the imagination and energy to gather a crew. Fortunately for Freydis, the same summer in which she returned to Greenland, two brothers had arrived with a crew from Norway. She invited them to her home and spent the summer plying them with stories of the easy wealth available to the west.

  It took less than a month for the two brothers – Helgi and Finnbogi – to sign on. They agreed to provide a ship, and to make sure that there was an equitable division of whatever they found, all three agreed to a limit of thirty men per vessel.

  Relations between them broke down immediately. The brothers arrived at the camp first and installed themselves in Leif’s old hall. When Freydis angrily protested, they pointed out that she had cheated by concealing five extra men on her ship. Insults started flying back and forth until Helgi and Finnbogi took their crew and moved to a different location.

  By the time winter set in, relations were so strained that the two camps stopped communicating with each other. Freydis decided to eliminate her rivals in a typical Viking fashion, equal parts ruse and brutality. Early one morning she walked to Finnbogi’s longhouse and offered to make amends with him. She had decided to leave, she said, and was wondering if he would sell her his ship as it was slightly larger than hers. Finnbogi generously agreed, and Freydis returned to her own camp.

  When she climbed back into her own bed, her cold feet woke up her husband who wanted to know why she had been outside. She proceeded to tell him that she had gone to make peace with the brothers, but that they had beaten her instead. Egged on by Freydis, the husband angrily gathered all his men and stormed into Helgi and Finnbogi’s camp.

  They were taken completely by surprise. Everyone in the house was seized, bound, and then dragged out in front of Freydis where they were killed. The only exception consisted of five women who the men refused to kill no matter how hard Freydis pleaded. She taunted her husband mercilessly for his weakness, but when he still refused, she grabbed an axe and butchered them herself.

  The grisly deed may have been gratifying for the formidable Freydis, but it doomed the colony. There were simply too few to sustain another winter, let alone a permanent settlement. She and her husband returned after threatening to kill any man who talked about what happened – and the Vikings never again attempted a settlement in the new world.

  There is evidence that they did periodically return to gather raw materials. An Icelandic annal records a voyage ‘in search of Vinland’ in AD 1121, and more than two centuries later mentions a journey to Markland to harvest timber.125 The failure to establish a permanent base, however, also doomed Greenland. The island was simply too rugged and sparse to support a European style existence based on animal husbandry. There was not enough pasture, wood, iron, or farmland available.

  Vinland would have solved this problem nicely. At the narrowest point of the Davis Strait, less than two hundred miles separates Greenland from Baffin Island. Beyond lay a vast continent teeming with greater resources than Iceland, Europe, and Scandinavia had to offer. But the Vikings simply had too few people to establish themselves against a determined native population.126 This failure threw the Greenland colony back on its tenuous lifeline of long distance trade with Scandinavia. As long as Viking sea-kings ruled their vast northern empire, that was at least possible, but even by the eleventh century, the trade routes were beginning to shift.

  As Greenland began to grow more isolated, the climate started to deteriorate. Starting in the mid fourteenth century, global temperatures began to cool, further reducing the island’s arable land. The glaciers advanced, and the Inuit crossed over from what is today northern Canada and began to push south.

  The last years of Greenland’s Viking colonies were not pleasant. A cluster of skeletons exhumed from the Western Settlement reveals a picture of a dying civilization. Half of those who survived to eighteen died before age thirty, and the average height of both men and women is less than five feet. Famine began to be more common; the Icelandic Landnámabók claims that the old and helpless were ‘killed and thrown over cliffs.’ Communication between the two settlements declined as temperatures cooled. After years of hearing nothing, an Easterner named Ivar Bardarson tried to contact the long silent Western colony. He wrote in his diary that he found “no people, neither Christian nor Heathen, but many sheep running wild.”

  The surviving eastern settlement struggled on a bit longer. It was decimated by the Black Plague, and in 1379 the “Skrælings (Inuit) raided it, killing eighteen and carrying off two boys as slaves.” The last record we have of anyone living, is the hauntingly short mention in an Icelandic annal: “In the Year of Our Lord 1410… Sigrid Bjornsdatter married Thorstein Olafson.” After that, Icelandic ships stopped going west, and there is only silence.127

  The colonies of Greenland were sustained by trade, and ironically, that lifeline was cut by other Vikings. A source for the luxury goods that the remote island provided – the ivory, pelts, and sealskins – was found much closer to the Scandinavian markets in what is today Russia. There was no need to risk life and limb on harrowing journeys across storm tossed seas. All the exotic goods a rich sea-king could ever want, were to be had to the east.

  THE TRADERS

  Chapter 15

  Rurik the Rus

  “They are tall as date palms, blond, and ruddy…”

  - Ibn Fadlan describing Vikings

  Unlike their Scandinavian cousins who pointed their longships down the coasts of Frisia and the British Isles, the Swedish Vikings looked in the other direction, to the vast forest zones across the Baltic Sea. As early as the mid eighth century – forty years before Norwegian raiders had attacked Lindisfarne – the Swedes began to explore the river systems of western Russia.

  What attracted them was not plunder but trade. There were no rich monasteries or unprotected towns, just expansive birch and pine forests and beyond them the grass steppes of the east. The Vikings came at first to exploit raw materials: honey and wax from the Finns living on the Baltic, and Arctic furs and amber from the Lapps to the north.128 The Slavic populations who lived in the interior of what is today Russia could offer little in the way of plunder, but were valuable as slaves, to be used in Scandinavia or sold in the busy slave markets of the south.129 The Vikings were joined in these early slave raids by the Finns, whose name for Sweden – Ruotsi – became corrupted to Rus, the name by which the Swedes in the east eventually came to be known to the Islamic and Byzantine worlds to the south.130

  The Vikings, regardless of which area they hailed from, were people of the water, and it was by lakes and rivers that they penetrated what is now Russia. In AD 753 they took over the outpost of ‘Staraya Ladoga’. The fort sat on the edge of Lake Ladoga near the mouth to the Volkhov River, and gave access to the two great river systems of Russia: the Volga and the Dneiper.

  Both rivers led to an abundant supply of silver and silks, two things in high demand back in Scandinavia. The Volga pointed east to the Islamic world, while the Dneiper led south to Orthodox Byzantium.

  The Dneiper route was extremely treacherous, and the Rus are the first people we know of who successfully navigated it.131 It required sailing south from the main Rus base of Staraya Ladoga, then up the Volkhov River to pick up the headwaters of the Dneiper. The five hundred and seventy miles of river that followed were broken up by a series of twelve dangerous falls that necessitated dragging the ship out of the water and carrying it – cargo and all
– to a more navigable spot downstream. This exposed the traders to attack, a daunting proposition since the area was inhabited by the Pechenegs, a terrifying tribe of eight ‘hordes’ who specialized in ambushes. If a merchant survived the river, he would still have to navigate the shores of the Black Sea, an additional three hundred and fifty miles away from Constantinople.

  The Volga route, by contrast, was far simpler and therefore preferable. It led by gentle stages to the Caspian Sea, and from there to the wealthy markets of Baghdad. There was a tremendous amount of money to be made, but in this case it was by trade, not by raiding. The Rus were far from home, and they could only operate on the Volga by permission of the Khazars, a powerful tribe that dominated the southern end of the river where the Volga Delta emptied into the Caspian. The Khazars were a semi-nomadic people originally from central Asia who had converted to Judaism in the eighth century.132 They commanded all trade on the southern Volga from their capital of Atil, a city near the Caspian Sea,

  The Khazars provided an emporium for the northern goods that the Swedes brought, but more importantly, they gave the Rus access to the far more lucrative markets of the Muslim world where the Rus could sell their slaves. The bulk of these unfortunates were acquired by the Rus from the Slavic populations of present day Russia, and were destined for the markets of Baghdad.

  The scale of this slave trade – and its profitability – can be glimpsed by the amount of silver that made its way back to Sweden. More than ten thousand Islamic silver coins have been found in various hoards, surely only a fraction of what was acquired. The Arab geographer Ibn Rustah claimed that slaves were virtually the only thing the Rus cared to import. “They sail their ships“, he wrote, “to ravage the Slavs…”

  Arab opinions on the Rus were mixed. There was no doubt that they were magnificent specimens. The traveler Ibn Fadlan claimed that he had never seen people of more perfect physique. “They are tall as date palms, blond, and ruddy“, he wrote. But, he also considered them “the filthiest of God’s creatures” – at least by Islamic standards.133

  By this time the Rus were beginning to act like the Khazars. Not only did their chieftains surround themselves with concubines and ape the dress and ceremonies of the Khazars, but they started describing themselves as ‘Khans’.

  By the mid ninth century, however, signs of trouble along the Volga route began to appear. Thanks to religious rifts, cultural stagnation, and several civil wars, Baghdad entered a period of decline, and as the silver dried up, the Rus began looking for other ways of making money. Characteristically, they resorted to the old habit of raiding and fell on the Islamic populations near the Caspian Sea without mercy. A Muslim chronicler wailed that “The Rus shed blood, ravished women and children, plundered… destroyed and burned… Then the people prepared themselves for war… but the Rus attacked them and thousands of Muslims were killed or drowned.”

  If Baghdad’s power was waning, however, that of the Khazar’s was not, and any raid had to have their permission first. This was made abundantly clear in an infamous raid carried out in AD 913. A large Rus fleet – according to an Islamic source it was five hundred ships – sailed down the Volga and cut a deal with the Khazars to split evenly whatever spoils they found. After pillaging several cities on the southern coast of the Caspian, the Rus turned north and advanced into a strange, ‘burning’ land.

  After three days travel across the surreal landscape, they sacked the city of Baku in present-day Azerbaijan. They found enough plunder to satisfy even the most avaricious Rus. Not only was Baku a major source of naphtha, one of the main ingredients of Greek Fire – fuel for the war machines of Byzantium and Moorish Spain – but it was also a religious center. Not far from the city was a geyser of natural gas which at some point in antiquity had been ignited. The fire-worshiping Persians had built a temple which over the years had attracted a tidy pilgrim trade from as far away as India, and was responsible for much of the city’s wealth.

  The raid was a dramatic success, but was remembered less for the haul of slaves and gold and more for what happened on the return journey. When they reached the Volga, the Rus were ambushed by their Khazar allies and slaughtered. The disaster illustrated the dangers faced by the Rus even in war bands. They were far from home, and as likely to be victims as raiders. The deeper problem, however, greater than any double-cross, was that the Volga trade was showing diminishing returns.

  There also seem to have been troubles closer to home. The Russian Primary Chronicle, a twelfth century work written in a monastery near Kiev, records that in the mid ninth century, several Slavic tribes drove the Rus out of their strongholds around Lake Ladoga. It continues – rather improbably – to suggest that the Slavs then fell into a civil war and after several years of fighting invited a Viking named Rurik to rule over them.

  This unlikely story is our first introduction to the man who would eventually be known as a founding father of the modern states of Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine. By 862, a Viking named Rurik, a form of the Norse name Erik, had installed himself south of Ladoga at a fortified market town he called Holmgård – better known today as Novgorod.

  From his capital on the Volkhov River, Rurik sent two of his nobles named Askold and Dir south to secure access to the Dneiper.134 On the west bank, where the ground rose to a prominent bluff, was the city of Kiev, dominating the river below. It served as a frontier outpost of the Khazars, and by sending his men to take it, Rurik was reorienting the Rus toward the south, a change which would have important ramifications for both Russian and European history.

  The dangers of the southern route were well known. The Rus would have to cross more than eight hundred miles of hostile territory, at times frighteningly exposed to aggressive tribes and treacherous conditions. But if the risk was much greater, so was the reward. At the end of that journey was the city of Constantinople, at the time the greatest metropolis on earth. In an age of poverty it was a city of gold. While the capitals of the west counted their populations in the thousands, Constantinople’s population was nearly a million.

  It was the physical and spiritual center of a realm that stretched back into antiquity. No mere kingdom, it was the eastern half of the fabled Roman Empire, the final unblemished jewel in the Roman crown. It was ruled over by an emperor who was still called Caesar, by a population which still called themselves Roman. Both emperor and empress still presided in style over chariot races in an ancient Roman Hippodrome as their predecessors had for five centuries. The empire’s borders stretched from the island of Sardinia off the coast of Italy to the Black Sea and the northern coast of what is today Turkey, and were still defended by its formidable legions.

  It was, to medieval eyes, a place of wonders. The great land walls, the most formidable defensive fortifications ever built, were pierced by nine main gates, the most famous of which was the ceremonial Golden Gate. It was a vast Roman triumphal arch with three huge doors, lined in gleaming precious metal and surmounted with statues of elephants pulling a victorious chariot. Beyond it lay a wide avenue lined with palaces of white marble, vast forums, and bazaars overflowing with exotic wares from three continents.

  Everywhere one looked there were splendid mosaics and breathtaking works of art from the vanished world of antiquity. Public squares held famous classical statues, while golden and porphyry sarcophagi held the remains of legendary emperors.135 Most awe-inspiring of all was the great cathedral of the Hagia Sophia that dominated the city’s skyline.

  There was no building like it in the world. In an age of squat, heavy architecture, the church of Divine Wisdom rose in graceful, elegant lines. A worshiper who entered through its enormous imperial door – a portal encrusted with silver and supposedly made from the wood of Noah’s ark – would gaze in wonder at the multicolored marble walls and an interior space that beggared imagination. The massive central dome, the largest in the world for a thousand years, rose a hundred and eighty feet above the floor, and the ceiling was covered with four acres of
gold mosaic. Around the base of the dome, the builders had put windows lined with gold. As light flooded into the building, this made it appear as if the dome itself were insubstantial and merely floating, ‘as if‘, wrote one of the first observers, ‘it was suspended from heaven by a golden chain.’136

  If these wonders weren’t enough to fire Rus greed, there were always the busy market places. In the sixth century, the Byzantines had smuggled the secret of silk making out of China by sending two monks to tour a Chinese facility. After learning the intricacies of the trade, the clerics had managed to sneak some silkworms into hollow bamboo canes, with enough Mulberry leaves to keep them alive on the return trip. When they arrived in the capital, they planted the city’s first Mulberry trees, and Constantinople’s most profitable business was born.

  The silk that the Rus had bought in Baghdad had been imported with the usual price increases along the way. In Constantinople, however, there was no middleman to add to the cost, greatly increasing the profit the Russ could get when they resold it at home. The route there was dangerous, but the Rus were free to develop it without asking permission from anyone, and having done so, they would reap all the rewards.

  Constantinople, called Miklagård – the Great City – by the Vikings, was obviously worth braving treacherous rapids, and fighting barbarians along the way. The Rus had probably been aware of its existence for some time. The first recorded contact is of a Rus delegation in 838, and the sight of such wealth must have stunned them. The walls probably did as well. The city was protected by a triple line of defenses. The first was a moat nearly sixty-six feet wide and twenty-three feet deep, reinforced with a seven foot stockade. If an attacker managed to get past that, they would have to climb over a thirty foot outer wall, while defenders could strategically withdraw through numerous minor gates. The last line of defense was the most formidable, a massive inner wall towering forty feet high and twenty feet wide – broad enough to rush whole companies of men wherever they were needed. This final wall was reinforced with ninety-six towers, allowing the defenders to fire their lethal bolts from nearly three hundred and sixty degrees. With adequate troops manning them, the walls were quite impregnable.