The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  What is perhaps most remarkable about these two accounts, one by a Norseman and the other by someone with, at the very least, close ties to the Scandinavian community, is the absence of any reference to plunder, raids, or fighting of any kind. The late ninth century was, after all, the height of Viking expansion. At about the same time that Ohthere and Wulfstan were offering their reports to Alfred, Norse Vikings were settling Iceland; Rollo was besieging Paris (he was later given Normandy); Viking Dublin was a thriving mercantile center; the Varangian Rus were on the verge of moving their capital south from Novgorod to Kiev, closer to the wealth of the Byzantine Empire; and Alfred’s great claim to fame was halting the Danish Vikings’ advance into Anglo-Saxon Wessex. Yet Ohthere’s and Wulfstan’s primary concerns seem to be the procurement of highly specialized or prestige goods. Equally striking is that these voyages could take place at all, for prior to the seventh century the sail was unknown to Nordic mariners. Thanks to the insights they provide into these disparate subjects, the stories of Ohthere and Wulfstan make a good point of departure from which to explore the rise of long-distance maritime enterprise in northern Europe.

  Maritime Northwest Europe to the End of the Roman Empire

  Given their proximity to the long-standing centers of Mediterranean culture, northern Europeans’ comparatively late adoption of centralized government and urbanism, to say nothing of the sail, seems remarkable. Yet northern Europe was known to the people of the ancient Near East and Greece chiefly as a source of obscure barbarian invaders like the Sea People, and what little information was available about the north was accepted with reservation. Herodotus was circumspect about the region’s geography, “for I cannot accept the story of a river called by non-Greek people the Eridanus, which flows into the northern sea, where amber is supposed to come from; nor do I know anything of the existence of islands called the Tin Islands, whence we get our tin.… I have never found anyone who could give me firsthand information of the existence of a sea beyond Europe to the north and west.” Evidence of north–south trade antedates Herodotus and Greek colonization on the Black Sea by many centuries, as the presence of Baltic amber in the fourteenth-century BCE Uluburun wreck attests; but how this exchange worked is unknown. The tin of Cornwall in southwest Britain reached the Mediterranean via the Bay of Biscay and the Loire and Garonne Rivers. Greek and Etruscan trade began reaching northern France and western Germany in the sixth century BCE, as shown by the discovery of a 1,100-liter bronze mixing bowl for wine. Probably made in Sparta, the so-called Vix krater was found in Burgundy, having been brought up the Rhône and Saône Rivers and then a short distance overland to the upper Seine, which flows north past Paris to the English Channel.

  This transpeninsular river route is one of many characteristic of the European subcontinent. Rivers facilitate transportation and commerce in many regions of the world, but practicable river routes through continental interiors from one sea or ocean to another are relatively few. The number of European rivers that allow for communication between the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas, in the south and east, and the Baltic and North Seas, and the Atlantic Ocean, to the north and west, is stunning. The longest of these routes includes the Danube and the Rhine, which rise within a hundred kilometers of each other in the Alps, while their tributaries are even closer, and so provide an almost continuous river route across Europe between the Black and North Seas. Central Europe and European Russia are crisscrossed by innumerable combinations of rivers. The Danube, Dniester, and Dnieper flow east and south to the Black Sea, and their headwaters are within more or less easy reach of the Elbe, which flows north and west to the North Sea, and the Oder, Vistula, and Western Dvina, which flow to the Baltic. The success of the ninth-century trading center of Novgorod and its predecessor, Staraya Ladoga, depended on their location on the Volkhov River, which flows north from Lake Ilmen to Lake Ladoga, from which the Neva drains to the Baltic. Lake Ilmen, in its turn, is fed by the Lovat, which flows from within easy reach of the Dnieper. Novgorod commanded the trade between the Baltic and Byzantium until it was superseded by Kiev, on the Dnieper. A second Dnieper route incorporated its tributary the Pripyat and a short portage to the Bug, a tributary of the Vistula. Farther east, the Volga rises just over three hundred kilometers from the Baltic (and within striking distance of the Western Dvina and Dnieper) and flows to the Caspian Sea. This gave northern European merchants the most direct access to the silk road of Central Asia and the trade of Iran. The lower Volga comes to within a hundred kilometers of the Don, before they diverge, the Don turning west toward the Sea of Azov and Black Sea.

  After two centuries of disruptions resulting from Celtic migrations, western Mediterranean merchants resumed their northern trade in the fourth century BCE. Among the busier transpeninsular routes was the Aude-Garonne-Gironde corridor between Narbonne on the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay port of Bordeaux. This route was favored by Greek traders from Massilia (Marseille), one of whom, Pytheas, probably used it to reach the Bay of Biscay in the 320s BCE. His account of his travels, On the Oceans, survives only in fragments quoted by later writers, some hostile to his claims, but we can sketch the broad outlines of his itinerary. Once in the Bay of Biscay, he sailed to Brittany. The dramatic tides of the Atlantic coast and English Channel—up to 4.5 meters at Quiberon and 16 meters at Mont St. Michel, compared with maximums of less than 1 meter in the Mediterranean—always impressed Mediterranean sailors, and Pytheas apparently discussed them at length. He crossed from France to Cornwall and continued up the west coast of Great Britain to the Orkney and Shetland Islands north of Scotland, which were first inhabited by the fourth millennium BCE. Most intriguing is his claim of sailing six days to a land he called Ultima Thule, where sunlight lasted nearly twenty-two hours and that has been identified as either Iceland (as medieval writers believed) or Norway. Even if his remarks are based on hearsay rather than firsthand experience, they suggest that western European seafarers (as distinct from the inhabitants of mainland Scandinavia) had reached lands on the edge of the Arctic Circle by this early date.

  Turning south, Pytheas likely hugged the east coast of Great Britain, with a possible trip across the North Sea to the Netherlands, another source of amber. If he did cross the North Sea, he evidently returned to complete his tour around Britain, the circumference of which he put at between 6,860 and 7,150 kilometers—within 3 to 7 percent of the actual figure—probably by combining sailing times and latitude calculated by measuring the angle of the sun at noon and other measurements. When the astronomer Hipparchus translated Pytheas’s estimates about two centuries later, they came out to a highly accurate 48°42N in Brittany, 54°14N (possibly the Isle of Man), 58°13N (the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides), and 61° in the Shetlands, where there were nineteen hours of sunlight, which is consistent with his claim.

  The beginnings of sustained Mediterranean interest in northwest Europe dates from Julius Caesar’s invasion of northern Gaul—which entailed several sea campaigns against the sailing fleets of the Veneti in western France and the Bay of Biscay—and his two crossings of the English Channel to Britain in the 50s BCE. Although Gaul became a Roman province in 51 BCE, civil war prevented the Romans from capitalizing on Caesar’s almost flawless invasion of Britain, and when stability returned, Augustus and his successors focused on pushing Roman authority north of the Rhine by land and sea. An Augustan fleet sailed to Jutland in around 10 BCE, and twentyfive years later another, said to number a thousand vessels, reached the Ems River just north of the border between the Netherlands and Germany. Despite these and other demonstrations of power, Rome’s authority on the continent effectively stopped at the Rhine and Danube.a Claudius is credited with establishing standing provincial fleets for service in Germany and Britain, which he invaded in 43 ce. The Classis Germanica (German fleet) was responsible for denying use of the river to Germanic tribes as well as for security at the mouth of the Rhine, a major point of departure for traffic to Roman Britain. The German
fleet’s home port was Cologne (Colonia Claudia) on the Rhine, but subsidiary flotillas were located at provincial capitals and garrison towns like Mainz, about halfway between the North Sea and the Swiss border. Charged with safeguarding the lines of communication between Boulogne and Richborough and later Dover, the Classis Britannica was based on the English Channel at Gesoriacum (Boulogne, France) about twenty miles west of the Dover Strait.

  Roman Gaul’s prosperity continued to attract Germanic tribes from beyond the Rhine. During a revolt in 69–70, Julius Civilis, prince of Batavia (the region at the mouth of the Rhine), mustered a fleet of “all the bireme and single-banked vessels he had, and to these added a larger number of small craft carrying thirty to forty men apiece and fitted out like liburnians. There were captured craft assisted by improvised sails made from coats of many colours.” His crews included many Batavians who had served in the Classis Germanica. The Romans were outnumbered but had “the advantage of experienced rowers, skilled helmsmen, and ships of greater size.” Nonetheless, when the fleets encountered each other off the mouths of the Waal and Meuse Rivers, they gave each other a wide berth. In response to further Germanic incursions through the Dover Strait and across the North Sea to Britain, the Romans built a string of coastal forts on both sides of the English Channel, known as the Saxon Shore. Gaul was less easily defended, and when legions were withdrawn for service elsewhere in the mid-third century, Frankish tribes poured across the Rhine as far south as Spain, where they commandeered a fleet in Tarragona for a raid on North Africa. It was not until the reign of Marcus Aurelius Probus in the 270s that the Rhine frontier stabilized.

  This incidentally led to one of the most remarkable feats of seamanship in Europe or the Mediterranean to that point. After pacifying the border, Probus relocated a large number of Frankish tribesmen to the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor. In 279 “some of them revolted and disrupted the whole of Greece with their large navy,” which they cobbled together from whatever ships they could steal locally. The erstwhile prisoners pressed on to Sicily, “where they attacked Syracuse and killed many of its inhabitants. Then they sailed across to Africa, and although beaten off by an army from Carthage, they were still able to return home [to the coast of the North Sea] through the Strait of Gibraltar.” The earliest seaborne Saxon raids on Gaul, to which Danes and Frisians also contributed, took place two years later and further eroded the defenses of the beleaguered empire and led to the burning of the Classis Germanica at Cologne.

  Barbarian tribes continued to cross the Rhine throughout the fourth century, and the end of Roman rule in Britain resulted from an invasion of Gaul by barbarian tribes at the start of the fifth. In 410 the emperor Honorius withdrew his legions and “sent letters to the cities in Britain, urging them to fend for themselves.” In the ensuing chaos, native Briton rulers recruited Angle, Saxon, and Jutish mercenaries from the continent for help against invaders and each another. In so doing, they may have sowed the seeds of their own demise, for the Saxons are said to have “sent back news of their success to their homeland, adding that the country was fertile and the Britons cowardly.” With guarantees of land and pay for maintaining “the peace and security of the island,” the newcomers expanded their authority and by the mid-seventh century the territory of modern England comprised seven kingdoms: Anglian Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, Saxon Essex, Sussex and Wessex, and Jutish Kent. Wales and Scotland remained in the hands of Britons. Saxon mariners also established themselves on the Loire from where they and Danish raiders struck the Garonne valley and Iberian Peninsula. Following the collapse of Roman authority in Gaul and Italy, in 476 the western empire expired.

  Germanic tribes were attracted by the prosperity of Gaul and Britain, the wealth of which was evident not only in the major cities and garrison towns, but on the sea-lanes that ran along the coasts of Gaul from the Rhine to the Garonne, and between Gaul and the British Isles. Elite Britons and Roman officials and soldiers throughout areas under Roman control sought out wine, olive oil, glassware, jewelry, pottery, and weapons from Gaul, while Britain exported grain, cattle, gold, tin, iron, slaves, hides, and hunting dogs to ports at the mouths of the Rhine, Seine, Loire, and Garonne. A host of more mundane cargoes have turned up in shipwrecks from the period. A second-century barge excavated at Blackfriars in London sank with a cargo of ragstone, a standard building material. Although this came from Kent via the Medway and Thames Rivers, teredo worm holes in the hull prove that the ship had spent considerable time at sea. Finds associated with a third-century wreck from St. Peter Port in the Channel Islands indicate that its crew of three traded from the Iberian Peninsula to the North Sea, and the cargo on its last voyage included barrels of pitch from the Les Landes region of southern France. The Roman-era trade routes were disrupted but not altogether ended by the barbarian invasions. Even as the last legions were leaving Britain, church missionaries were heading north to Ireland and Britain, and prestige goods continued to reach the British Isles from the farthest corners of the Mediterranean. Among the effects of a seventh-century East Anglian chieftain named Raedwald found in a ship burial at Sutton Hoo, England, were an eastern Mediterranean dish, an Egyptian bronze bowl, and two silver spoons inscribed with the names Saul and Paul in Greek letters. From closer by, the site also yielded thirty-seven gold coins from Merovingian Gaul dating from 575 to 625, the year of Raedwald’s death and, presumably, the interment of his ship—and coincidentally the year of the latest coin found with the Yassi Ada A ship off Turkey.

  Frisians and Franks

  The collapse of Roman authority disrupted the balance of power that had prevailed along the Rhine–English Channel frontier since the first century, and the primary sea-lanes of the imperial period declined in importance as trade passed into new hands to be carried in new directions. The Frisians were the first people in northern Europe to be distinguished for their maritime trading networks, which resulted from their adaptability to a treacherous, sea-soaked environment. Around the start of the fifth century, rising sea levels flooded parts of the Netherlands and a lake the Romans had called Lacus Flevo doubled in size to form the Aelmere.b Rather than flee to higher ground, the Frisians capitalized on their aqueous habitat to become the foremost traders in northern seas. By the sixth century, Frisians were in regular contact with the Franks and the Danes, and they were sailing to British ports like York and London. To the north they sailed to Jutland where their trade helped spur the founding of the eighth-century entrepôt at Ribe, on the west coast of the peninsula. This effort was undertaken by an unknown Danish ruler who sought to channel the trading networks of the North Sea through his domains. The choice of Ribe was due to the advantages that came of crossing the Jutland peninsula overland—sixty kilometers to Kolding Fjord—rather than sailing by way of the Skagerrak and Kattegat, or through the sheltered, hundred-mile-long Limfjord that snakes between Jutland and the island of Vendsyssel. Ribe was frequented primarily by Frisian and Frankish merchants from the North Sea, but the site has yielded goods from Norway, Birka, the Baltic, and even the Black Sea, which attests to the eastward reach of Scandinavian and Slavic trade networks at this early date.

  South of Frisia, the Salian Franks had emerged as the most powerful of the Germanic tribes to cross the Rhine. In 486 Clovis defeated the last Roman ruler in Gaul, but with their acceptance of Christianity he and his Merovingian successors secured Romano-Gaulish support against the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse and other Germanic tribes who followed heretical teachings. By midcentury, the Frankish kingdom encompassed most of modern France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and southern Germany. For all its size and resources, its long seacoast was exposed to Saxon and Danish raids, the most famous of which is recounted in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, and in Gregory of Tours’s History of the Franks. According to the latter, at some time between 516 and 534 the Danish king Chlocilaicus (Hygelac in Beowulf) raided northern Frisia and sailed into the Aelmere. From there the Danes sailed up the Vecht and Rhine to the junction
of the Waal before being caught by the Franks near modern Nijmegen, about a hundred kilometers from the sea. Chlocilaicus was killed and his army crushed, presumably near an intended rendezvous with the fleet.

  The Frisians’ own expansionist designs resulted in frequent hostilities with the Franks who sought to reclaim ancestral lands north of the Rhine in a process that would climax under Charlemagne. Early in the seventh century, the Merovingians built a church at Utrecht and their most important northern port was at nearby Dorestad. Although its population never exceeded two thousand, Dorestad had a kilometer-long waterfront on the Rhine and was the site of a mint from 630 to 650, when it fell to the Frisians. Although Pepin II restored it to Merovingian rule in 689, it was not until fifty years later that Charles Martel launched a major naval expedition that paved the way for Frisia to become Frankish territory.

  Neither Pepin nor Charles Martel was king; rather they served as hereditary mayors of the palace (major-domos) for the moribund Merovingian Dynasty. The mayors shunned the throne until 751, when Pepin III was crowned king of the Franks, the first of the Carolingian Dynasty, which takes its name from his son, Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus, or Charles the Great), who expanded the Frankish kingdom beyond all recognition. A supreme military strategist and tactician, he deployed riverine fleets to brilliant effect in four separate campaigns: in 789 against Slavs living along the Elbe and its tributaries; two years later against the Avars in Hungary, via the Danube; in 797 against the Saxons, by way of the Weser and Elbe; and finally against the Slavs of north-central Germany, again on the Elbe. Of these, the war against the Avars was the most decisive, because it destroyed the last vestiges of their power. Charlemagne’s experience of moving his armies on the Danube inspired him to try digging a canal, the Fossa Carolina or Karlsgraben, between the Swabian Rezat River, in the Rhine-Main catchment area, and the Altmuhl, a tributary of the Danube. Although the distance was less than two kilometers and the difference in elevation between the Rezat and Altmuhl only ten meters, the local geology presented insurmountable obstacles and the project was abandoned. Such a link between the Rhine and Danube would frustrate engineers until 1992, when the 171-kilometer-long Rhine-Main-Danube Canal opened.