The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Farther east, the Rus were drawn to the trade of the Volga River and Caspian Sea. The Khazars, whose ruling nobility had converted to Judaism in the eighth century, had nominal control over access to the Caspian from their capital in the Volga delta, but the Rus reached the sea in the late ninth century. Around 910 they raided the port of Abaskun on the Iranian shore. Three years later, according to the historian al-Masudi, “there came about 500 ships, manned each by 100 persons,” who promised the Khazars “half of what they might take in booty from the peoples of the seacoast” in exchange for access to the Caspian. This expedition ranged around the coast and as far inland as Ardabil, in northwest Iran, before the Rus established themselves on islands near Baku, in Azerbaijan. The Rus proved invincible, in part because “the nations round the sea … had not been accustomed in time past to any enemy making his way to them there, for only merchant-ships and fishing vessels used to pass therein.” Thirty years later another large force entered the Caspian, this time ascending the Kura River to capture the city of Barda’a, in Azerbaijan. Presumably under pressure from their Muslim neighbors, in 965 the Khazars denied passage to the Rus, who retaliated by sacking their major cities and so precipitated the end of Jewish rule.

  In eastern Europe as elsewhere, Scandinavians were essentially pragmatic traders whose voyages tended to follow the established if lightly used routes of the day. The Baltic’s ancient riverine trade with the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia exported furs, wax, honey, and slaves in exchange for gold, silk, and silver from Byzantium. Muslim lands were the source of myriad silver coins that have been found in hoards around the Baltic. Excavations at one of the seventeen farms on the island of Rügen yielded a basket with more than two thousand coins buried sometime after 844. Varangian traders also funneled goods more traditionally associated with the luxurious east, and Chinese silks have been found at Birka, York, and Dublin. We know that the Rus had access to Asian spices, too, for Abraham ben Jacob, a Jewish merchant who visited Mainz in the tenth century, reported finding silver dirhams minted in Samarkand as well as “quantities of such spices as are usually found in the Far East, pepper, imber [ginger], cloves, nard, costus and galingal [blue ginger].” Rus merchants doubtless had a hand in conveying these from east to west.

  The Norse Atlantic World

  The century and a half after 900 was the climactic period of Scandinavian expansion. By the start of the tenth century, Vikings were part of the political landscape in the places they had settled—the Danelaw and Laithlinn, and in Ireland, Normandy, and Russia. In Scandinavia itself, rulers taxed trade and used their newfound wealth to purchase the support of local chieftains. In this the Danish kings were especially successful, thanks to their command of the trade across Jutland and of the sea routes from the North Sea to the Baltic, which passed through the archipelago between Jutland and Skåne. (The Store Belt, widest of the three passages between the North Sea and Baltic, narrows to five miles; the most direct, the Øresund, is less than two.) Norway had been united under Harald Fairhair at the end of the tenth century, but the emergence of a strong kingship took place more slowly in Sweden.

  Harald’s success in consolidating the monarchy had sparked the initial settlement of Iceland, which remained a conspicuous exception to the trend toward centralized power then developing in Scandinavia. A more egalitarian thing (assembly), such as prevailed in Iceland, however, did not mean an absence of law, and just as the king of Norway could exile someone, the thing could do the same. Near the end of the tenth century, Eirik “the Red” Thorvaldsson managed to be banished from Norway for murder, and then from Iceland for the same crime. A century before, a mariner blown off course en route to Iceland had sighted lands to the west, and with few other options the exiled Eirik spent three years exploring the coasts of what he called Greenland before returning to convince several hundred Icelanders to join him. They settled in two groups, Eirik’s Eastern Settlement in the south and the Western Settlement about 160 miles up the Davis Strait near Nuuk (formerly Godthab). Greenland in turn became the jumping-off place for what turned out to be the first voyage to North America by Europeans (an event not understood as such at the time) thanks again to a sailor’s overshooting his destination.

  Navigational error in the North Atlantic was not all that uncommon in this period. Coastal navigation was the norm for most voyages around northern Europe, but sailing between Scandinavia and the British Isles, the Faeroes, Iceland, and Greenland required open-water passages of at least three hundred miles. Navigational instruments were few. The sounding lead (a long line with a weight at one end to determine the depth of water) was standard equipment, and the Norse could measure the angle of the sun to determine latitude, while they shaped their course with the aid of a “sunstone.” Working on the same principle as a sundial, a sunstone was a dial with a pointer in the middle that cast its shadow on notches incised around the outer ring, with different sets of markings being used to account for the sun’s altitude at different seasons. Mostly, sailors relied on the observation of natural phenomena, including the flight paths of birds, shoals, tidal streams, fog banks, the color of water, and the presence of ice—including the “ice blink,” the reflected light of glaciers visible from over the horizon. For long-distance voyages they practiced latitude sailing, running north or south to the parallel on which their destination lay and then following that parallel east or west as closely as possible.

  While meteorological conditions during the Medieval Warming Period may have been somewhat more benign than they are now, short days, fog, and overcast skies limited the hours of good visibility, and none of the tools or techniques available to Scandinavian mariners was infallible, especially when sailing to a new destination. Returning to Iceland after a voyage from Norway, Bjarni Herjolfsson learned that his father had joined Eirik in Greenland and decided to follow him there. Bjarni sailed too far south and wound up on a coast that was “well wooded and with low hills,” unlike mountainous, treeless Greenland. Bjarni refused to land and subsequent exploration was left to Leif Eirikson, who visited places he called Helluland (“slabland,” for its glaciers, probably Baffin Island), Markland (“woodland,” southern Newfoundland), and Vinland (for its grapes). Leif’s kinsman Thorfinn Karlsefni later spent two or three years at Vinland with a party of sixty men and five women including his wife, Gudríd, who gave birth to the first European in North America.

  Eirik’s Saga and the Greenland Saga agree that the Greenlanders intended to exploit the region—which encompassed the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence as far south as New Brunswick—for its wood, furs, grapes, and walnuts. But it was too remote and the Greenlanders’ numbers too few—only four or five hundred at this point, and never more than twentyfive hundred—to exploit Vinland fully. The essential accuracy of the sagas is corroborated by archaeological finds at L’Anse aux Meadows in northeast Newfoundland, near the entrance to the Strait of Belle Isle. This was a year-round settlement that could accommodate about one hundred people so that they did not have to make the round-trip from Greenland in one season. L’Anse aux Meadows seems to have been occupied until about 1030, but people continued sailing to Vinland for some time after that. In the 1070s, the chronicler Adam of Bremen wrote of an island called “Vinland because vines producing excellent wine grow wild there. That unsown crops also abound on that island we have ascertained not from fabulous reports but from the trustworthy relations of the Danes.” Somewhat closer, Markland remained a source of wood for Greenlanders until at least 1347 when, according to an Icelandic source, “There came also a ship from Greenland, smaller in size than the small Icelandic boats; she was anchorless, and came into the outer Straumfjördur [in western Iceland]. There were seventeen men on board. They had made a voyage to Markland, but were afterwards storm-driven here.” Norse Greenland seems to have died out or been abandoned sometime after 1410, when an Icelandic crew returned home after four years in the Eastern Settlement. Sources hint at no difficulties at the time, but the next writt
en reference to Greenland, in a note regarding John Cabot in 1497, mentions no Greenlanders of European descent. Even so, English cod fishermen and traders—especially from the port of Bristol—had begun sailing to Iceland on a regular basis earlier in the fifteenth century, and the odds are good that some reached Greenland and possibly the Newfoundland Banks well before Cabot’s time.

  From Anglo-Saxon to Norman England

  Five hundred years before, however, the English remained minor players in the drama then unfolding in the North Atlantic. Alfred had exercised his prerogatives as king wisely, and his successors built on the foundations he laid. Edward the Elder enlarged his realm and by 918 ruled all England south of the Humber and had won the submission of Northumbria, Strathclyde, Scotland, and Dublin. This rapid expansion set Wessex on a collision course with other aspirants to supremacy in the British Isles, a crisis that came to a head in the battle of Brunanburh in 937. Under Edward’s successor, Anglo-Saxon armies sailed north in hundreds of ships and were victorious in a dramatic battle that was, according to a poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, bloodier than any fought “since Angles and Saxons  came here from the east,  sought out Britain over the broad ocean, / …seized the country.” The Anglo-Saxon resurgence slowed during the long reign of Æthelred II, when disaffected Danes settled in England rather than submit to Denmark’s centralizing king, Harald Bluetooth, a convert to Christianity whose evangelization and monarchical policies alienated many of the aristocracy. In the 980s, these old-guard Danes sailed for southern England where they forced Æthelred to pay nearly 150,000 pounds of silver and gold—Danegeld, or “Danish tribute”—over twenty years to prevent further violence.

  Among the beneficiaries of this latest wave of Danish incursions into England were the merchants of the Duchy of Normandy across the English Channel. Although the Vikings never threatened the integrity of the Frankish kingdoms as directly as they did those of England, they had occupied the coast around the mouth of the Seine and sailed upriver to attack Paris. At the start of the tenth century, the French king purchased their allegiance in exchange for the land they already inhabited, and the Duchy of Normandy became a buffer between the French heartland and further incursions from the sea. A major commercial and political force in their own right, in Æthelred’s time the Normans engaged in coastal fishing, especially for whales, and carried on an active commerce with the British Isles, Scandinavia, the Faeroe Islands, and Iceland. Their chief exports included grain, salt, iron, and lead, while the merchants of Rouen also specialized in wine, sealskins, whale oil, salted whale meat, and blubber, as well as slaves. Slavery was a constant of medieval trade and a striking part of the life stories of even the most prominent figures of the time. A teenaged Saint Patrick was enslaved in Ireland before joining the church in the fourth century, and four hundred years later Bede wrote of a fellow Northumbrian who was taken south to London and sold there to a Frisian merchant. Olaf Tryggvason, a contemporary of Æthelred’s who became king of Norway, was traded as a young boy for “a precious garment” before ending up in Kiev. While the northern European slave trade lacked the organization and scale of that of the Mediterranean or Indian Ocean, it was no less savage and degrading. Warner of Rouen’s blistering tenth-century satire, Moriuht, follows the wanderings of its Irish protagonist in search of his wife, Glicerium, after her abduction. When Moriuht attempts to follow Glicerium’s kidnappers,

  He is captured by Vikings and vigorously tied up with chains.… As his body, struck powerfully by their whips and hands, is spun from their hands across the deck of the ship, the Vikings stand about and marvel at the active prodigy as they piss on the middle of his bald head.… He is subjected to insults and then in place of a wife he is forced by the Vikings to perform the sexual service of a wife.

  Sold in Northumbria and again in Saxony, he earns his freedom from a widow by sleeping with her and then makes his way to Rouen. In a nearby port “full to bursting with the merchandise of wealth supplied by Vikings,” Moriuht finally redeems Glicerium for “half a penny” and their daughter for “a quarter of a coin with … half a cooked loaf of bread.” Warner regards his fellow academic as a fool and exaggerates his literary failings and sexual proclivities for comic effect, but his horrific depiction of enslavement rings true. The brutal rape and humiliation of captives regardless of sex or age, the appallingly low value of human life, and the division of families were as typical of medieval slavery as they are today.

  Æthelred II was hardly troubled by such run-of-the-mill indignities, but he did object to the Normans’ willingness to trade with his enemies. A treaty with Richard, duke of Normandy, officially closed all ports to raiders of the other’s territories, but the terms were unenforced. In 1002 Æthelred tried to enhance this ineffectual agreement by marrying Richard’s daughter, Emma. This political marriage failed in its chief purpose due to Æthelred’s decision the same year to massacre all the Danes in England—men, women, and children—which only invited more Danish pressure and ultimately brought about the end of Anglo-Saxon England. Denmark’s Svein Forkbeard was well positioned to avenge the massacre and he led repeated attacks on England from 1002 to 1013, when Æthelred fled to Normandy and Svein ascended his throne. Three years later, Svein’s son Knút (or Canute) became king of England; he added Denmark to his crown after his brother’s death and Norway after the death of (Saint) Olaf Haraldson. A judicious and able ruler, Knút’s deft diplomacy included marrying Æthelred’s widow, Emma of Normandy. The exhaustion on all sides after forty years of nearly constant war and the fact that one person ruled Denmark, England, and Norway led to a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Knút’s creation of a North Sea empire was a remarkable accomplishment, but one that owed as much to timing and luck as anything else. The culmination of Danish rule in England, which lasted a generation, marks the precipitous highpoint of the Viking age. Knút died in 1035, and seven years later England was ruled again by the native Edward the Confessor, while Olaf Haraldson’s son, Magnús the Good, was king of Norway and Denmark.

  The only significant rival to Magnús’s rule was his uncle, Harald Sigurdsson (known as Hardradi, or “the Ruthless”), whose peripatetic career demonstrates the reach of Viking influence across Europe. Following the death of his half brother, Olaf Haraldson, Harald fled to the court of Yaroslav the Wise in Kiev. As a member of the Byzantine emperor’s Varangian Guard, he fought for the Byzantines in Bulgaria, Sicily, Asia Minor, and the Holy Land before returning to Norway to claim the crown in 1047. Norway prospered during Harald’s nearly two-decade reign, but he waged almost incessant war against Denmark’s Svein III until his overwhelming victory at the battle of Nissa in 1062. Although Svein “Leapt from the bloodied gunwales, / Leaving his fallen comrades,” he kept his throne, and two years later he and Harald came to terms.

  Another outlet for Harald’s restless aggression opened with the death of England’s Edward the Confessor in 1066. His brother-in-law Harald Godwinson succeeded him, but there were three other pretenders to the throne. William, duke of Normandy and Emma’s great-nephew, claimed that Edward had made him his heir—plausible enough considering that Edward had been reared in the Norman court—and that Harald Godwinson had made himself William’s vassal. Svein III was theoretically heir to all the territories once ruled by his uncle, Knút. Harald Hardradi’s pretensions to the throne were weakest, based as they were on reports that Edward had promised the crown to Harald’s predecessor, Magnús the Good. Yet Harald Hardradi was first off the mark, and with a fleet of 250 or more ships and an army of twelve to eighteen thousand men he sailed up the Ouse River and forced York’s surrender. His victory was short-lived and five days later, on September 25, Harald Godwinson surprised the Norse at Stamford Bridge in a battle so stunning that the survivors needed only twenty-four ships to return home with their fallen king.

  In the meantime, William of Normandy had spent months planning an invasion of England. He finally sailed on September 27, and the next d
ay landed on the Sussex coast. Racing south, Harald reached London a week later and after five days set off to catch William before the Normans became entrenched. On October 22 his weary army assembled atop Senlac Hill, nine miles from Hastings, where it collapsed under repeated assaults by William’s cavalry, archers, and infantry. William fought his way to London where he was crowned on Christmas Day. His English domains remained under threat from internal dissent and foreign intervention and he could assert his authority only when he had both ships and armies at his disposal, which according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles was not very often. When Denmark’s Knút II and Robert of Flanders threatened to invade in 1085, William “travelled into England with a greater raiding-army of mounted men and infantry from the kingdom of France and from Brittany as had ever sought out this country before.” As additional security he embarked on a scorched-earth policy and had “the land near the sea laid waste, so that if his enemies landed they would have nothing on which to seize so quickly.” This desperate policy shows the degree to which the Norman descendants of Viking raiders had abandoned the role of sea hunter to become the hunted. The events of 1066 marked a new epoch for northern Europe, but for the moment Norman England seemed vulnerable.