Cross and Scepter

by Bagge, Sverre

  In the fourteenth century, however, Norway was confronted with a similar challenge as the neighboring countries. Warfare along the Swedish and Danish border to the south in the early fourteenth century and then the struggles to regain Sweden for King Magnus and King Håkon in the 1360s and ’70s took place ashore and called for land forces. The Norwegian response seems to have been a combination of a peasant levy on foot and elite forces on horseback. Even at this point, however, no full transition took place, probably because the country, at least after the Black Death, was too poor to raise an elite force that could compete with those of the neighboring countries. The peasant levy seems to have managed well enough as a defensive force, however, because when Duke Erik occupied Oslo in 1309 during the conflict between Håkon V and the Swedish dukes, he was attacked by a local Norwegian force and shortly afterwards left the town. Although the Erikskrönikan depicts the battle as a Swedish victory, it is obvious that Erik would have continued the siege of the castle of Akershus if he had not been defeated or had not at least found himself in sufficient difficulties to be forced to retreat. By contrast, the Norwegians were defeated in offensive operations. During the fourteenth century, the Norwegian fleet also became obsolete and was defeated by German cogboats, which were higher and bigger and could sink the Norwegian ships or shoot at their crews without fear of retaliation.

  A logical consequence of the transition from sea to land and the development of heavy cavalry was the introduction of castles, the first of which were built in the twelfth century. In the 1240s, the king of Denmark had twenty of them, while ten belonged to the duke of Southern Jutland. The greatest expansion took place in the following period, however, as the result of the more intense internal struggles that began in 1286 and of Erik Menved’s early-fourteenth-century wars. After a rebellion in Jutland, which was put down in 1313, the king built a number of castles in this region, while up to then most of the castles had been in the border regions and along strategic sea passages. In Sweden, small and simple castles were built in the twelfth century, followed by really large and elaborate constructions dating from the thirteenth century, particularly from its second half, and from the following centuries. These new castles could serve both as residences for the king and his representatives and as fortifications. Similar changes took place in East Central Europe. Western military technology was adopted, partly through imitation, partly as the result of defeats against Western—notably German—armies, and partly as a result of the Mongols’ attacks in 1241/42 and later. The result was a strengthening of the top aristocracy who resided in these stone castles and shared the king’s governing power.

  Figure 11. A. The medieval stronghold of Glimmingehus (Scania, Denmark), now in southern Sweden, ca. 1500. The castle was built as a residence for Jens Holgersen Ulfstand, commander of Gotland. The foundation stone was laid in 1499 and the Ulfstand family lived there for around fifty years, after which it served as a granary for four hundred years. Photo: Christoph Müller. Wikimedia Commons. B. Åbo Castle in the city of Turku (Swedish Åbo, Finland). The first castle in Åbo dates from the 1280s. In the following period it became a strong fortification as well as a great residence for the many prominent castellans who held it during the later Middle Ages. It was rebuilt by Gustaf Vasa in the 1530s and underwent further changes when his son Johan (later King Johan III) resided there in the 1550s. Photo: Kallerna. Wikimedia Commons.

  Castles played a major role in the struggles between King Birger and his brothers in Sweden in the early fourteenth century. The reason for the dukes’ success in 1306 was not a military victory, but that they managed to catch their brother by surprise and take him captive. This gave them control of a sufficient number of castles to resist the repeated attempts by Birger’s brother-in-law, King Erik Menved of Denmark, to set Birger free to regain his position. Only during the final phase of the conflict, after Birger’s treachery, when aristocratic opinion had turned unanimously in favor of the dukes, were Birger’s castles conquered. Medieval castles were not impregnable, but they could resist a numerically superior enemy for a long time.

  The new military technology not only improved the king’s military capabilities; it also led to far-reaching administrative and social changes. Under favorable circumstances, an elite force of heavy cavalry could defeat an ordinary levy on foot that was roughly ten times as large. The change from a popular levy of combined rowers and fighters on foot to heavily armored knights on horseback had obvious social consequences. Whereas the former needed relatively simple and cheap equipment and a moderate amount of training, a knight’s armor, equipment, and specially trained horse were very expensive and became increasingly so as armor became heavier and more complicated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Most importantly, a knight needed special training from an early age; for only then could he hope to perform the kinds of maneuvers the Saxo attributes to Valdemar the Great. Admittedly, the knights did not replace foot soldiers; all medieval armies included both categories of combatants. With the exception of archers, however, whose importance increased from the twelfth century onwards, foot soldiers became less important.

  Castles were expensive both to build and maintain, but they enabled the king to exploit the people more efficiently. The castles that became common in this period covered only a fragment of the footprint of earlier fortifications, including the trelleborgs, but they were far taller, thus giving their relatively small number of defenders an even greater advantage against attackers than the armor and other equipment of a knight. However, the reduced number of warriors did not lead to any reduction in the costs of warfare, probably rather the contrary. Thus, in reducing the number of armed men the king needed and increasing the cost of keeping them, the castles furthered the transition from the popular levy to a limited number of royal retainers, financed by taxes from the majority of the population. Both for strategic reasons and because of the cost and labor necessary to build and keep up the castles, they were also used as administrative centers. The older royal administration consisted of a combination of stewards of the king’s estates, who fulfilled various functions on behalf of their master, and allies among the local magnates. Basically, this system was retained in Denmark and Sweden, but was transformed by the development of castles, their commanders becoming the governors of the surrounding area.

  The lack of military specialization and the meager tax revenues collected by the Norwegian king also explain the fact that fewer castles were erected in this country than in Denmark and Sweden. The local administration therefore developed in a different way. A new royal official, called the sysselmann (ON syslumaðr), analogous to the English sheriff and to continental officials of the same period, was introduced beginning in the second half of the twelfth century. From the first half of the thirteenth century on, the country was divided into fixed districts, around fifty, each headed by a royal official who often had no connection with the district in which he served and who might be replaced or moved from one district to another. Norway thus developed a local administration more directly under the king’s control, while at the same time the Norwegian aristocracy became an administrative more than a military class. However, castles were also erected in Norway. The earliest date from the late twelfth century, whereas the largest and most elaborate were erected from the mid-thirteenth century onwards, partly near the main towns of Oslo, Bergen, and Tønsberg, partly on the borders, Bohus on the Swedish and Danish border, and Vardøhus in the north. During the fourteenth century, the first four of these became centers of larger administrative districts, superior to the old ones.

  CHAPTER THREE

  State Formation, Social Change, and the Division of Power

  IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, we traced a series of changes from the eleventh to the thirteenth century: the development of monarchy as an institution and the end of regicides; the introduction of Christianity and the development of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy; the introduction of public justice and royal legislation; the organization o
f the military forces under the king’s leadership; and the formation of a military elite. To what extent are we dealing here with state formation, and how great were the changes in society from the previous period? Are the changes discussed above evidence of a greater centralization of society under the leadership of the king and his officials, or are we just dealing with a centralization that led to a new form of decentralization? Had the king delegated his power to a small number of prelates and nobles who governed their particular regions with little interference from him? The question can thus be divided into two that concern, respectively, the degree of bureaucratization in general and to what extent it increased the power of the central government.

  Social Structure in the High Middle Ages

  In the anticlerical pamphlet A Speech against the Bishops (c. 1200), the author looks at society through the common contemporary allegory of the human body: the various limbs represent estates and offices that work together for the benefit of the society, or, in the author’s terminology, the Church. The treatise gives a detailed description of the various secular and clerical offices, the former being compared mostly to the shoulders, arms, and other limbs, the latter to the organs of digestion. Finally, the common people are compared to the feet, which support and nourish (!) the rest of the body. This picture of society differs in two main respects from the picture presented in the Rigsthula: Whereas the commoner in the Rigsthula belonged to a kind of middle class, somewhere between an earl and a slave, now all commoners, whether free or slaves, are lumped together at the bottom. One reason for this is that slaves had disappeared (or almost disappeared) by 1200, but the main reason, no doubt, is that a stricter hierarchy was now in place. This is in turn related to a second development, the emergence of the idea of society as an organism with a purpose, that purpose being to ensure justice and God’s will on earth. Whereas the slave, the commoner, and the earl in the Rigsthula simply express the fact that men are born to different fates, without offering any idea as to the relationship between the classes, the social distinctions in A Speech are of benefit to society as a whole. From a modern perspective, it is easy to point out that in fact the main purpose for rigid social stratification was to to defend the privileges of the upper classes—“a defence of those who do not work by those who do not work.” Whether we like it or not, however, such ideas of social hierarchy were an important element of contemporary ideology and a way of dealing with a crucial problem: how to maintain an ordered society.

  No similarly detailed doctrine of society has been preserved from thirteenth-century Denmark and Sweden, but there are reasons to believe that these ideas were current there as well, at least to some degree. The social hierarchy was probably even more inflexible and the economic and social distance between the lay and clerical aristocracy on the one hand and the peasants on the other was probably greater. A Speech attributes a very strong position to the king as the heart of the body, which, in accordance with Aristotle’s theory, is the center of the intellect. Its mid-thirteenth-century successor, The King’s Mirror, follows up by identifying the king as the foundation of the entire social hierarchy, notably by making aristocratic status exclusively dependent on serving the king. A Danish or Swedish aristocrat of the thirteenth century would probably agree that his status depended on his relationship to the king, as there was at this time no formally defined nobility of blood. However, he would probably argue against the idea that aristocratic status depended exclusively on the king’s will and particularly against the frequent references to the fact that the king could raise men from the dust, and that such men were often more loyal, because they had only the king to rely on. On this point The King’s Mirror reflects the situation in Norway immediately after the internal struggles, when many new men had been brought into the aristocracy. More generally, the work also forms evidence of the stronger position of the king in relationship to the aristocracy in Norway than in the neighboring countries.

  With these reservations, The King’s Mirror gives an adequate picture of the transformation of Scandinavian society from the Viking Age to the thirteenth century, a transformation that made the Scandinavian countries, particularly Denmark and parts of Sweden, more similar to their neighbors to the south and west, in social structure, government and administration, and religion and culture. The replacement of the popular levy by landed elite forces reduced the military importance of the peasants and thus their ability to resist pressure from above, and probably also led to an increase in aristocratic landownership. The growth of the ecclesiastical hierarchy worked in the same direction, as the Church eventually became the greatest landowner in all three countries. It is debatable to what extent this increase came from peasant owners and how much was the result of transfers from the king and the aristocracy. A large part of the land no doubt came from the latter. Even so, the Church must have contributed to the increased concentration of landed wealth, partly because it replaced a number of smaller aristocratic landowners, and partly because it was an institution that never died, whereas the wealth of lay landowners might decrease as well as increase, depending on the vicissitudes of hereditary succession. Finally, demographic and economic conditions also contributed to greater social stratification. As in the rest of Europe, the population increased in Scandinavia during the High Middle Ages, and new land was cleared for cultivation, which towards the end of the period seems to have resulted in considerable pressure on land resources. It is debated whether this meant that there were now more people than could be adequately fed by the available land resources, given the technology and social structure of the day, but the land rent had reached quite a high level by the end of the period. Its sharp decline as a consequence of the high mortality caused by the Black Death suggests that this was largely the result of demographic pressure.

  Estimates of land distribution in the early fourteenth century give the impression of a very aristocratic society in all three countries. In the case of Norway, the percentages are believed to have been around 7 percent for the king, 40 for the Church, 20 for the aristocracy, and 33 for the peasants, based on the value of the land. These estimates are mostly deduced from later sources (of the sixteenth and particularly the seventeenth century) and are highly uncertain. This applies particularly to the estimates for the aristocracy and the peasants. It is clear that the 33 percent of the land that is ascribed to the peasants did not consist exclusively of small farms owned by individual families. An unknown but hardly insignificant percentage must have belonged to local owners of more than one farm. As the aristocracy at the time was also vaguely defined, there was a flexible boundary between aristocratic and peasant landownership. Most probably, therefore, the percentage suggested for the aristocracy is too low and that for the peasants too high. The corresponding estimates for Denmark in the fourteenth century are 12.5 percent for the king, 37.5 for the Church and the same figure for the aristocracy, and 12.5 percent for the peasants. In Sweden, peasant landownership has been estimated at around 50 percent, but this figure refers to the amount of land itself and not to its value, which means that the figure is not comparable to the estimate for the two other countries, although it is obvious that the percentage of land owned by the peasants would necessarily have been significantly lower if it had been calculated according to value. Sweden is also characterized by great regional differences, with peasant ownership dominating in Dalarna and the north, whereas the aristocracy owned most of the land in the best agricultural areas in the south. Generally, there are reasons to believe that the aristocracy owned more of the land in Denmark and Sweden than in Norway, whereas the Church may have owned less. Peasant landownership was also significantly lower in Denmark than in the two other countries.

  This distribution of land and resources must to a considerable degree be explained as the result of the growth of the monarchy and the Church. Another important factor, however, is demographic growth. Calculations for Europe as a whole suggest that the population grew threefold between 1000 and 1350, wh
ich amounts to an increase by 0.3 percent per year. Although the evidence is too meager to allow a similar calculation for Scandinavia, there may well have been similar population growth there as well. Studies of place names suggest a substantial increase in the amount of cultivated land and in the number of new farms, the latter mostly small and marginal, which indicates that most of the land that could be worked with medieval technology was already in use. Some evidence of famine in the early fourteenth century may also point in this direction, but this evidence is disputed.