Cross and Scepter

by Bagge, Sverre

  Royal and Ecclesiastical Revenues

  In addition to land, both the king and the Church had income derived from their governmental activities: taxes, fines, tolls, and so forth. All quantitative estimates of royal revenues in this period are of course very uncertain. Although the Swedish evidence before the fourteenth century is too scanty to allow any calculation, some attempts have been made concerning Denmark and Norway. Around 1930, the Norwegian historian Asgaut Steinnes estimated the king of Norway’s total annual income—from taxes, fines, land rent, etc.—at around 8,000 marks or 1,700 kg. silver. Steinnes’s own conclusion from this estimate (and most later historians agree) is that the sum was extremely low and hardly adequate to support a royal government. The sum amounts to between half and one sixth of the payments the Vikings received from England around the year 1000 to abstain from plundering. By contrast, the Danish king’s revenues were significantly higher. Thanks to the preservation of a series of documents from around 1230 (the bulk of which are dated to 1231), usually referred to as “King Valdemar II’s cadastre,” we have much information about Danish royal revenues around this time, although there is considerable scholarly disagreement about their interpretation. The income from the tax (leding) is estimated at from 20,000 to 40,000 marks (3,750–7,500 kg. silver), which makes around 40 percent of the total. The other major source was the royal domains with 32 percent, whereas town income made 8 up percent, fines and shipwrecks 8 percent, and the mint 12 percent. With between 50 and 100,000 marks (9,375–18,750 kg.) silver, the Danish royal revenues are thus five to ten times higher than the Norwegian ones in the early fourteenth century. Admittedly, the Danish population was also larger, but hardly more than four times larger, and probably less. On the other hand, the Danish king’s income was drastically reduced in the period after 1241, when much land was lost and a large percentage of the tax-paying peasants submitted to aristocratic landowners who were then able to appropriate the taxes previously paid to the king. A revival took place with the strengthening of the monarchy from the mid-fourteenth century on, when parts of the royal lands that had been alienated were recovered and the king succeeded in imposing extraordinary taxes on the population, which became the common practice.

  These numbers make the medieval Danish king’s relative wealth several times larger than that of his Norwegian counterpart, which demonstrates the former’s greater success in imposing burdens on his people. In absolute terms—which are of course the most important when comparing the military strength of two countries—there is even less doubt about Denmark’s greater wealth throughout the period. The Norwegian tax was also far lower than it became later, around one fifth of its mid-seventeenth-century level. In total, however, the peasants paid approximately the same to the upper classes in the seventeenth century as in the High Middle Ages; the difference was that the land rent was five times higher in the early fourteenth century. The Norwegian peasants were therefore not so much better off than their counterparts in Denmark and Sweden as the difference in taxes might suggest.

  As Scandinavian society at the time was mainly agrarian, calculations of royal revenues have for the most part paid little attention to income from towns and trade. Recently, however, Svein Gullbekk has pointed to minting as a considerable source of income. Although some coins were struck in Norway as early as the late tenth century, regular minting was not introduced until the reign of Harald Hardrada in the mid-eleventh century. Harald, who had brought with him a large amount of silver and other treasures from Byzantium and Russia, began by issuing good quality coins, which then gradually deteriorated over the course of his reign. He seems, however, to have succeeded in having his coins accepted as the regular means of payment and in preventing the use of foreign coinage. After him, there is an unbroken tradition of minting down to the collapse of Norwegian coinage in the later fourteenth century. The fact that a royal monopoly on minting existed in Norway during this period is in itself evidence of some strength in the monarchy: it shows that the people had sufficient trust in the king to accept his coinage as a means of payment at a higher value than its content of silver, and indicates as well his ability to exclude foreign coinage. Moreover, the inflated value of the mint’s output gave the king a substantial income, in particular if he managed to have coins with a low percentage of silver accepted at full value. The king of Norway did not succeed completely in this, as there was a distinction between burnt (pure), silver and coins, and between weighed and counted coins, as well as some restrictions regarding the use of coins, but he did derive a substantial profit from minting low quality coins. Gullbekk has estimated that this profit was as high as 300 to 400 percent. Its value in absolute terms of course depends on the volume of coins in circulation, on which there are widely differing opinions, but Gullbekk suggests that it may in some years have reached 7,500 to 10,000 marks burnt (2,500–3,300 kg. silver), or as much or even more than the king’s other estimated annual revenues. However, this sum seems too large; the Danish king’s income from minting was estimated at only 12 percent of the whole (or 1,100–2,200 kg. silver) around 1230, and money is likely to have been in wider use in Denmark than in Norway, in addition to the fact that the Danish population was much larger. The king of Norway’s income from trade and taxes in northern Norway and customs duties from the export of stockfish may also have been considerable; a recent calculation suggests 300 to 550 marks burnt for the former and 500 for the latter. The king of Denmark’s revenues from the markets in Scania are considerably higher; they are calculated at around 5,000 to 6,000 marks in the fifteenth century, which reflects the greater amount of trade there (see below). Although most of these sums are very uncertain, it would still seem that Steinnes’s calculation is too low and that the total must have amounted to at least 10,000 marks burnt, and probably more.

  Figure 12. Swedish ørtuger, ca. 1400, a hoard from Masku (Finland). Scandinavian denominations was based on the mark, originally 214,32 g silver (1 mark = 8 øre = 24 ørtuger = 240 penninger). The penninger was the only denomination that was minted—the others were units of calculation. However, with increasing inflation, the Swedish kings started to issue ørtuger beginning in the late thirteenth century. Collection of the Finnish National Museum. Photo by Daderot: Nasjonalmuseet i Finland.

  Steinnes’s estimate may well be too low, but even recent, higher estimates hardly make the king of Norway particularly wealthy. The regular incomes of medieval monarchs were usually quite small, however, as many examples demonstrate. The crucial question is how much the king was able to mobilize in case of war. There are various hints that extra taxes were levied, but we do not know their size and there is little to suggest that they were very substantial until the early sixteenth century, with the exception of the areas around the main castles, where higher burdens were imposed on the peasants in the form of both extra taxes and labor services. The most important extra resource was of course the leding, which put quite a substantial army or fleet at the king’s disposal for two months, without costs, and for even longer against extra payments. Nevertheless, the generally cautious and peaceful foreign policy pursued by Norwegian kings in the period from 1240 to 1319 indicates that there were clear limits on how much they could extract from their subjects for such purposes. Neighboring countries, notably Denmark, spent much more, although in some cases—like that of Erik Menved (1286–1319)—with disastrous results.

  We do not know exactly what portion of these revenues went directly to the king and what to his officials. In any case, the king of Norway in person received a larger part of the royal revenues than did his counterparts in the neighboring countries. The Danish and Swedish system, like those of most other European countries, probably created greater gross surpluses, in the sense that the number of agricultural laborers rose and each of them paid a larger percentage of the family’s earnings to the king or the landowner. It is questionable to what extent this also created a greater net surplus. Some calculations—admittedly based on very fragmentary mater
ial from the later Middle Ages in Sweden—indicate that most of what was paid in taxes by the peasants went to support the lord of the castle, his household, and his garrison.

  Thus, the Norwegian military organization created a smaller surplus than its counterparts in Denmark, Sweden, and East Central Europe, but gave the king greater control. The military also brought the Norwegian king’s rule closer to the classical modern definition of a state as an entity having a monopoly of legitimate violence. Although local officials may well have had greater control over the military than is indicated in the largely official sources, there is no evidence from the period between 1240 and 1319 of local magnates mobilizing the leding against the king. The aristocracy’s potential to emerge as an independent power in opposition to the king was also clearly more limited here than it would have been in a system based on a military elite in which the most important members acted as commanders of the royal castles. Indeed in Norway, it was unusual for members of the aristocracy to have their own castles.

  The apparent poverty of the Norwegian king does not therefore signal a corresponding a military weakness. However, if the kings of more aristocratic countries managed to create a good working relationship with the aristocracy (as in Denmark after 1340, in Sweden under the Sture regime [1470–1520], and in the kingdoms of East Central Europe for long periods during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) such an arrangement would strengthen their military and administrative capacities. The relative strength of these different military systems must therefore be estimated on the basis on their actual performance. The greater peace and stability in Norway in the period from 1240 to 1319 enabled the Norwegian king to perform fairly well in the Nordic competition, but in the long run, the military power of the neighboring countries, above all that of Denmark, proved superior.

  Modern accounts of state formation from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period often focus on the change from a “domain state” to a “tax state,” from the king “living on his own” to the head of state exploiting the resources of his country. We find some signs of a move in this direction in the West European monarchies by the later Middle Ages. In Denmark as well as Norway, we find a relatively high percentage of “public” incomes already in the thirteenth century, although there is no clear shift towards an increase in these kinds of income in the following period, with the possible exception of the Danish extraordinary taxes. If the calculation above is correct, however, there is a characteristic difference between the size of the two kinds of public incomes: higher taxes in Denmark, 40 percent against 30 or less in Norway, and higher fines in Norway, between 30 and 50 percent against less than 8 percent in Denmark, corresponding to the greater importance of warfare in Denmark and of justice in Norway.

  The income of the Church was to a greater extent confined to two main sources, the tax (tithes) and fines, to which can be added gifts that might be substantial. In contrast to the king, however, the Church could not raise extra taxes to meet real or imagined emergencies. Nevertheless, like the aristocracy, the Church, mainly the bishops, eventually received parts of the royal income. Bishops might hold royal len or might become lords of towns. Thus, the bishop of Roskilde was lord of the town of Copenhagen until the king took it back in 1417. Similarly, the bishop of Stavanger in Norway was the lord of the town of Stavanger, admittedly one of the smallest in the country. The archbishop of Lund held a large number of len in Scania, a region resembling an ecclesiastical principality. In this way, the bishops were linked to the king in much the same way as the secular aristocracy.

  The king and the Church not only increased their incomes during the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, they received them in a different form. In the early Middle Ages, the king and the bishop most often had to be present in person to receive their incomes, which took the form of provisions supplied during their visits in a particular district. The leding and the tithe were to some extent exceptions, but they were not, strictly speaking, income that belonged to these leaders. The leding consisted of provisions for ships manned by the local communities themselves, and the tithe mainly went to the local church and its priest. It either was divided into three shares, for the parish church, the priest, and the bishop (in Denmark and Sweden); or into four, the same three plus the poor (in Norway). We do not know how the bishop received his part in the early period, but it would seem likely that he did so during a visitation. According to canon law, a bishop was obliged to visit all parts of his diocese every year. Although this was not put into practice in a literal sense, there is evidence of episcopal visitations throughout the Middle Ages. However, the bishop eventually became entitled to the provisions whether he visited the district or not. In a similar way, the provisions for a king’s visits, as well as the leding, were converted into a permanent tax that was brought to some central place where it was made available to the king or his representative.

  Towns and Trade

  In the late ninth century, the Norwegian chieftain Ottar traveled from northern Norway to King Alfred’s court in England. His report on the journey was written down in the introduction to the Old English translation of Orosius’ world history, which is still preserved. Ottar tells that he lived the farthest north of all the Norwegians, probably near what is now Malangen in Troms, at nearly 70 degrees north. Although he owned only twenty cows, twenty sheep, and twenty pigs, he was a very rich man by local standards because he also owned six hundred reindeer. In addition, he received tribute from the Sami: hides, feathers, the bones of walruses, and the furs of reindeer, bears, otters, and martens. This tribute (finnferd) is later mentioned in the sagas as a royal privilege and one of the most lucrative favors that the king granted to his friends. As we have seen (p. 25), the export of such merchandise from northern Scandinavia to Western Europe was already on-going at this time and probably began even earlier. Ottar’s case is thus one of many examples of Scandinavian active trade in the period, in addition to the Viking expeditions.

  More than five hundred years later, in the winter 1432, a Venetian ship was shipwrecked off Røst, the outermost inhabited island of the Lofoten archipelago. The survivors managed to reach an uninhabited island and were found by the local population and brought to Røst, where they spent several months before they could resume their journey back to Venice in the summer. The captain, Pietro Querini, and some of the other Venetians wrote accounts of their experience that provide a detailed description of the life of the local population. The people of Røst lived, it would seem, in a kind of primitive innocence. They did not lock their doors, men and women bathed naked together without any immorality, they had sufficient food and material goods and were healthy and happy. Moreover, the Venetians discovered to their surprise that these people, living at the ends of the earth, wore clothes woven in London and belonged to a great international trade network. Lofoten had—and still has—one of the richest fisheries of the world. The people of Røst and the other Lofoten islands caught the cod that arrived in great numbers in the shallow waters offshore to breed at the beginning of each year. They cut up and dried the fish without salt in the cold and dry weather that was normal at this time of year and then brought it to Bergen in summer, where they sold it to German merchants. In return, they bought home grain, cloth, and other merchandise.

  These two examples point to major changes in the character and importance of Scandinavian trade during the half millennium that separates them. In the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages, the Scandinavians mainly exported luxury goods on their own ships. While this trade still continued, its importance was now surpassed by the export of surplus from fisheries and agriculture, which to an increasing extent was bought by German merchants and transported by them. Population growth and the expansion of cultivated land increased agricultural production. Most of Scandinavia was well suited to animal husbandry, and products like butter, hides, and fish were important export articles, especially when population growth in other European countries and the greater wealth of the aristocracy
led to greater demand for food. As the landowning aristocracy in Scandinavia appropriated more of the surplus of agriculture, a proportionally greater share of these products was brought to the market in return for products like grain, flour, cloth, wine and beer, and this led to the growth of towns.

  German merchants had turned up in Norway already in the twelfth century. In 1186, King Sverre spoke out against them in Bergen, complaining that they imported wine that made people drunk instead of useful commodities like wheat, honey, and cloth, as did the English merchants. From the detailed description of the traveling merchant in The King’s Mirror, we know that Norwegian merchants must still have traveled abroad in the mid-thirteenth century. They are also listed in the English customs rolls from the early fourteenth century and may have continued their visits well after that, although by then, the Germans had taken over most of the export. There have been various explanations of why this happened. At one time, the prevailing view was that better ships were responsible. Viking ships were excellent for sailing, but they could carry very little cargo compared to the bigger and heavier German cogs. It turns out, however, that the Norwegians actually did use cogs. A better explanation therefore points to organization and the existing trade network. The Germans were ideally placed for transmitting trade goods between the East and West. They had an established system for doing this and also for suppressing competitors and keeping the trade for themselves. From the late thirteenth century on, they settled in Norwegian towns, notably Bergen, where they organized as a separate community with their own laws and jurisdiction.