by Travers, Tim
Courage the greater, as our strength diminishes.
Here lies our leader, dead,
A heroic man in the dust.
He who longs to escape will lament for ever.
Still, despite this final show of bravery, the Saxons were defeated, and the victorious Vikings decapitated the corpse of Brihtnoth, and carried away the head. The monks of nearby Ely took away the body and buried it, less the head. Brihtnoth’s widow, Aelffled, apparently wove a tapestry to commemorate his life and death, but this has disappeared. Meanwhile, Olaf’s Viking ships continued their raids on the east coast until a truce was arranged by Sigeric, the Archbishop of Canterbury, which involved the payment of 10,000 pounds of silver to Olaf and his followers. So Olaf gained what he had demanded at the beginning of his raid on Maldon, but he had had to fight for the ransom.
Such was a typical pirate raid by the Vikings in England, but the Vikings also ranged very far afield. They raided into the Mediterranean, to Spain, Italy, and North Africa, into Russia, and the Black and Caspian seas. As explorers and farmers, the Vikings also settled Iceland, Greenland, and reached North America in about the year 1000. Before this, in the early 800s the Vikings raided Western Europe extensively, and paid particular attention to the Franks. In 799, the Danish Vikings raided and plundered St Philibert’s monastery on the island of Noirmoutier, then spent much time raiding the nearby Frisian islands. The Frankish empire was in discord in the early ninth century, and so it was relatively easy for the Vikings to raid at will – for example, the trading centre of Dorestad on the Rhine was attacked four times in the 830s, and a further four times between the 840s and the 860s. Meanwhile, on Easter Sunday 845, the Vikings under their leader Ragnar, attacked and plundered Paris. The West Frankish king, Charles the Bald, was forced to pay 7,000 pounds of silver for the Vikings to leave. However, this turned out not to be a clear Viking victory, since Ragnar, who brought back a bar of the city gate of Paris as a souvenir of his success, succumbed to an epidemic, together with most of his fellow Vikings. Nevertheless, Viking raids continued so frequently that a monk from St Philibert’s monastery wrote in the 860s that:
The number of ships grows: the endless stream of Vikings never ceases to increase. Everywhere the Christians are victims of massacre, burnings, plunderings: the Vikings conquer all in their path, and no one resists them … Angers, Tours and Orleans are annihilated and an innumerable fleet sails up the Seine and the evil grows in the whole region. Rouen is laid waste, plundered and burned: Paris, Beauvais and Meaux taken, Melun’s strong fortress leveled to the ground, Chartres occupied, Evreux and Bayeux plundered, and every town besieged.10
The Vikings practiced their normal system of attacking where defenses were weakest, and either plundered, or accepted silver to go away. There was also the option of settling in easily accessible areas, or sometimes they were given land, for example as a result of Charles the Bald’s internal Frankish struggles against his brothers. The best Frankish defense against the Vikings was to build fortified bridges on rivers that led to important towns and fertile areas, which could halt the water-borne Vikings, but these required cash, and often took a long time to build. Other defensive ideas were to fortify towns and monasteries, or simply to pay ransoms, which were in effect taxes on the population. Further possibilities were to make alliances or treaties with the Vikings, or simply to allow the Vikings to occupy areas around river mouths and coasts. Occasionally it was possible to fight back, and otherwise the last resort was to flee inland – so floods of monks were to be seen on the roads leading to Burgundy, the Auvergne and Flanders. These monks took with them their holy relics, so from the 850s to the 870s the monks of Tours took with them the body of their holy father, St Martin, from Tours to Cormery, then to Chablis, to Auxerre, and finally back to Tours when danger seemed over. Likewise, the monks of St Philibert’s monastery took their holy relics further and further inland from the 830s to the 870s, until they landed up at Tournus on the Saone River in 875.11
Siege of Paris: 885
The Viking attacks on the Frankish kingdoms started changing in the 850s. They were no longer isolated raids, but calculated campaigns, just as in England, involving the taking of horses after landing, and raiding inland. Between 879 and 892, a large force of Vikings left England, ravaged the north and north-east land of the Franks, and then turned south toward Paris in 885. Paris was a small town at the time, yet offered considerable defiance against the Vikings. Paris was located on an island in the Seine, the Ile de la Cité, defended by two bridges, with towers at either end of each bridge. With these fortifications, Paris held out against the Viking siege for a year, from November 885 to November 886. The Vikings were led by Sigfrid, and were really aiming at the Marne country beyond Paris, and so were willing to bypass the town to achieve this aim. Consequently, Sigfrid addressed Joscelin, the bishop of Paris, in the following way:
Oh, Joscelin, have pity on your self and on the flock entrusted to your care. For your own good listen to what I have to say. We ask only that you let us pass beyond your city: we shall not touch it. We shall strive to safeguard your rights and also those of [the Count of Paris] Odo…’
The bishop responded loyally with these words: ‘We have been charged with the protection of this city by our king Charles [the Fat], whose kingdom extends almost over the entire earth … The kingdom must not allow itself to be destroyed; she must be saved by our city. If these walls had been committed to you as they indeed have been committed to us and if you had acted as you have asked us to act, what would you think of yourself?’
Sigfrid answered, ‘My sword would be disgraced and unworthy of my command. Nevertheless, if you do not grant my request, I must tell you that our instruments of war will send you poisoned arrows at daybreak, and at day’s end there will be hunger. And so it will be; we will not cease.’
Thus the siege began, with Viking catapults and poisoned arrows fired against the bridge tower on the right bank, while the Parisians poured burning pitch and oil onto the attackers. The tower held out, and the next day the Vikings produced a battering ram in conjunction with the catapults. The tower continued to resist, and the Vikings settled down into a long siege, with the obvious intention of starving the Parisians. By January 866, this was not working, so the Vikings decided on an all out blow – they divided their forces so as to attack both the tower and the bridge on the right bank. The tower attackers filled the ditch outside the tower with branches, straw, dead animals, and even dead prisoners, in order to cross over and reach the tower itself. Meanwhile, the bridge attackers launched three fire ships against the bridge to burn it down. But all attacks against both tower and bridge failed.
Then, winter floods in February 886 swept away one bridge and enabled the Vikings to bypass Paris. Some Vikings raided beyond Paris, but others maintained the siege on the right bank. This was a partial Viking victory, but the Vikings could not leave their rear unsafe with Paris still resisting. So Sigfrid offered to raise the siege with a ransom of just 60 pounds of silver. The Parisians refused, and appealed for help from their king, but little help came. Meanwhile Joscelin died in April, and secretly Count Odo left Paris to persuade Charles the Fat to help. Coming back to Paris, Count Odo was intercepted by the Vikings and his horse was killed beneath him. Swinging his sword to left and right, Odo made it back into Paris, while Charles the Fat’s army reached Paris in October 886. But Charles did not attack the Vikings; he simply made a deal with them to spare Paris, and allowed the Vikings to proceed beyond Paris and raid in Burgundy. Outraged, Parisians refused to allow this to happen, forcing the Vikings to carry their boats overland around the city. Finally, Charles the Fat paid the Vikings 700 pounds of silver to leave the Seine. Ironically, justice prevailed later when Charles was deposed in 888, and Count Odo of Paris became king of the West Franks the next year.12
The siege of Paris came toward the end of the Viking raids on Western Europe – by the early tenth century, the raids had ceased due to increased fo
rtress building and stronger resistance by the Franks. Only in Normandy were the Vikings successful when in the early tenth century Charles the Simple, now king of the West Franks, gave the Vikings under their leader Rollo, the town of Rouen and an area around the town. The reason for this was that Charles hoped to use Rollo to defend Rouen, the coast, and the Seine River, against other Vikings. Rollo and his fellow Vikings settled down, were baptized and soon assimilated into the native French culture. Hence, William the Conqueror, who invaded England from Normandy in 1066, was a Frank and not a Viking.
The Vikings started as pirates and then became settlers and farmers, and some became kings. Their raids were often very successful and they were frequently violent. Huge amounts of silver were transferred from Eastern and Western Europe to the Vikings. But their ultimate assimilation into the cultures they attacked is perhaps the most significant aspect of their raids. Finally, it is noteworthy that this political evolution did not stop outbursts of local piracy by Viking descendants – in the twelfth century there was a revival of piracy in the Irish Sea from the Orkneys to the Hebrides, aiming at kidnapping and ransom.
Medieval Pirates
The Vikings were not the only raiders of the northern seas in the medieval period. There were several pirates who hovered on the boundary between piracy and privateering, generally being used by one competing nation or another as commerce raiders. One such was the famous Eustace the Monk, born in Boulogne, who allegedly started as a Benedictine monk but turned into a troublemaker. Eustace sold his services to the highest bidder, whether King John of England, or Phillip II of France. His role as a pirate occurred when he was in the pay of King John but simultaneously attacked English shipping, causing him to flee to France in 1211. Matthew Paris, the medieval English historian and Benedictine monk, described him as a viro flagitiosissimo (a real pain), but Eustace was captured in a battle between French and English ships in 1217 off Dover, and summarily executed, together with his crew.13
In the competition between medieval European merchants, operating when naval forces were few or non-existent, many ships crossed the line and became temporary pirates. In the 1380s and 1390s, conflict between the Hanse (a league of Baltic trading towns) and Denmark, led to commerce raiding and some independent piracy, with pirates operating out of towns such as Rostok and Wismar in the Baltic. The Hanse enlisted the pirates as privateers against Denmark, and after the end of the war, perhaps predictably, the pirates soon turned against the Hanse itself. This raiding developed into a bold group of pirates called Vitalienbruder (Brotherhood of Suppliers), who liked to think of themselves as ‘Likedeelers’, meaning equal sharers. These pirates set up a stronghold in the town of Visby, and among other actions, sacked Bergen in 1392, taking the leading merchants away for ransom. Two major efforts were made to destroy the Vitalienbruder, one by Queen Margaret of Sweden in alliance with Richard II of England, and the second by thirty-five ships of the Hanse in 1394. Neither was successful. Yet the Vitalienbruder were forced out of the Baltic by 1400, and transferred to Frisia and Gotland in the North Sea. Finally, in 1402, Simon of Utrecht, who flew the flag of the Spotted Cow at his masthead, led a Hamburg fleet which captured the last of their leaders, Godeke Michels (or Godekins), and Klaus Stortebeker (or Stertebeker). These two leaders were beheaded in Hamburg, together with all of their followers. Their heads were displayed to the people, putting an end to years of piracy on the seas.
Many legends surround these Vitalienbruder, and Stortebeker in particular. Stortebeker was allegedly a ruined nobleman from Frisia, whose name meant ‘beaker at a gulp’. This was because he compelled his victims to gulp down at one swallow the contents of four wine bottles. His coat of arms naturally featured crossed drinking glasses. Stortebeker pictured himself as a kind of maritime Robin Hood, adopting the motto for the Vitalienbruder, ‘Friends of God, Enemies of the World’. The legend goes that before he was beheaded, he requested that the mayor of Hamburg release as many of his companions as he could walk past after he had lost his head. The headless Stortebeker allegedly walked past twelve of his fellow pirates before he was tripped up by the executioner. However, his request was not honoured, and all seventy-three of his companions were executed. Another legend relates that after capture, the main mast of Stortebeker’s ship was found to be filled with bars of gold, which was sufficient to pay for the Hamburg fleet action against the brotherhood, and also pay back the merchants who had lost their ships to the Vitalienbruder. In addition, there was enough gold for the citizens of Hamburg to create a crown of gold atop the spire of St Nicholas’ sailor’s church in Hamburg.14
Piracy continued in the northern seas, usually as a by product of commerce raiding and maritime conflict. For example, there was an epidemic of piracy by the merchant community in the 1450s when the weak monarch, Henry VI of England, was on the throne. And despite the growth of European navies in the sixteenth century, Klein Henszlein, the German pirate, operated in the North Sea until captured by a fleet from Hamburg. He was beheaded together with thirty-three of his crew in 1573, with the executioner ‘flicking off’ their heads in only forty-five minutes. The executioner claimed that he was ‘standing in blood so deep that it well nigh in his shoes did creep.’15 The execution of Henszlein and his crew emphasises the point that the age of the freelance raiders of the northern seas was slowly coming to an end, while the consolidation of European states meant that nation states by the sixteenth century were beginning to control violence at sea. Laws and law courts, legal privateers, the convoy system, and the creation of European navies – all helped to create the state monopoly of maritime violence, which now separated out a clear distinction between piracy and privateering.16
4
The Elizabethan Sea Rovers and the Jacobean Pirates
In the sixteenth century, as trade expanded to the Mediterranean, West Africa, the Levant, the Caribbean, and eventually to the East Indies, pirates correspondingly preyed on these merchant ships. Also, as war engulfed sixteenth-century Europe, sea rovers in the shape of Dutch, French and English adventurers roamed abroad, either as real pirates, or as official or semi-official privateers. French pirates operated off the coast of West Africa, and created havoc there in the sixteenth century. Hence, while the Portuguese authorized the sinking of all foreign ships found off their colonial trading empire of West Africa, and the throwing overboard of their crews, French pirates were investigating the possibilities of this coast. For example, in 1542 French pirates attacked a Portuguese ship off Guinea:
…they robbed the crew and put them below the deck and nailed down the hatchways upon them, and by firing bombards at them they sent them to the bottom of the sea, where they perished, and only those of the crew escaped who happened to be on land and a shipmaster who escaped by swimming.1
English pirates raided Spanish ships in the Canaries, for example the pirate Edward Cooke captured a Spanish ship there in 1560, and for good measure took an English ship as well. Meanwhile, the pirate Thomas Wyndham sailed to West Africa in 1553 with three ships, backed by merchants from the city of London, which put him on the borderline between a privateer and a pirate. In this voyage, the crew suffered heavily from disease, but skirmishes with the Portuguese and African slave traders resulted in booty of 400 pounds of gold, 36 butts of pepper, 250 elephant tusks, and the complete head of one huge elephant.2
John Hawkins (1532–1595)
Hawkins was another sea rover who skirted the border line between privateer and pirate. Hawkins was born in Plymouth, England, and came from a sea faring and wealthy family. Hawkins’ father traded overseas, and left a small fleet to his two sons when he died. John Hawkins evidently learned about the sea from his father, but his own interest was slave trading, capturing or buying slaves on the west coast of Africa, and then selling these slaves to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Hawkins made several voyages in the 1560s with that purpose in mind. These voyages were financially successful, and Queen Elizabeth herself either invested in these slaving
expeditions by including her ships in Hawkins’ voyages, or at least tacitly encouraged or permitted Hawkins’ slaving and piracy to take place. But problems arose with this slaving enterprise because the Spanish did not allow the trading or the sale of slaves in their colonies in the Caribbean and the Americas without a license. And Hawkins certainly did not have a Spanish license. However, Hawkins was normally able to overcome this by making deals with corrupt local Spanish officials, such as buying licenses, or by selling slaves to Spanish merchants who pretended to refuse the transactions but secretly accepted the slaves, or by simply forcing the locals to trade. Still, a particular difficulty arose with Hawkins’ 1567–1569 voyage. After arriving off the coast of Guinea and Sierra Leone with his fleet of six ships (two of them being Queen Elizabeth’s ships, the Jesus of Lubeck and the Minion, while another, the Judith, was perhaps commanded by Hawkins’ cousin, Francis Drake), Hawkins apparently took and looted seven Portuguese ships. Following this, Hawkins managed to capture or buy some 400 to 500 slaves from Sierra Leone, and then sailed to the Caribbean and the northern coast of South America to trade or sell these slaves.
Hawkins’ fleet managed to trade and sell most of their slaves at seven Spanish ports in the Americas with a mixture of bribery and force, but then fell afoul of a major storm in September 1568. Perhaps this was a hurricane, but in any case Hawkins and his fleet (now numbering ten ships, augmented from the original six by captured Portuguese and Spanish ships), needed to find a base to repair and refit. The place chosen was San Juan de Ulua in New Spain (now central America), and Hawkins’ small fleet entered the harbour. For a while all went well, but on 17 September 1568, a Spanish fleet appeared, containing the newly appointed Viceroy of New Spain. The Spanish fleet also needed to enter San Juan, and this awkward matter was arranged by both sides exchanging hostages, although fifty of Hawkins’ men took over the shore batteries on land. This was seen as a contravention of the fragile truce by the Spanish, and plans were laid to capture the English fleet. At night, 150 Spanish soldiers went onboard an empty hulk and towed it alongside Hawkins’ ship, the Jesus of Lubeck, with the intention of boarding. Hawkins suddenly noticed the plot and responded to the Spanish battle cry of ‘Santiago’, with his English cry of ‘God and St George, upon these false traitors, for my trust is only in God that the daie shall be ours.’3
