The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (45 page)

The Muslim approach gradually spread. According to the
Libro del Consulado del Mar
(Book of the Consulate of the Sea), a digest of maritime law promulgated at Barcelona in the 1300s but the roots of which are much older, the captain had to explain the need for jettisoning cargo and the risks of not doing so. But the larger issue involved general average: whether losses were to be assessed by weight or value, whether values were determined based on prices at the place of purchase or the intended place of sale, whether the ship and its gear were included, whether nonmerchant passengers and the crew were liable because their lives were saved, and how slaves should be considered. The Rhodian Sea Law fixed the value of personal slaves at three minas, but “
if any one is being carried for sale, he is to be valued at two minas.” Most Muslim jurists deplored the concept of
human jettison, but some ruled that slaves could be jettisoned provided that they could swim and were within reach of land, while others considered it permissible to sacrifice non-Muslims to save Muslims. Taking a more equitable view, a twelfth-century jurist maintained that if necessary people could be “
chosen by lot [and] indiscriminately subjected to being thrown overboard, regardless of their social status and allegiance, whether they were males or females, slaves or free men, Muslims or
dhimmis
[protected minorities].” In general, however, the issue of human jettison was of secondary concern because the lives of free people had no monetary value and maritime codes were preoccupied with commercial rather than humanitarian concerns.

The codification and refinement of principles of commercial maritime law rationalized the way people conducted business and helped create an enlarged multicultural trading network whose benefits, restrictions, and penalties could be easily understood by all participants. By the time these were committed to writing, the Byzantine Empire and
Dar al-Islam
in the Mediterranean were at or past their mercantile prime. Yet they were not being challenged by anything
so obvious as an empire. Instead, small city-states on the
Italian Peninsula were enriching themselves at the expense of their former Byzantine overlords and of their Muslim antagonists and competitors. To a degree not seen since the time of Carthage, the citizens of Venice, Genoa, Amalfi, and
Pisa actively embraced maritime trade and forged relationships between merchants and the state that made commerce a civic virtue and led to developments as unexpected as they were unprecedented. These would change the nature and conduct of trade not only in the Mediterranean, but also among the newly minted commercial enclaves of northern Europe.

As late as the twelfth century, much of northern Europe was a backward and remote corner of Eurasia, far removed from the high civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East. The earliest historical records—foreign and subject to bias, ignorance, and guesswork—do not flatter, but the nautical dimension of its disparate cultures is evident in the sketch of northern Europe teased from the archaeological record and writers from
Herodotus on. To a degree found nowhere else, the people of the
European subcontinent are bound equally to salt- and freshwater; but the process of integrating fully the great river networks that today facilitate transcontinental exchange with the coastal and deep-sea shipping lanes of the Baltic, North, Mediterranean, and Black Seas, and the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, only began in the Middle Ages. While northern Europeans absorbed the sophisticated influences of pagan and Christian Rome, seafaring developed from within, most notably among
Angles and
Saxons in the third to eighth centuries,
Frisians from the fifth to ninth centuries, and Scandinavian
Vikings in the ninth to eleventh centuries. Considered by volume, value, or organizational sophistication, this maritime activity was on a far smaller scale than in the Mediterranean or Monsoon Seas. The emergence of ports of trade such as Dorestad in the
Netherlands,
Birka in
Sweden, and
Novgorod in Russia reflects the ambition of local sovereigns to capture the benefits of trade in the form of revenues, or
exemption from revenues; Frankish kings routinely curried favor by relieving their agents and religious houses from
paying duties. The indifferent defense against foreign—especially Viking—attack shows that sea trade was not yet the priority it would become.

The Vikings’ infamy is often overstated, for they were no more violent than
their contemporaries. In their favor, they helped integrate the extremes of western and eastern Europe and to draw Scandinavia into the mainstream of European political development. Although the first raiders sprang from loosely organized pagan tribes far removed from the influence of imperial or monarchical rule, they were quick to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by adopting Christianity and centralized government. Yet once they had absorbed the religion and principles of governance of their southern neighbors, the people of Scandinavia proved too few and remote from the chief centers of economic and political activity to play more than a supporting role in the development of northern Europe and the British Isles after the eleventh century.

Toward the end of the ninth century, England’s
Alfred the Great commissioned a vernacular translation of the
History Against the Pagans,
a work by
Paulus Orosius written to debunk claims that Christianity was responsible for the
Roman Empire’s decline. Written in the fifth century, Orosius’s work remained a standard text for a thousand years, until well after the cultural and political integration of northern and Mediterranean Europe was under way. To compensate for its omissions regarding the north, the Old English translation includes additional passages about northern Europe and narratives of three voyages in Scandinavia and the Baltic. The more audacious narrator is
Ohthere, a Norse merchant-landowner and whaler from
Hålogaland, the narrow coastal plain above the
Arctic Circle. Motivated by a basic curiosity “
to investigate how far the land extended in a northerly direction, or whether anyone lived north of the waste [or wilderness],” Ohthere decided to sail beyond the North Cape, the limit of the whalers’ hunting grounds about three days north of Tromsø. From the North Cape, he sailed east and then south for nine days to the mouth of the Varzuga River on the south side of the
Kola Peninsula. Here “the land was all settled” by people whose language was similar to that of “Finnas,” whose language he knew from traders who crossed the mountains into Hålogaland. Ohthere’s daring paid off, for the Kola Peninsula was rich in walrus, which were valued for their tusks—some of which he presented to Alfred—and for their hide, which was “very good for ship-ropes,” especially standing rigging and halyards.

Ohthere’s second passage was from Hålogaland south to
Kaupang (literally, “trade bay”), an emporium on the shore of the
Oslofjord, and from there to
Hedeby, an important commercial center on the southern
Jutland peninsula.
It is unclear how long it took Ohthere to sail along the “North Way” (that is, Norway) from Hålogaland, but he notes that if one stopped at night it would take about a month. The five-day passage from Kaupang south took him along the Swedish coast, through the
Danish archipelago, and twenty-two miles up the Schleifjord to Hedeby. This well-protected port was established by Denmark’s
King Godfred, who in an effort to deny
Charlemagne access to the Baltic trade had relocated the merchant community of
Reric, about 120 miles to the southeast, at the turn of the ninth century.

Hedeby also figures in the account of Ohthere’s contemporary,
Wulfstan, who was probably an
Anglo-Saxon with strong ties to the Scandinavian communities in England. According to his account in the
History Against the Pagans,
Wulfstan sailed four hundred miles in seven days, from Hedeby east past Wendland (Germany and
Poland) to the mouth of the
Vistula River. His actual destination was the port of
Truso near the junction of the
Elblag and Vistula, just before the latter reaches the Baltic. Wulfstan offers no details about his ship or route and the only commodities he mentions are fish and honey, the latter being the principal sweetener in the centuries before sugar was introduced to Europe.

Taken together, Ohthere’s and Wulfstan’s spare accounts introduce many places of more than passing interest to their contemporaries. In addition to the four major regions referred to—northern Norway, the southern Scandinavian peninsula, Jutland, and the Vistula estuary—both men knew something of the British Isles. Ohthere also refers to Ireland and the Orkney and
Shetland Islands. Wulfstan demonstrates his familiarity with the route to the port of
Birka on Lake Mälaren west of modern
Stockholm. This was reached by sailing south of the principal islands of the Danish archipelago and
Skåne (in southern Sweden and then under Danish rule), by the island of Bornholm (“the land of the Burgendas,” who migrated south and gave their name to Burgundy), before turning north past the islands of Øland and
Gotland en route to the myriad islands of the Stockholm archipelago, 500 miles from Hedeby and about 350 miles north of Truso.

There is no indication of the routes that Ohthere or Wulfstan took to reach Alfred’s court, but three suggest themselves. Ohthere may have sailed from Norway to the Viking kingdom of
York (Jorvik), the capital of which was a thriving mercantile and manufacturing center with a population of about ten to fifteen thousand people, enormous for a northern European city of the time. From there it was an easy coastal passage to the Thames estuary. Wulfstan likely followed the twelve-kilometer portage from Hedeby to a landing on the Eider River, which flows to the North Sea. From there he could have hugged the
Frisian coast to the mouth of the Rhine before crossing to Britain,
the route favored by Frisian middlemen in the trade between the Baltic and North Sea. Alternatively, he might have sailed direct from the mouth of the Eider to York.

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.

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 first-hand 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.