The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (46 page)

After two centuries of disruptions resulting from Celtic migrations, western Mediterranean merchants resumed their northern trade in the fourth century
BCE
. Among the busier transpeninsular routes was the
Aude-Garonne-
Gironde corridor between Narbonne on the Mediterranean and the Bay of
Biscay port of
Bordeaux. This route was favored by Greek traders from
Massilia (
Marseille), one of whom,
Pytheas, probably used it to reach the Bay of Biscay in the 320s
BCE
. His account of his travels,
On the Oceans,
survives only in fragments quoted by later writers, some hostile to his claims, but we can sketch the broad outlines of his itinerary. Once in the Bay of Biscay, he sailed to
Brittany. The dramatic tides of the Atlantic coast and English Channel—up to 4.5 meters at
Quiberon and 16 meters at Mont St. Michel, compared with maximums of less than 1 meter in the Mediterranean—always impressed Mediterranean sailors, and Pytheas apparently discussed them at length. He crossed from France to Cornwall and continued up the west coast of Great Britain to the Orkney and
Shetland Islands north of Scotland, which were first inhabited by the fourth millennium
BCE
. Most intriguing is his claim of sailing six days to a land he called
Ultima Thule, where sunlight lasted nearly twenty-two hours and that has been identified as either Iceland (as medieval writers believed) or
Norway. Even if his remarks are based on hearsay rather than firsthand experience, they suggest that western European seafarers (as distinct from the inhabitants of mainland Scandinavia) had reached lands on the edge of the
Arctic Circle by this early date.

Turning south, Pytheas likely hugged the east coast of Great Britain, with a possible trip across the
North Sea to the
Netherlands, another source of amber. If he did cross the North Sea, he evidently returned to complete his tour around Britain, the circumference of which he put at
between 6,860 and 7,150 kilometers—within 3 to 7 percent of the actual figure—probably by combining sailing times and latitude calculated by measuring the angle of the sun at noon and other measurements. When the astronomer
Hipparchus translated Pytheas’s estimates about two centuries later, they came out to a highly accurate 48°42N in Brittany, 54°14N (possibly the Isle of Man), 58°13N (the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides), and 61° in the Shetlands, where there were nineteen hours of sunlight, which is consistent with his claim.

The beginnings of sustained Mediterranean interest in northwest Europe dates from
Julius Caesar’s invasion of northern
Gaul—which entailed several sea campaigns against the sailing fleets of the
Veneti in western France and the Bay of Biscay—and his two crossings of the English Channel to Britain in the 50s
BCE
. Although Gaul became a Roman province in 51
BCE
, civil war prevented the Romans from capitalizing on Caesar’s almost flawless invasion of Britain, and when stability returned,
Augustus and his successors focused on pushing Roman authority north of the Rhine by land and sea. An Augustan fleet sailed to
Jutland in around 10
BCE
, and twenty-five years later another, said to number a thousand vessels, reached the Ems River just north of the border
between the Netherlands and Germany. Despite these and other demonstrations of power, Rome’s authority on the continent effectively stopped at the Rhine and Danube.
^a
Claudius is credited with establishing standing provincial fleets for service in Germany and Britain, which he invaded in 43 ce. The
Classis Germanica
(German fleet) was responsible for denying use of the river to Germanic tribes as well as for security at the mouth of the Rhine, a major point of departure for traffic to Roman Britain. The German fleet’s home port was Cologne (Colonia
Claudia) on the Rhine, but subsidiary flotillas were located at provincial capitals and garrison towns like Mainz, about halfway between the North Sea and the Swiss border. Charged with safeguarding the
lines of communication between
Boulogne and Richborough and later
Dover, the
Classis Britannica
was based on the English Channel at Gesoriacum (Boulogne, France) about twenty miles west of the
Dover Strait.

Roman Gaul’s prosperity continued to attract Germanic tribes from beyond the Rhine. During a revolt in 69–70, Julius Civilis, prince of
Batavia (the region at the mouth of the Rhine), mustered a fleet of
“all the
bireme and single-banked vessels he had, and to these added a larger number of small craft carrying thirty to forty men apiece and fitted out like
liburnians. There were captured craft assisted by improvised sails made from coats of many colours.” His crews included many Batavians who had served in the
Classis Germanica.
The Romans were outnumbered but had “the advantage of experienced rowers, skilled helmsmen, and ships of greater size.” Nonetheless, when the fleets encountered each other off the mouths of the Waal and Meuse Rivers, they gave each other a wide berth. In response to further Germanic incursions through the Dover Strait and across the North Sea to Britain, the Romans built a string of coastal forts on both sides of the English Channel, known as the Saxon Shore. Gaul was less easily defended, and when legions were withdrawn for service elsewhere in the mid-third century,
Frankish tribes poured across the Rhine as far south as
Spain, where they commandeered a fleet in
Tarragona for a raid on North Africa. It was not until the reign of
Marcus Aurelius Probus in the 270s that the Rhine frontier stabilized.

This incidentally led to one of the most remarkable feats of seamanship in Europe or the Mediterranean to that point. After pacifying the border, Probus relocated a large number of Frankish tribesmen to the Black Sea coast of
Asia Minor. In 279 “
some of them revolted and disrupted the whole of Greece with their large navy,” which they cobbled together from whatever ships they could
steal locally. The erstwhile prisoners pressed on to
Sicily, “where they attacked
Syracuse and killed many of its inhabitants. Then they sailed across to Africa, and although beaten off by an army from Carthage, they were still able to return home [to the coast of the North Sea] through the Strait of Gibraltar.” The earliest seaborne Saxon raids on Gaul, to which Danes and
Frisians also contributed, took place two years later and further eroded the defenses of the beleaguered empire and led to the
burning of the
Classis Germanica
at Cologne.

Barbarian tribes continued to cross the Rhine throughout the fourth century, and the end of
Roman rule in Britain resulted from an invasion of Gaul by barbarian tribes at the start of the fifth. In 410 the emperor
Honorius withdrew his legions and “
sent letters to the cities in Britain, urging them to fend for themselves.” In the ensuing chaos, native Briton rulers recruited Angle, Saxon, and Jutish mercenaries from the continent for help against invaders and each another. In so doing, they may have sowed the seeds of their own demise, for the
Saxons are said to have “
sent back news of their success to their homeland, adding that the country was fertile and the Britons cowardly.” With guarantees of land and pay for maintaining “the peace and security of the island,” the newcomers expanded their authority and by the mid-seventh century the territory of modern England comprised seven kingdoms: Anglian
Northumbria, Mercia and
East Anglia, Saxon
Essex,
Sussex and
Wessex, and Jutish
Kent. Wales and
Scotland remained in the hands of Britons. Saxon mariners also established themselves on the Loire from where they and Danish raiders struck the Garonne valley and Iberian Peninsula. Following the collapse of Roman authority in Gaul and Italy, in 476 the
western empire expired.

Germanic tribes were attracted by the prosperity of Gaul and Britain, the wealth of which was evident not only in the major cities and garrison towns, but on the sea-lanes that ran along the coasts of Gaul from the Rhine to the Garonne, and between Gaul and the British Isles. Elite Britons and Roman officials and soldiers throughout areas under Roman control sought out wine,
olive oil, glassware, jewelry, pottery, and weapons from Gaul, while Britain exported grain, cattle, gold, tin, iron, slaves, hides, and hunting dogs to ports at the mouths of the Rhine, Seine, Loire, and Garonne. A host of more mundane cargoes have turned up in shipwrecks from the period. A second-century
barge excavated at
Blackfriars in London sank with a cargo of ragstone, a standard building material. Although this came from Kent via the
Medway and Thames Rivers,
teredo worm holes in the hull prove that the ship had spent considerable time at sea. Finds associated with a third-century
wreck from St. Peter Port in the Channel Islands indicate that its crew of three traded from the Iberian Peninsula to the North Sea, and the cargo on its last voyage included
barrels of pitch from the
Les Landes region of southern France. The Roman-era trade routes were disrupted but not altogether ended by the barbarian invasions. Even as the last legions were leaving Britain, church missionaries were heading north to Ireland and Britain, and prestige goods continued to reach the British Isles from the farthest corners of the Mediterranean. Among the effects of a seventh-century East Anglian chieftain named
Raedwald found in a
ship burial at
Sutton Hoo, England, were an eastern Mediterranean dish, an Egyptian bronze bowl, and two silver spoons insc
ribed with the names Saul and Paul in Greek letters. From closer by, the site also yielded thirty-seven gold coins from Merovingian Gaul dating from 575 to 625, the year of Raedwald’s death and, presumably, the interment of his ship—and coincidentally the year of the latest coin found with the Yassi Ada A ship off Turkey.

The collapse of Roman authority disrupted the balance of power that had prevailed along the Rhine–English Channel frontier since the first century, and the primary sea-lanes of the imperial period declined in importance as trade passed into new hands to be carried in new directions. The Frisians were the first people in northern Europe to be distinguished for their maritime trading networks, which resulted from their adaptability to a treacherous, sea-soaked environment. Around the start of the fifth century, rising sea levels flooded parts of the Netherlands and a lake the Romans had called
Lacus Flevo doubled in size to form the
Aelmere.
^b
Rather than flee to higher ground, the Frisians capitalized on their aqueous habitat to become the foremost traders in northern seas. By the sixth century, Frisians were in regular contact with the
Franks and the Danes, and they were sailing to British ports like
York and London. To the north they sailed to
Jutland where their trade helped
spur the founding of the eighth-century
entrepôt at Ribe, on the west coast of the peninsula. This effort was undertaken by an unknown Danish ruler who sought to channel the trading networks of the North Sea through his domains. The choice of Ribe was due to the advantages that came of crossing the Jutland peninsula overland—sixty kilometers to Kolding Fjord—rather than sailing by way of the
Skagerrak and
Kattegat, or through the sheltered, hundred-mile-long Limfjord that snakes between Jutland and the island of Vendsyssel. Ribe
was frequented primarily by Frisian and Frankish merchants from the North Sea, but the site has yielded goods from Norway,
Birka, the Baltic, and even the Black Sea, which attests to the eastward reach of Scandinavian and Slavic trade networks at this early date.

South of Frisia, the Salian Franks had emerged as the most powerful of the Germanic tribes to cross the Rhine. In 486 Clovis defeated the last Roman ruler in Gaul, but with their acceptance of Christianity he and his Merovingian successors secured Romano-Gaulish support against the
Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse and other Germanic tribes who followed heretical teachings. By midcentury, the
Frankish kingdom encompassed most of modern France, the Low Countries,
Switzerland, and southern
Germany. For all its size and resources, its long seacoast was exposed to
Saxon and Danish raids, the most famous of which is recounted in the Anglo-Saxon epic
Beowulf,
and in
Gregory of Tours’s
History of the Franks
. According to the latter, at some time between 516 and 534 the Danish king
Chlocilaicus (Hygelac in
Beowulf
) raided northern Frisia and sailed into the Aelmere. From there the Danes sailed up the Vecht and Rhine to the junction of the Waal before being caught by the Franks near modern Nijmegen, about a hundred kilometers from the sea. Chlocilaicus was killed and his army crushed, presumably near an intended rendezvous with the fleet.

The Frisians’ own expansionist designs resulted in frequent hostilities with the Franks who sought to reclaim ancestral lands north of the Rhine in a process that would climax under
Charlemagne. Early in the seventh century, the
Merovingians built a church at Utrecht and their most important northern port was at nearby Dorestad. Although its population never exceeded two thousand, Dorestad had a kilometer-long waterfront on the Rhine and was the site of a mint from 630 to 650, when it fell to the Frisians. Although
Pepin II restored it to Merovingian rule in 689, it was not until fifty years later that
Charles Martel launched a major naval expedition that paved the way for Frisia to become Frankish territory.

Neither Pepin nor Charles Martel was king; rather they served as hereditary mayors of the palace (major-domos) for the moribund Merovingian Dynasty. The mayors shunned the throne until 751, when
Pepin III was crowned king of the Franks, the first of the
Carolingian Dynasty, which takes its name from his son, Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus, or Charles the Great), who expanded the Frankish kingdom beyond all recognition. A supreme military strategist and tactician, he deployed riverine fleets to brilliant effect in four separate
campaigns: in 789 against Slavs living along the Elbe and its tributaries; two years later against the
Avars in
Hungary, via the Danube; in 797 against the
Saxons, by way of the Weser and Elbe; and finally against the Slavs of
north-central Germany, again on the Elbe. Of these, the war against the Avars was the most decisive, because it destroyed the last vestiges of their power. Charlemagne’s experience of moving his armies on the Danube inspired him to try digging a canal, the
Fossa Carolina
or Karlsgraben, between the Swabian Rezat River, in the Rhine-Main catchment area, and the Altmuhl, a tributary of the Danube. Although the distance was less than two kilometers and the difference in elevation between the Rezat and Altmuhl only ten meters, the local geology presented insurmountable obstacles and the project was abandoned. Such a link between the
Rhine and Danube would f
rustrate engineers until 1992, when the 171-kilometer-long Rhine-Main-Danube Canal opened.