The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (48 page)

By the time Wulfstan sailed for
Truso, the increase in trade had sparked the rise of many emporia and port towns along the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic. Some of these grew organically from earlier agrarian settlements to accommodate trade and develop various manufactures, but many bear the mark of outside influence, from Danes, Gotlanders, and Swedes. The densest concentration of ports was
west of the Vistula delta, including
Starigard (Oldenburg) east of
Kiel Bay,
Ralswiek, on the island of Rügen, Menzlin and
Wolin in the Oder estuary, and Kołobrzeg. Located above the mouth of the Vistula near modern
Elblag, Truso was well protected from the sea. Wulfstan says nothing about the local population, but archaeological finds suggest that Danish influence was dominant. Truso seems to have been a center of seasonal trade until it became a permanent settlement around 850. Farther east, at the southern end of the Curonian Lagoon, was the site of Kaup (Mokhovoye, Russia), whose prosperity depended on its trade with Birka.

The real prize in all these ports was their access to trans-European river corridors, and it is not surprising that the most important of these lay not
directly on the Baltic but well to the east. In contrast to the litany of Viking raids in the west, accounts of the Scandinavian progress south across
Russia, the Baltic states, Belarus, and
Ukraine to the Black and Caspian Seas focus not on the plundering of wealthy religious houses—Christianity only took root here later—but on the establishment of trading centers at
Staraya Ladoga and
Novgorod near
Lake Ladoga, and at
Kiev on the Dnieper, about nine hundred kilometers south. According to the Russian
Primary Chronicle,
this came about because the
Slavs were experiencing a bout of internecine strife. “
They said to themselves: ‘Let us seek a prince who may rule over us, and judge us according to the Law.’ They accordingly went overseas to the Varangian Russes [and said], ‘Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.’ ” Three brothers came, the oldest and longest-lived of whom,
Rurik, settled at Novgorod. “On account of these Varangians, the district of Novgorod became known as the land of Rus. The present inhabitants of Novgorod are descended from the Varangian race, but aforetime they were Slavs.” The explanation offered in the
Primary Chronicle
does not settle definitively the question of why the Varangians originally came to Staraya Ladoga, but it is conceivable that as in post-Roman Britain, local tribes hired foreign mercenaries only to become subject to them. Rurik’s cohorts
Askold and Dir continued south from Novgorod and decided to relocate to the Slav settlement of Kiev. Inspired by the site’s more central and commanding location on the heights overlooking the Dnieper, Rurik’s successor,
Oleg, transferred his capital from Novgorod to Kiev.

The Byzantine Empire was the wealthiest and most accessible attraction for the
Rus and in 907 Oleg invaded, laying waste the territory outside Constantinople and securing from
Leo VI an indemnity of nearly a million silver pieces and a trade agreement giving preferential treatment to Rus merchants. Among its terms was the stipulation that “
Whosoever come as merchants shall receive supplies for six months, including bread, wine, meat, fish, and fruit. Baths shall be prepared for them in any volume they require. When the
Russians return homeward, they shall receive from your Emperor food,
anchors, cordage, and
sails, and whatever else is needed for the journey.” Relations between Kiev and Constantinople generally improved, although there were occasional setbacks, notably when the Rus invaded Byzantine territory in 941 and 970.
Vladimir the Great did the most to align Rus and Byzantine interests. Scandinavian soldiers had previously served in the Byzantine army, but at the request of Basil II, Vladimir sent six thousand soldiers to help in a civil war. This corps became the genesis of the emperor’s
Varangian Guard, an elite force in which many Scandinavians served and that survived through the
twelfth century. Rus-Byzantine ties strengthened further when in 988 Vladimir married Basil’s sister (over her strenuous objection) and she convinced him to accept baptism. Given the importance of
Byzantium as a political, military, and trading power, this was no hardship for Vladimir (a dubious candidate for the sainthood accorded him by a zealous church in the thirteenth century). Yet his conversion further illustrates the Scandinavians’ flexibility in adapting to the particular circumstances of the lands they settled.

Farther east, the Rus were drawn to the trade of the
Volga River and Caspian Sea. The
Khazars, whose ruling nobility had converted to
Judaism in the eighth century, had nominal control over access to the Caspian from their capital in the Volga delta, but the Rus reached the sea in the late ninth century. Around 910 they raided the port of Abaskun on the Iranian shore. Three years later, according to the historian al-Masudi, “
there came about 500 ships, manned each by 100 persons,” who promised the Khazars “half of what they might take in booty from the peoples of the sea-coast” in exchange for access to the Caspian. This expedition ranged around the coast and as far inland as Ardabil, in northwest Iran, before the Rus established themselves on islands near
Baku, in
Azerbaijan. The Rus proved invincible, in part because “the nations round the sea … had not been accustomed in time past to any enemy making his way to them there, for only merchant-ships and fishing vessels used to pass therein.” Thirty years later another large force entered the Caspian, this time ascending the Kura River to capture the city of Barda’a, in Azerbaijan. Presumably under pressure from their Muslim neighbors, in 965 the Khazars denied passage to the Rus, who retaliated by sacking their major cities and so precipitated the end of Jewish rule.

In eastern Europe as elsewhere, Scandinavians were essentially pragmatic traders whose voyages tended to follow the established if lightly used routes of the day. The Baltic’s ancient riverine trade with the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia exported furs, wax, honey, and slaves in exchange for gold, silk, and silver from Byzantium. Muslim lands were the source of myriad silver coins that have been found in hoards around the Baltic. Excavations at one of the seventeen farms on the
island of Rügen yielded a basket with more than two thousand coins buried sometime after 844. Varangian traders also funneled goods more traditionally associated with the luxurious east, and Chinese silks have been found at
Birka,
York, and
Dublin. We know that the Rus had access to Asian spices, too, for
Abraham ben Jacob, a Jewish merchant who visited Mainz in the tenth century, reported finding silver dirhams minted in
Samarkand as well as “
quantities of such spices as are usually found in the Far East, pepper, imber [ginger], cloves, nard, costus and galingal [blue ginger].” Rus merchants doubtless had a hand in conveying these from east to west.

The century and a half after 900 was the climactic period of Scandinavian expansion. By the start of the tenth century, Vikings were part of the political landscape in the places they had settled—the
Danelaw and Laithlinn, and in Ireland, Normandy, and Russia. In Scandinavia itself, rulers taxed trade and used their newfound wealth to purchase the support of local chieftains. In this the Danish kings were especially successful, thanks to their command of the trade across
Jutland and of the sea routes from the North Sea to the Baltic, which passed through the archipelago between Jutland and
Skåne. (The
Store Belt, widest of the three passages between the North Sea and Baltic, narrows to five miles; the most direct, the
Øresund, is less than two.) Norway had been united under
Harald Fairhair at the end of the tenth century, but the emergence of a strong kingship took place more slowly in
Sweden.

Harald’s success in consolidating the monarchy had sparked the initial settlement of Iceland, which remained a conspicuous exception to the trend toward centralized power then developing in Scandinavia. A more egalitarian
thing
(assembly), such as prevailed
in Iceland, however, did not mean an absence of law, and just as the king of Norway could exile someone, the
thing
could do the same. Near the end of the tenth century, Eirik “the Red” Thorvaldsson managed to be banished from Norway for murder, and then from Iceland for the same crime. A century before, a mariner blown off course en route to Iceland had sighted lands to the west, and with few other options the exiled Eirik spent three years exploring the coasts of what he called Greenland before returning to convince several hundred Icelanders to join him. They settled in two groups, Eirik’s
Eastern Settlement in the south and the Western Settlement about 160 miles up the
Davis Strait near Nuuk (formerly Godthab). Greenland in turn became the jumping-off place for what turned out to be the first voyage to North America by Europeans (an event not understood as such at the time) thanks again to a sailor’s overshooting his destination.

Navigational error in the North Atlantic was not all that uncommon in this period.
Coastal navigation was the norm for most voyages around northern Europe, but sailing between Scandinavia and the British Isles, the Faeroes, Iceland, and Greenland required open-water passages of at least three hundred miles. Navigational instruments were few. The sounding lead (a long line with a weight at one end to determine the depth of water) was standard equipment, and the Norse could measure the angle of the sun to determine latitude, while they shaped their course with the aid of a “
sunstone.” Working on the same principle as a sundial, a sunstone was a dial with a pointer in the middle that
cast its shadow on notches incised around the outer ring, with different sets of markings being used to account for the sun’s altitude at different seasons. Mostly, sailors relied on the observation of natural phenomena, including the flight paths of birds, shoals, tidal streams, fog banks, the color of water, and the presence of
ice—including the “ice blink,” the reflected light of glaciers visible from over the horizon. For long-distance voyages they practiced latitude sailing, running north or south to the parallel on which their destination lay and then following that parallel east or west as closely as possible.

While meteorological conditions during the
Medieval Warming Period may have been somewhat more benign than they are now, short days, fog, and overcast skies limited the hours of good visibility, and none of the tools or techniques available to Scandinavian mariners was infallible, especially when sailing to a new destination. Returning to Iceland after a voyage from Norway,
Bjarni Herjolfsson learned that his father had joined Eirik in Greenland and decided to follow him there. Bjarni sailed too far south and wound up on a coast that was “
well wooded and with low hills,” unlike mountainous, treeless Greenland. Bjarni refused to land and subsequent exploration was left to
Leif Eirikson, who visited places he called Helluland (“slabland,” for its glaciers, probably Baffin Island),
Markland (“woodland,” southern Newfoundland), and
Vinland (for its grapes). Leif’s kinsman
Thorfinn Karlsefni later spent two or three years at Vinland with a party of sixty men and five women including his wife,
Gudríd, who gave birth to the first European in North America.

Eirik’s Saga
and the
Greenland Saga
agree that the Greenlanders intended to exploit the region—which encompassed the shores of the
Gulf of St. Lawrence as far south as New Brunswick—for its wood, furs, grapes, and walnuts. But it was too remote and the
Greenlanders’ numbers too few—only four or five hundred at this point, and never more than twenty-five hundred—to exploit Vinland fully. The essential accuracy of the sagas is corroborated by archaeological finds at
L’Anse aux Meadows in northeast Newfoundland, near the entrance to the Strait of Belle Isle. This was a
year-round settlement that could accommodate about one hundred people so that they did not have to make the round-trip from Greenland in one season. L’Anse aux Meadows seems to have been occupied
until about 1030, but people continued sailing to Vinland for some time after that. In the 1070s, the chronicler
Adam of
Bremen wrote of an island called “
Vinland because vines producing excellent wine grow wild there. That unsown crops also abound on that island we have ascertained not from fabulous reports but from the trustworthy relations of the Danes.” Somewhat closer, Markland remained a source of wood for Greenlanders until at least 1347 when, according to an Icelandic source, “
There came also a ship from Greenland, smaller in size than the small
Icelandic boats; she was anchorless, and came into the outer Straumfjördur [in western Iceland]. There were seventeen men on board. They had made a voyage to Markland, but were afterwards storm-driven here.”
Norse Greenland seems to have died out or been abandoned sometime after 1410, when an Icelandic crew returned home after four years in the
Eastern Settlement. Sources hint at no difficulties at the time, but the next written reference to Greenland, in a note regarding
John Cabot in 1497, mentions no Greenlanders of European descent. Even so,
English
cod fishermen and traders—especially from the port of Bristol—had begun sailing to Iceland on a regular basis earlier in the fifteenth century, and the odds are good that some reached Greenland and possibly the Newfoundland Banks well before Cabot’s time.

Five hundred years before, however, the English remained minor players in the drama then unfolding in the North Atlantic. Alfred had exercised his prerogatives as king wisely, and his successors built on the foundations he laid.
Edward the Elder enlarged his realm and by 918 ruled all England south of the Humber and had won the submission of
Northumbria, Strathclyde,
Scotland, and
Dublin. This rapid expansion set
Wessex on a collision course with other aspirants to supremacy in the British Isles, a crisis that came to a head in the
battle of Brunanburh in 937. Under Edward’s successor,
Anglo-Saxon armies sailed north in hundreds of ships and were victorious in a dramatic battle that was, according to a poem in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles,
bloodier than any fought
“since
Angles and
Saxons / came here from the east, / sought out Britain over the broad ocean, / …seized the country.” The Anglo-Saxon resurgence slowed during the long reign of
Æthelred II, when disaffected Danes settled
in England rather than submit to Denmark’s centralizing king,
Harald Bluetooth, a convert to Christianity whose evangelization and monarchical policies alienated many of the aristocracy. In the 980s, these old-guard Danes sailed for southern England where they forced Æthelred to pay nearly 150,000 pounds of
silver and gold—
Danegeld, or “Danish tribute”—over twenty years to prevent further violence.