Cross and Scepter (18 page)

This distribution of land and resources must to a considerable degree be explained as the result of the growth of the monarchy and the Church. Another important factor, however, is demographic growth. Calculations for Europe as a whole suggest that the population grew threefold between 1000 and 1350, which amounts to an increase by 0.3 percent per year. Although the
evidence is too meager to allow a similar calculation for Scandinavia, there may well have been similar population growth there as well. Studies of place names suggest a substantial increase in the amount of cultivated land and in the number of new farms, the latter mostly small and marginal, which indicates that most of the land that could be worked with medieval technology was already in use. Some evidence of famine in the early fourteenth century may also point in this direction, but this evidence is disputed.

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.

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 material 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.