Cross and Scepter (7 page)

In the following period, the Danish kings turned towards Germany and the Baltic. One of the highlights of Saxo Grammaticus' great work about the deeds of the Danes is the siege and conquest of Arkona on Rügen in 1169. Saxo celebrates the courage and skill of his compatriots and above all their leaders, King
Valdemar I and Bishop (later Archbishop) Absalon, while also describing in detail the barbarity and superstition of the Wends, the Slavonic population of the Baltic area. The king orders his men to build siege engines to destroy the fortifications of Arkona, but then changes his mind. He is convinced that the pagan town can be brought down without the use of any such equipment, as Charlemagne had once converted the population of Rügen and ordered them to pay tax to St. Vitus. Therefore, they only have to wait for St. Vitus's day, when the saint will destroy the walls of the town in revenge. The king's prophecy proves true, a fire breaks out in the town and the inhabitants surrender and convert to Christianity.

Saxo pays great attention to the conquests in the Baltic region, emphasizing the close connection between warfare and the spread of Christianity. Not all conquests were as easy as Arkona; often the Danes had to fight bloody battles and sustain long sieges in order to overcome the opposition of the natives. The crusader ideology had been introduced in Western Christendom, first in the expeditions to the Holy Land that began in the 1090s and then extended to the remaining pagan areas, while at the same time Western Europe had become superior in military technology and organization.

Saxo and his contemporaries depict the Wends not only as pagans but as robbers who plundered the Danish coasts, behaving much as the Danes themselves had behaved a century or two earlier. Although Saxo does not explicitly point to this parallel, the continuity does not seem to have escaped him. In addition to Valdemar and Absalon, Cnut the Great is one of his heroes and his conquest of England duly celebrated, although described in less detail than the struggles against the Wends. Saxo is also full of praise for Cnut's namesake on the throne, St. Knud, who was planning a new conquest of England when he was murdered by his disobedient and lazy people, who refused to take part in the
hardships of war. Thus, there is certain continuity between the Viking expeditions and the territorial conquests in their wake and the crusades in the twelfth and following centuries. The great advantage of the latter was that there were ecclesiastical privileges attached to them, spiritual blessings as well as the opportunity to tax the Church to finance the expeditions. Politically, there was booty to be gained and land that might be colonized. Thus, forays to the Baltic could offer some of the same advantages as did the Viking expeditions.

Although the Baltic expeditions did not take the place of conflicts with other Christian countries, they played an important part in the following century, for Denmark as well as for Sweden. Norway was too distant from the Baltic to be involved. The expansion towards the Baltic began in the early twelfth century and reached a climax in the conquest of Estonia (1219). It was undertaken partly in alliance and partly in competition with the Germans. At the same time, the relationship with Scandinavia's mighty neighbor to the south, the German emperor, was problematic. Valdemar I had to do homage to Frederick Barbarossa, while Northern Germany was dominated by Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, who was a sometime ally, sometime rival in the Baltic crusades. Henry's fall in 1180 changed this and made the Danish king the strongest force in Northern Germany. Knud VI (1182–1202), and above all his brother and successor Valdemar II (1202–41), exploited this opportunity to intervene in conflicts between the various princes in the area. Several of them had to do homage to the king of Denmark, who in 1201 also became the lord of the wealthy towns of Lübeck and Hamburg. This lordship was particularly important, as the profit from it came in the form of ready money, which could be spent wherever the king wanted. Most of his other income was in kind, which either entailed considerable transport costs or had to be sold to be converted into money.

After his brother's death, King Valdemar continued the expansion into Germany and the crusades in the Baltic. In 1214, the new emperor, Frederick II—who at the time had to make concessions in order to overcome his rival Otto IV—transferred to Valdemar imperial power over all the territories he had conquered in Northern Germany. Valdemar suffered a setback when he was taken captive in a surprise attack by his vassal, Count Henry of Schwerin (in 1223). He was released in exchange for a huge ransom, tried to regain his power in Germany, but was defeated in the battle of Bornhøved in 1227 and gave up any further attempts at expansion, although he retained part of his influence in Northern Germany. In the following period, internal struggles prevented further adventures abroad. On the contrary, Germans were more likely to interfere in Denmark than vice versa. This period also saw the beginning of a problem that has vexed Danish-German relations into the twentieth century: Southern Jutland was granted as a fief to Abel, a younger son of Valdemar II, and developed into a semi-independent duchy.

In 1301, the young King Erik VI Menved had Frederick II's privilege transcribed, and in the following period set out to put its conditions into practice. For nearly two decades he intervened in Germany in various ways and with considerable success. To finance his conquests, he had to mortgage castles and territories in his own kingdom, which were redeemed when he had achieved his aims. Unfortunately, however, he died suddenly in 1319 at a time when most of his kingdom had been mortgaged and was succeeded by his brother Christoffer with whom he had been in almost continuous conflict throughout his reign. This introduced a period of chaos, which included eight years when Denmark was without a king. At his succession (1340), Christoffer's son Valdemar IV had to redeem the mortgaged areas before he could embark on an independent foreign policy, which, as we shall see, involved new challenges and opportunities as a consequence
of major changes in the relationship between the Nordic countries.

Given Norway's orientation towards the coast, the islands in the North Sea and Atlantic were the natural field for its expansion, the more so as the people of these islands were mostly emigrants from Norway and spoke the same language. Some of the sagas state that Harald Finehair made an expedition to the Orkneys, and although this is most probably a later invention, it may be an expression of the idea, apparently current in the thirteenth century, that the kingdom of Norway should include all peoples of Norwegian origin and speaking the Norwegian language and that such expeditions were, consequently, natural extensions of the original conquest of mainland Norway. Olav Tryggvason and St. Olav, both former Viking leaders and mercenaries, also seem to have sought influence in this area, as did Harald Hardrada with his failed attack on England. Around the turn of the next century, Magnus Barelegs (1093–1103) spent most of his reign pursuing victories in the West. He gained control over the Orkneys, the Hebrides, and Man, and fought to establish a foothold in Ireland, where he was killed. His successors gave up Ireland, but upheld the claim on the islands. The rulers there had to recognize the king of Norway as their overlord, and in certain periods, the Norwegian king was also able to assert some real control over them. This claim was strengthened through the foundation of the Norwegian archdiocese in 1152/53, in which all of these islands were included. They also played some part in the Norwegian civil wars; one of the frequent rebellions against King Sverre (1177–1202) started in the Orkneys. After it was put down, Earl Harald Maddadson had to accept Sverre as his direct overlord, and, at least for some time, the islands became more strongly linked to the king of Norway.

After the end of the civil wars (below, p. 56), Sverre's grandson King Håkon Håkonsson (1217–63) spent the last twenty-three
years of his long reign engaged in various foreign enterprises, partly offensive, partly defensive. He sought to strengthen Norwegian control of the islands in the West and was partly successful. However, the Norwegian revival in this area coincided with a similar one in Scotland, directed at the Hebrides and Man, which were just off the western coast of Scotland and of course much closer to that country than to Norway. The war between the two countries (1263–1266) ended with Norway ceding the islands against an annual money payment and Scottish recognition of the Norwegian possession of the Orkneys and Shetland (the Treaty of Perth, 1266). Relations with England and Scotland remained important to Norwegian foreign policy in the following period. King Eirik Magnusson twice married a Scottish princess, and his daughter was recognized as heir to the throne of Scotland after King Alexander III's death in 1286, but she died before she could ascend to the throne. Throughout this and the following period, the Norwegians repeatedly tried to make the Scots pay the sum of money they had promised in the treaty of Perth, but with little success.

The loss of the Hebrides and Man was to some extent compensated by Greenland and Iceland submitting to the Norwegian king, the former in 1261 and the latter in 1262–64. Iceland and Greenland were thus brought into the proper world order as enunciated by Cardinal William of Sabina. Both now had a king. Iceland had until then been kingless, with no centralized government, though it was not without political institutions. The island was from early on divided between thirty-nine chieftains called
godar,
and in addition it had a central assembly, called the Allting (ON Allþingi = general assembly), where decisions of general interest were made—regarding, for instance the introduction of Christianity—and where conflicts were adjudicated. A law was allegedly issued in 930, based on the Norwegian Law of Gulating and revised and written down in 1117–1118. A later version of
this law, preserved in manuscripts of the late thirteenth century, is extant. It is very detailed and highly sophisticated, but it is doubtful to what extent it was actually applied, as there was no executive power. During the first centuries after settlement, political power was divided between a considerable number of local chieftains, probably more than the thirty-nine
godar
. From the late twelfth century onwards, and particularly from around 1220, power became increasingly concentrated in a few magnate families, who got hold of most of the
godord
. The explanation of this must be sought in the combination of increased population and reduced resources, which made the common people more dependent on the chieftains. An important factor is also the development of the Church, which led to a concentration of wealth, partly through ecclesiastical landownership and partly through the introduction of the tithe, both of which served the interests of the chieftains who controlled the churches.

This concentration of power gave rise to intense competition between the chieftains, which provided an opportunity for the Norwegian king to interfere. He commissioned one after the other of them to work for his interests in Iceland, in the beginning with limited success; but eventually, he managed to make most of them members of his body of retainers (the
hird
). Though the king of Norway was not particularly wealthy, he was far wealthier than the Icelandic chieftains and his friendship was thus very attractive to them. The final agreement of 1262–1264, when the Icelanders submitted to the king of Norway (on certain conditions), was a logical consequence of this.

From a purely political point of view, medieval Iceland was a poor and distant island whose development had little influence on the rest of Scandinavia. From a cultural point of view, however, its importance was enormous. More evidence of pre-Christian religion and culture is preserved in Icelandic manuscripts than exists for any other Scandinavian country. Icelanders also wrote
the majority of the sagas about Norwegian kings, in addition to a rich literature dealing with a number of other subjects, as will be dealt with later (
Chapter 4
). Because of this literature, combined with the lack of a central government, Icelandic evidence is often used to illustrate pre-state society in other parts of Scandinavia, notably Norway. Although this has its dangers, Icelandic material can at least be used to gain a more complete picture of phenomena of which there is some evidence in the other countries.

In the following period, the king sought to integrate the possessions in the North Sea and the Atlantic as far as possible into the kingdom of Norway, through legislation and the appointment of Norwegian officials, although the distances between the islands and the mainland were an obstacle to such a policy. The kingdom of Norway also expanded towards the north, partly through missions to the Sami, partly through attempts to control the lucrative fur trade in this area, and partly through Norwegian settlement in the north. This brought the Norwegians into contact with the Russians, who were expanding westward towards the same area, a confluence that led to several altercations in the fourteenth century. The relationship to England and Scotland continued to play an important part in Norwegian foreign policy as well, until the early fourteenth century.

Swedish expansion across the Baltic Sea can be traced back to before the formation of the kingdoms; there were Swedish settlements in Southern Finland before the year 800, although most of them date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onwards. Sweden's national saint, King Erik (d. 1160), is said to have led the first crusade to Finland in the 1150s. Although this is disputed, we know that the Swedish settlements in Finland were extended and the population in the new areas converted at that time. From the 1220s, a permanent episcopal see existed in Finland, which from around 1290 at the latest was located in Åbo (Turku in Finnish). Both the diocese and the
len
were important parts of
the kingdom of Sweden; the latter was often held by prominent member of the aristocracy. A new crusade took place in the mid-thirteenth century as the result of a pagan uprising. The expansion in Finland led to conflicts with the Russian principality of Novgorod. The Russians, who belonged to the Orthodox Church, were for a long time regarded as fellow Christians, even after the schism of 1054. Eventually, however, they were stamped as schismatic and an appropriate target for crusades. During two expeditions in the 1290s, the Swedes moved into Karelia and conquered most of the southern shore of Finland. In 1292 they built Viborg castle and later defended it against Russian attacks. A peace treaty was concluded with Novgorod in 1323, which was supposed to settle the borders between the two countries. It gave the Swedes Southern Finland and most of the Karelian Peninsula, whereas exact borders were probably not drawn in the thinly inhabited areas in the north. The treaty did not lead to permanent peace—there were several wars in the following period—but it was often cited in later negotiations.