The Northern Crusades

The Northern Crusades Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: The Northern Crusades Read Online Free PDF
Author: Eric Christiansen
Tags: Religión, History, bought-and-paid-for
be landowners, lords of retinues, the masters of populous communities. Their ships had room on board for slaves, cattle and loot, but it was restricted, and such cargoes limited the movements of the crew. When it came to trading, there was another kind of ship, long, but wide and deep amidships, with fewer or no oarsmen, relying on wind power – the byrthing . Behind the byrthing was the partnership of two or more owners, pooling their resources and risking shipwreck and piracy for gain; and in the twelfth century the makers of such partnerships appear to have been associating into guilds and companies to protect themselves against a hostile world. The men of Gotland, or those who enriched themselves by trade, ran their island through an association of this kind, without the interference of the Swedish king; in the 1150s the landowners and merchants of Zealand safeguarded themselves from piracy by maintaining a small fleet of raiders under a privateer called Wedeman. The vulnerability of the byrthing made self-help a necessity, until princes could be got to assume responsibility for its safety.
    Then there were the small ships, a whole variety of types used by families or groups of neighbours for raiding, ferrying, trading, fishing and transport: the four- to fifteen-oared skude of the Danes, a keeled vessel that could accompany warships, carry bowmen, scout upriver, or be used for small-scale depredation on its own; the flat-bottomed pram of the Slavs, for riding over marshes and lakes – not found in early sources, but soon to be imitated all over the Baltic; the small keeled sailing-boat that plied between villages with local produce; the haapar , built for speed and resilience on the rivers flowing into the Bothnian Gulf, held together with green roots, poplar twigs and deer sinews; the strug and ushkui of the Russian rivers; and the bolskip , the skute and the kane , which carried merchandise up and down the Peene. For every shore- and river-dweller in North-East Europe, the boat was a vital part of his life and livelihood; changes in the technique of boat-building, and in the balance of sea-power, would have momentous effects.
    ‘Sea-power’ is the wrong term. It has come to mean the hegemony that depends on the naval power of a state; but what concerned the medieval North was more like ship- or boat-power, the ability of any group, from an individual to an association of traders or a king, to achieve a variety of ends through ownership or control of the appropriate type of craft. At no time could a fleet of big warships dominate the wholerange of Northern waterways; at most they could patrol certain areas, routes and harbours, such as when Canute the Great and Valdemar the Great policed the waters of Denmark, but such periods of limited sea-power were exceptional. At most times, pirates, levy-ships, slavers, traders, fishers and river transports carried on their various businesses in a state of wary co-existence, with battles, pursuits and deals recurring as occasion served. In the 1070s the king of Denmark had an arrangement with the pirates who infested the Great Belt: they robbed, he took a cut and looked the other way. At the turn of the fourteenth century things were not much better: the queen of Denmark waged open war with an association of pirates based on the north German coast, the Vitalienbrüder , but Danish, Swedish and Mecklenburg landowners connived at their robberies and bought and sold with them. Nobody could rule the waves when nobody could rule more than a share of the coasts and rivers that hemmed them in so closely.
    In these various ways, the conjunction of a temperate sea and intractable hinterlands of forest, mountain and bog, of mild summers and dreadful winters, of nomad and farmer, had given the Baltic and North-Eastern world of the early Middle Ages a character of its own, which marked it off from other regions and compelled the people who lived there to work, eat, fight and even think in
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