Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (50 page)

Only three years after the fall of Jerusalem, Denmark’s king Erik Ejegod (Erik the Evergood) became the first king of any Catholic country to set out for the Holy Land. Leaving Denmark with his queen Boedil and a large retinue, Erik travelled the old Varangian route to Constantinople through Russia. This was not a crusade but a pilgrimage, performed by Erik as penance for killing four of his retainers in a drunken rage. From Constantinople, Erik sailed on ships provided by the Emperor Alexius to Paphos in Cyprus, where he and Boedil fell ill. Erik died there in July 1103: Boedil carried on to Jerusalem, where she also died later in the same year.

Four years after Erik’s death, the seventeen-year-old Norwegian king Sigurd I (r. 1103 – 30) became the first king to lead a crusade. He was probably inspired to do this by the expedition of Skofte Ögmundsson, a Norwegian aristocrat who set out for the Holy Land with a fleet of five longships in 1102, the same year that King Erik set out on his ill-fated journey. Skofte got only as far as Rome, where he died, but his men carried on to Jerusalem and Constantinople and by 1104 they were back at home, telling exciting stories about their travels. Sigurd was the second son of Magnus Barefoot and since his father’s death in 1103, he had ruled Norway jointly with his elder brother Eystein, so the decision to go on crusade was not one for him alone. Eystein agreed that Sigurd should go and he quite clearly regarded the crusade as a worthy enterprise that would benefit the kingdom as a whole because he shared the costs. As part of the preparations for the crusade the brothers agreed to a general reform of government, abolishing unjust laws and oppressive taxes so that they would secure divine favour for the expedition. There was plenty of popular enthusiasm for the crusade and no one had to be coerced into joining.

Sigurd decided to make the entire journey to the Holy Land by sea, finally setting sail in autumn 1107 with a fleet of sixty longships. Depending on the size of the ships, Sigurd’s army may have been anything between 3,000- and 5,000-strong. Given the likely problems of supplying any army on a long expedition, the lower limit seems more credible than the higher. Because of the lateness of the season, Sigurd sailed only as far as England, where he spent the winter with King Henry I. The fleet set out again in the spring but by autumn it had got no further than the pilgrimage centre of Santiago de Compostela in the Spanish Christian kingdom of Galicia, where the Norwegians planned to spend the winter. The local lord had promised to provide markets where the Norwegians could buy provisions but, because of local food shortages, he held none after Christmas. Feeling that they had outstayed their welcome, the Norwegians stormed a local castle, looted its food stores and, despite the season, set sail and headed south along the coasts of Muslim Spain. From here on the crusade turned into a Christianised Viking expedition, no doubt made all the more enjoyable by the conviction that God surely approved of every injury they inflicted on the infidel. Sigurd first encountered a Moorish pirate fleet cruising off the coast of Portugal and captured eight of its galleys. Next Sigurd captured the Moorish castle at Colares, massacring its garrison after they refused to convert to Christianity, and then joined Count Henry of Portugal in an attack on nearby Lisbon. The allies took the city, and a great amount of plunder, but not the citadel, so Lisbon was soon back in Moorish hands: the Moors were finally driven out by English, Frisian and Flemish crusaders in 1147. Crossing the Tagus river estuary, the Norwegians sacked another Moorish town, Alcácer do Sol, and massacred so much of its population that it was abandoned for years. Sigurd continued plundering his way along the Spanish coast and, after another battle with a Moorish fleet, sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean. Formentera, Ibiza and Minorca, all at this time occupied by the Moors, were then each plundered in turn. In late spring 1109, Sigurd arrived at Palermo in Sicily, where he was welcomed by the twelve-year-old Norman count Roger II (r. 1105 – 54).

Norman Italy

Count Roger was the grandson of a minor Norman baron called Tancred de Hauteville (d. 1041). Nothing certain is known of Tancred’s ancestry but, according to the chronicler Geoffrey of Malaterra (d. 1099), he was descended from one of Rollo’s Viking warriors called Hiallt, who gave his name to the village of Hauteville. Geoffrey had access to the Norman court in Sicily so he was probably recording Hauteville family traditions, but Hiallt is most likely an invention: Hauteville almost certainly means simply ‘high village’. However, as members of the Norman military aristocracy, it would be surprising if the Hautevilles did not have Viking ancestors. Tancred married twice and fathered at least twelve sons, eight of whom, including Roger’s father Roger I, left Normandy and emigrated to southern Italy to seek their fortunes. The situation in Normandy in the early eleventh century was not dissimilar to that in early Viking Age Scandinavia. The Norman dukes were consolidating their authority and competition for land and power within the Norman aristocracy was intense and often violent. Members of the lesser nobility, like the Hautevilles, feared for their future status. They also found their resources becoming too slender to provide an adequate inheritance for all their sons. Normandy, therefore, had relatively large numbers of young men with little or no land and poor prospects of ever getting any. As part of their noble upbringing they had all been trained as knights, so many left to serve as mercenaries for foreign rulers.

The most popular destination for Norman emigrants was southern Italy, which in the early eleventh century was being fought over by the Lombards, the Byzantine Empire and the Arabs. The first Normans to serve here was a band of forty who fought for the Lombard Duchy of Benevento against the Byzantines in 1017. At first, the Normans fought simply for pay, but in 1030 Sergius, the duke of Naples, made the Norman leader Rannulf count of Aversa. Now that they were established as a permanent presence in Italy, more and more Normans came out to join family members who were already living there, a phenomenon known as chain migration. In 1047, Robert Guiscard (d. 1085), one of the Hauteville brothers, arrived in Italy. After he established himself in Calabria, he was joined by his younger brothers Roger (d. 1101) and Richard (d. 1078). Together they had conquered the Lombard duchies by 1072, driven the Byzantines out of Italy altogether, and captured Messina and Palermo from the Arabs in Sicily. After the fall of Palermo, Robert invested Roger as count of Sicily and left him to complete the conquest of the island by himself, which he did by 1091, while he returned to Italy. Roger was succeed by his eight-year-old son Simon and, after his early death in 1105, by his youngest son Roger, then aged about ten. Because of Roger’s age, the government was run by a regency under his mother, so he would have had plenty of time to keep Sigurd entertained. In his saga account of Sigurd’s crusade, Snorri Sturluson says that the king bestowed on Roger the title of king. This may be a fiction but it was Roger’s destiny as an adult to unite all the Norman principalities in Italy under his rule and in 1130 to be crowned king of Sicily with papal blessing. The culture of Roger’s court at Palermo, an eclectic mix of Latin-Italian, Norman, Arab and Byzantine elements, blended to perfection in the dazzling palace chapel, was a far cry from the rough ship camps of Rollo’s Vikings. This cultural eclecticism is evidence of one characteristic the Normans did share with the Vikings: they were good mixers. In the longer term, the Normans had little influence on the native Italian population. Both were Catholic Christians so there were no barriers to intermarriage and the Normans were gradually assimilated by the Italian majority. Norman rule continued in Italy until 1190 – 4, when the Kingdom of Sicily was conquered by the German emperor Henry VI.

To
Jerusalem

Sigurd greatly enjoyed his time at Roger’s court and it was not until summer 1110 that he left to complete his journey. Sailing from Sicily through the Greek archipelago, Sigurd finally landed in the Holy Land at Acre in late summer or early autumn. He had lost only one ship, wrecked on the coast of Brittany, during the whole voyage from Norway. From Acre he and his retainers rode in procession to Jerusalem, where they were greeted warmly by King Baldwin. Sigurd visited the usual pilgrimage sites and rode with King Baldwin to the River Jordan. Back at Jerusalem, Baldwin gave Sigurd many holy relics, including a precious splinter of the True Cross. Baldwin was very reluctant for the Norwegians to leave. At the end of the First Crusade, most of the surviving crusaders, having fulfilled their vows, went home, leaving all too few behind to defend what they had conquered. As a result the crusader kingdom was always chronically short of manpower. Baldwin begged Sigurd to remain: ‘for a very little time to aid in extending and glorifying the Christian name. Then, having accomplished something for Christ, they could return to their own country giving generous thanks to God.’ (Fulcher of Chartres). Muslim fleets were harassing Christian shipping and Baldwin wanted to eliminate the Muslim-held port of Sidon (now in Lebanon) which they used as a base. In return for supplies, Sigurd agreed to use his fleet to blockade Sidon from the sea, while Baldwin’s forces besieged it from the land. The siege lasted only seven weeks. Seeing that there was no hope of relief, the garrison negotiated the surrender of the town to Baldwin on 5 December 1110 in return for safe conduct. Having now ‘accomplished something for Christ’, Sigurd sailed off to Constantinople via Cyprus and Greece.

At Constantinople, Sigurd and his men were lavishly entertained by the Emperor Alexius, but he does not seem to have stayed long before setting out on the journey home overland through Bulgaria, Hungary, the Holy Roman Empire and Denmark, where King Niels gave him a ship to sail to Norway: he had been away more than three years. Before leaving Constantinople, Sigurd made a gift of his ships to the emperor and gave his men leave to sign on with the Varangian Guard if they wished. The Norwegians had had ample opportunities to talk to serving Varangians and learn about their privileged lives and it seems that most of them stayed behind in Constantinople, leaving their king to travel on with only a small retinue. Sigurd’s crusade made a modest but worthwhile contribution to securing the Christian position in the east and, just as important from his point of view, it considerably enhanced the status of the Norwegian crown, both at home and abroad. On his return to Norway, Sigurd was greeted rapturously as a national hero and he became known to posterity as ‘Jorsalfar’, the Jerusalem-farer. Such was the glamour of his expedition that his reign was looked back on as a golden age when God smiled on Norway. ‘Sigurd’s time was a good one,’ wrote one Norwegian chronicler:

‘both in terms of harvests and many other beneficial things, with the one exception that he could hardly control his temper when he suffered attacks as he grew older. But he was nevertheless regarded as the most splendid and remarkable of all kings, and in particular because of his journey. He was also a very fine-looking man and very tall, as his father and forefathers had been. He loved his people, and they him.’
(Agrip.)

The Wendish Crusade

In 1144, the crusaders lost the key city of Edessa in Syria to the Turks. Pope Eugenius III’s response to this setback was to call the Second Crusade, the first major crusading expedition to the Holy Land since Jerusalem was captured in 1099. The main expedition, led by kings Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, was directed at the Turks (and was a disastrous failure), but Eugenius widened the concept of the crusade by offering the same spiritual incentives to knights from northern Germany who wanted to launch a campaign against the pagan Wends of the southern Baltic region. In this way the crusading movement was co-opted to support German territorial expansion in Eastern Europe. The calling of a crusade against the Wends found an immediate response from the Danes, who for well over a century had suffered from devastating Viking-style raids by Wendish pirates. Coastal areas had been depopulated, churches built to double as refuges for the local population, and fjords blocked with stake barriers to keep pirate ships out: Wendish slave markets were said to be full of Danish captives for sale. Occasional Danish retaliatory attacks had made little impact and many Danish islands now paid tribute to the Wends in return for peace.

From the start the Wendish Crusade suffered from divided leadership and while the German contingent enjoyed modest success, the Danes were defeated. It was not until 1159 that the Danes finally enjoyed a major victory, when the young Valdemar the Great (r. 1157 – 82) flexed his military muscles and led a successful Viking-style raid on the Wendish island of Rügen. Valdemar’s success convinced the powerful Saxon duke Henry the Lion that he would make a useful ally in combined operations against the Wends, with the Saxons attacking them by land and the Danes attacking from the sea. After joint victories in 1160 and 1164, the alliance fell apart as the two rulers quarrelled over the spoils and thereafter regarded each other as rivals. But by this time Valdemar no longer needed Henry’s support. Valdemar’s tactics against the Wends were an almost seamless continuation of those used by the Vikings. Raiding parties made surprise landings from fleets of longships, sweeping quickly inland to plunder and return to their ships before the Wends could organise resistance. One departure from Viking traditions was that each longship carried four horses so that armoured knights could join the raids. Although they could not take the strongly fortified Wendish towns, the Danes brought them to their knees through economic warfare, burning crops and villages, taking livestock and captives, and by preying on Wendish merchant shipping. These tactics had the great advantage of being very profitable. Wendish retaliation was blunted by constructing castles at strategic locations on the Danish coast and by mounting naval patrols to look out for approaching pirate fleets. In most of his campaigns, Valdemar was accompanied by Absalon, the warlike bishop of Roskilde, who is best known today as the founder of Copenhagen. Absalon took great pleasure in destroying the idols of the Wendish gods to demonstrate their powerlessness, but religion was a secondary concern for Valdemar: his main aims were to seize plunder and territory, and end Wendish pirate raids on Denmark.