Chapter 11: Palermo, Jerusalem and Tallinn. From Viking to Crusader
By the twelfth century, the Scandinavian kingdoms were beginning to look much like the rest of the Catholic west. Castles and Romanesque churches and cathedrals impacted on the landscape like no Viking Age building had ever done. European fashions in the decorative arts and clothing predominated, and Latin became the language of high culture. The military aristocracy trained as knights and began to fight on horseback. Most of the population was now Christian by conviction rather than compulsion and it shared in the excitement and religious fervour of the crusading movement. As relatively new recruits to western Christendom, who had leaned heavily on Christian concepts of kingship to build their authority, Scandinavian kings were among the first to see that crusading was good politics as well as good religion. Yet, although the cause was new, it would often have been hard to tell the difference between a Scandinavian crusade and an old fashioned Viking raid.
Crusading was one of the most important expressions of the Catholic west’s growing self-confidence. After centuries on the defensive, the Catholic west was expanding. Scandinavia, Poland and Hungary had been brought into the Catholic fold and in Spain the Reconquista was in full swing, pushing the Muslim Moors back. Internally, the growth of government was bringing greater political stability, population and trade was growing, and a cultural revival was underway. For the first time in centuries, western Europeans were not preoccupied with mere survival. While the west was on the rise, the Byzantine Empire, for centuries the greatest Christian power, was in steep decline after suffering catastrophic defeats at the hands of the Seljuq Turks. In 1095, the Byzantine emperor Alexius I made a plea to Pope Urban II for military support against the Seljuqs. What Alexius had in mind was that the pope would send him some mercenary knights who would sign up and fight as part of the Byzantine army. What Urban actually called for was a holy war to free Jerusalem from the infidel Muslims who had occupied it for over 450 years and restore it to Christian rule. As an inducement, Urban declared that anyone who went on the expedition would enjoy the remission of all penances due for their sins, which was popularly, if incorrectly, understood to mean a guarantee of immediate entry to Heaven if they died. The crusade was, in effect, to be a great pilgrimage in arms.
Tens of thousands responded to Urban’s call, from great nobles like Duke Robert of Normandy down to humble peasants with no military experience at all. The appeal for the military aristocracy was particularly strong. For years the church had railed at them for their violent way of life and now there was a way for them to follow their profession and do God’s work at the same time. Most participants in the First Crusade came from France and the Holy Roman Empire, but there were certainly some Scandinavians – a Danish noble called Svein came with his French wife Florina and a large retinue of warriors. Though countless thousands of crusaders died of hunger, thirst, disease, exhaustion and battle along the way – Svein and his wife among them – the expedition was an astonishing success and in 1099 Jerusalem was taken after a short siege. However, the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem that was founded in the aftermath of victory needed constant support if it was to survive. Over the next 200 years, eight major crusades and dozens of minor ones were launched, though, ultimately, they failed to prevent the Muslims reoccupying the Holy Land. The First Crusade was so successful that the concept of crusading was soon extended to expeditions against those perceived to be God’s enemies, whoever they were and wherever they were found. Crusading vows could be fulfilled by fighting Moors in Spain, pagan Slavs and Balts in the Baltic, schismatic Orthodox Christians in Russia and Byzantium, and Cathar heretics in the south of France. Although there had been no kings on the First Crusade, they soon realised that crusading was a potent way to enhance their prestige as defenders of the Christian people.
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).