Even during the Medieval Warm Period Greenland had been a very marginal environment for European colonisation: the onset of the Little Ice Age pushed the Norse colony over the edge into extinction. The climatic deterioration undermined the Greenland colony at several different levels. The Thule Inuit began to migrate south and took over the vital Norðsetr hunting grounds by around 1300. Without the Norðsetr’s valuable commodities to attract European merchants the colony’s trade links to Europe began to fade. These were already in decline in the thirteenth century, because increased trans-Saharan trade gave European craftsmen access to plentiful supplies of elephant ivory, which was much superior to Greenland’s walrus ivory. Grain, iron and salt were everyday essentials in medieval Europe, but they must have become increasingly scarce luxuries in Greenland. In 1261, the Greenlanders acknowledged Norwegian sovereignty in return for a guarantee of one trade ship a year from Bergen. Increasing sea ice made it harder for the few ships that still set out for Greenland to get there. Ivar Bardarson, a priest who was sent to Greenland in 1341, wrote that the old route to the Greenland settlements, via the Gunnbjorn Skerries, had been given up because of pack ice. Ships now had to sail much further south to get around Cape Farewell. The increasing pack ice also reduced the Greenlanders’ already limited wood supply by preventing driftwood reaching the shore. The voyage to Markland in 1347 (see ch. 8) was probably an attempt to improve the situation. Without the ability to build ships, the Greenlanders’ dependence on the annual ship from Norway was absolute.
The colder conditions adversely affected the Greenlanders’ farming economy and animal bones from middens show an increasing dependence on wild caribou and seals. Skeletal remains from cemeteries show that the Greenlanders became prey to diseases associated with poor nutrition, such as chronic inner-ear infections, and had a reduced life expectancy. Everything depended on the hay harvest. The longer winters meant that livestock had to be kept in the byres for longer so the Greenlanders’ dependence on hay was increasing even as their ability to provide it was declining. If the summer was too cool for the grass to grow well, there would not be enough hay to feed the livestock through the winter, and if the livestock starved so too, soon after, would the people. At Sandnes in the Western Settlement, archaeological evidence suggests that the entire parish starved to death in a hard winter in the mid-fourteenth century. At the chieftain’s farm, the skeletons of nine hunting dogs were found on a stable floor: they had been butchered. This was an act of desperation indeed. When the houses of the parish were abandoned, even the valuable timbers were left. With wood in such short supply in Greenland, this would not have happened if there had been survivors. When Ivar Bardarson visited the Western Settlement in the 1340s, he found it completely uninhabited. By around 1380, the Middle Settlement had been abandoned too.
Although the archaeological evidence says otherwise, Ivar Bardarson believed that the Western settlement had been destroyed by the Inuit. The potential for conflict was clearly there, over hunting grounds, for example, and, as they did not own domestic animals themselves, the Inuit may have seen the Norse Greenlanders’ livestock as just another kind of game to be hunted. There certainly was some violence between the Norse and the Inuit, though how serious a factor it was in the decline of the colony is impossible to judge. The Icelandic annals record that in 1379 Skraelings killed eighteen Greenlanders and took two boys into slavery. Inuit folk tales collected by Danish missionaries in the nineteenth century tell of conflicts with the Norse, but also of friendships. One tale tells how the Inuit avenged a Norse attack on one of their villages. Using white skins to make their kayaks look like icebergs, the Inuit approached a Norse farm undetected. When everyone had retired inside the house for the night, the Inuit packed bundles of juniper branches around it and set them on fire. Those Norse who tried to escape were shot down with arrows as they emerged from the house, the rest perished in the flames. In contrast, another tale tells how the Inuit agreed to help the Norse against pirates who had raided the settlements. When the pirates returned the Inuit rescued five women and two children. When the Inuit discovered that the pirates had carried off the rest of the Norse as captives, the survivors were adopted into their community. English, German and Moorish pirates raided Iceland in the fifteenth century, seizing people to sell as slaves on the Barbary Coast, and there is one record in a papal letter of a pirate raid on the Eastern Settlement in 1418, so the tale has the ring of truth about it. The impact of a slave raid on the small Norse community could have been much more devastating than any skirmishes with the Inuit.
In the later fourteenth century, contacts between Greenland and Norway became increasingly sporadic. In 1367, the official trade ship was lost at sea and there is no evidence that the Norwegian crown replaced it. Álfur, the bishop of Garðar, died in 1378, but it was not until 1385 that the news reached Norway. A new bishop was duly appointed, but he never sailed to take up his seat. One of the last recorded ships to visit the Greenland settlement arrived in 1406, after it was blown off course on a voyage from Norway to Iceland. Pack ice in the fjords prevented it from setting sail again for four years. While there, the ship’s captain Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdottir in the small stone church at Hvalsey, in the Eastern Settlement. Many guests attended the ceremony, which was held on 16 September 1408. The banns had been read publicly on three Sundays before the wedding and afterwards the priest Paul Hallvardsson gave the happy couple a marriage certificate: it is the only document written in the Norse Greenland colony that has survived. At this time, it would seem that all was well with the Eastern Settlement. It was a fully functioning medieval European community in which the church enforced conformity to Christian values. Only a year before the wedding a man called Kolgrim had been burned alive after being found guilty of using black arts to seduce a widow. This may be behind the Norse Greenlanders’ striking failure to learn anything from the Inuit. Inuit hunting technology was far superior to that used by the Norse but even as their dependence on seal meat increased – isotope analysis of skeletal remains indicates that by this time Greenlanders relied on seal meat for 80 per cent of their nutrition – they adopted none of it. Inuit clothing was wonderfully adapted to survival in Arctic conditions but items of clothing recovered from a cemetery at Herjolfsnes in the Eastern Settlement show that the Norse continued to wear European-style woollens. Perhaps their Christian way of life was so central to the Norse that adopting Inuit ways would have challenged their sense of identity.