The World Encompassed

The First European Maritime Empires c.800-1650

G. V. Scammell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351014694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this authoritative study, first published in 1981, Geoffrey Scammell traces the course of European expansion between around 800 and 1650, during which time the world known to western Europeans was enlarged in a way unparalleled before or since.

The book takes a broad historical perspective, linking the classic age of European expansion to its medieval antecedents. The Norse reached North America in the tenth century, Italian missionaries and traders were established in China in the high Middle Ages, and during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in some of the greatest voyages ever made under sail, Iberian explorers crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and established footholds in the Americas, Africa and Asia. This is a stimulating and perceptive study, based on wide-ranging research, which makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the influence of empire on both colonial and metropolitan societies.

1

The Norse

I ‘The seas their land’

The first maritime empire in the west since Antiquity was that of the Scandinavians. From the second century BC the remote north, that ‘womb of nations’ we now know as Norway, Denmark and Sweden, had pushed out wave after wave of peoples – Cimbri, Goths, Burgundians, Angles – into Roman dominated Europe, their fearsome behaviour and astonishing customs sharply observed by classical historians. The movement died down in the sixth century AD, only to revive 200 years later against a Europe barely recovered from the collapse of Roman government and civilization. Between roughly 750 and 1050 the Scandinavians penetrated on the one hand to the Christian and Islamic civilizations of the Middle East, and on the other to Britain, France, Iberia, the Mediterranean and ultimately, in a series of breathtaking voyages, to Iceland, Greenland and North America. By the eleventh century Knut the Great (1016–35) – that Canute, the legend of whose failure to rule the waves still persists in English popular mythology – controlled an impressive confederacy embracing at the least Norway, Denmark and England, and by about 1100 the Norse had created what, by its bonds of trade, was the first empire of the North Atlantic.

For a hundred years or so before their oceanic voyages Vikings, in fierce, sudden and unheralded assaults, had been raiding east into the Baltic and south and southwest along the coasts of the British Isles and Europe.¹ In the course of the ninth and tenth centuries Scandinavian kingdoms were established in Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, the Hebrides, and in the northern, midland and eastern districts of England. On the whole it was the Danes, whose attacks were of an organized military nature under kings or princes, who came off best, securing land in eastern England and, in 911, in Normandy. The more individualistic and less-purposeful Norse, after some profitable raids on northeastern England in the late eighth century, were confined for a time to land-hunting in the poor and distant islands of the north and west – the Faroes, Shetlands and Orkneys – where they not so much subdued the native populations as were absorbed by them. From these bases they moved into the Irish Sea, to the conquest of Ireland, and to plundering expeditions to the coasts of France. In the Scottish islands, or more probably in Ireland, they could have learned of Iceland, a sanctuary since the late 700s for the wilderness-seeking anchorites of Irish Christianity, and by about 870 the Norse had made their first settlement in that forbidding land. In Scandinavia political change, always a powerful incentive to speedy departure for distant parts, hastened the flow of migration, whilst a series of defeats at the hands of erstwhile victims who now had the measure of the Vikings – in Lithuania (c. 850); France (891); England (892–6); and Ireland (902) – funnelled it into this new direction (see p. 10). Within little more than fifty years the colonization was completed. The Irish hermits, the only people the Vikings found there, were killed, enslaved or driven out, and the little habitable land available was occupied.

1 The Viking World

Precisely how many Norse migrated to Iceland we shall never know. It has been alleged that between 870 and 930 as many as 25,000 people settled there. That would amount to the equivalent of 8 per cent of Norway’s supposed population at the time, and constitute a loss from the mother country on a scale surpassed later only by the Portuguese. Yet admittedly it was the migration of a whole society – of men, women, children, slaves and retainers. As such it bears little resemblance to the male-dominated expansion either of subsequent commercial empires, such as that of the Hanse, or of those of conquest, as that of Spain. The closest parallel is with the exodus of the English Puritans to America in the seventeenth century, where once again, though for very different reasons, whole communities felt impelled to seek new homes. As in other similar movements, power in Iceland passed to those who by birth or achievement commanded resources and respect. Landnàmabók (The Book of the Settlements, see p. 35) records the names of some 400 major settlers and their families. Some were of royal descent, others lesser lords. The majority were from southwest Norway – from that very region in which the king had recently taken vigorous steps to enforce his authority (see p. 10). Some had lived in the Hebrides and Ireland, and several were of mixed Norse and Celtic blood. Like the Spanish conquerors of the American continent or some of the first Portuguese in Brazil and Asia, many settlers moved not directly from the mother country to a new land, but as conditions deteriorated, or as rumours of better things to be had elsewhere spread from colony to colony, giving the growth of empire, then as since, a momentum of its own. Iceland was to see no flowering of some pristine Germanic freedom. Royal authority – that of the king of Norway – was for long ignored and, as was to happen elsewhere, a form of government established reflecting the needs and interests of the dominant minority. Significantly enough, the island was without any central control until 930. Instead it was quickly carved up into a handful of vast and independent estates on which, surrounded by their women, families, slaves and retainers, the chiefs lived in patriarchal style distributing – as every good medieval lord was expected to do – lands to their followers, exacting obedience and dispensing justice. Nor did their authority end here, for in a fierce pagan world the proper worship of the gods demanded costly temples and sacrifices. Such burdens only magnates could bear, and so it was from among the chiefs that there emerged the thirty-six hereditary temple priests who by the tenth century exercised legislative and judicial power in Iceland. Each of these took payments from those who of necessity became their followers, for the right to participate in temple ceremonies, and who were obliged to accompany them to public assemblies. It was these priests who controlled the National Assembly (Althing) which appeared in 930 and which, some reforms notwithstanding, continued as a gathering of a few dozen grandees, each adamantly supreme in his own territory. They reached many admirable decisions, but since there was no authority willing or able to enforce them for some three centuries, the republic, with no external threats to inspire any change, went on its turbulent way in that not uncommon state of all law and no government.

There soon emerged in a land without towns, and without even villages, a simple pastoral economy based on scattered single farms – sheep and stock raising, hunting and fishing – enlivened and augmented in the early years by the old basic Viking practices of piracy and raiding. By about 1100 the population of Iceland is thought to have been between 60,000 and 80,000 – though like as not it was considerably less – and the country was no longer, as it had been for the Irish, a remote sanctuary, but an integral part of the flourishing Norse commercial empire which until the mid-twelfth century dominated the North Sea and the Baltic. Icelandic ships appeared in British and European waters, and Iceland was regularly visited by vessels from all parts of the Scandinavian world – Norway, Denmark, Ireland, the Orkneys, Faroes and Shelands. After the island’s conversion to Christianity at the beginning of the eleventh century, Icelanders made pilgrimages to Rome, Jerusalem and Compostella, whilst on a less elevated plane there was a constant coming and going of ecclesiasts, chieftains and merchants between Iceland and Norway.

Cold, wet and barren, much of it – five-sixths perhaps – covered by lava or permanent ice, Iceland produced none of the luxuries of life and few of its necessities. Grass grew plentifully in valleys and on plains and hillsides fronting the sea, and the high moorlands provided good summer grazing. Trout and salmon abounded in lakes and rivers; other fish, together with whales and seals, in the surrounding seas. The coasts and their islets teemed with seabirds, and for a brief time, ‘in certain choice places’ as tradition has it, wheat was grown. But in an age in which timber was even more vital than steel in the modern world, Iceland had no native oak, beech or conifer; nothing beyond driftwood and scrub for ships and houses.² And though a land of ‘stones, more stones and all stones’ it had virtually none suitable for building, and even gravestones were imported. The country was thus heavily dependent on others, and particularly on Norway, for its survival. It was from Norway that there came timber and meal, and later, as tastes became more sophisticated, a wider range of goods. In payment Iceland exported at first a crude, rough cloth made from the wool of her extensive flocks, to which were subsequently added hides, falcons and fish. The white Icelandic falcon was soon highly esteemed and much sought after in Europe, and in 1262 some were even sent as a present to the Sultan of Tunis. But most important was the fish, the skreid or dried cod, which came into prominence in the late Middle Ages. Together with seal oil it was shipped to Norway and thence re-exported, doubtless somewhat past its prime, to feed, amongst others, the peoples of England and Germany.

In the course of the thirteenth century Iceland’s dependence on Norway became even closer. Just as in the Americas the heirs of the conquistadores were revealed as notoriously unbellicose, so the descendants of the Vikings abandoned the sea. To both peoples the opportunities of the new lands were more attractive than their former ways of life, and in Iceland a falling population and the demands and profits of agriculture removed the previous incentives to seafaring. Icelandic shipping, always difficult to maintain in a country virtually devoid of shipbuilding materials, dwindled into insignificance by 1200, and for contact with the rest of the world the island was at the mercy of the Norwegians. At the same time, in a pattern to become only too familiar in the later Middle Ages, power had become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small group of magnates, each supported by his retainers, and all warring together with full-blooded Norse vigour. By 1264 the republic, desperately poor even by the unexacting standards of the time, and an anachronism, as a dignitary of the church conveniently and complacently observed, since it was ‘against all reason that this country should not serve a king even as all other countries in the world’, had collapsed, and Iceland had surrendered her independence to Norway. For a time commercial relations were maintained, but whereas in the 1100s there might have been thirty-five sailings a year from Norway to Iceland, by the 1340s they were down on average to about eleven. And new troubles came fast. The economy of Norway was increasingly dominated by the German Hanse (see p. 67) which had gained its initial foothold as the supplier of grain to the country’s growing population in the thirteenth century. At first this gave something of a boost to the Icelandic trade. There was a greater demand for fish; and Norwegian enterprise, blocked by the power of the Hanse in the Baltic and the North Sea, was diverted to the Atlantic. But this was not to last. In the fourteenth century Norway was crippled by the tightening stranglehold of the Hanse. Her ships – small, fast and light – were pushed off the seas by the bulk carriers of the German cities. After the Union of Kalmar (1397), uniting the three Scandinavian kingdoms, the ruling dynasty was Danish or half German. The seat of government was moved from Bergen to Oslo; the centre of gravity shifted away from the west coast as Norwegian products were taken by the Hanse to the Baltic and to Europe; and Norse ambitions and interests in the Atlantic were dead. Iceland, harassed by a worsening climate and a series of fearful volcanic eruptions which established Hekla as one of the gateways to Hell, was abandoned. In 1394 no more than two Norwegian ships reached the island, and its shrinking and impoverished population was only saved when, in the early fifteenth century, the country was drawn back into contact with the world by the arrival on its coasts of English fishermen (see p. 460).

Iceland was the sole survivor, but for a time the Norse empire in the Atlantic had been more extensive. Early in the tenth century one Gunnbjörn, on passage from Norway to Iceland, had been blown past his destination and had sighted new lands to the west. At first nothing came of this, but eventually the lead was followed up by the aptly named Eirik the Red, driven from Iceland (982) by a record of homicide imposing even by Scandinavian standards. He rounded what is now Cape Farewell in southern Greenland, and spent three years exploring the coast between Herjolfsnes (Ikigait) and Eiriksfjord (Tunugdliarfik), noticing the remains of habitations and boats.³ What he saw he liked, and on the evidence of the pastures at the heads of the fjords of the southwest, optimistically named his discovery Groenaland, The Green Land, or Groenland – Greenland. He returned in 986 with fourteen ships – survivors of a larger fleet – and a band of settlers, and within a short time his country, in general a gloomy and forbidding land, had attracted a small but vigorous population – probably never more than about 3000. The colonists were chiefly recruited from amongst those who for one reason or another Iceland could no longer contain or support. The migration was once again one of whole communities and families to what, at first sight, was another uninhabited land. As in Iceland there quickly emerged a simple patriarchal society, and Eirik, we hear ‘lived in high distinction and all recognized his authority’. Like Iceland, the country was Christian from about 1000 and sustained, in the same way, a pastoral economy of isolated farmsteads. ‘The farmers’, says the King’s Mirror of the mid-thirteenth century, ‘raise cattle and sheep in large numbers, and make butter and cheese in great quantities. The people subsist chiefly on these foods and on beef; but they also eat the flesh of various kinds of game, such as reindeer (caribou), whales, seals and bears.’ And like Iceland, the new colony was heavily dependent on Norway for many of its necessities – timber, grain, iron – and for all its meagre luxuries. In exchange it could offer furs, hides, a cloth of sorts, ropes – reputedly strong enough to take the pull of sixty men – and, more remarkably, polar bears, walrus and narwhal ivory, and those superb white falcons a dozen of which were thought in 1396 to be an adequate ransom for a European prince held by the Sultan of Turkey.

For reasons which are not clear, but which might well be guessed, Greenland, like Iceland, surrendered its independence to Norway in mid-thirteenth century, and like Iceland was doomed as Norway’s interest and power in the Atlantic faded. There were originally two major settlements, both on the then more or less ice-free west coast facing North America. One (the western) was in the vicinity of the modern Godthaab, and in its heyday comprised some ninety farms and four churches. The other (the eastern), was much larger with 190 farms, a cathedral, and over a dozen churches and monasteries in its prime, and lay just above Cape Farewell, in what is now the Julianehaab District. Beyond this tiny littoral there was nothing but mountains and ice, though further along the west coast (in roughly latitude 70°N) the two colonies found excellent hunting and fishing grounds, whilst on occasions, as is known from inscriptions, the intrepid pushed up, and even wintered, as far north as latitudes 73°, 76° and 79°. This hard and cruel world, well within the Arctic Circle, called forth staggering feats of enterprise and endurance, none of which, admittedly, have lost anything in the telling. Flóamanna Saga⁴ describes a shipwreck, with the survivors struggling through the ice in the ship’s boat, rowing where they could, and for the rest dragging it and themselves over ice floes and glaciers. Einars Tháttr tells of the finding (c. 1120), in ominous circumstances, of a beached ship, merchants and crew all dead, and nearby the corpses of two servants, one, it was reckoned, ‘who had been chopping wood and had collapsed through hunger’, the other ‘who had stayed on his feet as long as he could’. The King’s Mirror is laconic as to those who have been trapped in the ice and how ‘they have taken to their boats and have dragged them up on the ice with them, and in this way have sought to reach land; but the ship and everything else had to be abandoned and was lost. Some have had to spend four or five days upon the ice before reaching land, and some even longer.’

Not even the Norse could endure such rigours indefinitely. Survival might have been possible had nothing altered for the worse, but this was not to be the case. From about 1200 the northern climate apparently deteriorated, the sea temperature probably fell, and there was a vast increase in the drift ice which came south with the east Greenland current to Cape Farewell and then swung north-west to enclose first the eastern, and then the western settlement. With the ice came seals, and in pursuit of these the Skraeling – the Eskimo – who, having crossed Canada from Alaska, entered northern Greenland about 1200, and commenced to occupy its habitable areas, some moving south down the west coast.⁵ By the mid-fourteenth century they had overrun the Norse western settlement. The eastern colony struggled on longer. There were occasional clashes as the Eskimo advanced: the Icelandic Annals record that in 1379 ‘the Skraelings attacked the Greenlanders and killed eighteen of them’, and among the Eskimo folk tales collected by Henry Rink in the nineteenth century is one, Ungortok the Chief of Kakortok, describing a gruesome and bloodthirsty Norse-Eskimo feud. Possibly there was, at least in theory, room enough for the two peoples. The farms of the Greenlanders lay well back up the fjords, where the sea froze late and where the ice was never very safe. This was of little use to the Eskimo whose hunting was concentrated on the headlands, islands and sea ice where seals were most abundant. But neither race was accommodating, and the Norse were radically weakened by the loss of their northern hunting grounds to the Eskimo. And at the same time their contacts with the outside world were fading. What Greenland could offer Europe was no longer particularly attractive. Its cloth could hardly compare with that of Flanders or England; the Hanse could obtain furs more easily and in larger quantities from Russia; and the discriminating found walrus ivory inferior to that of Africa and Asia. Moreover, like Iceland, Greenland had neither the population nor the materials to construct and maintain any sizable ships of its own, and for such relations as it had with the outside world it was entirely dependent on the Norwegians. Just how tenuous these relations were, and how modest the scale of the colony’s trade, can be seen from the fact that in the second half of the fourteenth century a single ship did the run from Norway to Greenland fairly regularly – though certainly not annually – until she was lost in about 1370. Thereafter, with Norway’s maritime decline, the colony was abandoned, whilst Iceland, desperately fighting for its own life, could do nothing to help. In the last decades of the fourteenth century craft sailing between Norway and Iceland were occasionally blown westwards to Greenland, and English fishermen working in Icelandic waters may, by accident or design, have found their way there from time to time in the ea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• List of illustrations
• References and abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Norse
• Chapter 2 The Hanse
• Chapter 3 The Venetian Republic
• Chapter 4 The Genoese Republic
• Chapter 5 Portugal
• Chapter 6 Spain
• Chapter 7 Holland
• Chapter 8 France
• Chapter 9 England
• Conclusion
• Index