Northmen, The Viking Saga 793-1241 AD

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).

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.

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.)

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.

Decisive success came in 1168, when Valdemar plundered and burned the cliff-top sanctuary of the Wendish high-god Svantovit at Arkona on Rügen. The shocked Rugians surrendered, accepted Danish rule and submitted to baptism. Now joined by the Rugian fleet, the Danes destroyed the Liutizian pirate stronghold of Dziwnów on the island of Wolin near the mouth of the Oder in 1170, so removing another threat to their security. After the Danes defeated a Wendish pirate fleet in a sea battle off the island of Falster two years later, Wendish pirates never ventured into Danish waters again. By 1185 the Danish tactic of devastating Viking-style raids had forced the submission of the Liutizians and the Pomeranians to give them control of the entire Baltic Sea coast from Rügen east to the mouth of the River Vistula. Conquest was not followed by military occupation or settlement, however. The Wends simply became tributaries of the Danes, who counted on the threat of punitive raids to keep their vassals loyal.

Crusading in the Baltic region received a new impetus in 1193, when pope Celestine III called for a crusade against the Livonians, a group of tribes who lived in what is now Latvia and Estonia. The papacy’s motive in this crusade was not simply the conversion of pagans, it was also to prevent the area coming under the influence of what it saw as the heretical Orthodox church. The Livonian Crusade was dominated from the outset by German crusading orders such as the Livonian Knights, the Sword Brothers and the Teutonic Knights, but the Danish king Valdemar II (r. 1202 – 41) saw an opportunity for territorial expansion and in 1218 he won full papal blessing for an invasion of Estonia. Valdemar landed at the Estonian trading place of Lyndanisse (modern Tallinn) in June the next year with a fleet of 500 longships. Longships were becoming decidedly old-fashioned by this time and this was probably the last occasion that they were used on such a large scale in the Baltic. Apart from the adoption of the stern-post rudder in place of the less-effective side rudder, longships had changed little since the Viking Age and they had long exhausted their development potential. German crusaders were now sailing the Baltic in cogs, a type of ship that probably originated in Frisia in the Viking Age. Unlike longships, cogs had no oars and relied entirely on a single square sail. Though they could not compete with longships for speed and manoeuvrability, cogs were sturdy and seaworthy, with broad, deep hulls and high sides, and were cheaper and easier to build. Cogs were first built to carry bulky cargoes – even the smallest cogs could carry twice the 20-ton cargo of a Viking knarr – but they proved surprisingly well-suited to war. Especially when fitted with wooden fighting platforms at the bows and stern, cogs towered over longships, giving their crews a clear advantage in a sea battle. Scandinavian technological conservatism helped the German-dominated Hanseatic League of mercantile cities – early adopters of the cog – to supplant the Scandinavians as the main trading and naval power in the Baltic in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Scandinavians continued to build longships for the coastal defence levy fleets until the early fifteenth century, but their ineffectiveness in battle against cogs had been demonstrated many times by then.

It is thought that Valdemar set up camp on the Toompea, a steep-sided flat-topped hill rising around 100 feet (30.5 m) above the harbour at Tallinn, giving excellent views over the sea and low lying coastlands. As well as being a good defensive position, the hill had religious significance to the Estonians, who believed that it was the burial mound of their mythological hero Kalev. Apparently overawed by the strength of Valdemar’s fleet, the Estonian chiefs agreed to submit and a few even allowed themselves to be baptised. However, this was all a ruse to lull the Danes into a false sense of security and the Estonians achieved complete surprise when they attacked the Danish camp a few days later. The battle of Lyndanisse achieved legendary stature in Danish historical traditions as the place where the country’s national flag, the Dannebrog, fell from Heaven as a sign to encourage the embattled Danes to fight on and overcome the pagans. Some historians have tried to rationalise this story, explaining it away as the sighting of an unusual weather phenomenon, but it is more likely to be pure fiction. The legend cannot be traced back any earlier than the sixteenth century, and the earliest known the use of the Dannebrog dates only to 1397, nearly 200 years after the battle. After his victory, Valdemar built a castle on the Toompea which, despite being incomplete, held out against an Estonian siege in 1223. It is from Valdemar’s castle that Tallinn’s name is derived, from Taani-linn, meaning the ‘Danes’ castle’: rebuilt many times, it now houses the Estonian parliament. After Valdemar’s final victory over the Estonians in 1224, a stone cathedral was built near the castle and the Toompea became the main centre of Danish secular and ecclesiastical government in Estonia. Tallinn has the best harbour on the Estonian coast and it soon attracted German merchants, who settled on the lower ground between the Toompea and the harbour, creating a commercial Lower Town. In 1285 the city, known to the Germans as Reval, joined the Hanseatic League and Germans continued to dominate the city’s economy until the twentieth century. Outside Tallinn, most of the land was parcelled out not to Danes but to Saxon lords, who paid a land tax to the Danish crown.

The failure to follow up conquest with occupation and settlement quickly doomed Denmark’s Baltic empire. Denmark’s increasingly obsolescent fleet could not dominate the Baltic sea lanes, and neither could it challenge the power of the Germans on land. The lands won during the Wendish crusades were conquered by German princes even before Valdemar’s death and in 1346 Denmark sold Estonia to the Teutonic Knights after a native uprising.

Swedish involvement with the crusades was, if anything, an even more naked land-grab than was Denmark’s. Like the Danes, the Swedes had a pirate problem: in their case the pirates were Estonians from the island of Saaremaa (Ösel in Swedish), Finns from Karelia (eastern Finland), and Curonians from modern Latvia, all of them pagan peoples. The Swedes, in turn, raided their persecutors, plundering and gathering tribute Viking-style, much as they had been doing for centuries. The Swedes were also competing for influence in the region with Novgorod, which was the most important centre for the lucrative fur trade. Swedes were as welcome as any other merchants to visit Novgorod to trade, but the city was powerful enough to prevent them raiding in Russia and gathering furs as tribute as they had done in the Viking Age. The Swedes now sought to profit from Novgorod’s fur trade by controlling the Gulf of Finland, which gave the city its ‘window on the west’, and by plundering Novgorodian ships, as happened in 1142 when a Swedish fleet captured three ships from Novgorod and killed 150 merchants. To secure its access to the Gulf, Novgorod began the conquest and conversion to Orthodox Christianity of the Karelian Finns, and retaliated against Swedish raids on its territory by raiding the shores of Lake Mälaren. After one raid they carried the church doors of the royal town of Sigtuna back to Novgorod. The Swedes countered Novgorod’s influence in Karelia with their own wars of conquest and conversion in Finland, which they justified by using the terminology of crusading. Because of its desire to limit the influence of the Orthodox church, the Catholic church supported the Swedish expeditions, but they were never given papal sanction like the crusades to the Holy Land or the Wendish and Livonian Crusades, and the Swedish crusaders were never offered the same spiritual rewards.

Later tradition has it that the first Swedish crusade in Finland was led by King Erik IX (r. 1155 – 60), some time around 1157. Erik is said to have brought the whole of the south-west of Finland under Swedish rule and to have converted the conquered Finns to Christianity. When Erik returned home he left behind a missionary bishop Henry of Uppsala who was later martyred by the Finns. Erik may well have campaigned in Finland, but the story of the crusade was probably invented as part of the cult that developed around his memory after he was murdered by rebel nobles as he left church after attending Mass on Ascension Day (18 May) 1160. Sweden was by that time the only Scandinavian kingdom without a royal saint, so it suited his successors to encourage his veneration as a martyr. The Swedish conquest of Finland was probably begun a long time before Erik’s reign, as place-name evidence suggests that Swedes had colonised the south-west coast around Turku (Swedish Åbo) as early as the mid-eleventh century, and was a slow process marked by frequent campaigns and many reverses. Even in the late twelfth century Sweden’s hold on south-west Finland was not secure. In a letter to a Swedish archbishop, Pope Alexander III (r. 1159 – 81) complained that: ‘the Finns always promise to obey the Christian faith whenever they are threatened by a hostile army... but when the army retires they deny the faith, despise the preachers and grievously persecute them.’

Because of their frequent backsliding, Pope Gregory IX called for a formal crusade against the Finns, but the Swedes ignored it and instead attacked Novgorod in 1240 only to be defeated by Alexander Nevsky at the Battle of the Neva. The Swedish conquest of Finland was finally secured by the so-called Second and Third Swedish Crusades. The Second Swedish Crusade (c. 1248 – 50), led by the mighty aristocrat Birger Jarl, brought the Tavastia region of central Finland under firm Swedish control, while the Third Swedish Crusade (1292 – 3), aimed unashamedly at Christian Novgorod, conquered Karelia, ended the activities of Orthodox missionaries there, and established a castle at Vyborg (now in Russia). The Swedes hoped this would be a base from which to extend their conquests to the mouth of the Neva and cut Novgorod off from the Gulf of Finland. Years of raid and counter-raid followed until the Treaty of Noteborg in 1323 established a frontier between Swedish Finland and Novgorod, which left Novgorod in control of the Neva. The Swedes did eventually achieve their ambition of winning control of the Neva and cutting Russia off from the Gulf of Finland in 1595, only to lose it in 1702 to Peter the Great, the founder of St Petersburg. Unlike the ephemeral Danish conquests in the Baltic, the Swedish conquest of Finland had long-lasting consequences. This was in large part because here conquest was followed by settlement. In the wake of the crusaders, large numbers of Swedish peasant farmers, fleeing the imposition of serfdom at home, settled in southern Finland. Even though Russia ended Swedish rule in 1809, Finland still has a Swedish-speaking minority and recognises Swedish as one of its official languages.