Hedeby

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A low green ridge runs around the head of a sea inlet at the base of the Jutland peninsula, and behind it the ground is empty. No street, no roof, no quay. The turf has closed over everything. Beneath it lies the largest town that Scandinavia knew before the cities of the later Middle Ages — twenty-four hectares enclosed by an earthen rampart, a harbor that once held a forest of masts, workshops and houses and graves layered for two and a half centuries. The semicircle of the wall still stands, up to ten meters high in places, the most visible thing left. It is the negative of a town: the shape of what is gone.

This was Hedeby, in Old Norse Heiðabýr — “the settlement on the heath” — and in German Haithabu. For roughly two hundred years it was the hinge on which the trade of the northern world turned, the place where the routes between the North Sea and the Baltic met the routes between the Frankish south and the Scandinavian north, and where the goods of half the known world changed hands. It was also a frontier: the southernmost of the Danish towns, hard against the lands of the Saxons and the Slavs, shielded by the great wall called the Danevirke. Two outsiders left written accounts of it, a Frankish churchman and an Andalusian Arab, and between them they preserved the only contemporary portraits of a heathen Norse town from the lips of men who walked its streets.

The town on the heath

The site was chosen for geography. The Schlei, a narrow arm of the Baltic, cuts thirty kilometers westward into the land and reaches, at its inmost end, to within a short overland haul of the rivers running to the North Sea. A ship from the Baltic could sail up the Schlei to Hedeby, have its cargo carried a few kilometers across the neck of Jutland, and reload onto a ship for Frisia and the Frankish coast — and so avoid the long and dangerous voyage around the storm-beaten Skagerrak at the top of Denmark. Whoever held this portage held the throat of northern commerce.

The first firm date comes from the Frankish court. The annals attributed to Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, record that in 804 the emperor’s army was at the southern Danish border, and that the Danish king was massing ships and cavalry at a place the Franks called Sliesthorp. Four years later, in 808, the Danish king Godfred destroyed a rival Slavic trading place called Reric on the Baltic coast and, the annal says, carried its merchants off by force to settle them at Hedeby. Whether Hedeby grew from that forced transplant or merely swelled by it, the ninth century saw a planned town take shape: house-plots laid out along streets and a stream, plank-paved walkways over the wet ground, a wooden quay reaching out into the bay. At its height in the ninth and tenth centuries it held perhaps a thousand to fifteen hundred people — a vast concentration by the standards of a world whose largest settlements were elsewhere royal halls and farms.

Reconstructed ninth-century houses on the Hedeby site, within the semicircular rampart, beside the Haddebyer Noor inlet. Photo by Västgöten, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Behind the town ran the Danevirke, the largest earthwork in the north — a system of ramparts, ditches, and timber walls stretching some thirty kilometers across the waist of Jutland from the marshes of the west to the Schlei in the east, sealing the peninsula against attack from the south. Written sources credit its building to King Godfred around 808; dendrochronology — the dating of its oak timbers by tree-ring — has pushed the main construction phases across a span from the eighth century into the tenth, with earlier earthen phases possibly reaching back centuries before. The wall and the town belong together. The Danevirke turned the southern approach into a single guarded gate, and Hedeby sat just inside it, the market that the frontier protected. A spur of the rampart curled around the town itself in a great semicircle, anchoring its two ends on the shore of the bay, so that the whole settlement lay within a fortified arc with the harbor at its mouth.

The market of the world

What made Hedeby was not its size but its reach. Through its quay passed the produce of a trading sphere that ran, at its widest, from the Atlantic coast of Francia to the silver mines of the Abbasid Caliphate, and from the Arctic edge of Scandinavia to the slave-markets of the south.

From the Frankish south came the prestige goods of a more settled civilization: swords with pattern-welded blades and Rhenish glass and millstones of Eifel basalt, wine and fine pottery. From the rocky north came the staples of Scandinavian life — iron from the bogs of Norway, soapstone carved into cooking vessels, whetstones, timber, and from the Arctic fringe the high-value luxuries of the far north: furs of marten and beaver and ermine, walrus ivory, walrus-hide rope, eiderdown, amber gathered along the Baltic shores. And from the east, along the river-roads through the lands of the Rus to the Black and Caspian Seas, came silk and glass beads and, above all, silver — the silver coins of the Islamic world, the dirhams of the Abbasid caliphs, struck in Baghdad and Samarkand and carried north by the tens of thousands. They survive in the soil of Hedeby and in hoards across Scandinavia, the physical trace of a trade that joined the Viking north to the markets of central Asia.

And human beings. Hedeby was one of the great slave-markets of the Viking world. Captives taken in raids around the Baltic and the British Isles and the Slavic lands were funneled through such towns and sold on — to the Frankish lands, and east and south toward the immense demand of the Caliphate, where Slavic captives were so common a commodity that the very word for “slave” in several European languages descends from the name of the Slavs. The wealth that flowed across the Hedeby quay was woven through with this traffic; the encyclopedia renders the fact as the record renders it, without softening.

To handle so much exchange a town needs measure and money, and Hedeby supplied both. Excavated weights and balances, finely calibrated, show merchants weighing silver by the gram. More remarkably, the town struck its own coins. From the second quarter of the ninth century, coins were minted at Hedeby modeled on the issues of the Frankish port of Dorestad — among the very earliest coinage of Scandinavia. Some of these little silver pieces carry a stamped image of a ship under sail, a mast and rigging and a high prow: among the oldest pictures of a Viking ship made by Viking hands. Later, in the late tenth century, Hedeby was one of the mints where the first true royal Danish coinage was struck. A trading town learned, before its neighbors, to make its own money.

The Halbkreiswall, the semicircular rampart that enclosed Hedeby on its landward sides, still standing several meters high. Photo by Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Two witnesses at the frontier

Towns leave bones and coins; only writing leaves voices, and Hedeby was lucky in its visitors. Two men from beyond the heathen world recorded it, and the gap between what they saw tells as much as either account alone.

The first came to convert it. Ansgar, a Frankish monk of Corbie remembered as the “Apostle of the North,” made the heathen Danes and Swedes his life’s work in the first half of the ninth century. According to the Vita Ansgarii written by his successor Rimbert — a saint’s life, with all that the genre implies of miracle and edifying purpose, and our chief source for these missions — Ansgar obtained from the Danish king permission to build a church at Hedeby, the first Christian church in Denmark, around the middle of the century. He won leave to ring its bell, a sound that scandalized the heathen townsfolk, and to school the young. The mission was fragile; Christianity here was a tolerated minority enterprise in a thoroughly pagan town, and it would be two centuries more before Denmark turned officially Christian under Harald Bluetooth at Jelling. But the church at Hedeby was a beachhead, and the see established in the region — Hedeby became a bishopric in 948 — would outlast the town.

The second came only to look, and what he saw he did not like. Around the 960s — the precise year is debated, the visit usually placed in the third quarter of the tenth century — a traveler from al-Andalus reached Hedeby. He is known as al-Tartushi, Ibrahim ibn Yaqub of Tortosa, a man of the Muslim west whose account of his northern journey survives only in fragments quoted by later Arab geographers. He found a poor town and a strange people. He noted that the inhabitants worshipped Sirius, the dog-star — that is, in the only terms he had, that they kept the old gods rather than his own God or the Christians’. He recorded that a woman among them had the right to declare her own divorce. He remarked that, to save the cost of raising them, unwanted children were cast into the sea. And he set down the one detail that everyone remembers, the famous complaint of a man with a trained ear for song:

Never did I hear singing fouler than that of these people — a growling that comes from their throats, like the barking of dogs, only more bestial still.

It is a hostile portrait, an outsider’s recoil from a heathen frontier town at the edge of the world. But it is precious precisely as that: a contemporary, eyewitness account of the old Norse world still living its own life, the gods still worshipped, the customs still in force, written by a man who had no stake in the Christian story that would soon be told about these people. Between Rimbert’s missionary and al-Tartushi’s traveler, Hedeby is the rare Norse place seen plain, from outside, while it was still itself. The deeper frame of that world — the Norse gods whom al-Tartushi reduced to “Sirius,” the company of Odin and Thor and Freyr and the rest, the fate that the Norns wove for gods and men alike — reaches us mostly through Christian Icelanders writing two centuries later. Al-Tartushi heard the singing while the gods were still being sung to.

The turning of the age

A town built on a portage lives or dies by the routes that feed it, and in the eleventh century the routes shifted and the violence came.

The great river-road to the east, the artery that had carried Abbasid silver north for generations, dried up as the silver mines of the Caliphate failed in the later tenth century. The old patterns of Viking trade were giving way to a Europe of Christian kingdoms and new towns. And Hedeby’s frontier position, once its strength, made it a target. Around 1050 the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada — “hard-ruler,” the most formidable warrior-king of his age — sacked and burned Hedeby in the course of his long war against the Danish king Sweyn Estridsson; tradition holds that he sent fire-ships drifting into the crowded harbor. The charred remains of a wrecked, deliberately burned warship, scuttled at the mouth of the harbor, were raised by archaeologists and may be a relic of that day. Then, around 1066 — the same year the Norse age met its end in England at Stamford Bridge and Hastings — a raid by West Slavs finished what was left.

The survivors did not rebuild. They crossed the Schlei to the northern shore, to a place better suited to the larger, deeper-drafted ships of the new age, and there the town of Schleswig rose and took up Hedeby’s trade and its bishopric and even, in the mouths of later writers, sometimes its name. The old town on the heath was left to the grass. Its rampart slumped; its harbor silted; the plough went over the house-plots; and within a few generations the greatest town of the Viking north had become a green field that nobody could read.

The reading of the field

What was lost under the turf was, for the archaeologist, almost ideally preserved. Hedeby died and was abandoned rather than built over, so its layers lay sealed and undisturbed — and the waterlogged, oxygen-starved ground near the harbor kept what such ground keeps: timber, leather, textile, wood, the organic wreckage of daily life that almost everywhere else rots to nothing.

The Danevirke rampart system across the waist of Jutland, sealing the peninsula, with Hedeby (Haithabu) at its eastern end on the Schlei. Map by Begw and MEs, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The site was identified in the late nineteenth century and the first excavations began around 1900. Through the twentieth century Hedeby grew into one of the largest and most thoroughly studied archaeological projects in northern Europe — the harbor dredged for its sunken ships and dropped cargo, the cemeteries opened, the workshops mapped, vast assemblages of pottery and glass and amber and bone cataloged. The dig was not innocent of its own century: major campaigns ran under the Nazi regime in the 1930s, when the Viking past was pressed into the service of an ideology of Germanic glory, and the early publication record suffered for it. Later excavation and geophysical survey, careful and slow, recovered the town as a place of work and trade and ordinary life rather than a stage for myth. From the harbor came the burned warship; from the graves, the goods and the people; from the soil, the coins and the weights and the imported beads that drew the lines of Hedeby’s reach across the map of the known world.

In 2018 the field and its wall were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the “Archaeological Border complex of Hedeby and the Danevirke” — not a temple or a palace, but a frontier: a town and the great rampart that guarded it, preserved as the most complete surviving record of the trade and the defense and the daily reality of the Viking-Age north at the point where its world met the worlds to the south. The honor falls, fittingly, not on a monument but on an absence — a meadow, a bay, a long low ridge of earth, and beneath them the densest archive of the Viking town that survives. The poor, loud, gods-keeping place that al-Tartushi could not wait to leave outlasted every word he wrote about it, and gave them back to us with the coins and the keels and the bones still in the ground.

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