The Saint and the Wry-Neck: Norse Crusaders and the Second Crusade
Pål Berg Svenungsen Chapter 6 The Saint and the Wry-Neck: Norse Crusaders and the Second Crusade During the twelfth century, a Norse tradition developed for participating in the dif- ferent campaigns instigated by the papacy, later known as the crusades.1 This tradi- tion centred on the participation in the crusade campaigns to the Middle East, but not exclusively, as it included crusading activities in or near the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean. By the mid-1150s, the tradition was consolidated by the joint crusade of Earl Rognvald Kolsson of Orkney and the Norwegian magnate and later kingmaker, Erling Ormsson, which followed in the footsteps of the earlier cru- sade of King Sigurd the Crusader in the early 1100s. The participation in the cru- sades not only brought Norse crusaders in direct contact with the most holy places in Christendom, but also the transmission of a wide range – political, religious and cultural – of ideas. One of them was to bring back a piece of the holiness of Jerusalem, by various means, in order to create a Jerusalem in the North. In 1152, a fleet of fifteen large ships from Norway, Orkney and Iceland sailed out from Orkney towards the Holy Land.2 The fleet, commanded by the earl and later saint of Orkney, Rognvald Kali Kolsson (r.1136–1158), and the Norwegian “landed man” [lenðir 1 For a general overview of the development of the crusades, see Jonathan Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades?, fourth ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Norman Housley, Fighting for the Cross: Crusading to the Holy Land (New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 2008); Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).
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