Sea Names in Europe

Naming the Seas of Europe A historical survey

Tjeerd Tichelaar

1. The Sea as a geographical super-object

In many languages, the word for ‘sea’ started out as a singulare tantum, which in common usage it remained - the plural form, artificially created, essentially belonging to poetic discourse. Behind its singularity stands an ancient conceptual dichotomy: ‘sea’ and ‘land’ together cover the surface of Planet Earth.

One notion that did not require adaptation when Renaissance scientists and their Enlightened successors rediscovered the planet – redefining Earth as a sphere held together by centripetal gravitation, instead of a terrestrial disc sheltered by a celestial dome – was that of the fragmented landmass, inhabited by humans, washed on all sides by the waves of the Sea.

Sea, in this sense, was not a geographical object like a mountain, a river, a settlement or a lake. It was the uninhabitable limit of the habitable world (οἰκουμένη). Its subdivision into smaller water bodies was essentially academic and subjective, generally unneeded except for the purpose of communication by such specialists as geographers, fishermen and navigators.

The major categories of specialists interested in conceptual subdivision of The Sea, geographers and navigators, entered known European history in ancient times. As Phoenicians and Hellenes (Greeks), they reached for the setting sun from the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean basin - the very shores bounding the fertile crescent that had given birth to the Western Eurasian civilization.

2. The Godly integrity of The Sea – mythology and/or allegorical geology

The Hellenes maintained the integrity of The Sea by deifying it. The titan Oceanus (Ὠ κεανός), son of the God of the Sky Uranus and the Earth Goddess Gaia, took the shape of a giant river encircling the world – a mythological way to account for the currents observed by the early navigators. It is interesting to see how the first stages of their Theogony, inherited rather than invented by the Hellenes, in the earliest

2 version that was literally saved for eternity by Hesiod (ca. 700 B.C.) seem to represent a cosmic evolution that even to our modern eyes makes sense: the Sky impregnating Earth with the Ocean, with the next generation of Gods more ‘down to Earth’ representing the Sea (Ποσειδῶν) and the ancient rivers (Νεῖλος, Ἴναχος), connecting themselves to nymphs giving birth to Mankind (Μελίαι) and the Goddess of the Farther Shore (Λιβύη) born by the founding mother of the earliest human civilization (Μέμφις).

Not only did the Hellenes inherit their primeval Gods, perhaps at the time they took possession of the land that would come to bear their name: the concept of the Sea itself was passed on to them as well. Their mythological equation of Oceanus to a giant river may contain an echo of their ancestors lacking a clear geographical concept of ‘sea’. The ancient Greek words for ‘sea’, in any way, are suspected to be either pre-Indo-European (θάλασσα, thalassa) or derived from a pre-Hellenic Indo- European root meaning ‘plain’ (πέλαγος, pelagos < *plāk-). It seems to demonstrate that even the Hellenes, earning fame as long-distance navigators since Mycenaean times, at one point in their past started out as a land people not yet familiar with the Sea – a feature they share with most of the European peoples still known today.

The Hellenes were aware they had not always been familiar with the Sea. According to their own historiography, they were introduced to navigation – along with many other cultural and technological innovations – by other peoples, like the Phoenicians, the Cretans and the Egyptians. They were one of the many early civilizations of Europe who, like the Macedonians, Celts, Romans and Germans, started out as land people before they first set sail. Only some of Europe’s ancient peoples, like the Illyrians and Venetes, were from the very onset – i.e. from the time their name became known – associated with sea fare. Even the famous marauding ‘Sea Peoples’ of Pharaonic history, inscribed at Karnak as they fell upon the Egyptian and Canaanite shores, may have been less maritime than their appellation suggests. Their individual names are thought to refer to peoples like the Sards, Sicels, Achaeans (Mycenaean Greeks) and possibly Etruscans, all known to have been quite civilized but not (yet) boasting a long seafaring tradition at the time, which coincided with the 13th-12th century B.C. setting of the mythic Trojan War and great

3 attested migratory movements all around the Eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea. Migrating peoples take ship in order to cross the sea and settle beyond, not to sail and explore.

The train of thought above leads us to the conclusion that, together with the art of navigation, sea terminology – not only the names, but the generic terms as well – came at some point in history to many, if not most of the European nations as an exogenous innovation.

3. Attaching labels to the Sea

The point of this digression into ancient history is, to show that not so many people in Europe were familiar enough with the Sea to independently give it a more than generic name, let alone subdivide it into different conceptual bodies of water that by naming (labelling) could ultimately be set apart as separate geographical objects.

Naming practices evolved from generic to specific with the development of maritime traditions. In the toponymic evolution, the following stages may be recognized:

1. Generic term only: typical for a land people attaching little relevance to the sea. In several books of the Hebrew Bible, the Mediterranean is simply referred to as ‘The Sea’. The same was done, according to Strabo, by the ancient Pontic Greeks, who referred to the Black Sea by the name Πόντος (Roman latinized: Pontus) – their own Godly personification of The Sea. The Pontic example incidentally warns us not to apply the term ‘generic’ without due caution: it is clearly not applicable for reference to a unique, ‘one- of-a-kind’ object or phenomenon. The nouns describing ‘Heaven’, ‘Earth’, ‘Universe’, ‘God’, as emphasized – in English usage – by their capitalization, are by the uniqueness of the phenomena they refer to used in the same way as specific names. The very practice of deification of geographical objects – the Greek pantheon including gods like Oceanus/ Pontus, Memphis, Libya,

Nilus, Aliacmon and Inachus (the river Panitsa draining the Argive plain), the Gauls recognizing an eponymous god in every major river – demonstrates that the effect of naming is nothing less than redefinition of the generic into something unique, specific. It should be noted here as well that, due to indifference or lack of geographical awareness, sometimes no distinction is (was) made between the Sea and any .(Yām) ים other large body of water – cf. the Hebrew generic

2. A qualitative or quantitative description, based on observation rather than geographical awareness. Examples: in some other books of the Hebrew Bible, the Mediterranean is referred to as ‘Great Sea’; to the Pharaonic Egyptians it was the ‘Big Green’. For the North Sea, an old Germanic or Celtic (?) form Morimarusa was recorded by Plinius the Elder, a name supposed to carry the meaning of ‘dead sea’. It is thought to refer to the quality of ‘dead water’ resulting from the presence of unmixed layers of fresh and salt water on top of each other, as first described by Fridtjof Nansen in 1893. If this phenomenon may really be held to account for the name, which reportedly has medieval equivalents in the Old High German Mere Giliberōt and Middle Dutch Lebermer, it presupposes self-propelled navigation in North Sea waters in Celtic/proto-Germanic times. Specifying terms added to the unique, rather than generic name of an object (‘The Sea’) might be considered epithets: variable descriptions of the same object – in the same way as the ancients used to refer to their Gods: cf. Apollo, Phoebus (‘The Shining One’), Musagetes (‘Chief of the Muses’). Especially the Romans were keen on incorporating foreign gods into their own pantheon, if possible by amalgamating/equating them with their domestic deities. Considering this practice, it is not inconceivable that Oceanus Germanicus received its (his?) Latin name through the same process by which for instance Hercules Magusanus, the Romanization (by equation to the Graeco-Roman demigod) of the native warrior god of the Batavian Germans on the lower Rhine received his. To post-Roman Germanic peoples the use of epithets was not unfamiliar either. Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon poems are full of so-called ‘kennings’, including many appellations for the Sea like bæð-weġ (‘bath-way’)

in Andreas; seġl-rād (‘sail-road’), swan-rād (‘swan-road’) and hron-rād (‘whale-road’) in Beowulf; hwæl-weġ (‘whale-way’) in The Seafarer.

Whether or not they should be interpreted as epithets, the demonymic adjectives serving as specific additions to Oceanus in this 1648 Blaeu interpretation of Ptolemy seem not to disturb the Ocean’s integrity.

3. Topological description, differentiating between parts of the Sea (or bodies of water) according to the relative position of the nomenclator. This may be strictly positional or astronomical (using cardinal points). To quote the Hebrew Bible once again, some books use ‘Hinder’ or ‘Western Sea’ (Mediterranean) as opposed to ‘Eastern Sea’ (the Dead Sea). The Romans, until their stand-off with Carthage still overwhelmingly a land people without any maritime tradition but after conquering most of the Etruscan territory in the 4th century B.C. nevertheless in control of both coasts of the central Apennine Peninsula, adopted the Etruscan appellations of ‘Lower Sea’ (Mare Inferum, the Tyrrhenian Sea) and ‘Upper Sea’ (Mare Superum, the Adriatic Sea). The Turkish names for the Mediterranean (Akdeniz, ‘White Sea’) and the Black

Sea (Karadeniz, the current names in English and most other languages were translated from Ottoman Turkish) also fit into this stage, as the Turks and many other peoples originating from the Eurasian steppes ‘colour-coded’ the cardinal directions. Way before the arrival of the Turks, the Scythian nomads dwelling on the northern Black Sea shores at the time these were first colonized by Hellenes, referred to the latter sea as Axšaina, which in their Iranian language meant ‘unlit, dark’ as well. Whether this was an earlier expression of the same system of colour coding or just a coincidence we cannot tell. To the ears of the Hellenic newcomers, the Scythian name in any way sounded like Axeinos (‘inhospitable’), a bad omen the Hellenes sought to avert by stressing Pontus’ benevolence to the Hellenic case: they modified the old appellation into Euxeinos (‘hospitable’), to be added as an epithet to the Sea God’s name (this strategy, called apotropaism, occurs as a cross-cultural and diachronic phenomenon in toponymy).

4. Reference to people, lands or other geographical objects found on adjacent coasts. This category of names was typically employed by people occupied with long-distance navigation. The names, denoting the contents and coastal surroundings of different parts of The Sea rather than different and separable objects, were functional as they contained signposts and warnings to the sailors. As by the 7th century B.C. Phocaean Greeks ventured out into the Western Mediterranean, they were warned that the waters between Sardinia and the Italian coasts were invested with Etruscan pirates, at that time their main competitors: thence the Τυρρηνική θάλασσα, Tyrrhenian Sea – a name translated but probably never actually used by the Roman heirs of the Etruscans (Τυρρηνοί, Tyrrhenoi was the Greek name for Etruscans). The Romans did know who they had to face when entering the Mare Germanicum (North Sea), just as the most ancient Greeks knew whose territory they were approaching in the part of the Mediterranean they first dared to sail: the Ἀσώρι Θάλασσα (Assyrian Sea). The name Mare Nostrum warned Roman sailors that the waters beyond were not theirs anymore, and the coasts were potentially dangerous. Even when no danger was to be expected, names told or enabled to tell where one was heading for or coming from.

5. Morphological description, requiring knowledge of the shape and/or extent of the coastline surrounding the named part of the sea – which is thus set apart as a separate object. Both the Phoenicians and the ancient Greeks possessed such knowledge about the Mediterranean Sea, and so did their Roman students. They were able to look beyond their horizon, and knew this part of the Ocean to be surrounded by land on all sides: thus it became Mare Internum to the Romans – although the appellation ‘Our Sea’, Mare Nostrum (a name first applied to the Tyrrhenian Sea after the Carthaginians had been driven off its farther Corsican, Sardinian and Sicilian coasts) became more viable after all of its coasts were subjected to Roman rule – and in medieval times Mare Mediterraneum, which was again taken over or translated by the majority of languages in use today. Likewise, the name Baltic Sea (Mare Balticum in medieval Latin, replacing earlier demonymic Roman appellations as Mare Suebicum, Mare Sarmaticum and, once again, Mare Germanicum) seems to go back to a Germanic appellation referring to the belt-like shape of the sea, something only observable if one is able to draw a mental map of the complete body of water.

All these practices are or have been followed by the unknown nomenclators of the Sea(s) in the distant past. In a less distant past, their work was augmented by explorers and scientists studying the seas, the seafloor and the coasts, delimiting objects our ancestors did not discern – a prominent European example being the ‘creation’ of the Celtic Sea, by marine biologist E.W.L. Holt in1921.

Old names covering variable and historically varying tracts of sea are confined within exact, geo-referenced boundaries through the activities of the IHO, cutting up the old godly Ocean into real objects that make the plurality of the Sea into inter-subjective reality. At the time they were coined, however, the names were never meant as such.

The Seas of Europe as defined by the International Hydrographic Organization (1953)

While elaborating the typology above, we were led through the following observations:

1. Adding specifying elements to the name of a unique object does not necessarily imply definition of a new object, division of the original entity and redefinition of the name into a generic element:

 ‘beautiful The Hague’ just stresses one aspect of the unique object The Hague

 ‘the Canadian Rockies’ refer to the part of the Rocky Mountains located inside Canada, not to ‘other Rockies’

 ‘Oceanus Germanicus’ and ‘Oceanus Septentrionalis’ possibly refer (referred) to local qualities of one single Godly Ocean

2. Descriptive designations are variable and interchangeable: if we were to write an essay on The Hague, we could refer to it as ‘beautiful The Hague’ and ‘rainy The Hague’ in one and the same paragraph – likewise, a contemporary of Pliny or Ptolemy may have used OCEANVS GERMANICVS and OCEANVS SEPTENTRIONALIS in one and the same piece of text.

3. The process of standardization converts a descriptive designation into a proper name – a name separating one object from another.

4. Different from discrete (‘countable’) geographical objects, sea objects are actually created by giving them names.

4. Names and name-givers

Maritime navigation proved to be one of those innovations that would sooner or later reach all peoples and nations touching at least slightly on the Sea, or not even this: even land-locked Switzerland nowadays operates a high sees fleet of merchant ships. Since the emergence of national states in the past few centuries, the possession of a navy and a merchant fleet came to be considered a matter of national importance, promoting international respect and recognition. By this time, however, all navigable patches of open water in Europe had by long received their names.

As shown above, the practice of giving names to the uninhabitable wet parts of the surface of Planet Earth serves the interests of some specialized groups of people,

10 most importantly long-distance marine navigators. Although most seaboard populations did develop a tradition of exploiting the resources of their coastal waters, long-distance navigation has never been a competition with many players. In the waters surrounding Europe, at least, at any point in history the adventurous activity of distant maritime trade was dominated by just a few specialists. As these were the primary users of the names, and subsequently the main name-givers as well, the sea names currently in use in Europe spring from a limited number of sources. Another short historical survey will demonstrate this.

In ancient times, Phoenician and Greek ships dominated the Mediterranean trade, either under the flags of their independent city states or as Persians, Macedonians, Romans etc. In the 1st century B.C., Julius Caesar reported the trade between Gaul and Britain to be largely controlled by Venetan seamen of Armorica (Brittany). Among the other peoples putting to sea, Etruscan (‘Tyrrhenian’), Illyrian, Cilician, Chaucian, Saxon and Gaelic pirates were feared for, followed by Danish, Norwegian and Swedish Vikings in the Middle Ages. In the Early, resp. High and Late Middle Ages, Frisians, Gotlanders and Hanseatic Saxons dominated the North and West-European sea trade, while the Maritime Republics of Pisa, Genoa and Venice controlled Mediterranean commerce. They again were followed by the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French – the Greeks carrying on as Ottoman Turkish marines, whose Barbary compatriots gained renown as pirates. The world- circumnavigating merchant-fleets of the emerging European powers lay at the base of an unprecedented colonial expansion in Early Modern to Modern times.

5. Sea trade, fishing and whaling and the ownership of the Seas

The merchant fleets of the maritime powers of European history, from the Phoenician and Greek city states to the colonizers of the Modern Age, made use of the Sea as a medium of transportation. Soon after they set out from their own safe harbours, they were enticed to leave their familiar coasts behind and explore the world beyond. Exploring, later conquering while trading, the waters they moved about were in

11 principle foreign, or better extra-territorial. The pattern of thinking still reflected the ancient perspective of land vs. sea: land did belong to man, sea to fish and hostile, unfamiliar monsters. As the scale of maritime trade and the profits to be gained increased, conflicts about ‘ownership’ (exclusive rights) of the Seas were nevertheless looming.

As demonstrated above, the use of demonym elements in appellations of parts of the Sea, like Mare Tyrrhenum ( ‘Etruscan Sea’, Tyrrhenian Sea), Sinus Ligusticus (‘Ligurian Gulf’, Ligurian Sea) or even the classical Arabic Baḥr al-Rūm (‘Roman Sea’, Mediterranean Sea) did not traditionally allude to ownership, let alone imply any recognition of territorial rights. The expression the Romans applied to the Tyrrhenian and later the entire Mediterranean Sea, Mare Nostrum (‘Our Sea’), however, did reflect a growing conception that the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar) had practically come to serve as the water gate into the Roman world. Although vessels not sailing under the Roman flag were generally free to peacefully move about its waters – and from 212 A.D. all freemen inhabiting the Roman provinces boarding the Mediterranean coasts were Roman citizens anyway – the Emperor for some time did exercise his right of sovereignty by banning sea traffic during the dangerously clouded (winter) months of the year (Mare Clausum).

Although the ban may have never been effectively enforced, the aggressively competing Italian sea republics of Genoa and Venice, as their star was rising in the High Middle Ages, endeavoured to re-enact the Roman precedent in order to establish a maritime trade monopoly in the same Mediterranean. Their example was moderately followed by the Danes, from 1429 exacting toll at the passages into the Baltic Sea, and the English claiming to ‘rule the waves’ surrounding their own insular kingdom. More extravagantly, the Portuguese dared to declare all waters along the spice-route to India explored by them in the course of the 15th century as Mare Clausum, and by treaty divided the world with the Spanish Reyes Católicos after Columbus’ return from America (the Treaty of Tordesillas, concluded by the Pope in 1494). The Iberian monarchs could limitlessly enrich themselves through the ensuing monopolies until these were broken by the Republican Dutch at the close of the 16th century.

The Dutch, at war with their Spanish overlord who had also been wearing the crown of Portugal since 1581, took the liberty of sneaking behind the Portuguese explorers to India – an activity leaving them with a perpetual obsession for maps – and encroach on their holy monopoly. The seizure of a richly loaded Portuguese carrack by the Dutch in the Straits of Malacca in 1603, instantaneously doubling the capital of their newly united East India Company, nevertheless caused so much indignation both abroad and inside the Company, that it had to be defended with legal arguments. The result was a treatise by the Company-employed lawyer Hugo Grotius, in which the Mare Clausum- principle was explicitly rejected and replaced with an appeal to restore the traditional extraterritoriality of the High Seas (Mare Liberum, 1609). Grotius convincingly presented his arguments as principles of universal, international law. The fact that his plea was convincing enough to gain him lasting renown – the same principle of Mare Liberum was proposed again by Woodrow Wilson in World War I, and ultimately codified in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – confirms the traditional attitude of land-dwelling man towards the Sea.

Apart from using the Sea as a smooth surface to float about while searching for riches faraway, the waters washing the shores of most maritime countries have all through history been exploited in a more direct way. Fishery has for long been a coastal affair. The Dutch first developed the technique of ‘gibbing’, preserving herring aboard specially adapted fishing vessels (the so-called herring-busses), allowing them to catch their fish farther offshore, in the 14th or early 15th century. Unlike merchants, fishermen do have an interest in exclusive rights to use the waters they can by any reasonable argument put a claim to. Their interests are reflected in the naming of ‘their’ coastal waters, if not by the meaning of the names then at least by their language. Avoidance of disputes over fishery and other marine exploitation rights, frequently occurring all over the world, was a major goal when drawing up the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1982. This convention settled the limit of any country’s territorial waters to a maximum of 12 nautical miles, and its Exclusive Economic Zone to 200 miles out of the mean low water line. Note that this arrangement replaced an unwritten 18th century Law of the Sea introduced by Cornelius van Bijnkershoek – a reaction on Grotius’ plea for Mare Liberum – that

13 granted any coastal state territorial rights on its adjacent waters to the distance of a cannon shot, which at that time amounted to no more than 3 nautical miles.

A case apart, the activity of whaling exploited the Seas like fishery, but hardly shared its past as a traditionally coastal affair. Commercial whalers crossed the oceans as merchant vessels did, but their itineraries differed. They did not sail to harbours to exchange merchandise, but aimed for the high seas themselves, even and especially for the most desolate ones. As a consequence, some of the discoveries outside real or possible trade routes have been made from whaling vessels – like the 1849 ‘discovery’ of the rocks of Dokdo, yet unknown to Europeans, by the crew of Le Liancourt. Before the rise of large-scale commercial whaling, this enterprise was typically dominated by inhabitants of rough coasts with a hinterland poor in resources, like Brittany and the Basque territories, Norway and some of the Frisian islands. The Bretons left a name in South Antarctic waters – Malouines (Spanish: Malvinas), commemorating the 18th century whalers of Saint-Malo settling there – the Basques frequented the Atlantic coasts of Canada from the early 16th century on, and did this so intensively as to leave a pidginized form of their language to serve as a lingua franca among the local Native American tribes.

6. The influence of the Rulers of the Waves

Everywhere in the world, the regional specialists in long-distance marine trade and navigation were extremely influential in spreading cultural innovations, most strikingly in the fields of language and terminology – and moreover, their influence often proved lasting. The Phoenicians, dwellers of city-states that even in their own times did not belong to the big cities of the world, left us their alphabet. The language of the Malay seamen of the Sriwijaya empire, inhabitants of the Riau Islands and the adjacent Sumatran coasts, became a lingua franca all through the Indonesian archipelago that grew into the current national languages of Indonesia and Malaysia, the regional languages of the coastal area of West Kalimantan and a large part of

Sumatra, and numerous city dialects from Jakarta to the Moluccas. In Europe, the Vulgar Latin vernaculars of Venice and Genoa mixed with expressions from other dialects of the Mediterranean lands controlled by the empire of the Franks, to produce the language originally called Lingua Franca (‘Frankish Language’), that through the Middle Ages served as the language of commerce all through the Mediterranean basin: it was so influential that its name would ultimately be applied as a generic term to denote any vehicular language. A little later farther north, the Lower Saxon language of the Hanseatic League exerted so much influence that it transformed the Old Norse of the Vikings along the routes of their vessels into today’s Danish and Norwegian. These are just a few examples, to warn us not to underestimate the linguistic influence of the Rulers of the Waves.

The example of the naming of the North Sea, at earlier occasions investigated by Prof. F.J. Ormeling of the University of Utrecht and Prof. Shin Kim of Kyunghee University, will serve to illustrate the above in a toponymic sense. In Roman times, the Rulers of the North Sea were – as the Romans warned us by attaching their name to the ‘Northern Ocean’ they came upon after conquering Gaul in the 1st century B.C. – the ‘Germans’. These Germans were new to the Romans at the time. They were first described by Julius Caesar as a most primitive kind of marginal Gauls, differing from the other Gauls (the ones we now call Celts) through their less civilized ways, their restlessness and their warlike nature. The Germans living closest to the Sea were the Frisians. Plinius the Elder, serving under Corbulo in his 1st century A.D. expeditions against the Germans, gives a most vivid description of the Frisians as inhabitants of a land where the boundaries between land and sea were very vague After the Romans evacuated the mouths of the Rhine in the 4th century A.D., the Frisians extended their territory along the coast of the current Netherlands southwards down to Flanders. Frisian linguists and historians now believe that during these misty decades, the Frisian population itself was largely displaced as well: the artificial mounds (‘terps’) they had for centuries been raising to keep dry feet seem to have been evacuated, to be settled again by new Germanic immigrants from the north: the people also known as Angles. Part of these newcomers joined the Saxons in taking possession of Britain, abandoned by the Romans as well, while others

15 stayed behind and adopted the name and identity of the land of Frisia in which they now dwelled. The (probably) new, early medieval Frisians became the Rulers of the North Sea in their time. They may have been sailors familiar with the coastal route north from the time they first came down to settle the terps, and with the crossing from Zeeland to Britain from the time they joined or carried the Saxons there: about this we can only speculate. But what we know for sure is, that before long they developed a trade network connecting the harbours of Britain with those of the (proto-)Vikings of Denmark, Norway and Sweden and the Slaves of the Baltic Sea. They took advantage of their forceful integration into the Frankish Empire in the 8th century, by becoming the main agents of trade between the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, the Nordic countries and the Baltic Slaves. By the 11th century, Frisian currency ended up from the Faeroe Islands to the inland areas all around the Baltic Sea, including the Varangian-Rus settlements and their Slavic hinterlands.

As long-distance navigators sailing different seas, the Frisians were the typical specialists in need for sea toponymy. The waters immediately adjacent to their native land were, since a series of catastrophic floods had eaten away much of the moorland behind the terps, divided by a ridge of dune islands into the high seas to the north (Noardsee, ‘North Sea’) and a shallow inner sea to the south (Sudersee, ‘South Sea’). The Baltic Sea, frequented by Frisian vessels as well, may have been called Eastsee (‘East See’) by then.

Division of the sea surrounding Friesland in the High Middle Ages

The Frisian hegemony in the North European waters would not last forever. The Frisians shared their Baltic network with traders from Gotland, who were increasingly joined by Saxon merchants from free imperial cities in the northern parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Visby in Gotland became the first centre of a league of autonomous merchant cities that would soon be predominantly Saxon. By the mid-14th century, after Gotland had been conquered by the king of Denmark and the city of Lübeck (home to most of the Visby merchants) had become its headquarters, this ‘Hanseatic League’ had established a monopoly in the Baltic grain trade, and rapidly advanced in the North Sea as well. Its political and military power would come to equal that of the Scandinavian kingdoms, its economic power to exceed it by far.

The Hanseatic League, Lower-Saxon by (vehicular) language, greatly influenced all modern North Germanic languages except Faeroese and Icelandic, which sound very much like what Danish, Norwegian and Swedish would have sounded like if the Hanseatic League would never have existed. If not inherited from the Frisians, the appellation ‘East Sea’ for the Baltic Sea, phonetically taken over rather than translated by the Danes (Østersø), the Swedes (Östersjö) and the High German-

18 speaking Southern Germans (Ostsee) – both in Danish, Swedish and High German sø/sjö/see means ‘lake’, not ‘sea’ as in Frisian and Lower Saxon – and translated by the Fins (Itämeri), can only be of Lower Saxon origin.

The floods creating the Frisian South Sea also weakened the Frisian position in the western part of their homeland, where Danish Viking warlords succeeded by Frankish noblemen had cut the Frisian territory in two by creating a county in the delta of the rivers Rhine and Meuse. This county, named Holland, would prove a Frankish bridgehead in Frisian territory. The Lower Frankish language, also called Dutch, slowly advanced from Holland to the north and the south, and from the 13th century on the cities of Holland, profiting from the growing trade between the Franks and the English, gained supremacy over the Frisian.

In the course of the 16th century it was the city of Amsterdam, a short-time member of the League itself, that singlehandedly succeeded in bringing the Hanseatic monopoly in the Baltic grain trade to an end. The competition of the Amsterdam Dutch broke the Hanseatic League economically; the latter met for the last time in 1669, long after it had gone into virtual oblivion.

So the Dutch were the new Lords of the Northern Seas. The Hollandic/Dutch language, linguistically Lower Frankish, no doubt inherited its northern sea names from the Frisians, who at the time of their ascendancy owned the coasts. Dutch itself became influential in Scandinavian waters, both in toponymy and in their object definition: both Skagerrak (‘straight water off Skagen’) and Kattegat (‘cat hole’, i.e.

20 water with shallows all around so that ‘even a cat would have hard times to squeeze itself through’) are Dutch words for Dutch objects. The Viking longships, just like the Hanseatic cogs developed out of them, had a shallower draft than the fluyts the Dutch exploited for the Baltic trade, so to them the hazards in the shallow waters may have gone unnoticed. To the Vikings, at least, Skagerrak and Kattegat were one single object called Jótlandshaf (‘Sea of Jutland’).

Object definition and naming of he waters between North Sea and Baltic Sea in Old Norse (L) and Dutch (R)

As for the English name for the North Sea: Mr. Paul Woodman at an earlier occasion demonstrated that it was not until 1914 that the official English appellation was changed from German Ocean (an imprecise translation of Oceanus Germanicus, the classical Roman version used by Ptolemy) into North Sea, the name that had for long been in popular use. This shows us two things. Firstly, it shows how anachronistic names in maps tended to be – something which in the case of sea-names may not have been unrelated to the absence of them in common speech: even now we tell our friends that we spent a day at sea at this-or-that beach resort, we rarely specify that it was the North Sea we went to. Secondly, it shows just how much this originally Frisian and later also Lower Saxon and Dutch name prevailed among the English:

21 enough for them, obviously, to ignore the Romanisms so persistently crowding the printed maps – in Latin and English the like. When exactly it was adopted we can only guess: one may assume early enough to erase its Dutch origin from memory well before the Anglo-Dutch sea wars of the 17th and 18th centuries made the Dutch unpopular. In this context, it should be noted that the medieval Frisians are nowadays considered the same people as the Angles taking part in the Anglo-Saxon invasions into post-Roman Britain, this on the grounds of the striking similarity discovered between Old Frisian and the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) language.

7. Naming the European Seas – Conclusion

Most present-day nations of Europe developed out of land people lacking a concept of sea in terms of property or territorial ownership. Even if they became famous or notorious as seamen, like the Frisians and the Vikings, they used the sea for transportation, fishery or whaling without claiming to own it. Except for coastal fishing waters, the sea essentially remained ‘exo’, and its naming did not serve any other purpose than navigational communication.

As the boundaries of navigation were extended beyond known horizons, the naming of the waters gained importance to guide future navigators to the new discoveries. When Renaissance insights motivated Italian and West-European sailors to put out into the blue like the Vikings had done before them, they did, unlike their predecessors, not bravely head for the edge of the world. Their voyages were prepared on the base of rediscovered Greek and Roman geographical understanding, refined by Arabic-speaking scholars of Andalusia and the Middle East. In fact, long- distance navigation and (geographic) science did develop hand in hand.

The Renaissance cartographers’ way of looking at the Sea followed the Greco- Roman concept of an ‘Oceanus’ surrounding the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa – in fact ‘super-peninsulas’ – on all sides. The Ocean, also called Sea, was one big fluid object, which for reference purposes only was subdivided in areas

22 referred to by different names – names generally derived from adjacent lands, nations or river mouths. Names as sailing instructions or labels for scientific discourse, and nothing more.

Since we emerged from the Middle Ages, Europe witnessed the progressive replacement of Latin as sole or major language of official and scientific publications through the modern national languages. From the early beginnings of modern cartography in the 15th an 16th century, this process of replacement did show in the toponymic content of maps and atlases – not the least in those of Portuguese origin: the Latin-vernacular mix in Portuguese publications throughout the Age of Discovery was so notorious as to receive a name for itself, ‘Luso-Latin Macaronic’. Nowadays every language owns a separate set of geographical names for the parts into which we divide the water surrounding our lands. Within each language and national tradition, naming practices in general and those pertaining to sea features in specific have for long been lacking stability, but over the past century or so they rarely changed. The origin of sea names shown in European maps almost always antedates the age of nationalism that gave rise to the contemporary patchwork of states, and in the minds of the people the Seas remain as ‘exo’ as they were before the 1982 issue of the Law of the Sea. To an overwhelming majority of the people of Europe, therefore, these names are traditional, they are ‘just names’ that don’t invoke any hard feelings, fears for territorial ownership claims or sentiments of national identity. The people standing at the origin of the names were at one point in history Lords of the Sea, temporary specialists or regional monopolists in long-distance navigation. It were their names that were handed down from generation to generation, from region to region – taken over on sheer sound (transcribed) or on the message the conveyed (translated) – to become part of each individual language, within which they remain as mere labels stripped of meaning.