The Edges of the Medieval World

Living on the Edge: Pirates and the Livonians in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

LIVING ON THE EDGE: PIRATES AND THE LIVONIANS IN THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES Juhan Kreem INTRODUCTION The land ends at the coast and the sea begins. For the concept of edges, the coast is in many ways a complex, one could even say blurred, environment. From the geographic point of view the coastline is clearly defined as the land’s end. The humans living in this environment, however, are amphibious. The costal folk earn an important part of their livelihood on the sea: navigare necesse est. Furthermore, the sea seems to form an almost infinite field of action, a world of its own, which from a landlubber’s perspective always remains alien and different. But, even if one would want to advocate the idea of an independent maritime world “out there”, life at sea cannot be imagined without land. No one lives his entire life at sea; every ship has to call in some port. Piracy is one of the most fascinating fields of human action in this complicated environment. Although easy to name, it is difficult to deal with. While the phenomenon as a whole is unanimously condemned, there are still bad pirates and good pirates. On the one hand, piracy is clearly outside the norms respected in society. On the other hand, it is strongly bound to different aspects of the same society. Pirates’ actions must be accepted, at least by someone who will support them by giving shelter, trading for plunder or hiring them to serve against enemies. Furthermore, some social systems are favourable for the continuous recruitment of new pirates. And finally, in the broader context, a pirate is also dependent on the availability of resources to rob; the predator must have enough prey not to die out. The focus of this study is the relations of society, the “ordinary world”, with the pirates who remained outside of it. My aim is, on the one hand, to point at the edges of the social world but, on the other hand, to also show the communication over these edges. For research into piracy other regions are more famous than Northern Europe, like the Barbary Coast or the Caribbean. This study, however, focuses on the examples from the late-medieval Baltic and especially Livonia. In choosing this region, my aim LIVING ON THE EDGE 71 was not to find a place for the Baltic Sea in this dubious hall of fame, but rather to show that structural features of piracy can also exist in other regions and when the scale is smaller. LEGAL FRAMEWORK Let us start with legal distinctions. Robbery, treated very severely in normative sources, was a serious crime in medieval society. The punishment for robbers was execution – decapitation in Revalian1 and many other legal sources. Although it seems clear cut, the edge is blurred by the fact that piracy was one of the first methods of naval warfare at hand, practiced widely. Legitimisation of piracy came from the concept of feud (fede), the use of violence to pursue one’s rights.2 The main goal of privateering was to cut into the resources of the opposite party, most commonly by disturbing trade. The advantages were that it was cheap to organize and could pay well.3 The variety of legitimate violent actions against property is, of course, not confined to robbery at sea. A traditional understanding of coastal law (Strandrecht), that the goods (or rather everything) which drifts ashore belongs to the local lord, was practiced by coastal peasants until modern times, although even medieval regulations suppressed this kind of expropriation and tried to replace it with compensation for the salvaged goods.4 In written records the distinction between licensed privateers and pirates without an “employer”, outlaws, is crucial. In one example out of many letters, on July 29, 1526, the town council of Reval (Estonian Tallinn) testified that a ship and its commanders, Revalians Knuth Sturman and Hans Loren, had been sent out to attack the enemies of the town.5 The letter stresses that the leaders and the warriors stand under some kind of authority; the men are nene Serouers sunder vor unse vtgeschickede krigeslude. In other letters the same type of men are called rechtferdige vthligger. The term vthligger is difficult to translate . It is formed from uth (out) and leggen (lay), and, in Middle Low German usage, had a distinct meaning of guards at sea, i.e., those who stay out there. The word uthliger is used 1 See Erik...