[Megacampaign] A Saga Without Heroes Part 1: Liege-Lords

Thanks! Revenge does factor into it, that's for sure! Although not so much the future's revenge as much as one person's revenge...

Chapter 23:
A Sverre Problem
Vår historie (Our Story) Episode 5: A Sverre Problem.
Transcript courtesy of Den Arven Fundament, a government-supported foundation, ©2003 Den Arven Fundament Channel
(the Narrator begins to speak offscreen):
NARRATOR:
Olaf the Wise's body was scarcely cold before the crisis began. As the funeral was being prepared Gunnar, the youngest son of Olaf and his first wife Ingerid of Denmark, had already hatched his scheme. As ancient Bishop Tormod of Nidaros spoke of the deceased king as the truest friend he and Norway ever had, Gunnar Olafson Yngling, the quintessential Anglo-Norseman, with Anglo-Saxon being almost his mother tongue, having, since childhood, preferred it to pure Norse or the Lincoln dialect of Angorse, knew this was the best chance he would ever have. He shouted at the bishop, but his words were meant for the great crowd of the men of Chastaraborg and its surrounding areas:
(We see the funeral of Olaf, and GUNNAR OLAFSSON stand up and looks at TORMOD.)
"I will not deny the lord bishop's words. My father was truly one of the greatest friends Norway ever had. But, people of Angland, is that what you want? Do you want a king who will carry on the work of transforming this great land into just another part of his empire? You say: 'He is his son! Surely he has an ulterior motive!' The first is true, but the latter is not. I may be a son of the King of Norway and lord of Finnmark in that same land, but remember that I was born and raised among you. I am a Prince of Norway, but I am Anglish as much as the next man here.
(He looks at the crowd)
And I say to you: Sverre will be a disaster for all of you. He will crush any resistance and will make you all Norsemen. Mark my words, Sverre will be no Canute."
(The crowd is stirred by the words. There is much chatter. SVERRE OLAFSSON begins to speak.)
"My people! Do not listen to my little brother's foolish words. This is not a meeting of the Witan. We are not choosing the next King of Angland. My father was the last of those. Henceforth, you are all Norsemen. Angland is no more. Obey, and you will not be harmed."
(The crowd disapproves. SVERRE OLAFSSON sits down. GUNNAR and SVERRE's brother, ARNMOD OLAFSSON, restores order. But chaos is smoldering among the crowd. Their hearts are full of rebellion.)

Excerpted from A Saga Without Heroes, by Erik Haraldsson, ©2012 Nidaros University Press.
Used with permission.

The Great Chaos, as the period immediately following Olaf's death is called, can be likened to a keg of explosive powder that is about to explode: Gunnar filled the keg with powder, but the fuse was lit, so the legend so favored by Anglishmen, by someone rather less familiar to us:
The story goes that in a sermon in Chastaraborg some months after Olaf's death the speaker, a Norse priest that the story calls 'Arnbjorn' had heard rumors that the people were resentful of Sverre who had abandoned them to his Norse cronies and went off to be crowned in Nidaros Cathedral, in Norway. He opened the sermon by producing a bible, opening it to the end of the Book of Judges. He read the very final verse: "In those days there was no king in Israel; Each man did as he pleased." Having read, he closed the book and said: "Is this what you want? Do you wish to be a lawless people, whom in the absence of strong leadership drift off to idolatry as the People of Israel did before they had a king? You say that we Norsemen are not far removed from heathenism. In matters of time you are correct: Our great country has only been enlightened by Christ for a century and a half or so. But you who were converted by the great St. Augustine of Canterbury, you have reverted to pagan customs thinking that the Church will permit it. You call the sacred flesh of Christ 'magic bread' as if it were an object of witchcraft. You celebrate the birth of Christ on the same day as that of the pagan false god Mithras. You dare call that very same day 'Yule' in memory of your pagan holiday of drunken lechery.

It is time that you are truly converted. And the new king shall enlighten your heathen darkness. And if what it takes to truly save your souls is to turn you into Norsemen such as he and I, so be it."
At this, the story claims, the crammed cathedral became a scene of great violence. Overwhelming the priest, they ran out of the cathedral calling: "Death to the foreigners! Death to the False King! Death to the near-heathens!"
It is unjustly called 'Gunnar's Massacre' by the Anglish Yngling's critics, although it is true that Gunnar's speech at his father's funeral light the keg of Anglish discontent against their Norse overlords. Upon hearing the news in Nidaros, which Sverre had granted him in a vain attempt to appease him, Gunnar issued a 'Declaration of Right' in which he said he was to free Angland of its oppressors.


This was the last thing Sverre needed. Less than a month after his coronation he recieved news that the Pope had excommunicated him, and the Scottish King declared war on him as a 'godless savage'.

The Anarchy had begun.

5,000 views, WOOT!
Chapter 24:
Factions

Excerpted from A Saga Without Heroes, by Erik Haraldsson, copyright 2012 Nidaros University Press.
Used with permission.
Support for the Duke of Trondelag gathered quickly; Pope Sylvester's excommunication of Sverre meant that all his vassals were not only absolved of their loyalty oaths to him, but they were even forbidden to owe any fealty to him. In fact, before Sverre could raise his troops to fight the rebellion, most of the Anglish lords had already declared for his brother. Although bribery managed to convince the Pope to let him back in the Mother Church,
thus negating King Ferchar of Scotland's war against him, another trouble was heaped upon him just before the New Year when the Duke of Kiev, asserting his right to independence as a descendant of Alfred the Great, led a league of lords who, when the King refused their request for freedom, declared war against him.


Anglish nationalists like to present the Anarchy, as it is called due to their being no central authority over most of Angland (in Norway it is usually referred to as the Olafsson War) as a sort of ethnic struggle between the Anglish and Norse peoples. At first blush, it seems that they are correct: Almost all of England had broken away from Sverre's control, while most of Norway remained loyal. But then you look closer: Although Norway largely remained loyal, most of the troops it provided were Trondelagers who formed the core of Gunnar's forces. The Duke of York, Gyrth Aelfgarsson, was a Norseman in all but name having been mentored by old King Olaf. Gunnar's might have been called 'the Anglish Yngling' by his detractors, but one of the few things that was really Saxon about him was that he spelled his patronym 'Olafson' in the Anglish manner rather than 'Olafsson' as in the accepted Norse style. But for all the scholarly and not-so-scholarly debate about the nature of the conflict, there is no arguing about its results:

Sverre, having fought for over the year, finally recognized that between the northern Anglish lords' defection and the Duke of Kiev's alliance for independence that included his own realm in Leicester, Kiev, and his Russian vassal Korsun, plus the Duchess of Kent and the Earl of Fareyar (an Yngling), he could not win, despite his gains against Eadbehort, further resistance to his brother's allies would not achieve anything but more bloodshed that would not produce anything more than a shortage of manpower for the estates he kept after his submission.

On the Ides of October, 1118, Gunnar Olafson Yngling, the first king of Norway to call himself an 'Anglishman', was crowned at Nidaros Cathedral as King of Norway.

But with the end of the fraternal struggle the anarchy had not yet ended. The Kievan League fought on against the few that a war-weary Norse realm could field, scoring a significant boost to manpower when Gunnar ran out of money to pay some mercenaries he had hired to take care of the rebels.

Middle-aged and weary of war, having fought in his father's Crusade and against his brother, Gunnar gave up in a bleak closing to his first full year of rule.


In truth the Kievan league lost far more than Gunnar did in the final analysis. All Gunnar lost was a few counties in Kent, a minor group of islands in Fareyar, and two distant lands in Russia that had never been too tightly administered by Olaf. On the other hand, in a few years the pagan Cuman Khan would declare war on Eadbehort, taking away Kiev, and in fact ten years later Eadbehort's son would become a vassal of the Khanum as Count of Korsun. Kent was a minor power that lived in fear of the monarch it had betrayed, and before long the Earl of Fareyar, who had been bullied into the league to serve as a token Yngling, would swear his renewed fealty to Gunnar.

In the meantime, the short-lived illusion of peace and rebuiliding was shattered in the first February of the decade by the Duke of Lancaster who proclaimed some scion of the Hwicce clan as the rightful Queen of Norway.

This was a moment of crisis for Gunnar: If he failed, all that his father and grandfather had built would collapse: all the conquests, all the bitter rebellions crushed, all the blood of Norway spilled, all in vain after less than sixty years.
But clearly God intended the Yngling clan to rule, when He showed His hand in a minor skirmish in which the Duke was captured. The end of the rebellion came quickly, and his supporters in Cornwall and York would rot in jail along with the ringleader for the rest of their lives despite repeated pleas for mercy.


After three years of chaos the energy of the Yngling family now went into repopulating and rebuilding. A daughter, Aetheltryth, was born to Gunnar.
But the siren call of conquest and booty, ever the weakness of a Yngling, even an Anglish one, would awaken the dormant Harald Hardrada in Gunnar in 1122, when the Duke of Kent, foolishly believing that Gunnar would be forgiving enough to aid him when the Duke's vassal, the Countess of Sussex, made a play for his title, called Gunnar to arms.

Obviously, Gunnar was not going to aid him, but he did have a brainwave: This would be the best chance he would ever have of resubjgating Kent and undoing the Kievan league's victory.

After returning from an abortive campaign for Jerusalem that he was forced to stop before reaching the target due to the Emir of Jerusalem's defeat at the hands of the Caliph, Gunnar landed in Kent with a great army in late 1122.
The campaign did take longer than expected to a feud between Earled and Gyrth Eadgarson over the Duchy of York that Earled won,

but just after the beginning of 1124 the Duke of Kent surrendered all his lands to Gunnar.

The rebel countess was made to surrender, and now the victories of the Kievan league had all been reversed, except for the independence of Korsun, which as has been told, would be reversed in time.

The next two years were peaceful. Gunnar settled down, and so did the twin realms.
But as always, a Yngling could never be peaceful for long.
Fortunately, sometimes he can be used to crush an infidel.

Gunnar had been pursuing a claim on the Danish throne left to him by his mother, Ingerid Ylving. Sverre, the Duke of Vestfold, had been first to attempt this takeover, and Gunnar knew he couldn't let his brother become king and take all of his Norwegian possesions with him. From his court which had been relocated to conquered Kent, or 'Kantland' as it became known, Gunnar set forth to become the anti-Canute, as opposed to that Danish king who had ruled Norway. The Norse troops were making progress and would probably have taken the throne from the child queen of Denmark had not the papal legate to Norway arrived before the walls of Svendborg, where Gunnar was camped:


Immediately, Gunnar pledged his men to the holy enterprise of the 'Jorsalfaring' as it was called by the Norsemen, and send an emissary to make peace with the Danes.

There was more happy news for Gunnar as he made his way to the Holy Land, hoping to be forever known as 'Gunnar Jorsalfarer', who smote the heathen empire of Egypt and restored Christ's land to his believers:


Once the Norsemen had landed in Jaffa, they decided to evade stiff enemy resistance and to make their way up to the Holy City itself, which they called 'Jorsalaborg'. It is suggested that had the Pope himself not intervened the Lion of Norway would have flown over Jesus's city, proclaiming the return of the Cross to the city where it had first been raised.
But it was not to be. In one of history's most bizarre and unexplained moves, Pope Sylvester, despite early successes in the capture of Acre and the far superiority of the Crusaders to the Egyptian forces, decided to call off the Crusade and send the warriors of Christ home.

Gunnar is said to have coined at this point the famous saying: "To the losers go the spoils!"

Funnyman320 said:

So did you win the crusade or was it a loss? Either way nice work winning that tough civil war

Click to expand...

No, as you can see, it ended inconclusively. I'm a bit ashamed of myself but I used a cheat to imprison the Duke of Lancaster because if I hadn't I would have probably lost. :shame:

Update coming tomorrow, hopefully!

Chapter 25:
After the Calm
Excerpted from A Saga Without Heroes, by Erik Haraldsson, ©2012 Nidaros University Press.
Used with permission.
After the premature end of the Jorsalfaring Gunnar returned to Norway, called Jorsalfeiler instead of the Jorsalfarer he had dreamt of. In an attempt to nurse his wounded pride, Gunnar held a Grand Tournament in Dover, where he had moved his court and renamed the city Dovraborg. The tournament was won by Gunnar's nephew Helge Haraldsson Yngling, the Duke of Vestlandet.

This last burst of martial ability would keep Gunnar in exciting events until the end of the decade. Twenty days before the fourth decade of the twelfth century began, Gunnar decided to hold a feast at the court of Dovraborg, formerly known as Dover.

But there was a hitch or two:


Those who did come, however, rang in the new decade with a great feast, except for one or two sourpusses:

The glitter of the royal court faded, however, as January entered its later phase:

In September 1130, a crucial event in the family history of the Ynglings occurred:
Morcar would be married to the Duchess of Burgundy, thus, hoped Gunnar, bringing forth a line of Yngling Dukes of Burgundy.

A grandson, Oswine, was born:
although Hereford would become a heretic county under the pressure of a great peasant revolt:


Years of peace and dwelling at court with its pleasures and food took their toll on the king, and even the most sympathetic chroniclers would call him 'Gunnar the Fat', and with a lot of justice.

Middle-aged and wrinkly, Gunnar was a gaunt figure who forsook the glorious battles of his youth for the comforts of court. Some have called him the least capable of the sons of Olaf the Wise, and there is perhaps a grain of truth in that. On the other hand, he was the only son of Olaf's who reigned for a significant period of time.
Despite all the ridicule that was heaped on him, there was something important about his reign: It was in the long years of peace that the prospect of Saxon Engla-land turning into Anglo-Norse Angland was finally a realistic possibility, especially with the fiercely Norwegian Duke Isleifur II of Iceland becoming Duke of York.

But as the North spewed aid to Gunnar's cause, it also was the source of evil for the realm, as Jeremiah had prophesied a millennium and a half previously. Ferchar, King of Scotland and Gunnar's son-in-law, in one of the drunken orgies he was famous for, decided that Durham, ruled by a Norse bishop, Erling Henry, was actually a long-lost rightful part of his kingdom.

Gunnar immediately swung himself into the saddle, albeit aided by his groom. He marshaled the Anglo-Norse troops in Halagoland, and sailed to Durham to meet the Scottish invaders.
In the battle that followed Gunnar valiantly trounced the Scotsmen, and pursued them into Scotland, capturing cities and castles that rightfully belonged to the Anglish crown.
But it was to prove a hollow victory.
After many battles and many months spent in alien territory and the fresh Scotsmen in pursuit, and his vassals already taking advantage of the situation by plotting against him, Gunnar was forced to sign away Durham to Ferchar, who held another drunken orgy in Durham Cathedral, much to his new vassal bishop's dismay.


The king was now almost prostrate before anyone who bothered to attack, and his vassals knew this. Long they had been dismayed by the law that Olaf had made that the crown would go to the next eldest of the Yngling clan, and the non-Ynglings of the realm had no chance at gaining the throne as they had had before the law was made. Just three days after the Treaty of Durham, the rebels lead by the Duchess of Oxford, a Saxon, met Gunnar at Jorvikborg and presented to him what they called the Postulantium pro Iustitia, or Petition for Justice. With his levies headed home and most of those being vassals of the rebels, Gunnar had no choice but to relent.

The Submission of Jorvikborg had once been presented as a shameful triumph of selfish perfidy over the King's Divine Right, but since the Revolution it has been portrayed as the victory of freedom over tyranny that it was, though Gunnar would have disagreed.

The end came quickly. Only two and a half weeks after the Submission, the Duchess of Orkney, a good Norsewoman, demanded that Aslak Olafsson, a son of Olaf and his second wife Ætheltryth of Warwick, would replace Gunnar as King.
Gunnar, fat, tired, and defeated in a mockery of kingship, gave in.

Though there was some armed resistance from some fanatical supporters of Gunnar, he dispatched messengers calling for them to accept Aslak as king, and so on 21 July, 1136, only a few months before the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of York, Aslak Olafsson Yngling was crowned King of Norway in Nidaros Cathedral.

Aslak got down to business immediately afterwards. He realized what a shabby state the authority of the Crown was in, and tried to help it out of its decline.
Of course, very few vassals supported the move and Aslak would never be able to pass the law.
They did not appreciate his authoritarian moves, and on the 11th of January, 1137, they declared war on the new king when he refused to submit to them at Chastaraborg.


Aslak is remembered as the first king of Norway to employ a propaganda department, which succeeded in convincing a group of young men to flock to the royal banner, which was raised in Halgoland.

But it was not enough. The royal troops were defeated by the far more numerous rebels, and after three months and one week of fighting, Aslak made the second royal submission to vassal's demands in a year.


But even that was not enough. Æthelbehort, Duke of Cornwall, looked jealously at his independent neighbors in Somerset and regretted not joining the rebellion. He 'redeemed' himself in his own eyes in September, when an increasingly infuriated Aslak refused to recognize his independence.

The board was set and the pieces were in place for one of the great turning points in 12th century history.

It is coming... a watershed in medieval history..
Chapter 26:
Turning Point: The Fall of Monarchy

Coming this week to A Saga Without Heroes Part 1: Liege-Lords

Indeed they are :bitterness;

The update is coming today or Friday!

I am; Are the Ynglings?