Chapter 42:
Nova Mundi, Nova Ecclesie
Excerpted from A Saga Without Heroes Volume 2: The New Worlds
by Erik Haraldsson, ©2013 Nidaros University Press.
Used with permission.
As the thirtieth anniversary of
Iustitia Regis came, Norway was in dire straits.
An incompetent king, Hakon VIII, son of Halfdan, was unable to prevent massive heretic rebellions, excommunication by an angry Pope, and a declaration of war by the resurgent Svearike.
The war lasted eleven months, until on the first day of December 1483 he was forced to sign a humiliating peace that forced him to withdraw his 'special advisors' that in effect ruled the kingdoms of Baden and Frankfurt as clients of Norway, and also do what no Yngling had ever done publicly:
He bought peace for 150 ducats.
Not many tears were shed when Hakon died on the 22nd of May, 1485*, leaving the throne to his underaged son, Harald.
The years of the regency for Harald were some of the darkest years in Norse history: More peasant revolts, ever-higher taxes, and a shortage of army leadership all contributed to a general feeling that Norway's time as a regional power was coming to an end.
But seven years later, Harald, having finally come of age, was crowned in the year 1492 as King Harald V of Norway.\
It was, in fact, the best thing until this date that had happened to Norway since Erlend Alfsson election as King of Norway following the battle-death of Aslak Olafsson in 1138.
Even his name was portentous: Harald was the first Norse king since Hardrade's death in 1068 to bear that name, and all Norway venerated him as St. Harald the Conqueror who defeated the infidel Harold and conquered Angland, although in fact most of that work was done by his son Olaf the Wise after Harald's incapacitation at the beginning of the battle of Jorvik.
The new king began his reign by invading Valsherland, which had defected to the kings of Munster some decades back after a successful revolt.
Harald proved his prowess at military planning when Munster's Svenske allies were defeated when they invaded Norway itself, at Oppland.
After some months of campaigning and repelling Skottland's invasion in support of Munster, the Eirannmenn agreed to hand over the northern half of Valsherland, which was only part of the goal but as Castille had invaded and was winning Harald heartily agreed.
On the Castillian front things went far worse:
Harald signed away Wurzburg to Castille and renounced claims on most of the lands that had belonged to the Norse crown, including Fyn in Denmark and various Hispanic territories.
But salvation, unlike the Torah, was at the edge of the sea...
Excerpted from 1495: The Year That Changed The World,
by Erlend Sveriger, ©2013 Bourbonnais Nationalen Près.
Used with permission.
In 1495 the Catholic Church of Rome was a tired, corrupt beast.
Weakened by the militarily strong Cathar and Hussite heresies, corrupted by cash-strapped popes selling indulgences to the highest bidder, and manipulated politically by the Norwegian kings who had installed their own Norwegian candidate long ago and since then the Papal States had been a client of Norway, the Church, almost sixteen hundred years after the death of its supposed founder was far from the vision of an all-encompassing institution focused solely on guiding souls to heaven.
And in the small kingdom of Bourbonnais there was a heretic queen.
The queen, Anne, had not been seen in any church ever since her coronation, but many were surprised when, on Friday, the 20th of February, 1495 they were herded into the public squares for an important announcement.
Anne's heralds declared that since she deemed that the Pope in Rome (although by this time he had been forced out of Rome by the Byzantine conquest and was now a German residing in the city of Fulda in Nassau) was no longer the true successor to St. Peter or worthy of being the Vice-Regent of God on Earth, she would no longer accept his authority, temporal or spiritual. She then declared herself leader of the Church of Protesting Followers of Jesus, which would be known as the Protestant Church for short.
The major differences from the Catholic Church were mostly in the authority of bishops and especially icons, which the Protestant Church abolished as idolatry, and the celibacy of priests, which the Protestants did not enforce.
This radical new theology, emboldened by the successes of the Cathar and Hussite heresies, spread quickly.
Exactly three months after the establishment of the Protestant Church, Otto, King of Switzerland, a former Norse client broke with Rome, although mostly following the Catholic ritual of Mass and such, but without icons, creating what he called "The Church of Reformation of the Faith of Jesus", which is usually shortened to the 'Reform Church'.
From there the Reformation was unstoppable...
Excerpted from A Saga Without Heroes Volume 2: The New Worlds
by Erik Haraldsson.
The Reformation first arrived in the Norwegian realm in December 1495 when the populace of Badajoz rose up against the archbishop and replaced him with their own Reform Church Archbishop who had no allegiance to the Pope.
In Halagoland though, the Protestant church itself took root.
Angered by his allowing 'this most foul of heresies and abominations' to spread mostly unhindered in his realm, the Pope excommunicated Harald as his predecessor, the last pope in Rome, had Harald's father, but with each province that broke with Rome that punishment grew emptier and emptier. More than anything, it was a sign that the Middle Ages, in which an excommunicated king had no authority and so was putty in the Pope's hands were truly gone.
Realizing this, the pope soon rescinded the punishment.
Harald now had bigger troubles. The Fatimid Caliphate, ever the enemies of Christianity in the Holy Land, declared war in a bid to win back what they called 'al-Quds'.
At first Harald tried to ship some troops from his new standing army to Jorsal-land, but it was a lost hope.
In Janurary 1498 Harald surrendered. The commandant of Jorsalaborg marched out with his remaining troops, and according to popular legend he knelt in the Holy Sepulchre and wrote 'Remember Jorsalaborg'. After 339 years of Christian rule the Norse troops sailed away, to Italy, leaving behind a mostly Norse-speaking, Catholic population under the yoke of the victorious Muslims.
Accounts of their misery and the cruelty of 'the Mamluk', which was a generic name for a Muslim, after the Turkish slave-soldiers of the Fatimid caliphs were widely circulated and Harald was the first King of Norway to adopt what is the motto of House Yngling to this very day:
Memento Hierusalem. Remember Jorsalaborg.
In the meantime, the Pope was beginning to fight back against both the Reform and Protestant churches.
In June 1499, he called a General Council of all Catholic bishops in the Provencal city of Apt.
There, the pope, along with the bishops, analyzed the causes of the Reformation and found that the primary reason was the corruption and misconduct of the Catholic Church.
So, they drew up a list of what they called 'purifications', 'reforms' being a taboo word.
Chief among them was the abolition of indulgences and absentee bishops, along with changes to the Mass and even limits on the use and production of icons.
Historians have called it the 'Counter-Reformation', although the Roman Catholic Church would frown on this, for obvious reasons.
King Harald embrace the Counter-Reformation eagerly, especially the restrictions on the wealth of monasteries and bishops, which he enforced diligently.
1500 was a Jubilee Year, as declared by the Pope, but many ill-informed pilgrims went to Rome, having never heard that the Pope had long since lost the Leonine City to the Byzantine Emperors in Croatia, thus reducing the revenue expected by the Church.
But 1500 was a far more important year in Norway, due to an event that occurred on the last night of the fifteenth century.
To celebrate the Jubilee and the New Year, Harald held a great feast at his court at Nordhamptaborg.
At the feast there was much food and ale and bards and most of the important men of the realm were invited, including Nån Ulvsen, the governor of Lincea and of Danish extraction, and Leif Bårdsson, governor of Vestisland. Nån and Leif had sons of a rather adventerous nature, named Simon and Folke, respectively. During a break between courses they called for a bard, whose name is unfortunately lost to history. According to the
Simonsaga, a seventeenth-century history of the colonization of Folkland, they requested the bard to sing the
Vinlandsaga, a long epic poem, or saga, telling of Erik the Red, who having been exiled from Iceland for manslaughter, discovered a great frozen island he named Greenland (in what is the first known case of false advertising) in order to entice settlers, and of his son Leif Ericsson who sailed from Greenland and discovered lands he called Markland and Vinland and natives whom he called
Skraelings, or weaklings.
Excited by this tale (and probably too many swigs of ale), Simon and Folke resolved to find Greenland and Vinland and asked if 'there are any valorous and valiant men in this hall?'.
Harald, being also in incomplete control of his faculties, said that he would give them fourteen ships and thirteen regiments to find and settle those lands in his name, provided they wiped out the pirates that had been bottling up most of the fleet in a harbor in Austisland.
Enthusiastic, they immediately assigned Folke as commander of the ships and Simon as commander of the troops.
They spent the winter months, which as all know are an extremely bad time for long-distance sailing assembling their ships and plotting a course, and finally in late July they departed from the port of Lancsterborg to universal acclaim.
As expected, when they passed through the coastal waters of Iceland they handily beat the pirates, and finally, after a long and dangerous voyage they found land on September 12, 1500, which is celebrated as Folkedag. Immediately, the troops disembarked and not surprisingly, they found no people, the colony now abandoned. However, when they looked for a place with some wood for a fire, they found the remains of what seemed to be a village remarkably like any in Norse-speaking Angland and Norway. Since it was west of the site where the came ashore, they named it Vestbygden, the Western Village.
They celebrated the proof that the saga was true, and decided to remain for a while to explore for further traces of Erik the Red's settlement.
The Norsemen spent a month in the territory of Vestbygden, but after a battle with some natives they called the
Skraelings after the abroginal people in the
Vinlandsaga they decided to depart in October, bearing the news of their discovery.
The return voyage to Reykjavik, the capital of Austisland and the westernmost port in the Norwegian realm went by astonishingly quickly, perhaps because the crew was sped on by the prospects of the eternal glory they would win when news of their rediscovery spread, and before the sixteenth century officialy started a group of a hundred colonists, comprised mostly of Folke's crew arrived back in Greenland and established a colony they called 'New Vestbygden'.
The next sailing season Folke and Simon, accompanied by the experienced general Wilhelm Ernest Rauh, a German hireling, sailed from Reykjavik with a new crew and this time they sailed even beyond Greenland further west despite the pleas of the crew that, unlike all learned men believed they would fall off the edge of the flat world and it was a miracle they hadn't done so in the first expedition.
They came to another land, and when it was discovered Folke shouted: "This is my country! I am son of both Leif Bårdsson and Leif Eriksson and it shall be called Folkesland!" but Rauh and Simon, backed up by the majority of the crew persuaded him to allow them to officially name it Markland, for they believed it was the Markland Leif Eriksson in the saga had discovered, and archeological findings in the area of coins bearing the marking '
Rex Gloriae' have confirmed their belief.
But Folke won the greater prize in the end. For, he was the first European since Erik the Red's Greenland colony failed to set foot on the shores of the mainland of the West Hemisphere. And so by 1520 or so it is common to see that continent known as 'Folkesland', and although other nations also came to those shores and developed their own names for them, 'Folkesland' became the universal name, and when it was discovered that they were two and not just one continents it was amended to 'North Folkesland' and 'South Folkesland'.
Although the first colonization attempt, in Septembre 1501, failed, in January a second attempt succeeded in building a permanent colony in Markland, which became self-sufficient within a decade.
Thus began an entirely new chapter in the history not just of Norway, but of the world.
Despite a disastrous war against Tunisia in the first half of the 1510s that ended in Harald, now on his last years paying double the sum his father had paid in 1483, it was clear as the news traveled south, east, and west of Norway and its lands that the Norsemen had discovered that not only was the world round but there was an entirely new 'world' just a few month's voyage from, say, Coimbra or Bordeaux just waiting to be exploited and colonized, that Norway was not on the way out, but its star would only continue to rise and rise and rise...
*22nd of May is my crush's birthday. Is the game trying to send me a message concerning her?