Cross and Scepter

by Bagge, Sverre

  Popular response to the message of the Church can mainly be traced indirectly. Miracles, pilgrimages, and the cult of the saints show ordinary people’s attachment to the Church and Christianity, although some sources indicate that magic of a more or less pagan character was also practiced. Both Christian and magic rituals provide us with clear evidence of people turning to the supernatural to seek help in disease and various other life difficulties. They tell less about the search for God and salvation in the life to come. However, the imbalance is largely due to the character of the source material. Our major source, the extant miracle collections, are intended to prove the sanctity of particular persons by showing that they had performed “real” miracles, contrary to the normal workings of nature. Mere conversions or spiritual experiences were too ambiguous to be accepted as evidence, and, perhaps for this reason, were not recorded.

  In his great book on medieval sainthood, André Vauchez distinguishes between “hot” and “cold” regions, according to their ability to produce saints. Scandinavia as a whole must be considered relatively “cold.” Most of the saints venerated in the region during the Middle Ages were the common saints of Western Christendom as they appear in the Roman calendar. However, some local saints emerged from early on, and a few of them were even venerated outside Scandinavia. Most of these Scandinavian saints belong to Vauchez’s northern type; i.e., they are people holding high office, who are mainly venerated for their miracles after death. Their official lives are usually impersonal and stereotypical, as well as fairly brief, while the main focus is on their miracles. The royal saints are typical examples of this. Whereas the popularity of the Swedish St. Erik and the Danish St. Knud seems to have been limited, St. Olav in Norway had great popular appeal, inside and outside the country, and a large number of pilgrims sought his shrine, particularly on his holiday on 29 July. By contrast, the southern type is a charismatic figure, whose reputation for sanctity is largely based on a remarkable life—St. Francis is the best-known example. The preeminent Scandinavian exemplar of this brand of sainthood is St. Birgitta of Vadstena in Sweden.

  A Scandinavian Saint

  Birgitta was born in 1303 as the daughter of the lagman Birger Persson, a member of the highest Swedish aristocracy, while her mother, Ingeborg, was related to the royal house. At the age of fourteen, she was married to Ulf Gudmarsson, also a member of the top aristocracy. The marriage was happy; Birgitta bore eight children and lived as a mistress of a great aristocratic household. However, a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1341—a tradition in Birgitta’s family—became a turning point. The couple decided to live apart and devote themselves to religion. Ulf joined the Cistercian monastery of Alvastra, where he died shortly afterwards, in 1344, while Birgitta spent her time in prayer and contemplation in a house nearby. Birgitta had grown up in a pious family and been very religious throughout her life. She had her first revelation, of Christ’s suffering, at the age of ten. Nevertheless, the separation from her husband and his death marked a radical change, as expressed in an episode told by her biographer, Peter Olovsson. Shortly before his death, Ulf had given her a ring, asking her to think of the salvation of his soul. A few days after his death, Birgitta took it off. When those around her pointed out that this did not indicate much love for her husband, Birgitta answered:

  Figure 17. St. Birgitta, sculpture in Vadstena Church (Sweden), c. 1390. There are several portraits of Birgitta, but this is considered to be the most authentic. Dept. of Special Collections, University of Bergen Library. Unknown photographer.

  When I buried my husband, I buried all carnal love, and although I loved him of all my heart, I would not wish to buy him back … against God’s will…. And therefore, that my soul shall lift itself to love God alone, I will forget the ring and my husband and leave myself to God alone.

  After her decision to devote herself completely to religion, the revelations became frequent and directed her life. In 1345, she was told to found a new order and given detailed instructions for its organization, but the ecclesiastical authorities stopped her. In autumn 1349—the year of the plague in Scandinavia—she left for Rome to celebrate the Holy Year 1350 and never returned. Now, her great project was to make the pope return from Avignon to Rome, but she was also working for the foundation of her order, which was finally accepted by Pope Urban VI in 1370, although the first monastery was not established until after her death, in 1384. Birgitta also intervened in Swedish politics and supported the opposition against Magnus Eriksson that led to his deposition in 1364. In 1372 she went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she became ill. She died in 1373, shortly after her return to Rome. She was canonized in 1391.

  Birgitta had altogether more than seven hundred revelations, which were written down in four large volumes filling fourteen hundred pages, the Revelationes celestes (Heavenly Revelations). Birgitta either wrote them down herself and had them translated into Latin or told them to her confessor who wrote them down. In one of the revelations, she was ordered by the Virgin Mary to learn Latin, and, according to several witnesses who testified during her canonization process, she became quite fluent in the language, although she did not feel sufficiently confident to write her revelations in Latin herself. The revelations have a strongly sensual and visual character, with dramatic descriptions of the suffering of Christ and the saints, the pain of sinners in hell, and the ugliness and horrible stench arising from the devil and the sinners, all this very much in accord with the emotional and concrete character of contemporary art and sermons. On one point, Birgitta even directly inspired artistic representation. During her last pilgrimage, to the Holy Land, Birgitta had a vision of Christ’s birth. She saw him lying on the earth while his mother worshipped him. This became a common motif in pictures of the Nativity in the following period. The revelations also testify to Birgitta’s knowledge of doctrine and even law—expressed in descriptions of God’s judgment of humankind—and include detailed and precise rules for her order. Despite her total break with her former life, Birgitta could draw upon her experience as the head of a large aristocratic household.

  Claiming that one has received revelations from Christ and the Virgin Mary might easily have aroused suspicion in the fourteenth century, when the inquisition was in full swing and eager to persecute heretics of all kinds. And the danger was likely heightened when the revelations, like Birgitta’s, were often critical of ecclesiastical as well as secular authorities, as for instance in the following outburst against the pope:

  He is more disgusting than the Jewish usurers, a greater traitor than Judas, crueler than Pilate. He has devoured the lambs and strangled the shepherds. For all his crimes, Jesus has thrown him as a heavy stone into the abyss, and he has sentenced him to be devoured by the same fire that once devoured Sodom.

  Birgitta was nevertheless accepted, and we can only suppose that her personality as well as her status must have been important factors. She was used to moving in high circles, and she had an excellent relationship to the higher clergy in Sweden, which may have helped her to acquire a similar network in Rome. Her advisers included the learned Nils Hermansson, bishop of Linköping, one of the wealthiest and most important dioceses in Sweden, and her confessor, Master Matthias, a leading theologian. Her later confessors, after Matthias’s death, Peter Olovsson of Alvastra and Peter Olovsson of Skänninge, were also learned theologians. Thus, Birgitta had access to the best theological minds of her age, and her writings show that she made good use of them, keeping firmly within doctrinal orthodoxy. A widespread feeling of crisis in the Church might also have helped her, for she became part of a broad movement to reform the Church and bring the pope back to Rome.

  Institutionally, the most lasting result of Birgitta’s activities was the Birgittine Order, officially named the Ordo Sancti Salvatoris (the Holy Savior’s Order), whose detailed rules were expressed in some of her revelations. Each monastery housed both monks and nuns, although strictly separated, under the leadership of an abbess. The or
iginal foundation, Vadstena in Sweden, became an important religious and cultural center with, among other treasures, the largest library preserved from medieval Scandinavia.

  Thus, Birgitta was clearly what Vauchez would term a “hot” saint, one of the hottest in the fourteenth century. Of course, people of Birgitta’s ilk are exceptional in any society, but, as we have seen, in Scandinavia she was more different from a “normal” saint than she would have been for instance in Italy or the Low Countries. On the other hand, the support she got from her circle in Sweden shows that there was a place for her kind of sainthood, at least in the higher reaches of society. The royal court and the aristocracy lived in a world filled with religion, which frequent masses, pilgrimages, and other kinds of devotion, and in close contact with the higher clergy. Thus, one of Birgitta’s main supporters, Bishop Nils of Linköping, had in his youth been a teacher in her home. Although Birgitta’s intense devotion was an exception, she grew up in so strongly religious an atmosphere that she could scarcely have avoided familiarity with Christian cult and doctrine, and was fortunate to find, in the country where she spent her formative years, an audience receptive to her revelations.

  Figure 18. Interior of the Vadstena Church (Sweden). The Church, consecrated in 1430, is built in the late Gothic style and, like most contemporary Scandinavian churches, shows German influence. Unknown photographer. Middelaldernett.

  Nevertheless, Birgitta probably appealed more to the elite than to the common people. A study of sainthood in the later Middle Ages (by A. Fröjmark) indicates that the ecclesiastical elite was very influential in the promotion of the cult of the saints in this period as well. This was not only the result of the introduction of a papal monopoly on canonization, necessitating a long and costly process that had to be initiated and paid by the ecclesiastical elite. Examples from the miracle collections show that the ecclesiastical authorities were also operative in the process, often leading the people in the direction of particular saints whom they personally wanted to promote. The people were essential, too, in order to achieve canonization, because a saint needed a reputation for sanctity as well as a number of well-attested miracles. In the case of Birgitta, there is clear evidence of a popular cult. This extended to some people in her entourage, her daughter Katarina and Bishop Nils Hermanson of Linköping, who reached the lower rank of beatification.

  While there can hardly be any doubt that the Church succeeded in introducing its doctrine and rituals in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, there is less evidence of the newer trends towards a more personal religion, which in the later Middle Ages were expressed for instance in the devotio moderna. This may be due to the nature of the sources; after all, the external aspects of religion are more likely to leave traces than the interior workings of the soul, and the new, Lutheran Church was not interested in preserving Catholic devotional literature. We should also be wary of the “Protestant” tendency to assume that external piety signals the absence of interior devotions. Nevertheless, the extant sermons, as far as they have been analyzed, the number and types of saints, as well as the religious art seem to point mainly in the “traditional” direction. So does also the fact that there was little heresy in Scandinavia. Rather than forming evidence of the Scandinavians’ faithful adherence to the Catholic Church, this absence seems to indicate that personal religion was weaker, that religious customs and rituals were well integrated into daily life, but that few people were personally moved by the message of the Gospel.

  If we turn to the heresy that eventually did find favor in Scandinavia and in a short time abolished the Catholic Church, namely the Protestant Reformation, we may notice a significant difference between Denmark and Sweden on the one hand and Norway and Iceland on the other. The former countries had a real Reformation movement and even, to some extent, a Counter-Reformation, while in Norway, and to a lesser extent Iceland, the Reformation was introduced from above, with little preparation. Consequently, the new stirrings that were disturbing the calm of the pre-Reformation Church are more likely to be detected in the former countries than in the latter. This impression is also confirmed by the fact that the mendicants were stronger in Sweden and particularly Denmark than in Norway. In addition to the Franciscans and the Dominicans, the Carmelites came on the scene in the fifteenth century, founded a number of houses, and engaged in the reform of the Church.

  The Writing of History

  Historical writing was the most important literary genre in medieval Scandinavia and was common to the ecclesiastical and secular traditions. It had two main aims: (1) to trace the origin of the people and record the deeds of the ancestors; and (2) to deal with the relationship between this national past and the universal history of salvation. Given its political importance, it comes as no surprise that the dynasty plays an important part in historical writings. Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1150–1220) traces the Danish dynasty back to a founder by the name of Dan, a native of the country, who is supposed to have had twenty successors before the birth Christ. As some of these reigns were very long, the date of the foundation of the Danish kingdom corresponds approximately to that of the foundation of Rome (753 BC). According to Saxo, the Danes have no connection to any other people. He thus rejects Dudo of St. Quentin’s suggestion that the Danes are descended from the ancient Greeks; i.e., the Danai, and he omits every reference to the Roman Empire until the age of Charlemagne, emphasizing that the Danes had no part in it. Consequently, the contemporary Roman Empire, bordering Denmark to the south, has no claim on suzerainty. Saxo was not the first to write about the ancient history of his country; both the Chronicle of Lejre, probably from around 1170, and the slightly later work of Sven Aggesen contain such information, but Saxo’s work is by far the most extensive. His sources were to some extent ancient poetry and oral narrative—he explicitly mentions the Icelanders—but he clearly arranged the materials drawn from them very freely and probably even invented parts of his narrative. His extensive reading of Roman writers may have been a source of inspiration, as may also Geoffrey of Monmouth’s slightly earlier account of early English history, a very popular work at the time.

  In his history of the kings of Norway (Heimskringla), the Icelander Snorri Stuluson traces the origins of the dynasty back to the pagan god Odin, who is depicted as a human being worshipped as a god after his death. Odin is the prince of the city of Åsgård in Inner Asia and a contemporary of the Roman conquerors. Having prophetic power, he understands that the future of his descendants does not lie in the world of the Romans, so he moves to the North to conquer this area. Rather than a descent from the Classical peoples, Snorri here imagines a kind of division of power between the peoples of the North and the Romans. The link between Odin’s empire and the Norwegian kingdom is formed by a genealogy of Odin’s descendants, ending with Harald Finehair, the ancestor of the contemporary rulers of Norway. The source for this genealogy is an extant poem, Ynglingatal, probably composed in the Viking Age and preserved as quotations in Snorri’s text. This genealogy was used for the first time in historical writings in the anonymous Historia Norwegie, composed in Norway in the second half of the twelfth century. The entire prehistoric genealogy comprises twenty-eight generations. This means that Odin must have lived around the time of the birth of Christ, and thus have been a contemporary of Augustus. Whereas Saxo shows a connection between the rulers and the people from the beginning, Snorri has nothing to say about the origins of the people and only lets the dynasty arrive in the country at a late stage. As we have seen, Saxo as well as Snorri regard the Christianization as a crucial event. Both tried to show that it had its origins in local attempts to find the Highest God, and both point to the importance of indigenous kings in converting their people.

  Iceland was a new country when Ari the Wise (d. 1148) wrote its history in the early twelfth century. The first settler had arrived less than two hundred years earlier, in 870. There was thus no question of any relationship to the Romans. However, Ari tries to show a relationship to universal histo
ry in another way, by reconstructing an exact chronology for the history of his country, based on the reigns of the Norwegian kings, which in turn is based on some crucial events in universal history, such as the martyrdom of the English King Edmund in 870. Ari’s style is terse and dry, with no attempt at vividness and drama, quite unlike Snorri’s style and that of his other Icelandic successors, but he takes the same attitude to the conversion of his country as his successors dealing with the conversion of Norway. The conversion means that the Icelanders accept the truth of Christian revelation and reject their ancient religion. However, the way this happened shows their pragmatism. Seeing that the religious division would make life unbearable, the pagan Thorgeir prudently decides in favor of Christianity (above, p. 63). A later source, the Landnámabók (the Book of Settlement) forms a kind of genealogy of the whole people, listing the settlers establishing themselves in various parts of the island and their descendants.

  One of the earliest histories of Norway, Theodoricus Monachus’s Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium, composed around 1180 and dedicated to Archbishop Eystein, takes a different attitude to the pre-Christian history from that of Saxo and Snorri, but indirectly confronts the same problem. Theodoricus refuses to deal with the history before Harald Finehair, because he finds no reliable evidence for it, but nevertheless expresses pride at his ancestors’ plundering expeditions over large parts of Christendom. The conversion is the crucial event in his history; the reigns of the two Olavs who carried it out fill around one third of its pages. However, instead of linking Norway’s past to universal history by tracing it back to the Romans or the birth of Christ, he achieves the same result by a series of digressions, which create typological parallels between Norwegian history and the history of salvation. Thus, there is a parallel between the death of the pagan ruler Earl Håkon in Norway and the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (d. 363), who were both succeeded by Christian rulers. Similarly, when Earl Håkon’s grandson, also called Håkon, is killed in a maelstrom, the maelstrom forms a parallel to the pagan hordes streaming out of Hungary and killing Ursula and the 11,000 virgins at Cologne, which in turns signifies St. Olav’s martyrdom. The author, whose Norwegian name was probably Tore (ON Þórir) has been identified with either of two contemporary bishops, the bishop of Hamar (1188/89–1196) and one of Eystein’s successors as archbishop (1205–1214), both of whom were canons of St. Victor in Paris. The Victorine influence on the work is also striking; numerous references to Latin authors correspond very well with works known to have belonged to the library of St. Victor. Theodoricus himself clearly belonged to the contemporary international intellectual elite. Not only does he show considerable learning, but he also tries to adapt to contemporary scholarly standards by focusing on the reigns rather than the biographies of the kings, by trying to confine himself to trustworthy information, and, above all, by integrating the history of Norway into the international history of salvation through his typological parallels.