For a few months in the spring of 2018, the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo was to medieval conflict studies what Abbey Road Studios was to rock music. There, at the invitation of the editors of the present volume, several of the most distinguished scholars in this field gathered, “in an old villa...cut off from ordinary obligations, devoting [their] time fully to research” (9). New Perspectives on the “Civil Wars” in Medieval Scandinavia is one of several publications to emerge from this enviable environment (for others, see 13n7). It bears the hallmarks of close and extended collaboration among its contributors, each of whom, save one, worked at the Centre for at least a month in 2018 (9). The result is an engaging and impressively cohesive edited collection that offers far more than its title suggests, even if some of the central concepts that form its refrains would have benefitted from additional critical pressure.
The volume’s stated purpose is to seek fresh perspectives on the high politics of Scandinavia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, an era that witnessed violent factional struggles and repeated disputes over royal succession. The book finds traditional understandings of these “civil wars” wanting in several respects. While an older generation of historians interpreted the clashes largely in terms of their role in shaping Denmark, Norway, and Sweden into medieval kingdoms and ultimately nation states, the editors stress that the networks of power that animated the conflicts stretched across borders so extensively as to render them almost irrelevant (12, cf. 415). Whereas previous scholars conceptualized the civil wars as distinct periods of disturbance and disorder, this volume seeks to muddy the waters between peace and war, arguing that violence, or the threat of it, was the natural condition of medieval politics. As such, it was a potentially constructive, even stabilizing, force in society (20-22). From these starting points, the contributors reframe the political history of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scandinavia as a more or less constant conflict between competing magnates, including kings and would-be kings, who fought each other over wealth, status, and power, not religious or ideological differences (14).
The book is structured in three parts, each with its own short introduction. Part One presents three case studies of particular developments and patterns in the civil war era. Focusing on mid-twelfth-century Norway, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson departs from an older historiography that understood the outbreak of conflict as a function of economic crisis or the influence of the church. Rather, he interprets the civil wars in terms of the failure of royal networks, which usually kept violence in check, and the rise of flokkar, troops of semi-professionalized warriors who increasingly became kingmakers. Kim Esmark likewise seeks to move away from older interpretations that construed the decades of warfare that followed the murder of Knud Lavard in 1131 as marking Denmark’s transition from a Viking society to a medieval kingdom. Striving to understand the conflict on its own terms, Esmark finds a “polydimensional” altercation with fluid and dynamic alliances that cut across national boundaries (99). According to Esmark, warfare represented an intensification of the already-existing dynamics of socio-political competition among elites (157). Hans Jacob Orning picks up a similar point in his contribution, interpreting conflict in Norway between 1202 and 1208 in terms of “constant crisis,” a phrase that signals for him the intrinsic place of tension and strife in the socio-political order (168, 174-75, 38). This state of affairs, according to Orning, was governed by a principle of balance. Factional rivalries, intragroup disputes, and the inability of one party to achieve total dominance over the others produced an atmosphere of slow-burning conflict that amounted to relative stability (175, 185).
Part Two of the volume isolates some key themes in the civil war era across various theaters. Bjørn Poulsen traces the spatial and material dimensions of conflict in twelfth and thirteenth-century Scandinavia. A number of insights hinted at elsewhere—e.g., the interlinking of kingdoms via waterborne communication routes and the ways in which long distances placed a brake on governmental centralization—receive fuller treatment here (217-18, 221-26). Noblewomen come into focus in Lars Hermanson’s contribution, which examines how high-status women shaped royal networks. Seeking to restore agency to his historical subjects, Hermanson stresses that noblewomen like Margrethe Ingesdatter (d. 1130) and her niece Ingrid Ragvaldsdatter (d. after 1161) transformed, rather than merely transmitted, power (266, 275, 281-82, 295). Jenny Benham takes up the theme of peacemaking. She detects a great deal of European influence in the provisions of the 1208 agreement of Kvitingsøy, which attempted to arbitrate in the disputes between three claimants for the Norwegian throne (317-19). Benham underlines the modular nature of medieval peace, emphasizing that factional tensions, even when they erupted in violence, did not lead automatically to war (333-34).
The third and final part of the volume is comparative, with scholars of more familiar medieval European locales exploring how their sources might resonate with the themes and patterns highlighted in Scandinavia in Parts One and Two. Summarizing some of the main ideas animating his influential scholarship, Gerd Althoff provides an overview of the unwritten norms that regulated conflict and cooperation within the Holy Roman Empire. He emphasizes widespread knowledge of the “rules of the game” (Spielregeln), which, for the most part, worked to contain the escalation of violent hostilities, at least among members of the ruling classes (345, 353-54). Stephen D. White likewise stresses conflict’s place within the medieval sociopolitical order. Departing from a conventional historiography that tended to characterize armed conflicts against the kings of England as rebellions, he follows Robert Bartlett in seeing recurrent violent opposition against the crown as part of the structure of politics, with kings participating in the same honor-based political culture as the nobles who challenged them (373-75, 408). In the final article, Warren C. Brown, who was not among the visiting scholars at the Centre, offers an appraisal of the preceding contributions from his perspective as a scholar of medieval violence. He stresses that the cultures of power on display in the volume belong squarely within the history of medieval Europe proper, with the norms of Scandinavia’s “network-driven societies” finding plenty of analogues in continental sources (413-14, 416).
At 448 pages and 125 Euros, New Perspectives on the “Civil Wars” in Medieval Scandinavia is unlikely to be read cover to cover except by a select few. That is a shame, because the volume’s achievement comes into focus when its articles are read in tandem, with themes like medieval aristocratic society’s capacity to process and incorporate steady levels of often violent conflict finding traction in Scandinavian, German, and English sources. For all of its harmonies, however, some of the book’s key ideas struck a dissonant chord. The concept of a “network,” for instance, no doubt has value as a catch-all term that captures how various bonds and affinities overlapped and interacted. However, its repeated use tends to turn petty kings into MBAs, as when we are told that “[i]n a sense power politics quite simply was networking” (15). The notion of “constant crisis,” which is flagged as one of the book’s organizing ideas (22, 25-26, 153-54, 174-76, 417-18), would have likewise benefitted from additional commentary and justification. As opposed to alternatives like “constant competition,” “constant crisis” seems a contradiction in terms, with “crisis” implying a decisive turning point while “constant” suggests permanence.
Another concept that the contributors regard as self-evidently pertinent to their medieval sources is the notion of a “game.” On nearly every page, the book reports on the “game of power” or the “power game,” and, to a lesser extent, the “game of balances” (25) or (sigh) the “game of thrones” (14, 282, 289, 344). The idea that, in high medieval Scandinavia as elsewhere, conflict was contained by certain rules (à la Althoff) that all political players recognized, is surely salutary, but one might raise various questions. For one, are we sure that we are watching the game that we think we are watching? Brown rightly stresses the ways in which written sources warp our image of the past (423), yet the contributors are sometimes inclined to read the stylized descriptions of chroniclers as structured historical reality (e.g., 54, 178). They also often seem to be calling the action on the field, so to speak, from the press box. From this vantage point, the medieval evidence is more often analyzed in terms of grand schemes and social-scientific abstractions than the thought-worlds of the “players” themselves. Religious motivations, for instance, are mostly conspicuous in their absence. Instead, we read that noblewomen can be thought of as “proactive accumulation points” (300); that kingship might be construed as a “central bank of economic and symbolic credit” (154n304); that when medieval writers explain switching sides with reference to emotions “...we might alternatively seek to rationalize the movements of the main political actors in terms of strategizing networks and the balance of power” (135-36); and that, whatever the intentions of factional rivals like the Baglar and the Birkibeinar, their violence worked to produce relative stability (173). Even as the contributors stress the flexible character of the “power game,” its outcome seems predetermined: “...stasis (in the form of repeated local crises and disturbances) at least generally tended to promote homeostasis, global balance, by counteracting major concentrations of power” (25). An interpretive model premised on equilibrium and a return to the status quo will have difficulty analyzing moments of historical change, a few of which Brown attempts to bring to the fore (418, 420-21).
This begs more questions. Where and when did the game end? On the one hand, the volume is keen to underscore the contained and limited nature of medieval violence. Battles in high medieval Norway, for example, rarely killed more than one hundred combatants, out of a population of some three hundred thousand (50). Civil war, and the all-consuming struggle that term might imply, generally appears in scare quotes, with the authors instead preferring circumlocutions like “inter-Nordic intra-elite conflicts” (216, cf. 266, 289). On the other hand, the competitive dynamics that the book highlights seem to have few social or chronological limits. They are sometimes applied to the population as a whole, as when we read about a “society of constant crisis” (205, cf. 266-67) or that kings “played the game of power by the same rules as everybody else” (415). And the final whistle never quite blows. We are told that the struggle for power was “perpetual” (206), a kind of “infinite game” (24). Applied so widely across a vanishing horizon, the notion of “game” loses some of its analytical purchase and becomes, as games often do, a bit empty and wearying.
These reservations aside, this book deserves to be widely read. It breaks new ground in setting conflict in medieval Scandinavia against a wider European backdrop and it offers new models for thinking about how violence worked in medieval high politics. The book’s genesis at Oslo’s Centre for Advanced Study, an independent research foundation sponsored by the Norwegian Ministry of Education, also warrants praise. In the bleak funding climate of the present, the Centre’s model of state-sponsored humanistic inquiry should be celebrated, and, one can dare to dream, emulated elsewhere.