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had been an earth-wall, extending west from Schleswig, which could be used to block this entrance; here the track had to keep to a narrow neck of dry land. After Henry the Lion had ridden through with a Saxon army for a brief raid in 1157, King Valdemar of Denmark began lengthening and strengthening this defence with a mighty brick wall, and by the end of the century his sons had secured control of the roads that led to it, down to Hamburg and Lübeck.
    The western approaches by sea – the Skagerrak, Kattegat, Belts and Sound – could not be sealed off, even by the forts at Nyborg, Sprog⊘ and Copenhagen built in Valdemar’s reign, but the terrors of the North Sea and the treacherous sandbanks of the north Jutland coast still kept most English, Flemish and French mariners at a distance in the early Middle Ages; they preferred to anchor at Ribe, on the west coast of Jutland, or unload at Hollingstedt, up the Eider. Norwegian shipping was more adventurous, and had long formed part of normal Baltic traffic; but the kings of the Danes made it their business to deter the raids on Danish islands which had enriched so many Norwegians in Viking times, and they appear to have met with success in the twelfth century.
    To the east, the obstacle was mainly forest, which covered thousands of square miles between the Vistula and the Gulf of Finland and clogged the drainage of thousands more. Swedes had penetrated this region by navigating the rivers, and had set up a network of colonies and tribute-collecting chieftaincies stretching as far south as the Steppe; these became the Russian city-states. By 1100, the Rus blocked the way east for Scandinavians other than merchants and mercenaries, and were sending raids westwards, towards the Baltic coastlands. Russian traders came to Gotland, Wollin, and Schleswig; but centuries of water-borne traffic had caused no large immigration from the East.
    Nature thus presented certain obstacles to the intruder into this world. They were not insuperable; but they needed labour and organization to be overcome, and in the early twelfth century no outside invader orsettler had been able to secure a permanent foothold for six hundred years. Ever since Roman times, the Baltic region had been an exporter rather than an importer of men.
PEOPLES
     
    The peoples settled in North-East Europe c. 1100 can be divided into four main groups by language: Norse speakers, Slavs, Balts, and Finno-Ugrians. The first three spoke languages of the Indo-European family, the last are classified as Uralian. Affinity of speech within these groups never kept them apart or led their components to merge with each other; in economic and political matters, their culture was not much affected by such differences. Nevertheless, each group seems to have had certain distinctive characteristics shared by its component peoples in matters of social organization, religion, diet and dress, and these seem to provide a fair-enough principle of arrangement. This is to walk in the footprints of the first great Northern geographer, Adam of Bremen, the schoolmaster to the cathedral community of the metropolitan of the North, who was writing his Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum (‘History of the Archbishops of Hamburg’) in the 1070s, and collecting much of his information first-hand – from King Sweyn II of Denmark, among others.
    The first group (called Scandinavian) consisted of the people called Swedes, Götar and Danes, who spoke a variety of languages usually lumped together as ‘East Norse’; and the Norwegians, the ‘West Norse’ speakers. In those days the Norwegians occupied the coastlands of what is now Norway, as far north as the Lofoten Islands; and in addition, to the south, the shores of the Kattegat down to where Gothenburg now stands were theirs. They played a part in Baltic affairs both by trekking over the mountains into Lapland and by sailing in from the west; but the bulk of the population lived away from the