Oeselians

• 1. Introduction

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  The Oeselians were the people of Saaremaa, an Estonian island in the Baltic Sea, and one chronicle gave them a reputation that few island peoples could claim. Describing them on the eve of the Northern Crusades, the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle says: "The Oeselians, neighbors to the Kurs (Curonians), are surrounded by the sea and never fear strong armies as their strength is in their ships. In summers when they can travel across the sea they oppress the surrounding lands by raiding both Christians and pagans." That is how outsiders saw them. Danish kings, Swedish bishops and German knightly orders each tried to take the island and bring its people under the cross. This documentary asks what the Oeselians were called, how they fought at sea, which god they honored, and what their language reveals. It also asks how an island held out for so long against so many crowns, and how its story finally ended.

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• 2. A Name in Chronicles

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  Saxo Grammaticus, writing in the late 12th century, grouped the island's inhabitants with the "Vikings from Estonia". For him, Saaremaa belonged to the wider world of northern sea raiders. The word Oeselians itself arrived later. The earliest known writing of it in this Latinised form comes from Henry of Livonia in the 13th century. The island was known by several names in the records of that age, including Oeselia and Osilia, and its people were also called Osilians. Ösel is the island's older name for itself in these sources, and Saaremaa is the Estonian one. A number of other historic written sources from the Estonian Viking Age also mention the islanders. Almost everything known about them was therefore written by neighbors and enemies, and the first account of their fighting comes from Henry of Livonia himself.

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• 3. Ships and Raids

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  Henry of Livonia describes a fleet of sixteen ships carrying five hundred Oeselians that ravaged the region now known as southern Sweden. At that time the land belonged to Denmark. Saxo Grammaticus, in the fourteenth book of his Gesta Danorum, places a battle on the island of Öland in 1170. There the Danish king Valdemar I called out his entire fleet to check incursions by Couronian and Estonian pirates. The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle explains what the islanders sailed in. It names two kinds of vessel, the piratica and the liburna. The piratica was the warship, while the liburna served mainly for trade. A single piratica carried roughly 30 men. Its prow rose high and was carved to resemble a dragon or a snake, and it was driven by a quadrangular sail. The same chroniclers who counted these ships also recorded what the sailors worshipped.

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• 4. Tharapita and the Crater

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  Henry of Livonia names the supreme god of the Oeselians as Tharapita. According to the legend he preserved, the god was born on a forested mountain in Virumaa, on mainland Estonia, and flew from there to Saaremaa. Scholars have read the name in two ways. One reading is "Taara, help!", from the Estonian Taara a(v)ita. The other is "Taara keeper", from Taara pidaja. Taara is associated with the Scandinavian god Thor. The flight across the sea has also been linked to a real catastrophe. A major meteor disaster, estimated at 660 plus or minus 85 B.C., formed the Kaali crater on Saaremaa. If that link holds, the legend may preserve a memory far older than any chronicle. Henry also recorded the islanders' words, and those words point to another question.

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• 5. Laula! Laula! Pappi!

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  A captured Christian missionary named Frederick of Zelle stands at the center of the best evidence for the Oeselian language. Henry of Livonia, writing about the 13th century, reports that pagan Oeselians tormented him while shouting "Laula! Laula! Pappi!" The phrase means "Sing! Sing! Priest!" Its words are Finnic in form. That has been taken as support for placing the Oeselians among the Finnic language group at the time. A few shouted words are slim evidence, but Henry's chronicle preserves almost nothing else in their speech. Such meetings between islanders and missionaries grew more frequent once armies started arriving, and the first of them landed in 1206.

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• 6. Crowns Against the Island

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  In 1206 the Danish king Valdemar II sailed to Saaremaa with Andreas, the Bishop of Lund, and tried to build a stronghold. The attempt failed. A decade later, in 1216, the Livonian Brothers of the Sword joined the bishop Theodorich and crossed the frozen sea to invade. The Oeselians answered the following spring by raiding Latvian lands under German rule. In 1220 a Swedish army under king John I of Sweden and bishop Karl of Linköping captured Lihula in Rotalia, in western Estonia. The Oeselians attacked that same year, took the fortress and killed the whole Swedish garrison, including the bishop. Valdemar II tried again in 1222 and built a stone fortress with a strong garrison. The Oeselians besieged it and it surrendered within five days. The garrison returned to Reval, leaving behind Theodoric, brother of Bishop Albert of Riga, and a few others as hostages for peace. The Oeselians leveled the castle. Only in 1227 did a combined attack by the Brothers of the Sword and Bishop Albert succeed. After the fall of Muhu Stronghold and the surrender of Valjala Stronghold, the Oeselians formally accepted Christianity.

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• 7. Treaties and Broken Peace

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  The Battle of Saule in 1236 ended in defeat for the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, and fighting on Saaremaa flared again. By 1241 the Oeselians had accepted Christianity a second time, signing treaties with Andreas de Velven, Master of the Livonian Order, and with the Bishopric of Ösel-Wiek. Those agreements set penalties for pagan rituals. A further treaty followed in 1255, signed by the Order's Master, Anno Sangerhausenn. Elders signed for the Oeselians, and Latin scribes wrote their names down by sound as Ylle, Culle, Enu, Muntelene, Tappete, Yalde, Melete and Cake. The treaty gave the islanders several extraordinary rights, with unique clauses on land ownership and inheritance and on the social system. It also exempted them from certain restrictive religious observances. Yet in 1261 the Oeselians renounced Christianity again and killed all the Germans on the island. A united force of the Livonian Order, the Bishopric, and troops from Danish Estonia, including mainland Estonians and Latvians, conquered the Kaarma stronghold. A peace treaty followed, and soon afterward the Order built a stone fort at Pöide.

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• 8. The Night of 1343

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  On the 24th of July 1343, during the St. George's Night Uprising, the Oeselians killed all the Germans on the island and drowned the clerics. They then besieged the Livonian Order's castle at Pöide. They leveled it and killed its defenders. The Order answered in February 1344 with a campaign across the frozen sea. The Oeselians' stronghold fell and their leader was hanged. A further campaign in the early spring of 1345 ended with a treaty, which the Chronicle of Hermann von Wartberge and the Novgorod First Chronicle both mention. Saaremaa remained a vassal of the master of the Livonian Order and of the Bishopric of Ösel-Wiek. The island's later fate passed through several royal hands, beginning with a sale in 1559.

  In 1559 the Livonian Order fell in the Livonian War, and the Bishopric of Ösel-Wiek sold Saaremaa to Frederick II of Denmark. He gave the lands to his brother, Duke Magnus of Holstein. Denmark later took the island back under its direct administration. In 1645 the Treaty of Brömsebro made Saaremaa part of Sweden. The island that had once sent ships against Danish and Swedish shores thus entered the Swedish realm by treaty, not by the sword.

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