At the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries, Norway was just joining the ranks of Latin Christian countries, having been Christianized for barely a century. Despite this, it was from there that the first European monarch set out to visit Jerusalem after its capture by the Crusaders. Sigurd I was eighteen years old, had sixty ships, and ambitions that took him across half the known world.
The Young Jarl
Sigurd knew the sea before ever wearing a king’s crown. In 1098, when his father Magnus III seized archipelagos between Scotland and Ireland, the thirteen-year-old boy was granted the title of Jarl of Orkney. He married the daughter of an Irish ruler, strengthening the Norwegians’ position on western waters.
Five years later, Magnus died during an expedition to Ireland, and his three sons divided the kingdom among themselves. Sigurd took the north, Eystein the south, and the youngest, Olaf, was too young to rule independently and died before he did.
The brothers’ co-rule proceeded smoothly, but Sigurd apparently needed more than just governing distant fjords. News of the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 reached the north slowly, but when it did, it sparked imaginations. Less than a decade later, the king pinned a pilgrim’s cross to his cloak and began assembling a fleet.
Through England and Spain
In the autumn of 1108, sixty ships sailed from Norway’s western ports. The first stop was England, where the fleet spent the winter. In spring, they headed further south, passing the coasts of France until they reached Galicia. There, for the first time, the Norwegians encountered Muslims not as merchants or envoys, but as opponents in battle.
The area around Lisbon was plundered. The Moorish castle dominating Sintra fell to the northerners. After crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, the fleet turned toward the Balearic Islands, where a real challenge awaited.
On Formentera, Saracen pirates hid in a fortified cave, confident in its inaccessibility. They were wrong. The sagas describe how the Norwegians captured the stronghold and carried out treasures that funded their further journey. Ibiza and Minorca also felt the force of northern aggression before the ships set course for Sicily.
A Bath in the Jordan
In spring 1110, Norwegian ships entered the ports of Jaffa and Acre. Arab chroniclers recorded the arrival of an unknown Frankish fleet, unable to distinguish the Norwegians from other western visitors.
King Baldwin I welcomed the guest personally, a rare honor. The two rulers traveled together to Jerusalem, where Sigurd saw places he had only heard about from the missionaries who baptized his great-grandfathers.
Pilgrim tradition required a ritual washing in the waters of the Jordan. Sigurd immersed himself in the same river where, according to the Gospels, John baptized Jesus. Baldwin’s gestures of hospitality went even further.
According to Icelandic sagas, he gifted the Norwegian king a fragment of the True Cross, a relic of immense symbolic value. For a ruler from the distant north, whose grandparents still made offerings to Odin, it was a gift beyond all imagination.
The Siege of Sidon and the Price of Success
The visit to Jerusalem also had a military dimension. Baldwin needed a fleet, and Sigurd had the best ships in the eastern Mediterranean. Sidon, a port city controlled by Muslims, served as a base for Arab vessels attacking Latin coasts. Two years earlier, the Crusaders had tried to capture it, but the Egyptian Fatimid fleet broke the blockade. Now the situation was different.
In October 1110, the siege began. Norwegian ships tightly closed the port. When the Egyptian relief fleet arrived, it was forced to turn back in the face of overwhelming opposition. In early December, Muslim notables opened the gates to Baldwin.
Sigurd could consider his mission accomplished. He sailed to Constantinople, where he gifted his ships to the Byzantine Emperor in exchange for horses and an escort to the borders of the empire. A year later, he returned to Norway with the nickname Jorsalfare, the Jerusalem traveler. Ahead of him awaited wars with Sweden, the establishment of a bishopric in Greenland, and the dark years of mental illness—but that is another story.
Autor
Margot Cleverly
Margot's journey into women's history began with a box of forgotten letters in a Cambridge archive – suffragettes whose voices had been silenced for over a century. Since then, she's been on a mission to uncover the stories history overlooked.
What she writes about: Queens who ruled from the shadows. Scientists whose male colleagues took credit. Revolutionaries who risked everything. But also ordinary women – those who survived wars, raised families through upheaval, and shaped their communities in ways no one bothered to record.
Margot turns historical figures into real people. She writes with warmth and detail, making centuries-old stories feel surprisingly relevant. Rigorous research meets accessible storytelling – no dusty academic jargon, just compelling narratives backed by solid facts.
When she's not writing, you'll find her in regional archives, collecting oral histories, or visiting sites connected to the women she writes about.