The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [39]
To reach Samland, Grunovii would have followed one of three ancient Amber Routes that had linked the Classical world and northern Europe since before the time of Herodotus. Ancient thinkers held in great fear those who lived beyond the 'tired world' that stopped abruptly at the line of the Alps.4 In the north was ultima Thule, the furthest region of the world. Until the early sixteenth century many people still believed the stories of Adam of Bremen, an eleventh-century chronicler who claimed, in his Descriptions of the Islands of the North, that here lived a race of Amazonians who gave birth to male children with the heads of dogs.
Recent archaeological studies have revealed that the three Amber Routes were twenty-foot-wide log roads constructed on beds of branches, fastened together with pegs and topped off with sand and sod. Grunovii would almost certainly have followed the eastern Amber Route. This would have involved boarding a ship in the Gulf of Venice and crossing the Adriatic bound for Trieste, where he would have ridden with traders' caravans heading over the Alps for the Danube. Continuing to the River Oder, Grunovii would have gone north, eventually reaching the eastern Baltic.5
Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Uppsala, was among the first to illustrate Grunovii's destination in a hide-bound Encyclopaedia of Natural Products published in Rome in 1555. Across one page was a crude map of Samland, a clearly recognizable peninsula reaching out into the Baltic. Along the coastline were dotted ominous-looking watchtowers and beside one was the figure of a man dressed in cap and pantaloons, whose foot rested on a shovel, his finger pointing to a barrel at his feet from which exploded a fountain of light. Beside him was printed the word succinu (succinum, the Latin for 'juice', also meant sap, and then later amber). The Samland Peninsula was the source of the Gold of the North.6
Simonis Grunovii described what he saw: 'When there is a northerly gale all the peasants in the vicinity must come to the beach and run with nets into the sea to fish for the floating amber... but many will drown.7 When the sea roiled and the wind rose in November and December, amber resin was shaken loose from the seabed and could be scooped into nets. The men who fished for it wore leather 'cuirasses with deep pockets' and became 'frozen in icy waters and have to be thawed before they can be taken to their huts or put out again to work and for this reason big fires are kept upon the shore'. Men were roped together to battle the treacherous undertow and carried twenty-foot poles up which they clambered when the highest waves crashed down.
Grunovii wrote that these amber 'fishermen' were slaves, bonded by the Teutonic Knights, a German religious army that seized control of the region and grew rich by monopolizing the amber. 'The High Master of Prussia profits greatly... because he is paid approximately eighty marks for a ton.' It was a monopoly enforced by terror. An edict published by one of the order's judges 'prohibited the free collection of amber by hanging from the nearest tree... his henchmen applying instant justice, these servants having the right to kill anyone committing the deed without interrogation'. And riding to the coast, through Elbing, Pillau, Fischhausen and Gross Dirschkeim, the Dominican monk glimpsed carcasses swinging from the gallows.
Olaus Magnus's sixteenth-century map of the Samland Peninsula, showing the amber fishing grounds and burning barrels beside which fishermen thawed out after wading through the freezing Baltic Sea
Frontispiece depicting amber fishermen from P.]. Hartmann's book, published in 1677
Grunovii was directed to the main city on the Samland Peninsula, from