Norwegian Crusade
| Norwegian Crusade | |||||||||
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| Part of the Crusades (aftermath of First Crusade) | |||||||||
 King Sigurd sails from the country by Gerhard Munthe. |
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
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Norwegians
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Unknown | ||||||||
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| Unknown | In Iberia, two towns were said to have been extinguished. Also, many were slain in other places. | ||||||||
The Norwegian Crusade was a crusade that lasted from 1107 to 1110, in the aftermath of the First Crusade, led by Norwegian king Sigurd I. Sigurd was the first Scandinavian king to go on crusade to the Holy Land. The crusaders did not lose a single battle during the Norwegian Crusade.
Sigurd and his men sailed from Norway in the autumn of 1107 with sixty ships and perhaps around 5,000 men. In the autumn he arrived in England, where Henry I was king. Sigurd and his men stayed there the entire winter, until the spring of 1108, when they again set sail westwards.
After several months they came to the town of Santiago de Compostela (Jakobsland) in Galicia (Galizuland) where they were allowed by a local lord to stay for the winter. However, when the winter came there was a shortage of food, which caused the lord to refuse to sell food and goods to the Norwegians. Sigurd then gathered his army, attacked the lord's castle and looted what they could there.
During the journey, the Norwegians encountered a great pirate fleet of galleys which were seeking peaceful trading ships to rob. However, Sigurd set his course straight for the pirates and stormed their ships. After a short time all the pirates had been either slain or escaped, and Sigurd acquired eight ships from them.
After this they came to a castle in Muslim Al-Andalus called Sintra (Sintre - present day Sintra, Portugal, probably referring to Colares, which is closer to the sea). They took the castle, and killed every man there, as they had refused to be christened. They then sailed to Lisbon, a "half Christian and half heathen" city, said to be on the dividing line between Christian and Muslim Iberia. There they won their third battle, and acquired great treasures.
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