According to present knowledge, the town of Turku was founded in the late 13th century. It became the largest of the six medieval Finnish towns, and the largest town in the eastern part of medieval Sweden (Österland; Partes orientales). Moreover, it was the centre of the Diocese of Turku, covering roughly the area of present-day Finland (Hiekkanen 2001, 627; 2002, 157–177; 2003, 42–48; 2007, 189, 191). The medieval concept of ‘Finland’ must be understood primarily as a geographical area covering the eastern part of Sweden (on the different names, concepts and their problems concerning the area of medieval Finland, see Heikkilä 2010, 18–20).
At the end of the Middle Ages, the town formed an area of approximately 700 × 100–300 metres, mainly on the southeast bank of the Aura (Fi. Aurajoki) River (Figure 10.1). There is no medieval information on the population, but according to cameral sources of the mid-16th century it can be estimated at the time to have been between 2,000 and 3,000 (Kaukiainen 1980, 105). Even if Turku is the modern Finnish name of the town, the official (Swedish) name in the Middle Ages was Åbo. This name was also the basis for the German Abo and the Latin form Aboa, in the Middle Ages mostly occurring in the form Aboensis (on the names, see Pihlman and Kostet 1986, 7–9).
This article tries to piece together a small part of a large puzzle of medieval crafts in Finland. It deals with leatherworking and the manufacture of related artefacts in the town of Turku and the nearby Turku Castle, focusing on the Middle Ages (c. 14th-early 16th century). It must be taken into account that the archaeological material in Turku has accumulated over a period of more than a hundred years, and evidently the quality of documentation has varied considerably in the course of time. Systematic fieldwork (i.e. archaeological excavations and surveys of modern methods as they are understood today) have been carried out in Turku mainly from the 1980s onwards.
Despite the varying level of documentation of archaeological material, given the scarcity of written documents, archaeology provides the key evidence that may be used to answer questions related to medieval crafts in Finland in general. In this paper it is asked, what kind of material remains related to leather crafts there are available in Turku, and can this evidence help us in trying to distinguish the individual trades through the vast archaeological mass material, when supplemented with the written sources available? The remit of this paper is not to provide a complete picture of leather crafts in medieval Turku, which would only really be possible in theory. It is however, important to keep in mind the question covering the whole subject – what kind of people-and-things connections once formed the actor-network of leather trades in medieval Turku?