Chapter 6

Wherever danger threatens Valdemar and Absalon, Esbern is found, too, earning the name of the Fleet (Snare), which the people had fondly given to their favorite. Where the fighting was hardest, he was sure to be. The King’s son had ventured too far and was caught in a tight place by an overwhelming force, when Esbern pushed his ship in between him and the enemy and bore the brunt of a fight that came near to making an end of him. He had at last only a single man left, but the two made a stand against a hundred. “When the heathen saw his face they fled in terror.” At last they knocked him senseless with a stone and would have killed him, but in the nick of time the King’s men came to the rescue.

Coming home from Norway he ran afoul of forty pirate ships under the coast of Seeland. He tried to steal past; forty against one were heavy odds. But it was moonlight and he was discovered. The pirates lay across his course and cut him off. Esbern made ready for a fight and steered straight into the middle of them. The steersman complained that he had no armor, and he gave him his own. He beat his pursuers off again and again, but the wind slackened and they were closing in once more, swearing by their heathen gods that they would have him dead or alive, for a Danish prisoner on one of their ships had told who he was. But Esbern had more than one string to his bow. He sent a man aloft with flint and steel to strike fire in the top, and the pirates, believing that he was signalling to a fleet he had in ambush, fled helter-skelter. Esbern got home safe.

The German emperors’ fingers had always itched for the over-lordship of the Danish isles, and they have not ceased to do so to this day. When Frederick Barbarossa drove Alexander III from Rome and set up a rival Pope in his place, Archbishop Eskild of Lund, who was the Primate of the North, championed the exiled Pope’s case, and Valdemar, whose path the ambitious priest had crossed more than once, let it be known that he inclined to the Emperor’s cause, in part probably from mere pique, perhaps also because he thought it good politics. The archbishop in a rage summoned Absalon and bade him join him in a rising against the King. Absalon’s answer is worthy the man and friend:

“My oath to you I will keep, and in this wise, that I will not counsel you to your own undoing. Whatever your cause against the King, war against him you cannot, and succeed. And this know, that never will I join with you against my liege lord, to whom I have sworn fealty and friendship with heart and soul all the days of my life.”

He could not persuade the archbishop, who went his own way and was beaten and exiled for a season, nor could he prevent the King from yielding to the blandishments of Frederick and getting mixed up in the papal troubles; but he went with him to Germany and saved him at the last moment from committing himself by making him leave the church council just as the anti-pope was about to pronounce sentence of excommunication against Alexander. He commanded Absalon to remain, as a servant of the church, but Absalon replied calmly that he was not there in that capacity, but as an attendant on his King, and must follow where he went. It appeared speedily that the Emperor’s real object was to get Valdemar to own him as his over-lord, and this he did, to Absalon’s great grief, on the idle promise that Frederick would join him in his war upon all the Baltic pagans. However, it was to be a purely personal matter, in nowise affecting his descendants. That much was saved, and Absalon lived long enough to fling back, as the counsellor of Valdemar’s son, from behind the stout wall he built at Denmark’s southern gate, the Emperor’s demand for homage, with the reply that “the King ruled in Denmark with the same right as the Emperor in Germany, and was no man’s subject.”

However grievously Absalon had offended the aged archbishop, when after forty years in his high office illness compelled him to lay it down, he could find no one so worthy to step into his shoes. He sent secretly to Rome and got the Pope’s permission to name his own successor, before he called a meeting of the church. The account of what followed is the most singular of all Saxo’s stories. Valdemar did not know what was coming and, fearing fresh trouble, got the archbishop to swear on the bones of the saints before them all that he was not moved to abdication by hate of the King, or by any coercion whatever. Then the venerable priest laid his staff, his mitre, and his ring on the altar and announced that he had done with it all forever. But he had made up his mind not to use the power given him by the Pontiff. They might choose his successor themselves. He would do nothing to influence their action.

The bishops and clergy went to the King and asked him if he had any choice. The King said he had, but if he made it known he would get no thanks for it and might estrange his best friend. If he did not, he would certainly be committing a sin. He did not know what to do.

“Name him,” said they, and Valdemar told them it was the bishop of Roskilde.

At that the old archbishop got up and insisted on the election then and there; but Absalon would have none of it. The burden was too heavy for his shoulders, he said. However, the clergy seized him, “being,” says Saxo, who without doubt was one of them, “the more emboldened to do so as the archbishop himself laid hands upon him first.” Intoning the hymn sung at archiepiscopal consecrations, they tried to lead him to the altar. He resisted with all his might and knocked several of the brethren down. Vestments were torn and scattered, and a mighty ruction arose, to which the laity, not to be outdone, added by striking up a hymn of their own. Archbishop and King tried vainly to make peace; the clamor and battle only rose the higher. Despite his struggles, Absalon was dragged to the high seat, but as they were about to force him into it, he asked leave to say a single word, and instantly appealed his case to the Pope. So there was an end; but when the aged Eskild, on the plea of weakness, begged him to pronounce the benediction, he refused warily, because so he would be exercising archiepiscopal functions and would be _de facto_ incumbent of the office.[6]

Here, as always, Absalon thought less of himself than of his country, so the event showed. For when the Pope heard his plea, though he decided against him, he allowed him to hold the bishopric of Roskilde together with the higher office, and so he was left at Valdemar’s side to help finish their work of building up Denmark within and without. At Roskilde he spent, as a matter of fact, most of his time while Valdemar lived. At Lund he would have been in a distant part of the country, parted from his friend and out of touch with the things that were the first concern of his life.

They were preparing to aim a decisive blow against the Pomeranian pagans when Valdemar died, on the very day set for the sailing. The parting nearly killed Absalon. Saxo draws a touching picture of him weeping bitterly as he said the requiem mass over his friend, and observes: “Who can doubt that his tears, rising with the incense, gave forth a peculiar and agreeable savour in high heaven before God?” The plowmen left their fields and carried the bier, with sobs and lamentations, to the church in Ringsted, where the great King rests. His sorrow laid Absalon on a long and grievous sick-bed, from which he rose only when Valdemar’s son needed and called him.

In the fifteen years that follow we see his old warlike spirit still unbroken. Thus his defiance of the German Emperor, whose anger was hot. Frederick, in revenge, persuaded the Pomeranian duke Bugislav to organize a raid on Denmark with a fleet of five hundred sail. Scant warning reached Absalon of the danger. King Knud was away, and there was no time to send for him. Mustering such vessels as were near, he sailed across the Baltic and met the enemy under Rügen the day after Whitsuntide (1184). The bishop had gone ashore to say mass on the beach, when word was brought that the great fleet was in sight. Hastily pulling off his robe and donning armor instead, he made for his ship with the words: “Now let our swords sing the praise of God.” The Pomeranians were taken completely by surprise. They did not know the Danes were there, and when they heard the archbishop’s dreaded war-cry raised, they turned and fled in such terror and haste that eighteen of their ships were run down and sunk with all on board. On one, a rower hanged himself for fear of falling into the hands of the Danes. Absalon gave chase, and the rout became complete. Of the five hundred ships only thirty-five escaped; all the rest were either sunk or taken. Duke Bugislav soon after became a vassal of Denmark, and of the Emperor’s plots there was an end.

It was the last blow, and the story of it went far and wide. Absalon’s work was nearly done. Denmark was safe from her enemies. The people were happy and prosperous. Valdemar’s son ruled unchallenged, and though he was childless, by his side stood his brother, a manly youth who, not yet full grown, had already shown such qualities of courage and sagacious leadership that the old archbishop could hang up the sword with heart at ease. The promise was kept. The second Valdemar became Denmark’s royal hero for all time. Absalon’s last days were devoted to strengthening the Church, around which he had built such a stout wall. He built churches and cloisters, and guided them with a wise and firm hand. And he made Saxo, his clerk, set it all down as an eye-witness of these things, and as one who came to the task by right; for, says the chronicler, “have not my grandfather and his father before him served the King well on land and sea, hence why should not I serve him with my book-learning?” He bears witness that the bishop himself is his authority for much that he has written.

Archbishop Absalon closed his eyes on St. Benedict’s Day, March 21, 1201, in the cloister at Sorö which Sir Asker built and where he lived his last days in peace. Absalon’s statue of bronze, on horseback, battle-axe in hand, stands in the market square in Copenhagen, the city he founded and of which he is the patron saint; but his body lies within the quiet sanctuary where, in the deep forest glades, one listens yet for the evensong of the monks, long silent now. When his grave was opened, in 1826, the lines of his tall form, clad in clerical robes, were yet clearly traceable. The strong hands, turned to dust, held a silver chalice in which lay his episcopal ring. They are there to be seen to-day, with remnants of his staff that had partly crumbled away. No Dane approaches his grave without emotion. “All Denmark grieved for him,” says a German writer of that day, “and commended his soul to Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, for that in his lifetime he had led many who were enemies to peace and concord.” In his old cathedral, in Roskilde town, lies Saxo, according to tradition under an unmarked stone. When he went to rest his friend and master had slept five years.

Esbern outlived his brother three years. The hero of so many battles met his death at last by an accidental fall in his own house. The last we hear of him is at a meeting in the Christmas season, 1187, where emissaries of Pope Gregory VIII preached a general crusade. Their hearers wept at the picture they drew of the sufferings Christians were made to endure in the Holy Land. Then arose Esbern and reminded them of the great deeds of the fathers at home and abroad. The faith and the fire of Absalon were in his words:

“These things they did,” he said, “for the glory of their name and race, knowing nothing of our holy religion. Shall we, believing, do less? Let us lay aside our petty quarrels and take up this greater cause. Let us share the sufferings of the saints and earn their reward. Perhaps we shall win—God keeps the issue. Let him who cannot give himself, give of his means. So shall all we, sharing the promise, share also the reward.”

The account we have says that many took the cross, such was the effect of his words, more likely of the man and what he was and had been in the sight of them all throughout his long life.

Footnotes:

[3] Pronounced Reeg.

[4] Pronounced Snare, with a as in are. In the Danish hare rhymes with snare, so pronounced.

[5] Pronounced Veethe.

[6] That all this in no way affected the personal relations of the two men Saxo assures us in one of the little human touches with which his chronicle abounds. When Eskild was going away to end his days as a monk in the monastery of Clairvaux, he rested awhile with Absalon at his castle Haffn, where he was received as a father. The old man suffered greatly from cold feet, and Absalon made a box with many little holes in, and put a hot brick in it. With this at his feet, Eskild was able to sleep, and he was very grateful to Absalon, both because of the comfort it gave him and “because that he perceived that filial piety rather than skill in the healer’s art” prompted the invention.

KING VALDEMAR, AND THE STORY OF THE DANNEBROG

To the court of King Ottocar of Bohemia there came in the year 1205 a brilliant embassy from far-off Denmark to ask the hand of his daughter Dragomir for King Valdemar, the young ruler of that country. Sir Strange[7] Ebbesoen and Bishop Peder Sunesön were the spokesmen, and many knights, whose fame had travelled far in the long years of fighting to bring the Baltic pagans under the cross, rode with them. The old king received them with delight. Valdemar was not only a good son-in-law for a king to have, being himself a great and renowned ruler, but he was a splendid knight, tall and handsome, of most courteous bearing, ambitious, manly, and of ready wit. So their suit prospered well. The folk-song tells how they fared; how, according to the custom of those days, Sir Strange wedded the fair princess by proxy for his lord, and how King Ottocar, when he bade her good-by, took this promise of her:

In piety, virtue, and fear of God, Let all thy days be spent; And ever thy subjects be thy thought, Their hopes on thy care be bent.

The daughter kept her vow. Never was queen more beloved of her people than Dagmar. That was the name they gave her in Denmark, for the Bohemian Dragomir was strange to them. Dagmar meant daybreak in their ancient tongue, and it really seemed as if a new and beautiful day dawned upon the land in her coming. The dry pages of history have little enough to tell of her beyond the simple fact of her marriage and untimely death, though they are filled with her famous husband’s deeds; but not all of his glorious campaigns that earned for him the name of “The Victor” have sunk so deep into the people’s memory, or have taken such hold of their hearts, as the lovely queen who

Came without burden, she came with peace; She came the good peasant to cheer.

Through all the centuries the people have sung her praise, and they sing it yet. Of the many folk-songs that have come down from the middle ages, those that tell of Queen Dagmar are the sweetest, as they are the most mournful, for her happiness was as brief as her life was beautiful.

They sailed homeward over sunny seas, until they came to the shore where the royal lover awaited his bride, impatiently scanning the horizon for the gilded dragon’s head of the ship that bore her. The minstrel sings of the great wedding that was held in the old city of Ribe.[8] The gray old cathedral in which they knelt together still stands; but of Valdemar’s strong castle only a grass-grown hill is left. It was the privilege of a bride in those days to ask a gift of her husband on the morning after the wedding, and have it granted without question. Two boons did Dagmar crave,

“right early in the morning, long before it was day”:

one, that the plow-tax might be forgiven the peasant, and that those who for rising against it had been laid in irons be set free; the other, that the prison door of Bishop Valdemar be opened. Bishop Valdemar was the arch-enemy of the King. The first request he granted; but the other he refused for cause:

An’ he comes out, Bishop Valdemar, Widow he makes you this year.

And he did his worst; for in the end the King yielded to Dagmar’s prayers, and much mischief came of it.

Seven years the good queen lived. Seven centuries have not dimmed the memory of them, or of her. The King was away in a distant part of the country when they sent to him in haste with the message that the queen was dying. The ballad tells of his fears as he sees Dagmar’s page coming, and they proved only too true.

The king his checker-board shut in haste, The dice they rattled and rung. Forbid it God, who dwells in heaven, That Dagmar should die so young.

In the wild ride over field and moor, the King left his men far behind:

When the king rode out of Skanderborg Him followed a hundred men. But when he rode o’er Ribe bridge, Then rode the king alone.

The tears of weeping women told him as he thundered over the drawbridge of the castle that he was too late. But Dagmar had only swooned. As he throws himself upon her bed she opens her eyes, and smiles upon her husband. Her last prayer, as her first, is for mercy and peace. Her sin, she says, is not great; she has done nothing worse than to lace her silken sleeves on a Sunday. Then she closes her eyes with a tired sigh:

The bells of heaven are chiming for me; No more may I stay to speak.

Thus the folk-song. Long before Dagmar went to her rest, Bishop Valdemar had stirred up all Germany to wreak his vengeance upon the King. He was an ambitious, unscrupulous priest, who hated his royal master because he held himself entitled to the crown, being the natural son of King Knud, who was murdered at Roskilde, as told in the story of Absalon. While they were yet young men, when he saw that the people followed his rival, he set the German princes against Denmark, a task he never found hard. But young Valdemar made short work of them. He took the strong cities on the Elbe and laid the lands of his adversaries under the Danish crown. The bishop he seized, and threw him into the dungeon of Söborg Castle, where he had sat thirteen years when Dagmar’s prayers set him free. He could hardly walk when he came out, but he could hate, and all the world knew it. The Pope bound him with heavy oaths never to return to Denmark, and made him come to Italy so that he could keep an eye on him himself. But two years had not passed before he broke his oath, and fled to Bremen, where the people elected him to the vacant archbishopric and its great political power. Forthwith he began plotting against his native land.

In the bitter feud between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines he found his opportunity. One of the rival emperors marched an army north to help the perjured priest. King Valdemar hastened to meet them, but on the eve of battle the Emperor was slain by one of his own men. On Sunday, when the archbishop was saying mass in the Bremen cathedral, an unknown knight, the visor of whose helmet was closed so that no one saw his face, strode up to the altar, and laying a papal bull before him, cried out that he was accursed, and under the ban of the church. The people fled, and forsaken by all, the wretched man turned once more to Rome in submission. But though the Pope forgave him on condition that he meddle no more with politics, war, or episcopal office, another summer found him wielding sword and lance against the man he hated, this time under the banner of the Guelphs. The Germans had made another onset on Denmark, but again King Valdemar defeated them. The bishop intrenched himself in Hamburg, and made a desperate resistance, but the King carried the city by storm. The beaten and hopeless man fled, and shut himself up in a cloister in Hanover, where daily and nightly he scourged himself for his sins. If it is true that “hell was fashioned by the souls that hated,” not all the penance of all the years must have availed to save him from the torments of the lost.

Denmark now had peace on its southern border. Dagmar was dead, and Valdemar, whose restless soul yearned for new worlds to conquer, turned toward the east where the wild Esthland tribes were guilty of even worse outrages than the Wends before Absalon tamed them. The dreadful cruelties practised by these pagans upon christian captives cried aloud to all civilized Europe, and Valdemar took the cross “for the honor of the Virgin Mary and the absolution of his sins,” and gathered a mighty fleet, the greatest ever assembled in Danish waters. With more than a thousand ships he sailed across the Baltic. The Pope sped them with his apostolic blessing, and took king and people into his especial care, forbidding any one to attack the country while they were away converting the heathen. Archbishop Anders led the crusade with the king. As the fleet approached the shore they saw it covered with an innumerable host of the enemy. So great was their multitude that the crusaders quailed before the peril of landing; but the archbishop put heart into them, and led the fleet in fervent prayer to the God of battle. Then they landed without hindrance.

There was an old stronghold there called Lyndanissa that had fallen into decay. The crusaders busied themselves for two days with building another and better fort. On the third day, being St. Vitus’ Day, they rested, fearing no harm. The Esthlanders had not troubled them. Some of their chiefs had even come in with an offer of surrender. They were willing to be converted, they said, and the priests were baptizing them after vespers, while the camp was making ready for the night, when suddenly the air was filled with the yells of countless savages. On every side they broke from the woods, where they had been gathering unsuspected, and overwhelmed the camp. The guards were hewn down, the outposts taken, and the King’s men were falling back in confusion, their standard lost, when Prince Vitislav of Rügen who had been camping with his men in a hollow between the sand-hills, out of the line of attack, threw himself between them and the Esthlanders, and gave the Danes time to form their lines.

In the twilight of the June evening the battle raged with great fury. With the King at their head, who had led them to victory on so many hard-fought fields, the Danes drove back their savage foes time after time, literally hewing their way through their ranks with sword and battle-axe. But they were hopelessly outnumbered. Their hearts misgave them as they saw ten heathen spring out of the ground for every one that was felled. The struggle grew fiercer as night came on. The Christians were fighting for life; defeat meant that they must perish to a man, by the sword or upon pagan altars; escape there was none. Upon the cliff overlooking the battle-field the archbishop and his priests were praying for success to the King’s arms. Tradition that has been busy with this great battle all through the ages tells how, while the aged bishop’s hands were raised toward heaven, victory leaned to the Danes; but when he grew tired, and let them fall, the heathen won forward, until the priests held up his hands and once more the tide of battle rolled back from the shore, and the Christian war-cry rose higher.