fighting men, as was the custom of their class. Absalon, indeed,
was destined for the church; but in a country so recently won from
the old war gods, it was the church militant yet, and he wielded
spear and sword with the best of them. When, at eighteen, they
sent him to France to be taught, he did not for his theological
studies neglect the instruction of his boyhood. There he became
the disciple and friend of the Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, more
powerful then than prince or Pope, and when the abbot preached the
second great crusade, promising eternal salvation to those who
took up arms against the unbelievers, whether to wrest from them
the Holy Sepulchre or to plant the cross among the wild heathen
on the Baltic, his heart burned hot within him. It was a long way
to the Holy Land, but with the Baltic robbers his people had a
grievous score to settle. Their yells had sounded in his boyish
ears as they ravished the shores of his fatherland, penetrating
with murder and pillage almost to his peaceful home. And so, while
he lent a diligent ear to the teachings of the church, earning the
name of the “most learned clerk” in the cloister of Ste. Geneviève
in Paris, daily he laid the breviary aside and took up sword and
lance, learning the arts of modern warfare with the graces of
chivalry. In the old way of fighting, man to man, the men of the
North had been the equals of any, if not their betters; but against
the new methods of warfare their prowess availed little. Absalon,
the monk, kept his body strong while soul and mind matured. When
nothing more adventurous befell, he chopped down trees for the
cloister hearths. But oftener the clash of arms echoed in the quiet
halls, or the peaceful brethren crossed themselves as they watched
him break an unruly horse in the cloister fen. Saxo tells us that
he swam easily in full armor, and in more than one campaign in
later years saved drowning comrades who were not so well taught.
The while he watched rising all about some of the finest churches
in Christendom. It was the era of cathedral building in Europe.
The Romanesque style of architecture had reached its highest
development in the very France where he spent his young manhood’s
years, and the Gothic, with its stamp of massive strength, was
beginning to displace its gentler curve. Ten years of such an
environment, in a land teeming with historic traditions, rounded
out the man who set his face toward home, bent on redeeming his
people from the unjust reproach of being mere “barbarians of the
North.”
It was a stricken Denmark to which he came back. Three claimants
were fighting for the crown. The land was laid waste by sea-rovers,
who saw their chance to raid defenceless homes while the men able
to bear arms were following the rival kings. The people had lost
hope. Just when Absalon returned, peace was made between the
claimants. Knud, Svend, and Valdemar, his foster brother of old,
divided up the country between them. They swore a dear oath to keep
the pact, but for all that “the three kingdoms did not last three
days.” The treacherous Svend waited only for a chance to murder
both his rivals, and it came quickly, when he and Valdemar were
the guests of Knud at Roskilde. They had eaten and drunk together
and were gathered in the “Storstue,” the big room of the house,
when Knud saw Svend whispering aside with his men. With a sudden
foreboding of evil, he threw his arms about Valdemar’s shoulders
and kissed him. The young King, who was playing chess with one
of his men, looked up in surprise and asked what it meant. Just
then Svend left the hall, and his henchmen fell upon the two with
drawn swords. Knud was cut down at once, his head cleft in twain.
Valdemar upset the table with the candles and, wrapping his cloak
about his arm to ward off the blows that showered upon him, knocked
his assailants right and left and escaped, badly wounded.
Absalon came into the room as Knud fell and, thinking it was
Valdemar, caught him in his arms and took his wounded head in his
lap. Sitting there in utter sorrow and despair, heedless of the
tumult that raged in the darkness around him, he felt the King’s
garment and knew that the man who was breathing his last in his
arms was not his friend. He laid the lifeless body down gently and
left the hall. The murderers barred his way, but he brushed their
swords and spears aside and strode forth unharmed. Valdemar had
found a horse and made for Fjenneslev, twenty miles away, with all
speed, and there Absalon met him and his brother Esbern in the
morning.
King Svend sought him high and low to finish his dastardly work,
while on Thing he wailed loudly before the people that Valdemar
and Knud had tried to kill him, showing in proof of it his cloak,
which he had rent with his own sword. But Valdemar’s friends were
wide awake. Esbern flew through the island on his fleet horse
in Valdemar’s clothes, leading his pursuers a merry dance, and
when the young King’s wound was healed, he found him a boat and
ferried him across to the mainland, where the people flocked to
his standard. When Svend would have followed, it was the Lady Inge
who scuttled his ship by night and gave her foster son the start
he needed. There followed a short and sharp struggle that ended on
Grathe Heath with the utter rout of Svend’s forces. He himself was
killed, and Valdemar at last was King of all Denmark.
From that time the three friends were inseparable as in the old
days when they played about the fields of Fjenneslev. Absalon was
the keeper of the King’s conscience who was not afraid to tell him
the truth when he needed to hear it. And where they were Esbern
was found, never wavering in his loyalty to either. Within a year
Absalon was made bishop of Roskilde, the chief See of Denmark.
Saxo innocently discovers to us King Valdemar’s little ruse to
have his friend chosen. He was yet a very young man, scarce turned
thirty, and had not been considered at all for the vacancy. There
were three candidates, all of powerful families, and, according to
ecclesiastical law, the brethren of the chapter were the electors.
The King went to their meeting and addressed them in person.
Nothing was farther from him, he said, than to wish to interfere
with their proper rights. Each must do as his conscience dictated,
unhindered. And with that he laid on the table _four_ books with
blank leaves and bade them write down their names in them, each for
his own choice, to get the matter right on the record. The brethren
thanked him kindly and all voted “nicely together” for Absalon. So
three of the books were wasted. But presently Saxo found good use
for them.
For now had come the bishop’s chance of putting in practice the
great abbot’s precepts. “Pray and fight” was the motto he had
written into the Knights Templars’ rule, and Absalon had made it
his own. Of what use was it to build up the church at home, when
any day might see it raided by its enemies who were always watching
their chance outside? The Danish waters swarmed with pirates, the
very pagans against whom Abbot Bernard had preached his crusade. Of
them all the Wends were the worst, as they were the most powerful
of the Slav tribes that still resisted the efforts of their
neighbors, the Christian Germans, to dislodge them from their old
home on the Baltic. They lived in the island of Rügen, fairly in
sight of the Danish shores. Every favoring wind blew them across
the sea in shoals to burn and ravage. The Danes, once the terror of
the seas, had given over roving when they accepted the White Christ
in exchange for Thor and his hammer, and now, when they would be at
peace, they were in turn beset by this relentless enemy, who burned
their homes and their crops and dragged the peaceful husbandman
away to make him a thrall or offer him up as a sacrifice to heathen
idols. More than a third of all Denmark lay waste under their
ferocious assault. Here was the blow to be struck if the country
was to have peace and the church prosperity.
The chance to strike came speedily. Absalon had been bishop only
a few months when, on the evening before Palm Sunday, word was
brought that the enemy had landed, twenty-four ship-crews strong,
and were burning and murdering as usual. Absalon marshalled his
eighteen house-carles and such of the country folk as he could,
and fell upon the Wends, routing them utterly. A bare handful
escaped, the rest were killed, while the bishop lost but a single
man. He said mass next morning, red-handed it is true, but one may
well believe that for all that his Easter message reached hearts
filled with a new, glad hope for their homes and for the country.
That was a bishop they could understand. So the first blow Absalon
struck for his people was at home. But he did not long wait for
the enemy to come to him. Half his long and stirring life he lived
on the seas, seeking them there. Saxo mentions, in speaking of his
return from one of his cruises, that he had then been nine months
on shipboard. And in a way he was shepherding his flock there, if
it was with a scourge; for, many years before, a Danish king had
punished the Wends in their own home and laid their lands under the
See of Roskilde, though little good it did them or any one else
then. But when Absalon had got his grip, there were days when he
baptized as many as a thousand of them into the true faith.
He was not altogether alone in the stand he took. Here and there,
from very necessity, the people had organized to resist the
invaders, but as no one could tell where they would strike next,
they were not often successful, and fear and discouragement sat
heavy on the land. From his own city of Roskilde a little fleet of
swift sailers under the bold Wedeman had for years waged relentless
war upon the freebooters and had taken four times the number of
their own ships. Their crews were organized into a brotherhood
with vows like an order of fighting monks. Before setting out on
a cruise they were shriven and absolved. Their vows bound them to
unceasing vigilance, to live on the plainest of fare, to sleep
on their arms, ready for instant attack, and to the rescue of
Christians, wherever they were found in captivity. The Roskilde
guild became the strong core of the King’s armaments in his score
of campaigns against the Wends.
Perhaps it was not strange that Valdemar should be of two minds
about venturing to attack so formidable an enemy in his own house.
The nation was cowed and slow to move. In fact, from the first
expedition, that started with 250 vessels, only seven returned with
the standard, keeping up a running fight all the way across the
Baltic with pursuing Wends. The rest had basely deserted. On the
way over, the King, listening to their doubts and fears, turned
back himself once, but Absalon, who always led in the attack and
was the last on the homeward run, overtook him and gave him the
talking to be deserved. Saxo, who was very likely there and heard,
for there is little doubt that he accompanied his master on many of
the campaigns he so vividly describes, gives us a verbatim report
of the lecture:
“What wonder,” said the bishop, “if the words stick in our throats
and are nigh to stifling us, when such grievous dole is ours!
Grieve we must, indeed, to find in you such a turncoat that naught
but dishonor can come of it. You follow where you should lead, and
those you should rule over, you make your peers. There is nothing
to stop us but our own craven souls, hunt as we may for excuses. Is
it with such laurel you would bind your crown? with such high deed
you would consecrate your reign?”
The King was hard hit, and showed it, but he walked away without
a word. In the night a furious storm swept the sea and kept the
fleet in shelter four whole days, during which Valdemar’s anger had
time to cool. He owned then that Absalon was right, and the friends
shook hands. The King gave order to make sail as soon as the gale
abated. If there was still a small doubt in Absalon’s mind as he
turned, on taking leave, and asked, “What now, if we must turn back
once more?” Valdemar set it at rest:
“Then you write me from Wendland,” he laughed, “and tell me how
things are there.”
If little glory or gain came to the Danes from this first
expedition, at least they landed in the enemy’s country and made
reprisal for past tort. The spirit of the people rose and shamed
them for their cowardice. When the King’s summons went round again,
as it did speedily, there were few laggards. Attacked at home, the
Wends lost much of the terror they had inspired. Before many moons,
the chronicle records, the Danes cut their spear-shafts short, that
they might the more handily get at the foe. Scarce a year passed
that did not see one or more of these crusades. Absalon preached
them all, and his ship was ever first in landing. In battle he and
the King fought shoulder to shoulder. In the spring of 1169, he
had at last his wish: the heathen idols were destroyed and their
temples burned.
The holy city of the Wends, Arcona, stood on a steep cliff,
inaccessible save from the west, where a wall a hundred feet high
defended it. While the sacred banner Stanitza waved over it the
Danes might burn and kill, but the power of Svantevit was unbroken.
Svantevit was the god of gods in whose presence his own priests
dared not so much as breathe. When they had to, they must go to
the door and breathe in the open, a good enough plan if Saxo’s
disgust at the filth of the Wendish homes was justified. Svantevit
was a horrid monster with four heads, and girt about with a huge
sword. Up till then the Christian arms had always been stayed at
his door, but this time the King laid siege to Arcona, determined
to make an end of him. Some of the youngsters in his army, making
a mock assault upon the strong walls, discovered an accidental
hollow under the great tower over which the Stanitza flew and,
seizing upon a load of straw that was handy, stuffed it in and set
it on fire. It was done in a frolic, but when the tower caught
fire and was burned and the holy standard fell, Absalon was quick
to see his advantage, and got the King to order a general assault.
The besieged Wends, having no water, tried to put out the fire
with milk, but, says the chronicle, “it only fed the flames.” They
fought desperately till, between fire and foe, they were seized
with panic and, calling loudly upon Absalon in their extremity,
offered to give up their city. The army clamored for the revenge
that was at last within their grasp, and the King hesitated; but
Absalon met the uproar firmly, reminding them that they had crossed
the seas to convert the heathen, not to sack their towns.
The city was allowed to surrender and the people were spared, but
Svantevit and his temple were destroyed. A great crowd of his
followers had gathered to see him crush his enemies at the last,
and Absalon cautioned the men who cut the idol down to be careful
that he did not fall on them and so seem to justify their hopes.
“He fell with so great a noise that it was a wonder,” says Saxo,
naïvely; “and in the same moment the fiend ran out of the temple in
a black shape with such speed that no eye could follow him or see
where he went.” Svantevit was dragged out of the town and chopped
into bits. That night he fed the fires of the camp. So fickle is
popular favor that when the crowd saw that nothing happened, they
spurned the god loudly before whom they had grovelled in the dust
till then.
[Illustration: FALL OF ARCONA. THE IDOL SVANTEVIT DESTROYED]
When they heard of Arcona’s fall in the royal city of Karents, they
hastened with offers of surrender, and Absalon went there with a
single ship’s crew to take possession. They were met by 6000 armed
Wends, who guarded the narrow approach to the city. In single file
they walked between the ranks of the enemy, who stood with inverted
spears, watching them in sullen silence. His men feared a trap, but
Absalon strode ahead unmoved. Coming to the temple of their local
god, Rygievit, he attacked him with his axe and bade his guard fall
to, which they did. Saxo has left us a unique description of this
idol that stood behind purple hangings, fashioned of oak “in every
evil and revolting shape. The swallows had made their nests in his
mouths and throats” (there were seven in so many faces) “and filled
him up with all manner of stinking uncleanness. Truly, for such god
was such sacrifice fit.” He had a sword for every one of his seven
faces, buckled about his ample waist, but for all that he went the
way of the others, and even had to put up with the indignity of
the Christian priests standing upon him while he was being dragged
out. That seems to have helped cure his followers of their faith
in him. They delivered the temple treasure into the hands of the
King—seven chests filled with money and valuables, among them a
silver cup which the wretched King Svend had sent to Svantevit as
a bribe to the Wends for joining him against his own country and
kin. But those days were ended. It was the Danes’ turn now, and
Wendland was laid waste until “the swallows found no eaves of any
house whereunder to build their nests and were forced to build them
on the ships.” A sad preliminary to bringing the country under the
rule of the Prince of Peace; but in the scheme of those days the
sword was equal partner with the cross in leading men to the true
God.
The heathen temples were destroyed and churches built on their
sites of the timber gathered for the siege of Arcona. The people,
deserted by their own, accepted the Christians’ God in good faith,
and were baptized in hosts, thirteen hundred on one day and nine
hundred on the next. Three days and nights Absalon saw no sleep. He
did nothing half-way. No sooner was he back home than he sent over
priests and teachers supplied with everything, even food for their
keep, so that they “should not be a burden to the people whom they
had come to show the way to salvation.”
The Wends were conquered, but the end was not yet. They had savage
neighbors, and many a crusade did Absalon lead against them in
the following years, before the new title of the Danish rulers,
“King of the Slavs and Wends,” was much more than an empty boast.
He organized a regular sea patrol of one-fourth of the available
ships, of which he himself took command, and said mass on board
much oftener than in the Roskilde church. It is the sailor, the
warrior, the leader of men one sees through all the troubled years
of his royal friend’s life. Now the Danish fleet is caught in
the inland sea before Stettin, unable to make its way out, and
already the heathen hosts are shouting their triumph on shore.
It is Absalon, then, who finds the way and, as one would expect,
he forces it. The captains wail over the trap and abuse him for
getting them into it. Absalon, disdaining to answer them, leads
his ships in single file straight for the gap where the Wendish
fleet lies waiting, and gets the King to attack with his horsemen
on shore. Between them the enemy is routed, and the cowards are
shamed. But when they come to make amends, he is as unmoved as ever
and will have none of it. Again, when he is leading his men to the
attack on a walled town, a bridge upon which they crowd breaks, and
it is the bishop who saves his comrades from drowning, swimming
ashore with them in full armor.
Resting in his castle at Haffn, the present Copenhagen, which he
built as a defence against the sea-rovers, he hears, while in his
bath, his men talking of strange ships that are sailing into the
Sound, and, hastily throwing on his clothes, gives chase and kills
their crews, for they were pirates whose business was murder, and
they merely got their deserts. In the pursuit his archers “pinned
the hands of the rowers to the oars with their arrows” and crippled
them, so skilful had much practice made them. Turn the leaf of
Saxo’s chronicle, and we find him under Rügen with his fleet,
protecting the now peaceful Wendish fishermen in their autumn
herring-catch, on which their livelihood depended. Of such stuff
was made the bishop who
“Used his trusty Danish sword
As the Pope his staff in Rome.”
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.