Cross and Scepter (8 page)

Geography is certainly an important factor in explaining the direction of the conquests. It would be difficult to imagine Swedish attempts to conquer the Orkneys or Southern Finland as a target for Norwegian expansion, but geography was not the only determining factor. An important motivation for conquering an area was to convert its inhabitants to Christianity. The crusading ideology was strong in Scandinavia from early on. The kings of Denmark and Norway were among the first to conduct expeditions to the Holy Land, the former in 1103 (he died on Cyprus on his way to Jerusalem), the latter in 1108–1111. Later crusades were mostly directed at the Baltic area, where pagan peoples lived close to the frontier of the Christian kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. Denmark and later Sweden played an important part in the movement that eventually made the southern shore of the Baltic Sea part of Western Christendom.
Norway played a smaller role in this respect, but Norwegian kings worked for the conversion of the Sami, while pushing the frontiers of their kingdom further north. Expansion at the cost of pagan peoples implied great advantages. The kings and their men received papal privileges, were often allowed to tax the Church to finance their expeditions, and did not need to worry about justifying their aggression.

Attacks on Christian countries risked raising legal and moral objections and required special justification. Magnus Bareleg's arguments for his expeditions to the West (1098–1103) may be difficult to discern, but his thirteenth-century successor, Håkon Håkonsson, claimed that he had a legal right when he went to war against Scotland, and he could point to historical arguments in support of this claim. Danish expansion in northern Germany was supported by diplomatic negotiations and legal arguments, in particular after the Danish king had received the imperial privilege of 1214, which would still serve as an incentive and a justification nearly a hundred years later, when Erik Menved revived his great-grandfather's policy.

It would be an exaggeration to claim that the tender conscience of medieval kings prevented them from going to war without a watertight legal justification, but it would nevertheless be rash to dismiss such arguments as irrelevant. Arguments about legality might influence the amount of support a king could expect to get from the aristocracy, as well as the attitude of potential rivals. This may serve to explain some of the choices made by medieval kings in their foreign policy. Around 1260, when Denmark was in a deep crisis, it would probably have been more profitable for King HÃ¥kon HÃ¥konsson to join the Danish king's enemies in conquering the wealthy region of Halland, just across the border, than to cross the North Sea with a large fleet in order to defend the Hebrides and Man. The latter expedition had little chance of success and, even if successful, would hardly add much to King
HÃ¥kon's wealth. For HÃ¥kon, however, the difference between the two areas was that he had a right to the latter but not to the former. In a similar way, King Erik of Pomerania in the fifteenth century spent most of his reign fighting to conquer the duchy of Schleswig, which had been joined with that of Holstein, an ambition that eventually led to his deposition. When his successor Christian I gained both duchies in 1460, he did not use them for further expansion into northern Germany, but instead tried to regain Sweden, a policy that was continued by his successors. The Danish king had not attempted to conquer Sweden before the Kalmar Union. After 1448, this aim became top priority, because from now on the Danish kings had a legal claim.

Thus, the various fields of expansion of the three kingdoms, to a great extent determined by geopolitical factors, served also to cement the apparently coincidental division between them that was established in the mid-eleventh century. However, it is difficult to imagine such clear divisions without a considerable amount of internal consolidation. That subject will form the theme of the following chapter.

CHAPTER TWO

The Consolidation of the Scandinavian Kingdoms, c. 1050–1350

The Dynasty and the Royal Office

On the morning of November 22, 1286, King Erik V Klipping of Denmark was found dead in his bed with fifty-six wounds in his body. “The king was killed by his own men, those whom he loved so much,” says a contemporary chronicler. The way Erik was killed constitutes clear evidence of a conspiracy. Each of the conspirators had dealt the king one or more wounds, all of which were above the waist, suggesting an “honorable” killing by men of rank, not an attack by a band of robbers. Who the murderers were has remained unknown to this day, but there were a number of suspects. Erik had been involved in frequent conflicts both with his relative, the duke of Southern Jutland, and with members of the aristocracy. The regency for his son Erik VI Menved, led by the dowager queen, suspected the latter and half a year later accused a number of Danish magnates of the crime and forced them to leave the country. This mysterious murder and its consequences for inter-Danish and inter-Scandinavian relationship in the following years have frequently been discussed by scholars, most of whom believe that those who were convicted
were actually innocent. More interesting than the identity of the murderers, however, is the fact that they are unknown.

King Erik Klipping's was the last instance of the murder of a Danish king and the second to the last of a ruling king in Scandinavia as a whole—the last being that of Gustaf III of Sweden in 1792. By contrast, there are plenty of examples from the previous period of kings being killed either by rivals or as the result of popular rebellions. This happened to all three royal saints: Olav, Knud, and Erik. Although the detailed accounts of the killing of the two former lament their deaths, they do not contain any reference to a ban against killing a king. Quite the contrary, the Norwegian Law of Frostating even had a paragraph demanding that the people in a district gather and kill royal officials, or even the king himself, if they have acted unjustly against a member of the community. The paragraph was not abolished until the introduction of the Code of the Realm in the 1270s.

By contrast, the men who killed Erik Klipping were clearly aware that they had committed a crime; otherwise, they would have come forward to replace Erik with another king. There were actually candidates. These included Erik's son, who succeeded his father at the age of twelve, but also other descendants of Erik's grandfather Valdemar II (d. 1241), among them Duke Valdemar of Southern Jutland, who has been regarded as the prime suspect by modern historians. However, the conspirators must have been aware that the days were gone when it was possible to murder a king with impunity and replace him with someone else. They had to commit a crime that was in fact, according to the old laws, more serious than just killing another man, namely killing in secret.

Whereas the way in which the murder was committed clearly points in the direction of a new understanding of the monarchy, the punishment seems surprisingly mild compared to what happened to such criminals in later ages. (They were most often
tortured to death.) This may partly be explained by the power and status of the accused and partly by the fact that the evidence against them was only circumstantial; if they had been caught red-handed, they would probably have been killed. When one of them was caught later, he was broken on the wheel. Despite this reservation, the 1286 murder forms clear evidence of a change in the relationship between the king and his subjects. There were now rules for appointing a king, either through hereditary succession or election or, usually, a combination of the two, and once in his office, he was protected from being killed by rivals or as the result of popular rebellions. In this respect, Scandinavia conforms to the prevailing pattern in Western Europe, except that the change had taken place earlier in most other countries. The king had become qualitatively different from his subjects, an idea of dynastic continuity had emerged, and there was at least some sense of the royal office as an entity distinct from the king's person.

Characteristically, dynastic continuity is a central element in the rich historical literature that emerged in Scandinavia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Although the genealogies in these sources are often later constructions, they are nevertheless significant evidence of the importance of dynastic continuity at the time when they were composed, probably in the twelfth century. A Danish dynasty had developed already in the mid-tenth century, whose members ruled the country for around a hundred years, until the death of Cnut the Great's last son, Harthacnut, who was succeeded by King Magnus of Norway. Thus, dynastic succession seems not to have been sufficiently firmly established to prevent the election of a foreign king. However, Magnus was soon replaced by Sven Estridsen who belonged to a sideline of the old dynasty. His descendants ruled Denmark until the death of Valdemar IV, the last in the male line, in 1375.

Exactly when the idea of dynastic succession became permanently recognized in Denmark is difficult to say; the early sources
are too meager to allow us to distinguish between succession due to personal virtues or physical strength and a universally recognized hereditary succession. However, Danish kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries seem to have been strong enough to have their sons accepted as their successors, which probably led to the development of the idea of a dynasty. Individual succession also seems to have been introduced at an early stage; the five sons of Sven Estridsen ruled one after the other, not jointly (1074–1134). Legitimate birth—however this may have been defined at the time—seems to have been of no importance, whereas there was a preference for the eldest. Successions were not always peaceful, but there were no prolonged struggles within this generation, in contrast to the next, possibly because most of these kings reigned only for a short time. In 1131, Duke Knud Lavard, son of the late King Erik, was murdered by his cousin Magnus, son of the ruling King Niels. This led to the death of Niels and Magnus in the battle of Fodevig (1134) and to struggles between various members of the dynasty until the final victory of Knud Lavard's son Valdemar I in 1157. In the following, more peaceful period, there was a strong move in the direction of a purely hereditary succession, which, however, came to an end when a new series of internal conflicts erupted between the sons of Valdemar II (d. 1241) and their successors. In the early fourteenth century, kingship in Denmark was formally defined as elective, although in fact the eldest surviving son of the previous king was always elected, if there was one. Elective monarchy in practice meant the opportunity for the electors to pose conditions for accepting the king. The new king had to issue an election charter (
håndfæstning,
see p. 149).

The Norwegian dynasty originated later, although the sagas claim that all Norwegian kings were the descendants of the first king supposed to have ruled the whole country, Harald Finehair. Most probably, however, Harald's line became extinct with his grandsons, after which there was open competition for the throne
until the mid-eleventh century, when Harald Hardrada (1046–1066) and his descendants ruled in relative peace for four generations. The change must be understood partly as a reaction to the period of Danish rule 1030–1035 and partly as the result of the canonization of Olav Haraldsson (1031), from whom later kings derived their right to the throne. Olav was succeeded first by his son Magnus (1035–1047) and then by his half-brother Harald. The rules of succession were vague, but seem to have favored agnatic descendants, whether born in wedlock or not. There was no rule of individual succession; if there was more than one candidate, which was often the case, they either had to share the power between them or fight over it. During the following series of inner struggles, only members—or alleged members—of the dynasty were allowed to compete, which is evident from the fact that many of the pretenders were only boys. Formal rules of succession were laid down in the Law of Succession of 1163/64, which introduced individual succession with preference for the late king's eldest legitimate son, although it also established an element of election by prescribing an elective body dominated by the bishops.