(Tale 4) ABSALON, WARRIOR BISHOP OF THE NORTH 

A welcome change awaits the traveller who, having shaken off the chill of the German Dreadnaughts at Kiel, crosses the Baltic to the Danish Islands—a change from the dread portents of war to smiling peace.  There can be nothing more pastoral and restful than the Seeland landscape as framed in a car window; yet he misses its chief charm whom its folk-lore escapes—the countless legends that cling to field and forest from days long gone.  The guide-book gives scarce a hint of them; but turn from its page and they meet you at every step, hail you from every homestead, every copse.  Nor is their story always of peace.  Here was Knud Lavard slain by his envious kinsman for the crown, and a miraculous spring gushed forth where he fell.  Of the church they built for the pilgrims who sought it from afar they will show you the site, but the spring dried up with the simple old faith.  Yonder, under the roof of Ringsted church, lie Denmark's greatest dead.  Not half an hour from the ferry landing at Korsör, your train labors past a hill crowned by a venerable cross, Holy Anders' Hill.  So saintly was that masterful priest that he was wont, when he prayed, to hang his hat and gloves on a sunbeam as on a hook.  And woe to the land if his cross be disturbed, for then, the peasant will tell you, the cattle die of plague and the crops fail.  A little further on, just beyond Sorö, a village church rears twin towers above the wheat-field where the skylark soars and sings to its nesting mate.  For seven hundred years the story of that church and its builder has been told at Danish firesides, and the time will never come when it is forgotten.  

Fjenneslev is the name of the village, and Asker Ryg ruled there in the Twelfth Century, when the king summoned his men to the war.  Bidding good-by to his wife, Sir Asker tells her to build a new church while he is away, for the old, "with wall of clay, straw-thatched and grim," is in ruins.  And let it be worthy of the Master: 

"The roof let make of tiling red;
  Of stone thou build the wall;" 
and then he whispers in her ear: 
"Hear thou, my Lady Inge,
      Of women thou art the flower;
  An' thou bearest to me a son so bold,
      Set on the church a tower." 

Should the child be a girl, he tells her to build only a spire, for "modesty beseemeth a woman." Well for Sir Asker that he did not live in our day of clamoring suffragists.  He would have "views" without doubt.  But no such things troubled him while he battled in foreign lands all summer.  It was autumn when he returned and saw from afar the swell behind which lay Fjenneslev and home.  Impatiently he spurred his horse to the brow of the hill, for no news had come of Lady Inge those many months.  The bard tells us what he saw there: 

"It was the good Sir Asker Ryg;
      Right merrily laughed he,
  When from that green and swelling hill
      Two towers did he see." 
Two sons lay at the Lady Inge's breast, and all was well.  
"The first one of the brothers two
      They called him Esbern Snare.
  He grew as strong as a savage bear
      And fleeter than any hare.

"The second him called they Absalon,
      A bishop he at home.
  He used his trusty Danish sword
      As the Pope his staff at Rome." 

Absalon and Esbern were not twins, as tradition has it.  They were better than that.  They became the great heroes of their day, and the years have not dimmed their renown.  And Absalon reached far beyond the boundaries of little Denmark to every people that speaks the English tongue.  For it was he who, as archbishop of the North, "strictly and earnestly" charged his friend and clerk Saxo to gather the Danish chronicles while yet it was time, because, says Saxo, in the preface of his monumental work, "he could no longer abide that his fatherland, which he always honored and magnified with especial zeal, should be without a record of the great deeds of the fathers." And from the record Saxo wrote we have our Hamlet.  

It was when they had grown great and famous that Sir Asker and his wife built the church in thanksgiving for their boys, not when they were born, and the way that came to light was good and wholesome.  They were about to rebuild the church, on which there had been no towers at all since they crumbled in the middle ages, and had decided to put on only one; for the sour critics, who are never content in writing a people's history unless they can divest it of all its flesh and make it sit in its bones, as it were, sneered at the tradition and called it an old woman's tale.  But they did not shout quite so loud when, in peeling off the whitewash of the Reformation, the mason's hammer brought forth mural paintings that grew and grew until there stood the whole story to read on the wall, with Sir Asker himself and the Lady Inge, clad in garments of the Twelfth Century, bringing to the Virgin the church with the twin towers.  So the folk-lore was not so far out after all, and the church was rebuilt with two towers, as it should be.  

Under its eaves, whether of straw or tile, the two boys played their childish games, and before long there came to join in them another of their own age, young Valdemar, whose father, the very Knud Lavard mentioned above, had been foully murdered a while before.  It was a time, says Saxo, in which "he must be of stout heart and strong head who dared aspire to Denmark's crown.  For in less than a hundred years more than sixteen of her kings and their kin were either slain without cause by their own subjects, or otherwise met a sudden death." Sir Asker and the murdered Knud had been foster brothers, and throughout the bloody years that followed, he and his brothers, sons of the powerful Skjalm Hvide, espoused his cause in good and evil days, while they saw to it that no harm came to the young prince under their roof.  

The three boys, as they grew up, were bred to the stern duties of 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.  

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.  

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.

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.