ABSTRACT
One of the better documented episodes in Nicholas Breakspear’s career before his election to the papacy was his mission as papal legate to Scandinavia, which took place between the spring of 1152 and the autumn of 1154. This legation is only intelligible in the context of the complex relationship between the Scandinavian church and conflicting papal and imperial interests in the Baltic basin. 1 For the early history of Christianity in those regions had been much influenced by missionary endeavour directed from Germany. The new see of Hamburg had been founded as a metropolitan church in 831 for the precise purpose of overseeing the mission to the Danes, Swedes, and Slavs, with Ansgar as its bishop; and in about 849, he had joined Hamburg to the existing see of Bremen. It was expected that dioceses founded among the newly converted peoples would be subject to his jurisdiction. Thus it was that the Scandinavian bishops remained within the jurisdiction of Hamburg-Bremen until 1100 × 1104, 2 and the emerging kingdoms were simultaneously drawn into the sphere of influence of the German empire. In the wake of the papal reform movement of the late eleventh century, however, Paschal II began the process of detaching Scandinavia from its dependence on the German metropolitan. For this purpose, Alberic, his legate, visited a number of episcopal centres in southern Scandinavia. He interviewed their bishops, and decided that Asger Svensson of Lund (now in Sweden, but then in Denmark) was the most capable of ruling the new province. Lund was therefore promoted to metropolitan 42Status, and Alberic duly conferred the pallium on its new archbishop. The loss of jurisdiction was greatly resented by Hamburg-Bremen, but it proved to be permanent, apart from the brief interval of papal weakness, during the Anacletan schism from 1130 to 1137. At the time of Breakspear’s embassy, the archbishop of Lund was Asger’s nephew Eskil Christiansen, who had been translated from Roskilde to succeed his uncle in 1137, and had been appointed apostolic vicar for Scandinavia at an important legatine synod in 1139. Eskil was a significant figure in mid-twelfth-century Danish politics, widely known as a friend of Bernard of Clairvaux, and as an energetic promoter of the Cistercians in Scandinavia. The foundation of Alvastra, a daughter-house of Clairvaux, by King Sverker in 1143 was characteristic of Eskil’s interests. 3
