ABSTRACT
During the twelfth century the defensive wars and punitive expeditions of the Danish kings and church against the heathen Wends in the Baltic were turned into an aggressive war of expansion and conversion. The Danish kingdom was situated on the frontier of Latin Christendom and the expansion could therefore be seen as an expansion of Latin Christendom itself. The wars against Denmark's pagan neighbours in the northern parts of present-day Germany and Poland became connected to the crusades towards the Holy Land as early as 1108. 1 In 1147 this was explicitly formulated by Pope Eugenius III (1145–53) and Bernard of Clairvaux when – perhaps at the instigation of German princes – as a fulfilment of their crusading vows, some of the Christian knights who were getting ready to fight against the infidels in Spain and the Holy Land were turned against the heathen Slavic peoples living east of the river Elbe, collectively called the Wends. Thus the war was thought of within the crusading ideology of the time as a part of God's war against infidels and heretics for the defense, peace, and expansion of Christendoms. 2 In the last century Danish historians viewed crusading ideology as merely a pretext, concealing economic and political motives. 3 The purpose of the present paper will be to show that crusading ideology was an integral part of the royal ideology of Valdemar I (1157–82). It will analyse the important elements in the self-representation and self-comprehension of Valdemar's royal ideology and relate it to the crusading ideology of the time. Thus it has a twofold perspective: first to show that the royal ideology of Valdemar I follows a pattern for legitimizing warfare against heathens, which lay behind the contemporary conception of holy war and what is termed crusade by historians of a later age; second to place the wars of the Danish kings and Danish Church more thoroughly in the context of the general crusading movement.
