Undoubtedly, most of us Danes are used to think of Denmark as a Western country with its interests directed to Western Europe and North America as well as to the North in Scandinavia. But it has not always been the political situation of the Danish kingdom. At least, when we go back to the High Middle Ages, Danish interests reached even more to the East with its connections to the South via the river Elbe.

With the dean of the Faculty of Theology at University of Copenhagen and professor of Church History, Carsten Selch Jensen’s book from 2024, we get a vivid introduction into a dramatic piece of medieval history of the Danish eastern interests in its involvement in the Baltic region in the early thirteenth century. We get a fascinating description of how – according to the Annales Ryenses from the Cistercian Monastery in Rye – the Danish King Valdemar the Second set out for Estonia with a big army for attacking and subduing the local tribes who were well known as aggressive pirates assaulting merchant ships going to the East and South.

Yet, what makes the book’s contents a medieval drama of European dimensions, is that the king was not alone in his undertakings. He brought with him none less than the Archbishop of Denmark, Anders Sunesen from Lund. As archbishop, Anders Sunesen was an important representative of the European Christian Denmark, and he was a somebody, he had studied in Paris, became magister there, as well as in England and Italy with their leading schools of theology of the time.

It is with these two main persons, the king and the archbishop, that the whole dramatic scene and the theme of prof. Jensen’s book is et, namely how attack, colonization, and mission walked hand in hand to provide the ideological reasons for the suppression of a people. In the famous battle of Lyndanise in 1219, for example, the Danes had success in fighting the local tribes – as long a time as the archbishop could lift his hands in prayer. When he got tired, his servants held up his hands, and the battle was won. The flag of Dannebrog flew down from the sky on the same occasion. And interestingly, the book analyses this event as a sign of Denmark’s participation in the European mission activity of the time in the Holy Land, Spain, Southern France, and Northern Germany. Further, the famous Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux had preached that the pagans must be defeated and converted. The first crusade’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 was also a success. And the Pope had asked all the European kings to liberate the Holy Land and Eastern Europe from the infidels. In 1147 the Pope even defined the mission in the Baltic lands as a missionary crusade. Many followed the papal call, the papal ideology of fighting the enemies of Christendom grew – “the Danes even left their drinking parties and the Norwegians their raw fish” [p. 2], Jensen quotes William of Malmesbury in the Chronicle of the Kings of England.

The book shows, through a series of interesting details, how the battle of Lyndanise started a long history of foreign dominance with first of all Danes and Germans, but also Swedes and Russians. The Danish victory of Lyndanise led to more than a hundred years of Danish dominance of North-Estonia. And Jensen notes that it has not been quite forgotten; Danes still officially commemorate “Valdemar’s Day”, the flag-day of the Dannebrog on June 15. Just as the capitol of Estonia is named Talinn, which means the city of the Danes.

One can wonder what kind of Christianity the Estonians had met from the well-educated archbishop and his clergy. Were the Estonians convinced by an attractive gospel – and did they want to leave their own old religious rites – or were they simply met with the choice between getting baptized or killed? The book argues for the latter. The main scope of the Danish presence in Estonia is clearly, according to the Jensen’s well researched book, the military conquest of Estonia and the making of Denmark “a dominating political and military power in the Baltic Sea region” [p. 46]. The Germans had the same interest, and it came to many competing situations with them.

This long and complicated history was described by Henry of Livonia in Heinrichi Chronicon Livoniae. Jensen includes information from Henry’s history, together with critical commentaries. Jensen’s conclusion is clearly that the mission – both Danish and German – was simply a cover up for submission. The Danes left the territory to the Germans in 1346 – actually, they sold it. Later, also the Germans withdrew, and the Estonians became more and more autonomous. Jensen notes on the last lines that today “Estonia and Denmark have very close international relations”.

The book is not only a detailed scientific investigation of the Danish expansion and missionary activity into the Baltic lands, and very convincing as such, but it is almost a dramatic novel in its style and analysis of an instructive, but today of course less flattering piece of Danish medieval history.

Aage Rydstrøm-Poulsen, Emeritus, University of Greenland