Crusading at the Edges of Europe

Denmark and Portugal c.1000 – c.1250

Kurt Villads Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472469380
• eBook ISBN: 9781317156697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This book is the first to compare Denmark and Portugal systematically in the High Middle Ages and demonstrates how the two countries became strong kingdoms and important powers internationally by their participation in the crusading movement.

Communication in the Middle Ages was better developed than often assumed and institutions, ideas, and military technology was exchanged rapidly, meaning it was possible to coordinate great military expeditions across the geographical periphery of Western Europe. Both Denmark and Portugal were closely connected to the sea and developed strong fleets, at the entrance to the Baltic and in the Mediterranean Seas respectively. They also both had religious borders, to the pagan Wends and to the Muslims, that were pushed forward in almost continuous crusades throughout the centuries.

Crusading at the Edges of Europe follows the major campaigns of the kings and crusaders in Denmark and Portugal and compares war-technology and crusading ideology, highlighting how the countries learned from each other and became organised for war.

1 The letter to chief librarian Bruun

In March 1892 Luciano Cordeiro, the secretary at the Geographical Society in Lisbon, wrote a letter to the scholarly and well-informed Chief Librarian at the National Library in Copenhagen, Christian Bruun. The letter was written in French, the obvious and courteous language at the time, even though Bruun most probably was able to read Portuguese. Cordeiro had met Bruun at an orientalist conference in Lisbon,¹ and he now asked for information about the Portuguese princess Berengaria, who in the year 1214 had married the famous Danish King Valdemar the Victorious, and about Leonora, who was married to his son. In Portuguese sources, the facts are exceedingly sparse. As the two princesses left Portugal, they disappeared from domestic sources – was there anything to be found in Danish medieval sources that could explain why a royal princess from the warm South was married to a king in the far and distant North?² Bruun approached the matter with his usual efficiency. Thanks to his eminent grasp of the sources, he was able to send a quick and lengthy reply to Cordeiro in September. With the letter came a copy of Kongegravene i Ringsted (The Royal Tombs in Ringsted),³ which was donated to the Geographical Society of Lisbon. It is a beautifully laid out report from the excavations in 1855 under the auspices of King Frederic VII. The exquisite prints show the medieval royal skulls, and in his letter, Bruun emphasized the anatomist Ibsen’s characterisation of Berengaria’s skull: “The head was altogether complete and of a most beautiful shape, with an oval face, prominent nose bone, and with complete rows of teeth of a rarely even and beautiful shape… . [T]he other parts of the skeleton, that is, the arms and the legs … were finely and beautifully shaped to a high degree.” Leonora’s skeleton, on the other hand, had been disturbed and she had had cavities in her teeth.⁴ On January 31, 1893, Bruun gave a lecture about Berengaria during a meeting at Royal Nordic Society for the Study of Antiquities.⁵ Also in 1893, Luciano Cordeiro published his own book Berengaria and Leonora, Queens of Denmark. Bruun had apparently read the book in manuscript and used long passages from it in his article.

Cordeiro’s question has never been answered adequately. Historians have for a long time wondered why King Valdemar II the Victorious chose to marry Berengaria, the sister of King Afonso II the Fat of distant Portugal. For Danish historians, Portugal is not only far away, it also belonged to a completely different culture with different values and a different geographical orientation from Denmark during the Middle Ages. For Portuguese historians, Denmark is even further away and has a short history spanning not more than a thousand years. The country is inhabited by tall, Viking-like people, who find it difficult to speak a cultured Romanesque language. During the 1800s, Danish historians explained the strange royal marriage between two representatives from such different cultures as something “purely personal” regarding the Danish King. Berengaria was an outstanding beauty and some thought that Valdemar had seen her during an expedition to Portugal and the Holy Land and had decided – twenty-five years later – to marry her. Others thought that he had heard about her person and her character and was impressed. Yet others were of the opinion that he had seen her in Flanders and had fallen helplessly in love. Amongst some Portuguese historians, Berengaria’s beauty is still mentioned as an explanation.⁶

Figure 1.1 Skull. “The head was altogether complete and of a most beautiful shape, with an oval face, prominent nose bone, and with complete rows of teeth of a rarely even and beautiful shape.” Description of Berengaria from the archaeological report, 1855. Here a cast in the church of Sankt Bendt in Ringsted. © Mona Bager Jensen

There is, however, another and altogether much more interesting explanation: Valdemar and Afonso were both great crusader kings, just as their fathers and grandfathers, also called Valdemar and Afonso respectively, had been. During their reigns, the frontiers were moved gradually further into the lands of the infidels, and Denmark and Portugal became independent, strong kingdoms that gained their special positions as guardians of the frontiers of the world of Latin Christendom. The thesis in this book is that a comparable mental background and common horizon was developed in the two countries. This led to the creation of parallel institutions and could even lead to royal weddings. It happened in the aftermath of the capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade in 1099 and with inspiration from the general European crusading movement in the Middle East. Considered from this crusade perspective, the differences between Denmark and Portugal in the 12th and 13th centuries were not crucial.

A synthesis and a thesis

There are many reasons for investigating Danish and Portuguese medieval history. It began with curiosity regarding the distance between the two countries and Berengaria’s beauty, but it became part of something larger that has preoccupied me for some time. How do you get a holistic view of the medieval period in the two countries? How can piecemeal information change an established image – be it conscious or unconscious? It developed into an attempt to create a synthesis in which many well-known pieces, as in a mosaic, were being joined together to form a new overall picture.

Many historians have been more attracted to writing about precisely defined topics in which limited number of questions are being raised and answered. That is analysis. If the historian then combines all these analyses together to form a coherent picture into something that is larger than the sum of its parts, you have a synthesis. In the second half of the 20th century, Danish historians have been accused of lacking the initiative to make syntheses and have instead kept themselves to safe areas – the small analyses – where the risks are fewer. The disadvantage, it is claimed, is that the historian then only writes for his colleagues and not for a broader audience, which is not interested in reading highly specialized work. Another disadvantage is that a coherent view of a period or a certain domain in history is rarely given. The historians are just walking in the footsteps of their predecessors.⁷

In reality, any historical investigation must include both an analytical and synthesizing part. In general, it is also unfounded to accuse Danish historians of not writing syntheses. During the last decades, several excellent overviews have been published of whole eras or institutions – history of Denmark, foreign policy and artillery. With regard to volume, it is probably still markedly less than what Portuguese historians produce. They publish one large general history of Portugal after the other, written by a single individual or by groups of authors, tightly edited and lavishly put together. Nevertheless, Danish syntheses are far from rare. As far as this is concerned, there is nothing special in this book. Rather, what is different and new is 1) the attempt to view the history of Denmark as being closely tied up with missionary wars and the crusades and as part of a common European history; and 2) the close comparison with Portugal.

The overall thesis is that missionary wars and crusades can explain everything – or, put the other way round, that most individuals by far in both Denmark and Portugal during the period from the 11th century onwards were intensely engrossed in God’s war against the infidels and organized their societies in order to wage this war. From around 1100, they perceived their missionary wars as a form of crusade and as attempts to imitate the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. To a larger or lesser extent, this tendency continues all through the medieval period and far into the 16th century, but I have chosen to stop this investigation in the middle of the 13th century. At that point the crusades had become well established, and changes in mentality and practice through the following centuries did not lead to anything fundamentally new.

Comparison in history

All historical writing is comparative. We must assume that the past is comparable with the present, that there are similarities and differences which we can perceive and realize as being similarities and differences. However, in practice it is complicated. It is also possible to assert that the only things we can see in the past are those that resemble the present and our contemporary experiences.⁸ The unpleasant conclusion is that there must be an awful lot from the past that we cannot catch sight of any longer.

There are many metaphors for this chronological contraction of all perception. One is the street lamp. To search for something in the past is like looking for a lost coin at night under a street lamp. It is possible to see what the lamp casts its light on. One can change position and search in another direction for the coin, but still one can only see what is within the reach of the light, whereas we are blind to what lays outside the cone of light. Reality might be even worse than this metaphor. Perhaps there is great wealth directly under the light. We are just unable to perceive it as such because we have never seen such things before. There is not much to do about it, apart from recognize that no historical analysis will ever be complete. The following is also just one of many possible suggestions on how to interpret the past in a way that makes sense in the present. Other historians can put other suggestions forward.

Narrative

Comparison is not only a basic condition for all historical writing about which one does not need to speculate too much on a daily basis. It can also be a chosen method of work, pedagogically and cognitively.

Comparison can make a pedagogical point by relating something in such a way that it appeals to the reader emotionally. The reader is compelled, subconsciously, to draw parallels to something entirely different. It is possible, for example, to write about the dreaded Mongols of the Middle Ages in a subtle and discreet way and to choose words which make the reader automatically think about the barbaric dictatorship of the Nazis. They could also be described differently and make everybody think about their childhood books about free and proud Indians in the American West. Or one can write about the Mongols using words taken directly from everyday stories about officials and law making in the EU. Whether this is good or bad depends on the reader. The same wording can lead to different associations, depending on time and place and on the reader. It is rhetoric and is concerned with how the historian subconsciously or deliberately spreads associations through the text and lays out discreet pointers, which lead the reader in a certain direction. It concerns the narrative method in historical research, which arranges the tracks in the narrative in such a way that they fit in with contemporary experience.⁹

It can be done in so many different ways. It is probably possible to write a study of the crusades without quoting a single source directly, which would be quite boring. However, that might even be the purpose, because the study then gets a touch of objectivity and resembles a collection of tables or formulas that nobody can contradict. The individual agent gets completely lost in the structures. I have chosen to do the opposite: to quote in large measure in order to recreate the spiritual climate that was a necessary requirement for the crusades. That is obviously not fully possible, because we have different experiences today. Few readers have had a sword in their hand and cut off the head of another human and rejoiced in a fountain filled with blood; few have seen devils and demons or heavenly lights in the sky. My quotes and my way of retelling the past, however, ought hopefully to inspire readers to recollect the scent of the great narratives of which there is still a faint echo in our modern culture: narratives about death, shame, honour, duty, resurrection, hope and God. The quotes have the indisputable advantage that they are all genuinely medieval. We cannot get any closer to the people who lived a thousand years ago.

Comparison as a perceptual tool

Comparison can, however, have an altogether different purpose, which is making something visible for oneself that one would otherwise not perceive.¹⁰ A comparison can be a vantage point wherefrom the world can be turned anew, an opportunity to step out of one’s own experience and observe one’s own tradition in a new light. Comparison in history is just like journeying very far away; when you get back home, it is possible to acknowledge things about your own country that you were not aware of before.

In practice, it seems as if there have been two predominant ways of drawing deliberate comparison: searching for differences and searching for similarities.¹¹ During the 18th and 19th centuries, most sciences were probably particularly interested in finding similarities in order to deduct general laws, i.e. regularities, which could be employed in several different areas within the field. Sometimes it was rather simple, such as the idea that geographical conditions determined the political conditions. Hot countries were underdeveloped and poor because the natives couldn’t work in the heat. This was a common idea amongst the philosophers of the Enlightenment during the 18th century but has its roots all the way back to Aristotle.¹² Cultural geography was comparative and searched for similarities, as did some of the social sciences. From the late 18th century, they operated with theories of development in stages, i.e. that all societies necessarily had to go through the same development and through the same stages in order to reach their contemporary form.¹³ The idea of development in stages was given its most influential expression in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps and figures
• Preface
• 1 The letter to chief librarian Bruun
• 2 Were there any crusades in the periphery?
• 3 The missionary wars of the 11th century: precursors of the crusades
• 4 Is the edge of the world far away?
• 5 The extending of Jerusalem
• 6 Afonso and Valdemar: the victorious crusader kings
• 7 The struggle for land and history
• 8 The rise and fall of the crusader kingdoms
• 9 Syncretism and regimentation
• 10 Coordinated crusades in north and south?
• 11 Conclusion
• Literature
• Index