The Making of an Independent Monarchy: Denmark in the Twelfth Century
From the early Crusades until the reformation, the Papal Empire, more than the secular empire, was the unifying principle of Western Christendom. It ensured that the secular empire was restricted to a Central European scene.
The extent of the secular empire shifted over time, but overall, it contracted. An example of how this process worked in practice can be given from twelfth-century Denmark. It is almost forgotten today, or perhaps it is not even properly understood—that this realm in the first half of the twelfth century was gradually being more closely attached to the empire. It was about to become as much a part of the empire as Bohemia. The throne was heavily disputed within a large and numerous royal kin. At one time there were three kings simultaneously. Even after Valdemar I became sole king in 1157, his position was still highly vulnerable, with many of his kinsmen being potential candidates for the throne, and a flourishing tradition for political murder. Like two of his predecessors, Valdemar had no choice but to acknowledge Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa) as his overlord; it was a way of achieving legitimacy. The formal homage took place in 1162 in Dole on the empire's border with France. What really happened on that occasion, we can only vaguely comprehend. Our most important source, the Gesta Danorum by the historian Saxo Grammaticus, was written half a century later, at a time when the Danish monarchy was taking every measure to distance itself from the empire. Saxo was eager to explain that Valdemar had been tricked into the homage in Dole.[1607] The whole narrative of the first part of Gesta Danorum (books 1-11 out of 18) is a mythical fabrication telling the story of a unified and independent Danish monarchy stretching back into the distant past well before the birth of Christ. This narrative gave the impression that the homages of some of the later kings were an exceptional deviation from the norm and not representative of the natural state of the Danish monarchy. But the homage in Dole took place at a time when pope and emperor were again contesting for supremacy. Emperor Frederick had created an (anti)pope, Victor IV, against the cardinally elected Alexander III. Valdemar's homage included support for Victor, but also put his relations with the powerful Danish archbishop at stake. However, he did manage to switch sides a few years later when the emperor was occupied elsewhere. In 1168 the king led an expedition against the Rugian[1608] heathens and destroyed their shrine at Arkona. Whether this expedition should be classified as a crusade, a holy war, or simply as a campaign, is a matter of scholarly discussion,[1609] but in the twelfth-century popular perception, a war against pagans would most likely be interpreted as an execution of ecclesiastical or papal ideology, simply because it was directed against non-Christians.[1610] The expedition could therefore be considered a campaign carried out by Valdemar on behalf of the Church. The reward followed in 1170 at a pompous ceremony where the king's long deceased father was canonized and his seven-year-old son was consecrated as co-king.[1611] This was not only the first properly documented coronation in Denmark, but also the first incident where a new king was made in a constitutional way while his predecessor was still alive. The canonization of a father, who had been killed in a struggle for the crown, meant in reality that the many other branches of the Danish royal kin were excluded from succession to the throne. By a single strike, the Danish monarchy had been reinterpreted from the contested prize of a vast group of related magnates to the exclusive property of a single lineage, which would appoint new kings by lineal succession.The Gesta Danorum must be seen in this perspective, as a (for the earlier parts mostly fictitious) history of an independent and unified kingdom. The constitutional situation that was led back in time with an impressive number of kings was the recently established order of the author's own time, and the work had been commissioned by the aforementioned archbishop's successor.[1612]
In most other monarchies, this transformation was more gradual and took a longer time to complete.
But by the later Middle Ages, the outcome was more or less the same: a number of indivisible monarchies with lineal, appointive succession with great emphasis on legitimacy. The existence of composite monarchies complicates the matter, but a monarchy within a composite state would nevertheless be indivisible. The equilibrium of monarchies outside and principalities inside the borders of a very weak imperial dominion, all of them inside the Roman Church, must be considered the uncontested reality of European geopolitics from about 1300 at the latest. This equilibrium, not a classic empire, was the precursor of the post-1648 concert of sovereign states. Political scientists sometimes miss this point: that the concert of sovereign states was not conceived in the womb of empire, but in equilibrium of kingdoms and principalities, many of which were composite in nature. About the same time, the Middle East witnessed the growth of a more classical empire—the Ottoman. But even within the Islamic world, The Ottomans were not the only universal rulers. The Safavids and the Mughals also had univer- salistic ambitions and competed with the Ottomans in universalist display.[1613] There clearly was a kind of geopolitical equilibrium between the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal polities in the seventeenth century, and yet heavy competition in the symbolic sphere, but in a different legal context. Again, there are similarities, but also notable differences rooted in different legal traditions.In Europe, the most important developments between 1300 and 1648 in this respect was the Reformation, which tore half of Roman Christendom away from the Roman ecclesiastical structure, and the Counter-Reformation, which tore the other half away by means of new conventions that vested the remaining Catholic monarchies with the prerogatives of investiture.
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