Tag: history

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How to Rule Medieval Denmark

Painting of Danish rulers conquering a country
The Taking of Arkona, by Danish painter Laurits Tuxen c. 1890

So you’ve been born into just the right family at just the right time, and you’re poised to assume the throne of Europe’s best kingdom. You’ve got your work cut out for you. With religious, political, and military forces pulling you in every direction and none of the government infrastructure to hold it all together, your force of will and the whims of the nobility are the only thing preventing your nation from plunging into civil war and fracturing into tiny duchies. No pressure!

Here’s 9 tips to guarantee you a successful reign—and, more importantly, a successful legacy.

1. Become Christian

This one hardly gets a spot on the list, as Horik I did the work for you back in the Viking Age (and Harald Bluetooth took the credit for it a century later). These days, religious conversion works on a national scale (at least in theory). Being pagan makes you an automatic enemy both politically and economically. Entering the Christian Kings Club™ is a prerequisite to participating in European affairs.

2. Don’t do the Viking thing anymore

Closely related to #1. As a Christian King™, you’re not allowed to violently raid your neighbors (unless they’re pagan). This includes England, which has been Christian way longer than you have.

3. Be friends with the pope—but not too good friends

It’s not what you know, but who you know—and when you need to call in a very specific favor, such as getting your assassinated father canonized as a saint, then it helps to at least be on speaking terms with the man who can get it done. On the other hand, the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor get along about as well as oil and water (the emperor has been known to appoint his own pope to excommunicate the existing one), and one of those two happens to be your neighbor. Hint: it’s not the pope. The official one, anyway.

4. Keep the nobility happy

You can actually get fired from your job. Things to avoid doing: requiring the nobles to pay taxes, diminishing their local power, and/or publicly executing Swedish nobles en masse. (And if you do get fired, please for the love of Odin do not camp out on a Baltic island and become a pirate until the whole northern world is forced to remove you.)

5. Keep the peasants happy

I.e., don’t require all of them to leave their farms and assemble for an assault on England and then not show up at the last minute, then require everyone who went home before you ordered it to pay a large fee. This can and will end in an inglorious death at the hands of a mob, and your bones being put on display for centuries of pilgrims and tourists.

6. Have weak neighbors

This is the most important tip, and the one you have least control over. First rule of warfare: Anytime a nation weakens, the nations around it get stronger (and vice versa). Your only chance at winning land down south is if the Holy Roman Empire is fighting either its neighbors or itself (again), and you can only make a move if Norway and Sweden are too weak to stab you in the back while you’re busy. But if it makes you feel any better, the only reason you still exist anyway is because your neighbors have always been too preoccupied down south.

7. Produce (or be related to) one, and only one, potential heir

Have too many heirs, and your kingdom will descend into civil war as they all fight over who gets to be in charge. Have no potential heirs, and your kingdom will descend into civil war as the noble houses all fight over who gets to pick who gets to be in charge. Your heir also has to be old enough to take over by the time you die. Family planning is a precision affair.

8. You only get one shot at a nickname…

…so make it a good one. Don’t get known for something stupid—like the famine during your reign (Oluf I “Hunger”) or the name of the place where you suffered a decisive military defeat (Svend III “Grathe”). Oof.

9. Do not, under any circumstances, attend a banquet hosted by your enemies

This can and will turn into Game of Thrones faster than you can say “my brother will escape and get vengeance upon you and your family.” Or best case scenario, they’ll just get a world-class composer to debut a piece about how great and powerful your opponent is. Either way, it’s best to just stay home and chow down on smørrebrød in the comfort of your own castle.

So there you have it. Governing your kingdom can be a complicated and dangerous affair—but if you follow these 9 suggestions, you’ll be well on your way to holding your country together until your descendants start ill-advised wars with Sweden and lose a third of it. Good luck! ∎

This post was informed and inspired by Lars Hovbakke Sørensen’s book En europæisk Danmarkshistorie – fra oldtiden til i dag, published 2014 by Gyldendal A/S. Tak Lars! You can read about my experiences with modern Denmark in a two-part post here and here.

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Personal Update

I Have Corona

Life update: I have COVID-19.

I found out last Thursday, after I started getting the typical symptoms: headache, sore throat. I had a sneaking suspicion that it might have been a breakthrough infection, so I got tested at the university, and it came back positive.

After two phases of lockdown in Denmark over the course of a year, and after having been vaccinated, I had all but banished the possibility of another lockdown or quarantine from my mind. Such did not prove to be the case. Over the past couple days, I’ve been attending classes and working from here while still waiting to see the outside world. I suppose it borders on cliché to comment on how miraculous that is–twenty years ago, I’d be doing nothing but watching VHS tapes on a low-definition TV.

To celebrate the occasion, I thought I’d share a bit from an 1353 work of Italian literature, The Decameron, which is about ten young adults who run away from the city during the Black Death and tell stories to one another to pass the time. Plague seems to be the topic of the zeitgeist, and there’s something fascinating about reading contemporary attitudes about one of history’s deadliest plagues and seeing people newly discover things we take for granted with modern germ theory.

“This pestilence was so powerful that it was transmitted to the healthy by contact with the sick, the way a fire close to dry or oily things will set them aflame. And the evil of the plague went even further: not only did talking to or being around the sick bring infection and a common death, but also touching the clothes of the sick or anything touched or used by them seemed to communicate this very disease to the person involved.

“What I am about to say is incredible to hear, and if I and others had not witnessed it with our own eyes, I should not dare believe it (let alone write about it), no matter how trustworthy a person I might have heard it from. Let me say, then, that the plague described here was of such virulence in spreading from one person to another that not only did it pass from one man to the next, but, what’s more, it was often transmitted from the garments of a sick or dead man to animals that not only became contaminated by the disease but also died within a brief period of time.  My own eyes, as I said earlier, were witness to such a thing one day: when the rags of a poor man who died of this disease were thrown into the public street, two pigs came upon them, and…took the rags and shook them around; and within a short time, after a number of convulsions, both pigs fell dead upon the ill-fated rugs, as if they had been poisoned.”

Even more fascinating are the diverse and extreme reactions to the plague. “…almost all of [those who remained alive] took a very cruel attitude in the matter; that is, they completely avoided the sick and their possessions, and in so doing, each one believed that he was protecting his own good health.” Others “thought that living moderately and avoiding any excess might help a great deal in resisting this disease, and so they gathered in small groups and lived entirely apart from everyone else…eating the most delicate of foods and drinking the finest of wines (doing so always in moderation), allowing no one to speak about or listen to anything said about the sick and the dead outside.” Still others “believed that drinking excessively, enjoying life, going about singing and celebrating, satisfying in every way the appetites as best one could, laughing, and making light of everything that had happened was the best medicine for such a disease…This they were able to do easily, for everyone felt he was doomed to die and, as a result, abandoned his property, so that most of the houses had become common property, and any stranger who came upon them used them as if he were their rightful owner.” In any case “the revered authority of the laws, both divine and human, had fallen and almost completely disappeared, for, like other men, the ministers and executors of the laws were either dead or sick or so short of help that it was impossible for them to fulfill their duties; as a result, everybody was free to do as he pleased.”

Makes me a little more grateful that, despite everything that’s happened this year, from infections to rejections to armed insurrections, at least civilization as we know it hasn’t collapsed. ∎

Cover photo: A display at the BYU Museum of Art, which I visited not long before falling ill.

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Personal Update

No New Tale to Tell

What do eighteenth-century Russian tsars and Brigham Young University have in common? Presenting: the world’s very first beard card (above).

In 1698, Tsar Peter “the Great” launched a series of modernizing reforms, realizing that if Russia were to compete with Western European powers, they needed to cast off every custom that would prevent them from fitting in with their imperial neighbors–down to their old-fashioned facial hair. The beard ban was born. Nobles who wanted to keep their beards could purchase this token as a free pass to bear their hair in public without being forcibly shaved. The inscription on the front says “money taken”; the back features a Russian coat of arms and the year (the token had to be renewed annually–and heaven forbid losing weeks of delicate trimming if you were to forget to renew your expired beard token)!

Though the two eras’ beard restrictions differ in that Russia’s were a progressive step toward modern sensibilities in their own century–met with ire from the paying traditional nobles–while Brigham Young University’s were a conservative response to the aesthetic of anti-establishment 60s and 70s counterculture (and beard cards are granted for health, theatrical, or religious reasons, not to paying customers), the fact that today you can hold in your hands a beard pass with the same practical effect as old Peter the Great’s is a testament that nothing in history seems to be truly new. The great periods of development in history are called “Renaissance” (rebirth), or “Reformation”, or “Restoration”–all attempts to get back to some veiled golden age of the past.

This is why I enjoy old literature. It’s a special connection when something so old still resonates in today’s cultures, as if the author and I both know that we’re tapping into what it means to be human, independent of place or time. When Shakespeare’s Henry IV asks himself why he can’t sleep on his comfortable mattress with all of the thoughts weighing on his head, I know that exact feeling, four hundred years later! (I’d like to see a quiz show where contestants have to determine what era a quote is from. “You have power over your mind, not outside events. There is strength in knowing that.” Advice from a psychology book about maintaining an “internal locus of control”, or ancient Roman philosopher? “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all; all go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” Twentieth-century absurdism, or the Old Testament? Two points to the ancients.)

That last Old Testament quote is drawn from the book of Ecclesiastes, which is keenly aware of this idea that nothing in history is truly new. In ironic fashion, the 80s song “No New Tale to Tell” simply recapitulates Ecclesiastes and seems to add a few stanzas of its own:

All the rivers run into the sea
  Yet the sea is not full
Unto the place from whence the rivers come
  Thither they return again
The thing that hath been
   It is that which shall be
And that which is done
   Is that which shall be done
And there is no new thing
   Under the sun 
                    (Eccl. 1:7, 9)

You cannot go against nature
   Because when you do
Go against nature
   It's part of nature too
Our little lives get complicated
   It's a simple thing
Simple as a flower
   And that's a complicated thing
No new tale to tell
   No new tale to tell
                    (Love and Rockets)

We can learn a lot from those who came before. After all, they lived our very same lives–just in a different place and a different time.