ing's men came to the rescue.

Coming home from Norway he ran afoul of forty pirate ships under
the coast of Seeland. He tried to steal past; forty against one were
heavy odds. But it was moonlight and he was discovered. The pirates
lay across his course and cut him off. Esbern made ready for a fight
and steered straight into the middle of them. The steersman
complained that he had no armor, and he gave him his own. He beat
his pursuers off again and again, but the wind slackened and they
were closing in once more, swearing by their heathen gods that they
would have him dead or alive, for a Danish prisoner on one of their
ships had told who he was. But Esbern had more than one string to
his bow. He sent a man aloft with flint and steel to strike fire in
the top, and the pirates, believing that he was signalling to a
fleet he had in ambush, fled helter-skelter. Esbern got home safe.

The German emperors' fingers had always itched for the over-lordship
of the Danish isles, and they have not ceased to do so to this day.
When Frederick Barbarossa drove Alexander III from Rome and set up a
rival Pope in his place, Archbishop Eskild of Lund, who was the
Primate of the North, championed the exiled Pope's case, and
Valdemar, whose path the ambitious priest had crossed more than
once, let it be known that he inclined to the Emperor's cause, in
part probably from mere pique, perhaps also because he thought it
good politics. The archbishop in a rage summoned Absalon and bade
him join him in a rising against the King. Absalon's answer is
worthy the man and friend:

"My oath to you I will keep, and in this wise, that I will not
counsel you to your own undoing. Whatever your cause against the
King, war against him you cannot, and succeed. And this know, that
never will I join with you against my liege lord, to whom I have
sworn fealty and friendship with heart and soul all the days of my
life."

He could not persuade the archbishop, who went his own way and was
beaten and exiled for a season, nor could he prevent the King from
yielding to the blandishments of Frederick and getting mixed up in
the papal troubles; but he went with him to Germany and saved him at
the last moment from committing himself by making him leave the
church council just as the anti-pope was about to pronounce sentence
of excommunication against Alexander. He commanded Absalon to
remain, as a servant of the church, but Absalon replied calmly that
he was no