erning, he found little to govern with. There
were no money, no soldiers, no trade, no order in the kingdom, everything
being at so low an ebb that he found it necessary, as some writers state,
to secure support from Germany by recognizing the Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa as his suzerain and doing homage to him as a vassal in 1162.
But this ceremony did not entail upon him any of the usual duties of a
vassal, and was more of an ordinary alliance than a formal act of
submission.

Yet poor as was the state of Denmark when Valdemar came to it as king,
when he died he left it a flourishing, busy and peaceful country, to
which he had added great tracts of land on the pagan shores of the
Baltic, whose people he forced to give up their heathen practices.

During his reign Valdemar made as many as twenty expeditions against
these piratical peoples, gradually subduing them. At first, indeed, he
showed very little courage, and found so many reasons for turning back
before meeting the foe, that the sailors looked upon him as a coward, and
once he overheard one of them say with a laugh, that the king was "a
knight who wore his spurs upon his toes, only to help him to run away the
faster."

This made him very angry, but on speaking of it to his foster-brother,
Axel Hvide,--afterwards Bishop Absolon,--he found that the feeling that
he lacked the courage of a warrior was general. This contempt made him so
ashamed that from that time on he faced danger bravely and was never
again known to turn back from any risk.

Though Axel became a bishop, he had begun life as a soldier and was
throughout life bold and daring, a man who loved nothing better than to
command a ship or to lead his men in an assault against some fierce band
of sea robbers. From his castle Axelborg, on the site of the later city
of Copenhagen, he kept a keen lookout for these pirates and sought
manfully to put an end to their plundering raids.

The war against the Baltic heathens continued until 1168, when it ended
in the capture of the town of Arcona, on the island of Rygen, and the
destruction of the great temple of the Slavic god Svanteveit, whose
monstrous four-headed image was torn down from its pedestal and burned in
the presence of its dismayed worshippers.

The taking of this temple is an event of much interest, for it was due to
the shrewdness of a young Danish soldier, who circumvented the heathens
by a clever stratagem.

While the army lay encamped on