Henry of Livonia

The first military order in Livonia, founded in 1202 in order to supply the Christian mission with a stable and local military force in addition to the coming and going of seasonal crusaders. In its short history, it was defeated in Lithuania in 1236 and forced to merge with the Teutonic Order, the Sword Brethren played a major role in Livonia often in opposition to other Christian powers in Livonia, the Bishop of Riga, the city of Riga and the Danish king.

The conquest and colonisation of the northeastern Baltic Rim in the 13th century durably shaped religious and ethnic identities of and relations between the native population and the arriving crusaders. This article explores the codes and displays of hospitality in the anonymous ‘Livonian Rhymed Chronicle’, which are seen here as ways of conceptualising the relationship and conflicts between the Teutonic Knights and the pagan or apostate people in Livonia. It asks which consequences the framing of the host-guest relations might have had for the self-comprehension of the chronicle’s author and his audience. The analysis of the chronicle is pursued along three lines: the first focuses on the questions of chivalry, courtesy, and conversion; the second explores different renditions of a miracle story of inhospitality from the 1220s; the third focuses on the conceptual metaphors of hospitality as a way in which the Teutonic Knights accommodated their adversaries’ viewpoints. In its conclusions, the article argues how a broad focus on the institutions, concepts, and discourses of hospitality can help account for both confrontational and amicable attitudes between the colonisers and the colonised both on the Baltic frontier and among other European frontier societies.

This is the cumulative doctoral thesis of Dr. Daniel Zwick based on five peer-reviewed articles and a main part, which is monographic in character (although this thesis is not officially a monographic thesis). The doctoral project was based at the University of Kiel and took place in cooperation with the University of Southern Denmark (Syddansk Universitet) and the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde (Vikingeskibsmuseet).

It examines the maritime organisation of predominantly Danes and Germans in the period of the Northern Crusades, which includes navigation and orientation, fleet organisation, but also shipbuilding and the establishment of a maritime trade network and other maritime-related infrastructure. While the chronological framework of this study is defined by a historical period - of the Northern Crusades - spanning four centuries, a great variety of historical and archaeological sources are addressed in the course of the investigation. This study starts with an examination of the natural physical landscape of the Baltic Sea in chapter 1 and how its populations adapted to geographical and climatic factors in the maritime sphere.

Chapter 2 examines the logistical links from the North Sea to the Baltic Sea, bypassing the Jutland peninsula, which opened up to a large-scale colonization and urbanisation movement and long-distance trade networks from western European, particularly from Danish and German places of origin in the wake of the Wendish, Baltic and Prussian crusades, starting in 1147. The foundation of Schleswig and Lübeck and the growing importance of the Ummelandfahrt are identified as paradigm shifts, which can be both corroborated by privileges on the one hand and ship-finds on the other hand. Early Bremen-type vessels seem to have played a particularly important role, and presently the overwhelming evidence points for a southern Jutlandic origin of this type. The great variances observed in the constructional characteristics strongly suggest a maritime organisation that was not bound to a singular local tradition, but can be most likely linked to long-distance trade networks of this time, which bounded merchants of different denominations together, such as the Gotlandic-Lübeckian gilda communis or the fraternities danicum in Cologne.

While the previous chapter was most focussed on the legal and environmental precondition as well as the driving forces – i.e. actors – behind the opening up of the Baltic Sea, chapter 3 also investigates maritime organisation, but its practical aspects, i.e. navigation, orientation and fleet organisation. A major focus of this chapter lies on the re-evaluation of a 13th-century itinerary – colloquially known as King Valdemar's Iitnerary – describing the sea route between the then Danish territories of Blekinge and Estonia, along the Swedish and Finnish coastline. By drawing analogies to similar sources which served the orientation and army and fleet logistics, a new interpretation can be suggested according to which the itinerary was meant as basis for calculating travel time and organising leding fleets. This chapter is first and foremost focussed on Danish maritime logistics to its Estonian enclaves.

This is compared and contrasted to an evaluation of actual 13th-century ship-finds in chapter 4 in the wider region associated with the Baltic Crusades, i.e. Riga (historical province of Livonia, today Latvia), the Matsalu Bay (Estonia), Kuggmaren (Sweden) and Egelskär (Finland), all of which – except the Riga 3 ship – are Bremen-type vessels too. In the concluding section, the question is raised whether Bremen-type vessels corrospond to the historical cog type, which was frequently mentioned in contemporary chronicles and source in connection with the crusades in general (as was deduced in paper E) and this region in particular.

In contrast to the preceding parts, chapter 5, is first and foremost focused on trade – i.e. Baltic timber trade – and examines the probable impact of the availability of high quality Baltic oak on western European shipbuilding. The Beluga Ship (paper C) is introduced as exemplary case study, from which contextual study (paper D) further research questions are derived, assessing the use of timber imports in the light of possible cost-benefit decisions.

Chapter 6 examines the local transport geography of a castle where lime was cut and distributed via ship. A nearby wreck's role within this context is analysed. In its conclusion, Chapter 6 takes a longue durée approach to make a hypothesis for Saaremaa's strategical importance, reaching back in time to the very beginning of the chronological framework of this study, i.e. the early attempts of the Danes to gain a foothold on Saaremaa in the Valdemarian period in the 12th and 13th centuries.

In connection with the 800-anniversary celebration of the alleged descent from heaven of the Danish flag, Dannebrog, at Lyndanise [Tallinn] during the Danish conquest of Estonia in 1219 a number of books and articles were written, some more scholarly than others. In the present text the relevant sources of the Danish involvement in the Baltic crusades leading up to the conquest are discussed afresh. That involves first of all the only source to mention the descent of Dannebrog from Heaven accompanied by a voice promising Danish victory, not at Lyndanise, though, and not in 1219, but during a battle in 1208 at Viljandi in central Estonia!

In the article the validity of this source, only known in a copy from the 1520s, is positively evaluated as far as the date, place and context are concerned. This is done on the basis of contemporary sources, mainly letters to and from the popes Innocent III and Honorius III, showing a much more active Danish involvement in Livonia and Estonia from 1206 onwards than Henry of Livonia want us to believe in his Chronicle. Furthermore, it is argued, based on the evidence in Henry’s Chronicle, that, while the German missionaries and crusaders operated in the sign of the Virgin Mary, the Danes did so in the sign of the Cross. Also the continued use of the Cross symbol in Estonian and especially Tallinnian context, long after Danish rule had ceased, is seen as confirming the strong link between the Cross symbol and the Danish mission and conquest. This supports the idea of Estonia as the Land of the Cross, where Bishop Albert of Riga in an address to Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council, according to Henry, claimed Livonia to be the Land of the Mother, where the Holy Land was the Land of the Son.


Postscriptum
Among the many writings, resulting from the anniversary celebration, only a few focuses on the Danish crusades and their immediate aftermath. Since it will probably take at least 25 years, hopefully more, before another anniversary will be celebrated and scholars once more will be asked to comment on the legend of the descending Dannebrog, I should like to draw attention to two text which are of immediate interest with regard to the conquest and the legend of the descending Dannebrog.

Most important is a Danish-Estonian collaborative work, published in both Danish and Estonian versions. Two Danish historians, Carsten Selch Jensen and Janus Møller Jensen focus on the written sources while archaeologist Marika Mägi and art historian Kersti Markus pictures the local environments in which the Danish conquest took place. From a Danish perspective the Estonian contribution to the book is especially interesting. See ‘Da Danskerne fik Dannebrog. Historien om de dansk-estiske relationer omkring år 1200’ / ‘Taanlaste ristisõda Eestis’, Tallinn (Argo) 2019.

A much smaller and rather puzzling text is presented by the Danish historian Johnny Grandjean Gøgsig Jakobsen, available here, https://www.academia.edu/39788011/Tallinn_-_eller_hvor_det_nu_var_henne_at_Dannebrog_faldt_ned,
The main theme of the paper turns out to be a toponymic analysis of the surroundings of the battle in 1219, which in itself is indeed interesting. However, for some reason Jakobsen decided to embed this analysis within some rather lighthearted comments on the where and when of Dannebrog’s fall from Heaven. This leads him to the conclusion that it is for each and anyone to decide whether to believe the event happened in 1219 at Lyndanise or in 1208 at Viljandi. Jakobsen is well aware that it is the Franciscan Peder Olsen, who in the 1520s both copied the source about the battle in 1208 at Viljandi with the descending Dannebrog and at the same time expressed doubts with regard to the dating. Jakobsen assumes Peder Olsen must have had corrective knowledge. This knowledge, Jakobsen thinks, Olsen may have had from Henry of Livonia’s Chronicle, which, however, forces Jakobsen to admit that Henry has no mention of a descending Dannebrog!

We are, in other words, back to the fact that only one source mentions Dannebrog’s descent and without that one source, we would never have had reason to celebrate a legend of Dannebrog descending over Lyndanise in 1219. The reason for Peder Olsen to doubt the dating was quite rightly that he did indeed have ‘corrective knowledge’ in the sense that, while he had no further evidence of Danish activity in Estonia in 1208, he did know from some of the Danish annals, he was acquainted with, that the Danes led a large fleet to Estonia in 1219 ending in its conquest. It is also quite clear from his text that that was what made him doubt the date 1208. This he almost spelled out in both places he quoted the 1208 source. Thus there was no need for his knowledge of Henry’s chronicle, which he certainly did not have.

The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, written by a missionary priest in the early thirteenth century to record the history of the crusades to Livonia and Estonia in around 1186-1227, offers one of the most vivid examples of the early thirteenth century crusading ideology in practice. Step by step, it has become one of the most widely read and acknowledged frontier crusading and missionary chronicles. Henry's chronicle offers many opportunities to test and broaden the new approaches and key concepts brought along by recent developments in medieval studies, including the new pluralist definition of crusading and the relationship between the peripheries and core areas of Europe.

While recent years have produced a significant amount of new research into Henry of Livonia, much of it has been limited to particular historical traditions and languages. A key objective of this book, therefore, is to synthesise the current state of research for the international scholarly audience. The volume provides a multi-sided and multi-disciplinary companion to the chronicle, and is divided into three parts. The first part, 'Representations,' brings into focus the imaginary sphere of the chronicle - the various images brought into existence by the amalgamation of crusading and missionary ideology and the frontier experience. This is followed by studies on 'Practices,' which examines the chronicle's reflections of the diplomatic, religious, and military practices of the christianisation and colonisation processes in medieval Livonia. The volume concludes with a section on the 'Appropriations,' which maps the reception history of the chronicle: the dynamics of the medieval, early modern and modern national uses and abuses of the text."

Ce mémoire vise à étudier l’expansion des frontières de la Chrétienté sur les rives de la mer Baltique aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles en prenant comme point de départ la Chronique de la terre de Prusse, rédigée vers 1330 par le prêtre de l’Ordre teutonique Pierre de Dusbourg.

En confrontant son propos à un ensemble de sources narratives et normatives, nous tâcherons de saisir le rythme et le mode d’appropriation de l’espace prussien par l’Ordre teutonique et par ses alliés qui menèrent à la christianisation de cet espace et à la conversion de ses habitants, en un mot à l’intégration de la Prusse à la Chrétienté occidentale comprise comme un grand ensemble territorialisé placé sous l’égide de la papauté.

Nous étudierons ainsi divers aspects de l’appropriation du territoire Prussien par l’Ordre teutonique à travers la chronique : rythmes de la conquête et de la conversion des populations païennes, constructions de villes et de villages de colons, édifications d’églises et destructions de lieux de culte païens, purification du sol par le feu et par le sang des martyrs, importances des miracles et des reliques, création d’une nouvelle identité chrétienne en Prusse, etc. Pour ce faire, nous recenserons les différents termes employés par Pierre de Dusbourg pour exprimer ces réalités dans sa chronique.

Notre hypothèse est qu’au moment de la rédaction de la chronique de Pierre de Dusbourg, la Prusse est engagée de plein pied dans le processus de christianisation. Il ressort de nos analyses que les églises et les établissements religieux parsèment alors le territoire qui a été efficacement découpé en régions administratives (commanderies). À cette organisation territoriale séculière se superpose celle diocésaine et paroissiale commune à l’ensemble de la Chrétienté. Enfin, les reliques des saints disséminées en Prusse engendrent la création d’un troisième réseau, celui des pèlerinages qui unit centre et périphérie.

MOTS CLÉS : Ordre teutonique, Prusse, Christianisation, Chrétienté, Croisades baltes.

KEY WORDS : Teutonic Order, Prussia, Christianization, Christiendom, Baltic Crusades.

The Christianization of Livonia from the Perspective of Visual Sources

The early period of the Christianization of Livonia has until recently been considered in terms of written and archaeological sources, but the present article focuses on visual mate- rial. We will try to answer the question why two stone fortresses—Üksküla and Holme— had to be built in the Livonian territory in the context of a peaceful German mission, and why their architectural style is quite different, eliminating the possibility that they could be the work of the same hands. The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia tells us that both building projects were initiated by Canon Meinhard of the Segeberg Convent. In 1186, when the first of the two strongholds had been built, but not the second, Meinhard also became bishop. Although the investiture of a bishop by the Archbishop of Bremen should have been considered an important landmark in the Christianization of Livonia by the Church of Riga, the fact is only briefly mentioned in Henry’s Chronicle. More significant reasons for this gloss over such a major event may be found by looking more closely at the architec- ture of the Holme castle. The style clearly follows that of the Danish 12th century state fortresses, presenting an intriguing synthesis between the castle on the island of Sprogø and the Havn castle of Bishop Absalon of Roskilde.
Besides architecture, the fortresses’ spatial relation to the landscape deserves special attention. Most 12th century Danish fortresses are built on islands, facilitating the control of maritime traffic. The name in Henry’s Chronicle, castrum Holme, denotes a castle built on a small isle in the Scandinavian languages, and considering the position of the island, the fortress was conveniently placed for controlling the traffic on the river Daugava. We could draw the conclusion that after his investiture, Bishop Meinhard turned to the Danes for advice on the next steps to be taken in Livonia. The same happened in the Wendish Crusade, when Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony and King Valdemar of Denmark divided the conquered areas between them. Furthermore, after Bishop Albert’s (1199-1229) ordi- nation his first official visit was paid to the King of Denmark. The Danish marked their presence in the area with a castle on the isle of Holme. This explains why, in 1188, Arch- bishop Hartwig applied for papal approval to specifically emphasise the bishopric’s sub- ordination to Bremen. This could also be the reason for Henry’s taciturnity on the subject in his Chronicle and for the later exculpations of the Church of Riga, including the claim that this church antedated both the Danish crusade and the Danish mission in the region. The construction of the Holme castle lends credibility to the suggestion that Knud VI’s ambitions in Livonia were considerably broader than the historiography has so far sug- gested.

The processes of conversion and colonization of the northeastern Baltic Rim in the thirteenth century durably shaped the relations between the native population and the arriving missionaries, settlers, and crusaders, and formed religious and ethnic identities of both groups. The students of the expansion of Christendom to Livonia have mostly focused on means of evangelization as well as crusader warfare and the formation of identity through conflict, largely overlooking the sociopolitical role of emotions in cohabitation and cultural struggle in the new colony. This chapter studies the representations and attributions of feelings to different social groups in the Chronicon Livoniae and the Livländische Reimchronik. Through primarily quantitative (word statistics) and qualitative analysis this study explores to what extent the different groups of colonizers imaginatively set themselves apart from the native population and what types of feelings they deemed could bridge over the emotional divide between them? Which emotions – according to the viewpoints represented by those chronicles – enabled and which impeded the making of the Livonian society and community between the Christians, neophytes, and pagans in the thirteenth century? In other words, what did the different politics of love and friendship, grief and consolation, joy and fear look like for clerical authors (such as Henry of Livonia) vis-à-vis members of the Teutonic Knights (such as the anonymous author of the LRC)? And how transformative were they considered to be?

In the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Germans of Livonia and the king of Denmark were both crusading against the heathen Estonians. They soon began to quarrel among themselves over conquered territory. The papal legate to Estonia and Livonia from 1225 to 1226, Bishop Guillelmus of Modena, tried to settle these disputes via arbitration.

The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, written between 1224 and
1227, tells the tale of the crusade from the German point of view. It justifies German rights to the provinces under debate by claiming that the Germans were the first to subject the provinces to christianity, Danish missionaries used false methods of baptism and Danish administration was so cruel that the neophytes preferred German lordship. Henry probably inserted arguments made by the German side during the arbitration into his chronicle in order to preserve them for possible future use. Therefore parts of Henry’s Chronicle were based on a legal text and were meant to be used in a legal context.

The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia is the earliest and most important written source about the history of the eastern Baltic region at the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century. Together with a complementary source for this period, the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, the sources have primarily been used to illustrate the struggle on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea during the process of Christianisation. The chronicles are, however, rich in information on a variety of other aspects of the early medieval society as well, such as crusading ideology and rhetoric, administrative distribution and ethnicity, and the range of different practices, all of which have lately inspired much research. In this article, the chronicles are used to analyse seafaring on the Baltic Sea in the beginning of medieval times with the main emphasis on ordinary mariners. First and foremost, new evidence on the existence and importance of pilot services in the Baltic region is introduced. Briefly, winter traffic connected with the sea will be discussed as well and the chroniclers’ approach towards the sea and seafaring will also be touched upon.

Drawing on studies of the history of emotions, trust- and community-formation, and on medieval as well as modern religious violence, this study re-evaluates the predominantly military view of medieval sieges. Instead, this article examines sieges as extreme, often purposefully histrionic, and emotionally ambivalent social events, based
on the descriptions of sieges in two Baltic missionary chronicles: Helmold of Bosau’s ‘Chronica Slavorum’ (12th c.) and Henry of Livonia’s ‘Chronicon Livoniae’ (13th c.). By focusing on the means of emotional bonding during sieges in the Baltic Rim, this article argues that emotions expressed and accentuated the social, political, and religious
predicaments of missioning and crusading. Frequently, emotions in sieges were actively deployed and navigated as means of warfare or as the performative fuel of the theatre of war. Often employed as a motivational force, emotions could also serve as a paradoxical method of socialisation within groups of faith and across religious divides.

Full title:
‘Fears, Sights and Slaughter. Expressions of Fright and Disgust in the Baltic Missionary Historiography (11th-13th centuries)’, in: Per Förnegård, Erika Kihlman, Mia Åkestam, Gunnel Engwall (eds.), Tears, Sighs and Laughter. Expressions of Emotions in the Middle Ages, Conference Series: 92 (Vitterhetsakadmien: Stockholm 2017), pp. 109-137

The early period of the Christianization of Livonia has until recently been considered in terms of written and archaeological sources, but the present article focuses on visual material. We will try to answer the question why two stone fortresses—Ukskula and Holme—had to be built in the Livonian territory in the context of a peaceful German mission, and why their architectural style is quite different, eliminating the possibility that they could be the work of the same hands. The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia tells us that both building projects were initiated by Canon Meinhard of the Segeberg Convent. In 1186, when the first of the two strongholds had been built, but not the second, Meinhard also became bishop. Although the investiture of a bishop by the Archbishop of Bremen should have been considered an important landmark in the Christianization of Livonia by the Church of Riga, the fact is only briefly mentioned in Henry’s Chronicle. More significant reasons for this gloss over ...

The crusades began in the last years of the 11 th century in Europe, in an atmosphere that was anything but tolerant of the so called infidels and heathens meaning basically all non-Christians. They were seen solely as being evil and a threat to Christianity. By the mid-12 th century the crusading movement had reached the shores of the Baltic Sea, where the Slavonic and Baltic natives were being Christianized with the Bible as well as the sword. In the mid-13 th century, through the teachings of authorities like pope Innocent IV (1243–1254) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the ideological attitude of the church started changing toward a more tolerant view of the pagans. For example the theory of natural law was extended to include not only Christians but also non-Christians as well. Innocent IV was one of the most talented canonists of the middle ages. Thomas Aquinas in turn was probably the most important philosopher and theologian of his time. Although the concept of basic human rights was unknown in the Middle Ages, both Innocent and Thomas promoted views that had similarities to the modern Declaration of Human Rights. They argued that these so called natural rights were common to all, even non-Christians, and that all men were equal, everyone had a right to their life and possessions, and no-one should be made to accept Christianity forcefully. These kinds of changes in the doctrine of the church were a very real threat to the crusading movement and as was expected they were not accepted without resistance. One of the aims of this Master's thesis is to shed some light on the crusading ideology and its changes from the 12 th through to the 13 th centuries with the evidence of contemporary sources and previous studies. The main focus of the study is however on the attitudes of the crusaders towards the Baltic pagans and their (natural) rights. Did the changes in the teachings of the church have any real practical impact on the most active crusading frontier of the late 13 th and early 14 th centuries: Livonia and Prussia? Did the attitudes of the crusaders change with the influence of the new doctrine of the church to a more tolerant view of the pagans, or did they remain very extreme? How did the supporters of the crusading movement in the Baltic area react to these new doctrines? My main sources to answer these questions are three crusading chronicles of the Baltic crusades: The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle and the Chronicle of Prussia. These chronicles were written between 1220 and 1320 and they give an excellent view of the crusaders' attitudes and ideologies towards their pagan opponents, and the crusading movement as a whole. In the 13 th century the crusades in Livonia and Prussia had gathered momentum and evolved in effect into a continuous war of conversion sanctioned by the papacy. In all of the three chronicles studied the attitudes towards the pagans are very harsh. This can safely be interpreted as the overall philosophy of the writers of the chronicles and their patrons. Forced conversion was forbidden by canon law but it is obvious from the sources that this prohibition was ignored repeatedly in Livonia and Prussia. Warfare as well had certain restrictions in canon law. However

By the early thirteenth century, the word 'crucesignatus' (‘[person] signed with the cross’) was well on its way to becoming the standard Latin term for a crusader. In the nascent Christian territories settled by German-speaking merchants and missionaries in Livonia and Estonia, however, the idea of the crusader as a 'peregrinus' (‘pilgrim’) continued to hold sway. Using Henry of Livonia’s Chronicon Livoniae, the anonymous Middle High German Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, and numerous contemporary letters and documents, this paper analyses the preeminence of pilgrimage terminology in this region of anti-pagan crusading warfare. The highly artificial ideological framework of Livonia as the Virgin Mary’s special territory, the presence of a unique local military order, the Sword Brethren, the influence of spoken German, and bitter political disputes between the Livonian Church and Denmark in the 1220s all elucidate how and why the vocabulary of pilgrimage eclipsed that of the cross in accounts of the early Baltic crusades.

On the 24th of June 1218 bishop Albert of Riga and bishop Theoderich of Estonia promised to give the whole of Estonia over to king Waldemar II of Denmark in exchange for his involvement in the crusade against the Estonians. A promise from which bishop Albert retreated in the autumn of 1219 after the king had successfully begun his conquest of Estonia. The ensuing conflict ended in the summer of 1222 with the treaty of Ösel between the king of Denmark, the bishop of Riga and the Order of the Sword-brothers by which the two provinces of Southern-Estonia (Ugaunia and Saccala) were to belong to the Germans and the rest of Estonia to the Danes.

The stability brought by the treaty of Ösel was short-lived. The uprising of the Estonians at the end of 1222 and the capture of king Waldemar II by the count of Schwerin in May 1223 enabled the Germans to renew their claims on parts of Danish Estonia.

In the autumn of 1225 the vassals of the bishop of Dorpat invaded the Danish province of Vironia, an action that could have brought about open warfare between Denmark and Livonia. Bishop Guillelmus of Modena, the papal legate to Livonia from 1225 to 1226, intervened and took the provinces claimed both by the Danes and the Germans under papal protection. This has been interpreted as either an attempt of the legate to create a “Papal States in the East” subject to direct papal authority or as a creation of a “Puffer-State” between the opposing parties.

A closer reading of the sources reveals that legate Guillelmus took upon himself the position of an arbitrator of the conflict and that his power over the provinces under papal protection lay in the right to excommunicate anyone who attacked them and the right to confirm the possession of the provinces to the side that should rightfully own them. Since he was not able to end the conflict before his departure from Livonia in may 1226, he had to give his position over to his vice-legate Johannes.

After the departure of Guillelmus open warfare began between the Danes and the Germans that ended in 1227 with the expulsion of the Danes from Estonia. Vice-legate Johannes divided the former Danish provinces (including the provinces under papal protection) between the bishop of Riga and the Order of the Sword-brothers.  In doing so he acted only as the mediator between the Livonian powers and not as the arbitrator between the Danes and the Germans.