INTRODUCTION The last crusade has been fought many times and in many different places. Denmark is seldom believed to have taken part in it. This study will examine the role of crusading in late medieval and early modern Denmark from about 1400 to 1650. Judging from the treatment it has received within international and in particular Scandinavian historiog- raphy, it was not great. Even some contemporaries seem to have been of this opinion. At the imperial Reichstag that gathered in Regensburg in 1454 to discuss and plan a new great crusade against the Turks in the wake of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the papal legate Aeneas Sylvio Piccolomini—the later Pope Pius II (1458–1464)—lamented in a great anti-Turkish oration that “Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians live at the end of the world, and they are not capable of doing anything outside of their homes”.1 It will be the purpose of the present study to argue that Piccolomini, the vigorous crusade enthusiast, was mistaken. Crusading had a tremendous impact on political and religious life in Scandinavia all through the Middle Ages, an impact which continued long after the Reformation ostensibly should have put an end to its viability within Protestant Denmark. The present work thus has two main ambitions: \ rst to investigate the role of the crusade, politically and ideologically, in Denmark from the founding of the Kalmar Union consisting of three Nordic king- doms Denmark, Norway, and Sweden-Finland in 1397 (which lasted to 1523), to the Reformation in 1536; second, it will point to a number of ways in which crusade ideology lived on during the Reformation period and beyond, well into the seventeenth century, up to the death of King Christian IV in 1648.2 1 Quoted from Niitema 1960, p. 228: “Dani, Sveti, Norvvegii in ultimus orbis oris situ, nihil est, quod extra domum queant”. 2 In this work, Denmark means the lands of the Danish king, which in the late Middle Ages included parts of present-day southern Sweden and Schleswig and Holstein. With the formation of the Kalmar Union, Danish kings, nominally at least, also ruled in Sweden and Norway, including the lands tributary to the Norwegian king, Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. They are therefore included in the investigation until the nal dissolution of the union in 1523. From then on Denmark means the twin-monarchy of Denmark and Norway, which lasted to 1814, as well as 2 introduction The results, I believe, will make a substantial contribution to the understanding of crusading in the fteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Geographically the largest realm of the fteenth century, bordering on various heathen peoples and the schismatic Russians—against whom Scandinavian kings had conducted crusades for centuries—it would seem strange if the Scandinavian kingdoms had apparently escaped the message and impact of the crusade found in the rest of Europe in the \ fteenth century—or even that they were untouched by the political struggles to organize a new joint Christian crusade against the Turks. Some initial steps have been taken towards an investigation of these questions. They suggest that crusading did in fact play an important role, not only for the international politics of the Danish kings of the Kalmar Union, but also for the internal relationships between the different countries of the union, especially Denmark and Sweden. To my knowledge no research has been carried out on how the crusading ideology lived on in post-Reformation Denmark.3 This is regrettable since Danish evidence, Denmark being one of the leading Protestant kingdoms until the defeat in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) in 1626– 29—when Sweden took over that role—might represent an important contri bution to a more general debate on the afterlife of the crusade. Crusade Historiography in Denmark Crusades have been written about in Denmark since the twelfth cen- tury. The Danish word for crusade—korstog—was, however, rst used in the eighteenth century. It probably entered the Danish language as a direct translation of the German Kreuzzug, which was used from the early eighteenth century to describe the expeditions to the Holy Land in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.4 The rst modern historical Holstein, and the “eastern frontier” in the Baltic—despite continued minor Danish interests in the area—will not be treated further. 3 Cf. J. M. Jensen 2004a and 2004d. 4 Hölzle 1980, 1:31–34. According to Hölzle it replaced the term Kreutz-fahrt, which had late-medieval origins in the form of kriuze vart and similar variations that, however, appeared late and was seldom used. In the Universal Lexicon [64 vols. (Halle and Leipzig)] published in Germany between 1732 and 1750, the two forms were, however, still used interchangeably “Creutz-Fahrten oder Creutz-Züge” to describe the military expeditions of the “Abendländischen Christen nach dem gelobten Lande im 11 und 12 seculo”, 6:1627–36 and 58:1214: “Zug, (Creutz-) siehe Creutz-Fahrten”. Cf. the title of Adam .