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habitants, that language is generally spoken, but the German is employed in the churches and schools. Danish is likewise spoken and understood in Tondern, Flensborg, and the dioceses of Gottorp and Bredsted, with 36,000 souls; so that Danish is still the mother tongue for 194,700 Schleswigers among the 350,000 which inhabit the duchy, thus forming a decided majority.

Quite different is the deportment and character of the Holsteiner. He is tall and handsome, with auburn hair. He is economical and industrious, like the Hollander; active and dexterous, ambitious and quarrelsome. He is arbitrary and imperious; witty, lively, but proud and overbearing toward his inferiors. He is full of talent and capacity, but boastful, grandiloquent and selfish. The Holstein cultivators own their lands and are a laborious, brave and intelligent people. Their farms are exceedingly well kept, and comfort and wealth are seen everywhere. The Holstein mariner is clever, bold and enduring, and sings his national German songs with the liveliness and spirit of an Italian. Such is the character of the soil and the inhabitants of these three interesting provinces of the Danish monarchy.

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time, A. D. 810, occupied in the conversion and subjugation of the Saxons. The Frankish emperor being continually harassed by the fleets and armed bands of the Northmen on the coasts of Friesland, and at the mouth of the Elbe, founded the strong castle of Hamaburg (Hamburg) on its northern bank, and afterwards concluded a treaty with the successor of Godfred, Hemming, according to which the Eyder should form the boundary between Denmark and the Frankish empire, and the Danes abandon all their conquests south of that river.

Towards the close of the ninth century the Danish king, Gorm the Old, at last succeeded in uniting the small independent states of the islands, and the main land of Jutland and Scania, (Skaane,) in Southern Sweden, into a powerful kingdom. He crossed the Eyder; but entering into Nordalbingia, then a province of the duchy of Saxony, his career of conquest was arrested. The German king, Henry I. the Fowler, with his German chivalry, defeated the wild Northmen and established the march or margraviate of Schleswig, between the Eyder and the Schley-the limes Danicus, as it is called by the chroniclers, which now for nearly a century remained the battle-ground of the hostile Danish and Saxon borderers during their continual devastating forays.* But Canute the Great, during his interview with the German emperor Conrad the Salian, in Rome, in the year 1027, obtained the cession of this district, and thus the limits of Denmark were restored such as they had been in the time of Charlemagne.t The Saxon march, once more

The whole peninsula was in the remotest times of the middle ages inhabited by Jutes, Angles and Saxons. After the maritime expeditions of the two latter tribes to Britain, towards the middle of the fifth century of our era, Jutes and Frisians began to settle in the abandoned districts of Angeln or South Jutland, north of the Eyder; while large swarms of Vendes, Obotrites, and other western tribes of the Slavonic nation, occupied the eastern coasts of Nordalbingia or Holstein, the seat of the Saxons on the Elbe. In the eighth century Denmark did not yet form a united kingdom; different sea-kings ruled on the islands of the Baltic. Godfred, the king of Reit-Gothland or Jutland, advanced on the Eyder, where he erected the celebrated wall or mound of earth and stones called the Dannevirke The existence of this treaty between the Roacross the peninsula from the bay of the river man Emperor and the King of Denmark is conSchley, (Slias-wyk or Schleswig,) westward firmed by a very ancient inscription: Eidora to the North Eyder, to protect his Scan-Romani terminus imperii, which for centuries dinavian dominions from the inroads of the conquering Franks of Charlemagne, at that

This German settlement beyond the Eyder is very doubtful. Some chroniclers ascribe it to Charlemagne; others with more probability to Klak, a petty king of South Jutland, had been the Saxon Henry the Fowler (919-936.) Harald converted to Christianity so early as A. D. 826. The intrepid missionary of the North, Anscharius, built the first church in Schleswig at that time, and sowed the first seed of Christian piety and love among the wild worshippers of Odin and Freya.

stood over the Old Holstein Gate of Rendsborg. This town was at that time the border fortress of Denmark, who possessed all the tolls and duties

incorporated with the rest of South Jutland, remained in immediate dependence upon the crown of Denmark. In this whole period we find that the South Jutes or Schleswigers had their language, laws, and customs in common with their northern brethren, the Islanders and the Skoningers or Danish inhabitants of Scania. The ancient division of the provinces into districts or shires, called Herreder and Sysler, and the genuine Scandinavian names of towns, villages and natural scenery, down to the very banks of the Eyder, give the most evident proof of the Danish nationality of the South Jutes.

Yet the wars with the Slavonic and Germanic tribes, rendered it necessary for the kings of Denmark to place a powerful commander in the border province, who, possessed of more independence and a strong army, might better secure the Danish frontiers towards Saxony. The noble-minded Knud Lavard, the son of King Erik the Good, was thus proclaimed the first duke (dux or Hertug) of South Jutland in 1102, and took up his residence in Hedeby (Schleswig) on the Schley, which had been erected into an episcopal see. Crossing the Eyder, Duke Knud, in many arduous expeditions, vanquished and converted the heathen Vagrians, Obotrites, and Vendes; he extended his conquests as far as Pomerania, and forced the German Dukes of Saxony and Holstein to recognize his rights over Vendland.

Holzatia (woody Saxony) formed a part of the duchy of Saxony, belonging to the warlike house of Billungen, and consisted of Holstein Proper, Stormarn and the western district of the Ditmarskers. In the year 1106, after the extinction of that family, the Emperor Lothaire erected Holstein into a county, with which he invested Count Adolph of Schauenborg, a castle on the Weser, as a fief dependent on the German Empire. The Holstein counts now assisted Knud Lavard in the reduction of the wild Slavonic tribes on the eastern coast; new settlers from Germany and

on the river. In the fourteenth century, Rendsborg was ceded to the Counts of Schauenborg. The Latin inscription was taken down from the gate in 1806, on the dissolution of the German Empire, and is now deposited in the Royal Artillery Arsenal of the fortress.

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Holland were invited into the country, a bishopric was established in Lübeck, and. the brave duke proclaimed king of the Obotrites. Yet this sudden accession of power kindled the jealousy of King Niels of Denmark, who considered the enterprising duke of the border province a dangerous competitor for the crown. He ordered Knud Lavard to his court at Roeskilde in Zealand, where that excellent and unsuspecting chief was waylaid in a wood by Magnus, the prince royal, and assassinated, in the year 1129.

During the following reigns of Valdemar I., the son of Knud Lavard, and Knud VI., the Danish power became formidable and threatening to all their neighbors. King Valdemar II., the Victorious, conquered the county of Holstein, which by a treaty, in 1214, with the German Emperor Friederich II., of Hohenstaufen, was incorporated with Denmark. He extended his feudal possessions in Pomerania, and even attacked the distant Esthonia, where the Danish crusaders, with the cross and the sword, introduced Christianity among the Slavonians, and swept the Baltic with their numerous fleets. During this period of seventy years (1157-1227) of victories and conquests, the external dominion of Denmark was raised to a higher splendor than it had ever attained since the reign of Canute the Great. The Danes were the ruling nation of the North; but their chivalrous conquests were soon to be lost by one of those sudden turns of fortune which are characteristic of those turbulent times of the middle ages. King Valdemar, while hunting with his son on the island of Lyöe, was taken prisoner by his vassal, Count Henry of Schwerin, and confined in a castle in Mecklenburg, until he by treaty ceded all the conquered territories between the Elbe and the Eyder, including the county of Holstein, Vagrien, and the whole duchy of Pomerania. The king, on his return to Denmark, immediately assembled a large army and crossed the Eyder. But a powerful confederacy had been formed against him, between the counts of Holstein and Schwerin, the free cities of Hamburg and Lübeck, and the primate of Bremen. In the bloody battle, at Bornhöved, near Segeberg in Holstein' on the 22d of June, 1227, King Valdemar suffered a total defeat, and was forced to

give up all his pretensions to the countries | ambitious Holsteiner administrator of the south of the Eyder.

Valdemar II. died 1241, and the subsequent civil war, which broke out among the pretenders to the crown, brought Denmark to the very brink of destruction. This principal cause of such a rapid decline, was not only to be ascribed to the haughty bearing and dangerous influence of the rich and proud Catholic clergy and feudal nobility, mostly of German origin, who had received fiefs in the kingdom, but particularly to the pernicious practice at that time, of investing the royal princes, or other relatives of the kings, with the duchy of South Jutland, (ducatus Futiæ,) as a fief dependent on the Danish crown. Abel, the younger son of Valdemar, who had been invested with the duchy of Schleswig, laid claim to this province, as a free and independent patrimonial inheritance against his elder brother, King Erich Plough penning. Abel was defeated, and forced to receive the investiture of the duchy as a personal fief, not hereditary; but he took revenge against his brother, by the assassination of the latter on the Schley in 1250. The civil dissensions between the Kings of Denmark and their powerful vassals, the Dukes of South Jutland, who contended either for independent dominion or hereditary tenure, continued nearly without interruption; but though they often received aid from the German counts of Holstein, beyond the Eyder, they never succeeded in accomplishing their object.

The most distinguished of all the Holstein counts, Gerhard the Great, of Rendsborg, assumed, on the death of Duke Erich of South Jutland, the guardianship of his young son Valdemar, in opposition to the demands of his uncle, King Christopher II. of Denmark, who laid claim to that right. The king, at the head of a brilliant feudal army, entered the duchy and occupied the castle of Schleswig; but he shortly afterward suffered a signal defeat by the Holstein count on the Hesteberg; in consequence of which the Danes evacuated the duchy and retreated to North Jutland. The nobility of the kingdom, being disgusted with Christopher, expelled him from the country, and, yielding to the intrigues of Count Gerhard, called his ward, the young Valdemar Erikson, to the throne, and elected the

kingdom, during the minority of the prince. In return for these good offices of his powerful uncle, Valdemar, who, at that time, (1326,) was only twelve years of age, bestowed the whole duchy of South Jutland upon Count Gerhard as a hereditary fief, and, according to the Holstein historians, signed an important act in Lübeck, by which he declared Schleswig and Holstein to be eternally united, and bound himself never to reclaim the duchy, or reunite it with the crown of Denmark.

Thus we have arrived at the first union of these two provinces, in the year 1326. But it is fully evident from whatsoever point we view the subject, that this act was without legality, and did not create those rights, which the haughty counts of Holstein inferred from it. The guardian could not lawfully accept a grant of his own ward under age, the validity of which he had to confirm himself. Nor could a prince, chosen by a party of dissatisfied nobles, dispose of an integral part of the kingdom, quite contrary to the capitulation of rights (Haandfæstning) which his guardian had signed in his name, and without consent of the general elective Diet of the kingdom-the Dannehof. Duke Valdemar was never crowned king of Denmark; he is not numbered among the monarchs of that country, and was shortly afterwards forced to give up all his pretensions and retire to Schleswig.

The Holstein historians pretend that this document-this magna charta of "Schleswig-Holstein," which they call the Constitutio Valdemariana, forms the very basis in the dispute between the kings of Denmark and their German subjects in the duchies, by the guaranty which it is supposed to give to the inseparability of the two provinces. But it is a highly remarkable fact that the existence of this document never has been proved; no copy of it has ever been found, and it may, therefore, with good ground, be considered as altogether apocryphal. No mention whatever is made of it in the original capitulation of Prince Valdemar, nor in the letter of feoffment, which Count Gerhard received in 1326, by which the Danish Council of State (Rigsraad) confirmed the investiture of South Jutland as a simple banner-fief (Fanelehn) of the Danish crown. Suppos

ing even that such a document had existed, yet it remained without any influence on the relations of the kingdom; no reference was ever made to it by the Holstein Counts during their disputes with Denmark at that time, and the dukes of South Jutland continued to recognize the kings of Denmark as their lawful liege-lords. Yet we shall presently see an attempt of the Holsteiners to re-establish this imaginary constitution of Valdemar the Minor, in the concessions of Count Christian of Oldenborg, to his uncle, Count Adolph of Holstein, in 1448, on which they, at the present day, build all their pretensions to their right of a "Schleswig-Holstein union." Christopher II., in the mean time, returned from his retreat in Mecklenburg, and the Danes flocked round him with hopes to escape from German oppression. He regained his crown, and young Valdemar Erikson, renouncing his ephemeral dignity, returned to his duchy of South Jutland, which Count Gerhard surrendered to him. But the weak and despicable Christopher II., encompassed by enemies on all sides, not only recognized the succession of the Counts of Schauenborg to the Danish banner-fief of South Jutland, in case of the death of Valdemar without male heirs, but, in his pecuniary distress, mortgaged the whole of North Jutland to Count Gerhard for a sum of money, and the islands to Count John of Itzehoe. These chieftains immediately occupied the Danish provinces thus surrendered to them, with their wild bands of German hirelings and adventurers. Poor, distracted Denmark had never found herself in greater distress. Her prelates and nobles fawned on the high-plumed foreigners; her industrious citizens and brave yeomanry were alike oppressed by their countrymen and enemies, and treated as if they were serfs. Her nationality seemed on the point of perishing beneath that of the Germans; her political power was on the eve of a total dissolution. King Christopher died broken-hearted on the Island of Falster in 1333; the province of Scania rose in arms, slaughtered the German condottieri, and united with Sweden. Yet the Holsteiners, with their active and ambitious chief, Count Gerhard, one of the greatest warriors of the age, still possess ed all the mainland. Attempts at insurrection were made, but the Danes were

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routed in every battle. Otho, the prince royal, defeated near Viborg, was carried a prisoner to the gloomy castle of Segeberg in Holstein. Valdemar, his younger brother, lived an exile at the court of Brandenburg. The cruelty and exactions of the foreign soldiery now became insupportable; even the good-natured Jutes at last were roused to resistance, when Count Gerhard, at the head of ten thousand Germans, began devastating that unhappy country with fire and sword. But the hour of retribution had arrived. The Danish knight, Niels Ebbesen of Nörreriis, on the 18h of March, 1340, with sixty daring followers, entered the castle of Randers, and slew the count in the midst of his numerous mercenaries. Prince Valdemar Christopherson now returned from Germany, and succeeded by his prudence, perseverance, and eminent political talents, in redeeming nearly all the alienated and mortgaged provinces of the kingdom. He was less successful in his exertions to recover South Jutland. The male line of Abel's descendants became extinct in 1375. The old wary King Valdemar III. had foreseen this important event, and a Danish army immediately entered the duchy and occupied its principal towns. But the Holstein Count, Iron-Henry, the chivalrous son of the great Gerhard, was still more prompt. He took possession of the castle of Gottorp and was attacking the Danes, when the news of the death of King Valdemar, at Vordingborg in Zealand, again suspended the war. His nobleminded daughter, Margaretha, the Semiramis of the North, governed the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway in the name of her son Oluf Hakonson, and being pressed by a disastrous war with the overbearing Hanseatic confederation, and desiring the aid of the Counts of Holstein, she, at an assembly of the Danish nobility, at Nyborg, in 1386, bestowed upon the Count Gerhard of Rendsborg, the son of Iron-Henry, the much disputed duchy of South Jutland, as a banner-fief of the Danish crown, to remain indivisible in the hands of only one of the counts, who, as a Danish vassal, had to perform the usual feudal military service to his liege-lord. The act did not expressly state whether the fief was personal or hereditary; and the Danish kings demanded the repetition of the oath of allegiance at every succession.

This sacrifice of the most beautiful province of the kingdom had been forced on the queen by the internal distraction and political weakness of Denmark; and although she afterwards succeeded in placing the crowns of the three Scandinavian nations on her head by the celebrated Calmarian union in 1396, yet the favorite scheme of her life was the reunion of the duchy of South Jutland with the kingdom of Denmark. Circumstances seemed in her favor. The warlike Duke Gerhard, the first who assumed the title of Duke of Schleswig, had perished in battle against the Ditmarskers, in 1404. His sons Henry, Adolph and Gerhard, were minors, and the youngest still unborn.

Queen Margaretha, by her consummate skill in employing persuasion and force alternately, might perhaps have seen her exertions crowned with success; but her death in 1412, and the violence and indiscretion of her unworthy nephew, Erik of Pomerania, who inherited her triple crown, kindled a most bloody and untoward twenty years' war with the young dukes, which fill the most disgraceful pages in the annals of Denmark. Though Erik disposed of the united armies and fleets of the whole north, that dastard and indolent king was foiled in every attempt to repossess himself of Schleswig. In 1420, a Danish army of nearly a hundred thousand men suffered a terrible defeat at Immervad; and Flensborg, the only city still occupied by the king, was on the point of surrendering to the gallant Duke Henry, and his Hanseatic allies, when both the contending parties were invited to appear before the throne of the German Emperor Sigismund, who offered himself as umpire in this odious dispute. King Erik at once accepted the invitation, and departed for Germany. The young Counts of Holstein, on the contrary, preferred the prosecution of the war, until at last Henry, yielding to the exhortations of the clergy, presented himself at the Imperial Court at Buda in Hungary, in 1424. Here he found a splendid assembly of German princes and Madjar magnates, as assessors, attending on the decision of the emperor. King Erik and his Danish nobles, sure of gaining their cause, had already left Hungary, and undertaken a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

It is very interesting to observe the same uncertainty about the relations between the duchies and Denmark, in the writings of the historians of the fifteenth century, as among the diplomatists and politicians of the present day. It appears, nevertheless, that the principal point in dispute on the part of the vassals at that time was their refusal to render feudal homage and military aid to their liege-lord. However this might have been, certain it is, that when the imperial umpire demanded the production of all the former documents and acts of feoffment, setting forth the claims of the Counts of Holstein to the duchy, Henry of Schauenborg could only refer to the vague expressions of the act of 1386 and point to his good sword for the rest of the evidence. The imperial sentence was pronounced on the 28th of June, 1424, according to which the emperor, as the chosen umpire of both parties, having consulted the prelates, knights, professors and lawyers of the Roman Empire, resolved: "that the whole of South Jutland with the city of Schleswig, the castle of Gottorp and other towns, the Danish wood (Dänisch Wold,) the island of Als, and the coast district of the Friesians, with all rights and privileges, had ever belonged to the king and kingdom of Denmark; likewise that the Counts Henry, Adolph and Gerhard, neither had possessed nor did possess any hereditary right to the duchy." By that sentence, the constitution of Duke Valdemar of 1326, if ever it had existed, was then declared invalid, and Schleswig was pronounced an appurtenance of the Danish realm. Henry, indignant at the apparent injustice of the imperial decision, solemnly protested, and appealed to the Pope. But Martin V., feeling himself in a difficult position between the council of Constanz and the Emperor, and intimidated by a missive from the latter, in which he advised him to confine his attention to ecclesiastical affairs, contented himself with exhorting the Counts of Holstein to pious submission, and to peace with Denmark.

Both parties then returned to the north, and the war in Schleswig was carried on with renewed strength. In 1427, Count Henry fell before Flensborg; but his warlike brother Adolph continued the contest with extraordinary energy and success. Ham

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