The heathen temples were destroyed and churches built on their sites of the timber gathered for the siege of Arcona.  The people, deserted by their own, accepted the Christians’ God in good faith, and were baptized in hosts, thirteen hundred on one day and nine hundred on the next.  Three days and nights Absalon saw no sleep.  He did nothing half-way.  No sooner was he back home than he sent over priests and teachers supplied with everything, even food for their keep, so that they “should not be a burden to the people whom they had come to show the way to salvation.”

The Wends were conquered, but the end was not yet.  They had savage neighbors, and many a crusade did Absalon lead against them in the following years, before the new title of the Danish rulers, “King of the Slavs and Wends,” was much more than an empty boast.  He organized a regular sea patrol of one-fourth of the available ships, of which he himself took command, and said mass on board much oftener than in the Roskilde church.  It is the sailor, the warrior, the leader of men one sees through all the troubled years of his royal friend’s life.  Now the Danish fleet is caught in the inland sea before Stettin, unable to make its way out, and already the heathen hosts are shouting their triumph on shore.  It is Absalon, then, who finds the way and, as one would expect, he forces it.  The captains wail over the trap and abuse him for getting them into it.  Absalon, disdaining to answer them, leads his ships in single file straight for the gap where the Wendish fleet lies waiting, and gets the King to attack with his horsemen on shore.  Between them the enemy is routed, and the cowards are shamed.  But when they come to make amends, he is as unmoved as ever and will have none of it.  Again, when he is leading his men to the attack on a walled town, a bridge upon which they crowd breaks, and it is the bishop who saves his comrades from drowning, swimming ashore with them in full armor.

Resting in his castle at Haffn, the present Copenhagen, which he built as a defence against the sea-rovers, he hears, while in his bath, his men talking of strange ships that are sailing into the Sound, and, hastily throwing on his clothes, gives chase and kills their crews, for they were pirates whose business was murder, and they merely got their deserts.  In the pursuit his archers “pinned the hands of the rowers to the oars with their arrows” and crippled them, so skilful had much practice made them.  Turn the leaf of Saxo’s chronicle, and we find him under Ruegen with his fleet, protecting the now peaceful Wendish fishermen in their autumn herring-catch, on which their livelihood depended.  Of such stuff was made the bishop who

     “Used his trusty Danish sword
     As the Pope his staff in Rome.”