Wherever danger threatens Valdemar and Absalon, Esbern is found, too, earning the name of the Fleet (Snare), which the people had fondly given to their favorite.  Where the fighting was hardest, he was sure to be.  The King’s son had ventured too far and was caught in a tight place by an overwhelming force, when Esbern pushed his ship in between him and the enemy and bore the brunt of a fight that came near to making an end of him.  He had at last only a single man left, but the two made a stand against a hundred.  “When the heathen saw his face they fled in terror.”  At last they knocked him senseless with a stone and would have killed him, but in the nick of time the King’s men came to the rescue.

Coming home from Norway he ran afoul of forty pirate ships under the coast of Seeland.  He tried to steal past; forty against one were heavy odds.  But it was moonlight and he was discovered.  The pirates lay across his course and cut him off.  Esbern made ready for a fight and steered straight into the middle of them.  The steersman complained that he had no armor, and he gave him his own.  He beat his pursuers off again and again, but the wind slackened and they were closing in once more, swearing by their heathen gods that they would have him dead or alive, for a Danish prisoner on one of their ships had told who he was.  But Esbern had more than one string to his bow.  He sent a man aloft with flint and steel to strike fire in the top, and the pirates, believing that he was signalling to a fleet he had in ambush, fled helter-skelter.  Esbern got home safe.

The German emperors’ fingers had always itched for the over-lordship of the Danish isles, and they have not ceased to do so to this day.  When Frederick Barbarossa drove Alexander III from Rome and set up a rival Pope in his place, Archbishop Eskild of Lund, who was the Primate of the North, championed the exiled Pope’s case, and Valdemar, whose path the ambitious priest had crossed more than once, let it be known that he inclined to the Emperor’s cause, in part probably from mere pique, perhaps also because he thought it good politics.  The archbishop in a rage summoned Absalon and bade him join him in a rising against the King.  Absalon’s answer is worthy the man and friend: 

“My oath to you I will keep, and in this wise, that I will not counsel you to your own undoing.  Whatever your cause against the King, war against him you cannot, and succeed.  And this know, that never will I join with you against my liege lord, to whom I have sworn fealty and friendship with heart and soul all the days of my life.”