Suddenly, in the clash of steel upon steel and the wild tumult of the conflict, there arose a great and wondering cry “the banner! the banner! a miracle!” and Christian and pagan paused to listen.  Out of the sky, as it seemed, over against the hill upon which the priests knelt, a blood-red banner with a great white cross was seen falling into the ranks of the Christian knights, and a voice resounded over the battle-field, “Bear this high, and victory shall be yours.”  With the exultant cry, “For God and the King,” the crusaders seized it, and charged the foe.  Terror-stricken, the Esthlanders wavered, then turned, and fled.  The battle became a massacre.  Thousands were slain.  The chronicles say that the dead lay piled fathom-high on the field that ran red with blood.  Upon it, when the pursuit was over, Valdemar knelt with his men, and they bowed their heads in thanksgiving, while the venerable archbishop gave praise to God for the victory.

That is the story of the Dannebrog which has been the flag of the Danes seven hundred years.  Whether the archbishop had brought it with him intending to present it to King Valdemar, and threw it down among the fighting hordes in the moment of extreme peril, or whether, as some think, the Pope himself had sent it to the crusaders with a happy inspiration, the fact remains that it came to the Danes in this great battle, and on the very day which, fifty years before, had seen the fall of Arcona, and the end of idol-worship among the western Slavs.  Three hundred years the standard flew over the Danes fighting on land and sea.  Then it was lost in a campaign against the Holstein counts and, when recovered half a century later, was hung up in the cathedral at Slesvig, where gradually it fell to pieces.  In the first half of the Nineteenth Century, when national feeling and national pride were at their lowest ebb, it was taken down with other moth-eaten old banners, one day when they were cleaning up, and somebody made a bonfire of them in the street.  Such was the fate of “the flag that fell from heaven,” the sacred standard of the Danes.  But it was not the end of it.  The Dannebrog flies yet over the Denmark of the Valdemars, no longer great as then, it is true, nor master of its ancient foes; but the world salutes it with respect, for there was never blot of tyranny or treason upon it, and its sons own it with pride wherever they go.

King Valdemar knighted five and thirty of his brave men on the battle-field, and from that day the Order of the Dannebrog is said to date.  It bears upon a white crusader’s cross the slogan of the great fight “For God and the King,” and on its reverse the date when it was won, “June 15, 1219.”  The back of paganism was broken that day, and the conversion of all Esthland followed soon.  King Valdemar built the castle he had begun before he sailed home, and called it Reval, after one of the neighboring tribes.  The Russian city of that name grew up about it and about the church which Archbishop Anders reared.  The Dannebrog became its arms, and its people call it to this day “the city of the Danes.”