This chapter explores the itineraries and actions of several papal legates visiting Scandinavia in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in order to demonstrate how the members of the Nordic elites transformed their networks and power bases through contact with Rome’s deputies. Through the examples of Nicholas Breakspear, archbishops Absalon and Anders Sunesen, Gregorius de Crescentio, and William of Modena, the chapter traces the transformation and European expansion of the clerical, educational, and political networks of ecclesiastical and secular elites in Scandinavia. It is claimed that both locally appointed papal legates and those sent from Rome functioned as exceptionally potent nodes constricting or enabling interaction between an array of networks. They functioned also as influential mediators converting different types of capital: social, dynastic, educational, and symbolic. By representing and appropriating the symbolic power of the Roman pontiffs, papal legates constituted a hallowed fusion of the priestly ministerium and governmental mysterium. As a result, they offered the Nordic elites a new type of sacralized political technology of delegation of power to employ and emulate.

This introductory chapter presents the geographical, chronological, and thematic scope of the volume and expounds its guiding questions and conceptual framework. By combining Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic capital and doxa, Giorgio Agamben’s examination of medieval economy of gloria, and Max Weber’s threefold model of legitimation of leadership, the chapter discusses how medieval Scandinavian elites fused sacral and practical resources to elevate themselves and convince others of their social and political legitimacy, that is, their deservedness to rule. What is proposed is a dynamic, heterarchic, and practice-oriented model of studying how sociopolitical status and haloing glory were competed for, justified, and reproduced over time. These conceptual themes and problems are fleshed out in the presentation of the individual chapters and the three sections into which the entire volume is divided: Glorifying Kings, Spaces of Elevation, and Elevating Social Orders. In its last section the chapter discusses how the sudden boom in literary production and composition of historical sources on the verge of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries both reflected and was the vehicle of elite competition in Scandinavia.

The conquest and colonisation of the northeastern Baltic Rim in the 13th century durably shaped religious and ethnic identities of and relations between the native population and the arriving crusaders. This article explores the codes and displays of hospitality in the anonymous ‘Livonian Rhymed Chronicle’, which are seen here as ways of conceptualising the relationship and conflicts between the Teutonic Knights and the pagan or apostate people in Livonia. It asks which consequences the framing of the host-guest relations might have had for the self-comprehension of the chronicle’s author and his audience. The analysis of the chronicle is pursued along three lines: the first focuses on the questions of chivalry, courtesy, and conversion; the second explores different renditions of a miracle story of inhospitality from the 1220s; the third focuses on the conceptual metaphors of hospitality as a way in which the Teutonic Knights accommodated their adversaries’ viewpoints. In its conclusions, the article argues how a broad focus on the institutions, concepts, and discourses of hospitality can help account for both confrontational and amicable attitudes between the colonisers and the colonised both on the Baltic frontier and among other European frontier societies.

This book explores the practical and symbolic resources of legitimacy which the elites of medieval Scandinavia employed to establish, justify, and reproduce their social and political standing between the end of the Viking Age and the rise of kingdoms in the thirteenth century. Geographically the chapters cover the Scandinavian realms and Free State Iceland. Thematically the authors cover a wide palette of cultural practices and historical sources: hagiography, historiography, spaces and palaces, literature, and international connections, which rulers, magnates or ecclesiastics used to compete for status and to reserve haloing glory for themselves. The volume is divided in three sections. The first looks at the sacral, legal, and acclamatory means through which privilege was conferred onto kings and ruling families. Section Two explores the spaces such as aristocratic halls, palaces, churches in which the social elevation of elites took place. Section Three explores the traditional and novel means of domestic distinction and international cultural capital which different orders of elites – knights, powerful clerics, ruling families etc. – wrought to assure their dominance and set themselves apart vis-à-vis their peers and subjects. A concluding chapter discusses how the use of symbolic capital in the North compared to wider European contexts.

This chapter studies the representations and (self-)attributions of emotions to and of different social groups in two pieces of historiography penned in thirteenth-century Livonia, the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia and the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle. The processes of conversion and colonisation of Livonia in the thirteenth century durably shaped the relations between the native population and the arriving missionaries, settlers and crusaders, and formed the religious and ethnic identities of both groups. In order to access the emotional landscapes of thirteenth-century Livonia this study uses the only two locally penned historiographical accounts: The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia and the anonymous Livonian Rhymed Chronicle. The overuse of vro generates so much noise in this emotion’s data that it is difficult to isolate a meaningful signal. However, we can conveniently look at its less frequent but similarly attributed cognate, vreuden.

This article explores the ways episcopal milieus on the north-eastern peripheries of Europe created and renewed their identities and symbols of episcopal authority by domesticating their immigrant saints during the high Middle Ages. By comparing the examples of holy bishops arriving to Poland and Sweden (St Adalbert, St Sigfrid, St Henry), it studies the episcopal mythopoesis, that is, the creation of foundational myths and mythologies as well as their adaptation to specific local needs and changing historical circumstances. The article further probes to what extent these mythopoetic efforts were original or imitative in comparison to the Western European episcopal centres and other peripheries. How similarly or differently did the bishops in the "old" and "young" Europe respond to the question: What beginnings do we need today? And what role did the appropriation, commodification, and domestication of holy bishops' images and body parts play in building the institutional identities of bishoprics?