The battle of 4 June 1134 in which Eric II destroyed the army of his uncle King Niels on the Scanian shore, killed Niels’s son Magnus the Strong, and took the Danish crown. Five bishops died fighting on the royal side, the heaviest loss the Danish church ever suffered in a single day.
On 4 June 1134 the army of King Niels of Denmark was destroyed at Fotevik, a bay on the Scanian coast below the Falsterbo peninsula. The victor was his nephew Eric, called Emune, who had spent three years losing battles to him. The dead included Niels’s son and co-king Magnus the Strong, the man whose killing of Canute Lavard in 1131 had begun the war.
What makes Fotevik unusual is the casualty list. Five Danish bishops were killed on the royal side, along with a large number of priests, because the church of Jutland and the islands had gone to war with its king’s army in person. Nothing comparable happened again in medieval Denmark, and the loss is the single fact about the battle that every medieval source records.
The battle also marks the arrival of a new kind of fighting in the north. Eric had hired German heavy cavalry, and the Danish sources treat their charge as the thing that decided the day. Within a generation the Danish crown was raising its own mailed horsemen, and the levy of ships and axes that had fought Denmark’s wars for two centuries began to give way.
Niels had ruled since 1104, the last of the sons of Sweyn Estridsen to hold the throne, and by the 1120s the succession was a problem with two answers. His son Magnus expected it. So did Canute Lavard, son of the previous king Eric I, whom Niels had made duke in Schleswig and who had taken the title of king of the Obotrites from the German emperor — a Danish prince holding a crown of his own on the southern border.
On 7 January 1131 Magnus lured Canute into the woods at Haraldsted near Ringsted, on the pretext of a private talk, and killed him. The killing of a kinsman under a safe-conduct offended in a way an ordinary dynastic murder did not, and Canute’s reputation as a just and popular lord made it worse. He was canonised in 1170 and the church at Ringsted became his shrine.
Canute’s half-brother Eric took up the feud at once. The first three years went badly for him: he was beaten in Jutland and at Onsild and Vaerebro, and he fled to Norway and then to Scania. What changed was not his generalship but who was willing to fund it.
Scania was the richest of the Danish provinces and the seat of the archbishopric of Lund, which since 1104 had held the primacy over all Scandinavia. Niels had allowed that primacy to be questioned, and Archbishop Asser had reason to want a king who would defend it. Scania declared for Eric, and it was from Scania that he fought the last campaign.
Eric also bought help abroad. He obtained a force of mailed German horsemen from Holstein, professional cavalry of a sort Denmark did not yet field, and brought them across to the Scanian shore. Saxo and the Danish chronicles agree that this contingent was small and that it was decisive, which is the combination that makes an account credible: nobody exaggerating a victory invents a foreign minority and gives it the credit.
Niels answered by bringing his army to Scania by sea, the ordinary Danish way of moving an army, and landing it at Fotevik. The bay is shallow and open, and putting a levy ashore from ships into open ground in front of waiting cavalry is close to the worst position such a force can be given.
No source describes the fighting in any detail. What the Danish annals and Saxo agree on is the outcome and its speed: the royal army broke soon after it was engaged, the German horse rode through it, and the killing happened as the levy tried to get back to the ships across open shore and shallow water.
Magnus the Strong was killed. So were five bishops, among them the bishop of Roskilde, and the chronicles put the number of priests who died with them at about sixty. The medieval lists of the fallen bishops do not entirely agree with one another, so the individual names are less secure than the number, which every account gives as five.
The presence of a bishops’ contingent on a battlefield needs no special explanation in twelfth-century Denmark, where a bishop held land and men and owed service for them. What Fotevik shows is the cost when the whole episcopate of one faction is present at a rout: there was no orderly withdrawal, and prelates in mail who could not run died with everyone else.
Niels got off the field and away by ship. He made for Schleswig, which was a strange choice, because Schleswig was the town of the duke his son had murdered, and its merchant guild had honoured Canute Lavard as its patron.
On 25 June 1134, three weeks after the battle, the guildsmen of Schleswig fell on the king in the town and killed him. He was about sixty-nine, had reigned for thirty years, and was the last of the sons of Sweyn Estridsen; his death closed a run of five brothers on the Danish throne.
Eric was crowned as Eric II. He was king for barely three years and used them ruthlessly: his half-brother Harald Kesja, who had been raised up as a rival king in Jutland, was hunted down and killed in 1135 with most of his sons. On 18 September 1137 a magnate named Sorte Plov — Black Plough — ran Eric through with a spear at a public assembly near Ribe, in front of the whole gathering.
Fotevik decided which branch of the family would rule, and nothing else. The war it ended was the first round of a Danish civil conflict that ran, with pauses, for twenty-three more years: Eric II was murdered in 1137, his nephew Eric III abdicated in 1146, and the kingdom then split three ways between Sweyn III, Canute V and Valdemar. It closed only at Grathe Heath in 1157.
The long-term winner was Canute Lavard’s line. His posthumous son was the Valdemar who survived the Bloodfeast of Roskilde and became Valdemar I, and the Valdemarian kings who made Denmark a Baltic power in the later twelfth century descended from the duke murdered at Haraldsted, not from either of the men who fought at Fotevik.
At the bay itself, underwater survey has found a barrier of deliberately sunken ships across the approaches at Fotevik, of a kind used to close a harbour against attack. Its dating has been associated with this period and the battle, though a blockade is a standing defence rather than a battlefield feature, and it should not be read as part of the fighting of 4 June.