King of Denmark (1137–1146), a weak and conciliatory ruler beset by rival claimants, and the first Danish king to abdicate voluntarily — retiring to a monastery, which opened the war of the three kings.
Eric III, called Eric Lamb for his mildness, was king of Denmark from 1137 to 1146. A grandson of Eric Evergood, he was raised to the throne after the murder of his uncle Eric Emune, and spent his reign struggling, with little success, to hold the fractured kingdom together against rival claimants.
Weak and conciliatory where the times demanded strength, he was worn down by revolts and by the ambitions of the young pretenders Sweyn and Canute. In 1146, sick and exhausted, he did what no Danish king had done before: he abdicated and withdrew into a monastery, dying soon after. His resignation left the throne contested between rivals and opened the destructive war of the three kings.
Eric was born about 1100, a grandson of Eric I Evergood through his mother, and so a member of the fractious royal kin. On the murder of his uncle Eric II Emune in 1137, Eric — mild where his uncle had been ferocious — was chosen king, in part as a relief from the terror of the previous reign.
He inherited a realm exhausted by a decade of murder and civil war, and rivals with claims as good as his own.
Eric's byname "Lamb" says almost everything the sources thought of him: gentle, mild, and pious, but weak — a king without the hardness his turbulent age required. After the ferocity of Eric Emune, his mildness was at first welcome, but it soon looked like helplessness in the face of ambitious and violent rivals.
He was not without decency or piety; his final choice, to lay down the crown and end his days in a monastery, was remembered as an act of Christian humility rare among kings. But as a ruler he was overmatched. He could neither crush his rivals nor reconcile them, and his reign drifted from crisis to crisis until he gave it up — a good man, perhaps, and certainly an ineffective king.
Eric Lamb's reign was a losing struggle to keep control. He faced repeated challenges, most dangerously from the young Oluf Haraldsen, whom he eventually defeated, and lived under the shadow of the rising claims of Sweyn and Canute, grandsons of earlier kings. Unable to master the factions, he leaned on the Church and on compromise, and steadily lost ground.
Worn out and ill, Eric took an unprecedented step in 1146: he resigned the crown and entered the monastery of St Canute at Odense as a monk. No Danish king had ever abdicated before.
Eric III died in his monastery at Odense on 27 August 1146, only weeks or months after laying down the crown. He left no clear heir, and the throne he had resigned was at once contested.
Eric Lamb is remembered as a weak but not ignoble king, and above all as the first Danish monarch to abdicate. His resignation, however humble, was a disaster for the realm: it threw the succession open between the rival claimants Sweyn, Canute, and Valdemar, and plunged Denmark into the war of the three kings that would rage for a decade until Valdemar I emerged as sole ruler.