Growing inter-Scandinavian entanglement.

Internal consolidation in the high medieval Scandinavian kingdoms meant that more energy and resources could be directed to foreign affairs, which led to expansion in directions that were determined by the different geographical positions of the three kingdoms, and partly also by traditions from the Viking Age. Norway and Sweden lay, as it were, with their backs to each other and expanded in opposite directions: Norway towards the islands of the western sea, Sweden towards Finland and the eastern Baltic. The Danish kingdom, situated across the maritime access to the Baltic and comprising the northernmost part of the west European continent, found the chief outlets for its foreign energies in north Germany and along the Slavonic south coast of the Baltic, but had ambitions in the eastern Baltic as well. Danish and Swedish expansion in the Baltic was closely connected with missionary endeavours, which the papacy was willing to treat as crusades. In the west the organisation of a separate Norwegian church province paved the way for Norwegian expansion. Under the rule of the Valdemarian kings in the latter part of the twelfth and the first decades of the thirteenth century, a Danish dominion was established over Germany north of the Elbe, including the coastal areas south of the Baltic inhabited by Slavonic population groups, and further east Estonia was brought under Danish sovereignty. Denmark broke away from its inferior position in relation to the German kingdom and emerged as the strongest power in the Baltic, but the capture of King Valdemar II in 1223 and his defeat at Bornhøved in 1227 put an end to Danish expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]