52 Hammel-Kiesow
princely protection for the Low German merchants came to an end with the
termination of Waldemar’s rule of North Elbia (1223) and of the south Baltic
coast (1227). As a result, Lübeck became a free Imperial City, and all of the cities
had to handle the essential elements of the princely protectorate on their own.
The development of the latter was inevitable, for none of the north German
princes had sufficient power to administer the region and the Emperor was too
far away to bear any significant influence upon the North (a condition which
only deteriorated with the imperial struggle against the pontificate which
intensified beginning in 1239). At that point, those Low German cities not
within the dominion of the Danish Kings, which had constantly faced uncer-
tain times ever since the dethronement of Henry the Lion in 1180/81, had now
far more to administer, with what were, at the time, still largely insufficient
municipal resources.106
However, the mission to Livonia had brought the merchants of the early
Hanse, and especially the city of Lübeck, a powerful new ally: the Pope. In prin-
ciple, the mission to Livonia was, at that time, in a state of tension between
the archbishopric of Lund, which in the early 1170s had presented the Pope
with the initial plans for the proselytizing of Estonia, and the archbishopric of
Hamburg-Bremen, which had been active in Livonia since the 1180s when the
missionary Meinhard had arrived at the Duna Delta aboard the ships of the
Low German merchants (it was at the Duna Delta that the Bishopric of Riga
was founded in 1201). For the crusaders who were to protect the Bishopric of
Riga and then spread the Christian faith from it, Lübeck was the main port for
the reception of supplies. Thus it was that the city attracted the political atten-
tion of papacy and subsequently became factored into their official policy
for the Baltic region.107 It was in this context that Pope Gregor ix forced King
Waldemar ii of Denmark to lift his blockade on the port of Lübeck in 1234.
To accomplish this, Gregor threatened to grant the Livonian bound crusad-
ers, who had already assembled in and, in turn, been prevented from leaving
Lübeck by Waldemar’s blockade, permission to forcefully end the blockade
with military power, which meant war against a Christian king.108 Good rela-
tions between the city council of Lübeck and the Curia, though at times fraught
106 Stuart Jenks, “Die Welfen, Lübeck und die werdende Hanse,” in Die Welfen und ihr
Braunschweiger Hof im hohen Mittelalter, ed. Bernd Schneidmüller (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz-Verlag, 1995), 483–522, 491f.
107 Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes; Rainer Herrmann, “Lübeck und die Päpste (1201–1267),”
zvlga 75 (1995) 9–52.
108 Diplomatarium Danicum, ed. Niels Skyum-Nielsen et al., København, 1/6, No. 183; Carsten
Selch Jensen, “Urban Life and the Crusades in North Germany and the Baltic Lands in the