Both places were captured in 1169 by a great expedition under the command of Valdemar and Absalon; the hideous colossal idol of Riigievit was chopped into firewood for the Danish caldrons, and the Wends were christened at the point of the sword and placed beneath the jurisdiction of the see of Roskilde.
Meanwhile the Danish monarchy was attempting to aggrandize itself at the expense of the Germans, the Wends who then occupied the Baltic littoral as far as the Vistula, and the other Scandinavian kingdoms. Harold Bluetooth Danis expansion.
For the importance of Charlemagne's work, from the point of view of the Church, consists also, not so much in the fact that, by his conversion of the Saxons, the Avars and the Wends in the eastern Alps, he substantially extended the Church's dominions, as in his having led back the Frankish Church to the fulfilment of her functions as a religious and civilizing agent.
Here occurs the earliest mention of Vinland, and here are also references of great interest to Russia and Kiev, to the heathen Prussians, the Wends and other Slav races of the South Baltic coast, and to Finland, Thule or Iceland, Greenland and the Polar seas which Harald Hardrada and the nobles of Frisia had attempted to explore in Adam's own day (before 1066).
The crusaders of northern Germany never went to the Holy Land at all; they were allowed the crusaders' privileges for attacking the Wends to the east of the Elbe - a fact which at once attests the cleavage between northern and southern Germany (intensified of late years by the war of investitures), and anticipates the age of the Teutonic knights and their long Crusade on the Baltic. The crusaders of the Low Countries and of England took the sea route, and attacked and captured Lisbon on their way, thus helping to found the kingdom of Portugal, and achieving the one real success which was gained by the Second Crusade.
The Premonstratensians played a predominant part in the conversion of the Wends and the Christianizing and civilizing of the territories about the Elbe and the Oder.
No kind of information is excluded, but the fullest details refer to the bishopric of Merseburg and to the wars against the Wends and the Poles.
Ture, and in 1343 made a journey to the Holy Land in disguise, and on his way took part in an expedition of the knights of the Teutonic Order against the infidel Wends and Lithuanians.
The Czechs and the Slovaks, or, to give them their united name, the Czechoslovaks, are a branch of the great Slav family of which the Russians are the most numerous and the most important member and to which the Serbo-Croats with the Slovenes, the Poles, the Bulgarians and the Wends of Germany also belong.