The False King Olaf and His Necklace of Letters

As the False King Olaf was led to the stake, on the 28th of October 1402, it would have been no comfort for him to know that much of his story had happened before, and would happen again. He was an impostor, posing as a king who had died young, now apparently back from the dead. This was not an unheard-of occurrence in medieval kingdoms (Cheesman and Williams 2002, 87–8; Lecuppre 2006, 67–72). The False Olaf claimed to be King Olaf II of Denmark and Norway, who had died at the age of seventeen in 1387. Similarly, the False Konradin in 1269 had impersonated King Konradin of Sicily and Jerusalem, dead at sixteen the previous year (Scales 2012, 237; Schreibmüller 1949). Lambert Simnel was a commoner who in 1487 impersonated Edward Plantagenet, attainted at the age of ten. The False Olaf was an alien in the country he wished to govern, propped up by both domestic and foreign actors. In this, he resembled Perkin Warbeck, a half-Walloon Fleming who pretended to be first Edward Plantagenet and later Richard of Shrewesbury, who was backed by English Yorkists, the Scottish court, a Portuguese converso, and an army of Cornish rebels (Gairdner 1898, 263–336; Roth 1918–1920). Parallels could be found in European or Islamic royal imposture for nearly every aspect of the case of the False Olaf (Lecuppre 2005, 14–20; Ingram 1882, 77–85). But there is one detail that is unusual. Two sources record a peculiarly Gothic spectacle when pseudo-Olaf was burnt. In Johann von Posilge's Chronicle of the Country of Prussia (ca. 1420), it is said that before he was immolated, “wart behangen alumbe mit sinen briffen, die her der konigynne gesent hatte als ir son, und wart eyn crone ufgesatzt” (Posilge 1965, 261) [he was draped with his letters, which he had sent to the queen as her son, and a crown was fastened to him]. The anonymous Chronicle of Nordelbian Saxony reports that “uppe sineme houede ene koninglike krone uan papire” (Lappenberg 1865, 100) [upon his head (was affixed) a royal crown of papers].In what follows, I will interpret the meanings of this theatrical destruction of documents, staged as part of an execution. We will consider the case in the context of royal imposture, but also in the context of documentary culture. I provide (1) background on the real identity of the False Olaf (insofar as anything can be known); (2) a study of the beginnings of the imposture, including to what extent the impostor was coached; (3) some deductions on what letters the False Olaf had with him; (4) a theory on how he came to be given those letters; (5) the symbolism of the making and burning of the crown and the necklace; and (6) hypotheses on the meaning of the letters to the False Olaf's supporters.The question of who set up the impostor conspiracy is discussed in a separate article, and so is generally not treated here (Cole 2002, 100–6). However, a brief précis of my findings will also provide some background to the affair. On the death of the real King Olaf in 1387, the thrones of Denmark and Norway passed to his mother, Queen Margaret (r. Denmark and Norway, 1387–1412, Sweden 1389–1412). The young king's demise coincided with the return of four castles in Scania to Danish suzerainty, after they were pawned to the Hanseatic League on a 15-year term following Denmark's defeat in the Dano-Hanseatic War of 1361–1370. The League dragged its feet handing these over, as certain Prussian cities felt the Danes had not paid sufficient war reparations, and that Queen Margaret was not protecting Hanseatic shipping from pirates. The concerns of the Prussian cities were, however, overruled by Lübeck (Bøgh 2003, 296–8, 306–7, 360). In 1398, the Teutonic Order captured Gotland, previously conquered by Margaret's father, King Valdemar Atterdag (r. 1340–1375). By 1402, then, the Order was seeking to negotiate the return of Gotland to Danish hands for a good price while the Prussian third of the Hanseatic League nurtured a grudge against Margaret. The imposture probably began as a ploy by disgruntled Prussian Hansards to inflict revenge on Margaret. Only in its very latest phase was it then picked up by the Order, who were happy to deliver the False Olaf to Margaret in order to sweeten negotiations concerning Gotland (Etting 1987, 94).No source records pseudo-Olaf's real name.3 Posilge's chronicle does provide the names of his parents: “Und bekante offinlich, her were geborin bie Eygerus eyme dorffe, und sin vatir hette geheysin Wolff und sin muter Margarethe” (Posilge 1965, 261) [He admitted publicly that he was born by Eyger (i.e., the river Ohře) in a village, and his father was called Wolff and his mother Margarethe]. That Posilge can name the impostor's parents but not the impostor himself seems curious at first, but the explanation may lie in the type of document to which Posilge had access. Perkin Warbeck's confession begins “I was borne in the towne of Turney in Flaunders, and my father's name is Iohn Osbeck, which sayde Iohn Osbeck, was Comptroller of the said town of Turney, and my mother's name is Katheryn de Faro” (Grafton 1809, 218). Perkin provides his hometown and parents’ names, but not his own name. In the case of Lambert Simnel, no first-person confession survives (indeed, such sources are rare beasts in cases of medieval royal imposture), but the confession of one of the conspirators is preserved. There, the impostor's name is absent, although his father's profession and abode are given, “an organ-maker of the University of Oxford” (Pollard 1914, 247; the sources are discussed by Smith 1996). Posilge reproduces the same categories of information and leaves the same omissions. There is a logic in this because in cases of royal imposture, the most important business for the authorities was to rule out any trace of royal blood in the claimant. Once this was done, the only further details that needed to be elicited were those that would incriminate co-conspirators. Beyond this, the impostor's real identity was irrelevant to contemporary investigators.Etting has described Posilge's account as “referatet af retsagen i Kalmar” [the summary of the trial in Kalmar] and “referatet af den offentlige retshandling” [the summary of the public legal action] (Etting 1987, 95). More precisely, it may be that Posilge was drawing in part from a purportedly dictated confession of the type given by Warbeck. Like the False Olaf, Warbeck's confession is also preserved as an apograph in a chronicle, suggesting that letters of confession could be widely disseminated but quickly became ephemera once the pretender controversy was settled. Only two executive documents have survived concerning the case: one letter from Danish and Swedish knights asking that the impostor be delivered to Denmark, and one from the Teutonic Order assenting (in both instances the matter of pseudo-Olaf himself is not quite the chief matter of the letter, particularly in the second, which is more interested in negotiations regarding ownership of the island of Gotland). However, the case surely generated more documents at the time. Bishop Richard Young of Bangor (d. 1418) was part of an English embassy to Denmark during the affair. In a letter to the Privy Council in England, dated November 2, 1402, he makes an allusion to a now lost report that detailed both the agreement with the Order concerning Gotland and pseudo-Olaf. His tone in the incipit is in the hurried style of a diplomat attempting a quick summa before getting down to his main business, the proposal of marriage between the Danish and English thrones. It is not in itself proof of a confession document intended for circulation with European courts, but it does hint at the sorts of sources that have been lost: Scire dignemini quod, licet in festo Sancti Jacobi feliciter, laudato Deo, partibus Daciæ applicuimus, tamen propter absentam Reginæ, quæ in finibus ultimis regni Sweciæ cum Prucenis tractatum habuit, tam circa præsentationem personæ illius qui falso et ficte asseruit se Regem Daciæ et Norwegiæ, etc. et ejus combustionem, de quibus aliquando vobis scripsimus, quam alia negotia, statum regnorum, etc., concernentia, cum rege Daciæ, etc. seu cum ipsa vel eorum Conciliis usque ad decimum diem mensis Octobris proximo præteritum loqui non potuimus. (Hingeston 2012, 117 [nr. 49])(You ought to know that happily it has transpired, thanks be to God, on the day of St. James, that we have gone ashore in the country Denmark, but that because of the absence of the Queen, who is at the furthest bounds of the Kingdom of Sweden concluding a treaty with the Prussians, also concerning the parading of a person who faked [falso] and falsely claimed to be the King of Denmark and Norway, etc., and [concerning his] burning, of which at length I wrote to you [and] which was another business, concerning the position of the kingdoms, etc., we have not spoken with the King of Denmark, etc., or with her or her Council as of the tenth day of the month of October at the very latest.)Just as Warbeck acknowledged his birth in Tournai, and Simnel admitted his roots in Oxford, Posilge reports that the False Olaf revealed he had been born in a village on the Ohře. When he was discovered by merchants, who supposedly recognized his likeness to the real King Olaf, he was living “by Grudentz in eyme dorffe, und was komen her in das land” (Posilge 1965, 260) [in a village near Grudziądz, and had come here to this country (i.e., Prussia)]. In pseudo-Olaf's days, the Ohře ran all the way from Wolfsburg to Litoměřice, meaning that he would have been Saxon or Bohemian by background, although if the latter, his parents’ names indicate he was a German-speaking Bohemian, not a Czech. Either way, he would have been an immigrant who had made a fairly serious journey. At the closest point of the Ohře to Grudziądz, it is still almost 280 miles away, and almost 340 miles from the source of the river. According to Posilge, the False Olaf was born in one dorff and lived in another dorff bordering on Grudziądz. His family were not, then, urban artisans. If they had possessed skills that were useful in the city (smithing, cobbling, cordwaining, etc.), they could have moved to Grudziądz itself, rather than its hinterland. Pseudo-Olaf was therefore in all likelihood a peasant.Let us assume that pseudo-Olaf, when presented and then soon burnt in Denmark, was around the age that the real Olaf would have been, that is to say, about thirty years old. There is some danger in this assumption, as cases of royal imposture could occasionally be remarkably slapdash about getting ages right. The case of the False Margaret (d. 1301) in Norway had seen a woman in her forties impersonate Margaret, Maid of Norway, who should have been seventeen (Mitchell 2019, 1). Still, Posilge claims that pseudo-Olaf was a good resemblance: “Her were koning Olff gar enlichin” (Posilge 1965, 260) [He looked very much like King Olaf]. He was therefore likely of an appropriate age. This would mean that he had emigrated to Prussia from either Saxony or Bohemia at a point between the years c. 1370–1400. I treat his intellectual capacity elsewhere, but for now, it will suffice to say that he seems to have had what we today recognize as a mild learning difficulty (Cole 2002, 96–100). It is therefore likely that he migrated to Prussia with his family, as the roughly 300-mile journey would have been a hard undertaking for a lone, perhaps guileless, traveler.Some of our sources claim that the False Olaf had secondhand knowledge of Denmark. One of these sources is relevant to his family background. Hermann Korner (d. 1438) was a Lübecker, first a mercenary and later in life a Dominican monk, who composed a chronicle in three recensions, recording Baltic events in a broader European perspective. The first recension includes only a short note that a pretender had been burnt by Queen Margaret. The second recension adds the detail that the impostor was “ut dicebatur, per quandam mulierem, que tempore dicti Olavi filii regine apud ipsam reginam existens curie servierat” (Korner 1985, 364) [well informed, it is said, by a certain woman, who in the time of the aforementioned Olaf, son of the queen, was said at the house of the queen herself to have served the court]. The third recension, which switches from Latin to Middle Low German, says: “Dit was eme overst al geleret, also men sprak, van ener vrouwen, de den junghen ghesoghet hadde” (Korner 1985, 546) [He had been taught all about all this, so people said, by a lady who had visited the young man]. Korner gives the impression of reporting hearsay that presumably had reached him between the first and second recensions, perhaps c. 1420. Decades later, sources begin to provide more detail on the mysterious woman who had coached pseudo-Olaf. The North German humanist Albert Krantz wrote the compendious Chronicles of the Kingdoms of the North, printed in German in 1545 and in Latin the following year. In his version, the False Olaf “Hat vil heymlichkeyt von der Künigin gewist / vil gewist was das kind Olauus / in der kindtheyt gehandelet hette. Welchs ym die Amme Olaui gesagt hette” (Krantz 1545, ccccxliii)4 [knew many of the queen's secrets, knew much of things that had happened to Olaf during his childhood, which Olaf's wet nurse had told him]. In both Korner's and Krantz's tellings, wherever it was pseudo-Olaf encountered, the wet nurse, it most likely occurred once he had left Prussia for Kalmar. But in 1595, the Danish politician and historian Arild Huitfeldt (d. 1609) published the first volume of his Chronicle of the Kingdom of Denmark, which moved the wet nurse closer to home: Aar 1402. vaar en Prydz til / som gaff sig ud for Dronning Margretis Søn / Kong Oluff / hand sagde allehaande forborgen Handel / som ingen kunde vide / uden Dronningen selff / om hendis Hemmelighed: men hand vaar Kong Oluffs Ammis Søn / aff huilcken hand meeget hemeligt haffde forfaret om Dronning Margrete / som vel viste det icke saa vaar: thi hendis Søn tilforne paa Falsterboslot vaar død / hans Legeme begraffven til Soer / hans Indvold for Lunde Chor: thi sagde hun paa deflidste / vaar hand hendis Søn / da hafde hand en Vorte imellem begge Axele / huilcket da / der det randsagedis / icke fantis. Oc er hand Dagen for Michaelis / bleffue brent / imellem Falsterbor oc Skanøer. (Huitfeldt 1650, 621)(In the year 1402 a Prussian turned up who purported to be King Olaf, the son of Queen Margaret. Everywhere he went he spoke of secret occurrences which nobody could know about except the Queen herself, concerning her secrets. But he was the son of King Olaf's wet nurse, from whom he had discovered many secret things about Queen Margaret, who knew full well that he could not be thus, because her son had long since died at Falsterbo Castle, his body buried at Sorø, his innards in the choir at Lund [Cathedral]. Therefore she said in front of everyone, if he were her son he would have a mole between his shoulders, which, when an examination was made, was not there. And he was burnt the day before Michaelmas [28 October], between Falsterbo and Skanör.)As an aside, it has previously been suggested that Huitfeldt invented the story of the mole between the shoulders (Etting 1987, 98). However, it seems instead that Huitfeldt was drawing on the Danish Chronicle (c. 1520s) by Christiern Pedersen, a leading Danish humanist and Reformer. There, Queen Margaret challenges pseudo-Olaf: “Est du min sön, da haffuer du en lidell worte mellom dine herder som du wor födder med” (Pedersen 1856, 473) [If you are my son, you will have a little mole between your shoulder blades which you were born with]. Our main purpose in Huitfeldt's expansion of the tale is the unlikely suggestion that the False Olaf and the real Olaf were milk-brothers. Huitfeldt acknowledges that pseudo-Olaf was Prussian, so for his account to hold on its own terms, the impostor's mother has to be either (1) a Danish wet nurse who migrated to Prussia and bore a son, or (2) a Prussian who migrated to Denmark, served as wet nurse, and then came home to give birth to pseudo-Olaf. I will shortly conclude that Huitfeldt cannot be considered reliable on this point, but no source should be dismissed without the historian explaining some of their reasoning. There is one aspect of the wet nurse theory that is not as unlikely as it seems on first inspection. Medieval royals preferred to employ noble wet nurses, but recruitment of commoners was not unknown (Newman 2007, 49–50).However, in all other ways, Huitfeldt's account is flawed. If the False Olaf's mother had been a Danish migrant to Prussia, he would have been able to give a much better impression of being Scandinavian. Instead, Posilge tells us, “her wart irfunden unrecht in allin sachin, wen her us deme lande nicht geborn was, und kunde ouch der sproche nicht” (1965, 261) [he was found to be incorrect in all things, as he was not born in the country, and he also could not speak the language]. If his mother had been a Prussian migrant to Denmark, we would need a plausible route for her migration and her way into royal service as a wet nurse. If she was a Dane, we would need to find a route for her migration to Prussia, but we have already seen that this is not viable. The most historically plausible method of migration for a hypothetical single woman from Northern Germany to a Scandinavian town in the fourteenth century would have been through prostitution.5 The idea that pseudo-Olaf's mother had been a migrant Prussian sex-worker, who ended up as a wet nurse to Danish royalty before settling into a peasant life in a rural settlement on the outskirts of Grudziądz without acquiring enough knowledge of Denmark to coach her impostor son is so picaresque that it can be discounted—or, more properly, so scurrilous that we can be confident that the sources would record it. The “Margaret” that pseudo-Olaf says was his mother, back in Prussia, according to Posilge, cannot be the woman who supplied him with unsatisfactory information about Danish affairs, according to Korner. Krantz was recounting a popular tradition (“ein Fabel”) with the story of the wet nurse, but the detail surely owes more to the folkloric trope of children fed by the same wet nurse enjoying a special bond than historical fact (Strauch 1993, 622; Parkes 2004, 598, 602–4).If the wet nurse detail is inauthentic, what can we ascertain with more confidence? We previously noted that the likely date of his arrival in Prussia was around 1370 and that he most likely accompanied his parents. It was around this time that Prussia faced a population depleted by the Black Death and a shortage of immigrants from the German lands (Carsten 1964, 108). It is tempting to speculate that the False Olaf's parents, Wolf and Margaret,6 had taken advantage of an opportunity. A peasant is rarely just a peasant—there are many types of peasant experiences: freeholders who own their land, tenants who rent it, cottars who receive plots for subsistence farming in return for labor, agricultural servants who work the lands of other peasants, and so forth. It is generally in the interests of peasants to move toward increasing autonomy over their own soil (Hilton 1973, 40–1, 77–97). Fourteenth-century Prussia inherited many conditions of frontier European feudalism and often offered much better conditions to migrant peasants than their home regions. Dues were comparatively low, there was a relative degree of peasant autonomy, and the lowest positions of agricultural servitude tended to be filled by Indigenous, Slavic-speaking Prussians rather than newcomers (Carsten 1964, 67, 71–88; Koch 1978, 10, 21). The attraction for people like Wolf and Margaret is clear.That Wolf and Margaret initially succeeded in inserting themselves into the middling or higher sort of peasantry is suggested by the way that their son's undoing began. According to Posilge, “des fundin yn koufflute und vrogeten yn, ab her czu Denemarkin icht bekant were” (Posilge 1965, 260) [some merchants came across him and asked him if he had any acquaintance with Denmark]. The possibility that some merchants were idly strolling around the Vistulan countryside cannot be discounted, but the most likely place for an international trader to meet a peasant would have been in a market. In pseudo-Olaf's case, this would have been the Marktplatz of Grudziądz, which first appears in our sources in 1411, but can reasonably be assumed to have been established in the 1230s when the Teutonic Order reorganized the Slavic gród into a town, and extensive German migration began (Frölich 1868, 4–7, 84–8; Liek 1893, 62). From the sixteenth century onward, the Prussian peasantry was maneuvered into increasing serfdom, but around the year 1400, some peasants would still have been participating in market activity as well as rent/due payment, either by selling food as a village unit to a burgher or by selling surpluses in the marketplace as a household (Carsten 1964, 74–6; Nichtweiss 1979, 99–140; Wunder 1978, 53–4).7 Records from fourteenth-century Grudziądz show traders dealing in barrels of preserved herrings and in grain (Frölich 1868, 274). Gdańsk, where pseudo-Olaf was taken once his likeness to the deceased Danish king was discovered, was a major Baltic port and an important hub for the distribution of goods between Hanseatic sub-markets. Gdańsk was also the closest coastal city to Grudziądz. Bydgoszcz was marginally closer, but inland, less prosperous than Gdańsk, and in Polish rather than Teutonic hands. The marketplace of Grudziądz would thus have provided the perfect conjuncture for pseudo-Olaf to have encountered traders with Baltic interests—the people who would have means and motive to execute an imposture against Queen Margaret (for more on the merchants’ possible motivations, see Cole 2022, 103–5).Before he became the False Olaf, our protagonist did not come from a world that knew no bureaucracy. Non-literate bureaucratic rituals such as the passing of twigs before witnesses to formalize land transfers were a part of Prussian peasant legal praxis (Carsten 1964, 81). Similar rituals are known from other feudal economies, including Denmark (Bloch 2014, 121; Villadsen 1944, 5). Land registers (Middle Low German lantboke) were maintained in Prussia as they were elsewhere in feudal Europe. While much of peasant administration happened informally, village life did generate documents: legal conflicts could produce written resolutions, feudal relationships could be formalized in writing, and trading in markets could generate receipts (Clanchy 1993, 46–51; Poulsen 2010, 429–48; Dobrowolski 1971, 296–7). Of course, how often pseudo-Olaf personally dealt with paperwork is unclear. If, as posited earlier, he visited Grudziądz to trade or convey payment to specialists, then it is possible that he handled receipts, but if he had some intellectual impairment, his duties might also have been restricted to manual tasks such as carrying produce.8 Either way, a dramatic acceleration in his relationship with the written word occurred when he arrived in Gdańsk. The conspirators set him up with a court, including a herold, literally a herald, but in this case, also a scribe. Posilge says: Das irfur eyn burger von Grudentz, Tyme genant von der Nelow, und holdte yn, und tate ym gutlichin, und etliche kouflute der lande Denemarkin und Norweyn qwomen aldar, und furtin yn ken Danczk, alzo das das gemeyne volk yn alle hilden for eynen koning, und gobin im gros ere und legetin im vor die hant, war her habin wolde, uf ein gut hoffin. Und czu im qwam ein herold, der im alle ding usgab, und lys in ingesegel grabin, under deme her schreib, und sante botin us czur konigynne von Dennemarkin, wie her ir son were, und were czu lande komen, und welde gerne arm sin bleben sine tage; nu hett in der pabist dorczu getwungen, do her im bichte, her sulde czin szu lande und sin righe vordern. (Posilge 1965, 260–1)(A citizen of Grudziądz, who was known as Tyme von der Nelow, heard of [the resemblance between Olaf and the peasant], and met him, and treated him well, and a number of merchants of the countries of Denmark and Norway came here, and brought him to Gdańsk, so that all the common people hailed him as a king, and gave him great honor and brought to him whatever he asked for, in a great court. And a herald came to him who proclaimed everything for him, and had a seal carved for him. He wrote and sent a message to the Queen of Denmark, [saying] that he was her son, and wished to come to the country, and would very much have spent his days in poverty; but now the Pope had forced him, ordering him that he should preserve his country and his kingdom.)It sounds as though this herold was in fact a scribe with commercial experience, possibly the junior member of a merchant household, or a scrivener of the type that successful merchants employed in their back offices (Middle Low German: schrīværekāmer or schrīvekuntōr; see Dollinger 1971, 164). My confidence in this assessment stems from several details: (1) The “herald” was apparently more than the sort of townsman who had picked up some functional literacy necessary to their normal profession. He was not one who could write his name and pick out the relevant phrases in a letter, but one who had the scribal knowledge either to commission a seal or fashion one himself. (2) The herald was active while pseudo-Olaf's court was in Gdańsk, but apparently did not accompany his liege to Scandinavia. The public execution of those involved in imposture plots was generally root and branch, and the fact that our sources only record the False Olaf being burnt strongly suggest that the pretender and his documents made it to Falsterbo, but the man who wrote them stayed at home, beyond the reach of the Danish authorities. The Prussian chronicler Simon Grunau (fl. 1517) has an eccentric version that features a Gdański trader being examined alongside the impostor, but being unaccountably let off (Grunau 1876, 704–6). However, Grunau's account is so surreal and fairy-tale-like that it can be safely omitted. In a trading hub such as Gdańsk, it would have been relatively easy to find lettered men either in the mercantile sphere or in the grey area where town officials overlapped with merchant households. (3) As we shall see, I accept the detail in the Chronicle of Nordelbian Saxony that pseudo-Olaf wore a paper crown when he was burnt, and I interpret the crown as being made of his letters. Therefore, his letters must have been on paper, not on parchment/vellum. By c. 1400, paper was the preferred material of North German traders and Hanseatic urban administrators (Britnell 1997, 17–8; Jenks 2013, 68–9; Van Huis 2015). The use of seals was known on paper letters as well as parchment (Magerøy 1993, 137).One wonders what the scribe's documents said. Posilge implies that some were letters addressed to Margaret stating pseudo-Olaf's claim to be her son, which is plausible. However, Margaret did not correspond with the False Olaf directly concerning his visit to her—unsurprisingly, given that his court would have had no legitimacy in her eyes. A letter issued by Danish and Swedish noblemen on June 17, 1402, addressed to the Teutonic Order, says that Queen Margaret has heard that “eyn bove, velscher unde vorreder komen is in Pruzen, de zich hed koning Olef” (Karlsson 1903, 72 [nr. 2924, sdhk nr. 15869]) [a scallywag, forger (velscher, also “foreigner”) and traitor has arrived in Prussia, who calls himself King Olaf]. To deliver her message, she charged Folmar Jakobssøn (d. 1413), a Danish aristocrat who had supposedly held the real Olaf in his arms as the young king died, and Wulfhard Wulflam (d. 1409), a Hanseatic diplomat and confidant of Margaret, at that time, mayor of Stralsund.9 A reply was issued from Marienburg on July 21, 1402, stating that Knights of the Teutonic Order will deliver “den man, der sich eynen konyng von Denemark nennet” (Karlsson 1903, 77 [nr. 2928, sdhk nr. 15898]) [the man, who names himself as a king of Denmark]. The False Olaf was therefore probably not carrying any documents pertaining to his passage, as it had been organized by chanceries other than his own. He may have had edicts intended to appeal to commoners. As cited above, Posilge wrote that in Gdańsk, “all the common people hailed him as a king, and gave him great honor and brought to him whatever he asked for, in a great court.” The first personnel of the court were perhaps those sorts of townspeople whom Hilton characterizes with the Marxian term “lumpenproletariat”: those so desperate that they could not or would not see that a king of Denmark could hardly guarantee the liberation of the downtrodden in Pomerania (Hilton 1973, 187). However, pseudo-Olaf's handlers must have been careful to make only limited efforts in the production of emancipatory paperwork. Hanseatic cities could be tinderboxes of social unrest, and dissent in Hanseatic cities was violently extinguished (Dollinger 1971, 133–40; Heß 2016).One letter carried by the False Olaf when he arrived in Scania was probably a supposed papal bull backing his claim. We have already seen that Posilge records that part of pseudo-Olaf's backstory was that he “would very much have spent his days in poverty; but now the Pope had forced him, ordering him that he should preserve his country and his kingdom.” Contrary to Grunau's colorful version, the impostor does not seem to have come to Scandinavia with any of his handlers. Neither does he appear to have given a particularly enthusiastic performance of being the real king, so he could probably not have been trusted by the conspirators to mention the detail about the pope. A document would therefore have been the most reliable way for the conspirators to make sure the message of papal backing was conveyed. However, this letter in particular would have been seriously fi