OK. *cracks knuckles* Boys and girls, I live here and have worked on multiple museum exhibitions based on this battle. Get ready for some gritty details, because this is some Game of Thrones level dirty death and betrayal stuff.
The summer of 1361 was the hottest in living memory. Those first 1000 farmers slaughtered that were mentioned above? They were trying to lure the attacking Danes into a bog marsh to delay or even trap them. But the summer was so hot, the marshes had dried out, and the peasant army found themselves without defense and were all killed. You still find arrowheads and other remains on those fields from time to time.
So, the Danes - an army made up of seasoned professional fighters with the very latest in battle tech - kept marching on Visby, the largest town on the island. For a bit of backstory, Gotland is situated in the middle of the Baltic Sea and had been a pinnacle of trade since, well, forever. Well before Viking times, and still now in the Medieval era. Gotland was super rich. Visby was one of the most modern towns of its era. They had the equivalent of skyscrapers. They had indoor plumbing. They had a huge wall going around the whole city, protecting it both towards the sea and the inland. Why? Because Visby was very close to being a country of its own, separate from the rest of Gotland. People from the countryside had to pay hefty tolls to be allowed to trade in the city. But with medieval ships growing larger and heavier, they could no longer land in the other shallow ports of the island, so to trade, you kind of had to go to Visby. There was a literal civil war about it, only two generations earlier (that’s why the peasant army still had those weapons, chain mails etc hanging around, from grandpa’s fightin’ days).
So back to those infernal Danes. They’re marching on Visby, and everyone knows that if Visby falls, the whole island is officially in Danish hands. Of course the people don’t want this, so the farmers send every fighting man they’ve got to join the battle at Visby to stop the Danish king. They amass by the great wall.
Only, and here’s the filthy dirty part, the townsfolk won’t open the gates. Whether because there’s still enmity between the town and countryside, or because they’re afraid of treason, or afraid the Danes will slip through… they don’t open the gates, and they send no reinforcements. They watch from the wall as the Danes arrive, and the peasant army valiantly, hopelessly fight them, because they’re trapped and can do nothing else. Just about every single man dies. An entire generation of Gotlandic men are obliterated.
There’s a huge reenactment of the Battle of Visby every few years. I took this photo in 2011.
And Valdemar, the Danish king, tells the people on the wall that they’d better open the gates, or they’ll end up as dead as the other Gotlanders. And, also, pretty please, if they just surrender nice and easy and agree to pay taxes to Denmark, they’ll get official town privileges (it’s a big thing) and be his BFFs forever.
So they do open the gates, let the Danes in, profit is made on both sides, and Valdemar sails home again.
This is all so disgraceful that for centuries Swedish school children have been taught that Valdemar threatened to burn the city to the ground - if they didn’t surrender and give him several barrels full of gold. And poor Visby complied, at great cost. These days it’s generally accepted, though, that what really happened was that the townsfolk hid behind their walls and let the people outside die, then profited from striking a deal with the Danes.
People on the Gotland countryside are still bitter about it to this day, 700 years later. There are ceremonies held for the fallen every year, still. Though their sacrifice turned out to be in vain, they are not forgotten.
This is one of the illustrations I’ve made for the Visby Museum exhibition on Medieval Gotland. The guy in the crowned helmet is Valdemar. The man with the spear is based on a reconstruction of one of the skulls from the mass graves from the battle of 1361.
As a final, horribly hilarious note - the skull depicted above was for years labeled “Chain mail coif with skull attached”. Only in the last few years it was changed to “Skull with attached chain mail”. Not only did the poor guy never get to take it off, he was reduced to “skull attached”.
