Early Danish Explorers

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 183-184:

In Europe, the fifteenth century was the period of the great explorers. This led, among other things, to a collaboration between Portugal and the Danish Empire to find a route to India (Jensen 2007). The Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator had written to Christopher of Bavaria about the project, and a Danish nobleman Vallarte arrived in Portugal in 1448 and participated with the Portuguese Order of Christ in a long expedition south of Africa to Cape Verde, where he lived the rest of his life in captivity of the local tribal chief, who turned out not to be Christian, as the expedition had expected. In 1461, King Afonso V of Portugal wrote to Christian I and warmly recommended Christian’s herald Lolland. Heralds could function almost as ambassadors and were often named after provinces or landscapes (i.e. Lolland). Lolland had participated in the Portuguese crusades and voyages of discovery to North Africa, and Afonso was so impressed by his bravery that the king knighted him when he returned to Portugal. These connections between Denmark and Portugal were later expanded. Around 1471, when Christian presented his grand crusade plan to the imperial diet in Regensburg, an expedition to the north embarked, led by well-known captains Didrik Pining of Denmark, Hans Pothorst of Iceland, and João Vaz Corte-Real and Alvaro Martins Homem from Portugal. They reached Greenland, where they erected a large memorial on one of the more recognizable mountains. From there, they proceeded to America and reached Newfoundland, which was known among Portuguese fishermen as “terra do bachalau,” the land of the stock fish. The goal was to find the northwest passage to India. This was reattempted later. In 1519, Christian II equipped a new expedition under the leadership of the notorious pirate and admiral Søren Norby: prior to this, he had wrought papal bulls that authorized the raid as a true crusade. The goal was to win Greenland back from the pagans, which would only be the beginning. At the time of Christian II it was believed that Greenland was the outermost peninsula of the great Asian continent, and if one could lead a crusade there, one would be able to confront the Muslims with a two-front war. At the same time, Christian's army would land in the Far East near where the legendary Christian priest-king Prester John was supposed to live in a giant kingdom ready to support Christian Western Europe in the fight against Islam. During the fifteenth century, it was said that Prester John was descended from Holger the Dane, hero to Charlemagne, and thus King Christian's distant ancestor. The Danish empire was so large that it included not only huge areas of the north with diverse peoples, but also a bridgehead to Asia. However, the Great Crusade to Greenland and Asia never commenced, because Christian II became preoccupied with problems in Sweden [trying to maintain the Kalmar Union].