Secondly, he wished to reserve for himself and his fellow bishops the right of making all clerical appointments, and thirdly, he claimed the privilege of surrounding himself with a kind of ecclesiastical court, and keeping ninety to one hundred men-at-arms in his service, although the law only allowed him thirty. To settle these points, Sverre summoned the archbishop to Frosta-_thing_, and, after having read him the law, decided against him. Full of wrath, the haughty prelate left the country, seeking refuge with Archbishop Absalon in Denmark, who received him cordially. Here he composed a letter to the Pope in which he bitterly complained of the king's usurpations and infringements of the rights of the Church. The Pope responded by putting Sverre in the ban and releasing his subjects from their oath of allegiance. Before the bull reached Norway, however, Sverre had induced the bishops, remaining in the country, to crown him at Bergen (June 29, 1194). Even Bishop Nicholas, who had recently been transferred from Stavanger to Oslo, had participated in this ceremony, though probably much against his will. Sverre treated the papal bull, at first, as a mere fraudulent invention of archbishops, Erik and Absalon, but that he was far from believing this to be the case is shown by the fact that he sent embassadors to Rome to present counter charges against the archbishop, and to explain the causes of the controversy from his point of view. As far as we know these embassadors accomplished nothing, and on their homeward way they died suddenly in Denmark (1197), having probably been poisoned. Soon after, a falsified papal bull was published by Sverre, in which the ban was revoked. It is not improbable that he was himself responsible for this falsification. It was a question of "to be or not to be" with him, and he had been long enough connected with the Church to know how to soothe his conscience in such a matter. It is, moreover, scarcely credible that any one else would have committed the fraud in his favor.