Painting from 1882 of Valdemar Atterdag’s plundering of Visby after the conquest in 1361. The Danish king captured the town after a large battle outside the city gates, in which many peasants were killed. The painting is a Swedish National Romantic rendition of the events; it is doubtful whether the king plundered the town through taxation to such an extreme extent. As a whole the painting contains a number of errors and inaccuracies. Painting: Carl Gustaf Hellqvist, National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden

Valdemar Atterdag’s enemies

Valdemar Atterdag’s heavy-handed politics faced fierce resistance both internally and externally. In 1351–1353, 1357–1360 and 1367–1373, he thus had to defeat coalitions of Holstein counts, the duke of Schleswig and noblemen from Jutland, who were dissatisfied with his confiscation of noble property, among other things. After the conquest of Skåne and Gotland, Valdemar Atterdag also attracted the wrath of the Hanseatic towns, since his trade policy favoured Danish over Hanseatic interests. In 1368, a mighty alliance was established against Valdemar. This consisted of Hanseatic towns across northern Europe, Duke Albrecht of Mecklenburg and his son of the same name (who had become king of Sweden in 1363), the Holstein counts, the duke of Schleswig and members of the upper nobility of Jutland. Valdemar was forced onto the defensive by Hanseatic conquests in the Øresund area, but, in 1370, he succeeded in dividing the alliance by entering into a separate peace settlement with the Hanseatic towns. The price was that the Hanseatic League gained control of the Skåne fairs for fifteen years. Following a peace settlement with the duke of Mecklenburg, Valdemar was able to defeat the Jutland nobility and the duke of Schleswig and make peace with the Holstein counts. Schleswig, however, remained under the rule of the Holstein counts.

When Valdemar Atterdag succeeded in re-establishing the Danish kingdom and defeating attacks from both inside and outside, it was not least due to the support of the Danish nobility and Church, who, with the periodic exception of those in Jutland, had realised that an independent Danish kingdom best served their own interests.

Margaret and the Kalmar Union

Valdemar Atterdag died in 1375 without leaving a son who could be elected king. The most obvious candidates for the throne were therefore the sons of his daughters, Margaret and Ingeborg. The bishops and a part of the nobility chose the five-year-old Oluf, the son of Margaret and King Haakon of Norway. This choice was made at the expense of Ingeborg’s son, whose father was a duke of Mecklenburg. The Hanseatic towns and Mecklenburg were unhappy with the election of Oluf, but a guardian government led by Margaret and Haakon of Norway succeeded in retaining power.

When Haakon died in 1380, Oluf inherited the Norwegian throne, and when Oluf came of age in 1385, he could be proclaimed king of both Norway and Denmark. After this, the two kingdoms were ruled by the same monarch for over four hundred years – until 1814. Oluf’s power was also strengthened by the fact that the Hanseatic towns no longer had the right to the Skåne fairs after 1385, and progress was made even in Schleswig. This province was ruled by Holstein’s count, Duke Gerhard VI, who in 1386 recognised Schleswig as a duchy belonging to the Danish Crown as a fief. At the same time, Margaret also entered into negotiations with the Swedish nobility, who were disgruntled by Albrecht of Mecklenburg’s governance, to persuade them to elect Oluf king of Sweden.

Disaster struck in 1387, however, when Oluf died, aged only sixteen. At this point Margaret demonstrated her political ingenuity; she was immediately elected ‘regent lady and master [sic]’ (fuldmægtig frue og husbond) of Denmark and, shortly afterwards, of Norway. The plan was that she would govern until a suitable king could be found. In Norway, the Mecklenburg candidate for the throne was passed over in favour of Margaret’s great-nephew on her sister’s side, five-year-old Bogislaw (son of the Duke of Pomerania), who became Margaret’s foster son. Under the more Nordic-sounding name Erik (of Pomerania), Bogislaw was proclaimed king of Norway in 1389. In the previous year, Margaret had allied herself with the discontented Swedish nobility, who had appointed her as regent in Sweden. At the Battle of Åsle in Västergötland in 1389, Margaret’s Nordic army defeated the Mecklenburgs, and Albrecht was captured. Margaret now gained control of most of Sweden, though Stockholm only became part of her realm in 1398.

The way was now paved for a Nordic union. In 1396, Erik of Pomerania was proclaimed king of Denmark and Sweden, and, at a major assembly in Kalmar in 1397, he was crowned as the king of all three Nordic countries. The creation of the union was possible because of dynastic relationships, but the Mecklenburgs’ claim to the three kingdoms was actually just as valid as Oluf’s and Erik of Pomerania’s. The real reason for bypassing the Mecklenburgs was that the nobility in all three kingdoms feared that Mecklenburg rule would lead to them being displaced by German stewards and noblemen.

Erik of Pomerania’s coronation charter, issued in Kalmar in 1397. In the charter, representatives of the three Nordic kingdoms confirm that they have elected and crowned Erik of Pomerania as the common king. Thus the Kalmar Union was founded. Photo: Tom Jersø, Danish National Archives  

Erik of Pomerania and the wars over Schleswig

In reality, Margaret continued to reign long after Erik of Pomerania had come of age and been crowned king of the union. Only after Margaret’s death in 1412 did Erik step into his royal role in earnest. In the decades that followed, his most important project was his attempt to seize control of the duchy of Schleswig. After Gerhard VI of Holstein’s death in 1404, Margaret had begun to regain Schleswig little by little, but Erik of Pomerania adopted a more drastic approach. In 1413, he got the Danehof (court of the Danes) to rule that, according to feudal law, the Holstein counts had forfeited their right to Schleswig because they had waged war against their own feudal lord (i.e. the king). Unsurprisingly, the Holstein counts refused to comply with this ruling, and, after continued warfare, the case came before the emperor’s court in 1424. This time, King Erik argued that a fief could not be inherited according to Danish law, and that Schleswig was linguistically and culturally Danish and not German. Emperor Sigismund judged in King Erik’s favour, but the Holstein counts refused to respect the verdict and the wars continued. During the wars, the Holstein counts were supported by the Hanseatic towns, which were dissatisfied with Erik of Pomerania’s trade policy, not least the new Sound tolls. The wealthy Hanseatic towns of Lübeck and Hamburg played a particularly decisive role in the eventual victory of Holstein. In 1432, Erik of Pomerania was forced to admit defeat and enter a truce in which he both accepted Holstein rule in Schleswig and confirmed the Hanseatic towns’ trade privileges and customs freedom in Denmark.

The deposition of Erik of Pomerania

In 1397, Margaret had the power to govern in all three Nordic countries but there were no clear agreements on how this governance should be exercised. Margaret’s regime was relatively centralised, and Erik of Pomerania continued this policy after 1412. King Erik’s increasing tendency to appoint Danish and German royal stewards was a source of dissatisfaction in Sweden and Norway, but worse were the tax increases that financed the wars over Schleswig. In 1434, after Erik of Pomerania’s Schleswig policy had suffered a defeat, Swedish miners and peasants revolted. The Swedish nobility joined the rebellion and denounced the king; an uprising also broke out in Norway in 1436. At an assembly in Kalmar in 1436, both the Danish and the Swedish rigsråd dictated conditions for Erik of Pomerania’s continued rule of the union, but the king had no intention of adhering to them. Declaring that he would not be the ‘yes-lord’ of the nobility, he went into exile in Gotland, in the expectation that unrest and rebellion would lead the Danish and Swedish councillors to beg him to return on his own terms.

In the face of the extensive peasant uprising in 1438, the Danish rigsråd instead summoned Erik of Pomerania’s nephew, Duke Christopher of Bavaria, to the Danish throne. Erik of Pomerania was dethroned the following year and Christopher of Bavaria was crowned as the king of the union, comprising all three realms, in 1443. The circumstances surrounding the change of monarch placed the councils of the realm in a strong position vis-à-vis the new king. Whereas Margaret and Erik of Pomerania had exploited an unclear constitutional situation to govern in a relatively authoritarian manner, under Christopher of Bavaria the form of governance evolved towards regimen politicum. The councils of the realm considered themselves the actual bearers of sovereignty, partly inspired by the European Church councils of the time, which were based on the idea that the Church councils were above the pope. A prominent representative of this view was the powerful Skåne nobleman and archbishop of Denmark Hans Laxmand.

Christian I

Christopher of Bavaria died in 1448 without any successors who could take over the union throne. In Sweden, the nobleman Karl Knutsson was elected king before joint discussions of the royal election with Norway and Denmark could take place. In this situation, the Danish council of the realm turned to Count Adolf of Holstein, who had been recognised as duke of Schleswig since 1440. He did not wish to ascend the Danish throne, however, and instead referred the council to his sister’s son, Count Christian of Oldenburg, who was then elected king of Denmark and Norway. As part of the arrangement, Christian I married Dorothea of Brandenburg, who was the dowager queen of Christopher of Bavaria. At the time of her marriage to Christopher, she had been promised a widow’s pension consisting of len in all three kingdoms, and the marriage to Christian was intended to prevent the income from these so-called morgengavelen (morning gift districts) being lost to the Danish monarchy. The queen’s claim to the Swedish morning gift len was used by the Danish side to argue that Christian should be accepted as king of Sweden.

The idea of a union did not die with the royal elections in 1448. Parts of both the Danish and the Swedish nobility had major interests in a union. Several Danish and Swedish noble families were connected by marriage, and owned land and held len in both kingdoms. They wanted a union based on aristocratic-constitutional (regimen politicum) terms, achieved through negotiations between the councils of the realm. In Denmark, this party of nobles was opposed by a more monarchist group of nobles, who did not own land or hold len in Sweden. They wanted to re-establish the union based on the principles of regimen regale, if necessary through war. In Sweden there were also nobles who wished to detach Sweden from the union and re-establish an independent Swedish kingdom. The political conflicts during Christian I’s reign took the form of a struggle between these groups.

The union wars

In 1450, the councils of the realm in Denmark and Sweden agreed to hold a joint royal election when one of the two kings died. Christian I, however, wanted to be king of Sweden immediately. An attempt at conquest in 1452 failed. In 1457, Swedish rebels deposed Karl Knutsson and summoned Christian I, but dissatisfaction with Danish royal stewards and extra taxes led the Swedes to dethrone him again in 1464. Christian I then put his faith in negotiations via the aristocratic-constitutional party under the leadership of the so-called Axelsønner (of the Thott family, part of the upper nobility). When the Thott family seized power in Sweden in 1466 but failed to summon Christian I to the Swedish throne, the king lost patience and confiscated their land and mortgaged len in Denmark. At the same time, he reached out to the Danish peasantry and the minor nobility with the aim of creating a counterbalance to the upper nobility. The Thott family denounced Christian I and challenged him to a feud, once again calling Karl Knutsson to the Swedish throne. When Karl Knutsson died in 1470, Christian I was reconciled with the Thott family, but in the meantime, the national faction led by Karl Knutsson’s nephew Sten Sture (the Elder) had become too powerful for the Thott family to accomplish anything for Christian I. The Danish king and the pro-union Swedish nobility went on the attack, but they were defeated by Sten Sture and a Swedish peasant army at the Battle of Brunkeberg in 1471. Sten Sture wisely refrained from being elected king and instead ruled Sweden as rigsforstander (viceroy). In the years following the Battle of Brunkeberg, he conducted sham negotiations with the Danish council of the realm to accept Christian I, but this did not lead to anything. Instead, Sten Sture began to build up a strong Swedish central power.

The acquisition of Schleswig and Holstein

Concurrently with the unsuccessful union wars, Christian I was able to add a large territory to the Danish monarchy, namely the duchy of Schleswig and the county of Holstein. When Duke Adolf VIII died childless in 1459, the united Schleswig-Holstein Knighthood, who feared the dispute over Schleswig would resume, decided to elect Adolf’s nephew, Christian I, as ruler. With the stroke of a pen during
a major assembly in Ribe in 1460, Christian I became ruler of the territories that had caused the Danish monarchy so much anguish since the thirteenth century. For a brief period until he lost Sweden in 1464, Christian I was thus simultaneously ruler of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Schleswig and Holstein. This was the largest Danish empire since the time of Knut the Great. In 1474, the emperor elevated Holstein’s status from county to duchy, but the last surviving member of the Holstein dynasty had inheritance rights in the duchies, as did Christian I’s brothers, the counts of Oldenburg. They therefore had to be compensated with vast sums of money. The money required was raised by mortgaging large parts of the duchies to the Schleswig-Holstein Knighthood.

Paying off the Schleswig debt gave rise to serious problems for Christian I. In 1466, he had to make his brother, Count Gerhard of Oldenburg, vice regent over the duchies in order to satisfy his claim to the territories. But the king displaced him again in 1470, and, when Gerhard raised a peasant rebellion in 1472, it was defeated with the usual brutality. In the 1470s, the king appointed his wife Queen Dorothea as administrator of the duchies. With great skill and by investing the funds she had collected in the Danish and Norwegian ‘morning gift len’, she succeeded in repaying the debt. In 1479, she was enfeoffed with Holstein for life and, the following year, she received all of Schleswig as a mortgage for her loans to the Crown.

Hans and Frederik

When Christian I died in 1481, he left two sons: twenty-six-year-old Hans and nine-year-old Frederik. Hans had already been acclaimed as successor to the throne in the three Nordic kingdoms, but it was not clear who would rule Schleswig. The Queen Dowager Dorothea considered it fair that Frederik should receive the whole of Schleswig-Holstein, given that his brother stood to receive three kingdoms. But when the estates in the duchies assembled to elect a new duke in 1482, Hans turned up with a large, armed entourage. He put forward the fabricated argument that German feudal law applied in the duchies, which meant that the two brothers had equal inheritance rights. Later that year, the diets therefore elected both Hans and Frederik as dukes. Hans ruled the duchies with the queen dowager, who was Frederik’s guardian until Frederik came of age in 1489, and a further division of Schleswig and Holstein was made in 1490. The ducal castles, administrative districts, manorial lands and landowning peasants were divided equally between the two brothers so that they each had parts of Schleswig and Holstein, while the rights over the Church’s and the nobility’s domains, including the right to levy extra taxes on the peasants, were managed by a joint government.

Dorothea and Frederik now asserted Frederik’s claim to len in Denmark, but, in 1494, King Hans persuaded a diet to declare that the kingdom of Denmark was an indivisible elective monarchy, which meant that Frederik could not make inheritance claims against its elected king. It was conveniently forgotten that the king had argued in 1482 for a division of the duchies, including the Danish fief Schleswig, based on German feudal law. After this, the relationship between the two brothers was bitter, but no open conflicts ensued. Frederik got a form of revenge when he was granted the Danish throne in connection with the deposition of King Hans’ son Christian II in 1523.

King Hans and the union

Hans was crowned king in 1483, even though he had been acclaimed successor to the throne in his father’s reign, and he was crowned king of Denmark and Norway only. The delay was caused by lengthy negotiations, during which the councils of the realm made substantial demands. Despite the earlier promises of joint royal elections, the Swedish council of the realm could not be convinced to accept Hans as king of Sweden, and the viceroy Sten Sture remained in power. Supported by Swedish pro-unionists, King Hans attacked Sweden in 1497 and defeated Sten Sture’s army near Stockholm. But Hans’ rule over Sweden was short-lived, due partly to his catastrophic defeat by peasants in Dithmarschen in 1500, a battle in which many noblemen from Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein were killed. This setback for the Danish military forces was quickly exploited by the Swedes, who expelled King Hans in 1501.

The king’s military fiascos caused a great deal of dissatisfaction among the Danish nobility. In 1502, the leader of this dissatisfied group, seneschal of the realm Poul Laxmand, was murdered in Copenhagen. We will probably never know whether the king directly incited his murder, but his subsequent confiscation of Poul Laxmand’s land on the basis of a conviction for high treason certainly casts him under suspicion. Unrest also spread to Norway, where peasants and Norwegian noblemen rose up against Danish bailiffs in 1501. This uprising was suppressed after King Hans’ steward Henrik Krummedige had the leader of the rebellion, the Norwegian nobleman Knut Alvsson, murdered during negotiations in Oslo in 1502. Overall, the political developments during King Hans’ reign demonstrate how events inside and outside the kingdom were closely interrelated in the Late Middle Ages.

In 2015, divers from the National Museum of Denmark recovered this figurehead from the war ship Gribshunden (also called Griffen), which was the flagship of King Hans’ fleet until it caught fire and sank off the coast of Blekinge in 1495. The 35-metre-long ship was built to carry cannon and marks the beginning of the centralisation of the Danish fleet, which had previously been more loosely organised. The appointment of a Danish admiral in 1510 is considered the formal founding of a permanent Danish fleet, which was early in a European context. Photo: Ingemar Lundgren, Blekinge Museum

A look back from 1513

During the period between Valdemar Atterdag’s accession in 1340 and King Hans’ death in 1513, Denmark became stronger in relation to the outside world. From being a mortgaged kingdom ruled by foreign princes, Denmark developed into a dominant power in the Nordic and Baltic Sea regions. Denmark was losing its grip on Sweden from the middle of the fifteenth century, but added Schleswig and Holstein to its sphere of power. Denmark was able to strengthen its position partly because some of its neighbours became weaker. For example, the power of the Hanseatic towns declined throughout the fifteenth century. Another reason, discussed in the previous section, was the success of its internal state building, meaning that the Danish Crown was not only stronger itself in the face of its neighbours, but also that the elites in Norway, Sweden and the duchies recognised a vested interest in joining it. Similar internal state developments in Sweden meant that Denmark was unable to retain the Swedish kingdom in a Danish-dominated union, but the goal of winning Sweden for the Danish Crown was taken up again by King Hans’ son Christian II.