Kingdom of Denmark

Denmark's guardian

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Denmark appears in written record long before it had a king anyone could reliably name. Roman writers placed the Cimbri in Jutland centuries before Christ, and Augustus himself boasted on an inscription at Ankyra that his fleet had sailed to "the country of the Cimbrians, to which no Roman had ever penetrated before that time by sea or by land." The name Denmark itself first appears in writing far later still, in King Alfred's own translation of Orosius around 890. Between those two points lie centuries of half-legendary kings - the medieval chronicler Saxo Grammaticus names no fewer than fifty of them reigning before the Viking Age even began, a list no more reliable than the founding genealogies other early medieval kingdoms produced for themselves once they wanted an ancient pedigree.

A queen who built a wall

The first Danish ruler whose own words survive is Gorm the Old, and they survive because he had them carved in stone. Sometime in the mid-tenth century, Gorm raised a runic monument at Jelling for his dead queen, Thyri, with an inscription naming her "Denmark's guardian" - a title she earned, the tradition held, by organizing the building of the Danevirke, an earthwork wall stretching nearly ten miles from the Bay of Slien to the river Eider to defend Denmark's southern frontier, each province responsible for its own stretch of the work. It is the earliest occurrence of the name Denmark found anywhere within Denmark itself.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Ljunie · CC BY-SA 4.0

The king baptized by fire

Gorm's son, Harald Bluetooth, succeeded him and became, by the Saxon monk Widukind of Corvey's own account written in 970, the first king to make all of Denmark Christian. The occasion, as Widukind tells it, was a trial: a German missionary priest named Poppo carried red-hot iron in his bare hands before the king, around the year 960, and was unhurt - proof enough, in the terms that mattered to a Viking-age court, to bring Harald to baptism. Archbishop Adaldag of Hamburg had already been quietly building a Danish church in the decades before, appointing bishops to Slesvig, Ribe and Aarhus, but it was Harald's own conversion that made Christianity the religion of the Danish crown itself rather than merely a mission working at its edges. Harald went on to subdue southern Norway, and Earl Hakon of Norway became his vassal - though Hakon himself refused to follow his overlord into the new faith.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · National Museum of Denmark · No restrictions

Cnut the Great

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Sven Forkbeard, Harald Bluetooth's own son, spent years raiding England before finally becoming its master in 1013 - only to die within months, at Gainsborough in February 1014. His son Cnut, elected king by the Danish army already in England, was forced to withdraw and then fight his way back to the English throne over the following two years, a struggle settled only by the deaths of both Æthelred the Unready and his son Edmund Ironside in 1016. Cnut was twenty-two years old when he finally secured England outright, and he governed it, in Stefánsson's own judgment, not as a foreign conqueror but with greater wisdom and justice than many of its native-born kings before him - he sent most of his Danish army home, kept only his household troops, the housecarls, as a standing force, and let Englishmen like Godwine rise to be his chief advisers in place of the Danish earls who had brought him to power.

British Library, London · Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Three crowns

Cnut inherited Denmark itself in 1018 on his brother Harald's death, and in 1028 he sailed to Norway with a fleet of some 1,400 ships and took it without a battle. When the exiled Norwegian king Olaf Haraldsson tried to reclaim his throne two years later, Norwegian farmers themselves killed him at the Battle of Stiklestad. By the early 1030s Cnut ruled England, Denmark and Norway together, an Anglo-Scandinavian empire with no real precedent in the North. In 1027 he became the first Scandinavian king to enter Rome, walking out of St Peter's alongside the newly crowned Emperor Conrad II after his coronation - and wrote home to his English subjects a letter that reads less like a Viking war-leader's boast than a Christian king's statement of principle: "I have vowed to God to rule my kingdoms justly and piously... My officers shall administer justice to all, rich and poor, nor do wrong for fear or favour of any man, on pain of losing my friendship and their own life and goods."

An empire too young to outlast him

The same reign had its older, harder edge. At Christmas 1026, Cnut quarrelled with his own brother-in-law, Earl Ulf, over a game of chess at Roskilde; by the next morning he had ordered Ulf killed, and the earl was run through while kneeling in the choir of Trinity Church. Cnut's later pilgrimage to Rome was, by his own admission, partly meant to expiate that sin. He built churches and founded Denmark's earliest monasteries, brought English bishops to staff a Danish church he wanted answerable to Canterbury rather than Bremen, and struck the first regular Danish coinage of his reign. None of it gave the empire roots deep enough to survive him. Cnut died still a young man, and what Stefánsson calls his Anglo-Scandinavian empire - three crowns held by one Danish king at once, never achieved again - crumbled within a few years of his death, split back apart among heirs who could hold no more than a fraction of what he had ruled together.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Portable Antiquities Scheme · CC BY 2.0

Arkona

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Valdemar I, later called the Great, came to the throne in 1157 inheriting a kingdom worn down by civil war and, along its southern and eastern coasts, by decades of raiding from the pagan Wends across the Baltic - roughly a third of Denmark lay wasted and depopulated by their incursions when his reign began. What turned that around was less the king himself than his foster-brother and lifelong ally Absalon, Bishop of Roskilde from 1158 and, in Stefánsson's own judgment, the single greatest figure Denmark ever produced: equally capable as statesman, churchman and warrior, and the man who spent a decade leading campaigns against the Wends by land and sea.

The idol chopped for firewood

The campaign reached its climax in 1169, when Valdemar and Absalon stormed Arkona, the Wends' near-impregnable temple fortress on the northern tip of Rügen. Before an audience of hundreds of the shrine's own priests, the Danes tore down the four-headed wooden idol of Svantovit, the Wends' chief god, and cut it up for firewood in their own camp; the Wendish capital at Garz fell soon after, its own idol destroyed the same way. The Wends were baptized and Rügen was annexed to the bishopric of Roskilde, closing a threat that had bled Denmark's coasts for a generation.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Laurits Tuxen · Public domain

A fishing village becomes a capital in waiting

Absalon's other lasting achievement was less dramatic but, in the end, more consequential. In 1168 he fortified a small fishing settlement on the Sound called Havn, first mentioned centuries earlier in the Knýtlinga Saga, building a stronghold on the site where Christiansborg Palace now stands. Valdemar granted the growing town to the see of Roskilde, and its own bishops gave it municipal privileges that a royal charter later confirmed; traders came to call it Købmannahavn, "merchants' harbour" - the name that would become, centuries later, Copenhagen. Valdemar died suddenly at forty-seven, having already seen his own young son Cnut crowned in 1170 in Denmark's first royal coronation, held the same day Cnut Lavard, the king's own murdered father, was formally enshrined as a saint at Ringsted. His epitaph called him "conqueror and lord of the Slavs, liberator of the fatherland, keeper of the peace" - and for once, in an age generous with such inscriptions, the claim was not far wrong.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Calimo · CC BY-SA 3.0

The cloth that fell from the sky

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Valdemar II, called the Victorious, had already conquered Holstein and the lands south to the Elbe as Duke of Slesvig before he ever took the Danish throne in 1202, and the Emperor's own recognition of him as Lord of Northalbingia afterward put Lübeck and Hamburg under Danish overlordship as well. He pushed further still into the Baltic, seizing the island of Ösel off Estonia and then, answering an appeal from the Bishop of Riga, launching a crusade against the pagan Estonians with a fleet of some fourteen hundred vessels.

A banner from the sky

Tradition holds that at the Battle of Lyndanise near Reval in 1219, with the Danish standard lost and the army hard-pressed, a red cloth bearing a white cross fell from the sky - and the Danes, rallying around it, won the field. Whether the banner was really a consecrated gift sent by the Pope for the crusade or a story that grew up around one afterward, the Dannebrog has been Denmark's national flag ever since, and it still appears today in the arms of Reval, the city that grew up around the fortress Valdemar built there. By the early 1220s Denmark held the whole southern Baltic coast from the Elbe to Lake Peipus - a dominion, in Stefánsson's own assessment, wider than any power in Northern Europe held outside England, and one Denmark had not matched since Cnut the Great very nearly a full two centuries before.

Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen · Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Christian August Lorentzen · Public domain

One night in May

It came apart in a single stroke. One of Valdemar's own German vassals, Count Henry of Schwerin, nursed a grievance over a fief the king had taken from him, and on the night of 6 May 1223, while Valdemar and his eldest son were hunting on the small island of Lyø, Henry seized them both asleep in their tent and carried them off to his own castle at Dannenberg on the Elbe. Valdemar's German vassals rose against Denmark the moment word spread, and after two and a half years of captivity the king bought his freedom in November 1225 at a staggering price: forty-five thousand marks of silver, every jewel the queen owned, costly outfits for a hundred knights, hostages, and the surrender of every conquest he held except Rügen. Sixty years of conquest by three successive kings were undone in a single night's treachery. Absolved by the Pope of the oath his captors had forced on him, Valdemar tried once more to reverse the loss - and was defeated, and lost an eye, at the Battle of Bornhöved on 22 July 1227. He formally ceded Northalbingia to the Emperor that same catastrophic year, keeping only Rügen of the empire he had built. What Valdemar turned to afterward was law rather than conquest: he codified the laws of Zealand himself, and the Jutland law code he commissioned was finished only days before his death in 1241 - the lasting achievement, in the end, of a king better remembered by his own century as the Lawmaker than as the conqueror he had once been.

Eight years without a king

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The century after Valdemar II's death undid nearly everything his own reign had rebuilt. Civil war between rival claimants ran on and off for decades, and King Christopher II - remembered, in Stefánsson's own judgment, as the most faithless and useless ruler Denmark ever had - was driven from his own kingdom twice and died in 1332 in extreme poverty, most of his realm already mortgaged to German counts to pay for wars and ransoms. Count Gerhard III of Holstein, the chief creditor, occupied Jutland outright and let his mercenaries lay it waste. For eight years, from 1332 to 1340, Denmark had no king at all

• its provinces parcelled out among foreign mortgage-holders, its own institutions in abeyance. Gerhard's rule ended only when a Jutland nobleman, Niels Ebbesen, still remembered in folk song, cut him down by night in his own camp at Randers in 1340.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Agnes Slott-Møller · Public domain

A kingdom with the revenue of one county

Christopher's youngest son, Valdemar IV, was elected king that same year, not yet twenty years old and with nothing to draw on but the income of a single Jutland county - a kingdom in name only, still scattered among the men who held its mortgages. What he had instead was, in Stefánsson's words, dogged and unscrupulous energy and a cool determination to recover Denmark by any means available. He sold Estonia to the Teutonic Knights in 1346 for nineteen thousand marks of silver and used the money to buy back alienated crown lands; when the Black Death struck in 1349-50 and provoked a noble revolt in Jutland, he used the disorder to seize still more estates outright. By 1349 he had recovered all of Denmark west of the Sound bar parts of Funen and Jutland, and by 1360 Scania, South Halland and Blekinge had followed - along with control of the herring fisheries off Skanör and Falsterbo, where by one contemporary crusader's account some forty thousand boats and three hundred thousand fishermen gathered each autumn to salt fish for Lent, a single seasonal fishery that brought the crown more revenue than all its other income combined.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Carl Gustaf Hellqvist · Public domain

The day came again

Valdemar's recovery was not without setbacks - a coalition of seventy-seven Hanseatic cities, which he derided as "seventy-seven geese," combined with Sweden, Mecklenburg and Holstein in 1367 to carve up what he had rebuilt, forcing him abroad for three years and a humiliating peace at Stralsund in 1370 that barred any future Danish king from taking the throne without Hanseatic consent. But he had, by the time of his death in 1375, recovered nearly all of Slesvig as well, and the byname his contemporaries gave him - Atterdag, from a Low German oath meaning roughly "day again" - was literal: with him, after the eight kingless years and the decades of mortgage and civil war before them, it was day again in Denmark.

One sovereign, three crowns

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Valdemar Atterdag left no son, and with him the male line that had ruled Denmark since Sven Estrithson died out. His daughter Margaret, married at ten to King Håkon VI of Norway and already showing, in letters written in her own hand by nineteen, a firm grip on matters of government, secured the election of her five-year-old son Oluf as King of Denmark in 1376. When Håkon died in 1380, Oluf inherited Norway too, joining the two crowns in a union that would last, as it turned out, for four hundred and thirty-four years. Margaret governed both kingdoms as regent in her son's name - until Oluf himself died suddenly in 1387, leaving her a childless queen whose formal authority should, by every normal rule, have ended with him.

A woman ruling the largest realm in Europe

It did not. Denmark's councillors elected her "Sovereign Lady, the Guardian of the Realm" within months, Norway followed the year after, and discontented Swedish noblemen, eager to be rid of their own unpopular King Albrecht, offered her the same title in Sweden on terms heavily favouring their own interests. Albrecht tested her at the Battle of Falköping in 1389 and was taken prisoner outright - "God gave an unexpected victory into the hands of a woman," one contemporary chronicle marvelled, while another recorded that all the nobility of Denmark had come to fear this one woman's wisdom and strength. A childless queen now ruled, in practice if not yet in name, the largest monarchy in Europe. She spent the years afterward consolidating rather than resting on the victory: forcing Swedish and Danish nobles alike to surrender crown lands they had acquired in recent decades, leaving the highest offices of state deliberately vacant so that authority stayed gathered in her own hands, and reforming a debased currency with new silver coin.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Billed Tale · CC BY-SA 2.0

Crowned three times at once

To bind the three kingdoms together beyond her own lifetime, Margaret had her grand-nephew Eric of Pomerania proclaimed King of Norway at seven and elected King of Denmark and Sweden in the years that followed. In June 1397 she summoned the lords of all three realms to Kalmar, and on Trinity Sunday, 17 June, the Archbishops of Lund and Uppsala crowned Eric king of Denmark, Sweden and Norway simultaneously

• one coronation for three thrones, a deliberate symbol of the union itself. The assembled lords spent weeks afterward drafting terms to formalize what the coronation had already declared: eternal and unbroken peace between the three kingdoms under a single sovereign. Only one of the two resulting documents was ever actually sealed and ratified; the more detailed constitutional draft survived with just ten of seventeen councillors' seals attached, seven Swedish, three Danish, and not a single Norwegian one - an imperfect founding charter for a union that would nonetheless bind the Scandinavian crowns together, on and off, for more than a century to come.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Unknown scribe · Public domain

A banquet of another kind

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Christian II inherited the Kalmar Union's Danish crown determined to make its claim on Sweden real rather than nominal, and by 1520 his armies had fought their way to Stockholm itself, defended through a brutal siege by the widowed Christina Gyllenstierna after Swedish resistance under the Sture family collapsed. Christina held out through a hard summer of siege before autumn storms brought Christian to the negotiating table; her price was a full, explicit amnesty covering everyone who had fought against him, and on those terms she surrendered Stockholm's keys on 7 September. Christian entered the city in triumph, was crowned hereditary sovereign of Sweden that November with an envoy of the Emperor Charles V investing him with the Order of the Golden Fleece before the high altar - and three days later summoned the Senate, the City Council, Christina herself, and the assembled nobility and clergy to the royal palace for what the Swedish reformer Olaus Petri would later call "a banquet of another kind."

Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen · Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Michel Sittow · Public domain

The document that could not save them

Archbishop Trolle, whom the Stures had once imprisoned and whose castle they had razed, stood before the enthroned king and demanded punishment for those responsible as heretics who had violated canon law. Christina rose and produced a decree proving the acts had been authorized by a national assembly whose members, herself included, had all declared themselves jointly responsible - a document that should have spread the guilt too widely for any selective punishment to proceed. It changed nothing. After dark, armed men worked through a prepared list, arresting everyone named on it while the king had already withdrawn to settle, in private, exactly who was to be seized. The next morning an ecclesiastical court under Trolle's own presidency declared the prisoners manifest heretics, and at midday they were beheaded in the central square under guard, the executions continuing into a second day until the streets themselves ran with blood. The bodies lay unburied until Saturday, when they were burned in a heap - Sten Sture's own corpse, along with that of a child born to his widow during the interdict, dug up from its grave to be burned with them.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A cruelty its author could not admit to

What made the Stockholm Massacre distinctive, in Stefánsson's own judgment, was not only its violence but Christian's dishonesty about it afterward: he told the Swedish people the executions had been necessary to head off a new papal interdict, while privately writing the Pope that two of the murdered bishops had been killed by mistake during a plot against his own life. His journey home through Sweden that December was marked by gallows at every stop, and he believed, wrongly, that he had broken the country's spirit for good. Christina Gyllenstierna was sent to Denmark as a prisoner. Among the Swedish nobles who had escaped the palace that November night, having been carried off as a hostage to Denmark two years earlier under altogether different and, as it turned out, luckier circumstances, was a young nobleman named Gustaf Eriksson - of the family Vasa.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg · Public domain

An axe over his shoulder

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Gustaf Eriksson Vasa had been carried off to Denmark as a hostage in 1518, escaped a year later disguised as a horse-dealer, and was in hiding on his father's Swedish estate when a peasant brought him news of the Stockholm Massacre: his own father and brother-in-law executed, his mother and sisters imprisoned, a price set on his head. At the end of November 1520 he set off on foot into Dalecarlia, disguised as a labourer with an axe over his shoulder, alone against what Stefánsson calls the mighty ruler of three kingdoms. He was hunted from hiding place to hiding place, travelling by hay-cart and sleeping on forest leaves, and when he finally reached Mora and spoke to the assembled peasantry of Lake Siljan, they turned him away - weary of war, and unconvinced that a king interested only in punishing noblemen posed any threat to them.

Called back on snowshoes

Gustaf had already set out on snowshoes for the Norwegian border when further news reached Dalecarlia: Christian planned to march through the province in person, gallows already ordered raised at every manor along his route, and had imposed a harsh new tax in kind while disarming the peasantry outright. Two runners overtook Gustaf near the frontier and brought him back to Mora, where the leading men of the province elected him Lord of the Dales and of Sweden in January 1521. What began with two hundred young volunteers grew daily; a Danish force sent against the rising found peasant pikemen who, in one bishop's own resigned words, "drink little but water and eat bark bread" and would sooner die than yield, and Danish cavalry attacking at Västerås that April broke against unarmed but disciplined pike formations and lost their own artillery in the retreat. Province after province did homage to Gustaf through 1521; even Bishop Brask, once loyal to the crown, came over to him. The Estates of southern Sweden elected him Regent that August, though Stockholm itself, well defended, held out under siege for months longer.

Two kings undone together

Christian's own position in Denmark collapsed in almost exactly the same span of time. The domestic reforms of his final years in power - protections for peasants against arbitrary transfer between landlords, an end to the practice of selling them "as if they were brute beasts," restrictions on noble privilege - won him no loyalty from the nobility they targeted, and in December 1522 the bishops and nobles of Jutland renounced their allegiance outright and offered the crown to his uncle, Frederick of Holstein. Christian's nerve failed him: in April 1523 he sailed for the Netherlands with his family and a handful of loyal servants, abandoning a kingdom whose common towns and peasantry, unlike its nobility, had largely remained loyal to him. He spent eight years in exile seeking help that never came, pawning his own jewels to survive, losing his queen to death in 1526 and his children to a Catholic upbringing he had no power to prevent. Frederick I laid siege to Copenhagen that June and took it the following January. In Sweden, word of Christian's flight let a national assembly at Strängnäs proclaim Gustaf King of the Swedes and Goths on 6 June 1523, over his own genuine objections that an elder councillor would serve better; a fortnight later, its people reduced by hunger and disease to a quarter their former number, Stockholm itself finally surrendered - ending, in every practical sense though not quite in name, the union three kingdoms had sworn eternal in 1397.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Jacob Binck · CC BY-SA 3.0

The Count's War

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Frederick I's death in April 1533 split Denmark between Protestant and Catholic factions over his succession, and into that vacuum stepped Jürgen Wullenwever, the radical new burgomaster of Lübeck, who saw a chance to dismember Denmark under cover of restoring the exiled Christian II. His hired commander, Count Christopher of Oldenburg, overran eastern Denmark within weeks in the summer of 1534, while an assembly of Jutland nobles elected the elder, Lutheran son of Frederick I as Christian III that same July. The conflict took its name, the Count's War, from Wullenwever's own proxy. Jutland peasants rose in Christian III's favour under a leader known as Skipper Clement and beat the nobles at Svenstrup that October - but the royalist general Johan Rantzau reconquered the province within a month, stormed Aalborg, and put some two thousand peasants to the sword there in December; the yeomanry who survived were reduced to bondage as tenants, and Skipper Clement himself was executed.

A year's siege and a fleet destroyed

Rantzau went on to crush Count Christopher's own army at Øxnebjerg in Funen in June 1535, mortally wounding Archbishop Trolle in the process, while a combined Danish-Swedish fleet under Peder Skram annihilated Lübeck's navy at sea. With the Lübeck-backed cause broken on both land and water, Christian III crossed to Zealand and laid siege to Copenhagen itself. The city held out for a full year, hoping for relief from Christian II's son-in-law or from the Emperor Charles V, and endured what Stefánsson calls the full horrors of famine before finally surrendering on 29 July 1536. Its defenders walked bareheaded to the royal camp with white staffs in hand to beg pardon, and received a general amnesty. Two centuries of Lübeck's dominance over Scandinavian trade ended with the same defeat.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Rasmus Christiansen · CC BY-SA 2.0

One morning in August

With the civil war won, Christian III moved against the Catholic Church itself, following Gustaf Vasa's Swedish precedent of seizing episcopal estates - but on his officers' advice he struck in a single coordinated stroke rather than announcing his intentions first. On the night before his own birthday, the Archbishop and every prelate present in Copenhagen were arrested, and by eight o'clock the next morning, 12 August 1536, the kingdom's temporal councillors had been compelled to sign away the bishops' civil authority and hand their estates to the crown. A national assembly of twelve hundred representatives, the largest Denmark had ever seen, met that October and formally established a national Protestant church: bishops were replaced by Lutheran superintendents, church property passed to the crown, and the king became head of the church in his own right. The same day's royal charter laid such stress on Christian III's own hereditary claim that Danish kingship, though still nominally elective, became hereditary in practice - and the charter went further still, formally reducing Norway from a separate kingdom to a mere province of the Danish crown, on the stated grounds that Norway could no longer sustain a sovereign of its own. The clause proved more aspiration than fact - Norway kept its own laws and administration, and state papers went on calling it a kingdom - but it set the pattern of Danish domination that would govern the union for the better part of three centuries to come.

National Library of Norway, Oslo · Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Wolfmann · CC BY-SA 4.0

A paralytic dotard

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Christian IV came to the throne at ten years old in 1588 and grew into what Stefánsson calls a full-blooded Renaissance prince: restless, energetic, personally courageous, gifted in both military and artistic matters, and prone to the same excesses that marked his pleasure-loving private life. He explored his own kingdom's furthest reaches, sailing round the North Cape into the White Sea, founded and rebuilt towns across Denmark, Norway, Scania and Holstein, laid out the plans for Norway's new capital at Christiania with his own hand, and tripled the strength of his navy from designs he drew himself. His domestic life brought him less credit: his morganatic marriage to Christine Munk, after his first queen's death, produced twelve children before he sent her away for infidelity, and the resulting feuds between his legitimate and illegitimate offspring caused him lasting grief.

Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen · Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Pieter Isaacsz · Public domain

Trading insults with a dying king

When Charles IX of Sweden claimed the title King of the Lapps over territory reaching into northern Norway and granted trading rights there to the newly founded city of Gothenburg, Christian forced his own reluctant State Council into war. In the Kalmar War of 1611-13, Danish forces took the fortress of Kalmar after a three-month siege; an enraged Charles IX challenged Christian to personal combat, sword in hand, warning that refusal would mean he was no honourable king or soldier, and Christian's reply advised the "paralytic dotard" to stay by his fireside with his nurse. Charles did not long outlive the insult, and though his young successor Gustavus Adolphus offered concessions, Christian rejected peace and pressed the war further, taking the fortress guarding Sweden's only western outlet in 1612.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · L. Honold · Public domain

Lutter and the wolves of Wallenstein

Christian's greater ambitions proved far costlier. Hoping to control the mouths of the Elbe and Weser and encouraged by England and France to champion the German Protestant cause, he invaded the Empire in 1625 with a mainly German army - only to be defeated decisively by Tilly and Wallenstein at Lutter am Barenberg on 27 August 1626, his German allies abandoning him in the aftermath. The following year Wallenstein's mercenaries overran Holstein and Slesvig and then the whole Jutland peninsula, plundering at will while an increasingly powerless Christian, mired in disputes with his own State Council, could only watch from Funen. The Emperor now aimed at nothing less than mastery of the Baltic, naming Wallenstein "General of the Baltic and Oceanic Seas" - a design broken only when the besieged port of Stralsund, reinforced jointly by Denmark and Sweden despite their own long rivalry, held out against Wallenstein's boast that he would take it "though it were slung with chains between earth and heaven." Peace came at Lübeck in 1629 on comparatively merciful terms: Denmark recovered its occupied provinces, but only by renouncing the secularized German bishoprics it had claimed and abandoning, for good, its leadership of the Protestant cause in Germany.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam · Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Unknown artist · CC0

Thirteen wounds

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Sweden's chancellor Axel Oxenstierna judged, by the early 1640s, that Denmark stood as the last real obstacle to Swedish dominance of the North, and sent secret orders to his general Torstensson to strike while the Thirty Years' War still occupied every other power in Europe. Torstensson crossed into Jutland in December 1643 and overran the entire peninsula within weeks - a danger Denmark survived only through the personal exertions of Christian IV himself, now sixty-seven years old and spending days and nights equipping his navy and raising troops in a kingdom his own war minister could no longer defend by conventional means.

The gun on the quarterdeck

Christian took to the sea himself. In April 1644 he beat back a Dutch fleet sent to ferry Torstensson's army across to the Danish islands, forcing it home to Holland, and in June he met a forty-ship Swedish fleet on the same errand in a ten-hour battle off Kolberger Heide. A gun exploded on the quarterdeck where he stood; wood and metal splinters wounded him in thirteen places, cost him an eye, and felled him to the deck. He got up at once, insisted he was unhurt, and stayed on deck directing the battle until the Swedish fleet withdrew into Kiel Bay - an episode later celebrated in the Danish national hymn. The tactical victory did not hold: the blockaded Swedish fleet escaped regardless, and Christian had the Danish admiral responsible shot for it. A combined Dutch-Swedish force went on to destroy or capture fifteen of seventeen Danish ships off Lolland that autumn, outnumbering the Danes more than two to one.

Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen · Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Wilhelm Marstrand · Public domain

"They care not for God, King, or country"

Christian was forced to sue for peace at Brömsebro on 13 August 1645. The terms stripped Denmark of the long-disputed provinces of Jämtland and Härjedalen, the islands of Ösel and Gotland, and Halland for thirty years as security against Swedish customs exemption at the Sound - a toll whose revenue fell by three-quarters as a result. Christian, whose own son-in-law Corfitz Ulfeldt had turned against him and taken open satisfaction in his humiliation, blamed the nobility bitterly for the disaster: "They care not for God, King, or country," he said, "but only for their own selfish interests." He died in 1648 after fifty-two years on the throne, seventy-one years old - a king whose personal courage and genuine mastery of shipbuilding and naval command, in Stefánsson's own final judgment, stood out as the one bright thread running through a reign that otherwise closed in disaster after disaster for the kingdom he had ruled longer than any other Danish monarch before him.

The alarm bell

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Frederick III, learned and reserved where his father had been boisterous, was elected only after signing a charter that curtailed royal power further still - and spent his early reign disgracing the aristocratic leaders who had dominated the previous regency, forcing Hannibal Sehested to surrender his estates over embezzlement charges and driving Corfitz Ulfeldt into exile on suspicion of a plot against the crown. A war against Sweden launched while Charles X was distracted in Poland went badly, but Copenhagen's own heroic defence

• king and commoners together - left the nobility's continued exemption from taxation looking harder to justify than ever.

"Slaves who ought to keep within their limits"

When the Estates assembled in September 1660, the burgesses and clergy demanded that new indirect taxes apply to the nobles as well, and after bitter resistance forced the point, the nobles calling them "slaves who ought to keep within their limits" as they yielded. Sensing the moment, the burgesses and clergy then offered Frederick III the crown as a hereditary possession in gratitude for his wartime leadership - and called on the nobles to agree. The noble leaders refused, until their spokesman, meeting Burgomaster Hans Nansen in the street, gestured toward the state prison as a threat; Nansen answered by pointing to the alarm bell of Our Lady's Church, the signal that called Copenhagen's citizens to arms. With the city gates closed, the garrison secured, and armed burghers in the streets, the King pressed the Council for a swift answer, and on 13 October the nobility yielded: Denmark became a hereditary monarchy under Frederick III and his heirs.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Wolfgang Heimbach · Public domain

A constitution that promised everything and appeared once

Frederick surrendered his own coronation charter and was released from every oath binding him to it, empowered to issue a new constitution "as to His Majesty should seem best." On 18 October 1660 he received the formal homage of every order and rank in an amphitheatre before the royal palace, promising a fair and just constitution to come - a promise never heard of again. The State Council's own archives were moved into the palace as a sign that the body itself had ceased to exist, and Denmark's Estates would not meet again for nearly two centuries. A circulated declaration in January 1661 had subjects across the Danish dominions formally confer absolute government on the king and his heirs; the constitution itself, the Lex Regia, was drafted in secret by the king's own secretary, Peter Schumacher, signed on 14 November 1665, and kept hidden until Frederick's death five years later. It vested every legislative, executive and judicial power of the state in the king personally, acknowledging no earthly superior, bound only by his own Lutheran faith and a promise to keep the kingdom undivided - and declared, by its own twenty-sixth article, that any attempt to alter it was itself high treason.

Danish National Archives, Copenhagen · Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Danish National Archives · CC BY-SA 2.0

I was so ready to die

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Peter Schumacher, the son of a wealthy Copenhagen citizen, spent the years 1654 to 1662 studying abroad - at Queen's College, Oxford, where he witnessed the English Restoration firsthand; in Germany and Holland; and in Paris, where he watched Louis XIV lay the foundations of the centralized monarchy the rest of Europe would spend the following century imitating. He returned to Denmark to become librarian of the newly founded Royal Library and then the king's own secretary, steadily climbing the only ladder that mattered under the new absolutism: royal favour. On his deathbed in 1670, Frederick III told his son and successor, Christian V, to "make a great man of Schumacher, but do it slowly."

The self-made architect of absolutism

Christian V's very first act was to hand Schumacher the secret Lex Regia that only Frederick III had known of, and Schumacher's rise from there was rapid: Privy Councillor, ennobled as Count Griffenfeld after the griffin on his own coat of arms, Knight of the Order of the Elephant - an honour otherwise reserved for royalty - and finally Grand Chancellor in 1673. He built a genuinely efficient administration out of the new absolute monarchy's raw materials, consolidating government boards and pursuing a deliberately cautious foreign policy meant to recover Denmark's prestige through alliances and subsidies rather than through the wars of reconquest against Sweden that Christian V and his generals were impatient to fight. It was that same caution that turned the king against him: after Christian V personally handed his chancellor a list of fifteen points on which he wanted more circumspect conduct, Griffenfeld was arrested on 11 March 1676.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Abraham Wuchters · Public domain

A pardon that arrived on the scaffold

The formal charges were embezzlement, but the piece of evidence that did the most damage was a private diary entry noting that the king "talked like a child to the ambassadors." Neither his written appeal for mercy nor his own defence before a court packed with his enemies saved him: he was sentenced to lose life, honour and property, and his coat of arms was formally broken on the scaffold as he waited for the executioner's axe. The king's pardon, commuting the sentence to life imprisonment, arrived only as he lay there expecting the blow. "May God forgive you," Griffenfeld said, "I was so ready to die." He spent twenty-two years in prison, denied even writing materials, before his death - a statesman Louis XIV himself once called without equal in Europe, broken by the same absolute monarchy he had spent his career building into an efficient instrument of state. Among the quieter achievements of these same years, largely untouched by the court's own convulsions, was the astronomer Ole Rømer's measurement of the speed of light, and in 1683 Denmark's laws were codified and published as a single body for the first time.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Leonhard Lenz · CC0

The king's physician

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Christian VII inherited the absolute monarchy his great-grandfather had built at seventeen, in 1766 - a boy whose brutal upbringing under a tutor who beat and punished him had left him, in Stefánsson's own clinical account, mentally unstable and given to cunning deception learned as a defence against cruelty. Surrounded at court by dissolute companions, he descended within months of his accession into public drunkenness and vandalism, dismissing capable ministers on a whim and retaining the respect of only one, Count Bernstorff. His marriage to the English princess Caroline Matilda, George III's own sister, wed her by proxy at fifteen to a king she had never met; the coronation followed in 1767, and a Danish public that adored her young charm had no idea how quickly the marriage itself would curdle. Christian's drunken companion Count Holck became his closest confidant, and even the birth of an heir - the future Frederick VI - in 1768 changed nothing in the king's conduct toward his lonely, spied-upon young queen.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Peder Als · Public domain

A doctor who became a dictator

A German physician named Johann Friedrich Struensee was introduced to Christian on a royal tour of Europe later that year and so pleased him that he was retained as court physician on the king's return - and proved to have a strange, calming influence over the increasingly unstable monarch. Caroline Matilda disliked Struensee at first, but warmed to him as she watched him restore some order to the king's conduct, and by January 1770 he had become her lover as well as the king's most trusted advisor. Through 1770 and 1771 Struensee engineered the dismissal of his rivals - Holck, and then the formidable Bernstorff himself - abolished press censorship to popular applause, then dissolved the Council of State outright and made himself the sole channel through which royal authority passed. By July 1771 he held the title Cabinet Minister with power to issue orders under royal seal as though they carried the king's own signature; Christian, lucid only intermittently, signed whatever was placed before him.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Jens Juel · Public domain

Reform by decree

In his last thirty-eight weeks of power Struensee issued more than a thousand cabinet orders, a reforming zeal that abolished judicial torture and capital punishment for theft, established a proper finance board, opened public office to qualification rather than patronage, and modernized the courts - genuine achievements that, in Stefánsson's judgment, outlasted his own fall even though they were pushed through too fast and with too high a hand, dismissing whole department staffs without pension along the way. He outraged public sentiment just as thoroughly: decriminalizing adultery, converting a chapel into a hospital for venereal disease, licensing public gambling and masquerades that scandalized a still-devout capital. When the queen bore a daughter in 1771, congregations across Copenhagen walked out of church rather than sing the thanksgiving hymn ordered for the birth, certain the child was Struensee's own - a suspicion the king himself, in his more lucid moments, seemed to share.

Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen · Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Kristian Zahrtmann · Public domain

The right hand first

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Struensee's enemies multiplied as fast as his reforms alienated Danish opinion: a nobility that resented a German adventurer who had made German the language of government, a public scandalized by his moral reforms, and a court where he was noted, more than once during riots, to lack any real personal courage of his own. A powerful secret conspiracy took shape around the Queen Dowager, Juliane Marie, and struck in early 1772. Struensee was arrested in his own bedroom and chained to a prison wall, prosecuted for usurping royal authority, for lèse-majesté, and for injury to the king's honour. He denied everything until he learned the queen herself had also been arrested, at which point he confessed the nature of their relationship in full.

Residenzmuseum, Celle · Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Jens Juel · Public domain

A sentence out of an older age

Struensee and his ally Enevold Brandt, convicted of personal violence toward the king, were sentenced to a mode of execution that belonged to a much older century than the one that had produced Struensee's own Enlightenment reforms: on 28 April 1772, his right hand was cut off first, then his head, after which the head was set on a pole and his body drawn and quartered. Caroline Matilda, not yet twenty-one, was imprisoned at Kronborg Castle with her infant daughter; she had tried to shield Struensee, but once confronted with his own confession admitted the truth herself. An extraordinary court of thirty-five members sentenced her to divorce from the king on 6 April, and only her brother George III's direct intervention - he insisted she be treated as an English princess and sent a British warship to Elsinore - spared her lifelong imprisonment in a Danish fortress. She was allowed to leave for Hanover, but alone, without her daughter, and lived out her remaining years at Celle, beloved by its townspeople, while plans hatched with British and Danish sympathizers to restore her to power in Copenhagen came to nothing. She died of smallpox on 10 May 1775, not yet twenty-four - a queen whose entire public life, from her triumphal entry into Copenhagen at fifteen to her death in exile, spanned less than a decade.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Brothers of Englishmen

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Denmark's attempt to stay neutral in the wars convulsing Europe after 1793 pulled it steadily toward confrontation with Britain regardless. Joined with Russia, Sweden and Prussia in a League of Armed Neutrality meant to protect neutral shipping from British search and seizure, Denmark found its own frigates fighting British cruisers outright by 1800, and when Britain answered by laying embargo on every Danish and Norwegian ship in January 1801, the response was a fleet of fifty-three sail under Admiral Hyde Parker and Nelson.

The hottest fight Nelson ever fought

Nelson's squadron of thirty-five ships attacked Copenhagen's harbour defences on 2 April 1801 - blockships, floating batteries, and the fort of Trekroner, manned largely by raw recruits and university students under Olfert Fischer. Nelson himself later called it the hottest fight he had ever been in; after five hours of fighting left six of his own ships of the line aground and exposed to Trekroner's guns, he sent the Danish Crown Prince a letter proposing a truce, addressed simply "To the Brothers of Englishmen, the Danes." The Crown Prince agreed to a day's ceasefire. Losses on both sides ran close to even - over a thousand Danish casualties, twelve hundred English - and among the defenders was an eighteen-year-old named Peder Willemoes, who fought Nelson's own flagship from a small gunboat for four hours and lost two-thirds of his crew; Nelson himself later said the young officer deserved promotion above any man in his own fleet.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Christian Mølsted · Public domain

A fleet stolen before it could be used

Denmark's neutrality bought only six years' peace. In August 1807, an English fleet carrying thirty thousand troops under Lord Cathcart, with Arthur Wellesley - the future Duke of Wellington - as second in command, arrived in the Sound with an ultimatum: hand over the entire Danish navy for the duration of the war, or face attack. Denmark's Crown Prince refused, and Copenhagen, garrisoned by thirteen thousand mostly untrained volunteers, was bombarded from 2 to 5 September, burning the university, the cathedral and three hundred houses before the city capitulated. Britain carried off seventeen ships of the line, twelve frigates and dozens of smaller vessels - the entire Danish fleet, seized from a nation Britain was not formally at war with until the attack itself provoked one. Furious at what Stefánsson calls an unprovoked attack, the Crown Prince allied Denmark with Napoleon that October, a decision whose consequences would not become clear for another seven years.

Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Christian August Lorentzen · Public domain

Four hundred years undone

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Denmark's alliance with Napoleon, entered in fury after the 1807 bombardment, left the kingdom clinging to a losing side as the tide of the wars turned. Sweden's new Crown Prince, the former French marshal Bernadotte, secured Russian backing to claim Norway as compensation for Sweden's own loss of Finland, and by 1813 Norway itself was suffering famine under a naval blockade that cut it off from Danish supply entirely. The Danish heir, Prince Christian Frederik, crossed to Norway disguised as a fisherman in a small boat in May 1813 and took up the viceroyalty there, becoming, by Stefánsson's account, a genuinely popular favourite among a population increasingly drawn to separatism regardless. Denmark's own currency had by this point sunk to a fourteenth of its face value, the kingdom effectively bankrupt.

The treaty that ended four centuries

After Napoleon's defeat at Leipzig, Bernadotte marched into Holstein, and Frederick VI, despite a brave Danish stand at Sehested, could no longer avoid the inevitable. By the Treaty of Kiel, signed 14 January 1814, Denmark ceded Norway itself - though not Iceland, Greenland or the Faroes, which stayed with the Danish crown - to Sweden, and the island of Heligoland to Britain, in exchange for Swedish Pomerania, Rügen, and a million rixdollars (Pomerania and Rügen were themselves traded to Prussia the following year for the Duchy of Lauenburg and a further two million). It closed a union between Denmark and Norway that had lasted, in one form or another, more than four hundred years. Frederick VI, whom Stefánsson holds largely responsible for clinging so obstinately to the French alliance that produced this outcome, attended the Congress of Vienna in person seeking better terms and came away with none - though he was greeted, on his return to a humiliated and bankrupt Denmark, with genuine popular sympathy rather than blame.

Danish National Archives, Copenhagen · Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Danish National Archives · CC BY-SA 2.0

What grew back

The material and political wounds were real - a dismembered kingdom, a stolen navy, ruined finances - but the years that followed brought an unlikely compensation. What Danish literary history calls the Golden Age reached its full maturity in the generation between 1810 and 1830, producing Oehlenschläger, Grundtvig, Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen within a single national literature at almost the same moment the kingdom itself had never stood smaller on the map. Frederick VI, who had no personal interest in literature himself, spent his remaining years working to restore Danish finances and heal the war's wounds; the free constitution his own subjects hoped an enlightened absolutist king might grant them, having already freed the peasantry from serfdom decades before, remained, for the whole of his own reign, a promise deferred rather than delivered.

Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen · Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916) · Johan Vilhelm Gertner · Public domain