Cross and Scepter

by Bagge, Sverre

  Towards Renewed Scandinavian Integration, 1261–1397

  In summer 1260, a Norwegian delegation, led by a friar, Nikolas, turned up at the residence of the Duke of Saxony and asked him to consent to the marriage of his granddaughter, the Danish princess Ingeborg, to King Håkon of Norway’s son Magnus. The duke answered that he had no say over Ingeborg’s marriage and referred the Norwegian envoys to the queen of Denmark. He then showed the envoys his two daughters, both beautifully dressed, and told them, “I decide over these two, if anyone will ask for them.” The envoys were apparently unimpressed and left Saxony. Nikolas continued his journey to Denmark and according to the saga returned with the message that the queen had accepted the proposal and promised to outfit the princess in the most honorable way. However, when a new and higher-ranking delegation, led by Bishop Håkon of Oslo and traveling with an armed force on seven ships, arrived the next year at the convent in Horsens where the princess was living, they found that no preparations had been made and that the queen had no plans in this direction. The bishop then approached the princess directly, urging her to trust in God and the king of Norway. The princess was finally persuaded, and Bishop Håkon betrothed her on behalf of Magnus. Shortly afterwards, the Norwegian delegation returned and quickly brought the princess back to Norway, taking care to avoid the Swedes, whom they suspected of wanting her for themselves. The delegation arrived safely in Norway, to the great satisfaction of King Håkon, who was very impressed by his daughter-in-law and arranged what according to the saga was the most magnificent wedding ever to have been celebrated in Norway.

  The saga describes the proposal in unusual detail and gives a curious impression of the proceedings. Why the embassy to Saxony, rather than a direct approach to the Danish court? And why did the Danish queen do nothing to fulfill her alleged agreement with Friar Nikolas? The most likely answer is that the saga was trying to obscure the fact that Ingeborg was married without the consent of her relatives. The relatives, first King Christoffer (1252–1259) and then his widow, the formidable Margrete Sambiria, who headed the government on behalf of her minor son Erik, had good reasons to prevent the marriage. Ingeborg and her three sisters were daughters of the late King Erik IV Plovpenning (1241–1250). Christoffer, and later Margrete, wanted to confine them to nunneries in order to prevent claims for dowries that would threaten their financial resources (which were in bad shape) and to avoid the risk of new heirs who might endanger the position of their descendants. The same reasons made the princesses extremely attractive to neighboring kings—another of them was married to the king of Sweden. King Håkon may well have been impressed by Ingeborg’s beauty and charm—this story as well as some others indicate that she must have been a resourceful woman—but the main reason for his satisfaction was no doubt the potential political consequences of the marriage.

  The wedding in 1261 introduced a period of increasing interaction between the three Scandinavian kingdoms, which eventually led to the Kalmar Union of 1397. Historians, particularly Norwegian historians, have often pointed to the shift from the North Sea area to Denmark in Norwegian foreign policy from the mid-thirteenth century onwards. Rather than a shift, however, we seem to be dealing with a new field of interest in addition to the old ones—the 1290s represent a climax in Norwegian foreign policy, towards England and Scotland as well as towards Denmark. At the same time, Sweden launched a crusade in Finland while also strengthening its links with Denmark. The greatest difference compared to earlier times was that Norway and Sweden now interfered in Danish matters. This in turn resulted from the fact that Denmark had been weakened by inner conflicts, which broke out between the sons of King Valdemar II at his death in 1241 and continued intermittently over the course of the next hundred years. At the same time, central power in Norway and Sweden had been consolidated. As Denmark was the richest of the three countries, expansion towards Denmark was more attractive to the Norwegians and Swedes than expansion towards these countries had been to the Danes.

  The main form this intervention took was marriage, which was more likely now than before to lead to dynastic unions. The greater importance of descent in the direct line increased the chance that a woman or a member of the dynasty in the female line might inherit the throne, as did also the rule requiring legitimate birth as a precondition for succession. This latter rule, however, also increased the risk of the king dying without a direct heir. These factors, together with the customary practice of kings and princes marrying foreign princesses, increased the likelihood that the same person would be the nearest heir to the throne in more than one country. We therefore find an increase in dynastic unions all over Europe in the later Middle Ages. In East Central Europe, the indigenous dynasties died out in the male line in Hungary (1301), Bohemia (1306), and Poland (1370). In the two latter countries, a woman became the heir to the throne; Jadwiga in Poland was even formally proclaimed “king” of the country (1384). In both Bohemia and Poland, however, the female heirs later married foreign princes, who took over the throne, John of Luxembourg in Bohemia (1310) and the Lithuanian Duke Jogaila in Poland, who converted to Christianity and became king under the name of Ladislaus (1386). In both cases, political considerations were decisive. John of Luxembourg was the son of the Emperor Henry VII, and the union between Poland and Lithuania created a powerful alliance that inflicted a crushing defeat on Poland’s main enemy, the Teutonic Order, in 1410. In Hungary, Andrew III, the last king of the Arpad dynasty, was succeeded by Charles I of Anjou, who traced his claim from his grandmother Mary, who was the daughter of King Stephen V and married to King Charles II of Sicily. Although he was the nearest heir, the election of Charles was by no means automatic, and he had to fight rival pretenders and rebellious nobles for a long time after his election. The rules of succession were thus combined with political considerations, as the political elites sought pretenders who could strengthen the international status of their countries, and the kings themselves used marriage as a means to strengthen the position of their dynasties. The two main Central European dynasties, the Luxembourgs and the Habsburgs, worked systematically to extend their power through marriage alliances, as expressed in the motto of the latter, the most successful of all medieval and early modern dynasties: Bella gerunt alii, tu felix Austria, nube (Others wage war, but you, Happy Austria, marry!).

  Inter-Nordic marriages had occurred, probably as far back as in the tenth century, but they were not particularly frequent. Nor would they necessarily have major consequences, as long as the rules of succession were vague and illegitimate sons had access to the throne. Moreover, royal daughters and other female relatives often served as means to link prominent magnates to the king’s factions during civil wars, leaving fewer daughters to be exported. This changed during the following period, with more settled conditions and a greater distance separating the king from the aristocracy. Kings and princes now married women of foreign royal houses exclusively—which had been their usual custom even earlier—and women of the royal house did the same. Royal marriages were used to gain important allies and also, to some extent, in the hopes of extending the power and influence of the dynasty by inheriting the throne in another country. The Norwegian kings, who had limited military resources, made steady and systematic attempts in this direction. Before Magnus’s marriage to Ingeborg, Håkon had let his elder son marry a Swedish princess, but the marriage was dissolved by his death in 1257. By contrast, Håkon married his daughter off to a Castilian prince, possibly in order to avoid claims for her hand from the neighboring countries. Later, the marriage of Håkon’s grandson Eirik to a Scottish princess almost brought a Norwegian queen to the throne of Scotland. After the death of King Alexander III in 1286, his granddaughter Margaret, King Eirik’s daughter, was his nearest heir, but young Margaret died before she could reach Scotland.

  Of the two marriages to Danish princesses mentioned above, the Swedish one was without negative consequences from a Danish point of view, because the husband of the Danish princess,
King Valdemar, was deposed by his younger brother Magnus with Danish aid. By contrast, the Norwegian marriage led to claims for a dowry in the form of Danish lands, which after 1280, when Ingeborg, the former Danish princess, held a prominent position as dowager queen, occasionally led to war between the two countries. The conflict was intensified by the murder of King Erik in 1286, because the nobles convicted of the murder found refuge in Norway and in the following years joined the king of Norway in attacks on Denmark. Thanks to this alliance, the Norwegians gained a foothold in Denmark, notably in the border region of Halland, where one of the outlaws, Count Jacob, had his lands. In the following years, they launched a series of attacks on Denmark, which resulted in a temporary peace in 1295 on fairly favorable conditions from a Norwegian point of view.

  However, a Danish revival occurred when Erik Klipping’s son Erik Menved came of age in 1294. Erik strengthened the alliance with Sweden through a double marriage; the two kings married each other’s sisters (1296 and 1298). He emerged successful from a conflict with the archbishop (1302) and at about the same time embarked upon an ambitious policy in Northern Germany (above, p. 42). All of this placed the new king of Norway, Håkon V (1299–1319), in a tenuous position. His solution was to seek an alliance with King Birger of Sweden’s younger brother, Duke Erik. Whether this was an attempt to reach an understanding with Birger himself or Håkon was already sensing the bad relationship between Birger and his brothers, remains unknown, but the result was an alliance between the ruling kings in Denmark and Sweden against the king of Norway and against their opponents in both countries. During the following conflicts, the Danish outlaws gradually lost their importance and were replaced by the Swedish dukes, Erik and his brother Valdemar, who had the upper hand in Sweden after their coup at Håtuna in 1306, when they took their brother captive and eventually forced him to divide the country with them in three equal parts. Håkon’s great asset in this situation was his only daughter Ingebjørg, born in 1301 and likely to succeed him. Håkon hesitated for some time over the choice between two potential sons-in-law, Duke Erik and Birger’s son Magnus, but decided in favor of the former in 1312, after the formal division of Sweden two years previously. The advantage of Erik’s marriage to Ingebjørg from Håkon’s point of view was that he would be succeeded, in reality if not formally, by Erik, who was a very competent politician and who would join the western third of Sweden plus the Danish province of Halland to the possessions of the dynasty. King Birger’s murder of his two brothers resulted in Håkon gaining even more. In 1319, Birger was replaced by Duke Erik’s son Magnus, aged three, who also succeeded Håkon as king of Norway.

  The union between Norway and Sweden in effect lasted until Magnus’s death in 1374, although a decision was taken to dissolve it in 1343–44, when Magnus’s younger son Håkon, born in 1340, was elected king of Norway. Håkon took over the government when he reached majority in 1355. However, Magnus still ruled a part of the country. Moreover, after the death of Magnus’s elder son Erik in 1359, it became possible to envision a renewal of the union after Magnus’s death. In 1363 Håkon married Margrete, daughter of King Valdemar IV of Denmark, while Valdemar’s only son Christoffer died in the same year. Consequently, Margrete and Håkon’s son Olav, born in 1370, became the nearest heir in all three countries, opening the possibility of a Scandinavian union.

  The union became a reality towards the end of the century, and the main reason must be sought in the revival of Denmark after the crisis in the 1320s and ’30s. A lament over the sad fate of the country was composed during this period in Latin by an anonymous author, who longed for a return to the glorious days of Erik Menved and condemned the cowardice and decadence of his contemporaries. A famous event, celebrated by contemporaries as well as later ages, would seem to have been the answer to the poet’s complaints. On April 1, 1340, a squire from Jutland, Niels Ebbesen, accompanied by forty-seven of his men, entered the castle of Count Gerhard of Holstein, one of the main mortgagees during the interregnum, and killed him. The turning point had arrived. The Danish people rose against their German oppressors and killed them or chased them out of the country. The reality behind the story is more prosaic. We know nothing of Niels Ebbesen’s motives, but he was hardly the champion of a national movement. Nor was the main issue a conflict between Danes and Germans. The German mortgagees did not aim at ruling Denmark; their main interest was to get back their money. Gerhard himself was about to exchange his mortgage in Jutland with Duke Valdemar of Slesvig. Nor did the mortgagees control Denmark in such a way that the monarchy could be restored only by removing them. The problem was that the previous period had resulted in so many encroachments on royal estates and rights that it would take a long time and much hard work to restore the royal government.

  This process had begun two years before, when Christoffer II’s youngest son Valdemar (born in 1321) started negotiations with the mortgagees about taking over the Danish throne. In May 1340 he married Helvig, a sister of Duke Valdemar of Slesvig, and received parts of Jutland as her dowry. In this way, he ended the conflict between the two lines of Valdemar II’s descendants. He was acclaimed king of Denmark shortly after, on St. John’s Day (June 24). He spent the next twenty years transforming his nominal rule over the country into a real kingship. His assets in this effort included good contacts in Germany—he had spent his youth at the court of the Emperor Louis of Bavaria—but most important of all were his political and military abilities. He was clever, ruthless, and energetic, according to a contemporary chronicle a man who would not even allow water to run out into the sea without its having done any useful work (to this end he built watermills all over the country). He recovered castles and len with a combination of threats, violence, and promises. His particular skill was the ability to turn up unexpectedly and catch his opponents by surprise. He was clever in hiding his movements.

  In 1360, Valdemar had got control of most of Denmark and at a great meeting in Kalundborg in Zealand, he issued an ordinance about royal government and peace in the country that strongly resembled an election charter. Now, he was ready for his next strike. As a consequence of the Danish dissolution after Erik Menved’s death in 1319, Sweden had gained hold of the Danish lands east of Øresund: Scania and Blekinge (1332). The people there had approached the king of Sweden about getting rid of the Germans who held the area in mortgage from the king of Denmark, and the Swedes had paid that mortgage, 34,000 marks of silver. The sum was enormous and contributed to the financial difficulties that beset Sweden for the rest of Magnus’s reign. After the revival of the Danish monarchy with Valdemar IV after 1340, the Swedish king and aristocracy had lived in constant fear of a Danish reconquest and had taken various steps to avoid it. Internal struggles in Sweden from 1356 gave the Danes the opportunity they were looking for, and in 1360–61 King Valdemar reconquered the area and in addition got hold of Gotland, an important trading center under the nominal superiority of the Swedish king. This was apparently no incentive for the rapprochement between the two dynasties that resulted in the marriage between Håkon and Margrete, but King Magnus was faced with an even greater danger than these losses, namely an aristocratic opposition that threatened to depose him in favor of his cousin Albrecht, son of the duke of Mecklenburg. The deposition actually took place in February 1364.

  From now on, Nordic politics would be a struggle between two dynastic alliances, the old Nordic dynasties, represented by Magnus, Håkon and Margrete, and their descendants, and the Mecklenburgers, who traced their claim through the 1321 marriage between Magnus’s sister and the duke of Mecklenburg. Territorially, this meant an alliance between Denmark, Norway, and some of the western landscapes of Sweden against the rest of Sweden and Mecklenburg, with both sides seeking various allies outside the Nordic countries and both in fact trying to gain control of all three kingdoms. After Valdemar’s death in 1375, Håkon and Margrete’s son Olav (Danish, Oluf) was elected in Denmark, with Margrete as regent, in competition with Albrecht of Mecklenburg. When Ol
av died at the age of seventeen in 1387, Margrete replaced him with her sister’s son Erik, son of the duke of Pomerania, who is usually referred to as Erik of Pomerania in Scandinavian historiography.

  Whereas Denmark overcame its internal conflicts during the fourteenth century, there was frequent discord between the monarchy and the aristocracy in Sweden. The first Scandinavian union, between Norway and Sweden, was the result of a united aristocratic opposition against King Birger, who had murdered his brothers, and led to government by an aristocratic council of the realm in both countries during Magnus’s minority (1319–1331). Having taken over the government of the two kingdoms himself, Magnus eventually met with aristocratic opposition in both of them, first in Norway, and then, and more seriously, in Sweden. It is open to discussion to what extent we are dealing here with a radical opposition between monarchy and aristocracy or with reactions to a temporary financial crisis, as in Sweden in the 1350s, or dissatisfaction on the part of particular groups or individuals, as in Norway in the 1330s and ’40s. In any case, it is clear that the Swedish aristocracy in the second half of the fourteenth century had strong and well-defined interests and was able to defend them against the king.