Denmark in Wartime and Plague

Mikael Shainkman

By the, uh, by the early 1340s, Denmark looked less like an actual sovereign kingdom and more like... well, like a pawnshop with a coastline. Seriously. If you walked across the Danish islands in, say, 1335, you weren't really walking through a unified state. You were walking through a patchwork of mortgaged territories ruled by German pledge-lords who... frankly, they ruled the land like absolute wolves. The Danish crown itself? It had been reduced to a, a sad little political ornament. A decorative memory with a wax seal attached, but absolutely no teeth. No revenue, no land, nothing. And- and the biggest chunk of this humiliation was Scania. This incredibly rich, agricultural powerhouse... the literal economic engine of the western Baltic, with its massive herring markets and control over the Sound... it had been pawned off to Sweden in 1333 by a desperate, bankrupt regime. The man pulling the strings behind this system was Count Gert von Schauenburg. He wasn't just a foreign noble; he was the ultimate creditor. He held the castles, he collected the taxes, and he made sure the Danish kings stayed entirely ornamental. Because, let's be honest, in medieval politics, crown land isn't just real estate. It is the fuel of statecraft. Without it, you can't pay soldiers, you can't reward loyal followers, and you certainly can't tell the nobility what to do. But then... well, history has a lovely sense of irony. Sometimes a kingdom is saved by a brilliant administrative genius. And sometimes... sometimes it's saved simply because a terrifying old debt collector finally stops breathing. In 1342, Count Gert died of old age. Just... died. And that sudden vacuum cracked open the door for the sons of the exiled Danish king Christoffer II... Valdemar and his brother Otto... to slip back into the country and attempt a desperate, almost suicidal royal reclamation. Or... did they? Well, they certainly tried.

Mikael Shainkman

Now, the normal political logic here suggests that the two brothers, Valdemar and Otto, would work together to rebuild their father's shattered house. But medieval family loyalty is... how shall we put it... highly conditional. Valdemar... who we will come to know as Valdemar IV, or Valdemar Atterdag... was not a man for sharing. He quickly consolidated the native Danish faction around himself, aggressively reclaiming crown lands, and... in a move of pure, cold pragmatism... he pushed his own brother Otto entirely out of the picture. Otto was, in fact, nearly killed in the struggle. He managed to escape, though, fleeing north to the court of Jon I of Norway. Now, as a historian, I have to stop and appreciate the sheer beauty of this setup. Jon I... the newly crowned, deeply ambitious Norwegian king... suddenly has a discarded Danish prince sitting in Oslo. In medieval diplomacy, a spare prince is... it's a loaded dynastic weapon. He is a legal argument with legs. A future invasion plan with excellent table manners. Jon simply had to wait for the right moment to pull the trigger. Meanwhile, Valdemar was busy proving he wasn't just a lucky pretender. The German pledge-lords and the Hanseatic League... that massive network of wealthy northern trading cities... they realized very quickly that this new Danish king was trying to put the pawnshop back together, and they did not like it. In 1345, a massive coalition of Holsteiners and Hanseatics attacked Denmark to put Valdemar back in his place. But at the Battle of Husum, Valdemar didn't just survive; he absolutely crushed the Holstein lords. It was a tactical miracle. Husum was the exact moment Valdemar stopped being a minor Danish nuisance and became everyone else's problem. And he didn't stop there. The very next year, in 1346, a Danish-sponsored peasant rebellion broke out in Scania. Sensing blood, Valdemar landed his army there and met the Swedish king, Albert of Mecklenburg, at the Battle of Laholm. Albert, who had only been on the Swedish throne since 1336, desperately needed a victory to prove to his own highly rebellious nobility that he could protect Swedish interests. Instead, Valdemar's forces routed the Swedes. Albert was forced to sign a humiliating treaty, handing the incredibly wealthy Scanian lands back to Denmark. Just like that, Denmark was back on the map, the Hanseatics were bleeding money, and Sweden was left deeply, deeply humiliated. But, as usual... just as the board was set for a massive geopolitical tug-of-war... the rules of the entire game were about to be violently rewritten.

Mikael Shainkman

And then, after all of this... after the dynastic plotting, the battlefield triumphs at Husum and Laholm, the grand reclaiming of Scania... the plague arrived. The Black Death rolled into Scandinavia in the late 1340s, and it made everyone's very clever legal arguments look embarrassingly small. Now, the plague actually hit Scandinavia slightly milder than southern Europe, but it was still an absolute demographic catastrophe. When the dust settled, Norway was left with about 400,000 people, Sweden with 500,000, and Denmark with maybe 550,000. But here is the analytical pivot: the plague didn't just kill people; it shattered the economic foundation of the medieval world. Suddenly, land was plentiful, but labor? Labor was incredibly scarce. Farms were lying empty, rents were collapsing, and for the first time in history, the surviving peasants actually had bargaining power. They could pack up and walk away to find a better deal. And how the kings of the North responded to this labor crisis tells us everything about their regimes. Let's look at Norway first. King Jon I... always the calculating consolidator... saw this crisis and decided to strike a bargain. He confirmed a law known as the Frikarlslog. On the surface, this sounds like a generous humanitarian gesture... it gave free Norwegian peasants greater rights to move between farms and a much stronger legal standing at the local assemblies, the tings. But Jon wasn't running a charity. In exchange for these rights, every single free peasant became legally obligated to perform military service for the king, organized under their local royal official, the sysslemann. Jon also got the right to personally appoint the lawmen at the peasant assemblies. So, you see the brilliant pragmatism here? The peasants got mobility and protection; the king got a massive, loyal peasant levy, a tighter grip on local courts, and a direct line of control right into the heart of rural society. Now, contrast that with Denmark. Valdemar IV looked at the exact same labor shortage and... well, he chose the hammer. Denmark had been hit incredibly hard by the plague, which was dragging down his recovery of Scania. So, in 1351, Valdemar introduced vornedskab. This was a brutal system of labor control that legally bound Danish peasants to the estates they were born on. No moving, no bargaining. It was designed to protect the tax base and the noble landowners, but... predictably... it sparked furious peasant revolts across Denmark. Valdemar, being Valdemar, simply crushed them with mercenaries. You see the contrast? Jon in Norway looks at labor scarcity and builds a military partnership; Valdemar in Denmark looks at it and builds a prison. Same plague, completely different political instincts.

Mikael Shainkman

Which brings us, naturally, to Sweden. If Denmark was tense and Norway was consolidating, Sweden was a complete, unmitigated train wreck. King Albert of Mecklenburg was already on thin ice after losing Scania to Valdemar at Laholm, and the post-plague economic squeeze was making his noble council... who had already forced him to sign a highly restrictive coronation charter in 1336... absolutely furious. They saw a weak king, a collapsing economy, and a perfect opportunity to claw back power. In 1353, the powerful nobleman Svante Nilsson Tri Rosor led a massive aristocratic revolt to depose Albert. Albert was desperate. He had no money, his Swedish troops were deserting, and he knew that if he lost, he was either going to end up in a dungeon or on a chopping block. So, he turned to the one man who had the money and the army to save him: Jon I of Norway. And Jon... oh, Jon played him like a fiddle. Jon agreed to send Norwegian knights to crush the rebellion, but his price was astronomical. He demanded the formal, permanent return of Lödöse... or Laudos, as the Norwegian administrative documents called it... along with the entire mouth of the Göta River. This was Sweden's western breathing hole. The only Swedish outlet to the Kattegat and western trade that wasn't choked by Danish or Hanseatic tolls. Albert had no choice. He signed away Sweden's most strategic geographical asset just to keep his crown. With Norwegian spears, and the crucial backing of the Archbishop of Uppsala, Nils Bonde, Albert did manage to crush Svante Nilsson's revolt by 1355. But look at what it cost him. Yes, Albert survived. But he was now a king reigning over a deeply fractured country, entirely dependent on Norwegian military backing. To make matters worse, to maintain control, Albert started bypassng the Swedish nobility altogether, placing German bailiffs and Mecklenburg officials in key castles across Sweden. This, of course, did nothing but deepen the bitter, burning resentment of the Swedish lords. By 1355, the North had survived rebellion, recovery, and the Black Death. But survival is not the same thing as stability. Valdemar had rebuilt Denmark, but his treasury was empty and his peasantry was mutinous. Albert had held onto Sweden, but he had made himself utterly hated and rented out his kingdom's western coast to do it. And Jon I of Norway? He had turned Norway into the undisputed heavyweight of the region... holding the strategic keys to Sweden, controlling a massive new peasant army, and still keeping that spare Danish prince, Otto, safely tucked away in Oslo. Strength, though, has a funny way of attracting very expensive opportunities. The plague had rewritten the contract. Now, the kings of the North were about to test the fine print. But that... is a story for next time.