Reformation and war
News •
King Frederick I reigned during the early years of the Reformation, the religious revolution that resulted in the establishment of Protestantism as a major branch of Christianity. Frederick had promised Denmark’s Roman Catholic bishops that he would fight heresy, but he in fact invited Lutheran preachers to the country, most probably to expand royal power at the expense of the church. After Frederick died in 1533, the bishops and other members of the predominantly Catholic Rigsråd postponed the election of a new king; they feared that the obvious candidate, Frederick’s son Prince Christian (later King Christian III), if chosen, would immediately introduce Lutheranism. They tried unsuccessfully to sponsor his younger brother Hans.
Civil war broke out in 1534, when the mayors of Malmö (now in Sweden) and Copenhagen accepted help from the north German city of Lübeck, an important member of the Hanseatic League. The Lübeckers, under the pretext of restoring the exiled Christian II, hoped to regain their declining mercantile supremacy and take control of The Sound, the strait between Zealand and Skåne that was controlled by Denmark. The landing of Lübeck troops, led by Count Christopher of Oldenburg, in Zealand in the summer of 1534 roused the Jutland nobility as well as the Catholic bishops, who came out in favor of Christian III. The leader of Christian III’s forces, Johan Rantzau, duke of Holstein and a Lutheran, subdued a revolt of the Jutland peasants and then moved across Funen and Zealand to besiege Copenhagen, Count Christopher’s last holdout. Finally, in the summer of 1536, Copenhagen capitulated, ending the so-called Count’s War.
Following the war, to consolidate his position as king, Christian III arrested the Catholic bishops and confiscated all church property. The latter act brought vast estates to the crown, though in the following years many were sold or given to creditors to reduce the government’s debts. In October 1536 the Danish Lutheran Church was established. The following year, new bishops, all of the burgher class, were appointed. They had little political influence, however, as bishops no longer sat in the Rigsråd. The organization of the new state church was finalized in 1539.
The Rigsråd, now made up only of members of the high nobility, soon asserted itself. The coronation charter that it negotiated with Christian III differed only slightly from earlier ones with regard to its constitutional power and the privileges of the nobility. In accordance with the king’s wish to make the throne fully hereditary, the charter named Prince Frederick (later Frederick II) as his father’s successor and provided that a Danish prince should always be chosen as king. The latter provision, however, was omitted in Frederick II’s charter. The Rigsråd thus suffered no permanent loss of elective power.
The central government of Denmark was decisively strengthened by the Count’s War, primarily by the elimination of the church as an independent and occasionally competing administrative structure, as well as by the expropriation of church assets. The further development of a central administrative apparatus, which included a chancery and a new finance department (the Rentekammer), also bolstered the strength of the state. The power of the nobility grew as well: membership in the Rigsråd and most leadership positions in the new administrative structures were reserved for nobles, and many new royal manors and estates were created. Although the merchants of Copenhagen and Malmö had fought Christian III, they nonetheless favored a strong central government that would protect their interests in the Baltic trade. The centralization of power that took place during Christian’s peaceful reign prepared the way for the establishment of absolutism a century later.
Denmark’s central government remained strong during the reign of Frederick II (1559–88). Frederick aimed to reinstate the Kalmar Union, and in 1563 he was able to convince the Rigsråd to agree to a war with Sweden (Norway was still part of the Danish kingdom). At the conclusion of the so-called Seven Years’ War of the North, however, Sweden remained independent, and Denmark was left deeply in debt. The strain on public finances was relieved partly through heavier taxation but mainly through a duty charged on shipping in The Sound, an important passage for the growing trade in the Baltic. Originally a fixed fee per ship, the duty later became a fee based on tonnage; it was at the king’s own disposal, out of reach of the council. The process of collecting taxes and duties led to a more efficient financial administration. Meanwhile, Frederick focused his military policies on the navy and on establishing Danish dominance of the Baltic.
Upon the death of Frederick II in 1588, his son Christian IV succeeded to the throne at the age of 10. An aristocratic regency, headed by the aging chancellor Niels Kaas, governed the country and educated the future ruler for seven years. The first half of Christian’s personal reign was in every respect a success, marked by the dynamic king’s many initiatives: establishing trading companies, acquiring overseas possessions, investing in a colony in India at Tranquebar, founding new towns, and erecting monumental buildings in the capital and elsewhere. A particularly important focus of his foreign policy was to secure Danish control of the Baltic. When Sweden began expanding its influence into the sea, Christian reacted by intervening in the Thirty Years’ War; in addition to securing a broad sphere of interest in Germany as a counterweight to Swedish expansion, he also wished to strengthen the position of Protestantism. After disastrous battle losses and a devastating occupation of Jutland by German Catholics, the Danes signed a separate peace with the Holy Roman Empire in 1629. Despite this reversal, the king’s national government, public administration, jurisdiction, and promotion of business and new industries had great importance for Denmark’s future.
Christian IV has been regarded as Denmark’s Renaissance ruler as well as one of the greatest Danish monarchs; he was a central figure in later drama, poetry, and art. In reality, however, the military catastrophes of his reign weakened the position of the monarchy, so the high nobility of the Rigsråd decided to curtail the power of his son and successor, Frederick III (1648–70).
In 1657, as part of the First Northern War, hostilities with Sweden broke out again. In the exceptionally cold winter of 1657–58, the Swedish king Charles X Gustav attacked Jutland from the south and marched his troops to Zealand over the frozen sounds of Funen, after which the Danes signed the humiliating Treaty of Roskilde (1658). That summer Charles again invaded Denmark. Copenhagen, assisted by the Dutch, held out against the Swedes and defeated them in February 1659, but the war continued until 1660. The resulting Treaty of Copenhagen, imposed on Denmark by the great powers of Europe, led to the permanent loss of Halland, Skåne, and Blekinge to Sweden.
Danish absolutism
The military debacles of the second half of the 17th century were seen as proof that the nobles were unable to handle the central government; their refusal to pay taxes also angered the crown. Exploiting the situation, the king’s councillors drafted a new law that eliminated the special political privileges of the nobility and proclaimed the crown fully inheritable, thus giving the king de facto absolute power. This inheritance law—along with the secret King’s Law of 1665, among the most absolutist of all European expressions of absolutism—remained in force until 1848 with only minor modifications.
Absolutist Denmark was governed by a bureaucracy that continued to rely on political leaders from the class of great landowners, although wealth, not noble birth, now gave increased access to this class. The government in Copenhagen consisted of colleges—i.e., the chancelleries; the treasury college (descended from the old Rentekammer); and colleges for war, the navy, and, some years later, commerce. All major decisions were made by a secret council consisting of the leaders of the colleges, who could easily influence the king. Local administration remained largely unchanged after 1660, but the government took pains to curtail the military power of the new county governors (amtmænd).
During this period the crown further reduced its properties through sales to its bourgeois creditors, who thus joined the ranks of the large landowners. The state compensated for the loss of income from former crown lands by increasing taxes on the value of peasant land, though the nobles still paid the taxes for the peasants on their estates. Assessments of land values based both on area and on productivity were first made in 1662, and by 1688 surveyors had completed a nationwide register that served as the basis of taxation in both Denmark and Norway until the 19th century. The legal system was overhauled and regularized as well, and already in 1661 a supreme court, with jurisdiction over the entire kingdom, had replaced the old system whereby the king and the Rigsråd heard legal appeals. Each part of the country had had its own law codes, but under Christian V, who succeeded Frederick III, his father, in 1670, national law was codified.
The 18th century
Foreign policy
The 18th century brought a measure of balance in Denmark’s foreign relations. The Second Northern War (Great Northern War; 1700–21) demonstrated that, even with alliances, Denmark had no hope of recapturing the territories lost to Sweden in the preceding century. Sweden, moreover, no longer had the strength to invade Denmark from the south in alliance with the dukes of Schleswig or Holstein. King Frederick IV (1699–1730) decided on a foreign policy of keeping a balance of power in the north and safeguarding communications between Denmark and Norway. This necessitated alliances with Russia and the Netherlands and, from time to time, France. This policy succeeded for the rest of the 18th century, probably because of the common European need for free access to the Baltic. Finally, in the 1770s, the Gottorp lands in Schleswig and Holstein were brought under the rule of the Danish crown.
During the 18th century, Denmark-Norway acquired an important merchant marine and a navy. Freedom of the seas had become a vital issue and a difficult problem, complicated especially by the export of Norwegian timber to Great Britain. During wars in the middle of the century, Denmark-Norway had to bow to the British claim of ruling the waves. In 1780, during the American Revolution (1775–83), the Danish foreign minister Andreas Peter, greve (count) af Bernstorff, negotiated an armed neutrality treaty with Russia, the Netherlands, and Sweden, whose King Gustav III had married a Danish princess. However, because Norwegian export interests would have been threatened if Britain had considered these treaties hostile, Bernstorff also concluded a special treaty with Britain, much to the annoyance of Russia. The French revolutionary wars led Denmark and Sweden to extend the treaty in 1794, but Danish neutrality did not last much longer. After 1800 it became impossible for Denmark to maintain its access to world shipping lanes unimpeded, its efforts to placate the British notwithstanding.
