Kalmar Union

The personal union that made one monarch ruler of all Scandinavia, and broke on the question of who that monarch was for. Margaret I, daughter of a Danish king and widow of a Norwegian one, was already governing both realms when Sweden's nobles turned to her against their unpopular German king, and in 1397 the three kingdoms crowned her great-nephew Erik at Kalmar. It was the largest state in Europe by area, running from Finland to Greenland. The union document left the crucial question open: each kingdom kept its own laws, council and institutions, so the union was a shared monarchy rather than a shared state, and everything depended on how the king used it. Successive Danish kings used it to fight Holstein and the Hanseatic League with Swedish money and men, which Swedish nobles and the Bergslagen mining districts resented. Sweden rebelled repeatedly and spent long stretches under its own regents. The end came when Christian II took Stockholm in 1520 and executed around eighty of its leading citizens in the Stockholm Bloodbath; Gustav Vasa raised the country and was elected king in 1523. Denmark and Norway stayed joined until 1814. Norway then passed to Sweden without being consulted. Iceland and Greenland remained with Denmark. Copenhagen became the effective centre of the union. Its territory included Finland, Iceland, the Faroes, Greenland and parts of northern Germany. Erik of Pomerania introduced the Sound Dues, a toll on shipping that funded Denmark for four centuries. Margaret is buried at Roskilde cathedral.

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