When I started planning my trip to Copenhagen, Instagram, naturally, caught on pretty quickly and my feed filled up with pastries, coffee, Nyhavn and beautiful girls in beige boxy clothes. “Where are the best cafes?” it asked me, “where are the best viewpoints? What pastries should you eat?”. And I don’t want to be all I’m not like other girls travel creators but those weren’t on my list of questions to answer in Denmark. As an Iceland fan who’s recently written “Why Iceland doesn’t like Denmark”, my question was “How did Copenhagen go from the most wealthy and powerful city in Northern Europe to a city with virtually no political power but a massive thing for pastries?”.
To summarise the Iceland/Denmark post, Denmark owned Iceland for a few hundred years and attempted to starve it under the Danish trade monopoly. It also took most of England and although “owned” isn’t quite the right word, Norway and Sweden spent a while effectively under its thumb. This little country was hitting way above its weight in medieval times. How did it do that? And why is it now little more than Instagram made flesh?
So, naturally, I went to find the answers to all this – and the answers come from online research rather than anything I ever really found in Denmark.
It’s aggression. It’s Vikings. From pretty much the moment the Danish royal line came into being, either with Gorm the Old or his forebears who may or may not be the stuff of legend, they went out raiding.
Gorm’s son Harald Bluetooth took Norway after possibly arranging the assassination of his nephew, Harald Greycloak, king of Norway. Harald’s son Sweyn Forkbeard, having seized Denmark from his own father, recaptured Norway after the royal line reverted to the Norwegian Fairhair dynasty in the form of my favourite king Olafur Tryggvason (he who forcibly Christianised Iceland in July 1000), and then invaded England and took the crown from Æthelred II. And then Sweyn’s son, Cnut the Great, after the throne reverted back to Æthelred after Sweyn’s death, went back to England and wrestled it back out of Æthelred’s son’s hands. Cnut is another favourite, just because of his title: “King of all England and Denmark and the Norwegians and of some of the Swedes”. Also, don’t these early Scandinavian kings have amazing names?
England bowed out of the game in 1066 when the Normans came along and the kings of Norway and Denmark stopped stealing each other’s countries for a bit and lived relatively peacefully for three hundred years, at least by the standards of the last two centuries.
Then came 1363 and throne-swapping commenced again, only this time it was mostly via political means rather than wars and battles, with the next major inter-Scandinavian wedding. Magnus Eriksson, the grandson of the Swedish and Norwegian kings had a son, Haakon VI Magnusson, who in turn became king of both Sweden and Norway. The original plan had been for Haakon to take Norway and his brother Erik to take Sweden and for the newborn Norway-Sweden union to be broken up but Haakon changed his mind and was clearly the golden child because their father took his side and he got both, although he ended up co-ruling Sweden alongside his father, right up until 1364 when the pair were deposed in favour of a cousin, Albert, who’d invaded Sweden with the help of several Hanseatic cities and grabbed the throne.
In 1363, Haakon married Margaret, the youngest daughter of the Danish king Valdemar IV, bringing the three countries together, and when he died, their son Olaf inherited Denmark and Norway – Sweden having been taken by Cousin Albert the year after the wedding. Unfortunately, Olaf died young and without an heir and so Margaret, in a rare example of the line of succession working upwards, became regent and then queen. Meanwhile, seeing that she was quite a good queen, the Swedish regency council, having lost faith in Cousin Albert in the meantime, turned to Margaret for help and the upshot was that she finished up as queen of all three Scandinavian nations. As Sweden owned most of Finland at the time and Norway owned Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Orkney and Shetland at the time, it meant she also held the entire Nordic region. From the youngest daughter of the Danish king to the legendary Lady King of the Nordics is quite a thing!
It ultimately brought about the Kalmar Union in 1397, which formalised the three countries under a legal document instead of under wars and weddings. It was partly about uniting Margaret’s territories but it was partly about opposing the Hanseatic League, which had helped Albert take Sweden forty years earlier and had released him two years earlier from the prison he’d been in ever since Margaret took Sweden back from him. In theory, the Union made the three countries equals but Margaret favoured Denmark and it was always the ringleader of the three.
Sweden never had quite the same relationship with Denmark that Norway did; it quitting the Union in 1523 after the Swedish War of Liberation was the beginning of the end for Denmark the powerhouse. Denmark tried to take Sweden back by force but a series of humiliating defeats eventually made it realise this was going to be a permanent arrangement. Then a plague killed a third of the population of Copenhagen, followed by two devastating fires in the 1700s that wiped out most of the old city. To finish up, the British got it into their collective heads that Denmark might side with France during the Napoleonic Wars and sailed across the North Sea in 1807 to destroy their entire navy just to make sure they couldn’t. That’s bad enough in itself but remember, Denmark built its power as a seafaring nation. Now it has no boats and no sailors. That’s a hell of an ego-smash. It was also what finally tore Norway away from its longstanding partnership with Denmark. Well, technically, it was a demand from Sweden, which sided with Britain in an anti-French alliance and it was the Treaty of Kiel. If the British won the battle of the boats, as it tended to around that era, Norway had to be cut free. And it was.
For the first time in several centuries, Denmark really was just Denmark, feeling very small and weak. Denmark plus Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, which it somehow managed to keep in the divorce, despite them having originally belonged to Norway.
A few sensible kings and a century or two of economic recovery brought Denmark to what it is today: a modern, progressive, industrial country that cares about its citizens more than it cares about expansion. The days of taking England or Norway or threatening Sweden are long gone. Denmark ploughed away, racking up spots in the top five for pretty much any metric of progress and happiness and the outside world almost forgot it existed.
The concept of hygge brought Denmark back to the world’s attention somewhere in the 2010s, a cosy, non-threatening phenomenon of blankets, crackling fires, warm clothes and evenings in. Ganni seems to be largely behind the fashion thing; Copenhagen Fashion Week, established 2006, has become one of the big five, sitting incongruously next to London, Paris, Milan and New York. We know that what we see on social media is just a tiny slice of the reality, a highlight reel, something superficial and easily digestible and repeated over and over again until it almost begins to erase and replace reality. What we began to see in Denmark was a curated version of Copenhagen – hygge, Scandi fashion, aesthetic and pastries. The warmongering past slipped through the cracks. The beautiful languid fashion girlies couldn’t even conceive of Copenhagen as the seat of a colonial powerhouse.
The thing is, originally, Copenhagen wasn’t. Took writing at least two-thirds of this post to realise that. In the early days, Roskilde was the capital. Those big names, the Viking-era kings who went out raiding and came back with entire countries, didn’t know Copenhagen; it didn’t exist in their day. There’s evidence of settlement here back to the Stone Age and it’s generally accepted that it was founded around 1167 with the building of Bishop Absalon’s castle as part of the modest defenses of the merchant harbour that gave it its name, Købmannahavn. It received its city charter in 1254 and became capital somewhere around the early 1400s, when Erik of Pomerania, a distant relative and adopted son of Margaret who succeeded her as king of the entire Nordic region, moved his seat to Copenhagen Castle, where the current Christiansborg Palace now sits. Its position at the head of the narrow Öresund Strait meant it could control all trade going in and out of the Baltic – an excellent thing during a Kalmar Union set up specifically to oppose the Baltic-trading Hanseatic League.
As for Roskilde, just as power moved to Copenhagen, its Gothic cathedral was completed. It still survives today although it’s likely a bit of a Ship of Theseus in that it’s been repaired and renovated a lot over the last eight hundred years. As with any medieval cathedral, it’s had a major fire – in 1443, in this case. Margaret was buried there, after spending a year or so in the family chapel in Sorø, and just about every Danish monarch since has ended up there, in an extremely eclectic collection of ornate coffins. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The former queen, Margrethe II, who abdicated in 2024, already has her tomb waiting for her. You’re not allowed to look at it, so it’s covered in a wooden shell, painted in the ugliest pastel shades of pink, yellow and blue and shaped like a bench. I can’t quite comprehend the idea of “you can’t look at it but you can sit on it” – either be precious about it or don’t.
There’s not much more evidence of Roskilde’s powerful past. I ran out of time – and energy – to get to the Roskilde Museum but if the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen is anything to go by, I don’t think I’d learn much more about Roskilde’s colonial past there. But I’ll tell you about the Viking Ship Centre sometime!
Right. That’s a lot of names and dates. Let me summarise. Viking kings stole countries, marriage brought the Scandinavian nations together again more peacefully and the Kalmar Union made it all formal. Sweden left the Kalmar Union and Britain blew up Denmark’s navy, forcing them to give up Norway. Denmark settled down and quietly got on with things and became hygge and happy, Ganni put it on the fashion map and social media turned it into a country full of pastries.