Denmark–Norway, 1600–1660

King since 1588, Christian took power himself in 1596, when he was crowned and signed the charter that bound him to the Council of the Realm. He wanted a strong crown and a reckoning with Sweden over the far north. To run his government he raised two men that year: Christoffer Valkendorf as steward of the realm and Christian Friis as his chancellor.

A veteran administrator from Frederick II's reign, Valkendorf was given the realm's highest office, empty since 1575, and ran the government with the chancellor while the king travelled in Germany in 1597. He died in January 1601. Christian named no new steward; the office stayed empty until 1632.

Christian Friis of Borreby headed the chancery for twenty years. As fief-holder of Trondheim in the 1580s he had learned the disputed northern frontier, and he sat at the border meetings with Sweden in 1601–1603. He ruled the university and the church with a hard hand, backing the strict Lutheran Hans Poulsen Resen.

Arild Huitfeldt, chancellor of the realm and head of its courts, published his Chronicle of the Kingdom of Denmark in 1595–1603; its prefaces lectured the young king on the lessons of history. He distrusted Christian's plans against Sweden and gave the council's memorandum of 1604 its line. Ill, he retired in the spring of 1609.

Jacob Ulfeldt, a much-travelled humanist and one of the king's close friends, had joined the council in 1607 and became chancellor of the realm in 1609. Unlike most councillors he would back Christian's ambitions in northern Germany, and he became the leading Danish diplomat of the next twenty years.

Christian married Anne Catherine of Brandenburg in November 1597, and she was crowned in 1598. Of her six children three sons lived: Christian, Frederick and Ulrik. She took no part in politics; her place in the chain is the succession her sons gave the crown.

Prince Christian was born in 1603. In an elective kingdom the king's son was not heir by birth: the council chose him as successor in 1608, the estates confirmed it, and in 1610 he received homage in Denmark and in Norway.

Jørgen Friis, a Jutland noble and former provincial judge, became governor-general of Norway and fief-holder of Akershus in 1601. When the king stayed at Akershus in 1602, Friis was ordered, with Anders Green and the Norwegian lawmen, to turn Norway's old laws, written in Old Norse, into a new lawbook.

Anders Green, a Norwegian noble with his lands in Bohuslän, helped finish the work. Christian IV's Norwegian Law was printed in Danish in 1604 and took effect at New Year 1605; it kept Norway's own law while making it readable. Green was made chancellor of Norway at the Bergen herredag of 1604.

In 1602 the fief of Lista, on Norway's south coast, was put under Peder Grubbe, who sharply raised the dues and the labour he demanded of the farmers. The farmers protested, and their priest took their side.

Peder Claussøn Friis, priest of Audnedal and dean of Lista, backed the farmers. Grubbe summoned him before the herredag at Bergen in 1604 for setting them against their lord, and charged four farmers with rebellion. The court cleared Friis of all but minor points and the farmers too; Grubbe fell from favour and lost all his fiefs. In 1613 Friis finished a description of Norway.

Enevold Kruse, the king's treasurer since 1582, followed Jørgen Friis as governor-general and fief-holder of Akershus in 1608, and took a seat in the council the same year. He would command Norway's forces in the coming war.

Christian's elder sister Anne had married James VI of Scotland in 1589. In March 1603 James inherited England as well, and the Danish king's sister became queen of a far larger monarchy. Through her the Danish royal house reached into the Stuart court, and through her children it would later reach into the German war.

James and Christian met as kings: Christian paid a state visit to England in 1606 and came again, unannounced, in 1614. From 1606 James's agent at Copenhagen was a Scot who had served as a page at the Danish court, Robert Anstruther. When Denmark and Sweden went to war, James would press both sides to talk.

Tycho Brahe, the greatest astronomer of the age, had fallen out with the young king and with Chancellor Christian Friis over his duties and his neglected fiefs, and in 1597 he left Hven and Denmark. In 1599 the emperor took him into service at Prague, and he built a new observatory at Benátky.

Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, who gathered scholars and alchemists at his court in Prague, made Tycho his imperial astronomer. Tycho brought in a young assistant, Johannes Kepler, in 1600. When Tycho died in October 1601, Rudolf named Kepler his successor as imperial mathematician.

Kepler joined Tycho in 1600 and set to work on his observations of Mars. As imperial mathematician he used them to show that the planets move in ellipses and sweep out equal areas in equal times; Astronomia nova, published in 1609, set out the first two laws of planetary motion.

Holger Rosenkrantz, called the learned, a rich young noble and lay theologian, kept a house of study at Rosenholm in Jutland. In 1601, after their master's death in Prague, he took in Tycho's chief assistant, Longomontanus.

Christen Sørensen, called Longomontanus, had served Tycho for ten years on Hven and in Prague. When no chair was free, Christian Friis offered to pay most of his salary; he became a professor at Copenhagen in 1605 and professor of mathematics in 1607. His Astronomia Danica (1622) carried Tycho's system into Danish teaching for decades.

Charles IX of Sweden had styled himself king of the Lapps since 1607 and sent tax collectors into Norway's far north, and his new town of Gothenburg let ships reach Sweden without paying the Sound toll. Christian threatened to fight as Duke of Holstein, the council gave way, and in April 1611 he declared war.

Charles IX died in October 1611, and Gustavus Adolphus, sixteen, inherited a war going badly: Kalmar had fallen in August, and in May 1612 the Danes took Älvsborg, Sweden's only harbour on the western sea. He asked for peace, and meanwhile hired soldiers abroad, who now had to reach Sweden through Norway.

Gustavus made Axel Oxenstierna chancellor in January 1612, and Oxenstierna led the Swedes in the talks at Knäred, which began that November under English mediation. He had to accept Christian's price: Sweden would pay to buy back its own harbour.

Christian led the eastern army against Kalmar himself; the town was stormed in May 1611 and the castle surrendered in August. In May 1612 he took Älvsborg, Sweden's gate to the North Sea. His western army had meanwhile lost its commander.

Steen Maltesen Sehested, marshal of the realm since 1610 and a veteran of William of Orange's wars, led the western army. Short of guns, he took Nya Lödöse but could do nothing against Älvsborg, and in July was ordered to bring his men to Kalmar. He died at Kalmar castle in August 1611.

Gert Rantzau, the king's governor in the duchies, had been Sehested's second-in-command. After the marshal's death he was made field marshal. In June 1612 he retook Öland, which Gustavus had seized the autumn before, then advanced toward Jönköping, the last of Sweden's border fortresses, without bringing the war to a decision.

Governor-general Enevold Kruse commanded Norway's forces, and Chancellor Anders Green sat on the commission that organised the country's defence. Norway was almost without troops of its own; it relied on its fortresses and on levies of farmers.

Jens Bjelke, a young Trøndelag noble from Austrått, found himself in charge of the war in Trøndelag and Jämtland when the fief-holder fell ill. His untrained levies could not hold Jämtland, and a force hired for Sweden landed in the Trondheim fjord and marched through Stjørdal into Sweden. The king blamed the fief-holder, not Bjelke.

About three hundred Scots, recruited for Gustavus by Alexander Ramsay against King James's ban, sailed into the Romsdal fjord on 19 August 1612. With Älvsborg in Danish hands they had to march through Norway, up Romsdalen and down Gudbrandsdal, to reach Sweden.

George Sinclair, of one of the great clans of northern Scotland, commanded one of the three companies. Norwegian legend later made him the leader of the whole march; he was among those killed at Kringen.

When the war-arrow reached Lars Hågå, a farmer and the crown's local bailiff, he gathered the men of the upper dale and, with the bailiff of Ringebu, Peder Randkleiv, waited at Kringen, where the valley narrows. On 26 August 1612 they fired into the marching Scots and finished them with axes and swords.

Most of the Scots died in the ambush. Of the 134 taken prisoner, all but 18 were killed in the following days. Ramsay and a few officers were sent by way of Akershus to Copenhagen for questioning, and Robert Anstruther's intervention got them home. The king rewarded the farmers' leaders: Hågå received two crown farms in 1613.

James, uneasy at the prospect of Denmark dominating the north, pressed both kings to make peace and became the treaty's guarantor. He sent two Scots as mediators, kinsmen of each other: James Spens, his ambassador in Sweden, assisted the Swedes, and Robert Anstruther assisted the Danes.

Robert Anstruther, a page at the Danish court in 1598 and the Stuart agent there since 1606, helped broker the peace and carried the treaty to London for James's signature in April 1613; he was knighted for it. He would return as the go-between of a much larger alliance.

Chancellor Christian Friis, the king's adviser on the northern frontier, was one of the chief Danish negotiators at Knäred in 1612–13, beside Eske Brock. Against him sat Oxenstierna, and between them the English mediators.

Signed at Knäred in Halland in January 1613, the peace gave back the war's conquests: Kalmar and Öland to Sweden, Jämtland and Härjedalen to Norway. Sweden dropped its claims in Norway's far north and promised one million riksdaler to redeem Älvsborg. The last of it was paid in 1619.

The ransom came in until 1619, on top of the Sound toll, and the king had a further purse in his mother. Queen Sophie, a widow since 1588, had turned her dower lands into a business, fattening oxen for export and lending money to princes across Europe; when Christian's wars grew too costly, he too borrowed from her.

Queen Anne Catherine had died in March 1612. In 1615 Christian fell in love with young Kirsten Munk, the only child of the widowed landowner Ellen Marsvin. Ellen insisted on marriage, not a mistress's place: she had the king bind himself in writing to take Kirsten as his wife, with a crown fief for life, and then held the match back until a royal letter forced it.

Kirsten came to the king on New Year's Eve 1615 as his wife 'with the left hand': no church wedding, no crown, and children who would be counts and countesses, not princes. She bore him twelve children by 1629. Ellen Marsvin managed the money the king gave them and brought them up.

Christian Friis of Borreby died in July 1616, and on 1 December the king named Christen Friis of Kragerup, son of the former governor of Norway Jørgen Friis, his chancellor. Christen had fought at Kalmar, held Öland, and since 1615 been governor to Prince Christian. Gentler than his predecessor, he became patron to half the scholars of the realm.

Jonas Charisius, a pastor's son with degrees in medicine and law, had served the German Chancery since 1598 and become Christian's chief adviser on trade. He had tried to bring Dutch craftsmen and merchants to Denmark, and helped found the East India Company, chartered in 1616 on the Dutch model. In 1618 he negotiated at Verden for Prince Frederick's election in the German bishoprics. He died in 1619.

Christian wanted German land for his son Frederick. Jacob Ulfeldt's alliance with the Dutch Republic in May 1621 opened the way: that year the boy was chosen coadjutor, heir-designate, of the archbishopric of Bremen, in 1623 he became administrator of Verden, and in 1624 coadjutor of Halberstadt. The positions bound the dynasty to the Protestant cause in northern Germany.

The company's first fleet left Copenhagen in November 1618 with more than four hundred men under Ove Gjedde, a twenty-three-year-old secretary of the chancery. He reached Ceylon in May 1620 and found the king of Kandy unwilling to honour the treaty his envoy had made in Copenhagen; Gjedde settled for a smaller grant on the island's east coast.

Roland Crappé, a Dutch sailor who had made five voyages to the Indies, had gone ahead in the yacht Øresund. Off Karaikal the Portuguese sank her. Crappé and a few survivors were brought to Thanjavur, where friends got him an audience with its ruler, and he sent word to Gjedde to come to the Coromandel coast.

Raghunatha Nayak of Thanjavur wanted a European partner against the Portuguese. In November 1620 he granted the Danish king the fishing village of Tranquebar, with leave to build a stone fort and to levy taxes. Gjedde drew Fort Dansborg himself; Crappé stayed as director, and from 1624 ran a string of Danish trading posts from there.

Jens Munk, a captain meant at first for Gjedde's fleet, proposed instead to look for a northwest passage. He sailed in May 1619 with two ships and 64 men, reached Hudson Bay and wintered at the mouth of the Churchill River. Scurvy killed 61; Munk and two men sailed the small ship home to Norway in September 1620. He told the story in Navigatio Septentrionalis (1624).

In 1614 Jens Bjelke followed Anders Green as chancellor of Norway, and held the office for forty-five years. The leading Norwegian noble of his day, he sat on dozens of royal commissions on law, defence and taxes, sorted the archives at Akershus, and corrected the lawbook of 1604.

Jens Juel, treasurer since 1609 and paymaster in the Kalmar War, followed Enevold Kruse as governor-general in April 1618. With Bjelke he assessed Norway's land for new taxes in 1624–25, and he ran the crown's mines; when silver was found at Sandsvær in 1623 he led the founding of the Kongsberg works.

Hans Poulsen Resen, professor of theology and translator of the Danish Bible of 1607, led the strict Lutheran party with Chancellor Christian Friis behind him. In 1614 his quarrel with a crypto-Calvinist priest was decided in his favour, and in 1615 he became Bishop of Zealand.

Jesper Brochmand, a young professor, declared for Resen when his teaching was examined in 1614. In 1615 he and Christen Friis were sent to Odense to examine the Bishop of Funen for Calvinism, and in 1617 the king made Brochmand tutor to Prince Christian.

Hans Knudsen Vejle, Bishop of Funen since 1606, had studied at Leiden and recommended Calvinist writers to his clergy; after the 1614 verdict he warned of a coming 'Spanish inquisition'. His priests were questioned in secret, and in June 1616, with the young Christen Thomesen Sehested prosecuting, a court of councillors and bishops under the king removed him from office.

Ole Worm, professor at Copenhagen from 1613 and of medicine from 1624, became the antiquary of Christen Friis's circle. In 1622 the chancellor gave him a runic calendar written in 1328 to decipher, and a royal letter, with questions Worm drafted, ordered the bishops of Denmark and Norway to report the antiquities of their dioceses. His Fasti Danici followed in 1626.

Anders Arrebo, a court preacher and poet, was made Bishop of Trondheim on the king's proposal in 1618. His sharp tongue and his dancing at clergy weddings gave the town bailiff and the fief-holder material for rumours of misconduct, and in July 1622 the herredag at Bergen, with the king presiding, took his see from him. He turned to the Psalms, published in Danish verse in 1623.

James and Anne's daughter Elizabeth, Christian's niece, had married Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, in February 1613. When the Bohemian estates deposed their Habsburg king in August 1619, they offered the crown to her husband, and the couple accepted it.

Frederick was crowned at Prague in November 1619 and beaten at the White Mountain on 8 November 1620. Imperial troops overran the Palatinate, an imperial edict took his electorate in 1623, and the couple lived in exile at The Hague. Restoring them became a cause for the Stuarts and for Protestant princes.

Ferdinand II, elected emperor in August 1619, crushed the Bohemian revolt with the armies of the Catholic League and his own. By 1625 his victories threatened the Protestant church states of northern Germany, Frederick of Denmark's bishoprics among them. In July 1625 he commissioned Albrecht von Wallenstein to raise a second, imperial army.

James died in March 1625, and Charles I, Christian's nephew and Elizabeth's brother, took up the cause. In December 1625, at The Hague, England and the Dutch Republic promised Christian subsidies; Jacob Ulfeldt and Christen Thomesen Sehested signed for Denmark, and Robert Anstruther stayed on as ambassador at Copenhagen. Little of the money arrived.

In 1625 the princes of Lower Saxony chose Christian as their military commander. The Danish council refused to make the kingdom a party to the war, so he went in as Duke of Holstein, a prince of the Empire who needed no Danish consent. Jacob Ulfeldt had backed his German policy; Holger Rosenkrantz and most of the council opposed it.

Christian of Brunswick, son of the king's sister Elizabeth, had fought for Frederick V until Tilly destroyed his army at Stadtlohn in 1623. In 1625 he took the field again under the coalition's plan, but fell ill and died at Wolfenbüttel in June 1626.

Ernst von Mansfeld, a Catholic count who sold his sword to the Protestant side, brought an army raised with English money. On 25 April 1626 Wallenstein routed him at the Dessau bridge on the Elbe. Mansfeld marched off toward Hungary, hoping for help from Transylvania, and died in Bosnia that November.

Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Bohemian magnate made rich by confiscated rebel estates, had offered to raise an army for the emperor that would feed itself on the lands it occupied. His victory at Dessau kept the coalition off the Elbe, and his army and Tilly's worked together against Christian.

Hans Philipp Fuchs von Bimbach, a Franconian Protestant who had served the emperor, entered Christian's service with a regiment in 1625 and was given command of his infantry that November. He advised against staking everything on one battle and offered to cover a retreat to Wolfenbüttel; the king fought anyway.

At Lutter am Barenberge on 27 August 1626, Tilly, general of the Catholic League and victor of the White Mountain, met Christian's army. It left its prepared position to attack, broke against Tilly's veterans and scattered. Fuchs was mortally wounded and died soon after.

On 9 May 1626 the king left the government at home to Prince Christian, with councillors to assist him. Christian IV was not pleased with the result: he overturned a number of the prince's decisions, and he liked still less the company the prince kept.

Anne Lykke, a rich widow of thirty-one, had followed the prince about the country since the herredag at Kolding in 1626. In November the king had her arrested at Nyborg and held at Bohus, then Kronborg. The nobility saw it as an outrage; after Queen Sophie and others interceded he had to release her in January 1628.

After Lutter the king needed grants from the estates. At Odense in February 1627 the nobility, led by Jørgen Skeel, tied its grant to a free election to the marshal's office, empty since 1619, and elected Skeel. Christian refused him a council seat; the council and then the whole nobility stood by Skeel, and in December 1627 the king gave way.

Christian answered by tying young men to his family. Frants Rantzau, once a page to Prince Christian, entered the council on 28 January 1627 and became governor of Copenhagen. That year he was betrothed to Anna Cathrine, the king's nine-year-old eldest daughter by Kirsten Munk: the first of the royal sons-in-law.

Christen Friis negotiated a defensive alliance with Sweden at Stockholm in the winter of 1627–28, and from January to May 1629 led the Danish negotiators at Lübeck. With Gustavus's offer of a joint war refused, the peace signed in May 1629 gave Christian back every acre and took away the bishoprics and any further part in the war.

Wallenstein and Tilly followed up their victories. In 1627 they overran Holstein, Schleswig and the whole of Jutland up to the Limfjord; only the islands stayed out of reach. Wallenstein then turned to the Baltic coast and in 1628 laid siege to Stralsund.

Henrik Holck, a Danish colonel who had fought under Christian of Brunswick, lost an eye and was taken prisoner in the retreat of August 1627. Ransomed for 4,000 daler, he was sent with relief troops to Stralsund. He directed the town's defence until Wallenstein lifted the siege in August 1628, and in October handed Stralsund over to the Swedes.

Jens Munk, back in the navy after Hudson Bay, had commanded squadrons in the Weser estuary since 1625. In 1628 he was off Stralsund with a detachment of the fleet and fought in the actions there; he died that summer, whether of wounds or of illness is not known. Captain Pros Mund also supported the town's defence from the sea.

Gustavus Adolphus sent troops to Stralsund too, and when the siege was lifted the town became Sweden's foothold on the German coast. In February 1629 he met Christian at Ulvsbäck and offered a joint war under his own command. Christian refused, and made his own peace.

Governor-general Jens Juel drew up a war ordinance for Norway in 1627, approved in January 1628: a peasant militia in which each group of farms supplied one soldier. He fortified Akershus, and in 1627 garrisons were placed in Norway's four main fortresses.

At the Norwegian estates' meeting in Christiania in the spring of 1628, Bjelke and Juel saw to it that the tax grant paid for the new militia instead of the king's war in Denmark, and proposed armed merchant ships for Norway's defence. The king, who wanted to govern himself, let the militia lapse when the two-year grant ran out.

Lübeck ended Prince Frederick's first German career: he gave up Verden, which he had administered since 1623, and his places in Bremen and Halberstadt. He would win Bremen and Verden back in 1634–35, only to lose them to Sweden ten years later.

Kirsten Munk had fallen for the Rhinegrave Otto Ludwig, a German colonel of horse in the king's army, in the autumn of 1626, and openly kept his company at Dalum and at Kronborg. From November 1628 she shut her bedroom to the king. In September 1629 she bore a daughter whom Christian came to call 'the discarded miss'.

Otto Ludwig, Wild- and Rhinegrave of Salm, left for the Swedish army in the autumn of 1628. From Swedish service he accused Prince Christian of trying to poison him; on a Danish complaint the Swedish council found the charge groundless in 1631 and fined him.

Ellen Marsvin, anxious for her business with the crown, kept on good terms with the king. She took into her household Vibeke Kruse, a maid Kirsten had dismissed, and in May 1629 invited the king to her estate of Kærstrup, where his affair with Vibeke began.

In January 1630 Christian broke with Kirsten, accusing her of adultery; she withdrew to Boller in Jutland, which Ellen had to hand over to her. Vibeke bore the king a son, Ulrik Christian Gyldenløve, in April 1630, and kept her hold on him until his death. Kirsten's children, and the men who married them, hated her.

Out of the war, Christian wanted closer control at home. In 1629 he ended Jens Juel's governorship and made Christoffer Urne, thirty-five, a former treasurer and war commissioner on Lolland-Falster, governor-general of Norway and a councillor.

Ove Gjedde, home from India in 1622 and bitter at the company's ingratitude, had become a fief-holder in Norway and a partner in the company that took over the Kongsberg silver works. From 1630 he directed them.

After the peace Henrik Holck served the Dutch for a time, then wrote to Wallenstein, the general he had held off at Stralsund. In March 1630 he received an imperial patent to raise a regiment of 3,000 foot; he fought under Tilly and Wallenstein and died an imperial field marshal in 1633.

In June 1630 Gustavus Adolphus landed in Pomerania with a small army. The German war that Christian had left was now Sweden's, and Stralsund, the town Danish troops had helped to hold, was his first foothold.

Gustavus beat Tilly at Breitenfeld on 17 September 1631 and marched across Germany. He was killed at Lützen in November 1632, leaving a daughter not yet six.

Christina was declared of age only in 1644, at eighteen. Until then Sweden was governed by a regency of the great officers of state, and its armies in Germany fought on.

Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna led the regency, kept the armies in Germany paid and fighting, and watched Denmark raise the Sound toll and push the Dutch toward Sweden. In May 1643 he and the council resolved to take land from Denmark by surprise.

On 5 April 1632 Christian made his future son-in-law Frants Rantzau steward of the realm, the office left empty since Valkendorf's death in 1601. On 5 November, after a banquet at Rosenborg, Rantzau fell into the castle moat and drowned; the king himself helped in the attempt to save him. The office stood empty again.

Christen Thomesen Sehested, once Prince Christian's governor and a diplomat in the German war, followed Jacob Ulfeldt as chancellor of the realm in October 1630, and in May 1640 followed Christen Friis, dead the year before, as the king's chancellor. A strict Lutheran who guarded the council's rights, he also raised and advanced his young cousin Hannibal Sehested.

Corfitz Ulfeldt, son of the late chancellor Jacob Ulfeldt, was a gentleman of the king's chamber from 1630. Promised to Leonora Christina when she was nine, he married her in 1636, became governor of Copenhagen castle in April 1637, and in April 1643 was made steward of the realm, the highest office.

Leonora Christina, Kirsten Munk's daughter, was married at fifteen and shared her husband's ambition. Through her Ulfeldt was the king's son-in-law; through him she held the leading place among the women of a court that had no queen.

Prince Frederick won Bremen and Verden back in 1634–35 and ruled them as archbishop and bishop; from 1639 his chamber scribe Christoffer Gabel kept his accounts. In October 1643 he married Sophie Amalie of Brunswick-Lüneburg.

Hannibal Sehested, brought up under his cousin Christen Thomesen's care, was betrothed in 1636 to the king's ten-year-old daughter Christiane and led her brother Valdemar Christian's grand tour. After an embassy to Spain in 1640–41 he was made governor-general of Norway in April 1642, replacing Christoffer Urne, with his cousin's strong support.

Christiane, born in 1626 to Christian IV and Kirsten Munk, married Hannibal in 1642 at Copenhagen castle. The marriage made the governor of Norway the king's son-in-law, a tie Christian meant as a support for the crown.

Ole Worm's surveys bore fruit. In 1633 he published Peder Claussøn Friis's translation of Snorri's sagas of the Norwegian kings, which became the standard history of Norway for the rest of the century; in 1643 came Danicorum monumentorum libri sex, a collection of all the runic inscriptions then known in Denmark, Norway and Gotland.

Anders Arrebo got a parish again in 1626, at Vordingborg. There, at Chancellor Christen Friis's urging, he wrote Hexaëmeron, a Danish poem on the six days of creation after Du Bartas, drawing Norway's landscapes from Peder Claussøn Friis's writings. He died in 1637; the poem was printed only in 1661.

When Resen died in September 1638 the king made Jesper Brochmand Bishop of Zealand; he was consecrated in 1639. Christian trusted him: from 1636 Brochmand brought up the king's son by Vibeke Kruse in his house. In 1630 the theologians had advised the king to divorce Kirsten Munk, and her children never forgave it.

Lennart Torstensson, Gustavus's master of artillery, had commanded the Swedish army in Germany since Banér's death in 1641. On the council's orders he marched north from Moravia without a declaration of war, entered Holstein on 12 December 1643, and held all Jutland by the end of January 1644.

Louis De Geer, a Walloon industrialist who held Sweden's copper and iron trade, went to Amsterdam for Oxenstierna and fitted out a fleet in the Netherlands for Swedish service in 1644. After an indecisive fight with a Danish squadron off Lister in May, it reached Swedish waters.

Carl Gustaf Wrangel, a general who had served in Germany since the 1630s, commanded the Swedish fleet reinforced with De Geer's ships. In October 1644, between Fehmarn and Lolland, it fell on a Danish squadron and took or destroyed almost every ship. In June 1645 Wrangel took Bornholm and its fortress, Hammershus.

Peder Vibe, Danish resident in Stockholm since 1634, warned again and again that Sweden meant war. The king wrote to Ulfeldt that Vibe was talking a war into being; on the day he wrote, 12 December 1643, Torstensson's army crossed into Holstein.

Corfitz Ulfeldt, steward since April 1643, kept the war going on credit from the great merchants, and in 1645 led the Danish side at Brömsebro, with Christen Thomesen Sehested beside him, against Oxenstierna. The king signed the treaty only after openly criticising what Ulfeldt had accepted.

The peace ceded Gotland and Øsel, Norway's Jämtland and Härjedalen, and Halland for thirty years, and freed Swedish ships from the Sound toll. Peder Vibe brought word of the settlement to Copenhagen. Prince Frederick's German bishoprics, occupied by the Swedes, were lost with it.

Anders Bille, marshal of the realm since 1642 and a veteran of the German wars, commanded the defence. Prince Frederick, driven from his bishoprics, came as a general in March 1644; the two quarrelled over command, and their joint stroke against Wrangel's army came to nothing.

Jørgen Vind, admiral of the realm since April 1643, led the first squadron at Kolberger Heide on 1 July 1644, with the king, sixty-seven, aboard the Trefoldigheden; splinters cost Christian an eye. Vind was badly wounded and died on 17 July.

Peder Galt, Vind's vice-admiral, took over his squadron as the Danes blockaded the Swedish fleet in Kiel fjord. On 30 July he failed to attack when the king's orders, unclear as they were, gave him the chance. Relieved the next day, he was tried; the council sentenced him to death but asked for mercy, and Christian had him executed on 31 August.

The Swedish fleet slipped out of Kiel in August. Believing it gone into winter quarters, Copenhagen cut its force at sea to one squadron under Pros Mund, many of its men sick. On 13 October Wrangel's combined fleet caught it off Fehmarn; Mund fell when his flagship, the Patientia, was boarded.

In April 1644 Hannibal Sehested won the king's leave to keep Norway's taxes in Norway for its own defence, and he struck across the Swedish border. The Norwegians who paid for it called it the Hannibal War.

Henrik Bjelke, son of Chancellor Jens Bjelke, left the Prince of Orange's service when Torstensson struck. In March 1644 he was sent to Norway as colonel under Sehested, commanded the Akershus regiment and Sehested's own life regiment, and in 1645 stormed Vänersborg three times in vain.

Henrik's younger brother Jørgen Bjelke recruited men for the Norwegian army in Holland in January 1644 and served as a captain in the Akershus regiment in the skirmishes of the Hannibal War.

Ove Gjedde had commanded Norway's armed merchant ships in 1644. In March 1645, probably on Hannibal Sehested's recommendation, he was made admiral of the realm and a councillor. His flagship ran aground and sank near Vinga that May. In August 1648 he commanded the squadron that carried the new king to Norway for homage.

Christoffer Urne, back from Norway, was war commissioner on Funen in the war and one of the envoys at Brömsebro. In 1646 he followed Just Høg as chancellor of the realm, now one of the great offices of state.

Prince Christian had married Magdalena Sibylla of Saxony at a great wedding in Copenhagen in October 1634; the marriage stayed childless, and his father kept him out of affairs. In May 1647 the couple travelled to Saxony, where the prince died at Gorbitz castle near Dresden on 2 June. Prince Frederick was now the only candidate.

Magdalena Sibylla, daughter of the Elector of Saxony, was with her husband when he died. She kept Lolland and Falster as her dower until she married again in 1652.

Christian IV died at Rosenborg on 28 February 1648, at seventy. Corfitz Ulfeldt, as steward, ran the kingdom through the interregnum, and at once had the sick Vibeke Kruse and her daughter turned out of Rosenborg. Kirsten Munk's party demanded a special trial of Vibeke; the council refused, and she died in April.

The council chose Frederick only after he signed a charter that cut the crown's powers further and gave the council more. Christen Thomesen Sehested and the marshal Anders Bille were its chief authors, not Ulfeldt as was long supposed. Frederick received homage in July and was crowned in November 1648.

Frederick, who had lost Bremen and Verden to Sweden, gave up his claim to them when his brother died and was elected on the council's terms. He brought his own men from Bremen: Christoffer Gabel to run his money and Theodor Lente his correspondence.

As the old king lay dying, Ulfeldt got his signature on a summons calling Brochmand and two colleagues to answer for their opinion of 1646 against Kirsten Munk's children. Brochmand kept the crown jewels the king had entrusted to him. The council blocked his suspension but barred the three from the royal election, and in June 1648 they had to give a humiliating declaration. That November Brochmand anointed Frederick and Sophie Amalie.

Sophie Amalie, queen from 1648, hated Corfitz Ulfeldt and above all Leonora Christina, who outshone her in beauty and would not give up her place at court.

When Ulfeldt left on his embassy to the Netherlands, he had Joachim Gersdorff made governor of Copenhagen castle, in effect his deputy, from January 1649. Gersdorff shared the nobility's distrust of the sons-in-law and drew close to the king; Ulfeldt came home to find that Gersdorff had taken all authority to himself. In October 1652 Gersdorff succeeded him as steward.

Ulfeldt's embassy produced the Dutch treaties of 1649, among them a defensive alliance, the treaty that would bring a Dutch fleet to Copenhagen in 1658. At home his administration was under investigation, and around Christmas 1650 a woman named Dina Vinhofvers let the king know that Ulfeldt and Leonora meant to poison him.

Dina's charge, put up by her lover, Colonel Jørgen Walter, collapsed: in May 1651 a court cleared Ulfeldt, and on 11 July she was beheaded for perjury. The next day Ulfeldt and Leonora left Copenhagen, and went by way of Amsterdam to Swedish Stralsund.

With the sons-in-law gone, Frederick had a freer hand with the crown's money, and his chamber scribe Christoffer Gabel rose with it. More and more of the revenues, the Sound toll among them, were paid straight to Gabel for the court, bypassing the treasury.

In Norway Sehested had built a treasury and an army of his own. His chief enemy was the marshal, Anders Bille, who wanted all military administration in his own hands. An audit found large irregularities. The council demanded a confession: on 18–19 June 1651 Sehested admitted wrongdoing and resigned his offices, and at the king's further demand surrendered his estates in Norway.

Jørgen Bjelke, who had served under Sehested in the war and gone with Ulfeldt to Holland in 1649, was a member of the commission of 1651 that examined his former chief's administration in Norway.

Thomas Bartholin, Ole Worm's nephew and ward, had studied anatomy at Leiden, Padua and Basel while Worm urged him to come home. In 1648 Simon Paulli stepped aside for him in the anatomy chair. Working on the bodies of executed criminals, he described the thoracic duct in man in 1652 and in 1653 a separate system of vessels, the lymphatics.

Gregers Krabbe, a councillor and diplomat, became governor-general of Norway and fief-holder of Akershus in 1651, after Sehested's fall. He died at Akershus in December 1655.

Niels Trolle, a vice-admiral of the realm, was made governor-general in March 1656. In January 1657 he and General Iver Krabbe were put in charge of Norway's war preparations, and they laid in large stores of arms, uniforms and grain.

Christina declared her cousin Charles Gustav heir presumptive in 1649 and abdicated in June 1654. On her way to Rome she stayed at the court of Holstein-Gottorp and proposed one of the duke's daughters as Charles Gustav's bride.

Charles X Gustav married Hedvig Eleonora of Holstein-Gottorp in October 1654, and in 1655 invaded Poland. Early victories turned into a widening war against Poland, Russia, Brandenburg and the emperor.

Hedvig Eleonora, daughter of Duke Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, was married at eighteen on 24 October 1654. The match was made as an alliance between Sweden and Gottorp against their common enemy, Denmark.

Duke Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, who held part of Schleswig as Denmark's vassal, had refused union with Denmark and leaned toward Sweden. When war came he stood with his son-in-law, and at Roskilde in 1658 Sweden won him full sovereignty over his part of Schleswig.

In Copenhagen a war party, Gersdorff among them, saw Sweden tied down in Poland. In February 1657 the estates at Odense voted money for rearmament, after an opening speech of grave misgivings from the old chancellor Christen Thomesen Sehested. On 1 June 1657 Frederick signed a manifesto of war against Sweden.

Ulrik Christian Gyldenløve, Christian IV's son by Vibeke Kruse, had fought for Spain and been recalled in 1653–54. Spoiling for war, he recruited officers in the Netherlands before anyone else, and on 2 March 1657 was made major-general of horse and second in command of the army in Skåne.

Niels Juel, once a page to Frederick in Bremen, had learned war at sea in Dutch service under Maarten Tromp and Michiel de Ruyter. Home in 1656, he led a squadron in the Sound in 1657; in mid-May he was ordered to seize Swedish ships, and on 14 June he was made admiral and chief of the naval base at Holmen.

Charles Gustav left Poland with 8,000 veterans and reached Holstein in July 1657. Then the winter froze the Belts. On 30 January 1658 he led his army over the ice of the Little Belt to Funen, and in February over Langeland, Lolland and Falster to Zealand, 22 kilometres from Copenhagen.

Wrangel stormed the new fortress of Frederiksodde on 24 October 1657 and took its garrison, several of the Danish army's best regiments. All Jutland was in Swedish hands. In January 1658 Wrangel planned the crossing of the ice and led its right wing.

Corfitz Ulfeldt entered Charles Gustav's service in July 1657 and went with him through Denmark. At Taastrup and Roskilde he was one of Sweden's chief negotiators against his former colleagues, and won back all his estates in Denmark and Norway and Leonora's title of countess.

Anders Bille, who had helped plan Frederiksodde's defences, was in the fortress when Wrangel stormed it. Wounded and taken, he died a few weeks later. His enemies called him a traitor, without grounds.

Frederick needed generals. At the end of November 1657 he made Ernst Albrecht von Eberstein, a German veteran who had begun as Frederick V's page in Bohemia and served under Mansfeld, Tilly, Gustavus and Torstensson, a field marshal; at New Year 1658 Eberstein took command of all the troops on the Zealand islands.

Hans Schack, born in Schleswig, had served Christian IV and then Sweden and France from 1630 to 1651. In 1658 Frederick persuaded him back into Danish service with the fiefs of Riberhus and Møgeltønder, and he and Eberstein sat on the new war council.

Gyldenløve was given the defence of Funen in November 1657. When the Swedes came over the ice on 30 January he lay sick and had himself carried to Odense; his scattered troops at Tybrind Vig and Iversnæs broke, and most were taken prisoner.

With the Swedes on Zealand, Frederick asked for peace. Gersdorff, steward of the realm and one of the men who had urged the war, led the Danish side. At Roskilde on 26 February 1658 he signed away Skåne, Blekinge, Halland and Bornholm, and in Norway Bohuslän and Trondheim len, with Ulfeldt negotiating for Sweden.

Charles Gustav broke the peace in August 1658, landing at Korsør to finish Denmark. Frederick, urged to flee, said he would die in his nest. Hans Schack commanded the garrison; Gyldenløve led the cavalry sorties until his death in December; Niels Juel's sailors from Holmen manned the walls.

Mayor Hans Nansen rallied the burghers, who won privileges from the king that August and manned the walls; by September seven thousand men stood under arms. The partnership of king and capital forged in the siege would outlast it.

Gabel was in Hamburg when the Swedes broke the peace. He went on to Amsterdam to press for Dutch help and raise credit for the king, and came back with the Dutch relief fleet in October 1658; during the siege he managed the contributions for quartering the troops.

Charles Gustav threw his army against the walls by night. Soldiers, burghers and Holmen's sailors drove it back. Schack, who had commanded the defence, was made field marshal after the victory.

Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, would not see Sweden hold both shores of the Sound. Honouring the defensive treaty of 1649, the Dutch Republic sent large naval forces into the Baltic in 1658 and 1659 to support Denmark and keep the Sound open to Dutch ships.

Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam, de Witt's political ally and commander of the fleet, fought his way through the Sound against Wrangel's ships on 29 October 1658 and brought troops and supplies into Copenhagen as the church bells rang.

Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, had turned against Sweden. On 14 September 1658 a relief army crossed the Oder: 14,500 Brandenburgers under the Elector, 10,600 Austrians under Montecuccoli and 4,500 Poles. It attacked Swedish Pomerania and pushed the Swedes out of Jutland.

Stefan Czarniecki, who had led Poland's guerrilla war against Charles Gustav's invasion, brought the Polish contingent north. In 1658–59 his men crossed to the island of Als and fought at Kolding; the crossing to Als is remembered in the Polish national anthem.

Michiel de Ruyter, under whom Niels Juel had learned his trade, brought a new Dutch fleet in 1659. It supported the allied campaign on Funen that ended at Nyborg, and Frederick knighted him for it.

Svend Poulsen, a captain of dragoons from Halland or northern Skåne who had fought a guerrilla war in Skåne in 1657, organised the snaphaner, armed irregulars, against the Swedes in eastern and southern Zealand once Copenhagen was surrounded. Legend made him the Gønge chieftain.

Johan Printzensköld, a Swedish lieutenant-colonel, took over Bornholm for Sweden in the spring of 1658 with a garrison of 116 men. When the war resumed, burghers of Hasle around their priest, Poul Ancher, and Jens Kofoed plotted to give the island back to Denmark.

On 8 December 1658 Kofoed and others seized Printzensköld in the mayor's house in Rønne; in the scuffle in the street, Kofoed's brother-in-law Villum Clausen shot the governor dead. Kofoed rode that night to Ancher's parsonage and kept watch outside Hammershus. His own father had been banished for his part in surrendering Bornholm to Wrangel in 1645.

Next morning, with farmers and burghers gathered at the fortress, Ancher drafted the summons that made Hammershus's weak Swedish garrison surrender without a shot. On 29 December the islanders' envoys gave Bornholm to Frederick and his heirs; their address named Ancher as the leader.

In 1659 Eberstein commanded the allied troops in Jutland after the Elector. He and Schack agreed a plan at Kiel: Schack landed at Kerteminde on 31 October, Eberstein crossed the Little Belt on 4 November, and they joined at Odense. Taking the vanguard on alternate days, they beat the Swedish army before Nyborg on 14 November; it surrendered the next day.

In 1658 Governor Niels Trolle and the old chancellor Jens Bjelke were given full powers to govern Norway. Trolle raised money and supplies for the defence, while protesting at the resources he had to send to Denmark.

Jørgen Bjelke, who had led the reconquest of Jämtland in 1657, was made lieutenant-general and commander of Norway's militia in May 1658. With Trolle he organised the recovery of Trondheim len, ceded at Roskilde: troops marched from eastern Norway while Bergen sent a force by sea.

Ove Bjelke, the eldest of the brothers and fief-holder of Bergenhus, was war commissioner for western Norway. With Ludvig Rosenkrantz he equipped a corps of about 2,000 men in five weeks and sent it north by sea to Trondheim.

Claes Stiernsköld, Sweden's governor of Trondheim len, Jämtland and Härjedalen, had taken over Trondheim in August 1658. Besieged from September and cut off from reinforcements and supplies, he opened negotiations in November and capitulated on 11 December 1658.

Ulfeldt soon quarrelled with his new masters over their rule in Skåne. In May 1659 he was arrested at Malmö and tried before a Swedish commission for treasonable contacts with Copenhagen and for betraying the assault plan. Nearly paralysed by illness, he was defended by Leonora Christina, who insisted on sharing his arrest.

Charles X Gustav, pressed on every side, fell ill at Gothenburg at the start of 1660 and died of pneumonia on 13 February. With the king who had resisted concessions gone, peace became possible.

Charles XI was four. Hedvig Eleonora chaired the regency council that governed for him, and in April 1660 Sweden made peace with Poland, Austria and Brandenburg at Oliva. The Danish settlement was left to direct talks.

Hannibal Sehested had spent his disgrace abroad and around the Swedish camp. In 1659 he sent Frederick a long defence and pledged his loyalty; on 25 April 1660 he was allowed into Copenhagen, where he sought the support of his old business partner Gabel. He got direct Danish–Swedish talks going and became Denmark's chief negotiator.

The peace gave back Trondheim len and Bornholm; Skåne, Halland, Blekinge and Bohuslän stayed Swedish. The border it drew between Denmark, Norway and Sweden still stands.

In July 1660, frightened by false rumours of a harsh sentence, Leonora Christina arranged her husband's escape from Malmö before word of a pardon arrived. Frederick at once had them seized, and both were taken to Hammershus on Bornholm, where they were held for a year and a half.

Jens Bjelke died in November 1659, after forty-five years as chancellor of Norway, and in 1660 his eldest son Ove followed him in the office.

Niels Stensen had studied at Copenhagen under Thomas Bartholin through the siege years; his notebook of 1659 survives. That autumn he left for Amsterdam with Bartholin's recommendation to the anatomist Gerard Blasius, and in 1660, dissecting a sheep's head, he found the duct of the parotid gland, which still bears his name.

When the estates met in Copenhagen in September 1660 to vote new taxes, the nobles held to their old exemption. Otte Krag, one of the council's three deputies to the other estates, asked whether there was to be no difference between a lord and a peasant.

Hans Nansen led the burghers, who had held Copenhagen's walls in the siege. With Bishop Svane he demanded that every estate pay alike, and on 8 October the burghers and the clergy adopted their proposal to make the crown hereditary in Frederick's line.

The council held back. The city gates were shut and the garrison stood to arms, and on 13 October the council gave way. Frederick's charter of 1648 was handed back to him, and on 18 October the estates swore homage before the palace to a hereditary king. The act that made his rule absolute followed on 10 January 1661.

Peder Reedtz, a councillor who had negotiated the May peace, sat on the committee of councillors and estates' deputies that cancelled the charter, and wrote its final text; on 17 October he handed the cancelled charter to the king. On 26 October he was made chancellor.

On 13 October Sehested thanked the estates in the king's name for the hereditary crown, and at the banquet after the homage he sat above all the councillors. On 26 October he was made treasurer of the realm, second in rank only to Gersdorff.

Hans Svane, who had revised Resen's Bible for its edition of 1647 and been Bishop of Zealand since 1655, led the clergy. With Nansen he demanded equal taxes and carried the proposal for a hereditary crown through the clergy and burghers; on the evening of 13 October he formally offered it to Frederick.