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“Kalmarunionen - en nordisk stormakt föds”
is a book by Dick Harrison, a Swedish professor of medieval history. The Kalmar
Union, which nominally (and sometimes really) existed from 1397 to 1523, was a
personal union between the three Scandinavian kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden and
Norway. At the time, Finland was an integrated part of the Swedish kingdom,
while Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the Orkney Islands and the
Shetland Islands sorted under Norway. The acts of union were signed in the
Swedish town of Kalmar, but in practice Denmark was the dominant kingdom. Harrison´s book deal with the historical background to the Union, and the
rule of Margareta or Margret (her reign in Sweden lasted from 1389 to 1412).
It also discusses the time of Erik (or Eric) of Pomerania (reigned in Sweden
1412-1439 with some interruptions), but cuts the story short immediately before
the Engelbrekt uprising in 1434. Harrison has written extensively about Engelbrekt
and the later history of the Union elsewhere.
The Kalmar Union was formed in
response to the chaos after the Black Death or Great Death, the plague pandemic
around 1350 which killed about half of Europe´s population. The architect of
the union, Margareta, had gradually become de facto and then de jure ruling queen of
Denmark and Norway during the 1370´s and 1380´s. She also gained the support of
the Swedish nobility. Margareta´s project was to create a regional great power that
could defeat the well-organized pirates (the Victual Brothers) which made the
Baltic Sea unsafe, while also challenging the dominance of the German Hanseatic
League. The Swedish nobles felt shortchanged by the incompetent king Albrekt of
Mecklenburg and his German bailiffs (in later sources known as “the birds of
prey”). Albrekt´s main backer, Bo Jonsson (Grip), owned and
controlled almost half of the kingdom. Or perhaps all of it, since Jonsson was
the king´s “prime minister”. To rid Sweden of Jonsson and Albrekt, the nobility was willing to cooperate with a powerful foreign monarch. (Jonsson died a few years before the final
showdown between Margareta and Albrekt, however.) Besides, Margareta wasn´t strictly speaking “foreign”
at all, being the widow of the Norwegian king Håkan Magnusson, who was the son
of Magnus Eriksson, the Swedish king deposed by Albrekt. Magnus Eriksson had at
one point been king of both Sweden, Norway and Scania, so the union idea wasn´t
new either. The irony is that many nobles had initially supported Albrekt´s coup against Magnus, only to get cold feet later! Game of thrones...
Harrison clearly admires Margareta,
one of the few powerful women in the man´s world of the Late Middle Ages. There
is little doubt that Margareta did succeed in creating a Nordic great power of
sorts. However, Margareta saw the Union as first and foremost a personal and
family project, with the nobility playing second fiddle, and the common folk
essentially none at all. She even confronted the clergy, expropriating vast
Church holdings. It´s probably symptomatic that Magareta died of the plague during
an attempt to add the Duchy of Schleswig to her realm. Erik had a similar view
of the Union, and attempted to centralize it more than Margareta ever did (the
Union flag was his idea). Erik´s reign also saw the first major crisis of the
Union, when the Swedish peasantry, led by Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson (a member
of the lower nobility) rose in rebellion against him. After this, the union
would never really be the same, with Sweden constantly oscillating between membership
and independence (de facto or de jure).
Harrison believes that the Union was
doomed to failure from the start, since the component kingdoms were too different. Sweden was
oriented towards eastern theatres, seeing a confrontation with Novgorod as having
prime geopolitical importance. Denmark, by contrast, wanted to expand on German
territory by incorporating Schleswig and Holstein. Before the Union, Sweden and
Denmark had fought several wars against each other. Margareta and Erik favored Denmark, and the Swedes
increasingly resented that their tax money was used to finance Danish expansion
southwards rather than Swedish wars against the Russians. Since “Danish”
expansion was really Margareta´s and Erik´s personal expansion, the anger must
have been doubled! Harrison further points out that Margareta had a very
pragmatic view of “fighting the pirates”, frequently simply recruiting them to the
cause of the Kalmar Union instead. Former pirate captains were generously given
their own fortified castles if they swore loyalty to Margareta!
In the beginning of the book,
Harrison criticizes the Sweden Democrats (the right-wing nationalist party in
the current Swedish parliament) for having an anachronistic view of the Kalmar Union,
seeing it as an early version of the EU and hence extolling the “patriotism” of
anti-Union rebel Engelbrekt. But at the end of the book, it´s almost as if
Harrison himself projects his hopes and disappointments concerning the EU onto
the medieval Kalmar Union. What seemingly began as a cooperative project
between three kingdoms to curb the worst abuses of the post-plague world and
police the Baltic Sea, ended with a union exclusively for royals and nobles,
devoted to their own self-aggrandizement. And yes, it seems to have triggered a
kind of “populist” revolt!
Surely Harrison is making a point about
our own troubled times here? However, I won´t accuse him of anachronism.
Perhaps it´s reality itself which simply moves in circles…
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