A more perfect union...or make Denmark great again?

“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…