crown for help and protection as they drew apart from the gentry, who, moreover, as dispensers of patronage, lost no opportunity of appropriating church lands and cutting down tithes.
The burgesses had not yet recovered from the disaster of “Grevens fejde”; but while the towns had become more dependent on the central power, they had at the same time been released from their former vexatious subjection to the local magnates, and could make their voices heard in the Rigsdag, where they were still, though inadequately, represented. Within the Estate of Burgesses itself, too, a levelling process had begun. The old municipal patriciate, which used to form the connecting link between the bourgeoisie and the nobility, had disappeared, and a feeling of common civic fellowship had taken its place. All this tended to enlarge the political views of the burgesses, and was not without its influence on the future. Yet, after all, the prospects of the burgesses depended mainly on economic conditions; and in this respect there was a decided improvement, due to the increasing importance of money and commerce all over Europe, especially as the steady decline of the Hanse towns immediately benefited the trade of Denmark-Norway; Norway by this time being completely merged in the Danish state, and ruled from Copenhagen. There can, indeed, be no doubt that the Danish and Norwegian merchants at the end of the 16th century flourished exceedingly, despite the intrusion and competition of the Dutch and the dangers to neutral shipping arising from the frequent wars between England, Spain and the Netherlands.
At the bottom of the social ladder lay the peasants, whose condition had decidedly deteriorated. Only in one respect had they benefited by the peculiar conditions of the 16th century: the rise in the price of corn without any corresponding rise in the land-tax must have largely increased their material prosperity. Yet the number of peasant-proprietors had diminished, while the obligations of the peasantry generally had increased; and, still worse, their obligations were vexatiously indefinite, varying from year to year and even from month to month. They weighed especially heavily on the so-called Ugedasmaend, who were forced to work two or three days a week in the demesne lands. This increase of villenage morally depressed the peasantry, and widened still further the breach between the yeomanry and the gentry. Politically its consequences were disastrous. While in Sweden the free and energetic peasant was a salutary power in the state, which he served with both mind and plough, the Danish peasant was sinking to the level of a bondman. While the Swedish peasants were well represented in the Swedish Riksdag, whose proceedings they sometimes dominated, the Danish peasantry had no political rights or privileges whatever.
Such then, briefly, was the condition of things in Denmark when, in 1588, Christian IV. ascended the throne. Where so much was necessarily uncertain and fluctuating, there was room for an almost infinite variety of development. Much depended on the character and personality of Christian IV.,
1588–1648.the young prince who had now taken into his hands the reins of government, and for half a century was to guide the destinies of the nation. In the beginning of his reign the hand of the young monarch, who was nothing if not energetic, made itself felt in every direction. The harbours of Copenhagen, Elsinore and other towns were enlarged; many decaying towns were abolished and many new ones built under more promising conditions, including Christiania, which was founded in August 1624, on the ruins of the ancient city of Oslo. Various attempts were also made to improve trade and industry by abolishing the still remaining privileges of the Hanseatic towns, by promoting a wholesale immigration of skilful and well-to-do Dutch traders and handicraftsmen into Denmark under most favourable conditions, by opening up the rich fisheries of the Arctic seas, and by establishing joint-stock chartered companies both in the East and the West Indies. Copenhagen especially benefited by Christian IV.’s commercial policy. He enlarged and embellished it, and provided it with new harbours and fortifications; in short, did his best to make it the worthy capital of a great empire. But it was in the foreign policy of the government that the royal influence was most perceptible. Unlike Sweden, Denmark had remained outside the great religious-political movements which were the outcome of the Catholic reaction; and the peculiarity of her position made her rather hostile than friendly to the other Protestant states. The possession of the Sound enabled her to close the Baltic against the Western powers; the possession of Norway carried along with it the control of the rich fisheries which were Danish monopolies, and therefore a source of irritation to England and Holland. Denmark, moreover, was above all things a Scandinavian power. While the territorial expansion of Sweden in the near future was a matter of necessity, Denmark had not only attained, but even exceeded, her natural limits. Aggrandizement southwards, at the expense of the German empire, was becoming every year more difficult; and in every other direction she had nothing more to gain. Nay, more, Denmark’s possession of the Scanian provinces deprived Sweden of her proper geographical frontiers. Clearly it was Denmark’s wisest policy to seek a close alliance with Sweden in their common interests, and after the conclusion of the “Kalmar War” the two countries did remain at peace for the next thirty-one years. But the antagonistic interests of the two countries in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War precipitated a fourth contest between them (1643-45), in which Denmark would have been utterly ruined but for the heroism of King Christian IV. and his command of the sea during the crisis of the struggle. Even so, First losses of territory. by the peace of Brömsebro (February 8, 1645) Denmark surrendered the islands of Oesel and Gotland and the provinces of Jemteland and Herjedal (in Norway) definitively, and Halland for thirty years. The freedom from the Sound tolls was by the same treaty also extended to Sweden’s Baltic provinces.
The peace of Brömsebro was the first of the long series of treaties, extending down to our own days, which mark the progressive shrinkage of Danish territory into an irreducible minimum. Sweden’s appropriation of Danish soil had begun, and at the same time Denmark’s power of resisting the encroachments of Sweden was correspondingly reduced. The Danish national debt, too, had risen enormously, while the sources of future income and consequent recuperation had diminished or disappeared. The Sound tolls, for instance, in consequence of the treaties of Brömsebro and Kristianopel (by the latter treaty very considerable concessions were made to the Dutch) had sunk from 400,000 to 140,000 rix-dollars. The political influence of the crown, moreover, had inevitably been weakened, and the conduct of foreign affairs passed from the hands of the king Frederick III.,
1648–1670. into the hands of the Rigsraad. On the accession of Frederick III. (1648–1670) moreover, the already diminished royal prerogative was still further curtailed by the Haandfaestning, or charter, which he was compelled to sign. Fear and hatred of Sweden, and the never abandoned hope of recovering the lost provinces, animated king and people alike; but it was Denmark’s crowning misfortune that she possessed at this difficult crisis no statesman of the first rank, no one even approximately comparable with such competitors as Charles X. of Sweden or the “Great Elector” Frederick William of Brandenburg. From the very beginning of his reign Frederick III. was resolved upon a rupture at the first convenient opportunity, while the nation was, if possible, even more bellicose than the king. The apparently insuperable difficulties of Sweden in Poland was the feather that turned the scale; on the 1st of June 1657, Frederick III. signed the manifesto justifying a war which was never formally declared and brought Denmark to the very verge of ruin. The extraordinary details of this dramatic struggle will be found elsewhere (see Frederick III., king of Denmark, and Charles X., king of Sweden); Peace of Roskilde, 1658. suffice it to say that by the peace of Roskilde (February 26, 1658), Denmark consented to cede the three Scanian provinces, the island of Bornholm and the Norwegian provinces of Baahus and Trondhjem; to renounce all anti-Swedish alliances and to exempt all Swedish
