Christian IV of Denmark

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Christian IV of Denmark was crowned at the Church of Our Lady in Copenhagen on the 29th of August 1596, at the age of nineteen. He had already been king for eight years by that point, inheriting the throne as a ten-year-old boy when his father Frederick II died on the 4th of April 1588. By the time Christian himself died on the 28th of February 1648, he had reigned for 59 years and 330 days, longer than any other monarch in Scandinavian history.

  He reshaped the map of northern Europe, founded cities that still bear his name, commanded fleets in the most violent naval battles of his age, and sat at the center of a court that rivaled the grandeur of any in Europe. Yet he also gambled away Denmark's supremacy in the Baltic Sea and left his kingdom diminished. How does a king so celebrated for ambition end his reign in military defeat? And what do the cities, the castles, the mines, and the music he left behind tell us about who Christian IV actually was?

• 2. A Kingdom Won Young

  ›

  Frederick II died when Christian was just ten years old, and Denmark was not yet ready to hand power to a child. A regency council was assembled, led by chancellor Niels Kaas, with members including Peder Munk, Jørgen Ottesen Rosenkrantz, and Christoffer Valkendorff. Christian's mother, the thirty-year-old Queen Dowager Sophie, sought a place in that government and was refused. The council ruled without her.

  At Sorø Academy, the young king built a reputation as a headstrong and talented student. When Niels Kaas died in 1594, Jørgen Rosenkrantz assumed leadership of the council. A year later the Council of the Realm determined Christian was nearly ready. On the 17th of August 1596 he signed his haandfæstning, a binding curtailment of the monarch's power that was a direct copy of his father's document from 1559. Twelve days later came the coronation, with a new Danish Crown Regalia crafted by Dirich Fyring, assisted by the Nuremberg goldsmith Corvinius Saur.

  Denmark was still an elective monarchy when Christian was born, so the crown was not guaranteed even to the king's eldest son. Norway, however, was hereditary, and a split between the crowns was too costly to permit. At the age of three, Christian had been elected Prince and successor to the Danish throne by his father. He came into his personal rule in 1596 with a crown that rested on a compromise, not a birthright.

• 3. Builder of Cities

  ›

  Between 1599 and 1641 Christian IV founded more new cities than any other Nordic ruler on record. Christianopel appeared in 1599 as a garrison town near the Danish-Swedish border in the then-Danish territory of Blekinge. Christianstad followed in 1614 in Skåne. Glückstadt rose in 1617 in Holstein as a deliberate rival to Hamburg. Christianshavn was established in 1619 as a fortified harbour district outside Copenhagen.

  In Norway, the pace was equally remarkable. When silver was discovered, Konningsberg, now Kongsberg, was founded as an industrial town in 1624. That same year, Oslo burned for three days in August. Christian was nearby at Eiker in Buskerud, overseeing construction work, and reached the scene within weeks. He decided the old city should not be rebuilt on its original ground. He ordered it relocated to the area below Akershus Fortress and renamed it Christiania, a name the city kept until 1925 when it reverted to Oslo. His men laid out roads in Akershagen and required all citizens to move their shops and workplaces into the new city. Kristiansand was founded in 1641 to promote trade in southern Norway.

  Beyond the new cities stood a catalogue of individual buildings that transformed Copenhagen. Christian built Rundetårn as an observatory, the stock exchange Børsen, the fortress Kastellet, Rosenborg Castle, the naval workers' district Nyboder, and the arsenal now called the Tøjhus Museum. He converted Frederiksborg Castle into a Renaissance palace and completely rebuilt Kronborg Castle. He also controlled the silver mine at Kongsberg and the copper mine at Røros, and in 1647 granted the Røros Copper Works privileges to his banker and privy councillor Joachim Irgens von Westervick, including rights to forests and water resources within a circle of 90 kilometers diameter.

• 4. Fleets, Colonies, and Lost Expeditions

  ›

  When Christian took personal rule in 1596, the Royal Dano-Norwegian Navy consisted of twenty-two vessels. By 1610 it had grown to sixty ships, some of them built to Christian's own designs. The navy was one tool of a larger ambition: to extend Denmark-Norway's reach across the world's oceans.

  The Greenland expeditions of 1605 to 1607 sent ships north to locate the lost Eastern Norse Settlement and assert Danish sovereignty over Greenland. All three voyages failed, hampered in part by leaders who lacked experience with Arctic conditions. The English explorer James Hall served as pilot on all three trips. An expedition to North America followed in 1619, captained by the Dano-Norwegian navigator Jens Munk. The ships entered Hudson Bay and landed at the mouth of the Churchill River at the site now called Churchill, Manitoba. Cold, famine, and scurvy killed most of the crew. It was a catastrophe.

  The most consequential venture came in 1618, when Christian appointed Admiral Ove Gjedde to establish a Danish colony in Ceylon. The expedition took two years to reach its destination and lost more than half its crew along the way. The colony in Ceylon never materialized. Instead, the Nayak of Tanjore, in what is now Tamil Nadu, offered trading opportunities. A treaty signed on the 20th of November 1620 granted the Danes the village of Tranquebar on India's south coast and the right to build a stone house, which became Fort Dansborg, and to levy taxes. It was Denmark's first colony in India. Christian also formally established the Danish East India Company to manage the trade that followed.

• 5. Wars and the Baltic

  ›

  In 1611 Christian put his reorganized army to work against Sweden in what became known as the Kalmar War, named for the Swedish fortress whose capture was the campaign's central operation. At the Treaty of Knäred on the 20th of January 1613, King Gustavus Adolphus conceded on the main points Denmark had demanded. The gains, however, were not decisive enough to settle the rivalry.

  The Thirty Years' War drew Christian in more deeply. His objectives were to control the German rivers Elbe and Weser, and to secure the secularised Archdiocese of Bremen and the Prince-Bishopric of Verden as titles for his younger sons. He secured co-adjutorship of the See of Bremen for his son Frederick in September 1621, and a similar arrangement for Verden in November. Christian entered the war on the 9th of May 1625 as war-leader of the Lower Saxon Circle, commanding an army of roughly 20,000 mercenaries alongside national troops and British allies. France and Charles I of England had agreed to help subsidise the campaign partly because Christian was the uncle of the Stuart king and his sister Elizabeth of Bohemia through their mother Anne of Denmark. Some 13,700 Scottish soldiers under General Robert Maxwell, 1st Earl of Nithsdale, were committed as allies, and around 6,000 English troops under Sir Charles Morgan also eventually arrived.

  On the 27th of August 1626 Christian was routed by Johan Tzerclaes, Count of Tilly at the Battle of Lutter. By the summer of 1627 both Tilly and Albrecht von Wallenstein had occupied Jutland. Christian formed an alliance with Sweden on the 1st of January 1628, and a combined Swedo-Danish force compelled Wallenstein to lift the siege of Stralsund. In May 1629 Christian concluded the Treaty of Lübeck without losing territory, but the treaty bound him to stay out of the war going forward. When the Treaty of Brömsebro was signed on the 8th of February 1645 after the disastrous Torstenson War, Denmark ceded Gotland, Ösel, and Halland for thirty years, while Norway surrendered the provinces of Jämtland and Härjedalen. Sweden gained the supremacy of the Baltic Sea that Christian had spent his reign trying to deny it.

• 6. The Battle of Colberger Heide

  ›

  Sweden attacked Denmark in December 1643, with Field Marshal Lennart Torstensson advancing from Bohemia and crossing the southern frontier on the 12th of December. By the end of January 1644 the whole of Jutland was in Swedish hands. Christian was in his sixty-sixth year.

  Night and day he worked to raise armies and equip fleets. The Danes were fortunate that Sweden delayed opening a second front in Scania until February 1644, which gave Danish forces enough time to mount adequate defences and hold the fortress of Malmö. On the 16th of May 1644 the Danish fleet defeated a Dutch auxiliary fleet that had arrived to support Torstensson. A second attempt to ferry Torstensson's army to the Danish islands by a large Swedish fleet was blocked by Christian IV in person on the 1st of July 1644.

  The two fleets met at the Battle of Colberger Heide. Christian stood on the quarterdeck of his flagship Trinity when a Swedish cannonball struck a cannon beside him and sent splinters of wood and metal into his body, wounding him in thirteen places and blinding one eye. He was flung to the deck. He was back on his feet immediately, called out in a loud voice that he was unharmed, and stayed on deck until the fighting ended. Darkness separated the fleets and the battle finished without a decisive outcome. The Danish fleet subsequently blockaded the Swedish ships in the Bay of Kiel, but the Swedish fleet escaped, and a combined Swedish-Dutch force annihilated the Danish fleet in a battle between Fehmarn and Lolland at the end of September. Christian had no choice but to accept mediation.

• 7. Court, Music, and Private Life

  ›

  Christian's court was judged the second most musical in Europe, ranked only behind that of Elizabeth I of England. He hired musicians and artists from across the continent and employed a number of English musicians at various times, including William Brade, John Bull, and John Dowland. Dowland accompanied the king on tours and, since he joined the court in 1603, rumour placed him in Norway as well. Christian also requested through his sister Anne that Thomas Cutting, a lutenist in the service of Arbella Stewart, be released to work for him.

  His visit to England in 1606 left a memorable impression on both sides. His sister Anne had married King James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England in 1603. Sir John Harington recorded an entertainment at Theobalds, a masque of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, as a drunken fiasco in which most of the players fell over from excess wine. At Gravesend, Christian staged a firework display mounted on a small ship that brought tears to the eyes of King James, though the effect was reduced because the display ran in daylight. Christian sailed home escorted by Robert Mansell with the Vanguard and the Moon.

  In 1615 Christian privately married Kirsten Munk, by whom he had twelve children, three years after the death of his first wife Anne Catherine of Brandenburg. In the course of 1628 he discovered that Kirsten was involved with one of his German officers. He placed her under house arrest. She then arranged a relationship between his acknowledged mistress Vibeke Kruse, one of her former maids, and the king himself. In January 1630 the rupture became final and Kirsten retired to her estates in Jutland. An English envoy who visited in 1632, when Christian was fifty-five, wrote that the king's daily life was given over to drinking and to keeping a mistress. Christian's personal obsession with witchcraft led to the execution of subjects during the Burning Times; he was responsible for several witch burnings, including 21 people in Iceland. Among the most notable cases was the conviction and burning of Maren Spliid, executed at the Gallows Hill near Ribe on the 9th of November 1641.

• 8. Legacy and Final Days

  ›

  Christian IV died in Copenhagen on the 28th of February 1648, a week after being carried in a litter from Frederiksborg at his own earnest request. He was buried at Roskilde Cathedral, in a chapel that had been completed six years before his death. He left a kingdom that had lost control of the Baltic Sea, the defining strategic prize of his reign.

  The Danish Royal House later determined that Christian's official reign as king began not in 1588 but in 1596, when he was legally installed after the guardian government ended, which shifted the formal record for Scandinavian longevity. Nevertheless, his reputation with both the Danish and Norwegian peoples outlasted the military losses. He featured in the Danish national play Elverhøj, and the Christian IV Glacier in Greenland carries his name. He spoke Danish, German, Latin, French, and Italian, and was described by contemporaries as hospitable and social, though also irritable and increasingly ungoverned in his later years.

  In fiction he appears across Eric Flint and David Weber's alternate-history novels, in Rose Tremain's Music and Silence set in and around the Danish court in 1629 and 1630, and in Olga Ravn's The Wax Child, which connects him to the witch-trial beheading of noblewoman Christenze Kruckow of Funen. The Danish band Mew recorded a song called "King Christian" that portrays him as foul-natured but genuinely constructive as a ruler. The city of Oslo, rebuilt on his order and renamed after him in 1624, carried the name Christiania until 1925, more than two and a half centuries after his death.