Denmark History

The oldest mention of Denmark (Denemearc) as a designation for a geographically located kingdom is from approx. 890 and is found in two accounts of Alfred the Great, king of the southern English kingdom of Wessex. Here, the northern Norwegian chief Ottar described his sail southern Norway to Hedeby at the Danish southern border (today Germany), while the merchant Wulfstan reported his sail from Hedeby and east wards. The name Denmark actually means the Danes’ “field”, ie. the territory or country of the Danes, or the border area of the Danes.

Around the year 950, the king Gorm den Gamle (Gorm the Old) had a large stone placed in Jelling, commemorating his wife Thyra. This text (written with runes) is the oldest written Danish source to mention the name “Denmark”. Around the year 960-985 the king Harald Blåtand (Harold Bluetooth) had an even larger stone placed besides the first one, commemorating his father Gorm den Gamle and his mother Thyra, and declaring that he had conquered all of Denmark and Norway and Christened the Danes. Christianity thus became the official religion of Denmark, and one side of the stone has the oldest depiction of Christ in the nordic countries. The decoration on the stone is thought to have been painted in color originally, but no color remains to this day. The Jelling Stones (and other parts of the area – burial mounds and church) became part of the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1994.

Around the year 965, Denmark was officially Christianized. The first churches were made of wood (stave churches), but already in the 12th century, they were replaced by stone churches. None of the early wooden churches have been preserved. The reconstruction of the stave church from Hørning church gives a qualified idea of what the earliest churches in the country looked like.  

The Battle of Svold was a naval battle in which Erik Jarl of Norway with the help of Svend Tveskæg and Olof Skotkonung of Sweden defeated Olav Tryggvason of Norway in September of the year 999 or 1000. Olav Tryggvason lost his life in the battle. Where the battle took place is unknown; it could be either on Rügen, or in Øresund. The background of the conflict was probably the attempt to establish a united Norwegian kingdom, the political interest of the Danish monarchy in the country, and the spread of Christianity. Olav Tryggvason was on his way home from Venden when his fleet was attacked by an allied Danish-Swedish-Norwegian fleet. Olav Tryggvason had only 11 ships with him and the opponents had more than 70 ships at their disposal.

Harald Hårderåde became the absolute king of Norway in 1048 and is considered to be the last Viking king. For a number of years he fought with Svend Estridsen over Denmark, but finally recognized Svend as Denmark’s king in 1064.

Sankt Jørgensbjerg Church in Roskilde, where parts of the nave’s masonry can be traced back to around 1080 is supposed to be (one of) the oldest of the current churches in Denmark. The very first Danish churches were wooden churches built in the 8th century.  

In 1349 or 1350, Denmark was hit by the plague or “The Black Death”, which had worked its way up through Europe from the South within two or three years and in several places killed up to 40% of the population. Denmark was also hit hard. The church had a system where one could pay the priests to pray for one’s soul after death. In 1350, the number of registered soul masses and thus death notices increased. It is not possible to say exactly how the first plague outbreaks affected the population in Denmark, but in the source material from the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th century, so-called desolate farms are mentioned, ie. uninhabited farms whose lands were either cultivated by the neighbors, or which were not cultivated at all. These must be seen as a sign of a decline in population, which was mainly caused by the plague. In some areas, it also appears that a number of churches were closed down as a result of the demographic decline. The plague hit also hard in the cities. In cities like Copenhagen, Roskilde and Ribe, the sources say that there were deserted houses and plots, probably because there were no people to fill them. And in 1354, King Valdemar Atterdag forgave all the death penalty, probably due to lack of population in the country. In fact, the plague seems to have been such a severe blow to the Danish cities that the urbanization the country had experienced earlier in the Middle Ages came to a standstill – at least for a while. Perhaps it hit particularly hard in the cities, which were part of international networks in which the disease spread and where people lived close to each other. Since the first outbreak in the mid-14th century, the plague has returned intermittently. For example, in Denmark during the second half of the 14th century there were four more plague outbreaks, and during the 15th century there were approx. nine in the country. However, the plague hardly had as violent consequences as the first time, i.a. because it gradually became better at dealing with quarantined epidemics. The last plague epidemic hit Denmark in 1711.

Perhaps 1659 was not a great year of horror in world history. But for the Danes, it is a year you can not get around. The Swedish wars of 1657-1660 had terrible consequences for the civilian population, and in a few years between a third and a quarter of the Danish population died. It was quite violent, and there are terrible stories about how people died like flies in a short time, and about priests who had to bury several children in the same coffin because you could not keep up. Many were driven to flee, starved and lived close together and unhygienic. Many died of infectious diseases, women were raped, and people were tortured. It was a mixture of almost all the horrors one could imagine at that time. It affected everyone, both rich and poor, and it was a terrible period to live in with uncertainty about whether one lived the following day. 1659 was a particularly bad year in the period, which was also the year when the Swedes stormed Copenhagen. The wars have consequences that we live with to this day. Denmark lost Scania, Halland and Blekinge, political power, and all the Danes who lived east of Øresund.

In 1688, Christian V introduced a new land registry, which for the first time determined the tax capacity of all Danish agriculture on the basis of a survey of the land. It was a list of all the farms in a manor, indicating the tax capacity of each farm measured in barrels of hart grain. Land registers were published for all the lords in Denmark in 1662, 1664, 1688 and 1844, respectively. Agriculture was the kingdom’s most important occupation and the hard grain taxes the state’s most important financial basis. The land registers were therefore the tax administration’s most important tool, a simple and effective basis for the vast majority of the taxes imposed on the rural population, which at that time amounted to approx. 80% of the kingdom’s population. The preparatory work for them constitutes the most important source material for the history of Danish agriculture in the 17th century, especially the preparatory work for the land register 1688, the so-called field books from 1682-83, which contains a survey of each village’s adjacent farm by farm with accompanying description of land quality. the cultivation system used and the access to the hay, grazing, fuel, beneficial timber, etc.

On January 10, 1711, the long-feared message arrived: The plague had crept into Denmark. The disease had broken out in Poland in 1709, where it spread to the neighboring countries via the port of Danzig, but the Danish authorities managed to keep the plague at bay with preventive measures that were in line with the latest knowledge in the field. King Frederik IV had gained some experience in preventing plague on his great trip abroad in 1708. So when the plague broke out in Poland, he immediately took action and established a quarantine station on the small island of Saltholm in the Sound. Suspicious ships had to anchor on Copenhagen’s Red and crew as well as goods spend 40 days on Saltholm before they had to call at Copenhagen. Measures were also taken in Elsinore, and the king banned the trade in plague-stricken towns. Nevertheless, an epidemic broke out on Zealand, and at the end of May the plague was a reality in Copenhagen, and it raged violently in the hot summer. In October, however, the plague subsided, but by that time at least 23,000 people, corresponding to a third of Copenhagen’s population, had died, and more than 500 houses were empty. However, it did not take long before the capital got back into gear. People from the country flocked to take over an empty house or a closed business. Craftsmen could easily get jobs, and many seized the chance of a life in the capital. Although the plague of 1711 did not become as violent as it could have been, it left deep scars and overcrowded cemeteries. Fortunately, this was the last time that the dreaded disease visited Denmark.

In 1736, christening and confirmation became mandatory.

16 March 1792 the transatlantic slave trade under the Danish flag was banned by royal decree and Denmark became the first country in the world to ban its slave trade. However, the ban did not take effect until 1 January 1803, which meant that a number of countries came before Denmark with an actual ban on slavery. In the intervening ten-year period, the import of new slaves to the Danish West Indies was financially supported by the state. The intention was to build up such a large and gender-balanced slave population that it could reproduce itself, so that there was no need to bring in new slaves from Africa. Paradoxically, the result was that precisely in this transitional period from 1793 to 1802, the Danes brought more slaves to Africa than ever before or after. It involved a total of 24,900 slaves on 125 voyages, equivalent to a ship with 200 new slaves every single month. Slavery was a well-integrated part of the economy in Denmark and many other European countries.   An illegal but limited slave trade under Dannebrog continued after 1 January 1803, and Danish sailors participated in the trade on foreign ships, just as the Danes, who were stationed on the Gold Coast, to a certain extent continued their human trafficking.

Ordinance on Change in the Monetary System of the Kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, as well as the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, known as the Money Reform or State Bankruptcy on 5 January 1813, was issued as a result of Denmark’s participation in the Napoleonic Wars. Military spending had grown sharply, while state revenues stagnated. Therefore, the state began to send more money into circulation, which led to very strong inflation and major economic problems. During 1812, the state was no longer able to pay its debts, so the state was virtually bankrupt.

In 1828, Frederik VI issued a christening decree, in which it was stated that every child should be christened “not only with a first name but also with the family name that it should bear in the future.” If the family did not already have a family name, it was up to the father to determine the child’s surname. The fathers were even given a number of choices when choosing surnames for the pods: • The father’s own surname • Father’s first name followed by a -sen (patronymic) • A place name that the family was associated with

Hundreds of thousands of Danes traveled to the United States in the 19th century and well into the 20th century. Between 1820 and 1930, almost 336,000 Danes went to the United States. They made up a small splash in a global wave of 38 million emigrants heading for the United States. The vast majority of Danes left after 1867. While the US census in 1850 registered 1,837 people born in Denmark, the corresponding figure in 1880 was just over 64,000 and in 1900 159,000. It culminated in 1920 with just over 189,000 and then dropped to almost 179,500 in 1930. Including the immigrants’ American-born children, the peak was reached in 1930, when the census registered 529,000 Danish Americans, corresponding to 15 percent of Denmark’s population the same year. With the transition from sailing to steamship sailing in the decades after 1850, the voyage across the Atlantic became faster, safer, and more stable. Usually, the journey now lasted a maximum of 14 days. With the launch of the steamship company Thingvalla in 1879 – which in 1897 was acquired by DFDS and renamed the Scandinavia-America Line – the Danes could sail directly from Copenhagen to New York City. The painting from 1890 ‘Emigrants on Larsens Plads’ depicts the atmosphere before the emigrants board one of the Thingvalla Line’s Atlantic steamers and sail from Copenhagen to New York City.

The so-called Structural Reform replaced the country’s 14 counties by five regions (and the number of municipalities was also greatly reduced; from 270 to 98. More about the counties.