In the political history of the Scandinavian countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland and the states of the Scandinavian peninsula, Norway and Sweden — the long fifteenth century from c. 1390 to the Reformation forms a well-defined period. It began with the union of the Nordic crowns; it saw Sweden’s attempts to break away from the Union and Denmark’s endeavours to restore it, until it collapsed, once and for all, in the 1520s, while a few years later the old-established Church came to be supplanted by Protestantism of the Lutheran variety.
The years around 1390 saw the culmination of German immigration, especially in Denmark: during the fifteenth century Hanseatic political and economic influence in the Scandinavian countries was gradually repelled. Lubeck’s involvement in the Danish civil war 1534—6 was a last, unsuccessful attempt to recover lost ground. In the cultural field the fifteenth century was increasingly marked by northern Germany, especially in the visual arts and in literature; the introduction of Protestantism in its German and not in its French, Calvinist, form is, in this respect, revealing.
On the death of King Oluf of Denmark and Norway (3 August 1387), his mother, Margrete, was elected regent of Denmark by the provincial assemblies (landsting) of Scania, Zealand and Funen. Apparently no such election took place in Jutland, but representatives of the region may have taken part in those of the other provinces. In Norway, Margrete’s legal position was stronger: she was the queen mother, and in February 1388 the Norwegian council (rigsrad) declared that the other pretenders — the relatives of Margrete’s sister, Ingeborg, wife of Duke Heinrich of Mecklenburg, their son Albrecht IV, and Heinrich’s brother, Albrecht, king of Sweden — had forfeited their rights to the Norwegian throne. Consequently, the son of Margrete’s niece, Erik of Pomerania, was accepted as heir apparent, and was confirmed as such in 1389.
To the Swedish throne Margrete had very slight claims. Her father-in-law had been deposed in 1363 and her husband, Hakon VI of Norway, had taken up his father’s claim. When, in 1385, King Oluf came of age, he had resumed his father’s claim to Sweden, adding to his title ‘true heir to the kingdom of Sweden’.
Much more important was a group of aristocrats, executors of the will of the late seneschal, Bo Jonsson (d. 1386), who, holding his fiefs and estates, was opposing Albrecht’s government. The king, using military force, tried to obtain control over the lands in question, but this led to an aristocratic revolt in the summer of 1387. Contacts were made with Margrete and Oluf, which must have continued after the latter’s death. In March 1388 the executors recognised Margrete as regent of Sweden, and in the decisive battle at Asle, near Falkoping, Margrete’s army defeated and captured Albrecht (24 February 1389).
The countries now governed by Margrete were very extensive. Besides Norway, Sweden and Denmark, they comprised the duchy of Schleswig, the Norwegian Atlantic islands of Greenland, Iceland, Orkney, Shetland and the Faroes; only part of Finland — to the west and south of a line from Zelenogorsk in the Carelian Isthmus to Raahe/Brahestad on the Bothnian Gulf — was clearly Swedish. The remaining territories of present-day Finland as well as the northern regions of the Scandinavian peninsula were inhabited by Lapps who were subject to very little governmental control. Excluding Greenland, Margrete’s countries corresponded to an area twice that of present-day France; all, however, were very thinly populated.