The history of Denmark

Denmark, the peninsula of Jutland and the islands between the North Sea and the Baltic, has one of the oldest monarchies in the world, traced back to Gorm the Old in the tenth century. Its Vikings raided and settled across western Europe, and its medieval kings built an empire around the Baltic that peaked when the Kalmar Union joined all of Scandinavia under one crown. Wars with Sweden, Britain and Prussia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries stripped away Scania, Norway and Schleswig-Holstein, leaving a small, homogeneous kingdom. That kingdom became a constitutional monarchy in 1849 and, in the twentieth century, a model welfare state, a member of NATO and the European Union, and the sovereign of the self-governing Faroe Islands and Greenland.

The ice sheets of the last glaciation covered most of Denmark until about 13,000 years ago. Reindeer hunters followed the retreating ice, and as forests spread, Mesolithic peoples of the Maglemose, Kongemose and Ertebølle cultures lived by hunting, fishing and gathering shellfish along the coasts, leaving huge shell middens. A grave at Vedbæk from about 6000 BCE held 22 people, including a newborn laid on a swan's wing. Farming came late, around 4000 BCE, when the Neolithic Revolution reached the region with the Funnelbeaker culture, whose people built hundreds of dolmens and passage graves that still dot the landscape. Around 2800 BCE new people associated with the Single Grave culture arrived from the east, bringing ancestry from the steppe.

Denmark had no copper or tin, but in the Nordic Bronze Age, from about 1700 BCE, it traded amber for metal and became a centre of fine bronze work. The Trundholm sun chariot, a bronze horse pulling a gilded disc, and the oak-coffin burial of the Egtved Girl, who died around 1370 BCE, date from this time, as do the great bronze horns called lurs.

The Iron Age, from about 500 BCE, was a time of poorer, colder conditions. Many of the bog bodies for which Denmark is known, such as the Tollund Man and the Grauballe Man, date from these centuries and were probably sacrifices. The silver Gundestrup cauldron, made in a Celtic or Thracian style, was deposited in a bog in Jutland. In the first centuries CE chieftains traded with the Roman Empire and buried Roman glass, bronze and coins with their dead, and around 200 CE runic writing came into use. Large deposits of weapons in bogs such as Illerup show that armies were fighting and being defeated. The Danes are first named in sixth-century sources, and in the following centuries the Angles and Jutes, from the south of the peninsula, took part in the settlement of Britain. Work on the Danevirke, the earthwork across the base of Jutland, began in the seventh century, and Ribe, the oldest town, was founded early in the eighth.

In the Viking Age, from the end of the eighth century, Danish fleets raided the coasts of the Frankish lands and England. King Godfred defied Charlemagne and strengthened the Danevirke in 808. Danish armies conquered much of eastern England, which came to be called the Danelaw after Alfred the Great halted them in the 870s, and Danes were among the founders of Normandy. Trading towns such as Hedeby and Ribe linked the North Sea and the Baltic.

Gorm the Old, who reigned from about 936 to 958 at Jelling, is the first king recognised in the royal line that continues today. His son Harald Bluetooth raised the larger of the Jelling stones around 965, recording that he had won all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian, and he built ring fortresses such as Trelleborg. Harald's son Sweyn Forkbeard conquered England in 1013, and his grandson Cnut the Great ruled England from 1016, Denmark from 1018 and Norway from 1028, an empire around the North Sea that broke up after his death in 1035. The last great Danish attempt on England failed in the 1070s, after William the Conqueror had taken the Kingdom of England.

Christianity took firm hold in the eleventh century. Lund, then in Danish Scania, became the seat of an archbishop for all Scandinavia in 1104, and stone churches spread through the countryside. After a period of civil war, Valdemar I, called the Great, reunited the kingdom in 1157. His adviser Bishop Absalon led crusades against the pagan Wends on the southern Baltic shore and fortified the fishing town that became Copenhagen. Valdemar II conquered northern Estonia in 1219, founding the fortress of Tallinn; later legend says that the Danish flag, the Dannebrog, fell from heaven during that battle. His Jutland Law of 1241 remained in force for centuries.

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries brought royal murders, noble revolts and foreign debts, and from 1332 to 1340 Denmark had no king at all, its provinces pawned to German lords. Valdemar IV Atterdag rebuilt royal power, sold Estonia to the Teutonic Order in 1346, and fought the Hanseatic League of German trading towns, which defeated him and imposed the Treaty of Stralsund in 1370, confirming their privileges in the Baltic trade.

Valdemar's daughter Margaret I became regent for her son Olaf, heir to both Denmark and Norway, and after his death in 1387 she ruled both kingdoms herself. In 1389 she defeated the king of Sweden, and in 1397 at Kalmar her grand-nephew Eric of Pomerania was crowned king of all three Scandinavian kingdoms, creating the Kalmar Union. It brought Iceland, Greenland and the Faroes, as Norwegian dependencies, under the Danish crown as well. Eric imposed tolls on ships passing through the Øresund in the 1420s, a source of royal income until 1857. The Oldenburg dynasty, which took the throne in 1448, also inherited the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein in 1460.

Sweden resisted Danish domination. In 1520 Christian II conquered Stockholm and had more than eighty Swedish nobles and churchmen executed in the Stockholm Bloodbath, which provoked a revolt led by Gustav Vasa. Sweden left the union for good in 1523, and Christian II was overthrown by his own nobles the same year.

The ideas of Martin Luther spread quickly. After a civil war, the Count's Feud of 1534–36, Christian III confiscated the property of the Catholic church, imprisoned the bishops and made Denmark and Norway Lutheran, part of the Protestant Reformation. From then on the union of Denmark–Norway was ruled from Copenhagen, with Norway reduced to a province.

Christian IV, who reigned from 1588 to 1648, was a great builder who left Copenhagen the Rosenborg palace, the Round Tower and the Stock Exchange, and founded new towns including Christiania, the later Oslo. His intervention in the Thirty Years' War ended in defeat by the Catholic general Tilly at Lutter in 1626, and his war with Sweden in 1643–45 cost him territory. Worse followed. In the winter of 1658 the Swedish king Charles X Gustav marched his army across the frozen straits to Zealand, and under the Treaty of Roskilde Denmark ceded Scania, Halland and Blekinge, the eastern provinces it had held since the Viking Age. A second Swedish attack on Copenhagen failed, and the island of Bornholm, which had rebelled against Swedish rule, was returned, but the losses of 1658 became permanent.

In 1660, with the nobility discredited by defeat, Frederick III won the support of the clergy and townspeople to make the crown hereditary and absolute; the King's Law of 1665 was the only written constitution of an absolute monarchy in Europe. Denmark–Norway also became a small colonial power. It held Tranquebar in India from 1620, forts on the Gold Coast of West Africa and, from 1672, the Caribbean islands of St Thomas, St John and later St Croix, where enslaved Africans worked the sugar plantations. Danish ships carried roughly 100,000 Africans across the Atlantic as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Denmark was the first European state to ban the transatlantic slave trade, by a decree of 1792 that took effect in 1803, but slavery on its islands continued until an uprising on St Croix in July 1848 forced the governor to proclaim emancipation.

The eighteenth century was a time of peace and prosperous trade. Ideas of the Enlightenment reached the court: the royal physician Johann Friedrich Struensee ruled in the name of the mentally ill Christian VII from 1770 to 1772, enacting sweeping reforms, until he was overthrown and executed. Land reforms from the 1780s, including the abolition in 1788 of the stavnsbånd, which had tied peasant men to the estate of their birth, created a class of independent farmers.

Denmark tried to remain neutral in the Napoleonic Wars, but Britain feared its fleet would fall into French hands. A British squadron under Nelson defeated the Danish navy off Copenhagen in 1801, and in 1807 the British bombarded the city, killing hundreds of civilians, and seized the fleet. Denmark then allied with Napoleon. The alliance brought economic ruin and state bankruptcy in 1813, and under the Treaty of Kiel in 1814 the king had to hand Norway to Sweden, though Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland stayed Danish.

In the decades that followed, a Danish golden age in the arts produced the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, the writer Hans Christian Andersen and the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, while the pastor N. F. S. Grundtvig inspired folk high schools for rural people. The revolutions of 1848 pushed Frederick VII to give up absolute power, and he signed a liberal constitution on 5 June 1849, establishing a parliament elected by a broad male franchise.

The same year brought war over Schleswig and Holstein, duchies ruled by the Danish king but with large or majority German populations. Danish liberals wanted Schleswig fully absorbed into the kingdom; German nationalists wanted both duchies in a united Germany. Denmark won the first war of 1848–51, but in 1864, after a new constitution tied Schleswig more closely to Denmark, Otto von Bismarck's Prussia and Austria invaded. The Danish army was beaten at Dybbøl, and the kingdom lost all three duchies, about a third of its territory, a step towards the unification of Germany. The town of Altona, now part of Hamburg, had been Danish until then.

Defeat turned Denmark inward. Farmers organised dairy cooperatives and turned to exporting butter and bacon to Britain, and heathland in Jutland was reclaimed. A long struggle between the conservative governments and the Left party in parliament ended in 1901 with parliamentary rule. Women won the vote in 1915. Denmark stayed neutral in the First World War, sold its Caribbean islands to the United States in 1917, and recognised Iceland as a separate kingdom in personal union in 1918. In 1920, after plebiscites under the Treaty of Versailles, northern Schleswig voted to return to Denmark. In the 1930s the Social Democratic prime minister Thorvald Stauning laid the foundations of the welfare state through a broad compromise with the farmers' party.

Despite a non-aggression pact, Nazi Germany invaded on 9 April 1940, and the government surrendered within hours. For three years Denmark kept its own king, parliament and police in a policy of cooperation, while Iceland, cut off, declared itself a republic in 1944, and the United States took over the defence of Greenland. Resistance and strikes grew, and in August 1943 the government resigned rather than accept German demands to execute saboteurs.

When the Germans prepared to deport the Danish Jews in October 1943, a warning was leaked, and Danes of every kind helped some 7,000 Jews escape across the Øresund to neutral Sweden in fishing boats; fewer than 500 were deported, most to Theresienstadt, and the great majority of those survived. Denmark thus escaped the worst of the Holocaust. The German forces surrendered in May 1945, though the island of Bornholm was bombed and then occupied by the Soviet Union until 1946.

Abandoning neutrality, Denmark joined NATO as a founding member in 1949 during the Cold War. The Faroe Islands won home rule in 1948, and Greenland's colonial status was ended in 1953, when it became a county of Denmark; it gained home rule in 1979 and wider self-government in 2009, which recognises Greenlanders' right to independence. In the postwar decades the Social Democrats led the building of a comprehensive welfare state funded by high taxes. Denmark joined the European Economic Community in 1973 together with the United Kingdom, though Greenland later left it. Danish voters rejected the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and accepted it in 1993 with opt-outs, including from the single currency, which they voted again to keep out of in 2000. In 1989 Denmark became the first country to allow registered partnerships for same-sex couples.

Since the 2000s, immigration has been a central political issue, and governments of both left and right have adopted some of Europe's strictest asylum rules. The publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005 led to protests and boycotts across the Muslim world, and gunmen attacked a free-speech event and a synagogue in Copenhagen in 2015. Mette Frederiksen of the Social Democrats became prime minister in 2019. Queen Margrethe II, who had reigned since 1972, abdicated on 14 January 2024 in favour of her son, who became King Frederik X.

From 2025 the United States government under Donald Trump repeatedly pressed for American control of Greenland, which Greenlandic and Danish leaders rejected, insisting that the island was not for sale and that Greenlanders had the right to decide their own future. In the general election of 24 March 2026 the Social Democrats remained the largest party but with their lowest share of the vote since 1903, and in June Frederiksen formed her third government, a centre-left coalition with the Green Left, the Moderates and the Social Liberals, after record-long negotiations.