Denmark–Norway

Denmark-Norway was the union of the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway under a single king, ruled from Copenhagen, from 1536 to 1814. Together with Norway's Atlantic possessions, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, and the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, it was a major power around the North and Baltic Seas.

Denmark and Norway had shared monarchs since 1380, when Olaf, son of Queen Margaret of Denmark and King Haakon VI of Norway, inherited both crowns, and both were part of the Kalmar Union with Sweden from 1397. After Sweden left the union in 1523, Danish politics descended into civil war, the Count's Feud of 1534–1536. The victor, Christian III, declared in 1536 that Norway would no longer be a separate kingdom but part of Denmark, though in practice it kept its own laws and was called a kingdom again later. He also introduced the Lutheran Reformation in both realms, seizing church property.

Norway was governed from Copenhagen through a governor-general, the stattholder, and Danish officials. Danish became the written language of administration and the church in Norway, while Norwegians spoke their own dialects. The Norwegian law code was updated by Christian IV in 1604, and later Christian V's Norwegian Law of 1687. Norway prospered from timber, fish and shipping, and Bergen remained an important port.

Christian IV, king from 1588 to 1648, was a great builder: he founded Christiania, today's Oslo, after a fire in 1624, and Kristiansand, and built Rosenborg Castle, the Round Tower and the Børsen stock exchange in Copenhagen. He developed mining at Kongsberg, with its silver mines, and promoted trade. But his intervention in the Thirty Years' War ended in defeat in 1626, and his war with Sweden in 1643–1645 cost Denmark-Norway territory.

Denmark-Norway and Sweden fought repeatedly for control of the Baltic and the Øresund. In 1658 the Swedish king Charles X Gustav marched across the frozen straits, and the Treaty of Roskilde forced Denmark to give up Skåne, Halland and Blekinge, as well as the Norwegian provinces of Bohuslän and Trøndelag; Trøndelag was recovered in 1660. In the Great Northern War, the Norwegian naval hero Peter Wessel Tordenskjold won fame against Sweden.

After the war, in 1660, Frederick III, with the support of the clergy and townsmen, made the monarchy hereditary and absolute, reducing the power of the nobility. The Royal Law of 1665 was the only written constitution of an absolute monarchy in Europe.

Denmark-Norway founded trading posts at Tranquebar in India in 1620, forts on the Gold Coast of Africa, such as Christiansborg in today's Accra, and the Danish West Indies in the Caribbean, where enslaved Africans worked sugar plantations. Denmark-Norway was the first country to ban the transatlantic slave trade, by a decree of 1792 effective from 1803. The missionary Hans Egede began the recolonisation of Greenland in 1721.

In the eighteenth century, reforms freed peasants from some obligations, and Johann Friedrich Struensee, the king's physician, briefly held power in 1770–1772, introducing radical reforms, such as freedom of the press, before he was overthrown and executed. Norwegians grew more conscious of their national identity, and the Norwegian Society in Copenhagen promoted Norwegian culture.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain bombarded Copenhagen in 1807 and seized the Danish fleet, pushing Denmark-Norway into alliance with France. A British blockade caused famine in Norway. After Napoleon's defeat, the Treaty of Kiel in January 1814 forced Denmark to cede Norway to Sweden, though Denmark kept Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. Norwegians declared independence and adopted their own constitution on 17 May 1814, before accepting union with Sweden.

Our maps show Denmark-Norway from 1600 to 1800. Its largest outline, about 2.6 million square kilometres on the 1783 map, is mostly Greenland, with Norway making up 14 percent. On the 1815 map the basemap shows Denmark alone.