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S1. E3.
The battle for Kronborg
In 1658, a strong Swedish force besieged Kronborg to capture the Danish fortress. The castle had plenty of weapons, gunpowder and food, but it was only manned by 300 men and the situation was not helped by a leadership crisis. The castle's previous commander, Carl Brunow, had been demoted to second-in-command just before the Swedes attacked and replaced by the drunken but skilled bully Poul Beenfeldt. Neither Brunow nor his old crew liked this. To complete the leadership crisis, there was also a civilian head of the castle, Christoffer Bille. While the battles raged around the castle according to all the rules of warfare, intrigue simmered behind the castle's bastions. It was a battle not just of gunpowder and bullets, but of morale, psychology and pressure.Hosts: Nanna Winther and Poul Grinder-Hansen, Senior Researcher.
S1, E3. The battle for Kronborg
19.OCT.2020Meet your host, Nanna Winther
Nanna Winther is a journalist and has hosted a number of history podcasts. In this episode, she joins forces with senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, Poul Grinder, and explores the secrets of Kronborg.
Photographer: Karina Tenberg
Among other things, you can meet
Poul GrinderSenior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark
+45 41 20 61 15About Poul GrinderPoul Grinder
- Poul Grinder
Senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark
+45 41 20 61 15About Poul GrinderPoul Grinder
Secrets of Kronborg 3
The battle for Kronborg
You probably know Kronborg. The grand old castle located near Elsinore. Hamlets Castle. It's where Shakespeare set his most famous play. This is where Holger Danske sits in the basement, napping while supposedly looking after Denmark. But it's not really Hamlet's, and Holger Danske is both a mythical legendary figure and a statue.
In reality, Kronborg was the castle of Danish kings and queens, used to instill fear and impress.
Parties were held here that were talked about all over Europe. The castle was besieged, it burned down. It became the setting for blatant and provocative infidelity, imprisonment, betrayal and theft.
In this podcast, we tackle the real stories that actually took place at Kronborg.
Join storyteller Nanna Winther and senior researcher Poul Grinder-Hansen on a trip to Kronborg Castle. A tour where they lock themselves in tower rooms, go down into the casemates, jump around in the Queen's bedroom, all while telling stories that took place right here in these rooms at Kronborg.
In the third episode, we hear about the battle for Kronborg.
I can see a ferry, it's the Helsingør-Helsingborg ferry, and we can basically see all of Helsingør.
We have a good overview because we're up in the gun tower. What used to be the gun tower. Later on it got other names, the telegraph tower, but today it's a tower with a large, flat roof. That's why we can stand up here and look out over everything, as you say.
It's also a good place to stand when talking about the more dramatic episodes in Kronborg's history, namely the battle for Kronborg and the siege of Kronborg, when dramatic things happened there.
So what is the battle? Well, the reality is that the Swedes have entered the country and have actually taken most of Denmark and Copenhagen is besieged, but not taken.
It's true. Otherwise, they probably had pretty much all of Denmark, but Copenhagen was under siege and Kronborg was up here and still Danish. And now that the Swedes had realized that Copenhagen would obviously resist, they had to find another obvious target to take care of in the meantime. And Kronborg was a good target because this fortress was located right at the entrance to the Sound, and the Swedes imagined that if they controlled Kronborg, they could also control the Sound and perhaps even block it for vessels that would come to Denmark's aid. Denmark was allied with the Netherlands. So when Denmark was attacked, the Dutch would come to Denmark's defense, and therefore the Swedes could imagine that a Dutch fleet might arrive, so they had a military interest in capturing Kronborg.
But why are they there in the first place? It actually involves a side story. It also involves the biggest betrayal in the history of Denmark, right? So we have Corfitz Ulfeldt.
But like, what kind of war is it? We almost have to get a handle on that.
The Danes, the Swedes. They have fought several wars against each other, and the last war that Christian IV fought with the Swedes did not go very well, and now the new Danish king Frederik III wants revenge.
So while the Swedes were preoccupied with the war in Poland, he, the Danes, declared war on Sweden, thinking that they would regain some of what they had lost. But it wasn't a good idea, because the Swedes would much rather interrupt their campaign against Poland and move towards Denmark instead. And so they did, taking Denmark completely by surprise by waging war in the winter when the Danish belts were frozen, so the soldiers from Sweden simply marched across both the Little Belt and the Great Belt. And before the Danes had even looked around, they were almost outside the walls of Copenhagen and in a panic, Denmark had to sign a peace treaty and cede Skåne, Halland and Blekinge to Sweden.
Then there was peace at first, and by then it was the Danes who had begun. But it didn't last long. Then the Swedish king regretted that he had agreed to make peace. So he sent troops ashore again. And it was they who advanced towards Copenhagen. Now they wanted to conquer everything, so they might as well abolish Denmark once and for all.
On that occasion, Copenhagen would not surrender, so the Danes set about fortifying the city better, and it was then that the Swedes moved up towards Kronborg instead.
Okay, so it's actually on the backside of the war that I thought it was in the middle of.
There are basically two Swedish wars. There is one that the Danes had declared. And the Dutch didn't come to their aid because it was the Danes who had declared war, so they weren't obligated. But since it was the Danes who were attacked by the Swedes, the Dutch were obliged to help, which is why the Swedes feared that a Dutch aid fleet might arrive.
But it takes them a while to get here, the Dutch, right?
Yes, of course it does. They had to equip a fleet first, it has to be sailed. They won't arrive right away. So for the time being, Denmark was just standing on its own two feet, and they were always hoping that rescue would come at another time.
But they did the same for Kronborg. They said, if we can just hold out until the Dutch arrive, we'll be fine.
But there won't be any Dutchmen, so the battle for Kronborg will have to be fought alone. The Danes, that is. At that time, Kronborg consisted of Frederik II's castle and the bastions that Frederik II had built in the 1580s. Now we're up to 1658-59, 1658. So they're already 100 years old, or 80 years old or something. And right from the start, it was clear that the bastions built by Frederick II were not quite enough. They were right next to the castle. You had to have something in front again to keep the enemies further away when they attacked.
Christian IV had built some low ramparts that ran out towards the city, which was supposed to keep the enemies at bay, but they were never fully completed. And as the Swedes approached, the Danish military knew that it was not possible to defend the rather long stretch of ramparts that had been built there. It required a lot of soldiers, and they didn't have many soldiers. There were no more than 300 men in the castle, so they had to occupy the ramparts in front. The danger was that when the Swedes attacked, they could hide behind the ramparts that the Danes should have been hiding behind. So they set about trying to remove them, but there was no time to do so before the Swedes showed up.
Now we're talking about before. Then the Swedes came across the ice, which people think came from Skåne across the ice, and they didn't do that at all. They came because they were in Poland. That's the other story, but this time they come back, and they want Copenhagen and they think, okay, so they come to Kronborg, where do they come from?
They were put ashore from Swedish warships on Zealand.
And then they advanced from Korsør and places like that and then they moved towards Copenhagen and then they surrounded Copenhagen, so there were Swedish siege forces in a semicircle around Copenhagen.
There were no Danish military forces on the rest of Zealand. There were only those in Copenhagen and then those at Kronborg.
And at Kronborg there were 300 men.
So at some point... They have Copenhagen under siege, the Swedes decide to take Copenhagen slowly.
We're heading for Kronborg. And with how many men?
There were about 3000 Swedes, which means that there were ten times more attackers than there were defenders. The defense had the advantage that they were hidden, could hide behind some ramparts and prepared positions, but there were still not many defenders when there were so many attackers. And the Swedes typically arrived in the middle of the night on September 17.
Of course, let me get this right, it's August 17 at August 17. August, it was summer, so I was not completely pitch black. But they arrived in Elsinore around one o'clock at night or in the morning, and then they immediately marched through the city streets and then to as close to the fortress Kronborg as they could.
They could get quite close because Elsinore had been a thriving and growing city. Therefore, the city had also grown so that its buildings were very close to the castle. The Swedes knew this very well, they had spies who had made maps of the fortress and the city, so they rushed to the border of the city, where they could take shelter behind the houses. The Danes at the castle here had known it was a problem, but they didn't dare start blowing up the town houses before they knew if the Swedes were coming. Otherwise, they would have been thoroughly unpopular among the citizens of Elsinore. But now they could become unpopular anyway, because once the Swedes had shown themselves, the cannons at Kronborg began firing on the town houses to make it impossible for the Swedes to seek refuge at the closest fortress, so the cannonballs hit the town houses in Elsinore, the ones that were closest.
But they were also a bit of assholes down in Elsinore, right. Because there was no loyalty to Denmark, and it was just like, well, come and eat our food and lie in our beds.
Yes, I'm afraid to think that those who were there, all they were thinking about was saving their own business, so they had sent a delegation down to the Swedes and said: "Maybe you should hurry up and take Kronborg. If you come quickly, the Danes won't have had time to put the fortress in proper condition, and then you can conquer it more easily. Of course, this was because they thought, oh no, if there's a battle for Kronborg, we'll just get our houses shot to pieces, so let's just get the Swedes over there in a hurry. Then maybe they can take over the castle and we won't have to deal with all that. There was no great sense of nationalism or anything like that that characterized the inhabitants of Elsinore. But it was also a very international population of people, some of whom came from other parts of Europe and who benefited from the good commercial life in the city, who had no great sense of nationalism here.
They would certainly rather look after their money.
So they were not so disloyal to Kronborg's defense, and now it was 300 men. But in addition, there were also some commanders and officers. And it was a bit complicated, the way it was structured here at Kronborg, because there was a civilian official called Christoffer Bille, who was a sheriff. He was the one who had to take care of the castle in peacetime. And then there had been a lieutenant colonel, Carl Brunow, who had been commander of the castle.
But when war broke out, he was demoted to second in command, and a new battle-hardened commander, Poul Benfeldt, was appointed,
Which the king sent up here.
So it was the king who appointed him and ordered him to hold the castle to the last man. Last man standing! It was to be defended at all costs. So that became his task. But this meant that when a new commander arrived, the old commander was not very happy with the situation. He felt it was unfair that he had been demoted and was no longer commander. So he was unhappy from the very beginning with Poul Benfeldt.
And the men who were in the castle, quite a few of them anyway, sided with their old commander, whom they already knew, and were therefore somewhat recalcitrant towards the new commander. It wasn't the best starting point when you had to defend yourself against the enemy when you were 300 men and there were 3000 enemies outside. You had to be in complete agreement about what was going to happen, and the Danish leadership at the castle was not,
It almost sounds like some kind of old-fashioned children's show, like Brunow, Benfeldt and Bille. And then the 300 men here, right. And let's say they're standing up here now.
They could have done that. So we stand up, and then we look at what we're looking at...
Looking inland, towards the west.
They would be able to see the three B's if they stood here below the dome that the tower had back then and looked out over the landscape. Yes, then they would be able to see the town houses in Elsinore quite close, and some of them already shot to pieces by Kronborg's own cannons.
And then they'll realize that the Swedes were busy building such temporary fortifications. Made of wood and wicker baskets filled with earth and the like to protect their cannons. Because now the Swedes wanted to set up gun batteries so they could shoot at the castle.
Now they had to destroy the castle. That was the very first step in a siege war back then. It was that both sides fired cannons at each other.
In the beginning, this gun tower was actually a really good place to have guns standing, because it's as high as you could shoot down behind the temporary fortifications that the Swedes made. We can almost envision here when you get that high up. So even though they are built, some baskets filled with earth, you could still see when they stuck their heads up above, when you saw it from up here at least. So in the beginning, the Danes were actually able to fire very effectively from gun turrets, as well as from the surrounding ramparts. And then the Danes also did what was classic in such a defensive war back then: They made an attack. That is, they gathered armies that suddenly came storming in and out of the gates of the fortress.
And then they headed towards the attackers and drove them from some of their positions.
If holes were dug in trenches, they were filled with earth as far as possible, and if they had left any weapons behind, you tried to take them back to the castle, otherwise you blew them up. In short, they tried to prevent or at least make it more difficult for the invaders to fortify themselves.
But it must have cost a few people, and when you only had 300.
That was the risky part of it. There was one time in particular where it almost went wrong, because the Danes had made a raid where they initially drove the Swedes out of almost the entire area that had been violated under Christian IV. But then there were some Swedish horsemen who had been hiding down by the coast and who suddenly came riding up and almost cut off the Danish forces from getting back to the castle. But they didn't succeed, and the Swedish king was very angry about that. It was some inept soldiers, his own soldiers, who had not managed to stop the Danes from retreating, because then they could have captured the fortress immediately. If you had captured virtually the entire crew, there would have been nothing you could do. But they didn't succeed, so instead the Swedes were executed as punishment because they were such miserable soldiers.
It was the Swedish king who just made short work of a riding master.
He figured that if they couldn't figure it out or get it, then I can't use you guys for anything anyway.
Then we make an example, execute a few people and hopefully next time they will be more motivated.
It's dramatic enough that the Swedes come in and think that we're going to end Denmark once and for all, but inside the castle there is drama.
You say that we had Brunow, who was the commander, and we had Bille, who was the sheriff. And then there's Benfeldt, who is Benfeldt?
Benfeldt was headhunted by the king as someone who had a reputation for being experienced in war. He was known as a competent officer, and it was thought that he was probably better at defending the castle than Brunow, who perhaps did not have the same experience. Therefore, it was that Brunow was removed from command. At least as the head of the whole thing. Benfeldt was such a big bully, a hothead of a man, not a great diplomat. On the contrary, I think that probably didn't help matters either. He probably had a very short fuse and didn't put up with anything from Brunow. That's probably why Brunow also thought he was disgusting.
And that hasn't helped his willingness to cooperate, and that at some point during this siege we get to the point where people turn to Bille. The third man on wheels, the sheriff, who says that they could murder Benfeldt if they wanted to, they could just stab him, so we could get rid of him and things might go much better at the fortress.
Then there are some soldiers. Some soldiers ask if they shouldn't clear Benfeldt out of the way, so someone was simply planning a mutiny or murder of the commander of the castle,
And Benfeldt has been ordered not to abandon Kronborg under any circumstances.
In fact, he was told that if it looks like it's lost, blow shit up.
Those were his orders.
If he could see that it was impossible to defend himself, he would blow everything up, then there were some ships below Kronborg, and then they could see if they could escape on them. But the castle itself had to be destroyed. The Swedes were not going to enjoy that, and they could only surrender if they had orders from the king, written orders from the king. That was hard to get when you were sitting up here.
I was also about to say, because we have a besieged Copenhagen and a besieged Kronborg. And you have to have a written order to surrender, so they can't surrender at any time. And then they get more and more tired and fed up with each other.
Yes, so the leadership gets tired of each other, and the soldiers not only get tired, but they also get shot at by the Swedes. And gradually, the Swedes set up cannons that shoot up the fortress and make it harder and harder to defend it. The Swedes are also aware that it is important to silence the guns that are most dangerous to them. So where we're standing now, up on the gun turret, was the first to be shot to pieces by Swedish guns, because as I said, there were some effective guns up here. The Swedes wanted to get rid of them. They are here and so on down through several floors above each other.
We actually had a really good chance in the beginning, except that there were so few men.
Yes, they had many cannons and under the bastions, there were bulletproof rooms called casemates, where the soldiers could seek shelter when the Swedish shots rained down on them. In the casemates, there was also a gun emplacement from which you could fire at the Swedes with a little good will, in addition to the guns that stood on top of the ramparts.
So there was plenty of ammunition and there was plenty of gunpowder. There were plenty of supplies and food, but on the other hand, there weren't many people to defend. And the longer it went on, the more days passed, the more people were wounded in one way or another. So gradually the barracks were also filled with wounded soldiers who ended up there, and there were only one or two mustache cutters, as they were called. These were the primitive surgeons of the time, and they couldn't do much about those who had been shot.
What were they called?
A beard trimmer, that was a barber. A beard cutter is German, beard means beard, so a beard cutter is someone who cuts off beards. But when you weren't shaving people, you could also do other things. For example, you could bloodletting people, i.e. draining a little blood from them. This was thought to be good for your health. And you could also set a broken leg if you were a mustache cutter.
These field surgeons, they could be mustache cutters.
It's a far cry from the hipster babies we have today.
Well, you could say they were more versatile types.
And you'd probably have to be a pretty robust person to be a mustache cutter. Because it wasn't the best thing to go around trying to patch up people who had gotten a cannonball through their leg or had their leg shot off and stuff like that.
It wasn't some nurses or something?
No, there was no such thing.
So it's developing in such a way that the Swedes are actually gaining more and more ground. So even if you have a whole castle and defenses, and even if you have all those ramparts... All the fortifications you see here, they weren't all there, were they?
No, there was none of that there back then. We can't see Frederick the Second's bastion, it's just below the tower.
And then there was such a grassy terrain, and then there were the remains of the low ramparts that had been started.
had started and they were just an inconvenience actually. And the Swedes, they did what you always did when you besieged fortresses. They started digging trenches in a zigzag pattern, because if you made it straight up to the castle, you could just shoot down through it and hit people.
That's why they zigzagged across the terrain and got closer and closer, and at one point, they got so close, right down to the moat below. The Swedes were so close that they were able to place an explosive charge down by the wall that would keep the water inside the moat. So if they could blow the wall to pieces, they would get it out of the moat, and then the fortress would no longer be protected by the water, so that was one of the Swedish plans.
It didn't work out anyway.
No, the moat will hold. They set an explosive charge that also destroys some of the Swedish tunnels used to dig it. The water sinks a little, but they don't manage to get the water out of the moat. On the other hand, they succeeded in shooting the top of the gun tower here so that it can no longer be used. They also worked systematically to shoot at the bastions that they wanted to make quiet, and they also shot at the bastion with the largest casemates because they hoped to shoot them to pieces so that the soldiers could no longer hide inside the casemates. At some point, some of the wall slides down, which of course the defense fills with sandbags so that there's not just a hole, but they managed to remove some of the protection for the soldiers inside the casemates.
So they still manage to destroy part of Kronborg, which means they destroy a lot.
They do.
And while they're doing that, there's not even any unity in here. In fact, there's almost a mutiny. But now you're saying that two people come in and say that they can just kill Benfeldt. This guy Bille, what does he do about it?
Writes a letter to the king. Or he doesn't. He writes it down afterwards. He didn't write it then. He only tells it after the war is over. So at the time he doesn't tell the king anything, he probably didn't think it was appropriate to draw attention to all the problems. But Bildle is not a man who has a lot of influence, because none of the soldiers think much of him, because he was just a civilian.
So he has no military position.
He couldn't control the military, which is why he is the weakest party in the organization. And Benfeldt has the royal authorization behind him. Brunow has some of the crew behind him, but at the same time they can't be interested in doing nothing to defend the castle, because Brunow's strategy must be to say that Benfeldt is inept. I am much better. So when he writes and smuggles some letters to the king and Benfeldt, he writes: This is going to hell. This is not going to end well. If we only had 1,000 men, I could handle it. But with this crew, it won't work.
Brunow writes that it's going pretty well.
The Swedes have shot a few holes here and there. But we're repairing them, so he portrays that everything is going brilliantly. He may have known that Benfeldt had a much more negative assessment of how things were going. So he probably hoped that if they thought he was too negative, Benfeldt, he could be removed from the commission and Brunow could return as the determined, optimistic defender of the fortress. But that's not how it turned out. But they clearly had a message they wanted to convey, and if you look at how things turned out, Benfeldt was probably right in his assessment. He could see that this was not going to succeed. He was also a bit of a bully and a bit of a grump. He didn't believe the Dutch over a threshold, he thought, all that stuff they say about the Dutch coming to help - you can forget about it. They only care about their wallets. They don't bother to come. And as for the citizens of Elsinore, they were a bunch of disloyal bandits, so he was not happy with his surroundings.
Don't you think he's been fishing a bit to surrender so he wouldn't necessarily die in the middle of it all.
He has done that. You can also see that as the siege progresses, he makes more and more efforts to get a chance to write to the king one more time and get an order to surrender the fortress. It gets to the point where, at the beginning of September, when the Swedes are almost at the fortification and are planning an assault, the Swedes give him permission to bring a letter to Copenhagen if necessary. He then gives the Swedes a letter, which of course they immediately ride to the Swedish king and hand it over. It was perhaps a bit stupid, rather desperate, because after all these battles, Benfeldt decides that the fortress must be surrendered. This happened on September 5.
That's after you've been struggling for three weeks or so.
And there aren't that many men left, are there?
Yes, there are a lot of shattered ones.
However, the Danish king did manage to send a rescue force of 250 men up here by boat along the coast to the castle. This means that there is a short period of time when you are able to make another attack and destroy some of the Swedish trenches because you have new men. But you can't stop the Swedes. They just get closer and closer, and when the surrender finally took place, the Swedes had planned to storm the bastion at the main entrance the next day and probably had a good chance of doing so because there were many more people. Yes, there were many factors that suggested that this would not work.
Are all three of them alive at the end - Bille, Brunow and Benfeldt?
Yes, they are all alive.
And then they come to blows, so it's Benfeldt who decides that they should surrender, even though he's been told not to.
And he is also the one who negotiates the surrender agreement and the terms of the surrender. There are also some things that look a little suspicious. One of the things in the surrender agreement is that Benfeldt's wife will get back the estates on Funen that the Swedes have seized. But I have no place in the negotiations on the surrender of Kronborg, and the Swedes had also kindly told Benfeldt at an early stage: "Well, we'll take good care of your wife and children, and the land you have on Funen. We take good care of it. We've got it all under control. So they kind of had a stranglehold on the commander. He can't completely rid himself of the suspicion that he also looked after his own financial interests in connection with the surrender.
But we're not in Sweden now, so at some point it won't be Sweden anymore. Will he never be punished for that surrender?
The Danish king was at first furious and immediately sentenced Benfeldt to death as a wretched man who had surrendered the castle. I can't remember, but I think there were more punishments meted out to the others who had been commanders.
But then the war starts, and things don't go so well for the Swedes in the end, because a Dutch helper arrives. So Copenhagen gets help! I can come back to that. But in relation to that, we're also a little appeased. So Benfeldt is content to go into exile and then in the end he is actually allowed to return to Denmark. And he is now buried in Kolding Church. With a beautiful portrait painting of Benfeldt. There is no mention that he had suffered defeat at Kronborg.
That he was a coward and a selfish lout.
You could write that. I don't think he was a coward, but he was probably selfish. And he was a bit of an alcoholic. We can't quite get away from that. In any case, a Swede who talked to him wrote that he was drunk, as he used to be.
They've been in for some negotiations, and then they've kind of seen him several times and said "he was drunk, as he usually is",
Because they've heard other people before who said he was mostly drunk
So if we were defending Denmark, we'd have one of those big drunk bastards.
He's a big, drunk and very efficient bastard. Back then you could be a good military man and be drunk all the time.
Now, I'm not supposed to be knowledgeable about military matters. But I've heard military people say that you needed some unorthodox types. In reality, it shouldn't be too much straight out of the playbook and stuff like that.
But if you have someone with a personality that is weird and strange and does something you didn't expect, who could take some risks and make some decisions and cut through, then that could be very good to have. But maybe he didn't choose what the Danish king had chosen when he handed over the castle, and above all, he didn't blow it up. So we can be happy about that. Because if he had followed his orders, we wouldn't be standing here on a gun turret at Kronborg looking out over the landscape, it would just be a pile of rubble.
He kept his cool anyway, even in that way.
It's fair to say that he did.
The Dutch came. Copenhagen is still under siege, but not taken at all. Kronborg and Benfeldt surrender and get their wives and estates and so on again. What happens next? When will the Dutch arrive?
And then a Dutch fleet arrives. And now the Swedes are here at the castle. Also the Swedish King Carl Gustav. He thinks: now we'll stop the Dutch fleet with Kronborg's cannons. He stood down here on the bastions and fired the first cannon at the Dutch ships. But then he got a long nose, because none of the cannonballs could hit the Dutch ships. They sailed down in the middle of the Sound. The cannons simply cannot fire far enough from the castle, so the Dutch sailed right past the castle, and they weren't even going into the castle. They didn't want to waste their gunpowder on the castle. They knew it probably wouldn't work. Moreover, just behind the outlet into the Sound, there was a large Swedish navy, so the Dutch sailed straight down towards the Swedes, and then there was a big naval battle in the Sound. But the Dutch fought their way through the Swedish fleet and sailed on to Copenhagen and became part of the defense of Copenhagen.
It was Dutch sailors who helped defend Copenhagen when the Swedes finally decided to storm Copenhagen on the night of February 10-11, 1659. February 1659. The Swedes launched an assault on Copenhagen, but they were repelled with heavy losses, not least thanks to the Dutch help, which meant that there were more people to defend the ramparts of Copenhagen. Kronborg will remain Swedish for a while longer, but after the failed assault on Copenhagen, the spirit of Swedish warfare has been lost. Denmark also received help from some countries other than the Dutch, who moved up with their troops and fought the Swedes.
But how much more did they have of Denmark, did they only have Kronborg?
They had the whole shebang, you know. After all, Copenhagen was the last piece of Denmark left, so it could easily have gone very wrong from a Danish point of view. But that's not how it turned out,
So at some point, the Swedes give up anyway, and even though they are sitting on a lot, they retreat. And then we have our Kronborg again. But when it is, they have completely stripped it. Well, of almost everything it had.
Yes, of course they did, because the Swedish commander named Wrangel was not only a skilled commander, but he was also an avid art collector.
So when he had conquered something like Kronborg, he immediately thought: Aren't there any nice paintings I can take home with me to one of my manor houses.
And there were lots of lovely paintings all around the walls at Kronborg. Luckily, there were some other Swedes who also had interests in the art world who also wanted them. And then a little deal was made and they divided the spoils between them.
And they kept these paintings, especially those that Christian IV had commissioned for the great hall of the palace in the 1640s, which they were particularly fond of. They shared them between them, and today you can see some of those paintings at, for example, Wrangel's manor Skokloster outside Stockholm.
And is it some kind of museum now?
Yes, you could say it's a museum where you can be shown around and see some of the huge collections of art that he had stolen around the world. There are a lot of things from Danish manors and castles hanging up there.
But something was saved? Well, they skinned it, they ripped it.
But there was something about a small ship that the Swedes snuck out, because it wasn't part of the deal or anything.
When Wrangel needed to transport his artworks, the best way was to sail them. Then you didn't have to roll the paintings up, and you could put them in frames and everything and put them in the ship's hold. And that's why he had a ship to send down to Swedish Forpommern, they said.
He also had some manor houses in what is now northern Germany, and he needed someone to sail the ship. And he had a crew that was partly Swedish, but also a number of Danes who had gone into Swedish service when Kronborg had fallen. It was very common back then.
When you surrendered, all the soldiers just went over to the enemy and kept on fighting with them. They had to make a living, they were professionals. Anyway, there was a Danish soldier on this ship that was to take down Wrangel's spoils of war. His name was Jacob Dannefærd, and he had decided that he would try to pull off a coup. So when the ship had sailed from Kronborg and down through Øresund, he and some other Danish crew members sealed the Swedish crew in the hold so they couldn't interfere. And then he held the Swedish captain up with a pistol. And then they changed course and ran away as they approached Copenhagen with Wrangel's spoils of war. There was a Swedish warship with them, but it discovered too late that the others had escaped. So even though they fired at them, they couldn't stop the Swedish ship. So it ran straight into Copenhagen harbor and was met with some confusion, of course.
What was a Swedish warship doing there? But then the explanation was discovered, and Jakob Dannefærd of course received a royal reward.
What was in the cargo returned to Danish ownership, and there were at least a couple of the history paintings here from Kronborg that Wrangel wanted to keep, which ended up staying in Denmark. And one of them is still hanging on the wall, it's now back on the wall here at Kronborg. It depicts Margrethe subjugating the Swedes.
There could be no better motive for the medieval duke or king, Albrecht of Mecklenburg and the Swedish king, who must kneel humiliated in front of the proudly standing Danish Queen Margrethe who united the entire Nordic region. It was a really good motive to secure Denmark. The other thing that was saved was the battle where the Dannebrog fell from the sky in Tallin in 1219. That was also really good. Unfortunately, we can't see that painting today, because it was at Christiansborg Castle. And Christiansborg Castle burned down in the late 1700s with that painting.
Here at Kronborg you can see that the painting of Margrethe.
Because you can, yes.
This was just a small part of Kronborg's history. A little peek into the history of Denmark's largest Renaissance castle. The castle has gone through many wild things in the years it has stood where Denmark almost kisses Sweden on the foot. There's no longer any reason to believe that Kronborg's cannons can shoot ships into the Sound or be used to throw parties for Europe's royalty and nobility, firing them every time someone says cheers.
In return, we now have a castle full of stories whose echoes we can still hear.