Queen Magrethe I, Pt. 2
One of my favorite things about writing this blog is the conversations I have with my readers about the subjects of my posts, or in fact about history in general.
This morning I got a sidebar to the life of Queen Margrethe I from textile maven Julie Holyoke, who is my cousin by marriage and by choice. I thought it was absolutely fascinating. And, as you know, when I find a fascinating historical tidbit, I like to share.*
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- Original gown, Cathedral Museum, Uppsala
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- Reconstructed gown. @Laila Duran
As I learned from Kelcey Wilson-Lee’s Daughters of Chivalry, many of our historical sources for the lives of medieval royal women include descriptions of real-life “princess dresses.” But few of those gown survive. A major exception is a gold brocade gown traditionally believed to have belonged to Queen Margrethe I of Norway, Denmark and Sweden(1353-1412) .
The gown was long believed to be the gown Margrethe wore when she married King Haakon VI of Norway in 1363. It’s a romantic story for a gorgeous gown, but modern science has debunked it. Carbon-dating places the dress between 1400 and 1439. Some scholars suggest that it may have belonged to Phillipa of England (1394-1430), who was married by proxy to Margrethe’s adopted nephew and heir when she was eleven.**
Regardless of which Scandinavian queen wore the gown, it is fabulous. Made of gold brocade with a pomegranate pattern on a red silk background, it may well have cost more than Margrethe’s crown.
*Here’s the link to article that sent me down the rabbit hole: https://www.medieval.eu/royal-golden-dress-from-ca-1400-returns-to-denmark/ Julie tells me that a friend of hers created the museum reconstruction. Julie herself reconstucted materials for another of Margrethe’s gowns, now on permanent display in Copenhagen.
**Reminding you once again, that medieval princesses did not have much romance in their lives.
Queen Margrethe I and the Kalmar Union
At this point our trip to Norway back in June seems like a distant memory, and some of the stories I planned to share with you seem equally vague. But one story resonated with me too strongly to ignore: Queen Margrethe (1353-1412), the first great ruling queen in European history.
Like many ruling queens in medieval Europe, Margrethe came to power as a queen regent not a queen regnant.
The daughter of the the King of Denmark, she was betrothed to Haakon, the king of Norway, when she was six years old for dynastic reasons. (They were married when she was ten. Being a medieval princess was not an easy gig.) By the time their only son, Olaf, was born in 1370,* Margrethe had already demonstrated talent as a ruler.
In the coming years, Margarthe proved to be a master of dynastic chess. Here are the highpoints:
• When her father died in 1375, she succeeded in getting her five-year-old son elected to the Danish throne.
• When her husband died in 1380, she became regent of both Denmark and Norway in her son’s name.
• Olaf came of age in 1385, but Margrethe continued to rule along side him. Together they prepared to go to war against Sweden to claim the Swedish crown—Olaf’s grandfather had been the king of Sweden for a time.
• Olaf died suddenly in 1387. Margrethe adopted her six-year-old nephew, Eric of Pomerania, as her heir and continued to rule Denmark and Norway as regent.
• She then went after Sweden, though the claim to the throne had died with Olaf. By 1389 she was the undisputed ruler of the three Scandinavian states, though still officially as regent.
Even after Eric’s coronation in 1396, Margrethe remained Scandinavia’s actual ruler until her death.
Margrethe’s reign shaped Scandinavia for centuries. The three Scandinavian states were united in 1397 under the Kalmar Union, which united Denmark, Norway and Sweden until 1523 and Denmark and Norway until 1814.
Mighty important for someone who didn’t show up in any of my world history classes--or in either of the two books I own titled Medieval People.
*You do the math.
In which I review Abbott Kahler’s Eden Undone
Abbott Kahler, who previously published under the name Karen Abbot, consistently writes works of narrative non-fiction that combine impeccable research, the story-telling devices of fiction, memorable characters, and impeccable prose. As a reader, I find it hard to put them down. As a writer, I marvel at her writing chops. As a reviewer, I struggle to write about them, because I don’t want to spoil any of the twists and turns.
Her newest book, Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia, has twists and turns aplenty and characters who blow past memorable to just plain crazy.
The book tells the story of three separate groups of Europeans who fled the fracturing world of Europe between the two world wars for the Galápagos Islands. Each group set out to create their own vision of a utopian paradise.
Kahler makes it clear from page one that their differing dreams of Utopia fail. She opens the book in 1934 with a macabre discovery on a tiny remote island in the northern part of the Galápagos: two bodies that had been mummified by the tropical sun. The two had died of thirst, leaving behind an overturned skiff, baby clothes, several photographs, and a batch of letters.
Leaving us with no hints about who the bodies were, or why they had ended up on a lava-covered island with no fresh water, she moves back several years and introduces us to the three groups who settled on the nearby island of Floreana: a German doctor with extreme ideas about health and natural living and his married lover/patient, a traumatized German veteran of the Great War and his family, and a gun-toting, riding crop-waving Austrian baroness known as “Crazy Panties” and her two young male paramours. Each of the three groups had different ideas about their island paradise should look like and conflict between them was inevitable and ultimately violent.
Eden Undone is beautifully written, intense, and creepy. A perfect book to pick up for the spooky season.