Introduction

On the eve of the Black Death, Denmark covered almost 70,000 km2 and included three important populous regions situated along the southern tip of the Scandinavian Peninsula that were lost to Sweden in the mid-1600s, namely Scania, Halland and Blekinge. The size of Denmark’s medieval population is not known but it was certainly much larger than Norway’s or Sweden’s, possibly as big as the combined populations of those two countries. That is the main reason Denmark was the great political power on the Nordic political scene in the Middle Ages. This also means that Denmark’s population density was much higher than in the other Nordic countries, perhaps something of the order of magnitude of 10 persons/km2, which is, nonetheless, much smaller than in contemporary England or France. Around 1300, Denmark had over seventy towns and was far more urbanized than the other Nordic countries.

The year of the Black Death in Denmark: was it 1348, 1349 or 1350?

The scholarly discussion of the Black Death’s history in Denmark begins with a statement in the Chronicle of Zealand (Sjellandske krønike) to the effect that ‘a pestilence ravaged the country’ in 1348, and that, in 1349, ‘there was a great mortality in Denmark’. E. Ulsig, who published the current standard work on the history of the Black Death in Denmark in 1991, considers that the Chronicle misdates the outbreak of the Black Death, and redates it to 1349:

It is difficult to understand why it should be impossible that the Black Death could have reached Denmark in 1348, when it had landed in southern England in May, had broken out in June, and, in the autumn, had spread all the way to Kent, London and deeply into Suffolk along the R. Stour on the county’s southern border with Essex in south-eastern England.