Copenhagen Castle

Bishop Absalon fortified the islet of Slotsholmen in Copenhagen's harbour in 1167, a courtyard of several buildings inside a wall. The Lübeckers pulled that castle down in 1369 after the Hanseatic capture of the city, and in the years that followed a new stronghold went up on earthworks heaped over its ruins. Nobody recorded when it was finished, but a captain of the place is named in 1387, so it was probably standing by then. Valdemar Atterdag had taken over Absalon's castle in 1343 and at his death in 1375 the right to the site reverted to the see of Roskilde, so the builder was either the king or Bishop Niels Jacobsen Ulfeldt.

The new castle kept inside the old circuit: a curtain wall and a circular moat some 50 metres across on the inside, entered through one large, solid gate tower. The bishops of Roskilde held it until 1417, when Eric of Pomerania seized it and ended more than two centuries of argument over who owned Slotsholmen. The seizure belonged to his campaign to control the Sound trade, alongside Krogen at Elsinore - Kronborg's predecessor - Landskrona and Malmöhus.

The Hanseatic towns answered that policy with war. In 1428, during the Dano-Hanseatic war of 1426-1435, a powerful Hanseatic fleet attacked the castle and the town in the bombardment of Copenhagen. The attack was driven off by Eric's queen, Philippa, who directed the defence from Copenhagen Castle.

Christopher of Bavaria moved to Copenhagen in 1443 and the castle became a royal dwelling; under him and the kings who followed it grew into their preferred seat, and from the middle of the fifteenth century it served as the monarch's main residence and the centre of government. Though the king still travelled his realm with the chancery in his train, Copenhagen Castle came to be regarded as its home. Taxes and royal revenues from the whole country were carried to its tower, Christopher established an administrative archive there, and in 1582 the records of the realm were gathered into the castle vault.

The dynastic occasions followed the government. Christopher married Dorothea of Brandenburg at the castle in 1445; four years later Dorothea married his successor Christian I there, and Christian II married Isabella of Habsburg there in 1515. Christian I built a knights' hall, the Dandsesal, which King Hans completed in 1503, and Christian II fitted out a new castle chapel with a five-winged late Gothic altarpiece made at Antwerp about 1520.

When the realm rose against Christian II in 1523, Copenhagen stood with the king. Sailing to the Netherlands to fetch reinforcements, he left the castle to his supporter Henrik Gøye; after a siege that ran from June to December, Christian's uncle Duke Frederick took town and castle, and with them his hold on the kingdom.

The fight for Slotsholmen was not finished. In 1534, during the Count's Feud, the town opened its gates to Christian II's champion Count Christopher of Oldenburg, who set up his residence in the castle. Christian III's siege began in 1535 and starved town and castle to the last extremity before they surrendered in 1536. The siege had shown the place to be obsolete as a fortress. In his expansion of 1552-58 Christian III built out into the moat and put up buildings beyond it for the functions the castle had housed, including an access bridge and harbour and shipyard works for the fleet, leaving Copenhagen Castle a residence and no longer part of the town's defences.

Christian IV marked his coronation in 1596 by heightening the great gate tower and setting a spire on it. Known thereafter as the Blue Tower, it made its name as a prison: Leonora Christina Ulfeldt was held in it for twenty-one years.

The castle was long reckoned the meanest princely residence in Europe, an embarrassment to the royal house and to the country. Frederik IV had it rebuilt in the 1720s: the moat was filled and levelled, the castle's crooked plan with all its corners and outshots was squared into a regular five-sided baroque block, and the wings were raised to a uniform five storeys, the Blue Tower left standing but cut through by the new main gate to the courtyard. The work was finished in 1728.

The rebuilt castle was darker and more cramped inside than before, and so heavy that the walls began to slip and crack. Christian VI, succeeding Frederik IV in 1730, decided almost at once that an entirely new palace was needed, and the demolition of Copenhagen Castle began in 1731 to clear the ground for the first Christiansborg.