The Slavic-origin dynasty of the dukes of Pomerania, whose scion Eric of Pomerania ruled the three kingdoms of the Kalmar Union.
The Griffins emerged as dukes of Pomerania in the early twelfth century, a Slavic-origin dynasty on the frontier where the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, and the pagan Baltic peoples met. Duke Wartislaw I accepted Christianity during the missions of the 1120s, and his descendants held Pomerania — often divided among branches such as Pomerania-Wolgast and Pomerania-Stettin — for five centuries until the line died out in 1637.
Their emblem, the red griffin, gave the house its name and still appears in the arms of the Pomeranian lands.
The dynasty’s greatest prize came through kinship with Denmark. Margaret I, who had united Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, had no surviving child, and she adopted her great-nephew, the Griffin prince Bogislaw, renamed Eric, as heir. Crowned king of the three realms in 1397, Eric ruled the Kalmar Union in his own right after Margaret’s death in 1412.
His long reign was consumed by wars with the Hanseatic League and the Holstein counts over Schleswig, and by heavy taxation that alienated the Swedes. Rebellion drove him out: deposed in all three kingdoms by 1439, he withdrew to the island of Gotland, from which he raided Baltic shipping as a freebooter before returning at last to Pomerania.
Eric’s fall passed the union crowns first to the Wittelsbach Christopher of Bavaria and then to the House of Oldenburg, but the Griffins kept Pomerania. The duchy remained a Baltic power, contested between Brandenburg and, later, Sweden, until the last Griffin duke died in 1637 during the Thirty Years’ War and the lands were partitioned.
The house is remembered as the long-lived native dynasty of Pomerania and, briefly, as the ruling family of all three Scandinavian kingdoms.