A Danish castle town on the Guldborgsund, where Christopher II died in 1332 leaving a kingdom entirely pawned to German counts and no king after him for eight years.
Nykøbing stands on the island of Falster, on the Guldborgsund — the narrow channel dividing Falster from Lolland. Like most Danish towns of any age it grew up around a castle, and the castle was there because of the water: it was built to control the strait and to guard against seaborne raiding.
It belongs in the archive because of a single date. Christopher II of Denmark died here on 2 August 1332, and what makes that death significant is not the man but the state of the realm he left: every part of Denmark was mortgaged to German creditors, and for eight years afterwards the country had no king at all.
Fortifications were thrown up on a peninsula in the Guldborgsund at the end of the twelfth century, at the narrowest point of the channel, as protection against Wendish pirates from the southern Baltic shore — a real and persistent danger to the Danish islands before Valdemar I and Absalon broke Wendish naval power. Those works were later converted into Nykøbing Castle.
The castle was besieged and burned repeatedly through the Middle Ages, which is the ordinary career of a strongpoint on a contested waterway. Christopher II took it in 1329, and after his death it was pawned out for years along with everything else. It later served as a residence for widowed Danish queens. Today essentially nothing of it survives: a modest ruin of one tower, known as Fars Hat, is all that is left.
The town beside the castle received trading privileges from Valdemar II, who reigned from 1202 to 1241, but did not become a chartered market town proper until 1560 — a reminder that "town" in the Danish islands could mean a small cluster of houses serving a castle for centuries before it acquired formal status.
Its principal medieval building came late. Eric of Pomerania founded a Franciscan friary at the chapel of St Nicolai in 1419, and the Gothic friary church, the Klosterkirken, was built around 1500. It remained part of the friary until 1532, when it became the parish church, and much of the conventual range survives in later use. With the fragment of the castle tower, it is what the Middle Ages left in Nykøbing.
Christopher II was elected in 1320 on a charter that stripped the crown of most of its powers, and he spent his reign borrowing against the kingdom to pay for wars he lost. The mortgages were not figures of speech: Jutland was pledged to Count Gerhard III of Holstein for 100,000 marks of silver, to be redeemed only if the whole sum could be laid on the table at once, and Count John III held Funen and Zealand on similar terms.
Deposed, exiled and then restored as a figurehead, Christopher lost the last of his authority after a military defeat at the Dannevirke in 1331. The counts left him his title and nothing else. When he died the following year, Gerhard and John simply continued to hold the country as security for debts nobody could pay, and no successor was elected until Valdemar IV came to the throne in 1340 and began buying the kingdom back piece by piece.
Christopher died on 2 August 1332, aged about fifty-five, and was buried at Sorø Abbey. The date is not in question; the place is less settled than it looks. Danish reference works place the death at Nykøbing Castle on Falster, and that is the tradition this article follows and the reason the archive records it here. Other accounts place his last months and death on Lolland, at Aalholm, where he is said to have been held after the counts stripped him of everything, and one Danish authority says only that he died "on Lolland".
The two versions are a few kilometres and one channel apart, and both describe the same thing: a king without power, kept in a castle in the southern islands by the men who owned his kingdom. The archive states the divergence rather than choosing between them.