The chief city of medieval Denmark at the head of its fjord: Harald Bluetooth’s church and royal seat, a bishopric from 1020, the brick cathedral begun about 1170 that holds the kings, the scene of the Bloodfeast of 1157, and the capital until Copenhagen replaced it in 1443.
Roskilde lies at the southern end of Roskilde Fjord, a shallow inlet running some thirty kilometres inland from the Isefjord and the Kattegat. The name is usually explained as Ro’s spring, from a legendary king Ro or Roar said to have lived there, with kilde, a spring — the town sits above a line of springs on the slope down to the water.
For most of the Middle Ages it was the largest and most important town in Denmark: a royal seat, the head of a rich bishopric, and by the twelfth century a city of a dozen churches and five religious houses. The cathedral that holds the Danish monarchs still dominates it.
Harald Bluetooth, the king who declared on the great stone at Jelling that he had made the Danes Christian, is credited with founding Roskilde in the 980s, building a wooden church dedicated to the Holy Trinity on the rise above the harbour and a royal residence beside it. He was buried in that church after his death in 985 or 986, by the tradition the later cathedral inherited.
Roskilde’s early importance was a matter of water. The fjord is long, shallow and hard to navigate without local knowledge, which made the town far safer from seaborne raiders than a coastal site, while still giving its ships a way out to the Kattegat and the Baltic. The defence was deliberate as well as natural: about 1060 to 1070 five ships were deliberately sunk in the Peberrende channel at Skuldelev, roughly twenty kilometres down the fjord, to block the approach. They were salvaged between 1957 and 1962 and are now the core of the Viking Ship Museum in the town; one of them, a longship, was built near Dublin about 1042.
Cnut the Great raised Roskilde to a bishopric in 1020, which fixed its rank for the rest of the Middle Ages: its bishops were among the greatest men in the kingdom and its diocese covered Zealand and, from the twelfth century, the new town of Copenhagen. Bishop Svend Nordmand built a Romanesque church of travertine about 1080 to replace the wooden one.
The building that stands today was begun about 1170 in the episcopate of Absalon, the warrior bishop and adviser of Valdemar I, though recent work gives a larger share of the initiative to his successor Peder Sunesen. It was built of brick, a material then new in the north, and is among the earliest Gothic brick cathedrals in Scandinavia; the choir was consecrated in 1225, most of the work was finished by about 1280, and the western towers were completed in 1405. It became the model for brick church building around the Baltic and was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.
The cathedral is the burial church of the Danish monarchy. Sweyn II Estridsson, who died in 1076, lies there; so does Margaret I, whose alabaster sarcophagus was carved by the Lübeck sculptor Johannes Junge in 1423, and Christopher of Bavaria, who died in 1448. By the time of the Reformation in 1536 the town had twelve churches and five monasteries around it. Not every king who died at Roskilde stayed in it: Eric VI of Denmark died in the town on 13 November 1319 and was carried to Ringsted to be buried among the Valdemars whose reigns he had spent his own trying to match.
For a decade Denmark was fought over by three claimants — Sweyn III, Canute V and Valdemar — in shifting alliances and open war. Exhausted, in July 1157 they agreed to divide the kingdom between them and to seal the settlement at a feast of reconciliation in Roskilde.
At the feast, on 9 August 1157, Sweyn sprang his trap and his men fell on the other two. Canute V was killed outright; Valdemar, though wounded, cut his way out and escaped to Jutland. The treachery turned the country against Sweyn, and Valdemar destroyed him at the Battle of Grathe Heath that October, becoming Valdemar I and founding the dynasty that made Denmark a Baltic power. Saxo Grammaticus, writing a generation later under Absalon’s patronage, gave the story the shape it has kept.
Medieval Roskilde was a church town more than a trading one. Its wealth came from the bishopric’s estates, the cathedral chapter, the religious houses and the royal court rather than from a great volume of shipping, and the fjord that protected it also limited it: the largest vessels of the later Middle Ages could not easily work so far up a shallow inlet.
Copenhagen, on the open Sound with deep water and a position on the busiest sea lane in northern Europe, grew at its expense. In 1443 the royal residence was moved there and Roskilde ceased to be the capital, though it kept its bishop and its cathedral. The Treaty of Roskilde, signed in the town in 1658, later surrendered the Scanian provinces to Sweden, and the city has been a cathedral town in the shadow of the capital ever since.