A Pomeranian port at the mouth of the Wieprza, with a ducal castle begun about 1352, where Eric of Pomerania ruled his duchy after losing the Scandinavian crowns and died in 1459.
Rügenwalde — Darłowo in Polish — stands where the Wieprza reaches the Baltic on the Pomeranian coast, close enough to the sea for ships and far enough up the river for shelter. A stronghold called Dirlow is recorded at the river mouth by the eleventh century, and the town proper was probably founded in 1270 by Wizlaw II of Rügen, appearing in a document of 5 February 1271.
Destroyed in 1283, it was refounded and granted Lübeck law on 21 May 1312, the legal template that shaped most German-speaking Baltic towns. It matters to the archive as the place where Eric of Pomerania, who had ruled Denmark, Sweden and Norway together, lived out his last decade as a local duke.
Darłowo was a working port rather than a great city. It joined the Hanseatic League as a full member in 1412 and built up a merchant fleet larger than those of the neighbouring towns; its ships traded regularly with Lübeck and sailed as far as Normandy and Spain.
That reach explains both the town’s prosperity and its politics. A Baltic port lived by the herring, grain and timber trades and by the privileges that protected them, which made the Hanseatic connection more consequential to daily life here than the identity of whichever duke held the castle.
Duke Bogusław V began building the castle about 1352, having bought the river island and its mill from a wealthy Darłowo burgher, Elizabeth von Behr, in order to put a fortress on it. The result is a compact Gothic brick castle standing in the water, and it is the only ducal castle of its kind on what is now the Polish coast.
Its position is the point: an island site in the river, inside the town but not of it, defensible against both a seaborne raid and the townspeople. It served as a princely residence for the Griffin dukes of Pomerania and it is the building around which everything else in the town’s medieval history is arranged.
Eric was born in Pomerania about 1382, was adopted as heir by Margaret I, and from 1396 ruled the Kalmar Union — Denmark, Sweden and Norway under one crown. His long attempt to govern the three kingdoms as a single state, and to finance it through the Sound Dues, collapsed in rebellion, and he was deposed from all three by the end of the 1430s.
He withdrew to Gotland and used it as a base from which he preyed on Baltic shipping, until he gave that up too and returned to the duchy he had come from. From 1449 until his death he ruled at Rügenwalde and worked to enlarge his Pomeranian holdings, a man who had governed three kingdoms and ended by administering a coastal lordship.
He died on 3 May 1459 and was buried in St Mary’s Church in the town, where his sarcophagus can still be seen. It is a genuinely unusual monument: the tomb of a king of three Scandinavian realms in a parish church on the Pomeranian shore.
The medieval town plan survived the centuries largely intact — the old town, the market square, the churches and the castle all keep the shape they were given in the fourteenth century. Of the town’s gates, only the High Gate still stands.
For a place whose name in the archive is attached to the death of a deposed king, the substantial thing is that the setting is still legible: the castle he lived in, the church he is buried in, and the street pattern he would have known are all there.