The royal castle on the southern tip of Zealand: Valdemar I’s war harbour against the Wends, the place where the Code of Jutland was given in 1241, and the largest fortress in medieval Denmark.
Vordingborg on the southern tip of Zealand was one of medieval Denmark’s most important royal fortresses, guarding sea routes between Denmark and Germany. Valdemar I of Denmark died there in 1182 after a reign that consolidated Danish royal power across Scandinavia.
The site is a low headland above the Storstrømmen, the strait dividing Zealand from Falster, and it sat on the shortest crossing from the Danish islands towards the Wendish coast. That position made it a harbour for royal fleets rather than a frontier watchtower, and three generations of kings used it as the place from which Danish power was pushed south across the Baltic.
The first castle is dated to 1175, when Valdemar I raised a walled stronghold above the anchorage as a base for the campaigns against the Wendish peoples of the southern Baltic. The fleets that Valdemar and Archbishop Absalon led against the pagan strongholds of Rügen in the late 1160s and the raids of the decades that followed were mustered from harbours of this kind, and Vordingborg became the most used of them.
What the king needed there was not a border fortress but a place to assemble ships, men and stores at the point where the crossing was shortest. The early castle was accordingly a curtain wall enclosing a large yard rather than a tight keep, and the town that grew beside it lived off the traffic the campaigns brought.
In March 1241 Valdemar II of Denmark held a royal assembly at Vordingborg and there gave the Code of Jutland, the law book that governed Jutland and Funen and remained in force until the Danish Code replaced it in 1683. Its prologue opens with the sentence that later generations made a national motto: with law shall the land be built.
The king did not long outlive the assembly. Valdemar II died at Vordingborg on 28 March 1241, and the peace he had imposed on his sons collapsed almost at once into a quarrel over the duchy of Schleswig that ran for the rest of the century. The law he gave at Vordingborg outlasted the dynastic settlement he could not secure.
The castle that left the visible ruins was built for Valdemar IV Atterdag around 1364, in the years when he was recovering a kingdom that had been pawned piece by piece to German creditors. Nine towers stood along a curtain wall about 800 metres long, enclosing a yard large enough to hold an army: nothing else built in medieval Scandinavia matched it.
One of the nine survives. The Goose Tower stands 26 metres high, its wall some 3.5 metres thick at the base and thinning to less than a metre near the top, and it guarded the gate into the inner castle. Vordingborg served as a residence, a mint and a place for negotiating with the Hanseatic towns whose fleets Valdemar had fought.
The gilded goose on the tower’s spire carries the best-known Danish story about the place: that Valdemar IV, receiving a declaration of war from a league of German towns, set a golden goose above his gate and said he feared them no more than a flock of cackling geese. The present bird is not the king’s. It was made in 1871, and regilded with two kilograms of gold a century later.
The story is late and the ornament is modern, but the sentiment fits the reign. Valdemar spent the 1360s at war with the Hanseatic towns and lost: the Treaty of Stralsund of 1370 gave the league fortresses on the Sound and a voice in choosing his successor.
The fortress lost its purpose once the Danish crown’s wars moved elsewhere, and the buildings inside the walls were quarried away. On 24 December 1808 the Goose Tower was placed under the protection of the Danish state, the first historic monument in the country to be protected in that way.
What survives today is the tower, long stretches of the fourteenth-century curtain wall and the earthworks of the yard, with the Danish Castle Centre museum beside them displaying the finds from continuing excavation on the site.