Eric VI Menved (1286–1319) came to Denmark's throne as a boy after his father's murder at Finderup, fought the archbishops and Norway, and mortgaged the kingdom for Baltic glory that died with his childless line.
Eric Menved became king at twelve, the night after the most famous murder in Danish history — his father stabbed fifty-six times at Finderup — and reigned under its shadow: the outlawed magnates blamed for the deed raided Denmark for decades from Norwegian bases.
His mature policy was imperial nostalgia: to rebuild the Valdemars' Baltic dominion. Rostock, Lübeck's submission, lordship over the north German coast — each success was bought with borrowed silver and provinces pawned to Holstein counts and German princes. He crushed a peasant rising in Jutland, died childless in 1319, and left his brother a kingdom already sold.
Eric was born in 1274 to Eric V Klipping and Agnes of Brandenburg. On 22 November 1286 his father was murdered in a barn at Finderup; the regency for the boy king — his mother and her Brandenburg kin — fixed guilt at the Nyborg assembly of 1287 on Marshal Stig Andersen and eight companions, who fled to Norway and turned outlaw-corsairs against their own country.
Whether the condemned men were guilty remains one of Danish history's open questions; what mattered politically was the standing war it created with Norway, which sheltered the outlaws, and the fortress of Hjelm from which they harried the coasts through Eric's youth.
The annals and the German town chronicles show a king of genuine magnificence and dangerous appetite for it: the knighting festival at Rostock in 1311, with its tournaments and imported princes, was the talk of the north for a generation — and was held on credit. His byname "Menved", of debated meaning, contemporaries connected to a favourite oath of his.
His conflict with the church displays the harder edge: Archbishop Jens Grand of Lund, kinsman and partisan of the outlaws, was seized in 1294 and held in irons at Søborg until he escaped through the latrine — an outrage that cost Eric papal interdict and a crushing fine before the compromise of 1303. Yet even hostile tradition allows him courage, piety of the conventional kind, and a genuine, doomed constancy: fourteen children born to him and Ingeborg of Sweden, and all fourteen dead — the last, tradition says, dropped from the queen's arms from a carriage — a private catastrophe contemporaries read across his later years.
The Norwegian war over the outlaws ran hot and cold to 1309, the outlaw base at Hjelm was finally reduced, and the North German project then absorbed everything: Rostock taken under Danish lordship in 1300, the great coalition wars of 1307–1317 that made Eric overlord of Mecklenburg, Rostock, and for a time Lübeck itself. Every campaign was financed by pledging royal lands and revenues — by his death most of Funen and great tracts of Jutland and Zealand stood pawned to Holstein and German creditors.
The bill came home in blood as well: the Jutland peasants and lesser gentry rose against the war taxes in 1313 and were broken at Kolding, punishment castles rising over the rebel districts. His sister Martha's marriage made him arbiter of Sweden's civil wars, where his brother-in-law King Birger's murder of his own brothers at Nyköping in 1317 — an atrocity Danish policy was tangled in — destroyed Danish influence there too.
Eric died at Roskilde on 13 November 1319 and was buried at Ringsted among the Valdemars he had emulated, under the magnificent brass that still covers him and Ingeborg. He left no heir and a crown so encumbered that his brother Christopher II had to sign the most humiliating accession charter in Danish history to receive it.
Within a decade of his death the monarchy effectively dissolved into its creditors' hands — the kingless years of Holstein rule — until his great-nephew Valdemar IV spent a reign redeeming what Eric had pawned. His tomb remains his best monument: the imperial style, executed beautifully, over an empty succession.