ing even that such a document had existed, yet it remained without any influence on the relations of the kingdom; no reference was ever made to it by the Holstein Counts during their disputes with Denmark at that time, and the dukes of South Jutland continued to recognize the kings of Denmark as their lawful liege-lords. Yet we shall presently see an attempt of the Holsteiners to re-establish this imaginary constitution of Valdemar the Minor, in the concessions of Count Christian of Oldenborg, to his uncle, Count Adolph of Holstein, in 1448, on which they, at the present day, build all their pretensions to their right of a "Schleswig-Holstein union." Christopher II., in the mean time, returned from his retreat in Mecklenburg, and the Danes flocked round him with hopes to escape from German oppression. He regained his crown, and young Valdemar Erikson, renouncing his ephemeral dignity, returned to his duchy of South Jutland, which Count Gerhard surrendered to him. But the weak and despicable Christopher II., encompassed by enemies on all sides, not only recognized the succession of the Counts of Schauenborg to the Danish banner-fief of South Jutland, in case of the death of Valdemar without male heirs, but, in his pecuniary distress, mortgaged the whole of North Jutland to Count Gerhard for a sum of money, and the islands to Count John of Itzehoe. These chieftains immediately occupied the Danish provinces thus surrendered to them, with their wild bands of German hirelings and adventurers. Poor, distracted Denmark had never found herself in greater distress. Her prelates and nobles fawned on the high-plumed foreigners; her industrious citizens and brave yeomanry were alike oppressed by their countrymen and enemies, and treated as if they were serfs. Her nationality seemed on the point of perishing beneath that of the Germans; her political power was on the eve of a total dissolution. King Christopher died broken-hearted on the Island of Falster in 1333; the province of Scania rose in arms, slaughtered the German condottieri, and united with Sweden. Yet the Holsteiners, with their active and ambitious chief, Count Gerhard, one of the greatest warriors of the age, still possess ed all the mainland. Attempts at insurrection were made, but the Danes were

routed in every battle. Otho, the prince royal, defeated near Viborg, was carried a prisoner to the gloomy castle of Segeberg in Holstein. Valdemar, his younger brother, lived an exile at the court of Brandenburg. The cruelty and exactions of the foreign soldiery now became insupportable; even the good-natured Jutes at last were roused to resistance, when Count Gerhard, at the head of ten thousand Germans, began devastating that unhappy country with fire and sword. But the hour of retribution had arrived. The Danish knight, Niels Ebbesen of Nörreriis, on the 18h of March, 1340, with sixty daring followers, entered the castle of Randers, and slew the count in the midst of his numerous mercenaries. Prince Valdemar Christopherson now returned from Germany, and succeeded by his prudence, perseverance, and eminent political talents, in redeeming nearly all the alienated and mortgaged provinces of the kingdom. He was less successful in his exertions to recover South Jutland. The male line of Abel's descendants became extinct in 1375. The old wary King Valdemar III. had foreseen this important event, and a Danish army immediately entered the duchy and occupied its principal towns. But the Holstein Count, Iron-Henry, the chivalrous son of the great Gerhard, was still more prompt. He took possession of the castle of Gottorp and was attacking the Danes, when the news of the death of King Valdemar, at Vordingborg in Zealand, again suspended the war. His nobleminded daughter, Margaretha, the Semiramis of the North, governed the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway in the name of her son Oluf Hakonson, and being pressed by a disastrous war with the overbearing Hanseatic confederation, and desiring the aid of the Counts of Holstein, she, at an assembly of the Danish nobility, at Nyborg, in 1386, bestowed upon the Count Gerhard of Rendsborg, the son of Iron-Henry, the much disputed duchy of South Jutland, as a banner-fief of the Danish crown, to remain indivisible in the hands of only one of the counts, who, as a Danish vassal, had to perform the usual feudal military service to his liege-lord. The act did not expressly state whether the fief was personal or hereditary; and the Danish kings demanded the repetition of the oath of allegiance at every succession

This sacrifice of the most beautiful province of the kingdom had been forced on the queen by the internal distraction and political weakness of Denmark; and although she afterwards succeeded in placing the crowns of the three Scandinavian nations on her head by the celebrated Calmarian union in 1396, yet the favorite scheme of her life was the reunion of the duchy of South Jutland with the kingdom of Denmark. Circumstances seemed in her favor. The warlike Duke Gerhard, the first who assumed the title of Duke of Schleswig, had perished in battle against the Ditmarskers, in 1404. His sons Henry, Adolph and Gerhard, were minors, and the youngest still unborn.

Queen Margaretha, by her consummate skill in employing persuasion and force alternately, might perhaps have seen her exertions crowned with success; but her death in 1412, and the violence and indiscretion of her unworthy nephew, Erik of Pomerania, who inherited her triple crown, kindled a most bloody and untoward twenty years' war with the young dukes, which fill the most disgraceful pages in the annals of Denmark. Though Erik disposed of the united armies and fleets of the whole north, that dastard and indolent king was foiled in every attempt to repossess himself of Schleswig. In 1420, a Danish army of nearly a hundred thousand men suffered a terrible defeat at Immervad; and Flensborg, the only city still occupied by the king, was on the point of surrendering to the gallant Duke Henry, and his Hanseatic allies, when both the contending parties were invited to appear before the throne of the German Emperor Sigismund, who offered himself as umpire in this odious dispute. King Erik at once accepted the invitation, and departed for Germany. The young Counts of Holstein, on the contrary, preferred the prosecution of the war, until at last Henry, yielding to the exhortations of the clergy, presented himself at the Imperial Court at Buda in Hungary, in 1424. Here he found a splendid assembly of German princes and Madjar magnates, as assessors, attending on the decision of the emperor. King Erik and his Danish nobles, sure of gaining their cause, had already left Hungary, and undertaken a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

It is very interesting to observe the same uncertainty about the relations between the duchies and Denmark, in the writings of the historians of the fifteenth century as among the diplomatists and politicians of the present day. It appears, nevertheless, that the principal point in dispute on the part of the vassals at that time was their refusal to render feudal homage and military aid to their liege-lord. How ever this might have been, certain it is that when the imperial umpire demanded the production of all the former documents and acts of feoffment, setting forth the claims of the Counts of Holstein to the duchy, Henry of Schauenborg could on's refer to the vague expressions of the act of 1386 and point to his good sword for the rest of the evidence. The imperial sentence was pronounced on the 28th of June. 1424, according to which the emperor, as the chosen umpire of both parties, having consulted the prelates, knights, professors and lawyers of the Roman Empire, resolved: "that the whole of South Jutkad with the city of Schleswig, the castle of Gottorp and other towns, the Danish wood (Dänisch Wold,) the island of Ak and the coast district of the Friesians, with all rights and privileges, had ever belonge to the king and kingdom of Denmark: likewise that the Counts Henry, Adolph and Gerhard, neither had possessed nor dic possess any hereditary right to the duchy. By that sentence, the constitution of Duke Valdemar of 1326, if ever it had er isted, was then declared invalid, and Schleswig was pronounced an appare nance of the Danish realm. Henry, in dignant at the apparent injustice of the imperial decision, solemnly protested, and appealed to the Pope. But Martia V. feeling himself in a difficult position be tween the council of Constanz and the Emperor, and intimidated by a misse from the latter, in which he advised hinte confine his attention to ecclesiastical a contented himself with exhorting th Counts of Holstein to pious submission, an to peace with Denmark.

Both parties then returned to the rank and the war in Schleswig was carry of with renewed strength. In 1427, Henry fell before Flensborg; but his wart brother Adolph continued the contest wat extraordinary energy and success.

province of Denmark, should be at last incorporated with the kingdom and separated from Holstein, or again become united with the latter, by a new investiture of the king, was now to be determined. But a new difficulty had unexpectedly been created by the fact that the Duke Adolph, moved perhaps by his old rancor towards Denmark, against whom he had spent his youth in hard fighting, and still more by his natural desire to preserve the close union of his two beautiful states, had persuaded his young nephew, Christian of Oldenborg, when the crown of Denmark was offered to him in 1448, to renounce his right to Schleswig, and to promise that, according to the constitutio Valdemariana, the duchy of Schleswig and the kingdom of Denmark never should be united again under the same sceptre, and that the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein should remain forever and ever undivided-ewich tosammend ungedelt.

This curious Low German document of Count Christian of Oldenborg is dated 28th of June, 1448, more than a year before his coronation at Copenhagen as King of Denmark on the 28th October, 1449. It had no validity, because Count Christian could not give away any territory or rights of the kingdom of Denmark, the crown of which he did not wear; nay, he could not even do so after he had been crowned king, except with the consent of the states in a general dannehof or diet. This renunciation and promise of the young Count may therefore be considered null and void.

We said that Christian, as a cognate heir, had no right to the succession in Holstein in 1459. His ambition however incited him to go any length in order to acquire both the estates, Holstein as well as Schleswig, and to unite both with the kingdom in spite of his own renunciation of 1448. Instead, therefore, of drawing in the escheated fief of Schleswig, and ineorporating it with Denmark, he did not enforce that right, but simply offered himself as a candidate for the free election of the Schleswig and Holstein nobility. Thus he placed himself on a level with the indigent counts of Schauenborg-Pinneberg, well knowing that the large sums he had by underhand means distributed among the avaricious prelates and nobles, and the powerful influence of the family of Rantzau, would procure him the majority of

the votes. In this manner King Christian gained his object, but not without great sacrifices, which through his whole reign pressed hard on the kingdom of Denmark He settled his patrimonial counties of Oldenborg and Delmenhorst on his younger brother, with forty thousand florins. The Counts of Schauenborg received an indemnification of four hundred and thirty thousand florins, the county of Pinneberg. and several other possessions. The prelates and nobles secured their most extensive privileges, throwing all the burdens of the commonwealth on the more numerous and industrious classes of the citizens and peasants. On his actual election to the duchies he declared by a charter of rights (Haandfæstning) dated the 5th of March, 1460, which the Holstein historians consider as a renewal of the Valdemarian Constitution, that the estates of Schleswig and Holstein were to remain inseparable; that they had of their own free will, without any regard to his being King of Denmark, chosen him for their Duke and Count, that they likewise after his death were entitled to elect his successor from among his chil dren, or in case of his having no issue, from among his lawful heirs, and that if he should leave but one son to succeed him on the throne of Denmark, the estates should have the right to choose some other chief, provided only he were of the kin and lineage of the deceased.

The future position of Schleswig for several centuries was now decided. A fes years later, in 1474, Holstein was erected into a duchy, and though Schleswig remai ed a Danish fief, which did not belong to the empire, it now entered by its relation to Har stein into a more intimate intercourse with Germany. The mass of the people s spoke Danish, as they do to this day, but the all-powerful nobility, by intermarriages the sister duchy, and the clergy, by the great spiritual movement in the south, be came more and more Germanized. Wal half a century, the diet in Schleswig bega to be held in the Low-German dialect. In the times of the Reformation, the Luthe translation of the Bible in the High-Ger man language was still nearly unintell ble to the great majority of the comm people, both in Holstein and Schles yet by the mighty influence of the Ge man civilization from the south, and the indifference of the Oldenborg kings,

themselves spoke the German at the court of Copenhagen, the Danish lost ground, and the High-German at last gaining the victory, became the language of the pulpit, of the bar, and of the national assemblies. The university of Kiel was erected in 1665, and the young Schleswigers as well as the Holsteiners, having received their education at that institution, extended their travels to Germany, in order to finish their studies and bring German literature and science back to their native countries. Nor were the commercial relations with the Hanseatic confederation less influential in alienating the Schleswigers from their Danish brethren. The naval establishments (Styrishavne) of the victorious Valdemars, who with their Danish fleets subjected all the southern coasts of the Baltic, and extended their feudal dominion over Esthonia, Pomerania and Rügen, had gone to ruin during the civil wars of the fourteenth century. The eighty-five cities of the rich and powerful Hansa had for nearly two centuries possessed the entire commerce of the Baltic and northern seas, and by their exclusive rights and privileges, kept the Scandinavian kings in the most abject bondage to a commercial aristocracy. No wonder, then, that Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen had become the schools and places of general resort of the active mariners of Schleswig and Holstein.

King Christian I. of Oldenborg, having thus, in 1460, been elected Duke of Schleswig and Holstein, it might have been supposed that the great question about the duchies had at last been solved; but most unhappily for the tranquillity and welfare of the Danish monarchy, new divisions followed thirty years later (1490) which at different periods, for nearly two centuries and a half, were the causes of dynastic dissensions, foreign invasions, and incalculable distress and misery in the whole monarchy. Although the crown of Denmark continued elective for two hundred years (1460-1660) after the accession of Christian I., it descended nevertheless as regularly from father to son, as if it had been hereditary. But in the duchies, where the nobility (Ritterschaft) alone formed the states, this oligarchy simultaneously elected different descendants of the house of Oldenborg, and the lands thus became divisible and subdivisible among distinct lines of the

dynasty, quite contrary to the spirit of the principle of unity expressed in the act of 1460, which in this manner was abolished de facto by the Schleswig and Holstein states themselves.

Christian I. died in 1441, and left two sons by his Queen Dorothea-Hans, who was elected King of Denmark, and Frederik, at that time only ten years of age. The ambitious queen dowager, desiring her younger son, Prince Frederik, to be elected in the duchies, succeeded by her intrigues in delaying the final decision of the states for nine years, when at last, in 1490, both the royal brothers were elected, and a very remarkable division of the two provinces took place. Instead of declaring King Hans of Denmark Duke of Schleswig, and his brother Frederik Duke of Holstein and vassal of the Germanic Empire, the states now divided both duchies between both the princes. King Hans obtained the northern district of Hadersleben, the city of Flensborg, the island of Als, as belonging to Schleswig, and the western and southern parts of Holstein, with Rendsborg, Glückstad, Itzehoe, Segeberg, Oldesloe and the promontory of Heiligenhafen,—which all formed the possessions of the Royal or Segeberg line of succession. His younger brother Frederik united the Schleswig districts of Gottorp, Tondern and Apenrade, with Kiel, the eastern parts of Holstein and the island of Femern, and thus established the Ducal or Gottorp line. In this manner the Segeberg line possessed six different districts of both duchies inclosed or intermingled with the four portions belonging to that of Gottorp! This most untoward subdivision of the two Danish and German fiefs, afterwards gave rise to the fatal denomination of "a duchy of SchleswigHolstein," which, although a political nullity, has nevertheless been the cause of interminable complications and dissensions, and mainly contributed to the present unjust and iniquitous invasion of Denmark by the Germanic confederation. Disputes soon arose between the brothers; the ambitious Frederik laid claims to the investiture of fiefs in Denmark and Norway, which were refused by the diet, who declared that Denmark was a free and indivisible elective kingdom. Such a refusal exasperated the duke in the highest degree.

He united with the Hanseatic cities