She was nearly sixty when Flensburg pledged its loyalty to her. Four days later, she was dead aboard her ship. The king named beside her in the city's promise had already worn his crowns for fifteen years.
Margaret I died on 28 October 1412 in Flensburg harbour, after a sudden illness. She had come there over the struggle for Schleswig, on Denmark's southern border, and had just secured control of the city through negotiation and arbitration. Her authority was still being written into agreements. There had been no retirement.
She had entered northern Europe's dynastic arrangements as a child. The youngest daughter of Denmark's King Valdemar IV, Margaret was about ten when she married Håkon VI of Norway in Copenhagen in 1363. He was already a grown man. The marriage bound royal families and their competing interests together, and the little Danish bride went on to a Norwegian household, with a Swedish noblewoman responsible for her upbringing. The three kingdoms were part of her life long before she brought them under one king.
At Akershus, the castle at Oslo, the young queen had practical problems of her own. She wrote to Håkon, her "dearest lord", that she and her servants were in great need of food and drink, and asked him to make sure they would not have to leave her through hunger. She named the solution as well. He was to write to Vestfal, a merchant in Oslo, asking him to lend her what she needed, and promise to repay it himself. He was also to treat the moneyer well, so that the man stayed in royal service and could lend her money when ships came in. A request for help came with instructions for making the help arrive.
Her only child, Oluf, was born in 1370. After Valdemar's death, Margaret helped secure the Danish crown for the little boy, governing on his behalf with the kingdom's council. When Håkon died in 1380, Oluf inherited Norway as well. Margaret was now a widow, conducting the affairs of two kingdoms in her son's name. The family marriage had brought the crowns within reach. Keeping them required years of negotiation with nobles, rival dynasties and the powerful trading towns of the Baltic.
Then Oluf died suddenly at Falsterbo Castle on 3 August 1387. The son whose future had occupied so much of her government was gone, and both kingdoms needed a ruler. Within a week, Margaret had been recognised at Lund as Denmark's full-powered lady and lord, guardian of the kingdom. The title gave a woman authority for which the usual royal vocabulary had little room. She was a king's daughter, a king's widow and a king's mother. Now the governing power was entrusted to her personally.
Her son was gone. His mother remained.
Norway recognised her as ruler for life. Swedish opponents of their own king turned to her, and his defeat in 1389 brought her authority into a third kingdom. For a successor she reached into her sister's family, choosing her great-nephew, Eric of Pomerania, whom she brought up as her foster-son. At Kalmar in 1397, Eric was crowned king of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The kingdoms kept their separate laws, but shared a monarch. Margaret had helped make a king who could inherit the political union her own son had not lived to rule.
By 1405 Eric was an adult, preparing to travel to Norway, and Margaret supplied detailed instructions. He was to accept invitations to eat with people, and receive their gifts graciously, whether the giver was a man or woman, young or old, and whether the gift was small or large. Otherwise, people would take it otherwise than he meant it. There was German beer and mead to take for entertaining the Norwegians. Winning people over involved attention to what they were offered and how they were received.
Her advice became firmer where royal rights were concerned. Requests for privileges were to be put off for as long as he could manage. If someone brought old documents granting lands or privileges and wanted them confirmed, he was to answer that he did not know what had been given, until she arrived. The king could make the journey. Margaret would still have a say in what he gave away. The following year he married Philippa, daughter of Henry IV of England, in a match Margaret had helped arrange. She governed through a narrow circle of chosen advisers and left the highest offices of the kingdom unfilled, limiting the independence of the men around her. Keeping authority close was a habit she retained after her foster-son had grown up.
In 1411 she made provisions for another reckoning. Money entrusted to the bishop and canons of Roskilde was to go to women and girls who had been wronged and dishonoured east of the Sound during the wars, and to people who had unjustly lost their property. Other money was to benefit the souls of those who had died in the fighting, whether they had been with the kingdom or against it. These gifts belonged to a world of prayers, alms and concern for the soul after death. Alongside provision for her own soul and her family's, she had set down practical help for people the fighting had left behind.
By the following October, Margaret was at Flensburg. The struggle with the Holstein counts over Schleswig had led to war, and the city had been taken by their side before she recovered control through a settlement. On 24 October its burgomasters, councillors and community issued their pledge to Eric, Margaret and the Danish kingdom. They promised obedience and defence of the city with their lives and property. Anyone who failed in that loyalty was to be judged a traitor.
The pledge survives on parchment, with the city's seal in brown wax. It names the king she had brought up and the woman who had once governed for a different boy. Flensburg had bound itself to serve them both. Four days later, only one of them was alive.
