The Danes, a homogenous Gothic-Germanic people, have inhabited Jutland since prehistoric times. During the Viking period from the 9th to the 11th century, the Dane launched raids across western and northern Europe from their bases on the Jutland Peninsula, the Island of Zealand, and the southern part of what is now Sweden. Their raids brought the Vikings into contact with Christianity, which spread throughout the territory by the 10th century.
In the early 11th century, King Canute conquered and ruled England for almost 30 years. In the next century, the influence of the church and the crown increased, but the king’s power declined in the 13th century, when in 1282, the king was forced to declare the Great Charter and share power with parliament and a Council of Nobles.
In the 1350s, Danish power in the region expanded, but this was checked in the south by the Heanseatic League (of north German cities) which allied with ports from Holland to Poland, and hence Danish influence was confined to the areas further north. By 1397, Under Queen Margrethe I, Denmark succeeded by marriage, diplomacy and otherwise in assuming the thrones of Denmark, Norway and Sweden (the Kalmar Union), to counterbalance the influence of the Germans. However, the Danish kings who followed were not able to hold the union together, and in 1523, Sweden reestablished its own monarchy after a massacre and then a revolt in Stockholm.
During the Napoleonic Wars, Denmark supported France, and for this it lost Norway to Sweden in 1814. Meanwhile, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era had stirred the conscience of the masses, which provided momentum to the Danish liberal movement, as well as nationalist movements particularly among the German states, in the next few decades. This culminated in the European Revolution of 1848 which spread to Denmark, and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in 1849.
The nationalist movement in that period threatened Denmark in a different way. Almost a third of its population was Germans who resided in Schleswig, which formed the historic Schleswig-Holstein region. Holstein belonged to the German Confederation, but sovereignth over Schleswig was split between the Germans and the Dutch. Since 1848, the German states had demanded total control over Schleswig, and the issue came to a head in 1864 when Prussia under Bismarck launched a war against Denmark, which ended with the latter ceding Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia.
Denmark remained neutral in WW I and WW II, but was nevertheless occupied by the Nazis in 1940. Danish resistance to the occupation grew as the war progressed and it managed to save all its Jews from extermination, by smuggling them to Sweden. In 1944, Iceland declared in independence from Denmark; the Faroe Islands became autonomous in 1948 and Greenland became a territory of Denmark in 1953.
