from PART VII - SCANDINAVIAN UNIONS (1319–1520)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
The late medieval unions of two or all three Scandinavian kingdoms brought closer together areas which in spite of their similarities were far from homogenous in language, culture, social structure or living conditions. Denmark (including Skåne, Halland and Blekinge), Sweden (with Finland) and Norway (with the tributary islands of Føroyar, Iceland and Greenland) were each, like other medieval kingdoms and principalities, ruled by a prince in a kind of symbiosis with a secular and ecclesiastical aristocracy. Because of their offices and their participation in the councils of the realms and other representative assemblies Scandinavian prelates and magnates were, like their European counterparts, at the same time both assistants of the royal power and representatives of the estates and people of their respective kingdoms. Their relations to the monarchy and their governmental influence varied but in all three kingdoms they formed throughout the late Middle Ages a mainstay of the political system on which the unions were based.
This does not mean that the unions were a consequence of an aristocratic sense of Scandinavian community; they were brought about by monarchic and princely relations. However, in the long run they led to an aristocratic Scandinavianism which in the latter part of the union period came to influence political developments in a decisive way. Connections were particularly close between the Danish and Swedish nobles who held land near the frontier of their kingdoms. Already in the 1350s it is possible to identify Swedish magnates who had acquired landed property in Skåne and Halland.
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