By the recovery of Scania Valdemar had become the lord of the great herring-fishery market held every autumn from St. Bartholomew's day (Aug. 24) to St. Denis' day (Oct. 9) on the hammer-shaped peninsula projecting from the S.W. corner of Scania containing the towns of Skanor and Falsterbo. This flourishing industry, which fully occupied 40,000 boats and 300,00o fishers assembled from all parts of Europe to catch and salt the favourite Lenten fare of the whole continent, was the property of the Danish crown, and the innumerable tolls and taxes imposed by the king on the frequenters of the market was one of his most certain and lucrative sources of revenue. Foreign chapmen eagerly competed for special privileges of Skanor and Falsterbo, and the Hanseatic merchants in particular aimed at obtaining a monopoly there. But Valdemar was by no means disposed to submit to their dictation, and political conjunctures now brought about actual hostilities between Valdemar and the Hansa, or at least that portion of it known as the Wendish Towns', whose commercial interests lay principally in the Baltic.
From time immemorial the isle of Gotland had been the staple of the Baltic trade, and its capital, Visby, whose burgesses were more than half German, the commercial intermediary between east and west, was the wealthiest city in northern Europe. In July 1361 Valdemar set sail from Denmark at the head of a great fleet, defeated a peasant army before Visby, and a few days later the burgesses of Visby made a breach in their walls through which the Danish monarch passed in triumph. The conquest of Gotland at once led to a war between Valdemar and Sweden allied with the Hanseatic towns; but in the spring of 1362 Valdemar repulsed from the fortress of Helsingborg a large Hanseatic fleet provided with "shooting engines" (cannon) and commanded by Johan Wittenburg, the burgomaster of Lubeck. In Sweden proper he was equally successful, and the general pacification which ensued in April 1365, very greatly in his favour, was cemented by the marriage of his daughter Margaret with Haakon VI. of Norway.
Valdemar was now at the height of his power. Every political rival had been quelled. With the papal see, since his visit to Avignon in 1364, he had been on the best of terms. His ecclesi astic patronage was immense, and throughout the land he had planted strong castles surely held by the royal bailiffs. But in the winter of 1367-68 a hostile league against him of all his neighbours threatened to destroy the fruits of a long and stren uous lifetime. The impulse came from the Hansa. At a Hansetag held at Cologne on Nov. 11, 1367, three groups of the towns, seventy in number, concerted to attack Denmark, and in Jan. 1368 Valdemar's numerous domestic enemies, especially the Jut landers and the Holstein counts, acceded to the league, with the object of partitioning the realm among them.
And now an astounding and still inexplicable thing happened. At Easter-tide 1368, on the very eve of this general attack, Valdemar departed for three years to Germany, leaving his realm in the capable hands of the earl-marshal Henning Podbusk. Valdemar's skilful diplomacy, reinforced by golden arguments, did indeed induce the dukes of Brunswick, Brandenburg and Pomerania to attack the confederates in the rear; but fortune was persistently unfriendly to the Danish king, and peace was finally concluded with the towns by Podbusk and the Danish Council of State at the congress of Stralsund, 137o. The con ditions of peace were naturally humiliating for Valdemar, though, ultimately, he contrived to render illusory many of the inordinate privileges he was obliged to concede. He was also able, shortly before his death on Oct. 24, 1375, to recover the greater part of Holstein from the rebels.
See Danmarks Riges Historie, vol. pp. (Copenhagen, 1897-1905). (R. N. B.)