A good deal of fanfare, most of it orchestrated by Rødgrød himself, accompanied the bonds of Danish-Lithuanian matrimony and subsequent alliance. Morta was renowned as an unusually learned sort, acting almost as second-in-command in her father's administration of the country. And Christopher...well, he didn't
dislike her, exactly, it seemed. Rødgrød remarked over the coming months that things could have gone much worse.
Of course, Morta had her dark side. Various chambermaids and servants could be heard gossiping in corners about the Queen's cruelty and sadistic treatment of her inferiors.
Well, thought Rødgrød,
peasants will be peasants...If the royal wedding hadn't confirmed that Christopher III's reign had finally come into its own, the opening months of 1445 silenced any doubters. On the fifth of February, the upstart pretender Gryf landed in Gønge. At first, the Danish forces assembled to meet him seemed to flail in the face of an army half their size...
...but in the ensuing hours they regained their bravery and defeated Gryf, chasing him to Bleking, where he was finished off.
To the east, however, the world was changing. That June, the Polish nobles overseeing the interregnum period invited the king of Lithuania to take the Polish throne, making Lithuania a junior partner in personal union and nullifying its never-invoked Danish alliance.
I'm sure the Poles will find an alliance perfectly acceptable with a bit of persuasion, thought Rødgrød, and sent a new ambassador to Warsaw to spend several years schmoozing with the Polish court.
Not three months later, news arrived from even further east: Muscovy had invaded Novgorod.
The perfect opportunity, thought Rødgrød. Within hours, the Novgorodian ambassador had been banished from Copenhagen with a declaration of war in hand.
Of course, war didn't come cheap. The main portion of the Danish army was still tied up in Gotland, besieging Gryf's last and most desperate acolytes. The only thing for it was to raise a new army, and that took cash...
I'm sure we can pay them back once the peace deal comes through, thought Rødgrød. In any case, the king still had some Bavarian holdings whose rents were now flowing into the Danish coffers, to the tune of 8 ducats a year.
Just in time, too.
Ten days into the year of our lord 1446, news arrived that Gotland had finally fallen after eight and a half months of waiting.
That meant ten more regiments newly ready to join the war; the royal Navy obligingly ferried them to Vyborg, and the territory surrounding the mouth of the Neva had fallen by April.
Over the following six months, Danish and Swedish armies occupied the Kola peninsula and most of the land around lake Ladoga with nary a peep from the Novgorodian armies. Novgorod, however, stubbornly insisted that Neva would never be given up so long as Danish flags were absent from Novgorodian castles...
...hard to pull off, since Muscovy was besieging Luki and Novgorod itself.
During the summer of the campaign, moreover, luck smiled upon the court.
It soon became clear--to Rødgrød, at least, if not the king himself--that the child hadn't a kingly bone in his body. In Rødgrød's opinion, which became stronger by the day, it would be better to plunge the kingdom into uncertainty again than to allow the dull-witted and sickly Frederik to succeed his father. The royal astrologer, when pressed, confirmed as much. A bumbling maidservant was drafted to take the blame for the prince's unfortunate disappearance during a stroll through the royal woods.
The news sent shock waves throughout the courts of Europe; Danish artists were quietly dropped from kings' rosters as the kingdom's prestige sank like a stone.
Not that Rødgrød cared. He had bigger fish to fry.
1447 opened with fortunate news: Muscovy and Novgorod reached a peace agreement in March, ceding Novgorod itself and leaving Luki and the capital fort of Kholmogory as the only remaining obstacles to a peace deal. Rødgrød hoped he could have the thing in the bag by Christmas by taking Luki.
But it didn't turn out that way. Luki did indeed fall that December, leaving Novgorod itself in control only of Kholmogory and Mezen, another god-forsaken province in the far north...but no troops reached Kholmogory until October 1447, and the long arctic winter was favorable to Novgorod.
It didn't help that the Swedes weren't in any mood to help out.
At least England was in no shape to pull off anything of the sort.
Finally, in November of 1448, Kholmogory fell, and a peace treaty was signed the next day.
So, one port down, two to go. But the kingdom's finances were in dire straits--the ducats won from the Novgorodian peace treaty had only been able to pay for two loans, and there were still four outstanding--and the Swedes were getting restless. It was going to be a difficult peace.
