Suggest an Edit — King Canute

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Biography

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King Canute IV of Denmark, known in Danish as Knud den Hellige and in Latin hagiography as Canutus, was a son of King Sweyn II Estridsson by an unnamed concubine. He belonged to the Estridsen dynasty, which had re-established native kingship in Denmark after the North Sea empire of Cnut the Great. The year of his birth is not recorded in contemporary sources and can be placed only in the mid-eleventh century. He first appears in reliable notices as a royal prince and war-leader. During the 1070s he took part in Danish expeditions against Norman England, and he later held authority as jarl in Zealand. Already in these years he combined military ambition with marked favour toward the Church, a pattern that would define both his kingship and his later cult.

Canute succeeded his brother Harald III Hen on the Danish throne in 1080. Chroniclers, above all the English Benedictine Aelnoth of Canterbury who wrote a Latin passion of the king in the early twelfth century, present him as a severe but pious ruler. He sought to tighten royal control over the realm, to enforce the payment of tithes, and to protect clerical privilege. He endowed churches and monasteries and promoted the cult of Saint Alban, whose relics had been translated to Odense. Around the beginning of his reign he married Adela, daughter of Count Robert I of Flanders, thereby linking Denmark to a leading princely house of the Low Countries. The marriage produced children, including Charles, later Count of Flanders, who would himself be venerated as a martyr. Canute also asserted a claim to the English crown, derived from his family's connection to the line of Cnut the Great. In 1085 he gathered a large invasion fleet in northern Jutland with the intention of challenging William the Conqueror, but the armament never put to sea. Threats on the southern frontier, the danger of Norwegian intervention, and mounting resistance among Danish magnates and freeholders compelled him to dismiss the levy. The taxes, fines, and unpaid wages associated with the abortive expedition left a deep residue of anger.

In 1086 that anger broke into open revolt in Jutland. Deserted by much of his army, Canute withdrew with a small band of kinsmen and household troops to the island of Funen and took sanctuary in the church of Saint Alban at Odense. On 10 July 1086 a hostile force stormed the building. According to the earliest narrative accounts, the king was struck down before the altar together with his brother Benedict and seventeen companions while he was at prayer. Because he was a consecrated king slain inside a church, ecclesiastical writers immediately treated the killing as martyrdom. He was buried in the same church. Under his brother and successor Olaf I, known as Hunger, Denmark suffered famine, which popular and clerical opinion soon interpreted as divine vengeance for the sacrilege. In 1095 the tomb was opened and the body was reported incorrupt; miracles were ascribed to Canute's intercession, and a local cult took shape.

In 1101 King Eric I Evergood, another of Canute's brothers, obtained from Pope Paschal II recognition of the martyr's sanctity. The relics were translated into a new stone church at Odense, an act that in the practice of the time constituted canonization. Aelnoth of Canterbury, then living in Denmark, composed the principal vita, the Gesta Swenomagni regis et filiorum eius et passio gloriosissimi Canuti regis et martyris, portraying Canute as a Christian lawgiver who died in defence of the Church and of rightful kingship. A later brick Gothic cathedral, still called Saint Canute's Cathedral or Sankt Knuds Kirke, rose over the shrine and remains the place of his burial. The Roman Martyrology keeps his feast on 19 January, associated with the translation of the relics, while the day of his death, 10 July, has also been observed in Denmark. He is invoked as patron saint of Denmark. His cult became a central element of medieval Danish royal ideology, and through his son Charles the Good a related tradition of princely sanctity took root in Flanders.

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