Hammershus

Hammershus, on a crag 74 metres above the Baltic on the northwestern tip of Bornholm, is the largest medieval castle ruin in Northern Europe. Its curtain walls, about 750 metres long, enclose with the outer baileys some 35,000 square metres, and the ruin is defended on the sea side by sheer cliffs and inland by a deep valley and rough, rocky ground. Over it all rises the stump of the great keep known as the Mantle Tower.

The castle is thought to date from the early thirteenth century, perhaps built by agreement between King Valdemar II and Anders Sunesen, Archbishop of Lund, and for most of the Middle Ages it belonged to the archbishops. That made it a prize in the long struggle between Danish kings and the Church: royal forces took it in 1265, and again in 1319; in 1324–1325 it withstood a siege of sixteen months before surrendering. In 1522 Christian II claimed it and imprisoned the Bishop of Odense there, and in the same year it was taken by Lübeck, which held Bornholm in pledge until 1576 and repaired the fortress. Under the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658 the island passed to Sweden, but that December Bornholm rebels led by Jens Pedersen Kofoed killed the Swedish governor Johan Printzensköld in Rønne, seized Hammershus the next day and handed the island back to the Danish king.

By then the castle was out of date as a fortress and served as a state prison. Its most famous inmates were Corfitz Ulfeldt and his wife Leonora Christina, a daughter of Christian IV, held in 1660–1661; after a failed escape from the Mantle Tower they were confined in a dark chapel. The German alchemist and theologian Johann Conrad Dippel was imprisoned here from 1719 to 1724. Abandoned in 1743, Hammershus became a quarry — its stone went into buildings in Rønne — until it was protected in 1822. Its silhouette against the sea drew Danish painters in the nineteenth century; Anton Eduard Kieldrup's view of 1848 hangs in the Bornholm Art Museum.

Getting there

Hammershus stands on the north coast of Bornholm, about 3 km from Allinge and about 19 km north of Rønne, the island's main town and ferry port. Bornholm Airport (RNN), just outside Rønne, is about 23 km away. Ferries link Rønne with Ystad in southern Sweden; the Swedish mainland, though closer in a straight line, is reached only across the Baltic.