Dannebrog
The Dannebrog is the flag of Denmark. The flag is red with a white Nordic cross, which means that the cross extends to the edges of the flag and that the vertical part of the cross is shifted to the hoist side.
A banner with a white-on-red cross is attested as having been used by the kings of Denmark since the 14th century. An origin legend with considerable impact on Danish national historiography connects the introduction of the flag to the Battle of Lindanise of 1219.
The elongated Nordic cross, which represents Christianity, reflects its use as a maritime flag in the 18th century. The flag became popular as a national flag in the early 16th century. Its private use was outlawed in 1834 but again permitted by a regulation of 1854. The flag holds the Guinness world record of being the oldest continuously used national flag, that is since 1625.
Description
A 1748 regulation, which is still in force, defines the flag as constructed of two squares of, with a white cross the height of the flag and the two rectangular fields as. Multiplying the proportions by three to get whole numbers gives the proportions in the construction sheet below.Construction sheet
Colour
No official definition of "Dannebrog rød" exists. The private company Dansk Standard, regulation number 359, defines the red colour of the flag as Pantone 186c.Colors scheme | Red | White |
| Pantone | 032C | White |
| HEX | #C8102E | #FFFFFF |
| RGB | 200-16-46 | 255-255-255 |
| CMYK | 0-100-80-5 | 0-0-0-0 |
History
1219 origin legend
A tradition recorded in the 16th century traces the origin of the flag to the campaigns of Valdemar II of Denmark. The oldest of them is in Christiern Pedersen's Danske Krønike, which is a sequel to Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, which was written in 1520 to 1523. Here, the flag falls from the sky during one of Valdemar's military campaigns overseas. Pedersen also states that the very same flag was taken into exile by Eric of Pomerania in 1440.The second source is the writing of the Franciscan friar Petrus Olai of Roskilde. This record describes a battle in 1208 near Fellin during the Estonia campaign of King Valdemar II. The Danes were all but defeated when a lamb-skin banner depicting a white cross fell from the sky and miraculously led to a Danish victory. In a third account, also by Petrus Olai, in Danmarks Tolv Herligheder, in splendour number nine, the same story is retold almost verbatim, with a paragraph inserted correcting the year to 1219. Now, the flag is falling from the sky in the Battle of Lindanise, also known as the Battle of Valdemar, near Lindanise in Estonia, of 15 June 1219.
It is this third account that has been the most influential, and some historians have treated it as the primary account taken from a source dating to the first half of the 15th century.
In Olai's account, the battle was going badly, and defeat seemed imminent. However the Danish bishop, Anders Sunesen, was on top of a hill overlooking the battle and prayed to God with his arms raised. The Danes moved closer to victory as prayed. When he raised his arms, the Danes surged forward, but when his arms grew tired, and he let them fall, the Estonians turned the Danes back. Attendants rushed forward to raise his arms once again, and the Danes again surged forward, but for a second time he grew so tired that he dropped his arms, and the Danes again lost the advantage and became closer to defeat. He needed two soldiers to keep his hands up. When the Danes were about to lose, the Dannebrog miraculously fell from the sky. The King took it and showed it to the troops, their hearts were filled with courage, and the Danes won the battle.
The possible historical nucleus behind this origin legend was extensively discussed by Danish historians in the 19th to 20th centuries. One such example is Adolf Ditlev Jørgensen, who argued that Bishop Theoderich was the original instigator of the 1218 inquiry from Bishop Albert of Buxhoeveden to King Valdemar II which led to the Danish participation in the Baltic crusades. Jørgensen speculates that Bishop Theoderich might have carried the Knight Hospitaller's banner in the 1219 battle and that "the enemy thought this was the King's symbol and mistakenly stormed Bishop Theoderich tent. He claims that the origin of the legend of the falling flag comes from this confusion in the battle".
The Danish church-historian L. P. Fabricius ascribes the origin to the 1208 Battle of Fellin, not the Battle of Lindanise in 1219, based on the earliest source available about the story. Fabricius speculated that it might have been Archbishop Andreas Sunesøn's personal ecclesiastical banner or perhaps even the flag of Archbishop Absalon under whose initiative and supervision several smaller crusades had already been conducted in Estonia. The banner would then already be known in Estonia. Fabricius repeats Jørgensen's idea about the flag being planted in front of Bishop Theodorik's tent, which the enemy mistakenly attacked believing it to be the tent of the King.
A different theory is briefly discussed by Fabricius and elaborated more by Helge Bruhn. Bruhn interprets the story in the context of the widespread tradition of the miraculous appearance of crosses in the sky in Christian legend, specifically comparing such an event attributed to a battle of 10 September 1217 near Alcazar in which it is said that a golden cross on white appeared in the sky and brought victory to the Christians.
In Swedish national historiography of the 18th century, there is a tale paralleling the Danish legend, in which
a golden cross appears in the blue sky during a Swedish battle in Finland in 1157.
Middle Ages
The white-on-red cross emblem originates in the age of the Crusades. In the 12th century, it was also used as war flag by the Holy Roman Empire.In the Gelre Armorial, dated 1340–1370, such a banner is shown alongside the coat of arms of the king of Denmark. This is the earliest known undisputed colour rendering of the Dannebrog. About the same time, Valdemar IV of Denmark displays a cross in his coat of arms on his Danælog seal. The image from the Armorial Gelre is nearly identical to an image found in a 15th-century coat of arms book now located in the National Archives of Sweden. The seal of Eric of Pomerania as king of the Kalmar Union displays the arms of Denmark's chief dexter, three lions. In this version, the lions hold a Dannebrog banner.
The reason that the kings of Denmark in the 14th century began displaying the cross banner in their coats of arms is unknown. Caspar Paludan-Müller suggested that it may reflect a banner sent by the pope to support the king during the Livonian Crusade. Adolf Ditlev Jørgensen identifies the banner as that of the Knights Hospitaller, an order that had a presence in Denmark from the later 12th century.
Several coins, seals and images exist, both foreign and domestic, from the 13th to the 15th centuries and even earlier and show similar heraldic designs similar, alongside the royal coat of arms
File:Saxo Chr P front version 002.png|thumb|upright|The Danish flag from the front page of Christiern Pedersen's version of Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, 1514
There is a record suggesting that the Danish Army had a "chief banner" in the early 16th century. Such a banner is mentioned in 1570 by Niels Hemmingsøn in the context of a 1520 battle between Danes and Swedes near Uppsala as nearly captured by the Swedes but saved by the heroic actions of the banner-carrier Mogens Gyldenstierne and Peder Skram. The legend attributing the [|miraculous origin] of the flag to the campaigns of Valdemar II of Denmark was recorded by Christiern Pedersen and Petrus Olai in the 1520s.
Hans Svaning's History of King Hans from 1558 to 1559 and Johan Rantzau's History about the Last Dithmarschen War, from 1569, record the further fate of the Danish hoffuitbanner: According to the tradition, the original flag from the Battle of Lindanise was used in the small campaign of 1500, when King Hans tried to conquer Dithmarschen. The flag was lost in a devastating defeat at the Battle of Hemmingstedt, on 17 February 1500. In 1559, King Frederik II recaptured it during his own Dithmarschen campaign.
In 1576, the son of Johan Rantzau, Henrik Rantzau, also writes about the war and the fate of the flag, noting that the flag was in a poor condition when returned. He records that the flag after its return to Denmark was placed in the cathedral in Slesvig. Slesvig historian Ulrik Petersen confirms the presence of such a banner in the cathedral in the early 17th century and records that it had crumbled away by about 1660.
Contemporary records describing the battle of Hemmingstedt make no reference to the loss of the original Dannebrog, although the capitulation state that all Danish banners lost in 1500 was to be returned. In a letter dated 22 February 1500 to Oluf Stigsøn, King John describes the battle but does not mention the loss of an important flag. In fact, the entire letter gives the impression that the lost battle was of limited importance. In 1598, Neocorus wrote that the banner captured in 1500 was brought to the church in Wöhrden and hung there for the next 59 years until it was returned to the Danes as part of the peace settlement in 1559.
Modern period
Used as a maritime flag since the 16th century, the Dannebrog was introduced as a regimental flag in the Danish army in 1785, and for the militia in 1801. From 1842, it was used as the flag of the entire army.During the first half of the 19th century, in parallel to the development of Romantic nationalism in other European countries, the military flag increasingly came to be seen as representing the nation itself. Poems of the period invoking the Dannebrog were written by B.S. Ingemann, N.F.S. Grundtvig, Oehlenschläger, Chr. Winther and H.C. Andersen. By the 1830s, the military flag had become popular as an unofficial national flag, and its use by private citizens was outlawed in a circular enacted on 7 January 1834.
In the national enthusiasm sparked by the First Schleswig War from 1848 to 1850, the flag was still very widely displayed, and the prohibition of private use was repealed in a regulation of 7 July 1854 that for the first time allowed Danish citizens to display the Dannebrog "] as well as .