He inherited capable and strong realms, formed in large by his father after the civil war known as the Count's Feud, after which Denmark-Norway saw a period of economic recovery and of a great increase in the centralised authority of the Crown.

[3] Frederick was, especially in his youth and unlike his father, belligerent and adversarial, aroused by honor and national pride,[4] and so he began his reign auspiciously with a campaign under the aged Johan Rantzau, which reconquered Dithmarschen.

[10][11] This portrayal is, however, inequitable and inaccurate, and recent studies[note 1][12] reappraise and acknowledge him as highly intelligent; he craved the company of learned men, and in the correspondence and legislation he dictated to his secretaries he showed himself to be quick-witted and articulate.

[15][16][17] Frederick was committed to becoming the mightiest king in the North,[18] and for several years he fought exhausting wars against his archrival Erik XIV of Sweden, after which the battles changed character.

[25] On 30 October 1536 Christian convened the estates of the realm (Rigsdag) to Copenhagen, where they formally proclaimed Frederick heir apparent and successor to the throne, granting him the title "Prince of Denmark".

Another contributing factor has probably been the royal couple's concern by leaving the children too much out of sight in the tense political situation that prevailed in the first ten years of Frederik's life.

Frederik II's great-uncle, King John, had failed to subjugate the peasant republic in 1500, but the Frederick's 1559-campaign was a quick and relatively painless victory for the Danish Kingdom.

[40] The substantially warmer relationship between king and Council of the Realm after the Ditmarschen campaign is best illustrated by the Danish central administration's performance in the greatest national crisis of the reign, the Northern Seven Years' War (1563–70) against Sweden.

King Frederick's competition with Sweden for supremacy in the Baltic broke out into open warfare in 1563, the start of the Northern Seven Years' War, the dominating conflict of his rule.

[42] The leading councillors, Johan Friis foremost among them, had feared a Swedish onslaught for several years, and after the succession of Frederick II's first cousin, the ambitious and unbalanced Eric XIV (reigned 1560–1568) to the Vasa throne a confrontation appeared inevitable.

Frederik II, wisely, made no effort to exclude the council from the direction of the war, and though he retained chief operational control he entrusted much responsibility to his councillors, including Holger Ottesen Rosenkrants, Marshal Otte Krumpen, and Admiral Herluf Trolle.

[44] The conflict damaged his relationship with his noble councillors; however, the later Sture murders of 24 May 1567 by the insane King Eric XIV in Sweden, eventually helped stabilize the situation in Denmark-Norway.

The king hunted, feasted, and drank with his noble councillors and advisers, and even with visiting foreign dignitaries, treating them as his equal peers and companions rather than as political opponents or inferiors.

The greater financial liquidity of the crown and the king's decreased dependence on the Council for funding, while not meaning that Frederick was actively seeking to sidestep conciliar control,[48] it did allow him to be less frugal than his late father, Christian III, had been.

Considerable funds were devoted to an expansion of the Danish-Norwegian fleet and of the facilities for its support, not merely for security purposes but also to aid Frederick's active endeavours to rid the Baltic Sea of pirates.

Like most monarchs of his day, he sought to bolster his international reputation through a measure of ostentatious display, in his patronage of artists and musicians, as well as in the elaborate ceremonies staged for royal weddings and other public celebrations.

[60] Frederik II, repeatedly came to the defence of new parish priests whose congregations tried to force them to marry their predecessors' widows, and sometimes to protect preachers from the wrath of overbearing noblemen.

Conversely, the king – and especially Frederik II – would see to it personally that unruly, incompetent, or disreputable priests lost their parishes, or he would pardon those who had been punished by their superintendents for minor infractions.

[63] A good testimony of Frederik's stubborn resistance to all religious controversy can be found in his response to the late sixteenth-century Lutheran statement of faith, the Formula and Book of Concord.

[64] The 'Concord', which was written by leading Saxon divines and sponsored by Frederik II's brother-in-law, Augustus, Elector of Saxony, was an attempt to promote unity among the German Lutheran princes.

[63] Frederik II's 'Marriage Ordinance' of 1582, inspired by Niels Hemmingsen's writings on the institution, allowed divorce for a wide range of reasons, including infidelity, impotence, leprosy, venereal disease, and outlawry.

Frederik had a strong proclivity for Paracelsian medicine: in 1571 he appointed Johannes Pratensis to the medical faculty of the University of Copenhagen, and in the same year Petrus Severinus became his personal physician.

[68] Frederik II's fascination with alchemy and astrology, common to contemporary sovereigns, sped the rise of the astronomer Tycho Brahe to international renown as a pioneer in Europe's Scientific Revolution.

[69][70][71] After an extensive education abroad, Tycho Brahe returned to Denmark not to pursue a career in state service as men of his blood typically did, but instead retreated to the monastery at Herrevad,[71] where he and his maternal uncle Sten Bille experimented with the manufacture of paper and glass and maintained a private observatory.

[72] Brahe's treatise on the supernova that appeared in Cassiopeia in November 1572, published at the behest of the rigshofmester Peder Oxe, brought his activities to the attention of Frederik and his court.

Perhaps the king was driven, in part, by a desire to enhance Denmark's reputation among the great nations of Europe, but even so he demonstrated a finely tuned appreciation for intellectual talent.

[67] The king hunted, feasted, and drank with his councillors and advisers, and even with visiting European foreign dignitaries, treating them as his peers and companions rather than as political opponents or inferiors.

[46] As a young man, Frederick II had desired to marry the noblewoman, Anne Hardenberg, who had served as a lady-in-waiting to his mother, the Dowager Queen Dorothea of Denmark, however as she was not of princely birth, this was impossible.

His penchant for overestimating himself and underestimating everyone else was a profound feature of him that made him highly ungracious and unlovableOften described as wilful and impatient, he was easily moved to anger, and by his early twenties had exhibited a weakness for strong drink and an addiction to the hunt.

Indeed, Frederik would take the chief legacy of his father's kingship – the close symbiosis between king and aristocracy – to its logical limits, and simultaneously would bring Denmark to the height of its power and influence in European affairs.