Eric VI of Denmark

Eric VI Menved (1274–1319) succeeded his murdered father Eric V as king of Denmark in 1286, aged twelve, with his mother Agnes as regent until 1294. Arresting Archbishop Jens Grand in 1294 brought a papal interdict lifted only after his submission in 1303.

Lavish tournaments and foreign wars drained the treasury, forcing him to mortgage royal lands; famine and taxation then provoked revolts on Zealand and in Jutland, crushed with German mercenaries. All his children died before him, so on his death in 1319 his brother Christopher II inherited a bankrupt kingdom.