Valdemar, the youngest son of Christopher II of Denmark and spent most of his childhood and youth in exile at the court of Louis IV, Holy Roman Emperor in Bavaria after the defeats of his father and death and the death and imprisonment, respectively, of his two older brothers Eric and Otto at the hand of the Holsteiners.

Here he had acted as a pretender waiting for a comeback.

Following the assassination of Count Gerhard III by Niels Ebbesen and his brothers, Valdemar had been proclaimed King of Denmark at the Viborg Assembly (landsting) on St Hans Day, June 24, 1340, led by Niels Ebbesen.

By his marriage with Helvig, the daughter of Eric II, Duke of Schleswig, and with what was left to him by his father, he controls about one quarter of the territory of Jutland north of the Kongeå river.

Aalborg's earliest trading privileges date from 1342, when King Valdemar IV receives the town as part of his huge dowry on marrying Helvig of Schleswig.

He is not compelled to sign a charter as his father had done, probably because Denmark had been without a king for years, and no one expects the twenty-year-old king to be any more trouble to the great nobles than his father had been.

But Valdemar is a clever and determined man and realizes that the only way to rule Denmark is to get control of its territory.