Kirsten Munk

Kirsten Munk (sometimes "Christina Munk"; 6 July 1598 – 19 April 1658) was a Danish noble, the second spouse of King Christian IV of Denmark, and mother to twelve of his children.

Kirsten Munck was the daughter of Ludvig Munck (1537–1602) and Ellen Marsvin (1572–1649), members of the wealthy but untitled Danish nobility. Her mother, widowed a second time in 1611, was the greatest landowner on Funen.

Prior to yielding Kirsten to the evident desires of King Christian, her mother negotiated that, because Kirsten was a member of the nobility and not a commoner, she would become his wife rather than his mistress, and that she receive properties in her own name as tokens of the king's honourable intentions. On 31 December 1615, she was married morganatically to the widowed king, but not within a church. In 1627, she was given the title Countess of Schleswig-Holstein. Kirsten bore the king twelve children, among them the Countess Leonora Christina Ulfeldt.

She had 12 children. The youngest, Dorothea Elisabeth, was rumoured not to have been the king's child;

Her children intermarried with the nobility of Denmark, Corfitz Ulfeldt and Hannibal Sehested being among her ambitious sons-in-law. From the king's death in 1648 to 1652, five of her daughters' husbands were known as the so-called Sons-in-law Party, wielding dominant influence in the Rigsråd. Previously, Kirsten's son Count Valdemar of Schleswig-Holstein, had shown promise, becoming engaged to Tsarevna Irina Mikhailovna Romanov, daughter of Michael I of Russia. The alliance was prevented by Danish objections to Valdemar's conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church, yet the king's disappointment on the betrothal's rupture was believed at the time to have hastened his death.

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