Berengaria of Portugal

Berengaria of Portugal (Portuguese: Berengária, Danish: Bengjerd; c. 1198 – 27 March 1221) was a Portuguese infanta (princess), who became Queen of Denmark, as the second wife of Valdemar II, from 1214 until her death.

Born into the Portuguese House of Burgundy, she was the daughter of King Sancho I of Portugal and Dulce of Aragon. Likely the youngest of her siblings, she may have been the twin of Branca, and their mother died shortly after their birth. Following the death of her father in 1211, Berengaria became an orphan, and her brother, now King Afonso II, soon sought to curtail his siblings' bequeathed estates. In the ensuing conflicts, Berengaria was initially entrusted to the care of her elder sister Theresa, formerly Queen of León, then a nun at the convent of Lorvão in Penacova. Another brother Ferdinand fled to France, becoming Count of Flanders in 1212, and Berengaria seems to have followed him there or to the court of his overlord, Philip II of France, a cousin of theirs. Seeking to consolidate an anti-French North Sea alliance with King John of England, Emperor Otto IV and others, Ferdinand arranged her marriage to Valdemar II of Denmark, likely facilitated through Valdemar’s sister Ingeborg, the estranged queen of Philip II. The later marriage of Berengaria’s niece Eleanor of Portugal to Valdemar’s eldest son, Valdemar the Young, in 1229 further tightened the dynastic links between the Portuguese and Danish royal houses.

In May 1214, she married Valdemar II "the Victorious" as his second wife, his first consort, Dagmar of Bohemia, having died in childbirth in 1212. Exceedingly little is recorded of her queenship, although she was described as "exceptionally beautiful", and made several donations to churches and monasteries. She is also the earliest Danish queen known to have worn a crown. Her children with Valdemar included the future Danish kings Eric V, Abel and Christopher I, as well as a daughter, Sophie, who married John I, Margrave of Brandenburg. Berengaria died in 1221 in her early twenties, probably in childbirth, and was buried in St. Bendt's Church, Ringsted.

In later Danish ballads and chronicles, recorded from the sixteenth century, she appears under the name “Bengerd” as the hard and selfish counterpart to her idealised predecessor Queen Dagmar, and early narrative historians often repeated this hostile image. Her name came to be used proverbially for an ill-natured woman. Modern historians, however, stress that there is no contemporary source basis for this negative portrayal, and regard the “Bengerd” figure as legendary rather than based on contemporary evidence.