George II (11 October 1557 – 9 June 1605) was King of Denmark from 1589, the claimed jure uxorisKing of England as George I during his marriage to Elizabeth I, and the Holy Roman Emperor as elected by the Jungist electors during the Forty Years' War. The son of George I, who led Denmark during the Eight Years' War and other costly endeavors against the Kingdom of Sweden, George II's reign was marked by Denmark-Norway's continued attempts to counter and compete with the Swedes, most notably under monarchs such as Christina.
After the death of Margaret II of England in 1592, George and his wife Elizabeth I, Margaret's sister, were crowned as co-monarchs by a pro-Jungist faction in the English government, but their reign would ultimately be short-lived. They were contested by a more distant, Catholic relative of Margaret named Stephen III, beginning the Anglo Danish War of 1592-1600. The pair would be defeated and forced to flee England on 14 October 1594, never stepping foot in the country again, although George continued to claim the title King of England until 1600. George was unable to prevent the union of England with that of the United Kingdom, despite intervening in the Lowlands' Hundred Years' War to weaken his English rivals.
Following the death of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor in 1596, a schism among the imperial electorate led to the Jungist electors selecting their own emperor, selecting Joktan of Hesse. These events would spark the first phase of the Forty Years' War, known as the Frankfurt War, and the Hanseatic Civil War, the latter of which saw George grow increasingly interested in the conflict. Denmark's foreign policy during this era became marked by George's ambitions of dominating the former Hanseatic territories on the Northern German trade rivers, such as Bremen, and in rivaling Sweden. After Joktan's abdication in 1601, an over zealous treaty by the Catholics punished Jungists in Germany harshly, and placed the Electorate of Hesse in the hands of one of George's Anglo-Dutch rivals, Charles of Somerset. These developments pushed Denmark to intervene directly in the war, and George was elected Holy Roman Emperor by the Jungist electors.