Denmark had been forced out of the…

Denmark had been forced out of the Great Northern War by the treaty of Traventhal in 1700, but has long planned on reopening hostilities with the goal of reconquering the lost provinces Scania, Halland and Blekinge.

After the Swedish defeat at Poltava in 1709, the Danes had seen an opportunity and declared war on Sweden the same year.

The declaration of war had arrived on October 18, 1709, at the Swedish state council.

The pretexts given were that Sweden had been cheating with the Sound Dues, and that the population of Scania, Halland, Blekinge, and Bohuslän had been mistreated.

An enormous Danish fleet in late fall 1709 had gathered in Øresund, and landing had been made on November 2, off Råå.

The Danish invasion army is led by general Christian Ditlev Reventlow and consists of fifteen thousand men divided into six cavalry regiments, four dragoon regiments, eight infantry regiments and six artillery companies.

It has been met with virtually no resistance from the Swedes.

The Swedish army is in terrible shape after Poltava, when several regiments had been completely annihilated.

The work on reconstructing and recruiting the regiments had begun immediately after Poltava, but by late summer 1709, Magnus Stenbock only had one Scanian regiment in battle-fit condition.

The Swedish counterattack would have to wait and the army retreated into Småland.

The objective of the Danes, who controlled almost all of central Scania except for Landskrona and Malmö by the beginning of December, is to take the naval base at Karlskrona in Blekinge, and the Danish army has worked its way quickly into Sweden.

It defeats a smaller Swedish force in January 1710 outside Kristianstad.