The Bridgettines were latecomers. Founded on the visions of Saint Bridget of Sweden, the order reached Denmark only in the fifteenth century, the last monastic community to establish itself before the Reformation swept the whole apparatus away. Mariager Abbey was founded in 1430, during the reign of Erik of Pomerania, on a hill overlooking the ferry crossing of Mariager Fjord. The land had been acquired in the late 1420s from the dissolved Randers Abbey. Tradition credits several noble families of eastern Jutland with the founding, though the sources cannot agree on where the founding sisters came from - Maribo Abbey on Lolland, or Vadstena in Sweden, the order's mother house. What is certain is the timing. The Bridgettines had roughly a hundred years in Denmark, and Mariager used nearly half of that just getting built.

Papal permission for a double abbey - separate communities of monks and nuns on either side of a shared church - came in 1446. The building did not follow quickly. Funds ran short year after year, and in 1468 King Christian I was writing to Rome to ask the pope for help finishing it. He gave what he could himself: in 1449 he granted the order harbourage rights over the landing place next to Hobro Vig, a steady income from a busy piece of water. The kings who followed - Hans, Christian II, Frederik I - kept adding grants of rent rights across the decades. Noble families took the royal cue and handed over farms and income properties. By its high point the abbey owned farms, businesses, parts of towns, and the income of parish churches across the region.

The finished church was strange as well as vast. Bridgettine houses required monks and nuns to worship together while never mixing, so Mariager was built with two choirs: the larger one east, for the nuns, on a gallery lifted high between the pillars of the second and third bays; the smaller one west, on the ground floor, for the monks. Voices met in the air over the nave and nowhere else. Pilgrims came for absolution, and the church became one of the significant pilgrimage destinations in Jutland. Why is not entirely clear. It has been suggested that relics were deposited here for the veneration of the faithful, perhaps something connected with Saint Bridget herself, but no specific evidence has ever been found. Nobles, merchants and prosperous farmers bought burial plots and built chapels so they could lie in the abbey's ground, and the town grew downhill to serve the traffic.

In 1536 the Reformation made Mariager Abbey crown property. The community was not immediately expelled - the house was allowed to keep operating until 1588, part of that time as a residence for unmarried noblewomen, an aristocratic retirement home occupying a building meant for contemplative prayer. The church itself became a Lutheran parish church and has stayed one. The estates were another matter: sold off or given away by the crown, they left the buildings without the income that had maintained them. Roofs go first. Then everything under them.

In 1721, 1722 and 1724, most of the dilapidated abbey buildings were pulled down and the materials distributed for repairing houses and farm sheds. Bricks fired for a papal foundation ended up in cowsheds. The north range survived because it had a use - converted into a residence for the parish bailiff, and restored in 1891. The church held on longest, but in 1788 it too was mostly demolished, and the present building was constructed around the surviving west choir, about a quarter the size of the medieval church. The town shrank with it; at its lowest, Mariager held only four hundred people. Stand in the nave now and the proportions feel modest and calm. They are the leftover corner of something that once dominated this fjord.