History of Sweden (1523–1611)

• 1. Introduction

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  The History of Sweden from 1523 to 1611 opens with an act of reconquest. Gustav Vasa rode into Stockholm in June 1523, ending Danish control over the city and pulling Sweden free of the Kalmar Union that had yoked it to its neighbors for over a century. What followed was not a peaceful consolidation. It was nearly nine decades of religious fracture, dynastic rivalry, peasant rebellion, and Baltic warfare that would leave Sweden almost unrecognizable from the kingdom Gustav inherited. The questions worth following are these: how did a debt-ridden king fighting for survival transform Sweden into the first modern army in Europe? What happened when his sons tried to undo each other's legacies, one driven to madness and one to Rome? And what does it mean that this entire era ends not with a Swedish triumph but with a civil war, a king who fled into exile, and a crown that passed to a man his nephew tried to destroy?

• 2. Gustav and the Foundation

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  In 1520, Christian II of Denmark seized Stockholm and turned it into the scene of the Stockholm Bloodbath. That act of violence gave Gustav Eriksson, a nobleman and relative of Sten Sture the Elder, his cause. By 1521 he had gathered troops from Dalarna in north-west Sweden and secured help from Lübeck. His men elected him their monarch in August of that year. The Swedish War of Liberation had begun. It ran until June 1523, when Stockholm fell back into Swedish hands. Gustav then moved fast. Tax reforms in 1538 and 1558 simplified the multiple complex levies on independent farmers, adjusted assessments to reflect ability to pay, and spread a perception of fairness that mattered as much as the revenues themselves. A war with Lübeck in 1535 drove out the Hanseatic traders who had held a monopoly on Swedish foreign trade. With Swedish merchants in control of that commerce, the kingdom's economic strength grew quickly. By 1544, Gustavus had support from sixty percent of the farmlands across all of Sweden. He proclaimed the Swedish crown hereditary in his family, the house of Vasa, which would rule Sweden from 1523 to 1654 and Poland from 1587 to 1668. He also built what the source calls the first modern army in Europe, backed by a sophisticated tax system and government bureaucracy.

• 3. Reformation and Resistance

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  Shortly after seizing power in 1523, Gustav Vasa wrote to the Pope requesting confirmation of Johannes Magnus as the new archbishop of Sweden, to replace Gustav Trolle, who had been formally deposed by the Riksdag for his involvement with the Danes. The pope refused at first, then approved a year later. Magnus found himself caught between a king sympathetic to the Reformation and a bench of Catholic bishops. He was dispatched on a diplomatic mission to Russia in 1526. He eventually made his way to Rome and was consecrated in 1533 but never came home. Meanwhile, Gustav suppressed all Catholic printing presses in 1526 and claimed two-thirds of the Church's tithes to pay the national debt owed to the German soldiers who had helped him to the throne. In 1529 he called a church meeting in Orebro, where all Catholic rituals were declared merely symbolic while still being retained outwardly. The final institutional step came in 1531 when Gustav announced Laurentius Petri as the new archbishop of Uppsala. Laurentius and his brother Olaus, together with Mikael Agricola in Finland, spent the following decades writing and printing Lutheran texts. Still, neither Gustav nor his successor Eric XIV moved fast enough to make radical reforms. A complete Lutheran church ordinance did not arrive until the Swedish Church Ordinance of 1571. It was defined in the Riksdag in 1591 and a statement of faith was finalized by the Uppsala Synod in 1593. Gustav had faced half a dozen peasant risings between 1525 and 1543, all of them animated in part by religion. The peasants protested what they called the introduction of Luthery and demanded the restoration of ancient Catholic customs. The last of those risings, the Dacke War, was crushed, but the popular anger it expressed never disappeared entirely.

• 4. Eric XIV and the Northern Wars

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  Eric XIV ascended the throne after Gustav's death in 1560, and within months Sweden was drawn into the Livonian War. The trigger was the collapse of the ancient Livonian Order. Isolated between hostile powers after the secularization of the Order into the dukedom of Prussia in 1525, the last master, Gotthard von Kettler, appealed to his neighbors. By March 1561, the city council of Reval had surrendered to Sweden, giving the kingdom its foothold for further conquests in the region. Eric also blocked Danish ambitions in Estonia and incorporated the insignia of Norway and Denmark into his own coat of arms, a deliberate provocation. Lübeck, angered by trade obstacles Eric had imposed to obstruct Russian commerce, joined Denmark in a war alliance. Poland followed, seeking control of Baltic trade. At Bornholm on the 30th of May 1563, the Danish fleet fired on the Swedish navy. The resulting battle ended in Danish defeat, but the aftermath was misjudged. German royal emissaries were sent to negotiate peace at Rostock; no Swedes appeared. On the 13th of August 1563, war was formally declared in Stockholm. This was the Northern Seven Years' War, and it was grueling on land and at sea. Eric continued it until periods of insanity in 1567 halted Swedish military operations. Those episodes of mental disorder coincided with the Sture Murders of 1567, and had already put his brother John in prison. Eric was dethroned in 1568 by a magnates' uprising led by John himself, who had been married to Catherine Jagiellonica, the sister of Sigismund II Augustus of Poland. John then made peace attempts that eventually succeeded with the Treaty of Stettin in 1570.

• 5. John III and the Catholic Temptation

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  John III was described as the most learned of the Vasas and something of a theological expert. He came to the throne with a specific agenda: to bring the Church of Sweden back to what he called the primitive Apostolic Church and the Swedish Catholic faith. In 1574, he persuaded a synod assembled at Stockholm to adopt certain articles he had framed himself. In February 1575 a new church ordinance, moving still closer to the patristic church, was presented to another synod and accepted, though very unwillingly. In 1576 a new liturgy appeared, modeled on the Roman missal but with considerable modifications. Despite opposition from Duke Charles and the Protestant faction, the Riksdag of the Estates adopted these measures in 1577. The Catholic party across Europe took encouragement, and John was eventually persuaded to send an embassy to Rome to open negotiations for the reunion of the Swedish church with the Holy See. The Jesuit Antonio Possevino was dispatched to Stockholm to complete John's conversion. But John would only accept Catholicism under conditions that were never fulfilled. The result was that nothing was resolved, but Protestant resentment of the new liturgy intensified. The Riksdag of 1582 nonetheless decreed that every congregation in the realm was required to use that liturgy without exception. John also entered an anti-Russian league with Stephen Bathory of Poland in 1578. The war between Russia and Sweden for Estonia and Livonia from 1571 to 1577 had gone badly for Sweden. In early 1577, a large Russian force sat before Reval. With Bathory's help, the balance shifted. Ivan IV concluded a truce with Sweden on a uti possidetis basis at Plussa on the 5th of August 1582. The war resumed when that truce expired, leading to the Treaty of Tyavzino, which proved far less favorable for Sweden.

• 6. Sigismund and the Final Break

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  Duke Sigismund of Sweden, the son of John III, was raised by his mother in the Catholic religion. On the 19th of August 1587, he was elected king of Poland. Sixteen days after that, the Articles of Kalmar were signed by John and Sigismund to regulate the future relations between the two kingdoms when Sigismund should eventually succeed his father. The terms were careful: perpetual alliance, but each country would keep its own laws. Sweden would retain its religion, subject to such changes as the Privy Council might make, but neither pope nor council could release Sigismund from his obligations to his Swedish subjects. During any absence from Sweden, the realm was to be governed by seven Swedes, six chosen by the king and one by his uncle Duke Charles of Sodermanland. No new taxes were to be levied while the king was abroad, and Sweden was never to be administered from Poland. Sigismund ruled Poland from 1587 to 1632 and largely stayed there. When news reached him of the Uppsala Synod of 1593, he treated it as an infringement of his prerogative. The synod, summoned by Duke Charles after John's death, had rejected the new liturgy and drawn up an anti-Catholic confession of faith on the 5th of March 1593. It declared Holy Scripture and the three primitive creeds to be the true foundations of Christian faith and adopted the Augsburg confession. When Sigismund returned to Sweden he initially tried to confirm what had been done and gain time. But the aggression of the Protestant faction and the persistence of Duke Charles made civil war unavoidable. At the Battle of Stangebro on the 25th of September 1598, the struggle was decided in favor of Charles and Protestantism. Sigismund fled, never to return. On the 19th of March 1600, the Riksdag of Linkoping proclaimed Duke Charles king under the title of Charles IX of Sweden. Sigismund and his descendants were declared to have forfeited the Swedish crown, which would pass instead to the male heirs of Charles, the line that would lead Sweden into the era the source calls Stormaktstiden.