The Death of Charles XII of Sweden
Michael Srigley describes how, on November 30th, 1718, one of the foremost soldiers of the age was shot while besieging a fortress in Norway. Did he succumb to a stray bullet, or was he assassinated?
At about nine o'clock on the night of November 30th, 1718, as Charles XII was inspecting sapping operations from a forward trench before the Norwegian fortress of Fredrickshall, a bullet travelling at high speed entered his left temple, and passed clean through his skull. He died instantaneously. Who fired the bullet?
This question, asked within hours of his death, has ever since been exercising the minds of scholars, especially in Sweden, and during the last half century has given rise to keen, sometimes acrimonious debate. In its simplest form the debate is whether or not Charles XII was killed by a bullet from one of his own men, and both sides draw on two main types of evidence: historical evidence based on contemporary accounts, and the results of modern research in such diverse fields as folklore, ballistics and forensic medicine. The intention here is to give a review of this overall evidence so that the reader may be his own jury in resolving the mystery of Charles XII’s death.
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