Gustav Vasa: The Father of Modern Sweden?

On 4 November 1520 Christian II of Denmark and Norway was crowned king of Sweden. In the decade preceding the coronation the so-called Kalmar Union, which since 1397 had joined the three kingdoms under a common monarchy, had been the cause of a series of rebellions raised by various groups in Sweden who were opposed to this centralising project. Though initially successful in repelling the Danish forces, by September 1520 the last pockets of Swedish resistance in Stockholm were unable to hold out. With the promise of amnesty and favourable conditions under the new would-be king, the conflict was brought to a conclusion.

But as night fell on 8 November, as many as 100 rebels, including members of the council of state, high church officials, Stockholm city officials and ordinary citizens, were taken into custody. Accused of heresy, they were quickly condemned and hanged or beheaded at Stortorget, Stockholm’s main square. Their bodies were broken, dismembered and burned. The slaughter was recorded by the Swedish clergyman Olaus Magnus, who wrote:

He [Christian] had two bishops, Vincent of Skara and Matthias of Strängnäs, knights, nobles, city leaders, councilmen, and citizens – over 120 persons – beheaded – and I, Olaus Magnus, canon from Linköping, witnessed this in horror. In addition, on the following day, after giving promises of safe release from prison, more were hanged, broken on the wheel, or decapitated. The bodies of the decapitated lay unburied for three days before they were taken out of Stockholm to be buried.

The Stockholm Bloodbath (as it came to be known) marked a turning point in the war. If Christian had intended the event as a deterrent to continued Swedish resistance against his rule, he had misjudged. The Stockholm Bloodbath united the Swedish rebels under one leader, who would guide its fractured resistance to victory: Gustav Eriksson Vasa.

A history of violence

The Kalmar Union was established at Kalmar Castle in 1379, following a meeting of delegates led by Margaret, daughter of Denmark’s Valdemar IV Atterdag, widow of Denmark and Norway’s Håkon VI Magnusson, and mother of Olaf IV of Norway and Denmark. Ongoing unrest in Sweden surrounding its unpopular king, Albrecht of Mecklenburg, coupled with external threats to the autonomy of the region and a series of advantageous marriages and deaths within the royal families of Denmark and Norway coincided to create favourable conditions for the three Nordic countries to join together.

For some four decades the Union functioned well, first under Margaret and then her nephew, Erik of Pomerania. But the Union had a fatal flaw: while the Danes saw it as a kind of triple monarchy under the Danish Crown, Norwegian and, especially, Swedish nobles and their followers saw it as a federation in which each country remained largely independent, free to be led by its own nobility and follow its own laws.

Rebellions against the centralising efforts of a sequence of Danish monarchs began in the 1430s. They were unsuccessful in Norway, which remained under Denmark’s control until 1814. In Sweden, however, intermittent independence was established over the course of the 15th century thanks to localised revolts. In the country’s medieval provinces, such as Dalarna and Småland, discontent arose among the common people – farmers and miners, iron smelters and forest workers – due to over-taxation and mistreatment by Union authorities, who were often foreigners. Government in Sweden was to be based on a power share between the Crown and the nobility; attempts by the Union’s kings to encroach on Sweden’s autonomy faced increasing opposition from the great families.

The fighting in these revolts involved untrained peasant armies, who formed largely regionally based fighting units led by nobles. In battle these forces effectively used pikes and archers against the Danes’ trained mercenary troops. The leaders were chosen from a handful of powerful families (Bonde, Oxenstierna, Sture, Vasa) and were usually given the title Riksföreståndare (head of state or regent). Two of them, Karl Knutsson Bonde and Gustav Eriksson Vasa, would be elected as kings.

In 1512, Sten Sture the Younger stepped in to lead the ongoing rebellion. Elected regent, for seven years he led Swedish forces against those of Denmark’s Hans I and his successor, Christian II. However, in January 1520, on the frozen lake of Åsunden near Bogesund (present-day Ulricehamn), Sten was fatally injured by cannon fire and his army, leaderless, was defeated. Sten’s regent consort Christina Gyllenstierna assumed leadership, but her rebel forces were defeated in April and the fighting ended with the surrender of Stockholm in September. Christian entered the city in triumph, and on 4 November was crowned king. The Bloodbath followed four days later.

The massacre caused outrage in Sweden. If viewed as the act of a deeply flawed, tyrannical Machiavellian ‘new monarch’ of his age, the killings could be seen as a logical necessity to eliminate Christian’s enemies and secure his dominance. There were, however, other powerful people with scores to settle after years of conflict. Some said that the executions had happened at the behest of Gustav Trolle, Archbishop of Uppsala, who had become a close ally of Christian after being deposed from his position by Sten Sture, who had ordered the destruction of his fortress residence, Almarestäket, in 1517. Another of Christian’s key allies, Gorius Holste, one of Stockholm’s leading merchants, was said to have seized upon the occasion to eliminate his opponents. There were rumours, too, that a poorly disciplined army on the rampage was to blame.

Whatever its cause, the Bloodbath stoked renewed opposition to Danish domination, reinvigorating Sweden’s war of independence and setting in motion the events that would put Gustav Vasa on its throne.

The man who would be king

Born in 1496, Gustav was the son of Erik Johansson Vasa and Cecilia Månsdotter Eka. His father was a member of Sweden’s then untitled nobility and the council of state. Opposed to the Kalmar Union and a follower of the Stures, Erik was among the victims of the Stockholm Bloodbath. Gustav’s mother was a half-sister of Sten Sture’s widow, Christina.

By the time he was in his teens, Gustav was active in the resistance to the Union. In 1518 he was taken prisoner by Christian’s forces and sent to Denmark, where he was held under house arrest at Kalö Castle in eastern Jutland. In late summer 1519 he escaped and fled to Lübeck with the help of powerful friends, returning to Sweden in May 1520 and joining the struggle against Denmark. Although determined to resist Christian’s new and largely successful attack on Sweden, Gustav’s situation was dire: he was now a wanted fugitive pursued by agents of the king.

When Gustav arrived in Dalarna, a province with a long history of resistance to royal authority, in late 1520, he sought to rouse the peasants there to support his cause and take up arms again. Instead, he was met with scepticism and even outright hostility. Discouraged, he fled west towards Norway, where he hoped to find safe refuge. But the Dalarna peasants changed their minds, prompted, allegedly, by news of the Stockholm Bloodbath, as well as other violent actions committed by the Danes. There were also reports of plans to bring the mining and iron-making industry of the area under Christian’s control. A band of skiers caught up with Gustav at the village of Sälen, close to the Norwegian border. In January 1521 he was officially recognised as the leader of Dalarna. Gustav now had a fighting force.

As the war continued, one by one virtually all of Sweden’s provinces – including Västergötland, Östergötland, Småland – joined the conflict. In Vadstena in August 1521, at a meeting of leading Swedes, Gustav was recognised as regent. The once-localised rebellions now united under one leader, the tide turned against Christian and most of the countryside fell. However, the great fortresses of Kalmar, Visby and Stockholm remained under Danish control. In order to win them, Gustav turned to Lübeck, capital of the Hanseatic League. With the support of friends he had made in the city during his escape from Denmark, an agreement was reached that promised Gustav troops, equipment and naval forces in return for promises of repayment and assurances of continued Hanse monopolies on virtually all of Sweden’s import and export trade. The debts incurred were enormous and would plague Gustav for years. But the agreement, costly as it was, had the desired effect: much-needed military assistance was obtained and Christian’s loss of Hanse support contributed to his downfall in Denmark.

The Malmö Recess

On 6 June 1523, at the assembly of estates in Strängnäs, Gustav was elected king of Sweden and the kingdom was united under one leader. While the peasants may have had some representation, the assembly was dominated by Sweden’s secular and church nobilities and, in the shadows, two representatives from Lübeck, Bernt Bomhouwer and Herman Plönnis. This was a new generation of nobles and church leaders, some of whom were simply against the Union, while others hoped to restore the power of the nobility over an untested and therefore potentially malleable king. There were those factions that supported a strong central government, others a federative state. Exactly what Gustav had in mind for Sweden was not yet clear.

The war went on: key fortresses remained uncaptured, the debts to Lübeck continued to grow, and the Danes now presented a two-pronged threat because, by early 1523, Denmark had two kings – both of whom looked to maintain the Union. Though labelled a tyrant by both the Danes and the Swedes, Christian II was also a reformer who worked to ease the burdens of the Danish peasantry, reduce the power of the nobility, replace the economic domination of the Hanse, make Copenhagen a Danish-controlled centre of Baltic trade and further the Protestant Reformation. Unsurprisingly, each of these plans made him powerful enemies. At a meeting of the Danish nobles at Viborg in January 1523, Christian was deposed and his uncle, Frederick of Holstein, a strong proponent for the restoration of the Kalmar Union, elected king.

On 1 September 1524 Gustav Vasa and Frederick, accompanied by their supporters and representatives of Lübeck, met in the Danish city of Malmö. This was in the interests of both men: each needed to secure his position at home. There was also the question of the deposed, but still troublesome, Christian. The outcome, the so-called Malmö Recess, secured the end of the war with Denmark and the recognition by Frederick of Gustav as king of Sweden. The territorial aspects of the recess were more complicated. Denmark was assured continued control of Skåne and Blekinge, the southernmost regions of what is today Sweden. Sweden would hold Viken (Bohuslän) until the question of which side would gain the island of Gotland was determined. If Swedish forces succeeded in capturing Visby at the time of the Malmö conference, Gotland would go to Sweden. However, should the sea captain-pirate Sören Norby still hold the city, the question would be settled in a conference directed by the Hanse cities. (Ultimately, the island remained under Danish rule until 1645.) Finally, Lübeck’s various monopolies on much of both Denmark’s and Sweden’s trade in the staple goods of the period – grain, timber, furs, tar, honey, iron and flax – and exemption from the Sound Tolls that Denmark imposed on shipping in and out of the Baltic were assured.

How important was the Malmö Recess? Gustav was certainly infuriated by the territorial terms of the agreement, especially regarding Gotland, and the failure to secure a formal end to the Kalmar Union. He also believed he had been betrayed by the Lübeck representatives; according to contemporary accounts he took that anger out on the streets of Malmö in an encounter that almost became violent. A marker, placed by the local newspaper Sydsvenskan in 1990 outside Stortorget 7 in Malmö, describes this event: ‘During the peace negotiations in August 1524, the foreign guest Gustav Vasa drew a knife on the German merchant Herman Iserhel.’ Despite his frustrations (he swore never to set foot in Denmark again, a vow he kept), the peace established at the Malmö Recess was critical for Gustav Vasa, in part because resistance to his position, arising from the war, was already developing.

Master of monarchy

A new era in Swedish history had begun. Gustav Eriksson Vasa was now Gustav I Vasa. On his initiative, in 1544 Sweden became a hereditary monarchy. He ruled for 37 years, the dynasty he founded lasting until 1654. With the exception of Karl XIV Johan (Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a French Revolutionary general adopted by the childless Karl XIII at the age of 47), every ruler of Sweden since has family connections to the Vasa line. During Gustav’s reign a more centralised bureaucracy developed focused on Stockholm, both a royal navy and standing national army were created and a partial Reformation occurred. Gustav belonged to ‘the new monarchy’, a group of rulers that included Francis I of France, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Henry VIII of England and Frederick I and Christian III of Denmark. Each may have been influenced by Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532); all worked ruthlessly to develop some form of stable royal government. Gustav has long been seen as ‘the father of modern Sweden’, an interpretation nurtured by Gustav himself and, perhaps more importantly, by many of his successors, artists, poets, playwrights, educators and biographers.

Aware of the importance of image creation, the king of Sweden used every medium available to him. Much of the 16th-century record that survives emphasises the central |role he played in almost every aspect of the country’s life, including its economy, mining and iron industry, farming techniques, religion, local and regional administration, finances and foreign policy. Peder Andreæ Svart’s Gustav Vasa Krönika, published in 1560, was a chronicle of the king’s life up until 1534. Svart was a leader in the church and, for a time in the 1540s, served as Gustav’s chaplain. It is little surprise that he portrays the king in a highly positive light. When and how it was put together are matters of debate: some argue that Svart wrote it independently between Gustav’s death in 1560 and his own passing in 1562, but it has also been suggested that much of what Svart recorded had been dictated to him by the king much earlier. Many of the ‘details’ included in the Krönika have been repeated over and over in histories of Gustav’s reign written across the last 500 years.

Gustav proved himself a master of the ethos of monarchy. Through speeches, coins depicting his image, announcements by the clergy in churches, print propaganda, art and architecture, he sought to influence how his reign was – and would be – viewed. It has been suggested that he commissioned more portraits of himself than any other Swedish ruler; perhaps the most familiar of these is that by the German artist Jakob Binck, painted in 1542. Gustav is dressed in the royal fashion of the day – a short black coat with elaborate gold and pearl embroidery over white sleeves. In the place of a crown he wears a beret-like hat with a feather and pearl embellishment; a sword hangs from his back. In Latin to his right is the inscription: ‘By the Grace of God King of the Svea, the Goths and the Wends.’ Another powerful piece of propaganda was the 1541 Gustav Vasa Bible, central to the Reformation in Sweden. Written in the vernacular, it had profound influence on the development of the modern Swedish language. Gripsholm Castle, built as a part of new system of national defence and a royal residence for Gustav, is now home to Sweden’s National Portrait Gallery.

Gustav Vasa’s historical status as king was cemented by the historiography of the 19th century, when the creation of a broad national consciousness was integral to the development of Sweden as a modern nation state. Works by academic historians including Olof Celsius (1670-1756), Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783-1847), Anders Fryxell (1795-1881), Carl Georg Starbäck (1828-85) and P.O. Bäckström (1806-92), as well as Carl J. Rossander’s popular reference book for general readers, Den kunskapsrike skolmästaren (The Well-Informed Schoolmaster, 1864), included extensive narratives about Gustav and his achievements: fighting and winning Sweden’s independence from Denmark, contributing to the initial stages of the Lutheran Reformation, establishing the basis of a modern central administration and ending the dominance of Lübeck in the country’s economic and political life.

Statues in Stockholm, Uppsala, Mora, Västerås, Kalmar and Söderhamn were erected to commemorate the king, including an imposing oak rendering created in 1907 which stands in the main hall of the Nordic Museum; in 1908 the artist Carl Larsson depicted Gustav’s triumphal entry into Stockholm at Midsummer in 1523 as a 7x14 metre painting. In Uppsala Cathedral, a magnificent sarcophagus portraying Gustav Vasa and his first two wives was commissioned by his son, Erik XIV, in the 16th century; surrounding it today are seven frescoes painted by Johan Gustaf Sandberg in the 19th century.

Vasa’s reputation has bled into artistic productions, too. In 1786, a five-act opera composed by Johann Gottlieb Naumann with the libretto by Johan Henric Kellgren and heavily influenced by Gustav III (1746-92) debuted at the new Royal Opera in Stockholm. It has frequently been called ‘the Swedish national opera’. Fifty years earlier, the play Gustavus Vasa. The Deliverer of His Country, by the Irish writer Henry Brooke was about to open in London when it was banned under the English Licensing Act of 1737 – apparently because the characters in the play offended contemporary English political leaders who believed that the prime minister Robert Walpole was being portrayed in the part of its villain. (In 1794 the play was successfully performed in Boston.) One of the earliest films about Gustav was John Brunius’ two-part silent motion picture from 1928, in which Gustav was portrayed as the national hero so familiar in literature. A more critical view was presented in Henrik Dyfverman’s 1965 made-for-television film, based on August Strindberg’s play, Gustav Vasa. Set in 1542, the film depicts the king’s struggle to maintain power while grappling with his foreign debts and the peasant rebellion known as the Dacke War, when protests against Vasa’s policies – including raised taxation and his break with Rome – led to uprisings. Defeating the rebels in 1543, his retaliation was severe: the peasants who had participated were deported, their leaders executed.

Right-wing dream

In the 20th century fundamental changes in the nature of Swedish society brought about more critical assessments of Gustav’s reign and legacy. Industrialisation, urbanisation and democratisation were accompanied by the gradual decline in the influence of the monarchy and the evolution of the welfare state, or the ‘People’s Home’ (Folkhemmet), from the 1930s onwards. With these societal shifts came an increased scrutiny of the legacy of the ‘father of modern Sweden’. In Vilhelm Moberg’s Min svenska historia: berättad för folket (My Swedish History: Recounted for the People, 1971) Gustav is not a hero but a tyrant, under whose brutal rule church silver was confiscated by the Crown, burdensome tax policies were inflicted, local uprisings ruthlessly crushed and the king’s political opponents executed on his orders.

At least one political party continues to see Gustav I Vasa as worthy of emulation. The right-wing Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) hold the second-most seats in the nation’s parliament and the party has considerable influence in the coalition government – to which it does not belong. Deeply critical of the welfare state and today’s multi-ethnic Sweden, veneration of strong monarchs, empire and influence abroad are central to the group’s identity. Staunchly against internationalism and globalisation, the party’s antipathy towards Sweden’s membership in the European Union takes Vasa’s opposition to the Kalmar Union as its inspiration. The desire to achieve dominance in northern Europe goes hand in hand with an emphasis on a romanticised view of Swedish culture and past glory, defined by quaint Falu red country houses, ethnic homogeneity and the rejection of outside influence.

Byron J. Nordstrom is Professor Emeritus in History and Scandinavian Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota and the author of Scandinavia Since 1500 (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).