A Church That Owned the Land
The piety of the Scandinavian peoples around 1500 had made the Church the owner and employer of the land. Half the land of Denmark belonged to it, and the peasants who worked those lands lived like serfs. The city of Copenhagen was a fief of the Church. Nobles and clergy paid no taxes: the nobles because they met the costs of war, and the clergy because they carried the moral and religious leadership of society and ran its schools and charities. The universities of Copenhagen and Uppsala were founded and run by the Church. A tenth of the produce and income of the land and of non-church institutions was paid to it. On top of this the Church took a small sum for every building raised, every child born, every marriage made and every burial. Each person gave it one day of free service a year, and nobody could inherit an estate without ceding part of it to the Church.
The Church collected these levies on the pretext of meeting its administrative costs, but the people gradually realized that the money they paid was spent on the lavish, almost royal living of the bishops, and they began to complain. Danish merchants, alarmed by the Hanseatic League's mastery of the North Sea and the Baltic, were angered by competition from nobles and clergy, who usually shipped the surplus produce of their estates abroad in their own ships. In Scandinavia, as elsewhere, the nobles had their eyes on Church lands, and the Church, which saw itself above nationality, met rising national feeling here, as in other countries, with opposition.
The Kalmar Union and the Bloodbath
In all three countries the Church supported the union of the Scandinavian lands under the Kalmar Union, which was revived by Christian I of Denmark (1457). In Sweden a nationalist party of townsmen and peasants, weary of Danish domination, broke up the union and made Sten Sture the Younger regent of an independent Sweden (1512). Gustav Trolle, Archbishop of Uppsala (then Sweden's capital), rose to defend the union of the Scandinavian countries. Sture removed him from office. Pope Leo X ordered him restored, but Sture refused; Leo then forbade religious assemblies in Sweden and commanded Christian II of Denmark to march on Sweden and crush the regent. Christian's first attack failed, and he had to make an armistice with Sweden, but he carried several people off to Denmark as hostages (18 January 1520), among them Gustavus Vasa. In his second campaign Christian broke Swedish resistance, and Sture, mortally wounded in the fighting, died. His widow, with the force she had gathered, defended the besieged city of Stockholm against the Danish army for five months and finally surrendered it after the commander of Christian's army promised a general amnesty. On 4 November Christian was crowned by Trolle, who had recovered his position.
On 7 November the prominent Swedes who had backed Sture were brought before the king in the city's citadel. Trolle's representative asked the king to punish them for deposing the archbishop and destroying his palace. Ignoring his own promise of general amnesty, the king condemned seventy Swedes to death, and on 8 November they were beheaded in the city's "Great Square"; the next day several others were arrested and executed. A few spectators who sympathized with the victims were also put to the sword, and the property of all those executed was seized for the king.
A cry of outrage rose across Sweden. People said the Kalmar Union had drowned in the "Stockholm Bloodbath," and all held the Church responsible for the killing. Christian thought that by removing the leaders of the Swedish nationalist party he was securing his rule over the country, never realizing that he was clearing the way for a young man who would free Sweden from Denmark's grip.
Gustavus Vasa's Flight and Rising
This young man was called Gustav Eriksson and became known to posterity as Vasa. At thirteen he was sent to Uppsala to study, and at twenty he was called to the court of Sten Sture the Younger, who had married a sister of Gustav's mother's; there he learned more from Bishop Hemming Gadh. In 1519 he escaped from Denmark and went to Lübeck, where the city's senate, long an enemy of Denmark, gave him money and a boat. He finally reached the shores of his homeland (31 May 1520) and for months wandered Sweden, hiding in villages. In November he heard that a hundred Swedish patriots, his father among them, had been beheaded in Stockholm. At once he mounted a horse and rode to his native Dalarna (Dalecarlia) in northern Sweden, and, to free his country from the Danes, set about raising an army from hardy peasants who followed small landholders.
From then on he lived like a hero of Homer's epics. After crossing icy roads he reached the house of an old schoolmate and rested there. His friend did not fail in hospitality, but he told the police, who favored the Danes, that Denmark's escaped prisoner was in his house. Before he could be caught, Vasa slipped away, at a sign from his friend's wife. After about thirty-two kilometers on foot he came to a priest, who hid him for a week. After another forty-eight kilometers he reached the town of Rättvik and tried to rouse its people against the Danes, but they knew nothing of the Stockholm killings and did not believe what Vasa said. After another forty kilometers he came to the district of Mora and tried again to rouse the peasants, who listened to him with doubt and suspicion. Hopeless and alone, Gustav turned west, meaning to live in seclusion in Norway. But before he reached the Norwegian border the people of Mora sent a messenger to say that if he came back they would welcome him warmly. The peasants of Mora had now heard of the Danes' crimes in Stockholm; word had also spread that the king meant to tour the whole country and had ordered gallows set up in all the large towns to punish the people. Taxes were to be laid on a people who had so far fought the greed of their tyrannical rulers. When Gustav returned to Mora and spoke to the people, the peasants gave him a bodyguard of sixteen mountain fighters and pledged to take up arms and fight the Danes in orderly ranks under his lead.
A King for a Free Sweden
They knew no weapons but bow, arrow and dagger. Vasa taught them to make javelins and iron-tipped lances and stirred their patriotic zeal for the fight. The peasants, fired by the passion he had breathed into them, occupied the towns of Västerås and Uppsala. Archbishop Trolle once more fled his seat. Armed, organized peasants cleared one region after another of Danish garrisons. A rising within Denmark kept Christian II from leading his army in person, but the Danish fleet raided the Swedish coast several times. Gustav sent an envoy to Lübeck to obtain warships and, by promising a large sum of money, got ten warships from Lübeck's merchants. With their help the Swedes beat off Danish attacks by sea. On 7 June 1523 the victorious rebels, in a new Parliament, proclaimed their commander Gustav I, king of the country. On 20 June Stockholm joined the rebels, and Vasa made it his capital from then on. Soon afterward Christian II was removed from the throne of Denmark, and his successor, Frederick I, gave up Denmark's claims on Sweden. The Kalmar Union (1397–1523) thus came apart, and the House of Vasa became the ruling family of Sweden.