Gustav moved quickly to contain this new menace. Threatening and cajoling the Dalesmen, he was able to stifle the revolt. His old allies Mans Nilsson, Ingel Hansson and Anders Persson again stuck by Gustav and helped him quell the insurrection. The two leaders escaped to Norway, finding safe haven with the archbishop of Trondheim. The good archbishop, however, succumbed to Gustav’s entreaties and returned the two men, thinking they would be tried by an ecclesiastic court. But Gustav wanted to make an example of the pair and had them tried by the Råd where he acted as prosecutor. They were found guilty and sentenced to death. According to Peder Svart, they were led into Stockholm, “clad in old threadbare tattered cloaks, riding backwards on famished horses, Peder Sunnanväder with a coronet of Straw on his head and a broken wooden sword by his side, Master Knut with a crosier of birch-bark.”1 Both men were executed in the Stockholm public square.
There was still some mopping up to be done from the war with Denmark. The fortress at Stockholm had fallen when Lübeck had refused to resupply the defenders and the Danish-German garrison had been given safe passage out of the country, but Kalmar Castle, Sweden’s strongest fortification, still resisted. Gustav turned to his German commander, Berend von Melen, to take the fort. Von Melen arrived at Kalmar Castle with a large force and threatened a siege, then talked the garrison into surrendering. Kalmar was taken in the name of Gustav and Sweden. As reward for all his efforts von Melen was given Kalmar County and Uppvedinge Hundred as fiefs and made counselor to the king. Gustav gave him his second cousin, Margareta Eriksdotter Vasa, in marriage, probably in the hopes of securing permanent loyalty from this soldier of fortune. If that was Gustav’s intention, it did not work.
Von Melen immediately set about creating his own barony. He took over Kalmar County and used the fortress to guard it, putting his brother Henrik in command. He had the garrison and county officials swear fealty to him instead of crown and country. Gustav either was unaware of what was going on in Kalmar or turned a blind eye, for he next put von Melen in charge of an expedition against Gotland Island to root out Soren Norrby and his nest of pirates causing much damage along Sweden’s Baltic coast.
During the Swedish war for independence Admiral Norrby, after defeating the Swedish-Lübeck naval force off Copenhagen, had set up headquarters on Gotland. From here he attacked Baltic shipping and raided the Swedish coast, acting more like a condottiere of the sea than a Danish admiral. This activity was becoming intolerable to both Gustav and the Lübeck merchants. Even after Christian’s ouster in favor of Frederick, Norrby continued to support the former Danish king, making him a danger to both Gustav and Frederick.
To complicate things, Kristina Gyllensteina, Sten Sture’s widow, was released from Danish prison in 1524 and returned to Sweden, settling at Kalmar. She immediately began scheming with the Sture party in an attempt to put one of her sons on the Swedish throne in place of Gustav. She was certainly plotting with von Melen against Gustav and there were rumors she was planning to marry Soren Norrby, laying the groundwork for an invasion of southern Sweden. The marriage rumor was not at all ridiculous as the two had met while Kristina was a prisoner in Denmark. Norrby had been kind to her, perhaps interceding on her behalf with the Danish king. Norrby also happened to be a widower at this time. At the very least, these conspiracies may have led to the actions Norrby would take a year later.
Norrby’s continued Baltic piracy finally drove the Lübeck merchants to propose lending Gustav additional funds to assemble an expedition to wipe him out of his island base. Gustav turned to von Melen to command the assault.
Von Melen landed on Gotland and made good progress until he reached the fortress of Viborg. Lacking siege equipment, he entered into negotiations with Norrby, very possibly plotting further mischief against Gustav.
With von Melen in Gotland, Gustav made a move to secure Kalmar Castle. He ordered the gates opened to him for a state visit. Henrick refused, presumably on von Melen’s orders. This rebuff combined with rumors coming back from Gotland began to place doubts in Gustav’s mind as to the loyalty of von Melen.
To make matters worse, Norrby now decided to change his allegiance from Christian II to Frederick, making Gustav’s invasion of Gotland a war on Denmark. A Danish war was more then the merchants of Lübeck had bargained for and they quickly applied pressure on Gustav to negotiate an end to hostilities. At a conference in Malmö, with Lübeck mediating, the state of Danish and Swedish affairs following Sweden’s break with the Kalmar Union was finally settled. By the terms of the Malmö Recess of September 1, 1524, Sweden seeded all rights to Gotland, Bleking, Halland and Skåne. Denmark gave up Viken (the modern Norwegian province of Bohuslän). For her efforts in arranging the peace, Lübeck obtained new trade concessions from Denmark and a cordial relationship between the two countries. Gustav felt he had been outmaneuvered by von Melen, Norrby, Frederick, and especially by the Lübeck merchants. This seems to be the point at which Gustav began to develop a different attitude toward his Lübeck benefactors. The Swedish king may have come out second best in this round, but he was learning and he generally didn’t make the same mistake twice.
Upon von Melen’s return from Gotland, Gustav ordered his general to Stockholm and there he extracted a promise from the German adventurer that he would proceed to Kalmar and have the gates of the castle opened for the state visit. However, upon arriving at the fortress, von Melen threw off any pretense of loyalty to Gustav. He placed Henrick Jute, a soldier who had fought under Sten Sture, in command of the castle and had all the German and Swedish soldiers renew their vow of fealty to him. He then departed Sweden with his family, including his brother Henrick, returning to Germany where he immediately entered into intrigues against the Swedish king. For many years to come von Melen would be a focal point for conspiracies and plots against Gustav in Germany. Swedish outcasts, German mercenary opportunists and rebuffed Lübeck merchants would float in and out of these conspiracies, waiting for a crack in Gustav’s power, a chance to reenter Sweden and reassert control.
Gustav, furious at von Melen’s treachery, was now faced with retaking “the key to Sweden” himself. In July of 1525 Gustav left Stockholm with four companies of his finest foot soldiers bound for Kalmar Castle. His fifteen hundred men were opposed by a far inferior force in numbers, but the fortress proved to be every bit as formidable as its reputation promised.
Gustav stormed the walls and lost half his troops in the first few days. The moat was said to be red with the blood of the Swedish soldiers. Bodies lay everywhere at the foot of the walls and many of those surviving were missing arms or legs, a common result of warfare in the early Renaissance. These were losses Gustav could ill afford. Peder Svart records in his chronicle of the period that the king wept tears of grief at the terrible losses. Still Gustav could not leave the fortress so close to Danish territory in enemy hands.
He threatened to lead the troops himself up the scaling ladders and began to don his armor. His officers begged him to stay clear of the fighting, that they would lead another effort and this time would carry the wall. They did not. They only succeeded in getting more precious soldiers killed.
Still, the battle had taken its toll on the defenders also, so eventually a truce was arranged followed by capitulation. The terms of the surrender are not known. It is possible that the defenders’ numbers were so depleted that surrender became the only option. But it seems likely that safe conduct to Germany would have been insisted upon by the defeated.
However, following their surrender, the garrison was seized and held for court-martial, found guilty of treason and sentenced to the wheel, a nasty form of execution whereby the victim was beaten until enough bones were broken so that he could be threaded through the spokes of a large wheel. His body was then raised on a post of the wall and left to die and rot. In this case the defenders had their sentences commuted to beheading except for two who were freed. The remainder, some sixty to seventy men, went under the headsman’s ax, ending the last holdou
t from Swedish crown control.
Kristina Gyllensteina eventually reconciled with Gustav. She married a supporter of Gustav’s and disappeared from the Swedish political scene.
While Gustav had his hands full dealing with von Melen on the Swedish side of the southern border, Frederick and Lübeck were having their problems with Norrby on the Danish side. Early in 1525 the former Danish admiral switched allegiance back to Christian II and invaded Blekinge from his base at Viborg. He called for a general uprising in the name of the deposed Danish king and was rewarded with a peasant revolt in Skåne allowing him to lay siege to Hälsingborg. He appealed to Christian to send reinforcements and turn the insurrection into a war for the return of his throne. Fortunately, for the parties to the Malmö Recess, the exiled former king was in no position to take advantage of this opportunity. In April Lübeck sent its fleet to crush Norrby’s squadron and Rantzau, Frederick’s general, with his German mercenaries cut Norrby’s peasant army to pieces in Skåne. But the Viborg Castle on Gotland would be a challenge to take so Frederick bought Norrby off by granting him Blekinge as fief-for-life in exchange for Gotland. He pacified Lübeck by handing over Bornholm. However, Norrby seems to have been incorrigible. No sooner had things settled down than he put together another fleet and began indiscriminately attacking Baltic shipping from the Blekinge sea ports.
Once more the Malmö partners combined to rid themselves of this persistent nuisance. In August 1526 a Danish-Swedish fleet met and annihilated Norrby’s ships, sending most to the bottom. Norrby escaped and made his way to Russia where he was imprisoned for not accepting service with the tsar. Emperor Charles V negotiated his release in 1529 and sent him to fight in his Italian campaign. Soren Norrby was killed a year later in the siege of Florence, a soldier of fortune to the end.
The revolt was over. Sweden had won her independence from Denmark and was beginning to have a sense of itself as a nation. Gustav was the key to this transformation, but his trials were far from over. He had, at best, a tenuous hold on a people that still thought of themselves as Dalesmen or Smälanders more often than as Swedes. Rulers had come and gone with such frequency that the idea of any particular king being long term was foreign to them. Sweden had its independence, at least temporarily, but it would take a civil war and religious revolution to make this country a nation.
5. War Debt and the Reformation
At the same time Gustav was dealing with military and external matters, he had to find the money to satisfy the country’s war debt owed primarily to Lübeck and its merchants. Sweden was encumbered with a staggering debt of 114,500 marks (about $1.5 million) to various factions in Lübeck. Gustav had literally won his crown on credit. A letter from Herman Iserhel illustrates the situation: “I sit here in great sorrow. My creditors press me hard. Send at once as much wares as you can—salmon, lard, oil, furs, silver, copper, iron.”1 Likewise Henrick Möllar, whose ship had taken him to Småland, pressed Gustav, as did others. Exercising the tools available to him would aggravate already volatile situations, particularly with the peasants, Dalesmen, Smålanders and clergy.
Gustav’s conventional means of raising money were severely constrained by the partial feudal system Sweden had acquired and the strong position of the Catholic Church, which owned 21.3 percent of the land and was exempt from taxation. The nobility, also not taxable, held 20.7 percent, leaving only about half the land (52.4 percent) owned by taxpaying peasants (skattebonder). In Swedish Finland 96 percent of the arable land was occupied in this manner. However, skattebonder were mostly subsistence agriculturists, generally growing enough to provide for their families, but not accumulating any real wealth. They simply did not produce a lot of excess to tax. The king did have his own lands, and 5.6 percent of Swedish arable land was occupied by peasants who paid rent to the king (kronobonder). In addition to the crown lands and the peasant tax, the king received a portion of the court fines (sakoren) and duties on imports and exports which was negligible because Gustav had turned over nearly all trade with the outside world to the Hanseatic League cities, primarily Lübeck. According to law, the king could ask for a special tax on all subjects to meet an emergency, but the amount was set by the landstings of each province (landskap). Gustav would have to be resourceful if he was to find the money he needed to repay the debt to his German creditors.
Gustav’s Sweden was overwhelmingly agricultural and even this population was scattered with much of the country being forested. Only the fertile plains of Västergötland and Östergötland, the basins of Lake Mälar and Hjalmar, and the south coast of Finland had any kind of a dense peasant population. Only in the iron and copper producing region of the Bergslag was there any non-agricultural industry and this was poorly developed. The only city of any size was Stockholm and that had been decimated by the war. Gustav had ordered merchants and burghers back to the city, but it would take time and money to rebuild this commercial center to its prewar level.
Gustav did what he could to raise taxes on the peasantry then turned to the church, the source of real wealth in the country. With Gustav Trolle in exile, Hans Brask, bishop of Linköping, was nominal head of the Church of Rome in Sweden. Brask was an astute politician. He had managed to stay in the good graces of Trolle while maintaining relations with the Stures and keep his head through the Stockholm Bloodbath, yet had not antagonized the new king. With Gustav’s ascendance to the throne, Brask joined the Gustav party, supporting the crown with grants and loans from church coffers. However, as the new king pressed the monasteries, cathedrals and even parishes for more revenue, Brask became increasingly less ardent in his support. Besides the pressure from Gustav for money, Brask was alarmed by the number of positions being held by Lutherans in Sweden.
After rejecting the two sitting Swedish chancellors, Peder Jackabsson Sunnänvader and the bishop of Strängnäs, Gustav had selected as his chancellor and chief counselor Laurentius Andreae in 1523. Laurentius was the archdeacon of Strängnäs and had studied in Germany before Luther’s time, had been to Rome three times, and was a supporter of the Lutheran cause. In 1524 Gustav appointed Olaus Petri secretary and chaplain of Stockholm. Petri was becoming known as the voice of Lutheranism in Sweden. Gustav certainly had no far ranging plan to bring the Protestant Reformation to Sweden. Indeed, his first acts upon taking the throne had been to reconcile differences with the Holy See in Rome. At Strängnäs, he had vowed to uphold and protect the church. He accepted the pope’s envoy, Johannes Magnus, a Swedish commoner by birth and noted scholar at the Vatican. The terms conveyed by Magnus were that Gustav Trolle be reinstated to his position as Swedish archbishop and that Rome retain the right to appoint foreigners as Swedish bishops. Gustav could not accept either of these conditions. Finally, he proposed that Magnaus himself be appointed archbishop of Sweden and sent him back to Rome to plead his case. Gustav’s letter to Pope Adrian VI (1523) provides a glimpse into the king’s thinking and an indication of what was to come:
If our Most Holy Father has any care for the peace of our country, we shall be pleased to have him confirm the election of his legate ... and we comply with the Pope’s wishes as to a reformation of the Church and religion. But if His Holiness, against our honor and the peace of our subjects, sides with the crime-stained partisans of Archbishop Trolle, we shall allow his legate to return to Rome, and shall govern the Church in this country with the authority which we have as king.2
Time passed. Gustav received no answer and the ties between Gustav and the Church of Rome remained strained. The situation in Germany, however, was even worse.
The Reformation sparked by the Saxon monk was in full flower. Martin Luther was born in Eisleben, Saxony, in 1483. Early on he showed ability as a student. His industrious father had been able to get him into the University of Erfurt to study law, but his interests leaned more toward theology and at 22 he entered the monastery at Erfurt. Three years later he became a professor at the new University of Wittenburg and visited Rome on monastic business at least once. Gradu
ally he became more and more concerned with many of the practices of the church of his day and in 1517 he posted his 95 Theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. In 1520, he publicly burned the pope’s bull condemning his teachings. He was summoned to appear before the Diet of Worms in 1521 where he was denounced for his heretical preaching, but here a minority of delegates protested, casting dissenting votes and earning the label Protestants. This was followed by Charles V’s edict condemning Luther as a heretic, authorizing his capture and trial, and demanding the burning of his books and pamphlets. For his own protection Luther was seized and hidden by the elector of Saxony. Luther continued to write, translating the Bible into German along with the catechism and composing several hymns.
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