In the western counties of Jutland, however, the nobles held onto power and pushed the hard pressed council into accepting Frederick’s son as Christian III. Before he left Holstein, Christian defeated the invaders and was able to conclude an agreement with Lübeck to remove their forces from the country, leaving the insurgent peasants in Jutland, to the north, at the mercy of the Danish nobles. The council also appealed to Sweden for help and Gustav responded with loans, troops and ships.
In February 1534 the Danish Council made a treaty with Gustav. In exchange for military assistance and money, they granted a guarantee of non-interference in Swedish governmental affairs, dropping any claim to the Swedish crown. Swedish forces invaded Halland in the spring of 1534, capturing Halmstad by October, then pushed south taking Häsingborg early in the new year, recovering Halland for Christian III. Though receiving setbacks in Holstein and Halland, Lübeck still controlled both sides of the Sound (Malmö and Copenhagen) and most of Skåne, while Zealand was in chaos. Driving westward, Lübeck landed Christopher and the main body of their army on Fyn supported by their fleet, positioned to threaten Jutland.
At the same time, Gustav sent his fleet into the southern Baltic. In addition to the armed merchantmen he had purchased from Lübeck, Gustav had added four major warships of 500 to 1700 tons displacement and armed the entire fleet with cannon. The Swedish fleet was joined by a Prussian fleet and a Danish squadron still controlled by Christian, although most of these ships were poorly armed converted merchantmen. A squadron of Dutch merchantmen also joined the fleet. This combined force met a Lübeck fleet off Bornholm on June 9 in a battle in which the Swedish heavy guns were decisive. Many of the Danish captured ships and much of the Lübeck fleet was scattered or destroyed. A week later the combined allied fleet attacked the main Lübeck fleet in the Little Belt strait. Again, Gustav’s naval guns proved the difference. Much of the Lübeck navy was destroyed, eliminating it as an effective force for the rest of the war. The allied navy was now free to recover the Sound, and blockade Malmö and Copenhagen.
Count Christopher’s army was finally forced to battle and was decisively defeated by Christain and his nobles at the battle of Øxnebjerg on June 11. Captured was a seriously wounded Gustav Trolle, who died a few days later. Also killed in the battle was Johan av Hoya. Two more of Gustav’s enemies had been dispatched.
With the death of Gustav Trolle, Sweden’s official Catholic archbishop, the pope appointed Johannes Magnus as Swedish archbishop. However, Gustav had made Laurentius Petri archbishop at Uppsala in 1531. Johannes would never return to Sweden, but would travel Europe and spend his time writing in Rome. It is interesting that two of Sweden’s great literary works should be written at this time, Johannes’s A History of the Goths and Svear and Olaus Petri’s Chronicles of Sweden, two quite different views of Sweden’s past.
Lübeck had made a determined effort to regain control over Baltic shipping and had lost to the united Scandinavian monarchies. As a result of the war, Lübeck’s military power was destroyed. The Hanseatic stranglehold on northern maritime commerce was broken. The Swedish debt to Lübeck was canceled and new trade privileges for merchants negotiated. Under the new terms Sweden retained the right to tax all imports and exports. Swedish ports were open to all nations and Swedish merchants were free to trade throughout the Baltic and beyond. Gustav had obtained the economic and commercial freedom Sweden needed to develop as a modern European nation.
In Denmark the Zealand peasant revolt was put down mercilessly. Malmö and Copenhagen were blockaded and starved into submission. Christian III’s crown was secure, except for the constant worry that Charles V might at some point decide to take up his brother-in-law’s cause again. To mitigate this possibility both Sweden and Denmark sent feelers to Frances I of France, Charles V’s primary enemy in Western Europe.
As the country gained strength, it was obvious that Sweden would play an increasingly important role in international politics, but Gustav still had internal problems to deal with that would test the limits of his capabilities. There was the question of who would succeed him as regent of the realm and a civil war would test the very fabric of that realm itself.
6. Succession and Civil War
As Gustav’s throne became more secure and the central government stronger, he began working on another of his goals, a change in the succession process. The traditional Swedish method of election from among members of one or more aristocratic families was too unwieldy and put too much power in the hands of the electorate, namely the nobility. The elected king was then beholden to the factions who put him in power. Gustav wanted to establish a straight hereditary monarchy which could rule independent of the aristocracy, but to do this he needed an heir.
The recent instability in the Swedish government and the almost constant revolutions he faced caused Gustav difficulties in making proposals in the courts of Europe. His early attempts were rebuffed. However, in 1531 Gustav won the hand of Catherine of Saxe-Lauenberg, a German princess. Her family had neither wealth nor power, which indicates the extent of the problem Gustav was having in obtaining a bride. Catherine’s sister later married Christian III of Denmark, promoting ties between Christian and Gustav. By all accounts Catherine was delicate in terms of health and not happy in her new northern home. Gustav and Catherine had one son, Erik, born in 1533. His mother would die two years later.
Gustav’s second wife, Margaret Leijonhufvud, was from an old Swedish noble family. This marriage, in 1536, seems to have been a happy one producing ten children including three sons, Johan, Magnus, and Karl. Upon Margaret’s death, Gustav married her niece, Catherine Stenback. There were no children from this union, but Gustav had sons now with which to construct his new method of succession.
Stern and exacting in public, energetic, demanding and authoritarian as monarch, Gustav was warm and charming in private with family and friends. He had the ability to leave the pressures of state in the council room to pick up and play with a child a moment later in his private quarters. Yet the strain of the constant struggle to maintain power and build a free, strong nation certainly took its toll even on a strong man like Gustav.
Through the 1530s he suffered from bouts of depression and exhibited outbursts of erratic behavior. An example is the time he chased one of his state counselors through the courtyard with a drawn dagger because of some perceived offense.
A more serious event nearly cost the lives of Gustav’s two former chancellors, Olaus Petri and Laurentius Andreae. Laurentius had been Gustav’s first chancellor and close confidant since his election in 1523. Olaus followed as chancellor in 1531, but left the position two years later to return to his ecclesiastic and scholarly activities. He didn’t like being closely controlled and Gustav found him to be ill-suited to the highly political position.
In 1531 Olaus discovered a plot against the king through a parishioner’s confession. He could not divulge the treasonous information except to another clergyman, so he confided in Laurentius. Between the two of them the plot was foiled, but word of the incident eventually reached Gustav. The king was angry he had not been informed, but did nothing about it until years later. In 1539 Olaus and Laurentius were maneuvering the now independent Swedish church into a position of self-determination disapproved of by the king. Gustav had the two men arrested and tried for treasonous activities relating to the earlier plot against him. He influenced the trial so that both men were found guilty and sentenced to death. Gustav pardoned them, but imposed heavy fines that broke Laurentius financially and the citizens of Stockholm had to raise the money to free Olaus. Both men escaped with their lives, but they lost much of their influence in state affairs and the church movement toward independence from the state was arrested.
With the declining fortunes of the church, monastic and other ecclesiastic schools disappeared including a Greyfriars school in Stockholm. The University of Uppsala, weakened by the revolution, closed its doors in the early 1530s. Particularly promising students and som
e young men were sent to Germany for education, but these were few in number.
Unable to find qualified administrators in sufficient numbers in Sweden, Gustav brought in foreigners, mostly German, to fill civil service and advisory positions. This period is referred to as Gustav’s German era. As his new chancellor, Gustav appointed a German, Konrad von Pyhy. As tutor for his children, he imported another German, Georg Norman, but the ambitious Georg soon moved into Swedish politics.
Fortunately for Gustav the 1540s began with some triumphs in foreign affairs and relative quiet at home. In the spring of 1541 Gustav met with representatives from the Hanseatic League cities to renegotiate trade agreements. He could now play the cities against each other and dictate his terms. He met with Christian III at Brömsebro on the border just south of Kalmar. The two kings seem to have developed a warm personal relationship. On September 15 they signed the Treaty of Brömsebro providing for friendship and an alliance between the two countries. Denmark also repaid the loan Sweden had made during the Count’s Feud war. Thus, final recognition of Sweden as an independent nation was achieved.
After a period of quiet, new problems began to appear. The Swedish church, now severed from Rome, with its independent archbishop, began to slip from under Gustav’s control. In the Västerås Riksdag of 1544 the church was represented as its own estate, separate from the nobility for the first time. Gustav organized a system of government superintendents, one for the archbishop and one for each bishop, which usurped the church prelate’s authority. Georg Norman was appointed to head this agency with an office corresponding to the archbishop, essentially a minister of ecclesiastic affairs. But Gustav’s German administrators were about to cause him real problems.
First it was his chancellor. In November 1541 Denmark concluded a treaty with Frances I. The next year Gustav sent Konrad von Pyhy to the French court as head of a mission to negotiate for Sweden. The ever-conservative Gustav cautioned Pyhy to conduct proceedings carefully and with restraint. Once in France, however, Pyhy was apparently overwhelmed by the French court’s magnificence and tried to present an inflated picture of Sweden’s status. He spent money lavishly and promised Frances twenty-five thousand troops and fifty ships in support of his war against Charles V. On his return trip he hired a number of German knights to bolster Sweden’s army.
As the bills started piling up and word of his obligation to France arrived Gustav became worried and bewildered. This quickly changed to anger as the German knights began to disembark and he learned Pyhy was also being accused of bigamy. As soon as Pyhy arrived in Stockholm, he was removed from office and imprisoned for life.
At the same time Georg, the minister of religious affairs, was conducting an austerity program in the Swedish church. All unnecessary church valuables were to be turned over to the crown. The people complained that this final removal of bridal crowns, church plate and other ornaments was too much. Soon the chapels would be stark and bare. One might as well worship in the forest, it was said. Indignation and anger spread through all of Sweden’s rural areas, but in Småland this last act of sacrilege led to open hostilities.
The Dacke Rebellion was the most serious uprising of Gustav’s reign, indeed, the largest popular revolt against a native ruler in Swedish history, Sweden’s civil war. Georg’s act of removing the last of the church ornamentation and service pieces may have been the final straw, but the peasants of Småland had other complaints against the crown that weighed heavily on them. The religious reforms themselves were odious to these pious peasants who began and ended each day with family prayer. The tax burden certainly seemed excessive to this province of mostly taxpaying peasantry and minor nobility. In addition to taxes paid throughout the country, the small farmers and stockmen of Småland were paying fines imposed because of the 1537 revolt.
The king’s proclamation that “None shall hereafter drive oxen or horses out of the realm whether small or large, at the risk of their neck”1 cut off the border folk’s traditional trade with Blekinge and Halland. Prices were much higher at Ronneby and the other markets in the Danish provinces and the roads and waterways led in that direction as opposed to Kalmar where they were now forced to trade.
The king’s decree against killing deer and cutting trees impacted the people’s hunting and lumbering practices that helped sustain them. Also, the wild animals now ravaged their crops with impunity and the small farmer was prevented from wresting additional land from the ever present Småland forest.
Finally, the bailiffs themselves, the king’s men, were becoming more and more oppressive. By law they had a right to the hospitality of households they were visiting. But this had come to mean helping themselves to livestock, grain, hay, cloth, even a portion of bridal dowries. Bribes were often needed to clear the way for land and livestock sales, and other transactions. It was precisely this kind of corruption that led to the crime that would first make the leader of the Småland uprising an outlaw.
In 1536 Nils Dacke and Jon Andersson, peasants from the border country, hunted down and killed Inge Arvidsson, a particularly hated bailiff of the Möre area. At the time, Nils was living on Södra Lindö farm in Torsås parish of the Möre county with his wife and young son. Feelings against this man must have been running very high for the two men to risk everything in this desperate crime.
As was the practice, Nils and Jon took to the woods, losing themselves in the trackless forests of Småland and Blekinge. Here they would have run across other refugees from the law, indigents, all sorts of political, social and legal outcasts. They could slide back and forth across the Swedish-Danish border at will, avoiding capture, yet staying in contact with friends and relatives in both countries.
Nonpayment of taxes and fines, and the occasional killing of a bailiff had become such a problem in Varend and Möre, Småland, that Gustav sent his marshal, Lars Siggesson, to the province to bring this area into line. He was instructed to be particularly hard on the border clans. Delinquent debtors were thrown into the Kalmar Castle dungeon and their properties confiscated.
Led by Jon Andersson, the peasants of Möre rose in revolt, calling for an assembly with the men of Varend to make plans for action. Just in time, Ture Trolle, lord of Bergkvara and chief nobleman of Småland, stepped in, calling his own assembly of the disaffected peasants. He was able to quell the revolt and placate their anger with promises to address their grievances. Further bloodshed had been averted for the moment.
Following the aborted rebellion, Nils and Jon were relieved of their debt to society for the bailiff’s killing by paying a fine. Interesting that the theft of a horse or ox meant the gallows, but a murder, even of a king’s man, could be rectified with money, although in this case, a great deal of money. The fine was 40 oxen apiece. At the market in Kalmar an ox would bring about sixteen marks, higher at Ronneby in Blekinge. Forty head would be 640 marks, about the price of a sizable farm.
Nils was destitute, having lost everything while he had been in hiding the last two years. His extended family was obliged to come up with the money. This was common and the reason such fines were called clan fines.
Nils moved back to Södra Lindö, but stayed less than a year. He probably didn’t own the farm anymore and only returned long enough to make other arrangements and gather his family. He moved to a very small farm called Flaka, still in Torsås parish, but closer to the Danish frontier. It was an outcropper’s smallholding, newly cut out of the forest, belonging to the crown. Nils was now paying rent to the king. The farmstead was too small to make a living on, but it lay beside Lyckeby River, which had an abundance of fish, particularly eel, highly prized at the markets of Ronneby. The river also formed the boundary between Småland and Blekinge (Sweden and Denmark), but Nils’ neighbor on the other side claimed all rights to the river’s fish. The neighbor, Sven of Ledja, took his complaint to court and Nils lost.
Unable to make a living on the farmstead alone, Nils picked up his crossbow and, in early 1542, killed the bailiff who rented th
e farmstead to him, then fled into the forests once again. This time the outcropper turned outlaw was about to shake the throne of Gustav Vasa.
By May 1542, Nils had gathered about him a partisan fighting force. On June 20, he attacked Voxtrop, a bailiff’s farm, with 30 men. The bailiff, Nils Larsson, and a courtier, Arvid Vastgote, were stripped, tied to trees and shot full of arrows. A week later he called a thing at Inglinge Mound, the traditional assembly place for the border clans, and was able to attract a thousand men. Two weeks later he marched on Växjö, the main town of Varend, with over three thousand followers.
Meanwhile, Gustav had not been idle. He had appealed to Christian III for help under their Treaty of Brömsebro and sent what forces he had in the vicinity to the point of conflict. About 200 Swedes under Gustav Olofsson Stenbock invaded Värend from Västergötland, joining a small Danish contingent under Peder Skram. Their combined force, however, was vastly outnumbered and Stenbock called for a meeting with Nils on July 22. The royal army was forced to withdraw, leaving Nils in control of a good share of Småland.
The rebels were getting weapons, halberds, arquebuses, and ammunition, lead, shot and gunpowder from the mayor and citizens of Ronneby. Peasants on both sides of the border supplied food and clothing to the growing army. In addition to conventional weapons, Nils employed the traditional fighting methods of the forest people: felled trees to block roads and trails, ambushes from the thick undergrowth and the tree pull where a series of standing trees were cut nearly through then toppled at the same time with ropes as the enemy passed. But the most common weapon was still the one that every peasant had hanging on his wall at home, the crossbow. They were made by the peasants themselves. The bow was steel or horn and it shot a two foot, two and a half ounce bolt. At a hundred yards it could penetrate chain mail and all but the heaviest plate armor. Used for hunting, Nils’ commoners were practiced and deadly with this weapon. Nils and his peasant army met with continued success through the summer, driving out the king’s men from all corners of the province.
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