Sweden. At the end of the Middle Ages, the Swedish realm had an almost square shape. It stretched from the Baltic city of Kalmar in the south to the large Laplandish forests in the north, and from Lödöse at the mouth of the Göta River in the west to the fortress city of Viborg at the Russian border in the east. The Swedish Crown thus reigned over a territory that in north-south direction was about 1,400 km. long and in west-east direction about 1,100 km. wide. In the west and in the south, apart from a corridor at the mouth of the Göta River, Sweden was isolated from the North Sea and the Kattegat by Norwegian and Danish coast provinces; in the east, however, the northern part of the Baltic Sea had become a Swedish inland sea. The square shape of the realm and the prevailing dominance of waterway communications gave the east-west axis the same political and economic importance as the north-south axis. At the end of the Middle Ages, Stockholm was the largest and most important city, situated in the center of the realm, not, as it is has been since the loss of Finland in 1809, at its eastern edge.

The late-medieval Swedish realm comprised about twenty provinces that in most cases formed geographically and economically independent districts. The provinces were separated from each other by large forests or lakes, and their central parts in most cases consisted of plains that, with their fertile clay soils, were fairly well suited to agriculture. The most important agricultural districts were then as now in southern and central Sweden. The northern and eastern (i.e., Finnish) provinces were, on the other hand, dominated by forests. There, only the river valleys along the northern part of the gulf of Bothnia and the shores of the Finnish bay offered good conditions for farming and consequently for denser population.

The natural conditions for settlement and cultivation did not undergo any major changes during the Middle Ages, except the constant progression of the shoreline along the coast of the Baltic Sea. The progression was, and still is, a consequence of the rising of the earth's crust since the end of the latest ice age as well as of long-term changes in the water level of the world's oceans, resulting over centuries in both impairments and improvements for the coastal population. On one hand, it has made old sea routes unusable arid placed earlier ports and fishing settlements far away from the coast; on the other hand, it has given the coastal villages new, productive land which first provided fine pasture and which later, when it had dried, could be used as arable land.

The Swedish realm had developed during the end of the Viking Age and the first centuries of the Middle Ages. Exactly how it took shape and became "unified" is difficult to ascertain with precision, since the source material documenting this development is weak. At the beginning of the Swedish Middle Ages, around 1050, the provinces in middle and southern Sweden had a common king, although he apparently had difficulty in asserting royal power simultaneously in the old Svithiod (i.e., the provinces around Lake Mälaren), and in the territory of the Gotar around Lake Vänern and Lake Vättern (i.e., Västergötland with Daisland and Värmland and Östergötland with Småland). Sweden's first Christian king, Olav Skötkonung, had presumably been banished from the pagan Lake Mälaren region and taken refuge in Västergötland, where during his reign the first permanent Swedish bishopric was established in Skara.

The unity of the three main parts of the realm was not fully established during the early Middle Ages. Västergötland, for example, seems to have been separated from the rest of Sweden at certain periods during the 11th and 12th centuries. When the old royal family died out in the 1120s, a period of struggle for power followed lasting more than a century. The pretenders were usually drawn from two rival families, descendants of King Sverker the Elder and King Erik the Holy, respectively.

The explanation for the political instability of Sweden during the early Middle Ages lies in the varied geographical character of the realm and in the general social structure. The provinces were closed settlements, divided from each other by large forests and open lakes. They were thus not initially linked by common economic interests, and it was difficult to amass the military resources needed to bring the country under a single ruler. Regional chieftains governed the individual territories, and royal power and authority were limited to the right to lead men in combat and, when necessary, to function as the highest judicial authority.

In the 12th century, developments took place that in time would make it possible for the king to procure a stronger hold over the entire realm. The most important factor was probably that Christianity gained a strong foothold, and that, as a consequence, the country was organized into parishes and dioceses. The oldest list of Swedish episcopal towns dates from the year 1120; these can be identified as Skara, Sigtuna, Linkoping, (Eskils-)Tuna, and Västerås. The list implies that the basic structure of the medieval ecclesiastical organization in Sweden already existed. The establishment of a separate archdiocese in 1164 in Uppsala, to where the see had been translated from Sigtuna, presumably indicates that the Swedish state by then had a measure of political stability that could be compared with that of other North European states. The ecclesiastical organization must have given the royal power impulses to, and, by providing able officials, resources for, developing a central but in the beginning small civil administration.

The kings of the 12th century often resided in Götlarid, at the centrally situated island Visingsö in Lake Vättern. The long distances and the loose organization of the realm made it necessary for the king to have a deputy, an earl, to govern that part of the realm where he did not reside. Gradually, the earl came to have certain responsibilities for commanding the leding, the naval military organization with roots in the Viking Age that guaranteed the king access to a certain number of warships and control over the waters along the Baltic coast. The royal power gradually became stronger, and its resources were formally organized during the late 12th and 13th centuries. A definite shift came around 1250, when the Crown, after years of internal struggles, was given to the son of Earl Birger, who in reality was a kind of Swedish major domus, married to the former king's sister.

The ecclesiastical organization received its final form around 1250. Regular cathedral chapters were established; the parish subdivision received the form that, on the whole, it would retain throughout the Middle Ages; the ordinances of the Swedish Church were adjusted in all essentials to the continental model; and the Church was granted exemption from taxes for its property and the right to collect tithes from parishioners.

The administration of justice came increasingly under royal influence. At the end of the 11th century, the royal inquisition was introduced, which meant that the king or his deputy would appear every third year at the sessions of the district courts and there administer justice in cases submitted to him. Royal influence over legislation was not long in coming. To what extent the royal power, the Church, and the magnates participated in the process that led to codification of the provincial laws during the 13th century has been debated, but it is obvious that, by the middle of that century, the Crown, represented by Earl Birger, had such influence over the legislation that it could issue special laws valid for the whole realm and not just one province. Peace laws banning the use of violence in another's home, against women, in law courts, and in churches were instituted by an oath taken by the king and his men to punish infractions. Toward the end of the 13th century, the development had progressed so far that it was expressly the king who approved even new law books for the provinces, e.g., the Uppland Law, which was ratified by the king in 1296.

Parallel with consolidation in the area of judicial matters came a change in taxation and administration. At the end of the 13th century, the military leding was converted into a fiscal leding, that is, a yearly tax in money and in kind imposed on all self-owning farmers instead of the duty to serve on the king's ships. This conversion of the form of the farmers' obligation to the Crown is apparently connected with changes in the art of war in Sweden as in other European countries. There are strong reasons to see the castle building that took place in Sweden in the latter half of the 13th century in connection with the introduction of permanent taxes. The new large castles, such as those in Stockholm, Nyköping, Örebo, Kalmar, Åbo, and Tavastehus (the latter two in Finland), with their bailiffs and permanent garrisons, demanded constant maintenance from the surrounding countryside, including the provisions that farmers earlier brought with them on the leding ships and that they now had to pay as taxes in kind. With the allocation of special maintenance districts to the castles, the realm was divided into new, extensive administrative units. The castles were certainly erected in the first place for defense against foreign enemies, but they also gave the king, at least as long as the commanders in them were loyal to him, better possibilities than before to control the different parts of the country and their often stubborn magnates.

The remodeling of the military system and the consequent need for armored horsemen instead of mobilized, sea-borne farmers and district chiefs also seem to have been the main reasons for the creation of a Swedish nobility. This development was formally regulated through a statute issued at a meeting at Alsnö in Lake Mälaren, probably in September 1280. All who served the king on horse were thereby granted exemption from royal taxes and fines, which consequently gave them the right to collect these dues from their own tenants. The new nobility came to comprise the old class of locally rooted chieftains as well as peasants who chose to continue to serve the king as warriors, but now on horseback instead of on the leding ship, in exchange for exemption from the new permanent taxes. It was important that all of them, aristocrats as well as the lesser nobility, became the king's men and were personally tied to him in a uniform way throughout the entire realm.

At the same time, during the last decades of the 13th century, a more permanent circle of royal counselors appeared. The royal council consisted of the bishops of the realm and a group of secular magnates, among them the three foremost public officials: the lord chief justice, who came to represent the king as supreme judge; the lord high constable, who, in the place of the king, was in command during war; and the chancellor, most often a bishop, who was in charge of the king's chancery. From the beginning, the council was probably intended to function, when necessary, as a caretaker government, but after a couple of decades it came to be considered a permanent institution, known as the Council of the Realm, charged with the task of acting as permanent counselors of the king. In addition to the council, the king could draw support from specially formed assemblies of magnates, which, even if they usually were composed ad hoc of locally accessible magnates, were considered to represent the whole realm.

A distinct terminal point to the development in the 11th and 12th centuries toward a stable, economically strong, and unified kingdom came in 1319 with the "Freedom Letter," sometimes called "Sweden's Magna Carta." It was issued, together with a statute dictating how a king's election should take place in Sweden, when the three-year-old Magnus Eriksson was elected to the throne after protracted internal struggles. The Freedom Letter created guarantees against arbitrary taxation and forbade alienation of the fixed income of the Crown. In addition, the king, according to the election statute, was to take an oath that no one could be imprisoned unless he had been found guilty according to the law, and that the king would not place foreigners on the council or as bailiffs in the royal castles.

Around 1300, the Swedish realm was europeanized to a much higher degree than at the beginning of the Middle Ages. It had a nationwide royal power, whose strength was based on legal claims of continental character, on taxes, and on a military organization with castles and armored horsemen of European type. The Church was fully organized and, as a member of the international Church, was an important intermediary of continental European religious, intellectual, and cultural currents. The leading class of secular magnates had achieved positions and privileges that resembled those of the continental nobility, even if the process of feudalization, in legal terms, never developed as far in Swedish society as it did, for instance, in England, France, and Germany.

Around 1300, Swedish society was europeanized also in another respect. The number of towns had then increased significantly from only one around the year 1100 (Sigtuna) to about twenty-five by 1300. The growth was especially marked at the middle of the 13th century, concentrated in central Sweden (the Mälar valley region), and connected with an increased European demand for iron and copper from the mines in that area. Sweden became closely tied to international commerce, and the resources created through this commerce must have furthered the formation of a strong Swedish kingdom. The founding of Stockholm, the future capital of Sweden, around the year 1250 must certainly be seen in this context.

The 11th and 12th centuries were also the period when Sweden's borders were established. The stabilizing process that the royal power underwent bound together the various parts of the realm. The border with Norway was regulated through several agreements made during the period 1140-1273, while the border with Denmark was determined in detail sometime during the 13th century. At the middle of the same century, Sweden was given rights to a small corridor along the Göta River into the North Sea, Sweden's only breathing space toward the west. Gotland was finally placed under the Swedish Crown around 1280. In the latter part of the 11th and the beginning of the 12th century began a mainly peaceful immigration of Swedish farmers to parts of the coast districts along the northern part of the Gulf of Bothnia and the Finnish Gulf (Österbotten, Åboland's skerries, Nyland). The immigration was followed by regular war expeditions with the joint purpose of capturing and christianizing the territory. The first "crusade" probably occurred around the middle of the 12th century and was repeated during the 13th century. At the beginning of the 14th century, an attempt was made to reach all the way to the River Neva (at the site of present-day St. Petersburg) to control the commerce heading for Novgorod. This effort was unsuccessful, and in 1323 the border between the Swedish realm and Novgorod was regulated through the peace concluded at Noteborg. The southern part of the border established there remained in effect throughout the Middle Ages. The northern part marked spheres of interest in a no-man's land; the territories along the northeastern shore of the Gulf of Bothnia were in due time incorporated into the Swedish realm.

During the 14th and 15th centuries, Swedish society did not undergo any profound structural changes. The pattern that had developed during the early Middle Ages lasted until the introduction of the Lutheran reformation in Sweden and the reorganization of the central administration during the first decades of Gustav Vasa's rule.

In the area of foreign policy, the 14th and 15th centuries were dominated by repeated attempts to unite the Nordic realms under a single dynasty. At about the same time as he was elected king of Sweden (1319), the underage Magnus Eriksson became king of Norway through inheritance from his maternal grandfather, Hákon Magnússon. During a few decades (1332-1360), he was also lord of that part of Denmark east of the Sound (Scania, Halland, and Blekinge). Even if he never strove to create an integrated Nordic realm, his Swedish-Norwegian personal union had prepared the ground for the Nordic union created a generation later. Already in 1355, Magnus transferred the Norwegian Crown to one of his sons, Hákon, and five years later the Danish provinces were taken back by the Danish King Valdemar Atterdag ("ever-day"). In 1361, King Valdemar also incorporated Gotland into his kingdom. Magnus himself was defeated by his nephew, the German prince Albrecht of Mecklenburg, who had been summoned by the opposition Swedish magnates.

After a short while, Albrecht found himself in the same situation as King Magnus; because of poor finances, even he faced difficulties in upholding his kingdom against the Swedish magnates, who demanded greater influence over the administration of the realm. Finally, in 1388, they once more summoned a foreign monarch, Valdemar Atterdag's daughter, Margrethe, widow of Hákon Magnússon and heir of their recently deceased son, Olaf (d. 1387). Although a woman, she was recognized as regent in all three Nordic countries. In contrast to Magnus, she deliberately strove for an unlimited royal power that could unite the three realms. By playing the leading circles of the realms against each other, and by not giving her assurances legal form, she succeeded in 1397 (in Kalmar in southern Sweden) in getting her niece's son Erik, duke of Pomerania, crowned and acknowledged as king in all her Nordic realms without binding constitutional guarantees.

Even if the Union could not be maintained de facto during the entire 15th century, the thought of union was kept alive during more than 100 years by changing groups of magnates in the Nordic realms, who in different ways believed that they could benefit by a continued union. The Union meant certain advantages. It guaranteed peace in Scandinavia arid a collective force against non-Nordic countries, especially the German powers at the Baltic Sea. Furthermore, it gave both peasants and landowners an invaluable opportunity to carry on commerce freely among themselves across the borders and with the merchants in the towns of the other realms. From the Swedish perspective, however, there remained the constant, but perhaps exaggerated, fear that the richer and more powerful Denmark would gain a dominant influence in Sweden, and in various ways exploit its resources. Finally, many of the leading Swedish aristocrats feared that they would lose, among other things, the politically important and economically profitable commissions as bailiff administrators of the Crown's castles.

Toward the end of the 15th century, after an unsuccessful attempt by King Christian I to subdue the Swedes with force of arms (the battle of Brunkeberg outside Stockholm in 1471), the union increasingly became a political forum without real substance. Sweden was governed by a regent, who gradually became independent in relation to the Council of the Realm, whereas the Union king, although formally acknowledged, lacked influence in Sweden. The violent attempts made by the Union king to recapture power (1497-1501, 1518-1523) finally made the Union a political impossibility.

An essential aspect of the political history of Sweden during the late Middle Ages is the question of the relationship between the Council of the Realm and royal power, whether national or union. The king tried to strengthen his grip on the administration and the finances by reducing the influence of the magnates. At the same time, the leading men of the realm strove to preserve Sweden as a real elective kingdom (which implied that they themselves chose the king within certain limits), to protect the privileges and the immunity from taxation they had obtained from the Crown, to procure guarantees that they should have the right to administer at least some of the royal castles, and to be able to induce the king to consult them in ruling the realm. During periods in which royal power was weak, such as under the latter decades of Magnus Eriksson and under the reign of King Albrecht, the influence of the Council of the Realm increased. Under stronger monarchs, such as Margrethe and King Erik in the first decades of his own reign (after 1412), royal power was strengthened.

With the uprising against King Erik, which started in 1434, the Council of the Realm took on greater importance. As the king, although formally in power, was suspended, the council developed into an independent state government with full responsibilty for the administration of the realm. An expression of this independent position was the decision of the Council of the Realm to let a special seal of the realm, with a picture of the Swedish king St. Erik and the three crown coats of arms, replace the king's seal under important decisions.

The rebellion also led to important steps toward forming a popular Swedish representation. A formal parliament with chosen representatives for the four estates of the realm (nobility, clergy, burghers, and peasants) was certainly not established before the reign of Gustav Vasa; but it is obvious that representatives, even of the peasants, the mine owners, and the citizenry of the towns, especially around 1430, participated in meetings at which important decisions were taken on whether the union monarch was to remain in power. Earlier, peasants had been granted certain privileges in joint decision making at royal elections and in the question of taxation.

An area in which participation of the peasantry was never questioned was the administration ofjustice. At the local level, the district court or the thing, the jury consisted of twelve representatives for the farmers; these members of the jury could be freeholders as well as tenants of the nobility, the clerical institutions, or the Crown. According to the law, the district court at the vacancy of the district court judge had to recommend three candidates to the king, from which he should choose one as the new judge. During the reign of Magnus Eriksson, a further step was taken to unify the Swedish society by the introduction of two law books valid for the entire realm. One, the common law, which was compiled around 1350, was valid for the rural court district, that is, for the greater part of the population of the realm (ca. 90 percent) that lived in the countryside. The other one, the town law, which came a couple of years later, was applied to the towns of the realm and apparently based on conditions in Stockholm. A century later, a modernized version of the common law was ratified (King Christoffer's law, 1442), but during the Middle Ages, the new version was never in general use. The common law was supplemented throughout the Middle Ages by ordinances promulgated by the reigning king and regulating particular issues.

In the ecclesiastical area, no great changes took place during the last two centuries of the Middle Ages. The subdivision into dioceses and parishes generally remained stable from the end of the 13th century, although very small parishes, particularly in southwestern Sweden, were sometimes amalgamated with a neighboring parish, and the largest parishes in Norrland and Finland were divided into two or more parishes. The monastic orders in Sweden were the same as in the rest of Europe. In the countryside, there were monasteries of the contemplative kind, in most cases belonging to the Cistercian order and founded during the 12th century. In towns, however, the mendicant orders could be found, both Dominicans and Franciscans, in most cases established during the second half of the 13th century. At the end of the 14th century, religious life in Sweden was renewed through the creation of the specifially Swedish Order of Our Savior, founded by Birgitta Birgersdotter (St. Birgitta), daughter of a Swedish magnate. The preaching of Birgitta and the founding of the monastery became very important, both spiritually and culturally. The mother monastery in Vadstena became a national concern, although during certain periods it became closely associated with the union kings and especially their consorts.

Through the bishops who were ex officio members of the Council of the Realm, the Church came to play a central role in the political history of the 14th and 15th centuries. As a rule, they made common cause with the leading magnates in their struggle to reduce the-power of the king, since it was essential to protect the privileges of the Church (e.g, its exemption from taxes) and to defend its right to the free election of bishops. The last issue became especially important for political developments during the reign of Erik of Pomerania, since his repeated attempts to fill the Swedish sees with men, often Danes, loyal to the king led to the Church's siding with the insurgents in 1434. The struggle over the archiepiscopal see in Uppsala in 1432 and in subsequent years was an important factor in this development.

For the same reason, the Church took a cautious position when, at the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th, Sten Sture and his successors as governors of the realm acquired increasingly independent power and, among other things, secured pontifical permission in 1491 to fill certain bishoprics. This situation led to the archbishops coming to play an active role against the governors when the union kings tried to take back power at the end of the Middle Ages.

A powerful contributing factor in Magnus Eriksson's and Albrecht of Mecklenburg's failure to assert their power against the magnates was endemically poor finances. The revenue of the monarchs from this vast but sparsely populated country was insufficient to support a military apparatus, where strong castles and hired horsemen were the most important ingredients. The result was that the king had to transfer a considerable number of the royal castles and their maintenance districts to individual magnates, often as pawns for loans received. This situation led in time to a weakening of the king's power.

The financial situation of the Crown declined even more as a result of the Black Death and the effects of the agrarian crisis on the economy of the realm. Even if, because of the inadequacy of the Swedish source material, we cannot follow the development very closely, it is obvious that settlement and agrarian production during the latter half of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th decreased to such an extent that it must have had a powerful negative effect on the tax income of the Crown. Certainly, the decrease in agricultural production must have had an effect even on the secular and ecclesiastical magnates who were dependent on the income from their estates and tenants. But these magnates probably had better possibilities for compensation than the Crown, which was compelled to resort to unpopular and politically risky tax increases. An important reason for the rebellion against Erik of Pomerania in the 1430s was evidently a widespread dissatisfaction with the harsh tax increases that Margrethe and Erik put into effect a few decades earlier.

There are many indications that, after 1450, both demographic and economic development improved. The population seems to have begun slowly rising, which can be seen through the increased emigration to Norrland and the inner parts of Finland. Foreign commerce flourished, based foremost on metal products from central Sweden but also on fish and other animal products from the provinces around the Gulf of Bothnia. The modernizing of the churches, especially in central Sweden, Norrland, and Finland between 1450 and 1520, indicates that even the countryside received its share of the positive economic development.

The terminal point for the Middle Ages in Sweden is traditionally placed at 1521, with the rebellion against King Christian II, or at 1523, when the leader of the rebellion, Gustav Vasa, was elected king, or, less commonly, at 1527, when the reformation of the Swedish Church was initiated. The cited years all indicate political or ecclesiastical administrative changes, but they are not as natural if the social structure of Sweden is considered. In many respects, the new regent, Gustav Vasa (1523-1560), came to follow medieval lines of development. But through his conscious organizing of resources and conditions, he laid the foundation of a modern society, structured in a new way under forceful royal leadership.

Goran Dahlback