Who ruled Stockholm?

Stockholm is built on a cluster of islands and shores where Lake Mälaren drains into an inlet of the Baltic Sea. Lake Mälaren reaches deep into central Sweden's iron and copper country, and whoever held the narrow outlet controlled shipping between the interior and the sea. The city grew up as a fortified toll point on that channel in the thirteenth century and became the seat of Swedish royal power. Its defining episodes are the struggles of the Kalmar Union, culminating in the Stockholm Bloodbath, and its rise as the capital of a great Baltic power in the seventeenth century.

The land here was still rising out of the sea after the last Ice Age, and earlier centres of the Mälaren region lay further inland: the Viking-age trading town of Birka, and later Sigtuna and Uppsala. Stockholm first appears in written records in 1252, in letters issued by Birger Jarl, the powerful regent traditionally credited with founding it. A castle guarded the channel on the island now called Stadsholmen, the core of today's old town, Gamla stan. German merchants linked to the Hanseatic League formed a large part of the early population and shared in the town's government.

In 1397 Sweden, Denmark and Norway were joined in the Kalmar Union under a single monarch, usually Danish. Stockholm became the key to power in Sweden and was besieged repeatedly as Swedish regents and Danish kings fought for control. In 1471 the regent Sten Sture the Elder defeated a Danish army at Brunkeberg, on a ridge just north of the town. Christian II of Denmark took the city in 1520 and, in November of that year, had more than eighty nobles, bishops and burghers executed in the main square, an event remembered as the Stockholm Bloodbath. The revolt it provoked brought Gustav Vasa to the throne, and in June 1523 he entered Stockholm, ending the union for Sweden. His reign brought the Protestant Reformation to Sweden in its Lutheran form, with the preacher Olaus Petri serving as the city's secretary.

Under Gustavus Adolphus and his successors in the seventeenth century Sweden became a great power around the Baltic, and Stockholm was formally confirmed as capital in 1634. Its population rose from under 10,000 early in the century to over 50,000 by the 1670s, and nobles enriched by war built palaces on the surrounding shores. The royal warship Vasa sank on its maiden voyage in the harbour in 1628. In 1697 the old castle, Tre Kronor, burned down, and the present Royal Palace was built on its site over the following decades. Plague struck in 1710, killing perhaps a third of the inhabitants, and defeat in the Great Northern War ended Sweden's empire.

The city industrialised in the nineteenth century, and from 1866 a new plan laid out broad avenues on the ridges around the old town. Stockholm hosted the 1912 Olympic Games, and the Nobel Prize ceremonies have been held here since 1901. Sweden's neutrality spared it destruction in both world wars, while the 1950s and 1960s saw much of the old Norrmalm district demolished for a modern business centre. Stockholm today has about a million people in the city proper and well over two million in its metropolitan area, and is the political, financial and cultural centre of Sweden.