Gustav Vasa

Gustav Vasa, also known as Gustav I, led the Swedish revolt that broke away from the Danish-dominated Kalmar Union and ruled Sweden as king from 1523 until 1560. In nearly four decades he broke with the papacy, built a centralised and hereditary monarchy and laid the basis of the early modern Swedish state, by methods that were often harsh.

Gustav Eriksson was born on 12 May 1496, probably at Rydboholm Castle north-east of Stockholm, into the high nobility; his grandmother was a sister of the regent Sten Sture the Elder. Since the late 14th century Sweden had been joined with Denmark and Norway in the Kalmar Union, and Gustav's family backed the party of Sten Sture the Younger, which resisted the Danish king Christian II. In 1518 Gustav was one of six Swedish hostages whom Christian carried off to Denmark in breach of a truce. In 1519 he escaped and reached the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, returning to Sweden in May 1520.

Christian conquered Sweden in 1520 and was crowned in Stockholm that November. Days later his former opponents were seized and charged with heresy, and close to 100 were executed in what became known as the Stockholm Bloodbath; Gustav's father was among them. Gustav fled to the province of Dalarna to raise the peasants. The famous tale of his near-flight to Norway, when the men of Mora changed their minds and called him back, comes from a heroic chronicle written for him and cannot be checked; it still inspires the Vasaloppet ski race.

By early 1521 Gustav commanded a small peasant army of about 400 men. After an early victory at Brunnbäck's Ferry and the capture of Västerås with its mining wealth, support grew quickly, and in August 1521 nobles at Vadstena declared him regent. Lübeck joined the war in 1522, having lent the rebels money, and pressed for a king it could deal with. On 6 June 1523, at Strängnäs, the council elected Gustav king; that date has been Sweden's National Day since 1983. Stockholm opened its gates on 17 June, and the Treaty of Malmö in 1524 brought Danish recognition of Swedish independence.

The new king clashed with the papacy, which insisted on the return of the exiled pro-Danish archbishop, Gustav Trolle. Encouraged by the reformer Olaus Petri, Gustav eventually appointed Olaus's brother Laurentius Petri as archbishop in 1531, ending papal authority over the Swedish Church. Church property passed to the crown, and the church came under royal control on Lutheran lines. A complete Swedish Bible, known as the Gustav Vasa Bible, appeared in 1540–41. The pattern, a long quarrel with the pope ending in royal control of the church, resembled what Henry VIII was doing in England at the same moment.

Gustav governed energetically and severely. Dalarna, once his first base, rebelled three times in his first decade, and in 1542 peasants in Småland rose under Nils Dacke against heavy taxes, the seizure of church bells and the new religion; the king needed German mercenaries to crush them in 1543. In the 1540s he even sentenced the Petri brothers and his former chancellor Laurentius Andreae to death before pardoning them. In 1544 he made the crown hereditary in the House of Vasa, which held it until 1654. He also built a standing army and navy, founded Helsinki in 1550, and fought an inconclusive war with Ivan the Terrible in 1554–57.

Gustav died in Stockholm on 29 September 1560 and was buried in Uppsala Cathedral. Three of his sons, Erik XIV, John III and Charles IX, became kings. Swedes have long called him the father of the nation, but historians note how much of his heroic legend he shaped himself and how brutally he dealt with opponents.

Our 1530 map shows Sweden newly independent of the Kalmar Union in the early years of his reign; the 1500 map shows the union before the break.