Cross and Scepter

by Bagge, Sverre

  The situation in Norway was basically similar to the one in Denmark, which is not surprising, partly because succession crises there seem to have been overcome already in the mid-thirteenth century, and partly because of Norwegian dependence on Denmark. The exception is the situation after the death of Christoffer, when the Norwegians were divided between the Swedish and the Danish candidates, and the choice was determined by the greater strength of Denmark.

  This situation also illustrates the fact that what worked well for Denmark and Norway, did not work for the union as a whole, and particularly not for Sweden. Whereas the two former countries had institutions able to deal with a shortage of heirs and disputed successions, there was nothing similar for the union as a whole. Despite promises, a common royal election never took place, except the one in Kalmar in 1397; and as has already been pointed out, a common union council is difficult to imagine as a permanent institution. Although this might not prevent the occasional common meeting of the three councils, such a meeting seems in practice to have been difficult to arrange. In 1439, the Danish council acted alone and was followed by the Swedish one. In 1448, the Swedish council acted alone—in retaliation?—but the Danish council did not accept the Swedish candidate. An attempt at a united election was made after Christian I’s death in 1481, with a common election charter, but the Swedes failed to attend.

  The failure of the attempt to introduce royal elections by the whole union seems in particular to have been due to the Swedes, who also had great difficulties in agreeing about royal elections. Factional struggles were almost endemic from the second half of the fourteenth century, after which the union monarchy created some kind of stability. Erik’s rule was respected for a long time, whereas the rebellion against him created a united front, which continued, despite considerable tension, throughout the reign of Christoffer. The election of Karl Knutsson illustrates the problem of choosing an indigenous aristocrat as king. Karl was an ambitious and aggressive man who made enemies easily, and his reign was one of the most chaotic in Swedish history. He also had the problem that his resources did not measure up to his ambitions; he was far behind the leading families, the Vasa and the Oxenstierna, in wealth. His successors, the Stures, learned from his example and did not try to become kings. They also behaved more diplomatically toward the people and their fellow aristocrats.

  These observations show that state formation continued in the later Middle Ages but to a different degree in the different countries. In addition to its greater wealth and population, Denmark had the advantage of a relatively harmonious relationship between monarchy and aristocracy. Admittedly, Valdemar IV and Margrete had used both violence and manipulation to recover lost crown lands and extend their power, but they had succeeded, and despite some tension and hard negotiations over election charters, their successors mostly managed to rule without arousing the aristocracy to open rebellion. The Danish kings could exploit the fact that individual aristocrats were dependent on their favor, and their union policy gave career opportunities outside Denmark to members of the aristocracy.

  In addition, they had a good relationship with the Church. The support of the bishops was crucial to Valdemar’s revival of Danish power and was an important asset for his successors as well. The Danish kings also maintained friendly relations with the pope—they had during most of the period their own representative at the curia—and were to a considerable extent able to elect bishops of their own choosing, an important prerogative as bishops were often important as royal counselors and administrators. Although Denmark was an aristocratic country and most bishops were recruited from the aristocracy, there were also a number of humble background who had made a career in the king’s service, such as Archbishop Birger Gunnersen in the early sixteenth century.

  The Danish monarchy also increased its power during the fifteenth century. In 1429, Erik of Pomerania introduced the Øresund toll, which had to be paid by every ship passing through the sound. After some initial conflicts, he and his successors eventually managed to make it effective. This meant an enormous profit, amounting to around a quarter of the annual royal revenues in the early sixteenth century. Until the Kiel Canal was built in the late nineteenth century, Øresund was the only sea connection between the Baltic and the North Sea, the main trading route in Northern Europe. In addition, the toll had two other advantages. It went directly into the king’s treasury and could be used by him, without interference from the council of the realm. Secondly, it was paid in cash and thus provided ready money that the king could put to immediate use wherever he wished, unlike most other taxes, which were paid in kind. The Danish kings also developed a more professional central administration in their new capital Copenhagen, particularly under King Hans (1481–1513), who also built a modern navy that was used with some success during his and his successors’ attempts to gain Sweden. The increased cash income also enabled the Danish kings to hire mercenaries, who played a decisive part in their attempts to gain Sweden. Thus, Denmark had much the greatest military power of the three countries, but Sweden was nevertheless sufficiently strong defensively to resist Danish attempts at conquest.

  The Swedish aristocracy was more difficult for the king to control than their Danish counterparts. The fact that the king was Danish may be part of the explanation, but it should be remembered that two Swedish kings had been deposed already in the fourteenth century, before the union with Denmark. It also says something about the character of the Swedish aristocracy that the country was without a king almost continuously for fifty years. As might be expected, the Swedish Church had strong links to the aristocracy. Most bishops were aristocrats, although there were some exceptions. The Danish king occasionally managed to impose a lowborn favorite on a Swedish see during the union, but there are also some examples of broader recruitment towards the end of the Middle Ages—Archbishop Jakob Ulvsson from the lower aristocracy, for example, and Kurt Rogge of Strängnäs and Hans Brask of Linköping, both from burgher families. Like Danish aristocrats, the Swedish nobles also competed for len, which often led to internal unrest. Here the lack of a strong king may have been a disadvantage; there was no arbiter above the competing nobles who could referee their disputes and secure some balance.

  By contrast, the Danish kings constantly mediated between the two leading (and competing) families, the Rosenkrantzes and the Gyldenstjernes (Shakespeare’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern!) and saw to it that both of them received some len and offices. A king doing the same might possibly have worked in Sweden, but the union king was of course often absent, and in addition he had a habit of giving Swedish len to foreigners. The Sture had difficulties in acting as neutral arbiters between the nobles; they were sometimes more readily viewed as competitors. Admittedly, Sten Sture the Elder managed to gain the same protection from the Church as if he had been a crowned monarch (1474). Apart from that, he and his successors based their power on a number of important len, while the rest were distributed among the Sture’s allies. Here, however, they had to balance carefully to prevent rivalry and discontent. Nevertheless, the Sture were considerably more successful than Karl and did manage both to hold the Danes at bay and to limit internal conflicts. Important factors contributing to their success were, in addition to their personal skills, their mobilization of the peasants and their effective propaganda. Nevertheless, as we have seen, even towards the end of the period, the Danes were able to find allies within the Swedish aristocracy. A comparison between King Christian I of Denmark and Sten Sture the Elder shows the advantages of a stable monarchy. Sten Sture was a brilliant politician and propagandist but had to deal with a series of crises throughout his reign, was never safe from opposition, and towards the end of his career had to submit to the Danish king. Christian I was a mediocrity who admittedly failed to hold onto Sweden but was unchallenged in Denmark and Norway.

  Despite the Sture’s almost royal position, the council of the realm was officially the highest authority in the country. However, as the Sture had many c
ompetitors among the bishops and the nobles, they made considerable use of larger assemblies, where the lower nobility, the townspeople, and the peasants were represented. Although these assemblies were mostly local, they form the background for the development from the sixteenth century onwards of the Swedish Riksdag or diet, consisting of four estates. This was in clear contrast to the conditions in the two other countries, where such assemblies regularly took the form of extended meetings of the council of the realm. The paradox is that this “noble republic of Sweden” in the following period developed into one of strongest and most centralized states in Europe, surpassing Denmark politically and militarily to become a great European power in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The immediate explanation may be sought in the new king who came to the throne in 1523. Gustaf Vasa was the Swedish parallel to Valdemar IV in Denmark. He belonged to one of the wealthiest noble families, he had led a war of liberation against the Danes, he could profit from the heritage of the Sture and their prolonged struggle with the Danes, and he was a ruthless and clever politician. It has also been suggested that Christian II had done part of the job for him by executing a number of potentially rebellious nobles. The strength of the Swedish state over the long run depended upon an alliance between the king and a relatively poor aristocracy that enabled Sweden to profit from a war of conquest in Northern Europe.

  Norway shows the greatest continuity from the previous period. Although the importance of castles increased in this country as well, there were fewer of them, and the aristocracy was weaker and more dependent on the king. The consequences of the Black Death were more serious for the aristocracy in this country than in the other ones (pp. 233–34), and despite the fact that the king was mostly absent, there was less aristocratic opposition against him than in Sweden. As in Sweden, the king to some extent appointed foreigners as castellans, particularly from the beginning of the sixteenth century. By contrast, the king had less influence on the Church than in Denmark. After a whole series of twelfth- and early-thirteenth-century archbishops from high-ranking aristocratic families with strong links to either of the two dynasties, first that of Magnus, then that of Sverre, later archbishops had a somewhat more distant relationship to the king. The later pattern seems to have been to recruit bishops from the lower aristocracy, often from families some of whose members were canons. The cathedral chapters, which elected the bishops, were apparently able to recruit family members; although sons could not succeed fathers, nephews could and often did succeed or join uncles.

  The later Middle Ages in Scandinavia give an impression of almost continuous struggles and rivalries, war, plundering, and violence. Medieval warfare was certainly cruel and its effects on the common population should not be underestimated. Still, war was conducted with small forces and was less destructive than in later ages. The vast social inequality of the time took the form of greater cruelty towards peasants and commoners than towards members of the aristocracy. Peasants might have their farms burned during wars and they were punished more severely than aristocrats if they rebelled; the leaders were usually executed, while the others had to pay heavy fines. Moreover, in contrast to aristocrats, who were executed by beheading, commoners were hanged (which was considered shameful), or, even worse, they might be broken on the wheel or burned alive. Conflicts between aristocrats were usually conducted in a chivalrous manner, and although they were not as well protected as kings, they were relatively rarely executed. Periods of war were usually brief and were preceded and followed by elaborate negotiations. Wars, moreover, were fought not to destroy an adversary, but to force him to concessions in the following negotiations. Admittedly, what is probably the best-known event in late-medieval Scandinavian history gives an entirely different impression. The Bloodbath of Stockholm was a display of a shockingly new kind of behavior, and a radical departure from fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century political culture. There was, however, some precedent in the previous acts of Christian II. Christian’s Swedish opponents had received all kinds of guarantees of life and property, which almost all of them trusted—Gustaf Vasa being an exception. Moreover, the aftermath of the story shows that Christian’s action was not only immoral but ineffective; it had the exact opposite of the intended result, leading to the final loss of Sweden for the Danish king.

  Historians have usually expressed limited sympathy for the late-medieval aristocracies and their attempts to limit the power of the king. In practice, their constitutional principles were often the expression of narrow class interests and might even endanger the survival of the country in question, as it is claimed happened in Hungary. There the Turkish conquest of most of the country during the first half of the sixteenth century has been blamed on the aristocratic reaction after Mathias Corvinus’s death in 1490, which weakened the country militarily. The aristocratic policies in late-medieval Scandinavia had less disastrous consequences, possibly because the area was less exposed to foreign enemies, but in part also because aristocratic policy was more moderate and responsible there than in Hungary. The level of violence was relatively low by medieval standards, and there was a willingness to negotiate and compromise. Moreover, despite the many selfish demands they embodied in the elections charters, the aristocrats had a clear awareness of the need for a king as a guardian of the social order and the rule of law.

  Late-medieval constitutional thought was far from democratic, and in most countries the aristocratic constitutions were over-thrown by a strong monarchy in the following period. Nevertheless, there is a connection between the principles articulated in the later Middle Ages and the new wave of democratic constitutionalism that coincided with the American and the French revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Intellectually, the ideas of the medieval theorist survived and were developed further by thinkers like Locke and Montesquieu, and in some countries, notably England, even the medieval constitution survived. Within Scandinavia, Sweden forms a parallel to England. Although the Sture regime was replaced by a strong monarchy, the Swedish king never became formally absolute, and the late-medieval diet survived until 1866, when it was replaced by a modern parliament with two chambers.

  The Reformation and Its Consequences, 1523–1537

  The Swedish rebellion under Gustaf Vasa was followed by the deposition of Christian II in Denmark and Norway in 1523. The next year the new king, Frederik I, issued separate election charters for Denmark and Norway, in which he gave the usual promises about ruling justly and respecting the privileges of the Church and the aristocracy. Danish attempts to rule the whole of Scandinavia were a thing of the past, and the traditional government of a king ruling in cooperation with the aristocracy had replaced Christian II’s attempts at royal absolutism. Actually, however, Frederik’s accession to the throne introduced one of the most dramatic periods in Scandinavian history, which ended in the fall of both the Catholic Church and the independent kingdom of Norway.

  After Luther’s break with the pope in 1520, the Reformation movement had spread quickly over Germany and soon reached Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark, and, a little later, Sweden. The movement was particularly strong in the towns, but segments of the nobility were influenced. King Frederik was friendly to the movement and protected the Protestant preachers. Already in 1523, he broke the Danish Church’s connection with the pope, but he did not interfere with Catholic doctrine and religious practice and left the bishops in possession of their estates. After Frederik’s death in 1533, the bishops were reluctant to elect his eldest son Christian to succeed him, because he was, even more than his father, a convinced Protestant. This resulted in a postponement of the election to the next year, but before it could take place, a civil war broke out, usually referred to as the “Count’s War,” after the commander of the rebel forces, Count Christoffer of Oldenburg, a distant relative of the royal house. The rebels did not represent a Catholic reaction, but on the contrary were staunchly Protestant, with Copenhagen and Malmö as their main strongholds and Lübeck, led by a radical weave
r who had replaced the merchant aristocracy as the town’s ruler, as their main ally. Their aim was to reinstate the captive Christian II—who had also converted to Protestantism—as king. The rebellion thus had elements of a social revolution. In the beginning, however, the rebels, thanks to their mercenary army, managed to gain control of Scania and the islands, where they also, at least for a time, received the support of the nobility. In this situation, the bishops reluctantly rallied behind Christian and elected him king in the summer of 1534. Christian gained the upper hand already late in 1534 and won the final victory when Copenhagen surrendered on July 29, 1536. A few days later, on August 12, he arrested the bishops, and on October 30 the Reformation was officially declared. Lutheran superintendents replaced the Catholic bishops, the bishops’ estates were taken over by the king, and the monasteries were dissolved. In 1537, a new ecclesiastical constitution was issued after close consultation with Luther and the theologians around him.

  By that time, the Reformation had already been introduced in Sweden. This happened at the diet of Västerås in 1527. Sweden also had a Reformation movement, although it was weaker than the movement in Denmark. The king’s attitude was also very different. Whereas Christian III was a convinced Lutheran, Gustaf Vasa seems to have had little interest in theology and to have embraced the Reformation for political and financial reasons. The result of the diet was to give the king control of the Church, but very little was said about cult and doctrine. The Swedish Church continued to have bishops and even an archbishop, and the Catholic bishops continued in their offices, but were normally succeeded by men with Protestant sympathies. The Swedish Reformation was therefore gradual; there were even attempts to reintroduce Catholicism as late as in the second half of the sixteenth century. Gustaf Vasa’s son Johan III (1568–1592) married a Polish princess and their son, Sigismund, King of Poland and for a short time also of Sweden (1592–1598), was a Catholic.