Sweden, 1600–1660

Sigismund III, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, had been deposed as King of Sweden in 1599, after his uncle Duke Charles beat him at Stångebro the year before. He kept his Polish–Lithuanian crown and his claim to Sweden, and from 1600 the family quarrel was fought out as a war between Sweden and the Commonwealth in Livonia.

Duke Charles governed Sweden as regent. Sigismund had been made to hand over the councillors who had sided with him, and at the riksdag in Linköping in March 1600 Charles set up a court of some 150 men drawn from the estates and prosecuted them himself, charging them with treason against the realm.

Erik Sparre, Lord High Chancellor since 1593, was the spokesman of the aristocratic opposition, which wanted the crown bound by law and the council. He and the others held that they had only served their lawful king. On 20 March 1600 he was beheaded in Linköping's market square.

Gustaf Banér, a councillor who had joined Sigismund on his arrival in 1598, died beside Sparre the same day. His son Johan was three years old; he would grow up to command armies for Charles's son and granddaughter.

Sten Banér, Gustaf's elder brother, had been Sweden's chief negotiator at the peace of Teusina with Russia in 1595. He watched Sparre and his brother die, prayed aloud for each of them, and was beheaded after them.

Ture Bielke, a councillor and former treasurer, had told the court that a man could not serve two masters. He was beheaded with the others, and a fifth councillor, Bengt Falck, died too. Ture's brother Hogenskild was sentenced only to be kept in prison.

Arvid Stålarm had held Finland for Sigismund until 1599. Condemned at Åbo and again at Linköping, he was led to the block, made to watch the others die, and pardoned. Charles kept him in prison, then in 1602 released him to take over the failing war in Livonia.

John of Östergötland, Sigismund's half-brother, stood next in line after Sigismund, but he was ten; Charles raised him with his own son and treated him like one. At the riksdag in Norrköping in 1604 John renounced his rights, the estates recognised Charles as king, and the crown was fixed on Charles's sons, then on John's.

Christina of Holstein-Gottorp, Charles's second wife, was the mother of the heir, Gustavus Adolphus, and of Charles Philip. In 1604 Charles named her to head a regency should he die while their son was a minor, and in 1607 she was crowned beside him at Uppsala.

Olaus Martini, elected Archbishop of Uppsala in 1600 and consecrated in 1601, was a strict Lutheran who suspected Charles of Calvinism. In 1602 he condemned the king's German court preacher, and their struggle over who ruled the church lasted the rest of his life; he still crowned Charles in 1607.

Johan Skytte, a Nyköping mayor's son who had studied under Olaus Martini and at German universities, was hired in 1602 to teach the seven-year-old Gustavus Adolphus. Ennobled soon after, he rose with his pupil: head of the tax administration in 1612, councillor in 1617, chancellor of Uppsala University from 1622.

Johannes Bureus, a clerk in Charles's chancery, helped Skytte teach the prince. His passion was Sweden's past: he drew some 200 runestones, published the first Swedish ABC book in 1611, and in 1630 became the kingdom's first national antiquary.

Sigfrid Aronus Forsius, a priest and astronomer, called himself Charles's court preacher by 1601. That December the duke sent him to Torneå to survey the borderland towards Norway and judge what it could pay in tax, part of Charles's push into the far north; he fixed the latitude of eighteen places as far as Tromsø.

Hogenskild Bielke, Ture's brother and a former councillor, had been kept in prison since Linköping. At the Stockholm riksdag of 1605, where a tribunal tried Charles's real and suspected enemies, letters judged treasonable were laid against him and his daughter, and in June he was beheaded in Stockholm.

Nils Chesnecopherus, a mathematician home from a chair at Marburg, became Charles's court chancellor in 1602 and ran the chancery. He served the king's purges willingly and was hated by the nobility for it, and he is thought to have hardened Charles's line towards Denmark in the years before the Kalmar War.

Erik Tegel was the son of Jöran Persson, the executed favourite of Erik XIV; Charles had paid for his studies. Charles's secretary from 1598, he had acted as herald of the court at Linköping. Charles set him to write the history of Gustav Vasa and went through the draft himself, cutting and changing it.

In Livonia Stålarm faced the Lithuanian hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, who had taken Dorpat. Ordered to avoid battle yet pressed to act, he fought at Weissenstein in September 1604 and was routed. Charles took the command himself and had him tried again in 1605; pardoned at the block a second time, Stålarm died a prisoner at Gripsholm in 1620.

Charles brought a new army to Livonia. On 27 September 1605, at Kircholm outside Riga, Chodkiewicz with a far smaller force routed it, and the king escaped only because a nobleman in his service, Henrik Wrede, gave him his horse and was killed. The war went on without a decision.

Back from studies in Germany in 1606, Forsius was jailed for about a year without trial, suspected of dealings with Sigismund's exiles. Freed in 1607, he regained the king's trust, and in 1609–10 Charles put him in Uppsala's chair of astronomy in place of a professor who had fallen from favour.

Tsar Vasily Shuisky was besieged in Moscow by the Tushino pretender, False Dmitry II, who had Polish–Lithuanian lords behind him. He turned to Sweden. By the treaty signed at Vyborg in February 1609 Charles would send troops, and Russia would pay them and hand over the fortress and district of Kexholm.

Prince Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky, the tsar's young kinsman and best general, had negotiated the Swedish help at Novgorod. With De la Gardie's troops he cleared the north and broke the siege of Moscow in March 1610, hailed as the saviour of the city. That spring he fell ill after a christening feast and died; many blamed the tsar's family.

Sigismund had invaded Russia himself and laid siege to Smolensk. In July 1610 his field hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski met the Russian and Swedish relief army at Klushino and beat it with a much smaller force, as De la Gardie's unpaid hired soldiers went over to the Poles. Within weeks the boyars deposed Vasily, and Żółkiewski took him to Poland a prisoner.

Jacob De la Gardie, twenty-five, led the Swedish auxiliary army of Swedes, Finns and hired foreigners out of Vyborg in March 1609. It fought its way to Moscow beside Skopin-Shuisky's Russians, then fell apart at Klushino. With his Russian ally gone, De la Gardie turned to taking what Sweden had been promised.

Evert Horn, a lieutenant colonel under De la Gardie, led the vanguard on the march to Moscow and fought at Klushino. After Vasily's fall he built the fort of Nyenskans on the Neva, and in July 1611 he led the assault that took Novgorod, which then accepted a son of Charles as its future tsar.

Christian IV of Denmark–Norway would not let Charles claim the Lapland coast that Denmark–Norway counted as its own. In April 1611 he declared war, and his army laid siege to Kalmar and took it. In October Charles died at Nyköping, leaving the war to his son.

When Charles died, Christina of Holstein-Gottorp and Duke John of Östergötland headed the government, as the instructions of 1604 provided. At the riksdag in Nyköping the estates accepted Gustavus Adolphus as king and John renewed his renunciation; the regency ended on the king's seventeenth birthday in December 1611.

Gustavus Adolphus came to the throne with three wars on his hands, against Denmark, Russia and Poland. To win over the council he accepted an accession charter: he could make no law and begin no war, peace or alliance without the council and the estates. Axel Oxenstierna led the negotiations over it.

Axel Oxenstierna, a councillor since 1609, became chancellor in January 1612 at twenty-eight. When the Danes took Älvsborg that year, cutting Sweden off from the western sea, he led the Swedes at Knäred. Peace was signed in January 1613: Kalmar came back, but Älvsborg had to be ransomed for one million riksdaler, paid by 1619.

Magnus Brahe had left Sigismund's service for Charles's and sat on the court at Linköping; Charles gave him the county of Visingsborg that his brothers had forfeited by siding with Sigismund. Gustavus Adolphus made him Lord High Steward in 1611, and in 1614 the first president of the new Svea Court of Appeal.

Ebba Brahe, Magnus's daughter and a maid of honour to the queen mother, was the young king's love; their letters survive from 1613. The queen mother wanted a dynastic match and broke the affair off by 1615. In 1618 Ebba married Jacob De la Gardie, the general who had taken Novgorod.

Christian IV took Älvsborg, Sweden's only port on the western sea, in 1612, but could not finish the war: his campaign stalled, and England and the Dutch pressed for peace. At Knäred he gave back Kalmar and kept Älvsborg as a pledge until the ransom was paid.

In Novgorod De la Gardie put forward Charles Philip, the king's younger brother, as tsar. Their mother kept the boy at home, and only in 1613 did he travel as far as Vyborg to hear the terms. By then Moscow had a tsar of its own, and Charles Philip went home.

An assembly in Moscow elected the sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov in 1613, and Russia rallied behind him. Sweden fought on. Evert Horn, now a field marshal, took Gdov in 1614, but was shot dead in July 1615 at the start of the siege of Pskov, which Gustavus Adolphus then failed to take.

John Merrick, a Muscovy Company merchant whom James I had knighted and sent to Moscow as ambassador, brought the two sides together with Dutch envoys from 1615. He arranged a truce in 1616 and signed the peace of Stolbovo in February 1617: Novgorod went back to Russia, Sweden kept Ingria and Kexholm, and Russia lost its Baltic coast.

Johannes Messenius, schooled by the Jesuits at Braunsberg, became professor of law at Uppsala in 1609 and won students with comedies he wrote for them to stage. He fought so bitterly with Johannes Rudbeckius that the king stepped in, and in 1613 moved Messenius to Stockholm to keep the national archives and sit in the Svea Court of Appeal.

Johannes Rudbeckius, professor of theology and in 1613 rector of the university, was the other side of the quarrel. Gustavus Adolphus made him his court preacher and confessor, took him on his campaigns of 1614–15 and set him to revise the Bible, printed in 1618. In 1619 he became Bishop of Västerås.

In Stockholm Messenius fell into a bitter dispute with Erik Tegel and Nils Chesnecopherus. Accused of being a secret Catholic in Poland's service, he was sentenced to death for treason in 1616; the sentence became life imprisonment at Kajaneborg in Finland, where he wrote his history of Sweden, Scondia illustrata. Tegel wrote a tract against him as an arch-traitor.

Petrus Kenicius, a loyal supporter of Charles, had become Archbishop of Uppsala in 1609 on Olaus Martini's death, and as such oversaw the university. He drew up new statutes for it and crowned Gustavus Adolphus in 1617. He wanted a national church board, but one of clergy alone, and later sided with Rudbeckius against lay control.

Willem de Besche, a builder from Liège who had come to Nyköping in 1595, worked on Nyköping castle for Charles and from 1610 inspected the ironworks of Södermanland. In 1618 he leased the crown's works at Finspång with Louis De Geer's money behind him, and built there a cannon foundry that became Sweden's leading one.

Louis De Geer, a Liège-born merchant in Amsterdam, had been lending to the Swedish crown and selling it arms since at least 1617. Through the de Besche brothers he poured money into Finspång and Norrköping and brought in Walloon smiths. When he moved to Sweden in 1627 he was naturalised at once; the army that sailed for Germany in 1630 was largely armed from his works.

Jacob van Dijck, a lawyer from Haarlem, negotiated the Swedish–Dutch alliance of 1614 and became Sweden's first permanent ambassador, at The Hague. He coaxed Dutch settlers to the new Gothenburg, and after his recall in 1619 was put in charge of justice and administration there in 1621; in 1626 he was named its burgrave.

Johan Adler Salvius, a town clerk's son just home with a doctorate in law, laid out the plan of Gothenburg in 1619 and was involved in making it a free port. He went on to the Svea Court of Appeal in 1621 and became secretary of state in 1624.

With Ebba Brahe out of reach, Gustavus Adolphus looked for a Protestant princess and chose Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg. Her mother at first refused him, but in 1620 the king went to Berlin himself and won her over. The wedding was held in Stockholm on 25 November 1620.

Her brother George William had just inherited Brandenburg and the Duchy of Prussia, which he held as a fief of the Polish crown. He refused his consent until Sweden and Poland made peace, but his mother sent the bride out of his reach and settled the match herself. In 1627 he joined Sweden's enemies.

Hans Georg von Arnim, a Brandenburg nobleman who had fought for Sweden against Russia from 1613 to 1617, carried secret messages between Gustavus Adolphus and Brandenburg about the marriage for several years. In 1626 Wallenstein talked him into the emperor's service.

Carl Gyllenhielm, Charles IX's son by a mistress and so the king's half-brother, had been taken by the Poles in 1601 and spent twelve years in their prisons, six and a half of them in leg irons. Freed in 1613, he rose fast: field marshal in 1616, governor of Ingria, and in 1620 Admiral of the Realm.

In late July 1621 a fleet of some 150 ships carried the army from Älvsnabben to the mouth of the Düna, and the siege of Riga began in August. Gyllenhielm dug in the siege works beside his half-brother the king, both with shovels in their hands. Riga surrendered in mid-September.

Johan Banér, the son of the Gustaf Banér beheaded at Linköping, had been a colonel since 1620. For his courage at Riga the king knighted him there. The family that had died for Sigismund now fought for the son of the man who had executed its head.

Gustav Horn, Evert Horn's younger brother, was badly wounded at Riga and knighted with Banér. In 1625 he joined the council and led the troops that took Dorpat, and in January 1626 he fought at Wallhof, where the king surprised a Lithuanian army in its camp and routed it, completing the conquest of Livonia.

Jacob De la Gardie, governor in Estonia since 1619 and married to Ebba Brahe, defended Livonia with Horn while the king carried the war into Prussia. Horn was made a field marshal in 1628, at thirty-five, and the same year married the chancellor's daughter Kristina Oxenstierna.

Anders Bure, a chancery secretary and a cousin of Johannes Bureus, had drawn a map of Lapland in 1611. In 1622 the king gave him a thousand copies of the new Bible to sell to pay for a map of the whole kingdom; it appeared in 1626 and served mapmakers for three centuries. In 1628 he was made general mathematician and began training land surveyors.

Henrik Hybertsson, a Dutch shipwright hired under Charles IX, ran construction at the Stockholm naval yard. After talks with Gyllenhielm and the vice admiral Clas Fleming, he signed a contract with the king in January 1625 to build four warships. The first large one, Vasa, was laid down in 1626; he died in the spring of 1627, before she was finished.

Gustavus Adolphus landed at Pillau in July 1626 to choke Danzig. From November Stanisław Koniecpolski, the Polish field hetman, commanded against him and harried his supply lines for three years. In June 1629, with imperial troops the emperor had sent, he caught the Swedish cavalry at Trzciana; the king was nearly captured and said he had never had such a bath.

The Emperor Ferdinand II had beaten Denmark with the army Albrecht von Wallenstein raised for him, and his troops held the German Baltic coast. In 1629 he sent an army corps to help Sigismund against Sweden, and issued the Edict of Restitution, ordering church lands taken by Protestants since 1552 to be handed back, a threat to every Protestant prince in the north.

Wallenstein wanted the Baltic ports. In November 1627 Pomerania was made to take imperial garrisons, but Stralsund refused. His army laid siege to the town from May 1628, and he took command himself in June; on 4 August, after Danish and Swedish reinforcements had come in by sea, he gave up, his first failure of the war.

Arnim, now Wallenstein's field marshal, had opened the siege of Stralsund. In 1629 Ferdinand sent him with some 5,000 men to help Sigismund, and he joined Koniecpolski at Trzciana; unpaid by the Poles, many of his men mutinied or went over to the Swedes. The Edict of Restitution later drove the Lutheran Arnim out of imperial service.

Stralsund asked Denmark and then Sweden for help, and in June 1628 made a twenty-year alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, who put a garrison in the town, the first Swedish garrison on German soil. In July Alexander Leslie, a Scottish colonel in Swedish service, arrived with 1,100 men and took over as governor. The siege failed, and Sweden had its bridgehead.

Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII's chief minister, wanted Habsburg power checked, and a Swedish army in Germany would do it. For that Sweden needed peace with Poland, and Richelieu sent his confidant Hercule de Charnacé to the Baltic as his envoy.

Charnacé joined the other foreign mediators between the two exhausted armies, and in September 1629 they brought the sides to a six-year truce at Altmark. Sweden kept Livonia with Riga, held the Prussian coast towns and took two-thirds of the Prussian port tolls, money that would help pay for the German war.

Salvius, ennobled as Adler Salvius in 1629, attended the peace talks at Lübeck that year and wrote the war manifesto in which Sweden explained to Europe why it was taking its army into Germany.

Per Brahe, the king's chamberlain, who had fought close beside him in Prussia, presided over the nobility at the riksdag of 1629 and again at the committee meeting of the estates in 1630. He was made a councillor that year, rode to Germany with a regiment of horse, and was sent home to take his seat.

On 6 July 1630 Gustavus Adolphus landed on Usedom with about 13,000 men, using Stralsund, Swedish-held since 1628, to clear his western flank, and soon took Stettin.

Lennart Torstensson, a young officer who had learned war in the Prussian campaigns, was made colonel of the artillery in 1630. The light guns he organised would help win Breitenfeld and the crossing of the Lech.

Bogislaw XIV, the last Duke of Pomerania, had been forced to quarter Wallenstein's troops since 1627, and had tried to talk Stralsund into submitting. With the Swedes in his capital he signed an 'eternal' alliance at Stettin, concluded in September and backdated to the landing: Sweden took charge of the duchy's military affairs, and Pomerania became its base.

Christina, born in December 1626, was the king's only child. In 1627, under the Norrköping settlement, he had the estates recognise her as rightful heir if he had no son. When Maria Eleonora joined him in Germany in 1631, the girl was left in the care of his half-sister Catherine.

Charnacé came back for Richelieu with an offer of money. In January 1631 he concluded the treaty of Bärwalde, by which France undertook to subsidise the Swedish army in Germany: a Catholic cardinal paying a Lutheran king to fight the Catholic emperor.

Count Tilly, commander of the Catholic League's army, besieged and stormed Magdeburg, which had allied with Sweden; most of its people died in the sack. Then he marched into Saxony to force its elector onto the emperor's side.

John George of Saxony had tried to stand between the emperor and the Swedes; his field marshal, Arnim, had worked for an alliance with Sweden. Tilly's invasion settled it. On 17 September 1631 the Saxon and Swedish armies met Tilly at Breitenfeld; the Saxons fled within the hour, but the Swedes won, and Germany lay open.

Tilly was mortally wounded in April 1632 trying to stop the Swedes crossing the Lech. Ferdinand recalled Wallenstein, dismissed in 1630, who raised a new army, beat off the king's assault at the Alte Veste near Nuremberg in September, and moved into Saxony.

Gottfried Heinrich zu Pappenheim, Tilly's old cavalry commander and now an imperial field marshal, had been sent off towards Halle when the king attacked Wallenstein at Lützen on 16 November 1632. Wallenstein called him back; he reached the field in the middle of the battle and was mortally wounded.

After Breitenfeld Gustavus Adolphus went on to the Rhine and in 1632 into Bavaria. At the Alte Veste his artillery general Torstensson was taken prisoner. Following Wallenstein into Saxony, the king attacked him at Lützen and was killed in the fighting; his body was found stripped to the shirt, face down in the mud.

Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar took command when the king fell, and by nightfall the Swedes held the field and Wallenstein drew off. Bernhard went on to command the Swedish-allied army in southern Germany, but he and Gustav Horn could not work together and were given separate commands.

Christina was five when her father died, and became queen at once; the riksdag of 1633 gave her the title of king. Her upbringing as ruler was an affair of state, and she would govern in person only from December 1644.

Maria Eleonora brought her husband's embalmed body home in 1633 and was left out of the regency; the council said the late king had wanted it so. She kept her daughter in mourning rooms hung with black. In 1636 the council took Christina from her, and in 1640 she fled to Denmark on a ship sent by Christian IV.

Catherine, Gustavus Adolphus's half-sister, had kept Christina while the king was in Germany. In 1636, on Oxenstierna's recommendation, she was made the queen's guardian and foster mother, and raised her with her own children, among them Charles Gustav, until she died in 1638.

Catherine's husband, John Casimir, Count Palatine of Zweibrücken, a Calvinist German prince, had settled in Sweden in 1622. He broke with the council in 1633 and withdrew to Stegeborg, but his children, Charles Gustav, Maria Eufrosyne and Adolph John, grew up at the queen's court and would carry the succession.

Axel Oxenstierna led the regency council and ran the war from Germany. In April 1633 he bound the Protestant states of the south and west into the Heilbronn League under Swedish direction, and in 1634 the estates adopted his Instrument of Government, which set five great officers of the realm at the head of the council. He stayed in Germany until 1636.

His brother Gabriel Oxenstierna, whose first wife was a daughter of Ture Bielke, beheaded at Linköping, saw the king's body home. In June 1634 he became Lord High Steward, head of the Svea Court of Appeal and first man of the government in Stockholm. It was he who told Maria Eleonora that queens dowager had no place in a Swedish regency.

Johannes Matthiae, who had gone to Germany with the late king as field bishop, became Christina's teacher in 1633 and taught her religion, philosophy, Greek and Latin. A mild Lutheran influenced by Comenius, he was later attacked as a syncretist, and Christina, as queen, protected him.

Ferdinand, King of Hungary and the emperor's son, had worked against Wallenstein at court. After Wallenstein was deposed and murdered early in 1634, Ferdinand took command of the imperial army himself in May.

The Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, Philip IV's brother, was marching a Spanish army from Italy to the Netherlands to reopen the Spanish Road. He joined his brother-in-law's imperial army near Nördlingen, which the Swedes held, and together they faced the relief army under Horn and Bernhard.

Nördlingen broke Sweden's German alliance. In May 1635 John George of Saxony, the ally of Breitenfeld, made peace with the emperor at Prague, and most of the Protestant princes followed him. Within a year Saxon troops were fighting the Swedes.

Gustav Horn and Bernhard marched to relieve Nördlingen and underestimated the army waiting for them. Their attacks on 6 September 1634 failed; as Horn ordered a withdrawal, the imperial cavalry turned it into a rout. Horn, the chancellor's son-in-law, was taken prisoner and held for eight years.

Władysław IV, Sigismund's son, elected King of Poland in 1632, still claimed the Swedish crown. With Sweden weakened after Nördlingen, he won good terms as the Altmark truce ran out: at Stuhmsdorf in September 1635 Sweden gave up the Prussian ports and their tolls but kept Livonia, and the truce was extended by twenty-six years.

Per Brahe led the Swedish delegation at Stuhmsdorf. Axel Oxenstierna sharply disliked the treaty, and the quarrel between them was settled by making Brahe Governor-General of Finland in 1637. He founded towns and a postal service there and in 1640 opened the Royal Academy of Åbo; on Gabriel Oxenstierna's death he became Lord High Steward.

Johan Banér, field marshal since Horn's capture, rebuilt the army after Nördlingen and Prague. On 4 October 1636 at Wittstock he and Alexander Leslie beat the imperial and Saxon armies, and Sweden could attack again. Banér campaigned on until he died in May 1641, naming Torstensson to succeed him.

Leslie, now a Swedish field marshal, led the Army of the Weser at Wittstock beside Banér's army; Banér's own report gave much of the credit to Leslie and his Scots, though the two quarrelled over the battle. By 1638 Leslie was home in Scotland commanding the Covenanters' army, with Swedish guns as his back pay.

Lennart Torstensson, general of artillery, had come home ill and been made a councillor in April 1641 when Banér died. Appointed field marshal and commander in Germany that August, he beat the imperial army at the second battle of Breitenfeld on 23 October 1642; in 1643 he was ordered north against Denmark.

Louis De Geer was ennobled in 1641 and allowed to buy Finspång and his Uppland ironworks outright. Through his household, Sweden reached the Czech exile John Amos Comenius, a Moravian Brethren pastor whose books on teaching were read across Europe.

Comenius came to Sweden in 1642 and met Oxenstierna, De Geer, Johannes Matthiae and the young queen. Oxenstierna set him to write schoolbooks for Swedish schools; De Geer paid for the work and supported Comenius's exiled Brethren, and Comenius settled at Elbing to write. His ideas shaped the Swedish school ordinance of 1649.

Clas Fleming, admiral and from 1634 the first governor of Stockholm, had helped negotiate the Vasa contract and watched the ship fail a stability test a month before she sank in 1628. In 1637 he organised the first expedition of the New Sweden Company to the Delaware River.

Peter Minuit, a former director of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, led the expedition. In March 1638 his two ships reached the Delaware; he had Lenape and Susquehannock chiefs sign deeds to the land and built Fort Christina, named for the queen. Sailing on to the Caribbean, he drowned in a hurricane off St Kitts.

Johan Printz, a pastor's son turned soldier, had been dismissed for surrendering Chemnitz; ennobled and restored to favour, he arrived as governor in February 1643. He built forts on both banks of the Delaware and a manor for himself on Tinicum Island, and kept the peace with the Lenape while competing with the Dutch for trade.

The council decided on war with Denmark in 1643, and Torstensson marched his army north from Moravia without warning. He entered Holstein in December 1643 and held Jutland by January 1644.

Gustav Horn, exchanged in 1642 for three imperial generals, led a second army into Scania early in 1644 and took all of it except Malmö and Kristianstad.

Clas Fleming commanded the fleet. On 1 July 1644 he fought Christian IV's ships off Kolberger Heide without result, and a few weeks later, at anchor in the Bay of Kiel, he was killed by a Danish cannonball.

Carl Gustaf Wrangel, an army officer of thirty-one, took over the fleet. In October 1644 he joined it to the Dutch squadron Louis De Geer had hired, and off Fehmarn the combined fleet took or wrecked twelve Danish ships, leaving Sweden master of the sea.

Maerten Thijssen, a Zeeland admiral, commanded the squadron that Louis De Geer fitted out in the Netherlands, largely at his own cost. Driven back by the Danes in May, it returned, broke the blockade of Gothenburg and joined the Swedes at Kalmar. Christina made Thijssen a Swedish admiral and a noble, as Anckarhielm.

Christian IV, sixty-seven, commanded his fleet himself at Kolberger Heide and lost an eye. After Fehmarn he had to negotiate. At Brömsebro in August 1645 Denmark–Norway gave up Jämtland, Härjedalen, Gotland and Ösel, and handed Halland to Sweden for thirty years.

Christina came of age at eighteen and took up the government in December 1644. She wanted the German war ended, and soon set herself against the chancellor's policy of holding out for more.

Axel's son Johan Oxenstierna led the Swedish delegation at Osnabrück and kept to his father's line: hold out for everything the war could still win.

Johan Adler Salvius, Sweden's resident in Hamburg since 1631, was the queen's own man at the congress and pushed her wish for a settlement. In 1648 she put him on the council over the protests of Oxenstierna and Per Brahe, who thought a town clerk's son too lowborn for it.

Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu's successor as chief minister of France since 1642, kept the alliance with Sweden, and in 1646 sent Pierre Chanut to Stockholm as his resident; Chanut also took part in the talks at Osnabrück.

Turenne, Marshal of France, joined his army to Wrangel's for the last campaigns. On 17 May 1648 at Zusmarshausen they beat the Bavarian and imperial army, the last major battle of the war on German soil.

Wrangel, the victor of Fehmarn, went back to the army and in 1646 succeeded the sick Torstensson as commander in Germany, campaigning with the French in southern Germany and Bavaria.

Hans Christoff von Königsmarck, a German who led Sweden's flying column, broke into Prague by night in July 1648 and took the castle and the Lesser Town; the Old Town held out. Rudolf II's collections, paintings, statues and the Codex Argenteus among them, were shipped to Stockholm for the queen.

Charles Gustav, the queen's cousin, had come to her court in 1646, thought of as her future husband. In 1648 he was given command of the Swedish forces in Germany and brought a third army to Prague in September, but news of the peace ended the siege.

Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, son of Jacob De la Gardie and Ebba Brahe, was the queen's favourite: ambassador to France in 1646, councillor in 1647, Lord Marshal in 1651, Lord High Treasurer in 1652. In 1653 a campaign of slander cost him her favour, and he was suspended and sent from court.

Maria Eufrosyne, Charles Gustav's sister, had been raised with Christina. The queen arranged her marriage to De la Gardie in March 1647 and gave her estates. When the favourite fell she tried to mediate; the match made him brother-in-law to the next king, and that brought him back.

Christina would not marry. In 1649 she made the estates accept Charles Gustav as her heir, over the objections of the council under Oxenstierna, and at her coronation in 1650 he was proclaimed hereditary prince, the crown to pass to his sons.

Arnold Johan Messenius, son of the prisoner of Kajaneborg, had himself spent years in prison as a Polish spy. Freed in 1640 through Per Brahe, he recovered his father's manuscript from Poland and in 1645 became historiographer of the realm. Embittered by lawsuits, he fed material to the non-noble estates' opposition at the riksdags of 1649 and 1650.

His son Arnold, once a page to Charles Gustav, sent the prince an anonymous rhyme in 1651 urging him to raise the army against Oxenstierna and the De la Gardies. Charles Gustav passed it to the queen. Father and son were tried for treason and beheaded in Stockholm on 22 December 1651; there had been no conspiracy.

Christina abdicated at Uppsala Castle on 6 June 1654, and Charles Gustav was crowned the same day. She left Sweden at once, and in Brussels on Christmas Eve 1654 she was privately received into the Catholic Church.

Pierre Chanut, France's resident in Stockholm from 1646, became the queen's friend. He was already corresponding with René Descartes, and when he showed Christina the letters she began writing to the philosopher herself and invited him to Sweden.

Descartes came reluctantly in 1649, when the queen asked him to organise a scientific academy. He lodged with Chanut near the palace, finished The Passions of the Soul and took the first barometer readings in Stockholm. He died there on 11 February 1650, of pneumonia by Chanut's account.

Georg Stiernhielm, once Johan Skytte's secretary and a judge in the court of appeal at Dorpat, was called to Stockholm in 1649 to take charge of the national archives. He wrote the court ballets in Swedish, in one of which Christina danced Diana, and the hexameter poem Hercules, printed in 1658, a landmark of Swedish verse.

Olof Rudbeck, Bishop Rudbeckius's son, had found the lymph vessels as a student. In April 1652 he dissected before the queen at Uppsala; she gave him 800 riksdaler and Oxenstierna 200, and he studied at Leiden. In 1655 the university's new chancellor, Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, made him adjunct in medicine.

Christina had secretly asked Rome for Jesuits. Paolo Casati, a mathematician at the Roman College, was sent with Francesco Malines to judge whether she was sincere; they reached Stockholm in the spring of 1652 and discussed doctrine and philosophy with her.

Antonio Pimentel, sent by Philip IV of Spain, landed in August 1652 and quickly became her confidant; they planned her abdication in long talks in her library. He asked for her portrait, painted by Sébastien Bourdon, as a gift for his king, stayed on with her, and followed her abroad.

Charles X Gustav, thirty-one, had learned war under Torstensson. He inherited a treasury in disorder, crown lands given away to the nobility, and a cousin in Poland, John Casimir, who still called himself King of Sweden.

Christina, passing through Holstein-Gottorp on her way south, suggested the duke's daughter Hedwig Eleonora as a wife. Charles married her on 24 October 1654, a match against their common enemy Denmark. Their son Charles was born in November 1655.

Erik Oxenstierna, Axel's younger son and Charles's friend from Uppsala, brought the bride from Holstein, as his father had once brought Maria Eleonora. When Axel died in August 1654 Erik became chancellor, and at the riksdag of 1655 he steered the estates to the decision the king wanted on taking back crown lands.

Herman Fleming, son of the admiral Clas Fleming, had backed the non-noble estates' call for a reduction since 1650 and headed the Treasury College from 1653. He was made chairman of the new reduction college, which was to take back a quarter of the crown's gifts of land, and drove it on against noble opposition.

Fabio Chigi was elected Pope Alexander VII in April 1655. Christina made her public profession of the Catholic faith at Innsbruck on 3 November, and entered Rome late that year, the convert of the age. He later called her a queen without a realm, a Christian without faith and a woman without shame.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky, hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, had led a rising against the Commonwealth since 1648. In January 1654 at Pereiaslav he placed his Cossack state under the tsar's protection, turning a rebellion into a war between Russia and Poland.

Tsar Alexei's armies swept into the Commonwealth in 1654, taking Smolensk, and in 1655 Vilnius. Sweden saw an opening, and the danger of Russia on the Baltic. When the two kings quarrelled over the spoils, Alexei declared war on Sweden in May 1656, took Dorpat but failed before Riga; a truce followed in December 1658.

Janusz Radziwiłł, Grand Hetman of Lithuania, could not hold Vilnius against the Russians. In August 1655 he put the Grand Duchy under Swedish protection at Kėdainiai and in October signed a union with Sweden; some lords refused to endorse it and part of the army formed a confederation for the king. He died that winter, besieged at Tykocin.

John Casimir, Sigismund's son and King of Poland since 1648, still styled himself hereditary King of Sweden. As Warsaw and Kraków fell he fled to Silesia, but the occupation soon turned the country against the Swedes, and in 1656 he came back to lead the rising and retook Warsaw in June.

Augustyn Kordecki, prior of the monastery of Jasna Góra, had offered to recognise Charles to spare it. When a Swedish force under Burchard Müller came in November 1655, he refused to open the gates and held out until the siege was lifted at the end of December. The defence became a rallying cry for Catholic Poland.

Stefan Czarniecki had defended Kraków against the Swedes in 1655 and surrendered it on good terms. He stayed loyal when many of the army's leaders went over to Charles, was made regimentarz of the royal army, and waged a war of raids against the Swedish columns that wore them down.

Arvid Wittenberg, a veteran of Torstensson's battles, led 17,000 men from Swedish Pomerania into Poland in July 1655. At Ujście the levy of Greater Poland surrendered to him, and he took Kraków in October. Left to hold Warsaw, he gave it up to John Casimir in June 1656; held at Zamość against the terms, he died a prisoner in 1657.

Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg and George William's son, held Ducal Prussia from the Polish crown. Cornered by Charles's army, he became his vassal at Königsberg in January 1656, fought beside him in the three-day battle of Warsaw in July, and at Labiau in November was granted full sovereignty in Prussia. In 1657, at Wehlau, he changed sides when Poland granted him the same.

Erik Oxenstierna followed the king into the field and negotiated the treaties with Brandenburg at Königsberg and Marienburg and with the Dutch at Elbing in 1656. In October that year he died of camp fever at Frauenburg in Prussia.

George II Rákóczi, Prince of Transylvania, signed the treaty of Radnot with Charles in December 1656 to share out Poland, and invaded in January 1657. When Charles left for Denmark the Poles cornered him; he capitulated in July, the Crimean Tatars fell on his army as it went home, and his own diet deposed him that November.

Printz had left New Sweden in 1653. Johan Risingh, who had served Erik Oxenstierna at the College of Commerce, arrived as governor in May 1654 and seized the Dutch Fort Casimir, just below Fort Christina, claiming it stood on land bought from the Lenape.

In November 1654 the Dutch West India Company ordered Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of New Netherland, to drive the Swedes from the river. In the summer of 1655 he came with seven ships and 317 soldiers, retook Fort Casimir and took Fort Christina. New Sweden became part of New Netherland, though many settlers stayed.

Frederick III, king since 1648, judged that Charles was about to come to grief in Poland and declared war in June 1657. Charles marched west through Holstein into Jutland, and in October Wrangel stormed Frederiksodde, the fortress that was to shield the Danish islands.

Corfitz Ulfeldt, Christian IV's son-in-law and once Steward of the Realm, had fled Denmark in 1651 after falling out with Frederick III. In July 1657 he entered Charles's service, talked the commandant of Nakskov into surrendering during the march across the Belts, and negotiated on the Swedish side at the peace.

Erik Dahlbergh, an engineer who had joined the king's camp the day before the battle of Warsaw in 1656, was deputy quartermaster general. He scouted Frederiksodde, and in the hard winter of 1658 he tested the ice; the army crossed the Little Belt on 30 January and went island by island to Zealand by his route, though later historians have played down his part.

Charles X Gustav staked the army on the ice and won. With Swedish troops on Zealand, Frederick III gave in: at Roskilde in February 1658 Denmark–Norway gave up Scania, Blekinge, Halland for good, Bohuslän, Trøndelag and Bornholm, about a third of its territory.

Charles X Gustav landed on Zealand again in August 1658 and laid siege to Copenhagen. Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, would not let one power hold both shores of the Sound, and sent a large fleet to the Baltic to help Denmark and keep the passage open for Dutch ships.

Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam, the Dutch lieutenant-admiral, found de Witt's orders too complicated and asked for them in three words; the answer was to save Copenhagen and hit anyone who stood in the way. On 8 November 1658, in the Sound, he fought through Wrangel's fleet and brought supplies into the city.

Hans Schack, a German veteran who had served Sweden from 1630 and then France, was hired by Frederick III in 1658 as lieutenant-general. As military governor he held Copenhagen against the Swedish assault of 11 February 1659, and that autumn he led the army that destroyed a Swedish force at Nyborg on Funen on 14 November.

Michiel de Ruyter brought a second Dutch fleet in 1659, and it fought alongside the allies in the campaign on Funen that ended at Nyborg, where Danes, Dutch sailors, Brandenburgers and Stefan Czarniecki's Poles stood on the same side.

Frederick III had stayed in his besieged capital, saying he would die in his nest. At Copenhagen on 27 May 1660 he made peace with the regency: Denmark–Norway recovered Trøndelag and Bornholm, while Scania, Blekinge, Halland and Bohuslän stayed Swedish.

Charles went to Gothenburg to ask the estates for money for the war and died there on 13 February 1660. The day before, he had signed a will naming the regency for his four-year-old son: his widow, his brother Adolph John, and his choice of great officers.

Charles XI became king at four. His mother Hedwig Eleonora headed the regency, with Per Brahe as Lord High Steward and Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, named chancellor by the dying king, as its leading man. The council and the nobility set out to change the rest of the will.

Adolph John, the king's younger brother, had been generalissimo of the armies in Poland and Prussia and won at Gnesen in 1656. The will made him Lord High Constable and his sister-in-law's deputy in the regency, but he never came into the office.

Lars Kagg, sixty-five, who had grown up at the court of Christina of Holstein-Gottorp and defended Regensburg against the imperial army in 1634, became Lord High Constable instead.

Shortly before he died, Charles named Herman Fleming Lord High Treasurer. Against all custom the nobility, whose granted lands Fleming's reduction had threatened, refused to accept him, and he withdrew from public life.

Gustaf Bonde, a treasury official who had sat on the reduction college but wanted it applied with restraint, took the nobility's side in the fight over the will and became Lord High Treasurer in November 1660. He set out a programme of peace and thrift to pay off the debts of war.

With Charles dead, peace came quickly. At Oliva on 3 May 1660, with Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie leading the Swedish delegation, John Casimir gave up his claim to the Swedish throne, sixty years after Sigismund's councillors died at Linköping, and recognised Swedish Livonia.