Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Steno Sturé the Elder. King John. Suanto Sturé. Steno Sturé the Younger, and Christian the Tyrant. A.D. 1470—1520
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a. d. ) Hostility of SturS.
1497—1501.$ Reconcilement.
ADMINISTRATION OF THE STUIlES.
Charges against Steno
Stur6.
75
tliey declared they were all opposed, and would
never submit themselves to bis authority. The
Hanse Towns, now in league with the
administrator, fanned the existing disaffection against the
king, whose alliance with the Russian czar at the
very time when Finland was burning and bleeding
from the cruelty of the Muscovites, the Swedes
could not forgive.
Steno Sture, at the head of his levies of peasants,
attacked the archbishop, who had long played the
waverer, but was now shut up in his castle of
Stacket with some of the council. The peasantry
marched against Stockholm, while the royal army,
chiefly consisting of mercenary troops, was
likewise conveyed before the capital in the Danish
fleet, and encamped anew on the Brunkeberg, as
had been done five and twenty years before
Sturm’s plan was that the Daleearlians should
attack the hill, whilst he himself, sallying from the
town, whose suburbs he had caused to be burned,
fell upon the enemy in the rear. His scheme was
betrayed. The peasants, by the Danish account
30,000 in number, were first surprised and defeated
at Rotebro, and when the victorious army of Danes
returned with Swedish banners flying, Steno,
mistaking them for his own men, marched out to meet
them, and would have been made prisoner had he
not thrown himself from his horse into the
Norrs-trom, and obtained entrance into the castle by a
secret door. This happened on the 28th of
October, 1497- A reconciliation was soon effected
between Stur£ and the king, on condition that the
former should be discharged from all responsibility
for his administration, and receive the investiture
of fiefs of immense extent2, the largest ever
possessed by any Swedish subject excepting Boece
Jonson. They made their entry arm in arm
together into Stockholm, and on arriving at the castle,
the king is said to have jestingly inquired whether
he had made all things properly ready for him.
Sture pointing to the Swedish nobles standing
behind the king, replied, "That you will hear best
from these, for it is they who have brewed and
baked here." To this the king observed, " Lord
Steno, you have bequeathed to me an ill legacy in
Sweden ; the peasants, created by God to be slaves,
you have raised to be lords, and those who should
be lords you would degrade to be thralls3." So
uncontrollable was the anger of the magnates
against Sture, that many of them clamoured for his
death with a virulence that was blamed by the
Danes themselves, and his head would perhaps
have fallen if bishop Cordt of Strengness had not
interceded in his favour 4.
Steno Sture wasstill formidable from the devotion
1 The king was also accompanied by the so-called great
or Saxon guard, famous at this time in the service of several
princes, whose strength is differently stated from 3000 to
6000 men. (The text has fourteen years, but this must be
a slip of the pen. T.)
2 The whole of Finland with Norrbotten and Aland,
Su-dermania, Swartsio, with Faering’s isle, and the estate of
Gotala in West-Gothland.
3 A Danish account says, that in 1497 at the diet of Funen,
king John produced evidence against Steno Sture’s
accusation that he wished to enslave the peasants. Serfage was
not yet introduced in Funen, although it was in Zealand.
1 Olave Peterson.
5 Hvitfeld, however, laments that the gold chain began,
from 1500, to be the common ornament of the nobles.
of the common people in his cause. To pacify the
Dalecarlians, who, in spite of their defeat, would
not retire from before Stockholm, he employed hi3
personal influence, and they submitted to the king
only on condition that Steno Sture should
thenceforward be governor over Westmanland and
Dalecarlia, an augmentation of power which he
afterwards voluntarily relinquished to the king. That
Sture’ should have acknowledged king John seemed
a thing so incredible to the people generally, that
the council were obliged to despatch letters into all
the provinces, with copies of the convention of
Cal-mar, concluded in ] 483, in order to prove that he
had already set his name to that act fourteen years
before. On the 25th November (a. d. 1497), the
king was crowned in Stockholm, on which occasion
many new knights were created from among the
nobility. The Rhyme Chronicle asserts that the
desire of the Swedish ladies to see their husbands
bearing the title of lords contributed not a little to
open to John the path to the throne ; for knights
only were at this time called lords, as their wives
only were ladies, and this dignity, of which a golden
chain round the neck was the badge 5, could not be
conferred by the administrator, though himself a
knight, but by the king only. Steno Sture was
nominated high chamberlain, Suanto, marshal, and
the former was one of the four councillors to whom
the government was committed when the king, in
January, 1498, repaired to Denmark. In the
beginning of next year he returned, attended by his
consort Christina6 and his eldest sou Christian,
who was now in his eighteenth year, and had in
1497 been acknowledged as his successor. Homage
was now solemnly rendered to him in that capacity
by the justiciary and twelve men of every
province.
The exasperation of the domestic party which
was hostile to Steno Sture’ was by no means yet
appeased. Notwithstanding the acquittal he had
obtained from all responsibility, the archbishop,
armed with a papal brief, insisted on receiving
compensation for all the losses which his see had
sustained during the late discords ; the rest of the
bishops also, with Suanto Sture’ and the council,
preferred complaints of violences committed by the
guardian’s order, and there are undoubtedly
instances of wrong either commanded or permitted by
Steno Sture in those troublous times 7. The king
endeavoured to accommodate their disputes even
by the expenditure of money. A letter of
agreement was subscribed by Steno Sture’, containing a
partial admission of the charges brought against
him ; he was obliged also to cede the greater
portion of Finland, and to pledge his honour never
" Of Saxony; daughter of the elector Ernest, married in
1478.
7 In the court-hook of the townof Stockholm, an extract
from which is among the Nordin manuscripts in the library
at Upsala, complaints are made in the year 1492, that Lord
Steno had forbidden the export of grain on penalty of death,
at the very time when he was an exporter himself. Towards
the end of his administration he was not popular with the
burghers of Stockholm, who began to take the side of the
council. He was obliged to promise that he would replace
cut of his own means all the damage that had been caused
in 1497 by the burning of the suburbs, and eight years after
his death, the magistrates caused all the property he had
left in the town of Stockholm to be sequestered for the
payment of his debts.
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