Today we’re going to cover the reign of King Gustav Vasa.
This video is the second part in a two-part series. If you haven’t watched part one yet, make sure you do that before you keep watching.
The year is 1523. The king of Denmark has been defeated, and Sweden has officially severed all ties to the Kalmar union in favor of becoming an independent country with Gustav Vasa as its king.
The Swedish reformation
Despite his triumph, the new king found himself in a tough situation.
The war with Denmark had left Sweden poor and heavily indebted to Lubeck.
In order to get the kingdom back on its feet the state was in a desperate need for more resources.
Luckily for king Gustav, an enticing opportunity to get the resources needed soon appeared.
Down on the continent, new winds were blowing. The protestant reformation, initially started by Martin Luther in the 1510s had spread throughout central Europe and led many lords to break their ties with the papacy.
This new religion soon came to Sweden through german traders and presented a tempting opportunity to the crown.
A central idea of the reformation was that the property of the church belonged to the people who in turn were represented by the king.
Capitalizing on this idea, the crown gradually started to seize the church’s properties and used it to pay back the interest, as well as strengthen the crown's power.
The actions were of course not without opposition, and in order to legitimize the seizure of church properties Gustav held what in Sweden is called a riksdag, roughly translated to parliament, in the city of Västerås in 1527.
The assembly was attended by many representatives from the realms four estates who all came to discuss solutions to the kingdom's pressed situation.
The representatives of the church were of course negative to the crown’s proposal to seize its lands,
but by compromising with the nobility, the burgers, and the peasants, king Gustav managed to get his proposal accepted, and thus steamrolled the clerical opposition.
As a result, the catholic church in Sweden lost all of its properties and was transformed into the national church of Sweden with Gustav Vasa as its head.
This development meant that Sweden officially broke with the catholic church though it didn’t necessarily mean that Sweden became protestant.
Many catholic ideas and practices remained throughout the century, until the church of Sweden officially declared the land to be protestant in 1593.
Despite the riches from the church’s property, however, it was not enough to solve the government’s financial problems.
Peasant rebellions
The crown needed more money, and the only way to get it was to introduce new taxes.
As probably been made clear by now is raising taxes a big no-no to the Swedish peasantry and civil unrest soon broke out in many places in the land,
even among the people in Dalarna who just a few years prior had rallied behind King Gustav.
In order to keep the kingdom together, the insurgencies needed to be dealt with, even if it meant sending out an army to stamp out the civil unrest by force if needed.
Unlike his predecessor, though, king Gustav proved himself to be quite efficient handling the insurgencies.
Instead of defeating the rebels on the battlefield, he reached out to the peasants and negotiated with them in order to try to come to a compromise he could accept.
At the same time, he also used agents to spread propaganda to nearby regions to avoid a local rebellion from spreading beyond its origin point.
To achieve this, the king took advantage of the printing press, a relatively recent invention which allowed the crown to spread thousands of pamphlets that de-legitimized and black painted his opposition.
The strategy proved to be efficient and allowed the king to keep many rebellions small enough that they either would be easily crushed by the crown’s forces,
or be forced to surrender due to the rebels finding themself in an unwinnable situation.
One rebellion, however, would become too much for the crowns propaganda machine to handle.
In the region of Småland, the peasantry were angry with the new taxes, as well as the increased governmental control that came with it.
In the middle ages the people of Småland, like most other regions, had for the most part governed themselves, while paying taxes to the church and crown.
During the reign of Gustav Vasa this would come to change as the fingers of the state began to dig deep into the common folks daily life,
making changes to old religious practices, as well as introducing new regulations like the prohibition against hunting large animals
and the prohibition against cutting down oak trees that the state could use to build warships.
Needless to say, many peasants in Småland wanted none of this, and in the summer of 1542 a rebellion broke out led by a farmer named Nils Dacke.
King Gustav applied his usual strategy of spreading information that black-painted the rebels to villages all over the region.