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HISTORY] Bremen in his History (iv. 26) apparently dates from the period immediately preceding these events. He describes the temple as one of great splendour and covered with gilding.

In it stood the statues of the three chief deities Thor, Odin and Fricco (by whom he probably means Frey). Every nine years a great festival was held there to which embassies were sent by all the peoples of Sweden. A large number of animals and even men were sacrificed on such occasions. In the neighbourhood of the temple was a grove of peculiar sanctity in which the bodies of the victims were hung up. After the introduction of Christianity the importance of Upsala began steadily to decline, and owing to its intimate associations with the old religion the kings no longer made it their residence.

.—Tacitus, Germania, cap. 44; Claudius Ptolemaeus, Geographica ii. 11 ad fin.; Jordanes, De origine actibusque Getarum, cap. 3; Procopius, De bello gothico, ii. 15; Beowulf, Rimbertus, Vita S. Ansgarii in monumenta Germaniae historica, ii. 683-725 (Hanover, 1829); King Alfred's translation of Orosius i. 1; Adam of Bremen, Gesta hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum iii. and iv.; Ynglinga Saga, with the poem Ynglingatal contained in the Heimskringla; Olafs Sagan Tryggvasonar and Olafs Saga hins Helga, both contained in Heimskringla and in Fornmanna sögur; Saxo grammaticus, gesta Danorum; a collection of later Swedish Chronicles contained in Rerum suecicarum scriptores, vol. iii. (ed. Annerstedt, Upsala, 1871 and 1876); Sveriges historia, vol. i. (Montelius & Hildebrand, Stockholm, 1875–1877); Thomsen, The Relations between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia and the Origin of the Russian State (Oxford and London, 1877).

Under Blotsweyn's grandson, King Sverker (1134–1155), who permanently amalgamated the Swedes and Goths (each of the two nations supplying the common king alternately for the next hundred years), Sweden began to feel the advantage of a centralized monarchical

government. Eric IX. (1150–1160) organized the Swedish Church on the model prevalent elsewhere, and undertook a crusade against the heathen Finlanders, which marks the beginning of Sweden's overseas dominion. Under Charles VII., the archbishopric of Upsala was founded (1164). But the greatest medieval statesman of Sweden was Earl Birger, who practically ruled the land from 1248 to 1266. To him is attributed the foundation of Stockholm; but he is best known as a legislator, and his wise reforms prepared the way for the abolition of serfdom. The increased dignity which the royal power owed to Earl Birger was still further extended by King Magnus Ladulås (1275–1290). Both these rulers, by the institution of separate and almost independent duchies, attempted to introduce into Sweden a feudal system similar to that already established elsewhere in Europe; but the danger of thus weakening the realm by partition was averted, though not without violent and tragic complications. Finally, in 1319, the severed portions of Sweden were once more reunited.

Meanwhile the political development of the state was of the steadily proceeding. The formation of separate orders, or estates, was promoted by Magnus Ladulås, who extended the privileges of the clergy and founded an hereditary nobility (Ordinance of Alsnö, 1280). In connexion with this institution we now hear of a heavily armed cavalry as the kernel of the national army. The knights too now became distinguishable from the higher nobility. To this period belongs the rise of a prominent burgess class, as the towns now began to acquire charters. At the end of the 13th century, and the beginning of the 14th too, provincial codes of laws appear and the king and his council execute legislative functions.

The first union between Sweden and Norway occurred in 1319, when the three-year-old Magnus, son of the Swedish royal duke Eric and of the Norwegian princess Ingeborg, who had inherited the throne of Norway from his grandfather Haakon V., was in the same year elected

king of Sweden (Convention of Oslo). A long minority weakened the royal influence in both countries, and Magnus lost both his

kingdoms before his death. The Swedes, irritated by his misrule, superseded him by his nephew, Albert of Mecklenburg (1365). In Sweden, Magnus's partialities and necessities led directly to the rise of a powerful landed aristocracy, and, indirectly, to the growth of popular liberties. Forced by the unruliness of the magnates to lean upon the middle classes, the king summoned (1359) the first Swedish Riksdag, on which occasion representatives from the towns were invited to appear along with the nobles and clergy. His successor, Albert, was forced to go a step farther and, in 1371, to take the first Coronation oath. In 1388, at the request of the Swedes themselves, Albert

was driven out by Margaret, regent of Denmark and Norway; and, at a convention of the representatives of the three Scandinavian kingdoms held at Kalmar (1397), Margaret's great-nephew, Eric of Pomerania, was elected the common king, but the liberties of each of the three realms were expressly reserved and confirmed. The union was to be a personal, not a political union.

Neither Margaret herself nor her successors observed the stipulation that in each of the three kingdoms only natives should hold land and high office, and the efforts of Denmark (at that time by far the strongest member of the union) to impose her will on

weaker kingdoms soon produced a rupture, or, rather, a series of semi-ruptures. The Swedes first broke away from it in 1434 under the popular leader Engelbrecht, and after his murder they elected Karl Knutsson Bonde their king under the title of Charles VIII. (1436). In 1441 Charles VIII. had to retire in favour of Christopher of Bavaria, who was already king of Denmark and Norway; but, on the death of Christopher (1448), a state of confusion ensued in the course of which Charles VIII. was twice expelled and twice reinstated. Finally, on his death in 1470, the three kingdoms were reunited under Christian I. of Denmark, the prelates and higher nobility of Sweden being favourable to the union, though the great majority of the Swedish people always detested it as a foreign usurpation. The national party was represented by the three great Riksföreståndare, or presidents of the realm, of the Sture family (see ), who, with brief intervals, from 1470 to 1520 successively defended the independence of Sweden against the Danish kings and kept the national spirit alive. But the presidentship

was too casual and anomalous an institution to rally the nations round it permanently, and when the tyranny of (q.v.) became intolerable the Swedish people elected Gustavus Eriksson Vasa, who as president had already driven out the Danes (see : History), king of Sweden at Strengnäs (June 6, 1523).

The extraordinary difficulties of Gustavus (see ) were directly responsible for the eccentric development, both political and religious, of the new kingdom which his genius created. So precarious was the position of the young king, that he was glad to make allies

wherever he could find them. Hence his desire to stand well with the Holy See. Only three months after his accession, he addressed letters to the pope begging him to appoint new bishops “who would defend the rights of the Church without detriment to the Crown.” He was especially urgent for the confirmation of his nominee Johannes Magni as primate, in the place of the rebellious archbishop Gustavus Trolle, who as a convicted traitor had been formally deposed by the Riksdag and was actually an outlawed exile. If the pope would confirm the elections of his bishops, Gustavus promised to be an obedient son of the Church. Scarcely had these letters been dispatched when the king received a papal bull ordering the immediate reinstatement of Gustavus Trolle. The action of the Curia on this occasion was due to its conviction of the imminent triumph of Christian II. and the instability of Gustavus's position. It was a conviction shared by the rest of Europe; but, none the less, it was another of the many blunders of the Curia at this difficult period. Its immediate effect was the loss of the Swedish Church. Gustavus could not accept as primate an open and