The Reign of Gustav II Adolf

Abstract

No Swedish sovereign has equaled Karl IX’s son and successor, Gustav II Adolf (1611–32), in overall reputation. Indeed, few European monarchs of the seventeenth century — with the exception of Louis XIV — rival Gustav Adolf in this regard. Even among the most casual students of the early modern period, Gustav II Adolf is one of those few statesmen who enjoys instant name-recognition. Long before the appearance of the twentieth-century biographies of the king by Nils Ahnlund, Génter Barudio, and — most eloquently — by Michael Roberts, Gustav Adolf’s immortality within European historiography was assured by a plethora of biographies, some of them more akin to hagiography than they are to serious historical literature. To his nineteenth-century admirers, Gustav II Adolf was simultaneously Old Testament warrior-king, practitioner of Realpolitik, and savior of European Protestantism. Even in recent survey texts of the early modern period and of the history of Western Civilization in general — genres that tend to brush off Scandinavian developments as ‘peripheral’ — Gustav Adolf is practically the only major Scandinavian figure who appears with any regularity. In short, Gustav Adolf has become, in Western eyes as well as in Swedish popular historiography, synonymous with the apogee of Swedish power and with seventeenth-century Scandinavia in general.