On 10 October 1471 the forces of the regent Sten Sture the Elder beat King Christian I of Denmark on the ridge north of Stockholm, wounding him in the face with a handgun shot and leaving the Kalmar Union a name rather than a government in Sweden; most of the men on both sides were Swedes.
The Battle of Brunkeberg was fought on 10 October 1471 on the sandy ridge that ran north of Stockholm, in what is now the middle of the city. On one side was Sten Sture the Elder, elected regent of Sweden five months earlier; on the other King Christian I of Denmark, who had sailed over to remove him and to make the Kalmar Union mean something again in its largest kingdom. Christian was shot in the face, his army was cut in two, and he went home.
The victory fixed Sweden’s position for a generation: Sture governed as regent for most of the next thirty years, and no union king ruled in Sweden again without fighting for it. It also became the most heavily mythologised battle in Swedish history, which is a separate matter and needs to be kept separate — because the largest single fact about Brunkeberg is that most of the men on both sides were Swedes.
The Kalmar Union had joined Denmark, Norway and Sweden under one monarch since 1397, and in Sweden it had never stopped being contested. The quarrel was not primarily about nationality; it was about money and who collected it. Union kings governed Sweden through bailiffs who took the revenues, and they ran a foreign policy centred on the Sound tolls and on Denmark’s relations with the Hanseatic towns. The iron and copper of Bergslagen went out through Stockholm to Lübeck and the other German cities, and the mining districts and the merchants who handled that trade wanted a government that would not sacrifice it to Danish diplomacy.
That is why Sweden’s revolts kept coming from the same places. The rising of Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson in 1434–36 began among the miners and peasants of Bergslagen; Charles VIII of Sweden was crowned and expelled three times; and when he died in 1470 he left his lands and Stockholm castle to his nephew Sten Sture, whom a meeting of the estates at Arboga elected regent on 1 May 1471. Sture’s support came from the peasantry, the mining region and the capital. Much of the higher nobility, whose estates and interests straddled the union, went the other way — and fought for Christian.
Christian sailed into Lake Mälaren’s outlet and anchored off Skeppsholmen, then camped his army on Brunkebergsåsen, the ridge north of the town. Stockholm at that date was only the island that is now Gamla Stan, so the ridge overlooked it from open ground. Negotiations for a settlement were under way and were broken off on Sture’s initiative: he had gathered the larger force and judged that he would do better by fighting.
The plan was to catch the union army in a vice. Sture would come at the ridge from the west, his kinsman Nils Bosson Sture from the east out of the woods towards Ladugårdsgärdet, and Knut Posse would sally from the city into the rear. It worked, though not quickly. Early in the fighting Christian was struck in the face by a shot from a handgun and lost several teeth, and had to leave the field — one of the earliest well-attested occasions on which a reigning king was wounded by a firearm. The decision came when Nils Sture’s column finally broke out of the forest north of the ridge at the same moment as Posse attacked from the town, cutting off a body of union troops at the Klara monastery. Christian pulled back east towards Käpplingen, the island now buried under Blasieholmen; Sture’s men destroyed the makeshift bridge his troops had thrown across, and a great many of them drowned.
Sture is said to have prayed to Saint George before the battle, and in 1489 he paid Bernt Notke of Lübeck for the enormous oak group of Saint George and the Dragon that still stands in Storkyrkan in Stockholm, with an altar dedicated to the saint beside it. The horse carries Sture’s arms, and the group was made to serve as a funeral monument for him and his wife as well as a thanksgiving. Reading the dragon as Denmark is an old and natural interpretation, but it is a tradition rather than a documented intention, and the monument works perfectly well as a saint’s image in a parish church.
That statue is the beginning of the mythology. Over the following centuries Brunkeberg was rewritten as a national war of liberation in which a Swedish people threw off Danish oppression, and the rewriting was useful to every regime that did it — to the Vasa monarchy, to eighteenth-century patriots, and to the nineteenth-century painters and historians who gave it the images most Swedes still carry. Georg von Rosen’s canvas of Sture riding into Stockholm, painted in 1864, is a fine picture and a poor witness. A copy of Notke’s group was unveiled at Köpmantorget in 1912 on the 441st anniversary, which is a good indication of how carefully the date was still being kept.
The correction historians make is not that the battle was unimportant but that it was a Swedish civil conflict fought inside a dynastic union, and the national reading gets the sides wrong. Christian’s army contained Swedish nobles and Uppland peasants in large numbers; Sture’s contained German mercenaries and depended on merchants whose interests were tied to Lübeck. What divided them was whether Sweden’s revenues and its Baltic trade would be governed from Copenhagen or from Stockholm, and which Swedish families would profit either way.
It is also worth being exact about what changed. The union was not ended in 1471, and Sweden did not become independent that day: no Swedish king was elected, Christian and his heirs kept their claim, and Sture himself governed in the union’s name while refusing its king. Hans of Denmark beat Sture’s peasant army at Rotebro in 1497 and was crowned; Sture rose again in 1501; the struggle ran on to the killings in Stockholm in 1520 and Gustav Vasa’s election in 1523. Brunkeberg made the arrangement a military fact rather than a legal one, and that is a real and dateable achievement without any of the flags.