Regent of Sweden for thirty years without a crown, who beat Christian I of Denmark at the Battle of Brunkeberg in 1471, kept the Kalmar Union's kings out of the country for a quarter of a century with the Swedish throne deliberately left empty, and saw Uppsala University chartered in 1477.
Sten Sture the Elder governed Sweden for a little over thirty years and never wore a crown. Elected riksföreståndare — regent, literally the realm's steward — on 1 May 1471, he defeated Christian I of Denmark at the Battle of Brunkeberg outside Stockholm five months later, and then kept the Kalmar Union's kings out of the country for twenty-five years with the Swedish throne deliberately left empty.
His power rested on castles, on the mining and farming commons of the Dalarna country, and on a willingness to summon them against his own aristocracy. That is what the Swedish council finally would not tolerate: it declared him deposed in March 1497 and called in King Hans of Denmark, to whom he submitted that October. The magnates changed their minds, elected him regent again in November 1501, and he died at Jönköping on 14 December 1503 with his death concealed by his chancellor for long enough to arrange the succession.
He was born about 1440 — the Svenskt biografiskt lexikon prefers about 1437 — and no source gives the place. His father, Gustav Anundsson Sture, sat on the council of the realm and died in 1444, when the boy was small; his mother was Birgitta Stensdotter of the Bielke family, and she was the half-sister of Karl Knutsson Bonde, who ruled Sweden three separate times as Charles VIII of Sweden. Sten was brought up by his mother and her second husband, Gustav Karlsson, at Kalmar and at the family seat of Ekholmen in Uppland.
That kinship was the making of him, but so was a marriage. Knighted in 1462 and on the council by 1466, he married Ingeborg Åkesdotter of the Tott family in the latter year, which placed him inside the network of the Axelsson brothers — a private Baltic interest holding castles and islands across Denmark, Sweden and Finland, and for a generation the most formidable power bloc in the north that was not a crown.
He learned the war young. In 1464 he fought in Bishop Kettil Karlsson Vasa's rising against Christian I and won an engagement at Haraker in Västmanland. Six years later, dying in May 1470, Karl Knutsson handed him his castles and towns, Stockholm among them. Sweden's next head of state was chosen by a king's deathbed disposition of real property, which says a good deal about how the kingdom actually worked.
The first difficulty with Sten Sture's character is that he wrote a good deal of it himself. The Sturekrönikan — the closing section of the Stora rimkrönikan, covering 1452 to 1496 — is really two chronicles bound together, and the first, running to 1487, was in all probability commissioned by Sten Sture. The standard heroic narrative of his rise is therefore his own campaign literature in rhyme. The second part was written about a decade later on Archbishop Jakob Ulvsson's initiative, and it attacks him hard and argues that he should be removed from the regency. One chronicle, two patrons, two Sten Stures; where they agree is where the evidence is firmest.
What both halves show, from opposite sides, is the method that defined him. He went over the heads of the council to the commons. He summoned peasants and miners to assemblies, used the Dalarna levies as an army and as an argument, and made himself a man the aristocracy could not remove without asking the country first. His supporters called that the realm's liberty; the magnates called it demagoguery and a standing threat to their own standing, and in 1497 they acted on the second reading.
Modern scholarship has stripped a good deal of varnish off. Sven Ulric Palme's study of 1950 set aside the national hero and described a formidable accumulator: a financier, a land speculator and an exporter who gathered fiefs, mines and money on a scale no Swedish magnate had managed, and who understood as well as anyone in Europe what a commissioned chronicle, a votive monument and an annual procession were for. Palme's sharpest point is that the lines of Sten Sture's posthumous portrait were drawn in his own lifetime, and that historians from Johannes Magnus onward simply followed them. He was a genuinely skilled politician, and one of his skills was arranging how he would be remembered.
Charles VIII of Sweden died on 15 May 1470, the last king the Swedes had elected for themselves, and Sten took possession of the castles left to him. He was elected riksföreståndare on 1 May 1471, with the Axelsson brothers' backing, and the choice was confirmed at an assembly at Arboga that May which nobles, burghers and peasants attended — the estates machinery improvised in Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson's generation, now used to install a head of state.
The office needs stating precisely, because it is easy to mistake for something else. A riksföreståndare was not a regent for an absent or infant king in the ordinary European sense, and certainly not a monarch. Sweden simply had no king: the union crown belonged in law to Christian I of Denmark, the Swedes declined to give it to him, and rather than elect a rival they left the throne vacant and appointed a steward to exercise royal government. It was a constitutional improvisation, and it lasted, with interruptions, for half a century.
It also had to be defended within months. Christian I was not prepared to be legislated out of a kingdom, and in the autumn of 1471 he came to Stockholm with a fleet and an army to take it back.
Christian encamped on the Brunkeberg ridge immediately north of Stockholm, blocking the landward approach while Sten gathered levies in the country behind him. Modern estimates put the Danish force at around six thousand, roughly half of it German mercenaries, and the Swedish at up to ten thousand, most of them Dalarna and Uppland levies rather than professional soldiers; these are estimates from later reconstruction rather than counts, and the numbers matter less than the shape of the day.
On 10 October 1471 Sten attacked the ridge from the west and held Christian's front. Nils Sture brought a second force out of the woods on the north-east flank, and Knut Posse led the Stockholm burghers out of the city and over the bridge into the Danish rear. Christian took a handgun shot in the face that cost him several teeth. Caught between the sortie and the flank attack, part of his army was cut off and the rest broke toward the ships. The Battle of Brunkeberg was the most complete victory Sweden won in the union century.
What it bought was time, which is what he wanted. Christian never recovered the kingdom, Sten's election stopped being provisional, and the Danish claim was not pressed in arms again for a generation. He was also careful about what the victory should mean: he had put his army under the protection of Saint George before the battle, and he paid for the consequences of that vow in oak, gold and elk antler eighteen years later.
The decision to found a studium generale at Uppsala was taken at a meeting at Strängnäs in 1477, on the initiative of Archbishop Jakob Ulvsson and with the regent's backing. Sixtus IV's bull of 27 February 1477 granted the new university the privileges of Bologna — the four faculties of theology, law, medicine and philosophy, the right to confer degrees up to the doctorate, and the archbishop of Uppsala as its chancellor — and lectures began on 7 October that year.
It mattered because of what it replaced. Swedish clerks and administrators had until then gone abroad for their degrees, to Paris, Prague, Leipzig and Rostock, and a realm arguing that it could govern itself without a king had an obvious interest in training its own men at home. The first Swedish university was in that sense a political statement as much as a scholarly one. It was also fragile: teaching stopped in 1515 and the university did not properly revive until the 1590s.
Sten Sture's personal share in it is easier to assert than to document, and the two main sources pull in opposite directions in the usual way. The Sture chronicle is keen to give him the credit; the papal bull answers the archbishop, whose project it plainly was. What can be said without strain is that the foundation happened under his government, with his support, in the years when his authority was least contested.