The Sture costumes

The Sture costumes

I showed you this photo already in my entry about the Sture murders, but they are just so awsome that they deserve to be talked about on their own.

What is the Sture costumes? They are the clothes that were worn by Svante Sture and his two sons Nils and Erik on 24 May 1567. They are said to be the only completely preserved male costumes from the renaissance. I am not sure if this is true, but it is certainly rare to have clothes in general left from that time and even more rare to have them come complete with stabbing wounds and blood stains.

The chest Märta put the clothes in
Photo: Lennart Engström, Upplandsmuseet

After the murder Svante's widow and Nils and Erik's mother Märta Leijonhufvud took care of their clothes and put them in a chest that was placed on top of their grave in the Sture choir in Uppsala cathedral. The chest and some of the clothes can be seen at the exhibition in the Uppsala cathedral's museum in Uppsala. It once contained, among other things the clothes of Svante, Nils and Erik that is now in the museum and a hat that belonged to Svante's and Märta's son Sten who died in a sea battle two years prior to the murders. Two years after the murder, Märta also put down the release protocol for Svante, Nils and Erik.

Svante Sture

The clothes are influenced by Spanish as well as German contemporary fashion.

Svante's costume (the one to the left in the photo above) is of a little older model than the ones belonging to his sons. Based on the form of the clothes, he also seems to have been shorter and a bit more robust than both of his sons who, based on their clothes must have been quite tall and slender.

Svante's jacket is made of black velvet with greyish green decorations and the pluderhosen is of taffeta. Mainly on the right side of the jacket, you can see blood stains.

Nils Sture

Nils Sture's costume (in the middle in the photo above) is a  typical travelling outfit for noble men of the time. The jacket is made in chamois leather and traces show it was originally painted black. In a list of inventory from the Uppsala cathedral from 1780 it is noted that the jacket had 19 silver buttons. Of those, only one is still there today. The stab wounds are evident.

The pluderhosen he wore is of black woollen. The fact that Nils wears a travel costume is not really strange. He was emprisoned as soon as he returned from a trip to Alsace-Lorraine where he proposed to a princess on the Erik XIV's behalf. It is said that the king wanted him to fail so he would get a reason to affront him. In the portrait to the right, Nils wears an earring in his left ear. This might be something he picked up on his trip to England where he also was ordered by Erik XIV to propose to queen Elizabeth I.

Erik Sture

Erik Sture's costume (to the right in the photo above) seems to be the one he is wearing in the portrait to the left. The jacket is made of black velvet with thin yellow braids as ornament. The pluderhosen is in taffeta like his father's and they might have once been purple in colour and not brown like today. Purple was a colour only the royals and higher nobility were allowed to wear at the time. (Disney seems to taken this to their heart in Frozen. They let Elsa throw away her purple cloak in the Let it go sequence after all.)

I do love the Sture costumes. They are prof of what I discussed a little in my entry about the exhibition Göteborgs födelse at Göteborg City Museum. Materialities tend to overbridge time gap and make history and historical people get closer. They also evoke thoughts and feelings inside of us. Märta also seems to have understood how they could be used in general memory. She saved the clothes just to have people remember her husband and sons. Unfortunately, most Swedes have today.

The Sture costume is particularly thought provoking since they actually show you real physical evidence on what seem to be quite gruesome murders. Reconstructions have been made comparing the clothes's stab wounds to the account of the murders from the written sources and they seem to match up quite well. What got me to react the most in this case is that the blood stains have actually rusted. I knew very well that there is iron in blood, but I have never thought that blood stains could rust before.

References:
Rangström, Lena (ed) 2002. Modelejon. Manligt mode, 1500-tal, 1600-tal, 1700-tal

The Sture Murders

The Sture costumes in the cathedral museum in Uppsala.
From left: Svante, Nils and Erik

Allow me to introduce to you Swedish earl, Lord High Constable of Sweden (riksmarsk) and member of the Swedish counsil (riksråd) Svante Sture (1517-1567) and two of his sons Nils (1543-1567) and Erik (1546-1567). They were quite brutaly murdered on this day in 1567 by the Swedish king Erik XIV. But lets not get ahead of ourselves and start looking at what actually happened.

Erik XIV was the oldest son of Gustav Vasa and the only child of Gustav's first wife Katarina av Sachsen-Lauenburg. His mother died when he was only two years old and he got lots of half-siblings from Gustav's second marriage with Margareta Leijonhufvud. One of them was Cecilia Vasa another Duke Johan of Finland who Erik had imprisoned at Gripsholms castle. Margareta also died and Gustav remarried her niece (the daughter of Margareta's sister Brita) Katarina Stenbock. She came to play an important role in this particular event. Gustav died in 1560, leaving the throne to Erik.

Margareta also had another sister named Märta. She was married to Svante Sture. He was the son of Kristina Gyllenstierna and former regent of Sweden Sten Sture the Younger who both fought to get Sweden out of the Kalmar Union in the beginning of the 16th century (The latter part of the Kalmar Union era is in Sweden sometimes called The Sture era). In the end Kristina's nephew Gustav Vasa freed Sweden and took the crown for himself. However, the Vasas from time to time considered the Stures as a threat. Not least Erik XIV who had heard rumours about "Sturen på tronen" (The Sture on the throne) and after interrogating the noble man Gustav Ribbing who had served as a page at the Stures's home, he took Svante, Nils and Erik Sture to his special supreme court Höga nämnden together with a couple of other noble men, Abraham Stenbock, Ivar Liljeörn, Sten Leijonhufuvd and Sten Banér charged with conspiracy and treason. Höga nämnden found them guilty on 19 May and they were first imprisoned at Svartsjö castle on Färingsö in Mälaren outside of Stockholm and was later brought to Uppsala castle where Erik XIV had called for the parliament to gather. Nils Sture had been sent to Alsace-Lorraine to propose to a princess on Erik XIV's behalf and was not imprisoned until he returned home on 21 May.

What happened at Uppsala castle on 24 May 1567 is quite grusome. It started with Erik XIV visiting Svante Sture in his prison cell. He fell to his knees begging Svante to forgive him for what he had done to Nils a year prior when he had insulted him after mistakes made during the Northern-seven-years-war Sweden fought against Denmark. Svante seems to have forgiven him and the king leaves.

Erik XIV

What happened next is hard to understand in lights of this. Erik XIV brought his drabants to Nils's prison and stabbed him in the arm. Later on Märta Leijonhufvud claimed that he also pushed the knife into Nils's eye and up through his skull, but that has never been confirmed. Nils, on the other hand, is said to have pulled the knife out of his arm and apologised to the king, but in vane. Erik and his drabants stabbed Nils to death. On the way from Nils's prison, they met Erik's old teacher Dionysios Bureus. In some sources it is said that he tried to calm down the raging king, but this is not sure. What is sure is that he became the next victim of Erik and his mob of soldiers. They stabbed him to death before Erik ordered the soldiers to kill everyone except "Herr Sten" (Mr Sten). The king then ran out of the castle and was not to be found until three days later at Odensala a bit south of Uppsala.

The drabants followed the orders and Svante and Erik Sture as well as Abraham Stenbock and Ivar Liljeörn were all stabbed to death. And pretty nasty too. Lots of stabs and cuts and prolonged beatings until they died. The soldiers did spare Sten Leijonhufvud and Sten Banér though. But only because they did not know who the "Herr Sten" that the king wished to save was. For three days the castle is completely locked and no one gets in or out. The king had disapperad and no one really knew what had happened. Svante's wife Märta Leijonhufuvd worried. She tried to talk to the king's mistress Karin Månsdotter (who he later married and made queen) and his bastard daughter (by one of his other mistresses) Virginia who told her everything would be fine. Märta then sent up food and clean clothes to her husband and sons without knowing they all lay dead in the basement of the castle.

Katarina Stenbock

On the third day, Gustav Vasa's widow (and Erik XIV's stepmother) Katarina Stenbock had had enough. Together with noble man Per Brahe the older, she went to Uppsala castle demanding to be let in. Inside she found her brother (Abraham Stenbock), her uncle (Svante Sture), two of her cousins (Nils and Erik Sture) and Ivar Liljöhök killed. Their bodies had just been left were they had died three days earlier. (Poor old Dionysios was actually left for eight days until someone took care of him.) Despite of what must have been a pretty terrifying sight for the dowager queen, she decided resolutely that she needed to inform her aunt about what happened.

Both Katarina Stenbock and Märta Leijonhufvud deserve blog entries in my Historical Women and my Meet the Vasa Women series. Therefore I will not tell you all about them here. What I must say is that it seems like Katarina was the one who told Märta about the murders of her husband and sons. Märta was heartbroken and like she opens up about her worries in her correspondence with Karin Månsdotter, she does so in letters she sent in the years to come. Personally I do actually love when you get to read letters and other personal notes where historical characters has really opened up. Time differences from time to time can only give us a little insight into personal traits and emotions, but this really is a wife and mother who first worries immensely about her husband and sons and then is struk with grief when told about their murders. This over-bridge the time gap and make them more human and close.

Katarina returned to Stockholm to meet the newly found king. He fell to his knees before her, begging her to forgive him for what he has done. With one foot among the royals and one among the mobility, Katarina was seen as the ultimate mediator by both sides.

It has been speculated a lot about what happened to Erik XIV and why he went berserk that day in May 1567. What is obvious is that he had some form of mental collapse. He was not considered fit to rule for a few months afterwards. On 13 July he married Karin Månsdotter and made her queen. This together with the Sture murders led to his brothers Johan, Magnus and Karl together with the noble families (not least Märta) removed him from the Swedish throne in 1568. He was put in prison where Johan is said to have killed him in 1577, according to the legend by giving him pea soup spiced with arsenic.

Märta took her husband and sons's clothes (The ones you can see in the first photo.) and put them into a chest that was to rest upon their graves in the Sture choir in Uppsala cathedral, where hers and Svante's other son Sten was waiting after having died in a sea battle against the Danish navy two years prior. Two years later, she opened the chest to put down the document from the parliament, saying they were free from all accusations.

References:
Eriksson, Bo 2017. Sturarna. Makten, morden, missdåden
Eriksson, Bo & Harrison, Dick 2010. Sveriges historia 1350-1600
Larsson, Lars-Olof 2005. Arvet efter Gustav Vasa
Rangström, Lena (ed) 2002. Modelejon. Manligt mode, 1500-tal, 1600-tal, 1700-tal
Tegenborg-Falkdalen, Karin 2015. Vasadrottningen. En biografi över Katarina Stenbock 1535-1621

The pictures of Erik XIV and Katarina Stenbock was borrowed from Wikipedia. The photo of the Sture clothes was taken by me during a visit to the cathedral museum in Uppsala.

Göteborgs födelse - Göteborgs stadsmuseum

Poster of Göteborgs födelse

During my stay in Göteborg recently, I had time to visit Göteborgs stadsmuseum's (Gothenburg City Museum) new exhibition Göteborgs födelse (The Birth of Gothenburg) about life in the new town Göteborg during the 17th century.

Already when I first arrived by train, the day before my museum visit, I saw the poster (seen here to the left) and thought it looked interesting and cool. However, I was a bit sceptical since the museum could have put all the money into the marketing, but I decided to try it out anyway and I was not disappointed.

The symbol of the exhibition is a heart-shaped pendant made out of silver was found in a female grave dating to the first half of the 16th century in one of Göteborg's predecessors, Nya Lödöse. The town is situated in the district today known as Gamlestaden and has been the subject of a massive archaeological excavation in the last couple of years (The project has its own web site which can be found here. The site is in Swedish, but you can use Google translate in the upper left corner.). The excavation has revealed a lot of burials (many more than expected and what the written sources say should be there), but this one particular grave was excavated in 1916 and the skeleton reburied at Östra kyrkogården in Göteborg.

The exhibition catalogue

The heart-pendant has an interesting story which is told in the exhibition and also in the exhibition catalogue. It is decorated with symbols and letters and a coat of arms that might belong to a Dutch family. Inside it was a small packet of several layers of fabric wrapped around parts of plants. Pollen analyses showed that cornflowers and heather were at least part of the packet.

I just love it when museums really emphasizes one or more artefacts from their collections in their exhibitions. Yes, this might be because I am an archaeologist and my main focus is the material culture. We are most of the time unaware of how we are affected by materialities. How symbolical they can be, how we interact with other living beings (even they materialities mostly) through them and how we basically keep ourselves grounded in reality with the help of them. (This is really a subject that deserves its own entry some day, but I cannot help talking a little about it here as well.) Artefacts also often make history come alive in an extremely physical way. It can over-bridge time and both geographical and cultural space and can have us reflect on life both in the past, the present and the future. Emphasizing on one or more objects in an exhibition puts the focus on that particular object and it encourage you to reflect. This is really the case with the heart pendant in the Göteborgsfödelse exhibition.

The first thing that meets you when you walk into the exhibition is the sound of heart beats. It engages you and makes you curious. In the rest of the exhibition, I miss this engaging of other senses than sight. I really have nothing negative to say about the visual aspect of the exhibition. It really is great. The texts are mostly not too long and it is interesting when they tell stories about different inhabitants of the town.

The exhibition stands in stark contrast to the one about the 18th century. It is obvious that they have thought a little about making the material and information fun. Some attempts at interactivities have been made, but it really does not work nearly as well as the new exhibition. This is particularly sad because the material from 18th century Göteborg is just amazing. This was the time of the Swedish East India Trading Company and the museum is even lodged into its house so there are real potentials in the material of the time period. Did you know that the biggest collection of Chinese 18th century china that is known from outside of China is in Göteborg? I cannot find my notes from the lecture about it now, but there are tens of thousands only from the museum's courtyard and than from the East Indiaman Götheborg who sank as it ran aground in the Göteborg archipelago on its way home from its third journey to China 12 September 1745. Based on the knowledge of this and all the other amazing things the museum has in its collections, I do hope they make an exhibition just as amazing as Göteborgs födelse about that century too soon.

Salve. En medeltidssaga

About a week ago the twitter account Svensk Historia tweeted about the Nordic king Erik of Pomerania. I retweeted it saying it always makes me think about the Swedish children's show Salve from 1997. This was read by a host at the Swedish radio music show Klassisk morgon and we started talking about the show and its music. Later that day I was contacted by the producer and they wanted me on the show, so this morning I made my radio debute. It can be heard here but since it is in Swedish and since I have much more to say than I had time for on the show, I thought I would make a blog post about it as well. One of the characters, Katarina Örnfot, has her own post in my My Heroine series. It can be found here and I will try not to repeat myself too much.

I was 12 years old when Salve was first broadcasted and already a history nerd with a massive interest in knights. So this was really the perfect show for me and I started recording it on tape every morning already from the start. A year later, the show was cut down to an eleven episode long TV series which was then made into two VCRs and later on also to a DVD. (And of course I have both and yes, I do still watch the DVD from time to time.)

The plot revolves around Nils Svensson who normally is from 1997. He travels to the Swedish town Kalmar to celebrate the 600 jubliee of the union between all the Nordic countries set up by Danish queen Margaret that normally goes by the name The Kalmar Unionen. He tries to call his mother with his mobile phone, but the display just says 1397. He tries it anyway and gets transported to Kalmar 1397. There he befriends Katarina who is the daughter of a knight and works in the bathing house helping the elderly women Rodwy. Later on he becomes a squire to the rather clumsy knight Rosenstråle. The new 15 year old king, Erik (of Pomerania) is bored in the castle and runs away, out into town and becomes a friend of Nils and Katarina as well. At the end he is officially crowned king.

I cannot over-estimate how much this show has meant to me! It really is historical fiction at its best. It has an overarching frame that is the happenings in Kalmar in 1397 and there also seems to be a structure of what and how they wanted to convey facts. This makes the show take the facts seriously, but is not too serious in how they teach the children making it fun to learn. They had question times where children wrote in questions about the Middle Ages to the show, but most of it was told through the fictive plot. The fact was more showed (or played) into the viewers than taught into them.

Nils is the character through whom the viewers learn and just like me during the time I watched Salve, goes from a rather stereotypical image about knights, to learning a great deal about the period itself. What I find to be one of the best aspects about his character is the fact that he is never seen as stupid like is so often the case with characters the viewers are supposed to learn through in TV shows in general and children's shows in particular. Nils just does not know so much about the Middle Ages when he gets to 1397 because he is from 1997 (The scene before he time travels in the beginning of the first episode also has him imagining a rather stereotypical picture about how he, as a knight, saves a princess from a dragon.).

I have already talked about Katarina, but I cannot stress enough how great she is as a female character. She is not reduced to a steretypical medieval woman or a tomboy who gets to play knight. Neither is she overshadowed by the boys. She is independent, complex and colourful and certainly no damsel in distress.

Based on how popular the show was, I was sad to not see it getting more of a follow up than a shortened version in the autumn the year after. I think it would have been so perfect to make a winter holiday show (or a julkalender) so we could see how the people during the Middle Ages celebrated christmas and handled the colder climate of the season.

I rewatch the show from time to time and even though it is a bit childish from time to time and there are some plotholes, I can overlook its flaws because it is aimed at children and it shows how much fun you can have with real facts. It does still hold up extremely well, 20 years and a master's degree in archaeology later. It had me interested in the Middle Ages as a time period and I am still building on that knowledge in my work as an archaeologist today.