War against Sigismund

In 1587, Sigismund was elected king of the Commonwealth , and when his father, King of Sweden Johan III, died in 1592, in accordance with the Västerås law of succession from 1544, the Swedish throne also passed to Sigismund, having made Commonwealth and Sweden the countries headed by Catholic the king.

After 1527, when a meeting of members of the Riksdag in Västerås was held, discussing the problems of reforming the church, the church situation in the country remained extremely precarious: the Swedes had not yet found support in evangelical-Lutheran teachings, and the irreconcilable contradictions between Evangelical-Lutheran Protestantism (reformers), Calvinism ( Eric XIV, Charles IX) and Catholicism ( Sigismund III Waza , relying on large groups of the rural population) divided the country. Ordinance of Juhan III on the liturgy of 1576 (the “Red Book”), although it was an attempt to compromise, but did not lead to the reconciliation of the parties, intensifying religious contradictions in the country.

Sigismund’s formal accession to the Swedish throne raised in the country a strong concern about the direction of political and religious development, as the king was the main representative of anti-reform forces in Northern Europe.

Sigismund was expected to attend the funeral of his father and his own coronation, but even before he entered Swedish soil, leading evangelical-Lutheran church leaders and politicians gathered in March 1593 to the church council in Uppsala ( Uppsala Cathedral ), where the Augsburg confession was adopted which in turn led to the recognition of the Evangelical-Lutheran teachings as a state religion and the abolition of the Red Book decrees.

In September 1593, Sigismund III Waza arrived in Sweden with his advisers and armed detachments. He refused to acknowledge the decisions of the Uppsala Council, since he did not attend the meetings of the latter, and in order to demonstrate his attitude to the decisions of the council, he organized a solemn Catholic liturgy in Stockholm.

All the estates were convened for the funeral of Juhan III, and the Duke Charles arrived with a large armed detachment. Seeing the hidden threat, Sigismund was forced, internally disagreeing with this, to recognize the decisions of the Uppsala Church Council and promised to take only Lutherans for public service.

In the autumn of 1593, Sigismund returned to Poland. In his absence, the management of Sweden was entrusted to the Duke Charles and the Council. On the ground, Sigismund left his governors, who were not accountable to the Swedish government. Duke Karl and members of the State Council were against such an arrangement of forces, as they believed that the Swedish government should have full power in the country. In addition, Karl believed that he should rule the country as a regent. Contradictions arose in the government, which led to a complete rupture between the Duke Charles and the members of the State Council. Then the duke turned to the estates for support. Contrary to the categorical ban by Sigismund, the Duke Charles convened the Riksdag in Söderköping in 1595, which in turn gave him the authority to administer the state as regent, guided by the "council of council."

Thus, the existing differences between Sigismund and the Swedish government (Duke Charles and the nobility of the council) escalated into conflicts between the Duke Charles and the estates on the one hand and Sigismund and most of the Swedish State Council on the other. The reason for the transfer of the State Council to Sigismund was that, choosing between the one-man regent, who Karl feared would turn into, and the allied king, who was in Poland and had limited power in Sweden, they preferred the latter, although he was a Catholic worship.

Sigismund and his supporters (especially Finland’s deputy Klas Fleming ) decided to do away with Duke Charles. In connection with the outbreak of struggle, some members of the council were forced to flee to Poland.

After several armed conflicts, on September 25, 1598, a decisive battle took place at Stongebra at Linköping , after which Sigismund was forced to conclude an armistice agreement. According to the agreement, he promised to arrive in Stockholm and convene the Riksdag, and later rule in accordance with the royal oath, issuing members of the Council of State who had fled to Poland to the Duke Carl. Sigismund did not fulfill the terms of the contract and returned to Gdansk on October 30 , without giving up the royal title. ^[1] In this regard, the Riksdag in July 1599 removed him from power and considered the candidacy of his son Vladislav as a successor, but put forward the conditions: the 4-year-old prince should come to Sweden and be baptized into the Lutheran faith within six months. For Sigismund, such conditions, of course, were unacceptable. Thus ended a brief personal union between Poland and Sweden ( Polish-Swedish union ).

Duke Charles became the sole ruler of Sweden, starting a company of cruel vengeance for representatives of the nobility and other groups of the population who were inclined to the side of Sigismund. In 1600, he forced the assembly of estates to sentence (the so-called Linköping Bloodbath) some of his enemies to death (Ture Bielke, Eric Sparre, Wall of the Banner). A few years later, Charles took the title of King Charles IX.

Sigismund to the end of his life did not leave hopes to regain the Swedish throne. From this point on, his policy was built mainly around attempts to conquer Sweden, although the nobility of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not show any particular desire to participate in such a protracted and bloody confrontation. Sigismund began to implement his plan in 1599 , confirming the terms of the pacta conventa — the obligations that he assumed when he was elected king of Poland . In this document, he promised to add the Swedish duchy of Estland to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth . And at the Sejm on March 12, 1600, the king announced the accession directly.

The gap with Sigismund led to the fact that the Commonwealth became the enemy of Sweden. In the difficult times of the Russian state during the “troubled times”, both Sweden and Rzeczpospolita tried to seize the moment and establish their protectorate.

In the last years of Charles IX's life, the war began with Denmark, in connection with which his son Gustav II Adolf , the new Swedish king, inherited three wars at once.