October 20, 2014 • 39 mins
Christina was a smart, learned woman, but not a particularly good ruler. Her entire life was marked by being kind of a contradictory, restless character - starting basically from the moment she was born. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Today we're going back to the
world of Swedish royalty. This time it is to Queen Christina.
(00:22):
She lived about a hundred years after previous podcast subject
Eric the fourteen and she, like him, was also part
of the House of Vassa. And her story has a
lot of our favorite running podcast themes. Most of them
really started with previous hosts, but they've carried on until today.
(00:42):
We have a sad royal childhood, we have an abdication,
and we even had an exhumation. All in all, Queen
Christina was not known for being a particularly great ruler
of Sweden, and she abdicated her throne only about a
decade into her reign. But she was extremely learned. She
spoke a lot of languages. Apart from her native Swedish,
(01:05):
there was also Greek, Latin, German, French, Flemish, Italian, Spanish
and Finnish, along with a little Hebrew and Arabic. And
she helped start the first Swedish newspaper in sixteen forty five,
as well as Sweden's first public opera house and its
first universal public school program. She amassed a huge collection
(01:28):
of arts and literature, and her collection of books and
manuscripts later went on to become part of the Vatican
Library UH and a sort of a side note, her
life became a movie starring Greta Garbo in nineteen thirty three.
So her whole life was marked by being this kind
of contradictory, restless character, and that started basically from the
(01:48):
moment that she was born. So Christina was born to
King Gustav Adolf and Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg. Before she
was born, her parents had had to stillborn baby's and
they also had a daughter who had died before she
reached the age of one, so people were really starting
to be concerned about the kingdom having an air. Gustav
(02:11):
had an illegitimate son who was named Gustav Gustafsson, and
he was not eligible for a lot of reasons, including
his illegitimacy to be on the throne. King Gustav's Catholic
cousin uh Seismund was king of Poland and he had
two sons of his own, and people were quite worried
that if something had happened to Gustav before he produced
(02:33):
a legitimate air uh Seismund was going to take over
and make Sweden, which at that point was a staunchly
Lutheran country, into a Catholic country, and since since Sigismund
had two sons, it seemed like that had the potential
to turn into a lasting Catholic dynasty, so it would
really have upended Sweden. Maria Eleonora, so Christina's mother, also
(02:58):
seemed to to have developed some kind of mental or
emotional disorder over the course of her previous pregnancies and
the children she had lost. She had always been really
affectionate with her husband, but she became just desperately attached
to him. She would get really agitated and distressed whenever
he was away, which he had to be away quite
(03:19):
a lot because he was king. Her language skills and
her handwriting started to deteriorate, and her behavior became really erratic.
People started to worry about her ability to conceive and
to carry a healthy child to term. However, despite all
of those potential issues, uh, five years into Gustave and
(03:39):
Maria Eleonora's marriage, Maria became pregnant with Christina, who was
born on December eighth of sixty six, that's in the
Julian calendar, uh, which would be December eighteenth under the
modern Gregorian calendar. And she was a little early and
born in call, so that means her amniotic membrane was
still intact and covering her once she was born, and
(04:02):
so the midwives removed the membrane and they declared her
initially to be a boy, uh, and words spread around
the castle to a great deal of celebration. However, once
the excitement was over and they took a longer and
more careful look at her, they almost immediately realized she
was actually a girl. And everybody was sort of afraid
(04:23):
how the king would react. I mean, they had had
all of these previous strategy tragedies and all that's build up,
and they had just told him joyfully that he had
a son now. Um, so nobody told him about the
mistake until the next day. That kind of cracks me up. Uh.
There's been a great deal of speculation about what may
have caused this misidentification on the part of the midwives
(04:44):
to believe that Christina was a boy rather than a girl.
There have been theories bandied about that she had an
intersex condition and some kind of chromosomal disorder, and that
her external genitalia may have exhibited both male and female traits.
Another theories that her body was simply ambiguous and that
the lighting was poor, and that there could have been
(05:06):
a little wishful thinking in the mix, and that the
midwives saw initially what they wanted to see, which would
have been a male heir. There are a lot of
family memoirs from this time who portray the king is
being just enormously and immediately welcoming and accepting of the
fact that he actually had a daughter. Uh, and some
of that is kind of glossing over the initial shock
(05:28):
and upset that he did have um having a daughter
instead of a son was a big upset. They had
been trying for a long time to have a male
heir and now they didn't. But he did quickly warm
to the idea of having a daughter and of raising
his daughter like a prince. Christina's mother, on the other hand,
was devastated that after so many attempts, now she had
(05:50):
a daughter and not the son that she had been,
you know, basically tasked with providing for the kingdom. So
she basically shunned her daughter for a lot of her
early life. Uh and Gustav decided that Christina, in spite
of being female, would indeed be his heir, and he
wanted her her, as Tracy said just a moment ago,
to have a princely upbringing. And this was not just
(06:12):
in terms of her education and her intended role as
as the leader of the country, but also in terms
of her sort of day to day exercise and the
pastimes that that they would kind of nurture her into
as she grew up. This suited her just fine. She
was not at all fond of the duties and pastimes
that genuine that generally fell to women at the time.
(06:36):
Her father wanted her to learn to ride, and to
fight and to handle a bow, and she did all that,
and she did it well, and her demeanor was not
at all typically feminine. I think today people would have
called her a tomboy. And just for clarity, it really
was not unheard of for girls to have the same
education as boys, especially when they were in line for
(06:56):
the throne. And so Christina's schoolmates are part of her childhood,
were actually two female cousins, the fighting and the hunting
and the bow work. However, we're not really typical pursuits
for girls or women, so the idea of Christina as
his heir was not just an idle fancy on Gustav's partner.
(07:16):
He started making real plans to confirm her as his
successor while she was still a baby. The Thirty Years
War had been going on for about eight years by
the time Christina was born, and Adolph knew that it
was very possible that he would be killed in battle.
So in addition to officially naming her as his successor,
(07:37):
he started looking for suitable candidates for her to marry
when she got older to cement the hereditary line to
the throne. The primary candidate was a cousin of hers
named Carl Gustav. He also had his chancellor named Axel Oxenstierna,
along with five regents to rule in his and his
daughter's stead. However, he didn't really have an active part
(08:01):
in raising his young heir. He was needed in the war,
and Christina's mother wanted nothing to do with her, so
Christina spent most of her early childhood living with cousins,
except for being dropped once when she was a baby
and that was possibly on purpose by someone with Catholic leanings.
It was mostly a happy few years. She was surrounded
(08:22):
by other children close to her own age. She had
playmates and friends and other girls who were studying with her,
So this part of her earlier life, in spite of
being separated from her parents, was not all that bad.
But when she was just five, so still very young,
her father was killed in the Battle of Lutzen, and
(08:42):
Christina's mother of course completely distraught. Uh. We talked about
how clingy and sort of almost obsessive she had become
with king. So her mother had the King's heart removed
and placed in a golden casket so that she could
keep it with her. Her behavior continued to become increasingly bizarre,
(09:02):
and she spent a lot of money on a really
elaborate funeral. She also did not bury the king's body
right away. Now, this was not entirely unheard of at
the time, especially when it was wintertime and the ground
was frozen and it was difficult for people to travel
for that sort of thing. But Gustav's body wound up
(09:23):
being buried nineteen months after his death, and this was
over the fierce objections of his wife, who had kept
it lying in state and spent hours and hours at
a time viewing it. At some point she even kept
the coffin in her own bedroom so she could have
it close by. So, as we said, not a typical
(09:43):
for there to be a long delay at this point
between when king was, when the king died, and when
the king was buried. But this was a really long time,
and Maria Eleanora's displays of grief were not at all
typical for the time. So the king was finally buried,
and does that happened? Maria Eleonora took custody of Christina,
and she took her out of the home where she
(10:05):
had been and had friends and playmates, and she moved
her into a much more lonely and erratic and just
sort of cold existence that was largely just the two
of them together. And this is where Christina's royal childhood
became kind of sad. She started having these really sudden illnesses,
and the general agreement is that these were brought on
(10:27):
by the stress of the situation. She generally got better
pretty quickly, but she got sick over and over again.
It was a frequent occurrence, in part to get some
distance from her mother, she really threw herself into her
education and into training and into exercise. She sort of
dove even farther into the more masculine parts of her upbringing.
(10:51):
And before we move into when she actually ascended to
the throne, Holly, would you like to take a minute
for a brief word from a sponsor. It sounds like
a capital idea. And now let's get back to Christina
of Sweden and now when she's going to actually become queen,
and becoming queen and her ascension to the throne really
was not as simple as just being the king's daughter
(11:12):
and surviving to adulthood to be crowned. Sweden was an
elective monarchy, so even if someone had inherited the throne,
they still had to be accepted by the Reek's Dog,
which was Sweden's parliament, as well as the Swedish senators.
This meant that the four estates of the reeks Dog,
which were the clergy, the nobles, the burghers, and the peasants,
(11:34):
all had to be in favor of Christina's presence on
the throne in order for her to actually become the queen.
And the end they were and Christina became the Queen
of the Swedes, Goths and Vandals, Great Princess of Finland,
Duchess of Estonia and Karelia, and Lady of Ingria, and
she basically carried herself as a ruler right from the beginning.
(11:55):
The Chancellor began to allow her to attend council meetings
and participate as early as the age of fourteen. She
was officially crowned at the age of eighteen, so she
was kind of doing the work of this job for
several years before it was made official. She was, at
that point simultaneously a diminutive young woman. She had very
fine hands and beautiful blue eyes, but she was also
(12:18):
a very masculine for she walked the walk, she talked
to talk, and she swore like a soldier. Christina and
Chancellor Axel Oxensternia did not see eye to eye. The
Chancellor had done a really good job of ruling between
the death of her father and her age of majority,
and even when the king was still alive, the two
(12:38):
men had really worked together to run the kingdom and
to plan and make decisions. Axel had been an efficient
and pragmatic diplomat, and he was well respected among the
Reeks dog and among Sweden's military leaders. But Christina was
a proud and arrogant eighteen year old and she really
felt like it was her time to shine, and so
(13:00):
she and Excel butted heads. They did so repeatedly and often.
If this were a modern day film, you would maybe
expect them to end up falling in love somehow, but
would work out that way in real life. Yes, that
would definitely be the romantic comedy version version of Christina
of Sweden. They also started to have financial problems in
(13:23):
the kingdom pretty early in her reign. She tried to
continue her father's generosity with the royal coffers, but she
wasn't nearly as careful about it as he had been.
She got into this cycle of giving away too much
and then selling noble titles to try to earn some
more money, and then raising taxes on the people she
had just promoted. It did not work out well. It
(13:46):
was not an efficient way of bridging the gap, kind
of like a cascading circle of bad decisions. Um Naturally,
in the midst of all of this, everyone wanted her
to marry Uh. In addition to Carl Gustav, another student,
there was Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg, who ended up marrying
someone else, and Christina had a not all that clandestine
(14:07):
affair with one of the ladies of her court, which
let do some speculation about her sexual orientation, her sex,
and her gender, which of course tied back into that
initial uh mistake in identifying her sex. In the midst
of all of this, popular opinion started to turn against her,
(14:29):
and when she was twenty, a man armed with daggers
tried to kill her while she was at prayer. Her
life being apparently legitimately at risk, put a lot more
pressure on her to get married, which was an idea
that she continued to resist. And about this same time,
the Thirty Years War was drawing to a close, which
was something she herself was greatly in favor of, but
(14:51):
not everyone felt the same. Many Protestant clergy wanted the
war to continue until there could be a decisive Protestant
victory over because policism. Others wanted it to continue just
so that Sweden could continue to collect additional war booty
to potentially supplement their their money situation. Yeah, the Thirty
Years War was this massive and obviously very lengthy conflict
(15:14):
and different nations had different motivations for being involved in it.
We haven't really talked about that part of it because
it's kind of ancillary to this podcast. But yeah, for
Sweden in particular, there were people who felt like ending
the war at that point was too soon. But to Christina,
as long as the war went on, she could never
really be in charge. While she had been accepted as
(15:36):
Sweden's queen and she was making lots of decisions for
herself as the ruler, she really had no authority over
military matters. War was pretty much exclusively a man's game,
especially when it came to running the show. So as
long as the war went on, the Chancellor and the
regents continued to have a major hand in making decisions
that Christina could have no control over. Ending the war
(15:59):
would and did put an end to one of their
sources of power and gave Christina more direct control over
pretty much everything that was going on in the kingdom.
So the Thirty Years War did indeed end with the
Peace of Westphalia in sixteen forty eight, and once the
war had concluded, Christina turned her attention to her own
(16:19):
court and she began inviting artists, writers and thinkers to
the Swedish court. The most famous among all of these
was mathematician and philosopher reneed A Cart, who she invited
to stay in the palace at Stockholm. He did not
really want to go. Sweden was too cold, and it
was too far away, and he really doubted that the
(16:41):
Lutheran court was going to welcome him with open arms
since he was Catholic. But in the end he was
convinced to come, and he and a translator went to
Sweden in September of sixteen forty nine. His misgivings about
going and about staying once he got there were, unfortunately prescients.
He got the flu the following January and died. Uh
(17:03):
Some people blamed Christina both for bringing him there and
for putting huge demands on his time and effort while
he was visiting courts. Yet another source of pressure for
Christina to marry came in sixteen forty nine when her
cousin Jan kazim Years ascended to the throne in Poland.
This was the second of Sigismund's two sons who had
so worried people before Christina was born. Jan succeeded his
(17:27):
late brother and married his late brother's widow who was
still young enough to have children. So once again people
were threatened by the idea that the monarchy in Poland
was going to come to power over Sweden. Instead of marrying, though,
Christina did something completely different. She went to the Reek's
dog and said that she wanted her cousin, Count Palatine
(17:49):
Karl Gustav, the one that she had been intended to marry,
to be named as her successor. Threeks Do pretty much
scoffed at that entire idea. They were like, you're gonna
marry him anyway, so what's the point. Like, that's the
guy you're gonna get married to and have babies with,
so naming him as your successor now seems silly. They
(18:13):
thought this, even though she was still having sudden illnesses.
Even even though she was um sick pretty often, people
still thought she was young and healthy enough to have
a baby. Uh. Christina, not delighted by this reaction, she
went back to them and she said it was going
to be impossible for her to marry. In her words quote,
(18:33):
I am absolutely certain about it. I do not intend
to give you reasons. My character is simply not suited
to marriage. I have prayed God fervently that my inclination
might change, but I simply cannot marry This once again
was a completely foreign and kind of silly idea to
the Reeks dog and they refused her suggestion. Again. They
(18:54):
basically thought she's just gonna agree to marry him eventually.
They've been friends since their childhood, they get along fine.
Of course they should be married. It seems so clear
to them. Yeah, they were. They were really like, well, obviously,
you're just going to marry him, so why is why
is this a big thing? Are you being fussy? So
the thing that ended up changing the reef Stower's minds
(19:17):
on this issue was the execution of Charles the First
of England. When that happened, leaders began to fear rebellion
on multiple fronts, so they wanted to ensure that the
line of succession was not going to be interrupted, So
in March of sixty nine, they finally agreed to officially
named Carl Gustav as Christina's successor, although at that point
(19:37):
they really still thought she would end up marrying him
and make it all a sort of a moot gesture. Yeah,
they thought they were humoring her. She, on the other hand,
thought she was getting exactly what she wanted. She was
still going to get to rule, but she was not
going to have to get married and produce an air
Carl was going to have to do that. She was
off the hook. And before we talk about getting further
(19:59):
off the hook, let's take another brief moment for a
word from a sponsor that sounds grand. And now let's
return to the story of how Queen Christina, having fought
so long and so hard to get total control over
the throne, abdicated. So although she had started to rule
officially at eighteen, and that was after she had already
(20:20):
been kind of involved in some government duties, she still
wasn't actually crowned until she was twenty three, So it
really took quite a long time for her to kind
of get all of the dust settled on her official ascension.
By the time she was actually planning her coronation, which
was scheduled for October of sixteen fifty, she was already
thinking abdicating might sound like a good plan. Before she
(20:45):
had told anyone about this plan, she started trying to
convince the Reeks dog not just to make Carl Gustav
her successor if she died, but to make him the
actual next hereditary king of Sweden, not just someone to
sort of run things in the event of her untimely
death until another real king could be found and elected.
(21:05):
And they said no. Um, so she pulled a series
of political strings until they finally agreed. She basically pitted
all of the different classes against one another and like
played up the you know, the noble sphere of the
common people taking over and the common people's fear of
the nobles, until they all agreed that if if she
(21:27):
would just give them a break, that they would do
what she asked. Uh. In August of sixteen fifty one,
so less than a year after her very extravagant coronation,
she h informed the Senate that she planned to abdicate,
and she spent the next several months trying to convince
the reefs Dog to allow it. I feel like she
(21:47):
spent her entire time trying to convince the reefs dog
of things. That is pretty accurate. There was a lot
of her trying to get the reefs dog to do
what she wanted. Um, they were not buying this at all.
And so after this couple of months of really trying
to convince them. She dropped the matter for a couple
of years, but during the interim she started meeting with
(22:10):
Jesuits and talking about converting to Catholicism. So we have
talked about up to this point, you know, some pretty
deep seated um discord between the religions, and so for
her to want to convert, that's big stuff. Uh. Catholicism
was a religion that had really appealed to her since
(22:30):
she was quite young. When she was nine, a tutor
had told her that Catholicism did not allow lay people
to read the Bible, it encouraged celibacy and believed in purgatory,
and her reaction to all of that was, oh, what
a lovely religion. In early sixteen fifty four, when everyone
thought this whole matter of advocating had just been dropped,
(22:51):
Christina announced once again that she was going to advocate.
She negotiated a settlement that granted her some lands and
some money, and it apt her as the sovereign of Sweden,
so she didn't have to handle any of her royal responsibilities.
But she was still a queen regardless of how you
feel about her. Her various ways of running the kingdom
(23:14):
that we're not all that great. This was kind of
a masterful string pulling to get exactly the best possible
situation for her to be in. Yeah, like all of
the benefits, none of the responsibilities. So she abdicated that may,
leaving the palace before midnight on the night of Karl
Gustav's coronation. She was like the person that leaves the
(23:35):
wedding reception early. In this case, she was like, ye'all
have fun, I'm out of here. So there are a
lot of theories about exactly why she was so set
on abdicating. Her explanation was that she thought that they
really needed a man to rule the country, in particular
to lead the army. So if you know, there were
(23:57):
another future war that the country was going to participate, Haiden,
they would be better off with a male king than
with a female queen. She also said that the pressures
of ruling had been too much for her and that
she needed to rest. And as we've made pretty clear,
she was really deeply opposed to the idea of marrying
and she was under immense pressure to do so as queen,
(24:19):
And as soon as she was out of Sweden she
adopted a more masculine dress, more masculine mannerisms, and a
more masculine demeanor, and she converted to Catholicism. She took
the names Maria and Alexandra, after Alexander the Great. And
I want to make clear here she was not living
as a man. She tended to wear trousers instead of
(24:40):
dresses and to just behave in a more coarse way
than women were expected to, but she did not present
herself as a man. She was still apart from a
couple of times as she was traveling in disguise, she
was still Christina. Her conversion to Catholicism was an enormous deal.
Sweden was a Lutheran nation and as Queen Christina was
(25:00):
the head of the church, and even though she had
abdicated her rule, this was still pretty monumental, and she
was still sovereign, so they still had a lot of
stock in her religion. So Christina traveled to Rome, where
she was a guest at the Vatican, something women were
not generally allowed to do, and she later moved into
a palace in Rome, which was her permanent home until
(25:23):
her death, although at various times she was away from
that palace in Sweden. In Hamburg and elsewhere. While in Rome,
she fell in love with Cardinal Ducchio at Felino, who
was the Pope's representative and a priest, and this seems
to have been more like a romantic friendship than a
physical relationship, but he did basically break up with her
(25:46):
in a letter later in their relationship when he quote
freed her. In sixteen fifty seven, while traveling, she became
embroiled in an anti Habsburg plot to seize control of Naples.
This plot had to be abandoned when she learned that
one of her officers had revealed her plans, so she
had last rites administered to him and then had him
(26:09):
executed in her presence. This was a long and gory execution,
and the Pope did not approve of it, and so
when she returned to Rome, she was no longer allowed
in the Pope's presence. Yeah, her conversion had basically been
viewed as this giant coup among the Catholic Church. They
she was sort of their golden example of of awesomeness
(26:32):
for a while, but not anymore after this. Uh. Later
in her life she also sort of wanted to rule again.
She had hoped to take the throne of Poland Lithuania,
another elective monarchy after Yan Kazimir's abdicated Um she really
did not have any tie to that throne apart from
(26:53):
being a cousin of the previous king. Um she was,
you know, a vassa and now she was Catholic, and
that was really all that she had to show for
herself on the matter, and so that attempt failed. She
also hoped for a while uh in her sort of
mere curial desires, that she would become Queen of Sweden
(27:13):
again after Karl Gustav's sudden death at the age of
thirty eight, his own successor at the time was only five.
But she did not get her wish in this case
and did not become Queen the ruler of Sweden again.
She spent her last year's mostly keeping to herself, and
she was basically broke when she died in sixteen eighty
(27:34):
nine at the age of sixty two. All of her
possessions passed to Ducchio Atsolino, although there wasn't enough money
to pay off her debts or to set up legacies
for some people who had worked with her and deserved them,
which normally would have been part of what a ruler's
estate would have done. Her tomb is in St. Peter's
(27:54):
Basilica in Rome. Her body was exhumed in ninet tried
to determine whether she had an intersex condition or whether
there was some other explanation for the midwives early confusion
about what her sex was, and then whether that might
explain her more masculine behavior later on. The results of
(28:18):
that were totally inconclusive. In Christina's description of herself, she
said she had quote an ineradicable prejudice against everything that
women like to talk about or do in women's words
and occupations. I showed myself to be quite incapable, and
I saw no possibility of improvement in this respect. And
(28:38):
that is Christina. She's quite a fascinating character. She has
kind of fascinating character. One of the papers that I
read about her, that which not a lot from it,
made its way into this outline because this outline became
very long. UH was about the erotic art in her
artwork and how her artwork collection um, and how a
(29:01):
lot of the people who had previously been owners of
this artwork had kind of kept that off in the
corner um and not really wanted to be associated with
the fact that this more erotic art was part of
their collection. Um. She on the other hand, hung it
all in her grand salon, which was right outside her bedroom,
and she would Greek visitors with these erotic nudes hanging
(29:23):
all around her. Um. Yeah, she just was a whole
pile of contradictions her whole her whole life, because she,
on the one hand, did not seem super interested in, uh,
having relationships of a romantic sort with people. She you know,
she had a few, but they didn't really last. But
you know, then she's greeting visitors in a room with
(29:45):
hung with these erotic nude paintings. There there are some
fascinating juxtapositions. There are many. Do you have some listener
mail for us? I do? This was her mail is
from Liz. Lizz starts off describing difficulty that she had
leaving comments for us on our blog. So so I'm
(30:06):
sorry about that. UM. I do want to say the
best way to make sure we see something, if you
want to say something to us is to email us,
because basically every other method of talking to us has
the potential to be overlooked. Um yeah, not because we
don't care, but just because we get a lot of messages.
(30:26):
It's easy to do something in the shuffle. When you're
looking at you know, like fifty messages, sometimes your eye
skips over one inadvertently. We're yeah, well, and the like
the way Facebook threads comments that if you if you
want to make sure you see everything, you have to
meticulously go through it, and uh, a lot of times
will get a lot of Twitter replies on things and
(30:46):
we don't necessarily see them all and that it's really
hard to like find that again. Later emails much better. Um,
But onto her actual comment, I thought The Lady Julianna
was an interesting episode, but I think your discussion of
quote wives on the ship was problematic. You mentioned that
some women used the situation to their advantage and consented.
(31:07):
This is not consent. The legal definition of consent states
that quotes consent assumes of physical power to act and
a reflective, determined, and unencumbered exertion of these powers. The
key point is that consent requires a real choice, which
these women did not have. These women were more or
less forced into being on a ship as punishment for
(31:27):
generally minor crimes, and were then faced with a choice
between poor treatment and possibly the risk of overtly violent
sexual assault or less poor treatment and latently violent sexual assault.
I say latent because all sexual assault involves violence, but
does not always involve the kind of physical beating that
we normally associate with the word violent. The wives made
(31:47):
a choice, but it was between forms of sexual violence
and subjugation. Under any definition, this coercion. This is coercion,
not consent. Maybe one or two of them would have
married the sailors if they freely on land, but I
doubt that the number is higher than that. I know
that listeners may not want to hear about situations that
are in fact cases of rape, but downplaying the nature
(32:09):
of sexual violence is extremely dangerous. The popular misunderstanding of
consent and rape was a large part of the reason
that one and for women are victims of severe forms
of sexual assault in our society today. I don't think
it was your intention to perpetuate this misunderstanding, as evidenced
by your clear skepticism of calling these women wives in
the first place. But I do think you can take
the kid gloves off and call a spade a spade,
(32:31):
say that some of these wives made the most of
a terrible situation but please please do not call this consent.
Use the opportunity to educate your listeners so that we
may eventually break this long history of sexual violence against women.
Thanks Liz Um. One of the difficult things about most
of the research for UH that episode coming from inter
(32:52):
library alone is that I can't go refer back to
the book and re refresh my memory on why we
explained things the way that we did. But I do
remember the book having a pretty compelling and well thought
out explanation of why it was really important not to
paint every encounter that happened aboard the Lady Juliana as rape. UH.
(33:15):
If we were talking about a modern prison ship existing
today in which male guards were basically forcing women to
have sex with them in exchange for avoiding poor treatment,
I absolutely would not hesitate in calling that rape of
the time. But we were not talking about modern event.
(33:36):
We were talking about something that happened centuries ago, and
women at that point in time had vastly like a
vastly different base level of control over their own bodies
and their own decision making. And so if we use
that legal definition of rape to UH apply to hundreds
of years in the past, basically every relation ship in
(34:00):
the past is rape, and I am I know there
are probably people who would make that argument. I am
not going to make that argument because I am not
willing to retroactively make every woman throughout history until about
into a rape victim. I think that minimizes and diminishes
the conversations about rape and consent that are happening today
(34:21):
and are extremely important today. UM. I'm also personally not
willing to say that a woman who saw a situation
and took the first steps and made the first moves
to to work something to her advantage, I'm not really
willing to call that person a rape victim. I'm also
not really willing to call the women who afterward UH
(34:44):
had apparently loving marriages with men who had been sailors
on that ship. I'm not really willing to call them
rape victims either. I think it's yes extremely important to
talk about consent today and to talk about UH the
vastly different ways we in interpret consent now than we
did hundreds of years ago. But I don't think we
(35:05):
can just say that everyone in the past was a victim.
That's not I don't think that serves history or the
present well. At all. So, uh yeah, context is kind
of always key in these and it's an issue that
I know you are extremely thoughtful about. And this isn't
something you cavalierly decided that you know, you have studied
(35:29):
issues along these lines in school as well as an adult.
I know it's something you're very aware of and very
sensitive to you. So, I mean, I feel like your
logic is extremely sound. It would be a huge revision
of history to look at it through that lens. Yeah,
that's uh, I mean definitely if we were talking about
a modern situation or you know, there are modern, modern
(35:51):
things that happened today that would not have been considered
rape a hundred years ago and absolutely are considered rape now.
And that doesn't make it okay that it happened a
hundred years ago or whatever. But you know, I am
just I'm not willing to to call a woman who
(36:11):
ultimately married someone who she loved a rape victim, uh,
because of nor like because of today's standards applied to
a situation that happened hundreds of years ago. So um,
I agree it is extremely important to educate people about
consent and educate people about rape and even talk about
(36:32):
things like that, uh, in the context of how these
standards are different now and how much more agency women
in many parts of the world, not all parts of
the world have over their bodies and over their sexual
decisions now than they did hundreds of years ago. But uh,
it's all of the evidence that I have points to
some of the women on the Lady Julianna were raped.
(36:55):
Some of the women on the Lady Julianna had consenting
sexual relationships people who they later married. So that is
where we will leave that. And it is sort of
a good listener male pair up for Christina since she
also had some some you know, unusual for her time
kind of sexual context of her own. Yeah, a lot
(37:17):
of what was going on in Christina's life no one
would bat an eye about today. No one would really
have I will say no one, Uh, no one in
in the culture that you and I are living in
would really think it a big deal, uh for women
to have pants on. But they're having pants on was
(37:39):
an enormous issue when she lived. Um, I would say
there are maybe a very very few people in the
United States who are excessively concerned with whether women wear
pants instead of dresses, But for the most part women
can wear pants is fine if you would like to
write to us where a history podcast but how stuffworks
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(38:00):
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(38:21):
stuff Works dot com. We do have some articles about
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(38:46):
on this and thousands of other topics because it how
stuff works dot com. Two
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Today we're going back to the
world of Swedish royalty. This time it is to Queen Christina.
(00:22):
She lived about a hundred years after previous podcast subject
Eric the fourteen and she, like him, was also part
of the House of Vassa. And her story has a
lot of our favorite running podcast themes. Most of them
really started with previous hosts, but they've carried on until today.
(00:42):
We have a sad royal childhood, we have an abdication,
and we even had an exhumation. All in all, Queen
Christina was not known for being a particularly great ruler
of Sweden, and she abdicated her throne only about a
decade into her reign. But she was extremely learned. She
spoke a lot of languages. Apart from her native Swedish,
(01:05):
there was also Greek, Latin, German, French, Flemish, Italian, Spanish
and Finnish, along with a little Hebrew and Arabic. And
she helped start the first Swedish newspaper in sixteen forty five,
as well as Sweden's first public opera house and its
first universal public school program. She amassed a huge collection
(01:28):
of arts and literature, and her collection of books and
manuscripts later went on to become part of the Vatican
Library UH and a sort of a side note, her
life became a movie starring Greta Garbo in nineteen thirty three.
So her whole life was marked by being this kind
of contradictory, restless character, and that started basically from the
(01:48):
moment that she was born. So Christina was born to
King Gustav Adolf and Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg. Before she
was born, her parents had had to stillborn baby's and
they also had a daughter who had died before she
reached the age of one, so people were really starting
to be concerned about the kingdom having an air. Gustav
(02:11):
had an illegitimate son who was named Gustav Gustafsson, and
he was not eligible for a lot of reasons, including
his illegitimacy to be on the throne. King Gustav's Catholic
cousin uh Seismund was king of Poland and he had
two sons of his own, and people were quite worried
that if something had happened to Gustav before he produced
(02:33):
a legitimate air uh Seismund was going to take over
and make Sweden, which at that point was a staunchly
Lutheran country, into a Catholic country, and since since Sigismund
had two sons, it seemed like that had the potential
to turn into a lasting Catholic dynasty, so it would
really have upended Sweden. Maria Eleonora, so Christina's mother, also
(02:58):
seemed to to have developed some kind of mental or
emotional disorder over the course of her previous pregnancies and
the children she had lost. She had always been really
affectionate with her husband, but she became just desperately attached
to him. She would get really agitated and distressed whenever
he was away, which he had to be away quite
(03:19):
a lot because he was king. Her language skills and
her handwriting started to deteriorate, and her behavior became really erratic.
People started to worry about her ability to conceive and
to carry a healthy child to term. However, despite all
of those potential issues, uh, five years into Gustave and
(03:39):
Maria Eleonora's marriage, Maria became pregnant with Christina, who was
born on December eighth of sixty six, that's in the
Julian calendar, uh, which would be December eighteenth under the
modern Gregorian calendar. And she was a little early and
born in call, so that means her amniotic membrane was
still intact and covering her once she was born, and
(04:02):
so the midwives removed the membrane and they declared her
initially to be a boy, uh, and words spread around
the castle to a great deal of celebration. However, once
the excitement was over and they took a longer and
more careful look at her, they almost immediately realized she
was actually a girl. And everybody was sort of afraid
(04:23):
how the king would react. I mean, they had had
all of these previous strategy tragedies and all that's build up,
and they had just told him joyfully that he had
a son now. Um, so nobody told him about the
mistake until the next day. That kind of cracks me up. Uh.
There's been a great deal of speculation about what may
have caused this misidentification on the part of the midwives
(04:44):
to believe that Christina was a boy rather than a girl.
There have been theories bandied about that she had an
intersex condition and some kind of chromosomal disorder, and that
her external genitalia may have exhibited both male and female traits.
Another theories that her body was simply ambiguous and that
the lighting was poor, and that there could have been
(05:06):
a little wishful thinking in the mix, and that the
midwives saw initially what they wanted to see, which would
have been a male heir. There are a lot of
family memoirs from this time who portray the king is
being just enormously and immediately welcoming and accepting of the
fact that he actually had a daughter. Uh, and some
of that is kind of glossing over the initial shock
(05:28):
and upset that he did have um having a daughter
instead of a son was a big upset. They had
been trying for a long time to have a male
heir and now they didn't. But he did quickly warm
to the idea of having a daughter and of raising
his daughter like a prince. Christina's mother, on the other hand,
was devastated that after so many attempts, now she had
(05:50):
a daughter and not the son that she had been,
you know, basically tasked with providing for the kingdom. So
she basically shunned her daughter for a lot of her
early life. Uh and Gustav decided that Christina, in spite
of being female, would indeed be his heir, and he
wanted her her, as Tracy said just a moment ago,
to have a princely upbringing. And this was not just
(06:12):
in terms of her education and her intended role as
as the leader of the country, but also in terms
of her sort of day to day exercise and the
pastimes that that they would kind of nurture her into
as she grew up. This suited her just fine. She
was not at all fond of the duties and pastimes
that genuine that generally fell to women at the time.
(06:36):
Her father wanted her to learn to ride, and to
fight and to handle a bow, and she did all that,
and she did it well, and her demeanor was not
at all typically feminine. I think today people would have
called her a tomboy. And just for clarity, it really
was not unheard of for girls to have the same
education as boys, especially when they were in line for
(06:56):
the throne. And so Christina's schoolmates are part of her childhood,
were actually two female cousins, the fighting and the hunting
and the bow work. However, we're not really typical pursuits
for girls or women, so the idea of Christina as
his heir was not just an idle fancy on Gustav's partner.
(07:16):
He started making real plans to confirm her as his
successor while she was still a baby. The Thirty Years
War had been going on for about eight years by
the time Christina was born, and Adolph knew that it
was very possible that he would be killed in battle.
So in addition to officially naming her as his successor,
(07:37):
he started looking for suitable candidates for her to marry
when she got older to cement the hereditary line to
the throne. The primary candidate was a cousin of hers
named Carl Gustav. He also had his chancellor named Axel Oxenstierna,
along with five regents to rule in his and his
daughter's stead. However, he didn't really have an active part
(08:01):
in raising his young heir. He was needed in the war,
and Christina's mother wanted nothing to do with her, so
Christina spent most of her early childhood living with cousins,
except for being dropped once when she was a baby
and that was possibly on purpose by someone with Catholic leanings.
It was mostly a happy few years. She was surrounded
(08:22):
by other children close to her own age. She had
playmates and friends and other girls who were studying with her,
So this part of her earlier life, in spite of
being separated from her parents, was not all that bad.
But when she was just five, so still very young,
her father was killed in the Battle of Lutzen, and
(08:42):
Christina's mother of course completely distraught. Uh. We talked about
how clingy and sort of almost obsessive she had become
with king. So her mother had the King's heart removed
and placed in a golden casket so that she could
keep it with her. Her behavior continued to become increasingly bizarre,
(09:02):
and she spent a lot of money on a really
elaborate funeral. She also did not bury the king's body
right away. Now, this was not entirely unheard of at
the time, especially when it was wintertime and the ground
was frozen and it was difficult for people to travel
for that sort of thing. But Gustav's body wound up
(09:23):
being buried nineteen months after his death, and this was
over the fierce objections of his wife, who had kept
it lying in state and spent hours and hours at
a time viewing it. At some point she even kept
the coffin in her own bedroom so she could have
it close by. So, as we said, not a typical
(09:43):
for there to be a long delay at this point
between when king was, when the king died, and when
the king was buried. But this was a really long time,
and Maria Eleanora's displays of grief were not at all
typical for the time. So the king was finally buried,
and does that happened? Maria Eleonora took custody of Christina,
and she took her out of the home where she
(10:05):
had been and had friends and playmates, and she moved
her into a much more lonely and erratic and just
sort of cold existence that was largely just the two
of them together. And this is where Christina's royal childhood
became kind of sad. She started having these really sudden illnesses,
and the general agreement is that these were brought on
(10:27):
by the stress of the situation. She generally got better
pretty quickly, but she got sick over and over again.
It was a frequent occurrence, in part to get some
distance from her mother, she really threw herself into her
education and into training and into exercise. She sort of
dove even farther into the more masculine parts of her upbringing.
(10:51):
And before we move into when she actually ascended to
the throne, Holly, would you like to take a minute
for a brief word from a sponsor. It sounds like
a capital idea. And now let's get back to Christina
of Sweden and now when she's going to actually become queen,
and becoming queen and her ascension to the throne really
was not as simple as just being the king's daughter
(11:12):
and surviving to adulthood to be crowned. Sweden was an
elective monarchy, so even if someone had inherited the throne,
they still had to be accepted by the Reek's Dog,
which was Sweden's parliament, as well as the Swedish senators.
This meant that the four estates of the reeks Dog,
which were the clergy, the nobles, the burghers, and the peasants,
(11:34):
all had to be in favor of Christina's presence on
the throne in order for her to actually become the queen.
And the end they were and Christina became the Queen
of the Swedes, Goths and Vandals, Great Princess of Finland,
Duchess of Estonia and Karelia, and Lady of Ingria, and
she basically carried herself as a ruler right from the beginning.
(11:55):
The Chancellor began to allow her to attend council meetings
and participate as early as the age of fourteen. She
was officially crowned at the age of eighteen, so she
was kind of doing the work of this job for
several years before it was made official. She was, at
that point simultaneously a diminutive young woman. She had very
fine hands and beautiful blue eyes, but she was also
(12:18):
a very masculine for she walked the walk, she talked
to talk, and she swore like a soldier. Christina and
Chancellor Axel Oxensternia did not see eye to eye. The
Chancellor had done a really good job of ruling between
the death of her father and her age of majority,
and even when the king was still alive, the two
(12:38):
men had really worked together to run the kingdom and
to plan and make decisions. Axel had been an efficient
and pragmatic diplomat, and he was well respected among the
Reeks dog and among Sweden's military leaders. But Christina was
a proud and arrogant eighteen year old and she really
felt like it was her time to shine, and so
(13:00):
she and Excel butted heads. They did so repeatedly and often.
If this were a modern day film, you would maybe
expect them to end up falling in love somehow, but
would work out that way in real life. Yes, that
would definitely be the romantic comedy version version of Christina
of Sweden. They also started to have financial problems in
(13:23):
the kingdom pretty early in her reign. She tried to
continue her father's generosity with the royal coffers, but she
wasn't nearly as careful about it as he had been.
She got into this cycle of giving away too much
and then selling noble titles to try to earn some
more money, and then raising taxes on the people she
had just promoted. It did not work out well. It
(13:46):
was not an efficient way of bridging the gap, kind
of like a cascading circle of bad decisions. Um Naturally,
in the midst of all of this, everyone wanted her
to marry Uh. In addition to Carl Gustav, another student,
there was Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg, who ended up marrying
someone else, and Christina had a not all that clandestine
(14:07):
affair with one of the ladies of her court, which
let do some speculation about her sexual orientation, her sex,
and her gender, which of course tied back into that
initial uh mistake in identifying her sex. In the midst
of all of this, popular opinion started to turn against her,
(14:29):
and when she was twenty, a man armed with daggers
tried to kill her while she was at prayer. Her
life being apparently legitimately at risk, put a lot more
pressure on her to get married, which was an idea
that she continued to resist. And about this same time,
the Thirty Years War was drawing to a close, which
was something she herself was greatly in favor of, but
(14:51):
not everyone felt the same. Many Protestant clergy wanted the
war to continue until there could be a decisive Protestant
victory over because policism. Others wanted it to continue just
so that Sweden could continue to collect additional war booty
to potentially supplement their their money situation. Yeah, the Thirty
Years War was this massive and obviously very lengthy conflict
(15:14):
and different nations had different motivations for being involved in it.
We haven't really talked about that part of it because
it's kind of ancillary to this podcast. But yeah, for
Sweden in particular, there were people who felt like ending
the war at that point was too soon. But to Christina,
as long as the war went on, she could never
really be in charge. While she had been accepted as
(15:36):
Sweden's queen and she was making lots of decisions for
herself as the ruler, she really had no authority over
military matters. War was pretty much exclusively a man's game,
especially when it came to running the show. So as
long as the war went on, the Chancellor and the
regents continued to have a major hand in making decisions
that Christina could have no control over. Ending the war
(15:59):
would and did put an end to one of their
sources of power and gave Christina more direct control over
pretty much everything that was going on in the kingdom.
So the Thirty Years War did indeed end with the
Peace of Westphalia in sixteen forty eight, and once the
war had concluded, Christina turned her attention to her own
(16:19):
court and she began inviting artists, writers and thinkers to
the Swedish court. The most famous among all of these
was mathematician and philosopher reneed A Cart, who she invited
to stay in the palace at Stockholm. He did not
really want to go. Sweden was too cold, and it
was too far away, and he really doubted that the
(16:41):
Lutheran court was going to welcome him with open arms
since he was Catholic. But in the end he was
convinced to come, and he and a translator went to
Sweden in September of sixteen forty nine. His misgivings about
going and about staying once he got there were, unfortunately prescients.
He got the flu the following January and died. Uh
(17:03):
Some people blamed Christina both for bringing him there and
for putting huge demands on his time and effort while
he was visiting courts. Yet another source of pressure for
Christina to marry came in sixteen forty nine when her
cousin Jan kazim Years ascended to the throne in Poland.
This was the second of Sigismund's two sons who had
so worried people before Christina was born. Jan succeeded his
(17:27):
late brother and married his late brother's widow who was
still young enough to have children. So once again people
were threatened by the idea that the monarchy in Poland
was going to come to power over Sweden. Instead of marrying, though,
Christina did something completely different. She went to the Reek's
dog and said that she wanted her cousin, Count Palatine
(17:49):
Karl Gustav, the one that she had been intended to marry,
to be named as her successor. Threeks Do pretty much
scoffed at that entire idea. They were like, you're gonna
marry him anyway, so what's the point. Like, that's the
guy you're gonna get married to and have babies with,
so naming him as your successor now seems silly. They
(18:13):
thought this, even though she was still having sudden illnesses.
Even even though she was um sick pretty often, people
still thought she was young and healthy enough to have
a baby. Uh. Christina, not delighted by this reaction, she
went back to them and she said it was going
to be impossible for her to marry. In her words quote,
(18:33):
I am absolutely certain about it. I do not intend
to give you reasons. My character is simply not suited
to marriage. I have prayed God fervently that my inclination
might change, but I simply cannot marry This once again
was a completely foreign and kind of silly idea to
the Reeks dog and they refused her suggestion. Again. They
(18:54):
basically thought she's just gonna agree to marry him eventually.
They've been friends since their childhood, they get along fine.
Of course they should be married. It seems so clear
to them. Yeah, they were. They were really like, well, obviously,
you're just going to marry him, so why is why
is this a big thing? Are you being fussy? So
the thing that ended up changing the reef Stower's minds
(19:17):
on this issue was the execution of Charles the First
of England. When that happened, leaders began to fear rebellion
on multiple fronts, so they wanted to ensure that the
line of succession was not going to be interrupted, So
in March of sixty nine, they finally agreed to officially
named Carl Gustav as Christina's successor, although at that point
(19:37):
they really still thought she would end up marrying him
and make it all a sort of a moot gesture. Yeah,
they thought they were humoring her. She, on the other hand,
thought she was getting exactly what she wanted. She was
still going to get to rule, but she was not
going to have to get married and produce an air
Carl was going to have to do that. She was
off the hook. And before we talk about getting further
(19:59):
off the hook, let's take another brief moment for a
word from a sponsor that sounds grand. And now let's
return to the story of how Queen Christina, having fought
so long and so hard to get total control over
the throne, abdicated. So although she had started to rule
officially at eighteen, and that was after she had already
(20:20):
been kind of involved in some government duties, she still
wasn't actually crowned until she was twenty three, So it
really took quite a long time for her to kind
of get all of the dust settled on her official ascension.
By the time she was actually planning her coronation, which
was scheduled for October of sixteen fifty, she was already
thinking abdicating might sound like a good plan. Before she
(20:45):
had told anyone about this plan, she started trying to
convince the Reeks dog not just to make Carl Gustav
her successor if she died, but to make him the
actual next hereditary king of Sweden, not just someone to
sort of run things in the event of her untimely
death until another real king could be found and elected.
(21:05):
And they said no. Um, so she pulled a series
of political strings until they finally agreed. She basically pitted
all of the different classes against one another and like
played up the you know, the noble sphere of the
common people taking over and the common people's fear of
the nobles, until they all agreed that if if she
(21:27):
would just give them a break, that they would do
what she asked. Uh. In August of sixteen fifty one,
so less than a year after her very extravagant coronation,
she h informed the Senate that she planned to abdicate,
and she spent the next several months trying to convince
the reefs Dog to allow it. I feel like she
(21:47):
spent her entire time trying to convince the reefs dog
of things. That is pretty accurate. There was a lot
of her trying to get the reefs dog to do
what she wanted. Um, they were not buying this at all.
And so after this couple of months of really trying
to convince them. She dropped the matter for a couple
of years, but during the interim she started meeting with
(22:10):
Jesuits and talking about converting to Catholicism. So we have
talked about up to this point, you know, some pretty
deep seated um discord between the religions, and so for
her to want to convert, that's big stuff. Uh. Catholicism
was a religion that had really appealed to her since
(22:30):
she was quite young. When she was nine, a tutor
had told her that Catholicism did not allow lay people
to read the Bible, it encouraged celibacy and believed in purgatory,
and her reaction to all of that was, oh, what
a lovely religion. In early sixteen fifty four, when everyone
thought this whole matter of advocating had just been dropped,
(22:51):
Christina announced once again that she was going to advocate.
She negotiated a settlement that granted her some lands and
some money, and it apt her as the sovereign of Sweden,
so she didn't have to handle any of her royal responsibilities.
But she was still a queen regardless of how you
feel about her. Her various ways of running the kingdom
(23:14):
that we're not all that great. This was kind of
a masterful string pulling to get exactly the best possible
situation for her to be in. Yeah, like all of
the benefits, none of the responsibilities. So she abdicated that may,
leaving the palace before midnight on the night of Karl
Gustav's coronation. She was like the person that leaves the
(23:35):
wedding reception early. In this case, she was like, ye'all
have fun, I'm out of here. So there are a
lot of theories about exactly why she was so set
on abdicating. Her explanation was that she thought that they
really needed a man to rule the country, in particular
to lead the army. So if you know, there were
(23:57):
another future war that the country was going to participate, Haiden,
they would be better off with a male king than
with a female queen. She also said that the pressures
of ruling had been too much for her and that
she needed to rest. And as we've made pretty clear,
she was really deeply opposed to the idea of marrying
and she was under immense pressure to do so as queen,
(24:19):
And as soon as she was out of Sweden she
adopted a more masculine dress, more masculine mannerisms, and a
more masculine demeanor, and she converted to Catholicism. She took
the names Maria and Alexandra, after Alexander the Great. And
I want to make clear here she was not living
as a man. She tended to wear trousers instead of
(24:40):
dresses and to just behave in a more coarse way
than women were expected to, but she did not present
herself as a man. She was still apart from a
couple of times as she was traveling in disguise, she
was still Christina. Her conversion to Catholicism was an enormous deal.
Sweden was a Lutheran nation and as Queen Christina was
(25:00):
the head of the church, and even though she had
abdicated her rule, this was still pretty monumental, and she
was still sovereign, so they still had a lot of
stock in her religion. So Christina traveled to Rome, where
she was a guest at the Vatican, something women were
not generally allowed to do, and she later moved into
a palace in Rome, which was her permanent home until
(25:23):
her death, although at various times she was away from
that palace in Sweden. In Hamburg and elsewhere. While in Rome,
she fell in love with Cardinal Ducchio at Felino, who
was the Pope's representative and a priest, and this seems
to have been more like a romantic friendship than a
physical relationship, but he did basically break up with her
(25:46):
in a letter later in their relationship when he quote
freed her. In sixteen fifty seven, while traveling, she became
embroiled in an anti Habsburg plot to seize control of Naples.
This plot had to be abandoned when she learned that
one of her officers had revealed her plans, so she
had last rites administered to him and then had him
(26:09):
executed in her presence. This was a long and gory execution,
and the Pope did not approve of it, and so
when she returned to Rome, she was no longer allowed
in the Pope's presence. Yeah, her conversion had basically been
viewed as this giant coup among the Catholic Church. They
she was sort of their golden example of of awesomeness
(26:32):
for a while, but not anymore after this. Uh. Later
in her life she also sort of wanted to rule again.
She had hoped to take the throne of Poland Lithuania,
another elective monarchy after Yan Kazimir's abdicated Um she really
did not have any tie to that throne apart from
(26:53):
being a cousin of the previous king. Um she was,
you know, a vassa and now she was Catholic, and
that was really all that she had to show for
herself on the matter, and so that attempt failed. She
also hoped for a while uh in her sort of
mere curial desires, that she would become Queen of Sweden
(27:13):
again after Karl Gustav's sudden death at the age of
thirty eight, his own successor at the time was only five.
But she did not get her wish in this case
and did not become Queen the ruler of Sweden again.
She spent her last year's mostly keeping to herself, and
she was basically broke when she died in sixteen eighty
(27:34):
nine at the age of sixty two. All of her
possessions passed to Ducchio Atsolino, although there wasn't enough money
to pay off her debts or to set up legacies
for some people who had worked with her and deserved them,
which normally would have been part of what a ruler's
estate would have done. Her tomb is in St. Peter's
(27:54):
Basilica in Rome. Her body was exhumed in ninet tried
to determine whether she had an intersex condition or whether
there was some other explanation for the midwives early confusion
about what her sex was, and then whether that might
explain her more masculine behavior later on. The results of
(28:18):
that were totally inconclusive. In Christina's description of herself, she
said she had quote an ineradicable prejudice against everything that
women like to talk about or do in women's words
and occupations. I showed myself to be quite incapable, and
I saw no possibility of improvement in this respect. And
(28:38):
that is Christina. She's quite a fascinating character. She has
kind of fascinating character. One of the papers that I
read about her, that which not a lot from it,
made its way into this outline because this outline became
very long. UH was about the erotic art in her
artwork and how her artwork collection um, and how a
(29:01):
lot of the people who had previously been owners of
this artwork had kind of kept that off in the
corner um and not really wanted to be associated with
the fact that this more erotic art was part of
their collection. Um. She on the other hand, hung it
all in her grand salon, which was right outside her bedroom,
and she would Greek visitors with these erotic nudes hanging
(29:23):
all around her. Um. Yeah, she just was a whole
pile of contradictions her whole her whole life, because she,
on the one hand, did not seem super interested in, uh,
having relationships of a romantic sort with people. She you know,
she had a few, but they didn't really last. But
you know, then she's greeting visitors in a room with
(29:45):
hung with these erotic nude paintings. There there are some
fascinating juxtapositions. There are many. Do you have some listener
mail for us? I do? This was her mail is
from Liz. Lizz starts off describing difficulty that she had
leaving comments for us on our blog. So so I'm
(30:06):
sorry about that. UM. I do want to say the
best way to make sure we see something, if you
want to say something to us is to email us,
because basically every other method of talking to us has
the potential to be overlooked. Um yeah, not because we
don't care, but just because we get a lot of messages.
(30:26):
It's easy to do something in the shuffle. When you're
looking at you know, like fifty messages, sometimes your eye
skips over one inadvertently. We're yeah, well, and the like
the way Facebook threads comments that if you if you
want to make sure you see everything, you have to
meticulously go through it, and uh, a lot of times
will get a lot of Twitter replies on things and
(30:46):
we don't necessarily see them all and that it's really
hard to like find that again. Later emails much better. Um,
But onto her actual comment, I thought The Lady Julianna
was an interesting episode, but I think your discussion of
quote wives on the ship was problematic. You mentioned that
some women used the situation to their advantage and consented.
(31:07):
This is not consent. The legal definition of consent states
that quotes consent assumes of physical power to act and
a reflective, determined, and unencumbered exertion of these powers. The
key point is that consent requires a real choice, which
these women did not have. These women were more or
less forced into being on a ship as punishment for
(31:27):
generally minor crimes, and were then faced with a choice
between poor treatment and possibly the risk of overtly violent
sexual assault or less poor treatment and latently violent sexual assault.
I say latent because all sexual assault involves violence, but
does not always involve the kind of physical beating that
we normally associate with the word violent. The wives made
(31:47):
a choice, but it was between forms of sexual violence
and subjugation. Under any definition, this coercion. This is coercion,
not consent. Maybe one or two of them would have
married the sailors if they freely on land, but I
doubt that the number is higher than that. I know
that listeners may not want to hear about situations that
are in fact cases of rape, but downplaying the nature
(32:09):
of sexual violence is extremely dangerous. The popular misunderstanding of
consent and rape was a large part of the reason
that one and for women are victims of severe forms
of sexual assault in our society today. I don't think
it was your intention to perpetuate this misunderstanding, as evidenced
by your clear skepticism of calling these women wives in
the first place. But I do think you can take
the kid gloves off and call a spade a spade,
(32:31):
say that some of these wives made the most of
a terrible situation but please please do not call this consent.
Use the opportunity to educate your listeners so that we
may eventually break this long history of sexual violence against women.
Thanks Liz Um. One of the difficult things about most
of the research for UH that episode coming from inter
(32:52):
library alone is that I can't go refer back to
the book and re refresh my memory on why we
explained things the way that we did. But I do
remember the book having a pretty compelling and well thought
out explanation of why it was really important not to
paint every encounter that happened aboard the Lady Juliana as rape. UH.
(33:15):
If we were talking about a modern prison ship existing
today in which male guards were basically forcing women to
have sex with them in exchange for avoiding poor treatment,
I absolutely would not hesitate in calling that rape of
the time. But we were not talking about modern event.
(33:36):
We were talking about something that happened centuries ago, and
women at that point in time had vastly like a
vastly different base level of control over their own bodies
and their own decision making. And so if we use
that legal definition of rape to UH apply to hundreds
of years in the past, basically every relation ship in
(34:00):
the past is rape, and I am I know there
are probably people who would make that argument. I am
not going to make that argument because I am not
willing to retroactively make every woman throughout history until about
into a rape victim. I think that minimizes and diminishes
the conversations about rape and consent that are happening today
(34:21):
and are extremely important today. UM. I'm also personally not
willing to say that a woman who saw a situation
and took the first steps and made the first moves
to to work something to her advantage, I'm not really
willing to call that person a rape victim. I'm also
not really willing to call the women who afterward UH
(34:44):
had apparently loving marriages with men who had been sailors
on that ship. I'm not really willing to call them
rape victims either. I think it's yes extremely important to
talk about consent today and to talk about UH the
vastly different ways we in interpret consent now than we
did hundreds of years ago. But I don't think we
(35:05):
can just say that everyone in the past was a victim.
That's not I don't think that serves history or the
present well. At all. So, uh yeah, context is kind
of always key in these and it's an issue that
I know you are extremely thoughtful about. And this isn't
something you cavalierly decided that you know, you have studied
(35:29):
issues along these lines in school as well as an adult.
I know it's something you're very aware of and very
sensitive to you. So, I mean, I feel like your
logic is extremely sound. It would be a huge revision
of history to look at it through that lens. Yeah,
that's uh, I mean definitely if we were talking about
a modern situation or you know, there are modern, modern
(35:51):
things that happened today that would not have been considered
rape a hundred years ago and absolutely are considered rape now.
And that doesn't make it okay that it happened a
hundred years ago or whatever. But you know, I am
just I'm not willing to to call a woman who
(36:11):
ultimately married someone who she loved a rape victim, uh,
because of nor like because of today's standards applied to
a situation that happened hundreds of years ago. So um,
I agree it is extremely important to educate people about
consent and educate people about rape and even talk about
(36:32):
things like that, uh, in the context of how these
standards are different now and how much more agency women
in many parts of the world, not all parts of
the world have over their bodies and over their sexual
decisions now than they did hundreds of years ago. But uh,
it's all of the evidence that I have points to
some of the women on the Lady Julianna were raped.
(36:55):
Some of the women on the Lady Julianna had consenting
sexual relationships people who they later married. So that is
where we will leave that. And it is sort of
a good listener male pair up for Christina since she
also had some some you know, unusual for her time
kind of sexual context of her own. Yeah, a lot
(37:17):
of what was going on in Christina's life no one
would bat an eye about today. No one would really
have I will say no one, Uh, no one in
in the culture that you and I are living in
would really think it a big deal, uh for women
to have pants on. But they're having pants on was
(37:39):
an enormous issue when she lived. Um, I would say
there are maybe a very very few people in the
United States who are excessively concerned with whether women wear
pants instead of dresses, But for the most part women
can wear pants is fine if you would like to
write to us where a history podcast but how stuffworks
dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com
(38:00):
slash missed in History and on Twitter at missed in History.
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dot com slash missed in History. We have a spreadshirt
store where you can buy shirts and phonecases and whatnot,
and that is at missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com.
You can come to our parents website, which is how
(38:21):
stuff Works dot com. We do have some articles about
the history of Sweden and its geography and that sort
of thing. You can also come to our website, which
is missed in History dot com, and we have show
notes and occasionally blog posts about other stuff. We have
an archive of every single episode. You can do all
that and a whole lot more at how stuff works
dot com or missed in History dot com for more
(38:46):
on this and thousands of other topics because it how
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