Swedish Monarchs Family Tree

today I'm going to show you the family tree of Swedish monarchs shown on this chart in blue I'll be starting with the legendary King Bjorn Ironside and we'll be going all the way down to the current king of Sweden carl xvi gustaf please note that i now sell two different versions of my european royal family tree the original one which looks like this focused mostly on western europe so i've now labeled that one with the word west the new version which i'll be using in this video covers central and eastern europe as well as scandinavia so I've labeled it north / east both versions are now available at my website useful charts calm [Music] so the kings of Sweden can supposedly trace their descent all the way back to the Norse god Odin of the many legendary kings of Sweden though the most famous is probably Bjorn Ironside who is usually seen as being the founder of the House of moons ax the first royal house some legends make him the son of another great Viking King Ragnar Lodbrok who was supposedly the ancestor of the kings of Denmark as well but the first historical King of Sweden is Eric the victorious he reigned during the late 900 CE II and was a contemporary of svenne Forkbeard over in Denmark in fact he is linked to Sven by a legendary woman known as Sigrid the haughty Sigrid might actually be a composite of several historical women but according to legend she was married to Eric the victorious first and then second to spend Forkbeard this would make the second king of Sweden King Olaf the half-brother of Knut the Great who ruled an empire that included most of England Norway and Denmark other sources make their mother out to be the daughter of Mieszko the first of Poland which would make her sister to the first king of Poland but again everything we know about her is legend what we do know is that in Sweden King Olaf was the first King to embrace Christianity and that he was followed by two of his sons he also had a daughter named Anna who is later known as Saint Anna she married Vladimir the wise the Grand Prince of Kiev so all of the remaining princes of Kiev and ruse have a connection to Swedish royalty through her which brings me to an important point some have questioned the fact that I've included these Scandinavian monarchs on the east chart as opposed to the west because most people think of Scandinavia as being part of Western Europe now although this is true from a modern perspective for much of medieval history the Scandinavian royal lines actually intermarried more frequently with Central and Eastern Europe this is just one example of this but it demonstrates why I split things the way that I did getting back to Sweden you'll notice that the male line of the house of moon saw died out fairly quickly in 1060 therefore the throne passed to a new house the house of Steel through a female line and then after the house of Steel we actually get to rival houses the house of Eric and the house of Furka who fought for control of the throne and I'm not going to go through every king from these early dynasties but I do want to mention another important point I've been using the term king of Sweden so far but I should make it clear that Sweden during the medieval period was not the same size as the Sweden we know today in fact through much of this period there were actually two major kingdoms in Sweden not just one sometimes they were unified sometimes they were not there was fear land land of the Swedes but also yacht island land of the Geats you might recognize the name he owe to land as being the kingdom from which the legendary hero Beowulf came from anyway is not until we get to the house of B elbow that Sweden as we know it today truly emerged as a unified state by this point there was a title called yarol of Sweden which in English can be translated to earl or duke of sweden the person who held that title was second only to the king himself and during the mid 12 hundreds it was held by this individual here who married eric the 11th sister his name was beer jalal and he was perhaps the most influential person when it came to the final consolidation of sweden he also founded the city of stockholm the current capital of sweden and he led the crusade that resulted in Sweden coming to rule Finland for the next 500 years or so but beer shall never became King himself instead when Eric the eleventh died the throne passed to burgess son Valdemar however Borgia continued to be the real power behind the throne until his death after beer Charles death there was a conflict between Valdemar and his younger brother Magnus in which Magnus ended up seizing the throne the next generation saw sibling rivalry as well Magnus the third was followed by his eldest son Borgia but Burgess younger brother Duke Eric eventually started a civil war against him for many years duke erik seemed to have the upper hand but then in 1317 during a Christmas banquet King Mirza had Eric and another one of his brothers captured and killed this enraged those who had supported Duke Eric so they deposed King Borgia and killed his only son and heir this led to Duke Eric's three year old son becoming king Magnus the fourth now Magnus's mother was a Norwegian princess and it just so happened that in Norway the ruling Furai dynasty had run out of male heirs so young Magnus actually became the king of Norway as well reigning there as Magnus the seventh this was actually the first step in what would eventually lead to all three Scandinavian kingdoms becoming united under a single monarch something known as the column our union but we're not quite there yet Magnus came of age and was officially crowned in 1336 this occurred during a time when Denmark was actually without a king having had mortgaged all of its land to German Nobles so that left Magnus the sole king in Scandinavia but shortly thereafter King Valdemar the fourth took over in Denmark and restored the kingdom there and then in 1355 the Norwegian Nobles decided they wanted to put Magnus son on the throne instead so once again we had three separate monarchs for Denmark Sweden and Norway finally though in 1364 the Swedish Nobles supported a takeover by Magnus's nephew Albert and therefore Magnus lost the Swedish throne as well but here's the other really important link Magnus's son Hakan who is now King of Norway married Margaret daughter of King Valdemar of Denmark therefore when of all Tamar the fourth died their five-year-old son became King of Denmark because Waldemar didn't have any living sons that boy's name was Olaf the second he was a grand son of Waldemar the fourth but also of Magnus the fourth when his father Hakan died in 1380 he became the king of Norway as well thus uniting Denmark and Norway for the first time since Knut the great but as so often happens in rural genealogy the unexpected occurred and Olaf died at the age of 16 the thrones of both Denmark and Norway therefore passed to his mother Margaret although technically she was just at Regent meanwhile in Sweden Albert was growing unpopular and so certain Swedish nobles invited Margaret to send troops to depose him this was successful and Margaret ended up Regent of all three countries the problem though was that she had no more children and in fact there were no close male relatives that could be named King so she chose her sister's grandson to be her heir in 1397 at the age of 16 Eric of Pomerania was crowned king of all three countries in the city of calamar and thus the column our union was born however Queen Margaret remained the true power behind the throne until her death in 1412 Eric then had quite a long reign but since he did not have any children upon his death the throne passed to his nephew Kristopher of bavaria but then christopher died unexpectedly before having children so after him the Scandinavians had to look really far back in the Royal lines to find an heir the person they found was Kristian the first from the house of oldenburg he was a rather distant descendant of erik v of denmark via this female line here initially though norway and sweden chose a different king a king Karl from a house not closely connected to any of the ones on this chart but after King Karl's death Kristian the first became king of all three countries and the column our union continued the house of oldenburg is quite important because it's male-line descendants would go on to reign in Russia as well in future they will also include the reigning kings of the United Kingdom being that Prince Charles the current Prince of Wales is a male-line descendant of the house of oldenburg and thus so is Prince William the Duke of Cambridge and his eldest son George but we're dealing with Sweden here when Christians grandson Kristian ii became king an event occurred known as the Stockholm bloodbath in which eighty-two people were executed including many Swedish nobles and leaders this led to a war of independence in which Sweden broke free from the calamar Union the person who led that war was the son of one of the nobles killed in the bloodbath he was from the house of Vasa and became King Gustaf the first and his reign marks the beginning of modern Sweden he had a long reign and then was followed by his son Erik the 14th Erik was one of the several royal men who proposed marriage to Queen Elizabeth the first of England she obviously didn't accept but had she done so we might have had a united kingdom of England and Sweden instead of England and Scotland but it's probably for the best that Elizabeth turned him down because later in life he is thought to have gone insane in fact in a fit of insanity he murdered five prominent Nobles and therefore his younger brother John took it upon himself to over throw the king and take the throne for himself and this is where Sweden almost ended up uniting with another major country this time Poland John had married a princess from the Polish Lithuanian House of Jagiellonian together they had a son named Sigismund who was elected king of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1587 when John the third died Sigismund therefore became king of both Poland and Sweden but the problem was that Sigismund was Catholic like his mother and like most of the people in Poland but Sweden had adopted Protestantism and Sweden wanted a Protestant King so there was yet another Civil War and sigismund's Uncle Carl became King and I should make a quick note here about the numbering if you've been keeping track you will have noticed that we haven't actually had 14 Eric's and eight curls prior to this point so it's a bit strange that we get a Carl the 9th this is because the Kings at the time based their numberings on a list that included several legendary kings that are no longer considered to have been historical kings but Sweden has decided to keep going with the original numbering anyway all right so we now come to Sweden's most famous and most important King Gustav the second Adolphe later known as Gustavus Adolphus the great Gustavus Adolphus was a very capable military leader and has even been called the father of modern warfare he won a decisive battle during the 30 Years War that tipped things in favor of the Protestant side thus greatly impacting the rest of European history starting with his reign and continuing for the next 100 years or so Sweden was considered to be one of the major powers in Europe and in fact historians tend to call Sweden during this period the Swedish Empire even though the swedish kings never actually held the title of Emperor unfortunately though Gustavus Adolphus died in a subsequent battle during the Thirty Years War and his reign was cut short having no legitimate sons the throne therefore passed his six-year-old daughter Christina now there's been a lot of speculation over the years about Queen Christina due to the fact that she was supposedly raised like a boy often dressed like a man and probably had a female lover all of this centuries before the term butch lesbian was coined she was also a huge fan of learning and built up a massive collection of books and art however at the age of 28 she decided to abdicate and become Catholic she spent the rest of her life in France and Italy spending time with several popes and Nobles the throne of Sweden therefore passed to her cousin via a female line we therefore get a new house in Sweden the house of Palatinate be broken a junior branch of the house of Wittelsbach but that house only remained for three generations after which there were no more males and therefore the throne passed to Queen Rika eleonora who then abdicated in favor of her husband Frederick a German noble all of this happened during the great northern war which was the war between Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia in which Russia won and thus were placed Sweden as the main power in northeastern Europe after Frederick the first the throne passed all the way to King Adolphe Frederick who was from the house of Holstein goat orb a branch of the Danish house of oldenburg which as I mentioned earlier had also ruled Sweden during the column our union but the reason why he was chosen had more to do with this connection here you can see that he's a descendent from the house of Vasa through a line involving several females I should also point out that Adolphe Frederick was also very closely related to another famous figure in European history Catherine the Great if we follow this line here you'll see that he had a sister named Joanna and Joanna is the mother of Catherine the Great however adult Frederick was also related to Catherine's husband Emperor Peter the third for this connection here that makes them first cousins once removed so although we tend to think of the remaining Russian Emperor's as being from the house of Romanov they were actually members of the House of Holstein goat orb and thus members of the Oldenburg dynasty just like the Danish kings and the future kings of the United Kingdom but back to Sweden the house of Holstein goat orb was actually short-lived there we get a firstborn son a grandson and then a second born son who reigned during his old age and then at this point there was a succession crisis Carl the thirteenth had no legitimate living descendants and in fact his clothes as heir at this point would have been the Emperor of Russia so the Swedish royal family turned to adult adoption instead a rare move when it comes to European royal lines at first Carl adopted a Danish prince named Karl agust but Karl Gus did son Lee and unexpectedly leading Karl to adopt for a second time the second adopted son was ja Bernardo a veteran officer of the French Revolutionary Wars and one of Napoleon's top generals but once he became the Crown Prince of Sweden he ended up joining the coalition that led to Napoleon's defeat he also fought and won a war against Norway which led to Norway leaving its union with Denmark and joining a union with Sweden instead so when he became King in 1818 he became Karl the 14th John of Sweden and Karl the third john of norway and we get a new royal house the house of Bernadotte karl xiv john was followed by his son her the first and then by his grandson King Karl the fifteenth and forth that king's daughter married King Frederick the eighth of Denmark and so she is actually the great grandmother of the current Queen of Denmark but in Sweden the throne passed to his brother who became Oscar the second during the reign of Oscar ii norway achieved its independence and established its own monarchy choosing the second son of King Frederick the eighth and Princess Louisa in Sweden Oscar the second was followed by King Gustav the fifth who was king during world wars one and two he married Victoria of Baden thus creating the first actual link between the house of Bernadotte and the previous royal houses of Sweden you can see here that she is a descendent of the house of Holstein go tour through these links here you can also notice that he had a younger brother named Karl who had a daughter who married the king of Norway and who is the current king of Norway's mother so lots of connections between the current Scandinavian monarchs in Sweden King Gustaf v was followed by his son King Gustav the sixth Adolphe and he married twice before becoming King he was married to Princess Margaret who was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria together they had five children including their eldest son Gustav the father of the current king of Sweden but you can see they also had a daughter named Ingrid who married the King of Denmark King Frederick the ninth she's the mother of the current Queen of Denmark and so this makes the current Queen of Denmark and the current king of Sweden first cousins which is the closest relationship that exists between two European monarchs today Prince Gustaf died in a plane crash when his grandfather Gustaf v was still king so that's why after Gustav the six Adolphe the throne went straight to his grandson who is the current king carl xvi gustaf two days from now on September the 15th carl xvi gustaf will mark 40 six years on the throne that's longer than any other monarch in Swedish history he's currently 73 and will eventually be succeeded by his eldest daughter Victoria Victoria was not originally the heir apparent she has a younger brother but in 1980 Sweden became the first European country to adopt absolute primogeniture meaning that the eldest child inherits regardless of whether they are male or female Victoria is married to Prince Daniel and their eldest child a daughter named Estelle is currently second in line to the throne so that was the monarchy of Sweden all the way from Bjorn Ironside to Princess Estelle again if you want a copy of this brand-new poster the European royal family tree north / East version you can head over to my website useful charts com if you find history genealogy and monarchies interesting be sure to subscribe to the channel if you check the playlists you'll find that I have videos covering the family trees of famous dynasties from all over the world and to see what else I'm up to follow me on Twitter or Instagram thanks for watching

Channel: UsefulCharts

Views: 173,881

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Id: wlRafgsG5ms

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 13 2019