Everything about Christina Of Sweden totally explained
Christina (
8 December 1626 –
19 April 1689), later known as
Maria Christina Alexandra and sometimes
Countess Dohna, was
Queen regnant of
Sweden from
1632 to
1654. She was the only surviving legitimate child of King
Gustav II Adolf of Sweden and his wife
Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg. As the
heiress presumptive, at the age of six, she succeeded her father to the throne of Sweden upon his death at the
Battle of Lützen in the
Thirty Years' War.
After having converted to
Catholicism and abdicated her throne, she spent her latter years in
France and
Rome, where she was buried in
St. Peter's Basilica.
Early life
Christina was born in
Stockholm and her birth occurred during a rare
astrological conjunction that fueled great speculation on what influence the child, fervently hoped to be a boy, would later have on the world stage. The king had already sired two sons, one of whom was stillborn and the other lived only one year, heightening pressures for a male heir to be produced. She was educated in the manner typical of men, and frequently wore men's clothes (such as dresses with short skirts, stockings and shoes with high heels - all these features being useful when not riding
pillion).
Christina's mother,
Maria Eleonora of
Brandenburg, came from the
Hohenzollern family. She was a woman of quite distraught temperament, and her attempts to bestow guilt on Christina for her difficult birth, or just the horror story itself, may have prejudiced Christina against the prospect of having to produce an heir to the throne.
Her father gave orders that Christina should be brought up as a prince. Even as a child she displayed great precociousness. In 1649, when she was twenty-three, she invited the philosopher
Descartes to Sweden to tutor her (so early in the morning, according to one popular account, that the lessons hastened Descartes' death from
pneumonia in 1650). Christina also took the oath as king, not queen, because her father had wanted it so. Growing up, she was nicknamed the "Girl King."
Queen regnant
The Crown of Sweden was hereditary in the family of Vasa, and from Karl IX's time excluding those Vasa princes who had been traitors or descended from deposed monarchs. Gustav Adolf's younger brother had died years earlier, and therefore there were only females left. Despite the fact that there were living female lines descended from elder sons of Gustav I Vasa, Christina was the heiress presumptive. Although she's often called "queen", her father brought her up as a prince and her official title was King.
National policy was directed during the first half of Christina's reign by her guardian, regent and adviser
Axel Oxenstierna, chancellor to her father and until her majority in 1644 the principal member of the governing regency council.
As ruler, Christina resisted demands from the other estates (clergy, burgesses and peasants) in the
Riksdag of the Estates of
1650 for the reduction of tax-exempt noble landholdings. Several princes of Europe aspired to her hand; but she rejected them all.
To prevent a renewal of applications on this subject, in 1649 she appointed her cousin
Charles X Gustav of Sweden (also called Karl) her successor, but without the smallest participation in the rights of the crown during her own life.
It was under Christina that Sweden undertook its short-lived effort at
North American colonization, known as "
New Sweden".
Fort Christina, the first
European settlement in the environs of what is now
Wilmington, Delaware (and the first permanent settlement in the
Delaware Valley as a whole) was named for the Queen.
Christina was interested in
theatre and
ballet; a French ballet-troup under
Antoine de Beaulieu was employed by the court from 1638, and there were also an Italian and a French Orchestra at court, which all inspired her much. She invited foreign companies to play at
Bollhuset, such as an Italian Opera troupe in 1652 and a Dutch theatre troupe in 1653; she was also herself an amateur-actor, and amateur-theatre was very popular at court in her days. Her court poet Georg Stiernheilm wrote her several lays in the Swedish language, such as
Den fångne Cupido eller Laviancu de Diane performed at court with Christina in the main part of the goddess Diana. She founded the dance order Amaranterordern in 1653.
Abdication
Christina abdicated her throne on
June 5,
1654 in favour of her cousin
Charles Gustavus in order to either practice openly her previously secret
Catholicism, or to accept the same publicly so as to be at the centre of a scientific and artistic
renaissance. The sincerity of her conversion has been questioned. In
1651, the
Jesuit Paolo Casati had been sent on a mission to
Stockholm in order to gauge the sincerity of her intention to become Catholic.
Her conversion was however not the only reason for her abdication, as there was increasing discontent with, in the words of her critics, her arbitrary and wasteful ways. Within ten years she'd created 17 counts, 46 barons and 428 lesser nobles; to provide these new peers with adequate
appanages, she'd sold or mortgaged crown property representing an annual income of 1,200,000
riksdaler. There were clear signs that Christina was growing weary of the cares of what remained a provincial government in spite of a large conquered territory.
Political contributions
The importunity of the senate and Riksdag on the question of her marriage was a constant source of irritation. In retirement she could devote herself wholly to art and science, and the opportunity of astonishing the world by the unique spectacle of a great king, in the prime of life, voluntarily resigning her crown, strongly appealed to her vivid imagination. It is certain that towards the end of her reign she behaved as if she were determined to do everything in her power to make herself as little missed as possible. From 1651 there was a notable change in her behavior. She cast away every regard for the feelings and prejudices of her people. She ostentatiously exhibited her contempt for the Protestant religion. Her foreign policy was flighty to the verge of foolishness. She contemplated an alliance with Spain, a state quite outside the orbit of Sweden's influence, the first fruits of which were to have been an invasion of Portugal. She utterly neglected affairs in order to plunge into a whirl of dissipation with her foreign favorites. The situation became impossible, and it was with an intense feeling of relief that the Swedes saw her depart, in masculine attire, under the name of Count Dohna.
Setting off to Rome
Upon conversion she took a new name,
Maria Christina Alexandra, and moved to
Rome, where her wealth and former position made her a centre of society. Her status as the most notable convert to Catholicism of the age, and as the most famous woman at the time, made it possible for her to ignore or flout the most common requirements of obeisance to the Catholic faith. She herself remarked that her Catholic faith wasn't of the common order; indeed, before converting she'd asked church officials how strictly she'd be expected to obey the church's common observances, and received reassurances. Christina's visit to Rome was the triumph of
Pope Alexander VII and the occasion for splendid
Baroque festivities. For several months she was the only preoccupation of the Pope and his court. The nobles vied for her attention and treated her to a never-ending round of fireworks, jousts, fake duels, acrobatics, and operas. At the
Palazzo Aldobrandini, where she was welcomed by a crowd of 6,000 spectators, she watched in amazement at the procession of camels and elephants in Oriental garb, bearing towers on their backs.
Having run out of money and surfeited with an excess of pageantry, Christina resolved, in the space of two years, to visit France. Here she was treated with respect by
Louis XIV, but the ladies were shocked with her masculine appearance and demeanor and the unguarded freedom of her conversation. When visiting the ballet with la
Grande Mademoiselle, she, as the latter recalls, "surprised me very much - applauding the parts which pleased her, taking God to witness, throwing herself back in her chair, crossing her legs, resting them on the arms of her chair, and assuming other postures, such as I'd never seen taken but by Travelin and Jodelet, two famous buffoons... She was in all respects a most extraordinary creature".
In
1656, Christina planned to become Queen of
Naples. Her plans involved the help of French military. She had made an agreement with
Cardinal Mazarin. Apartments were assigned to her at
Fontainebleau, where she committed an action which has indelibly stained her memory and for which in other countries (says her biographer) she'd have paid the forfeit of her own life. This was the execution of
marchese Gian Rinaldo Monaldeschi, her master of the horse, who had betrayed Christina's plans in the autumn of 1657. He was summoned into a gallery in the palace; letters were then shown to him, at the sight of which he turned pale and entreated for mercy; but he was instantly stabbed by two of her own domestics in an apartment adjoining that in which she herself was. The killing of Monaldeschi was legal since Christina had judicial rights over the members of her court. It was however seen as murder. The French court was offended by this deed; yet it met with vindicators,
Gottfried Leibniz among them. Christina sensed that she was now regarded with horror in France, and would gladly have visited England, but she received no encouragement from
Cromwell. She returned to Rome and resumed her amusements in the arts and sciences.
After the death of Charles Gustav in
1660, she took a journey to Sweden to recover her crown, but her estranged subjects rejected her claims. She submitted to a second renunciation of the throne and returned to Rome. Some differences with the Pope made her resolve in
1662 once more to return to Sweden; but the conditions annexed by the senate to her residence there were now so mortifying that she proceeded no farther than
Hamburg. She went back to Rome and cultivated a correspondence with the learned men there, and in other parts of Europe, as well as acting as patron to musicians such as
Arcangelo Corelli and
Alessandro Scarlatti.
She died on April 19,
1689, leaving her large and important library, originally amassed as war booty by her father Gustavus from throughout his European campaign, to the
Papacy. Among other paintings,
Titian's
Venus Anadyomene originally was in the possession of Queen Christina.
She is one of only three women to be given the honor of being buried in the grottoes of
St. Peter's Basilica, alongside the remains of the popes. A monument to her was carved later on and adorns a column close to the permanent display of
Michelangelo's Pietà. At the opposite pillar across the nave is the
Monument to the Royal Stuarts, commemorating the other 17th century monarchs who lost their thrones due to their Catholicism.
Legacy
The complex character of Christina has inspired numerous plays, books, and operatic works.
August Strindberg's 1901
Kristina depicts her as a protean, impulsive creature. "Each one gets the Christina he deserves" she remarks.
The most famous fictional treatment is the classic feature film
Queen Christina from
1933 starring
Greta Garbo. This film, while entertaining, had almost nothing to do with the real Christina. Another feature film,
The Abdication, starred the Norwegian actress
Liv Ullmann, and was based on a play by
Ruth Wolff.
The
Finnish author
Zacharias Topelius' historical allegory
Tähtien Turvatit also portrays her, like her father, as having a mercurial temperament, quick to anger, quicker to forgive.
Kaari Utrio has also portrayed her tormented passions and thirst for love.
Christina's reign was controversial, and literature circulated during her lifetime that described her as participating in multiple affairs with both men and women. This, along with the emotional letters that she wrote to female friends, has caused her to become an icon for the
lesbian and feminist communities (and inspired comedian
Jade Esteban Estrada to portray her in the solo musical
ICONS: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World (Vol. 2), though there's no clear-cut evidence that she actually was involved in love affairs with either sex.
The strongest evidence of a lasting
platonic love-affair from afar surfaced as encrypted letters she'd sent to a Cardinal
Decio Azzolino (with whom she was already at the time rumored to be a lover), which were decrypted in the 19th century. They speak of intense but sublimated erotic desire. She later named him as her sole heir. Azzolino was the leader of the free thinking "Flying Squad" (
Squadrone Volante) movement within the Catholic Church.
Her unusual, masculine attire caused her to later become an icon of the
transgendered community. It is controversial whether it's appropriate to refer to her as "transgendered", because the concept didn't exist during her lifetime, despite the fact that she transgressed the gender boundaries of her era. Indeed, "transgender" is a 20th century concept and personal identity. The interest in her possible crossing of sex and gender boundaries culminated in the mid-20th century, when her grave was opened so that her
death mask could be examined. At that time her bones were examined to see if sex abnormalities could be identified, but the results were inconclusive.
Ancestors
Christina's ancestors in three generations
Further Information
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