Christina of Sweden

Christina was born in Stockholm on December 18, 1626, the only surviving legitimate child of King Gustavus Adolphus and his German wife, Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg ^[1]. Contemporary accounts record that the newborn was at first mistaken for a boy, a story Christina herself repeated in her unfinished autobiography. Her father, then deep in preparations for Sweden's entry into the Thirty Years' War, ordered that she be raised and instructed as a male heir would be, and the Riksdag recognized her as successor to the throne ^[2].

Gustavus Adolphus was killed at the Battle of Lützen in November 1632, when Christina was not yet six years old. She became queen at once, though real power passed to a regency council headed by the chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, one of the most capable statesmen of the century ^[1]. Her mother, unstable in her grief, was gradually excluded from the child's upbringing, and Christina was placed in the care of her aunt Catherine and later of appointed governors.

Her education was exceptional by any measure of the period. Tutored by the theologian Johannes Matthiae, she studied theology, philosophy, classical languages, and history, and she reportedly kept a schedule of study that ran ten or more hours a day ^[3]. She learned Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, and Spanish, and she took to riding, hunting, and shooting with an enthusiasm that observers found unusual in a princess. Anyone asking who was Christina of Sweden begins with this fact: she was trained not as a royal consort in waiting but as a working head of state.

Christina began attending council meetings as a teenager and assumed full royal authority in 1644, on her eighteenth birthday ^[2]. She proved a quick and confident participant in government, and she soon showed a willingness to differ from Oxenstierna, the man who had governed in her name for over a decade. The sharpest disagreement concerned the war in Germany. The chancellor favored pressing Sweden's military advantage; the young queen wanted peace.

Her preference mattered. Christina pushed her negotiators toward settlement, and in 1648 the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War, confirming Sweden as a major European power with territories in northern Germany, including Western Pomerania, Bremen, and Verden ^[4]. The treaties made Sweden a guarantor of the imperial constitution and marked the height of its influence on the continent.

At home she managed a delicate succession question. Christina resisted mounting pressure to marry, including a long-expected match with her cousin Charles Gustav of the Palatinate-Zweibrücken line. Instead she persuaded the estates in 1649 to accept him as hereditary heir to the throne, a decision that secured the dynasty while freeing her from a marriage she had privately ruled out ^[1]. Her formal coronation followed in 1650 with festivities of a scale Stockholm had never seen.

Any account of Christina of Sweden achievements must start with her cultural program. She set out to make her capital, in a phrase attached to her court, an Athens of the North. She invited foreign scholars, purchased libraries and manuscript collections, and expanded the royal holdings with paintings, books, and antiquities, including a large share of the treasures Swedish armies removed from Prague in 1648 ^[5]. The booty from Rudolf II's collections brought hundreds of paintings to Stockholm and formed the core of what later became her famous personal gallery.

Her most celebrated recruit was the French philosopher René Descartes, who arrived in Stockholm in 1649 to instruct her in philosophy. The queen scheduled their sessions for five in the morning in the depths of a Swedish winter. Descartes contracted pneumonia and died in Stockholm in February 1650, an episode that has shadowed Christina's reputation ever since, though scholars note he was also worn down by the climate and his changed routine ^[3].

Her record in domestic government was more mixed. Christina created new nobles at a rapid pace and alienated crown lands and revenues to fund her court and reward supporters, practices that strained state finances and stirred resentment among the lower estates ^[2]. The Riksdag of 1650 saw open complaints from clergy, burghers, and peasants against noble privilege. Yet she also supported education and industry: she issued a new charter and endowments benefiting institutions of learning, encouraged the country's first nationwide school ordinance drafted under her rule, and protected scholars regardless of their origins ^[6].

By the early 1650s Christina had resolved on a step without precedent in Swedish history. Exhausted, in uncertain health, unwilling to marry, and increasingly drawn to Catholicism through conversations with visiting scholars and Jesuit contacts she had received in secret, she announced her intention to give up the crown ^[7]. Sweden's constitution required its monarch to be Lutheran, so conversion and rule could not be combined.

The abdication took place at Uppsala Castle on June 6, 1654. In a staged ceremony Christina removed her regalia piece by piece and transferred the throne to her cousin, who reigned as Charles X Gustav ^[1]. She negotiated an income from designated lands and retained her library and art collections. Within days she left Sweden, traveling south through Denmark dressed, by several accounts, in men's clothing under the name Count Dohna.

At Innsbruck in November 1655 she made a public profession of the Catholic faith, having converted privately at Brussels the previous year ^[7]. The conversion of the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, the great Protestant champion of the Thirty Years' War, was a sensation across Europe and a propaganda triumph for the papacy. Pope Alexander VII welcomed her to Rome in December 1655 with elaborate ceremony, and she took the confirmation name Alexandra in his honor.

Christina never married and stated plainly that she felt an insurmountable aversion to marriage. Her closest attachment in Sweden was to Ebba Sparre, a lady-in-waiting she called Belle, to whom she wrote affectionate letters for years after leaving the country ^[3]. Historians continue to debate how to characterize her sexuality and her gender presentation; she wore masculine dress by preference, walked and spoke in ways contemporaries found unfeminine, and delighted in flouting convention. In 1965 her remains in St. Peter's were examined, partly in response to speculation about her anatomy, and the study found nothing atypical ^[8].

In Rome the central relationship of her later life was with Cardinal Decio Azzolino, a skilled Vatican politician and leader of the reform-minded faction known as the Squadrone Volante. Their correspondence, partly written in cipher, shows deep mutual devotion; whether the bond was romantic, and whether it stayed within the bounds both publicly maintained, remains a matter of scholarly discussion ^[7]. Azzolino managed her affairs, steadied her finances, and was named her universal heir.

Her temperament combined genuine learning with impulsiveness. The darkest episode of her life occurred at Fontainebleau in 1657, when she ordered the summary execution of her master of the horse, Gian Rinaldo Monaldeschi, for betraying her plans ^[1]. She claimed sovereign authority over her own household; French and European opinion was appalled, and the affair damaged her standing for years.

Christina's decades in Rome were not passive retirement. Twice she pursued a return to power: in 1656 and 1657 she negotiated with France's Cardinal Mazarin over a scheme to make her queen of Naples at Spain's expense, a plan that collapsed after the Monaldeschi scandal, and in 1668 she put herself forward for the elective throne of Poland after the abdication of John II Casimir, without success ^[2]. She also traveled back to Sweden twice in the 1660s over her revenues, receiving a cool reception.

Her lasting Roman work was cultural. From the Palazzo Riario on the Longara she presided over one of the great salons of Europe, filled with paintings by Titian, Veronese, and Raphael, ancient sculpture, manuscripts, and a library that after her death enriched the Vatican ^[5]. She sponsored the composers Alessandro Scarlatti and Arcangelo Corelli, supported Rome's first public opera house, the Tordinona, which opened under her protection in 1671, and gathered the circle of scholars and poets that after her death organized itself as the Accademia dell'Arcadia ^[6].

She could still surprise Europe with independent stands. She protested the persecution of Huguenots after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and she declared the Jews of the Roman ghetto under her personal protection ^[3]. Christina died at Palazzo Riario on April 19, 1689, after an illness, with Azzolino at her side. Against her stated wish for simplicity she was given a grand funeral, and she was buried in the grottoes of St. Peter's Basilica, one of very few women honored with a monument there ^[8].

Few seventeenth-century rulers have invited as much reinterpretation. Every Christina of Sweden biography must reckon with a double reputation: in Sweden she was long remembered as the queen who squandered crown resources and deserted her father's faith, while in Catholic Europe she was celebrated as the century's most illustrious convert. Modern historians treat her instead as a formidable intellect who used the freedom of abdication to build a life no reigning queen could have led ^[7].

Her collections had a long afterlife. The paintings she took from Stockholm passed through the Odescalchi family to the Orléans collection in Paris, and many now hang in major museums; her manuscripts, the Codices Reginenses, remain a named fonds in the Vatican Library ^[5]. The learned society that grew from her Roman circle, the Arcadia, shaped Italian letters for a century.

Christina's cultural presence endures well beyond scholarship. Greta Garbo played her in the 1933 film Queen Christina, fixing an image of the androgynous philosopher-queen in popular memory, and later novels, operas, and films have returned to her story ^[8]. Among the more striking Christina of Sweden facts is the company she keeps in death: a monument in St. Peter's Basilica, an honor shared by only a handful of women, marks the resting place of a Lutheran king's daughter who chose Rome ^[1].