Sweden is a Scandinavian country in northern Europe on the west coast of the Baltic Sea. The Swedes were first mentioned by the Roman writer Tacitus in his book Germania in the first century. During the Viking Age from the eighth to the eleventh centuries Swedish Vikings established a series of settlements that formed the nucleus for the later nations of Russia and Ukraine. A Swedish kingdom had been established by the eleventh century, at which time a majority of the Swedes had converted to Christianity. Sweden lost of third of its population to the Black Death in the fourteenth century, and by the end of the fifteenth century Sweden was part of a union of Scandinavian countries called the Kalmar Union.
The union of thrones ended in 1523 in the wake of a massacre of Swedish nobles by King Christian II of Denmark, when Gustav Vasa became the king of an independent Sweden. Gustav Vasa also converted to Protestantism, and the kingdom along with him. A union of thrones between Protestant Sweden and Catholic Poland in the late sixteenth century led to a century of civil wars.
Sweden's intervention in the Thirty Years War in 1630 brought the country to the height of its power and led to the creation of a short-lived overseas colonial empire. The New Sweden colony in America would gave rise to the provinces of Pennsylvania and Delaware. Swedish power was eclipsed following a lengthy war with Tsar Peter the Great of Russia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
On 5 September 1900, Tsar Michael II, the last ruler of the Russian Empire, abdicated and fled to Sweden along with the remaining members of the Romanov family.
Sweden does not have an entry in Sobel's index.
In For All Nails, Sweden is again part of a Scandinavian union that includes Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland.