Åbo Bloodbath

On 10th November 1599, at the Old Great Square in Turku, Finland (then part of the Kingdom of Sweden), fourteen noblemen were publicly executed for their involvement in the War of Deposition against Sigismund. The execution of the noblemen came to be called the Åbo Bloodbath (after the Swedish name of Turku).

The War against Sigismund was the culmination of a decades-long power struggle that had taken place after the death of Gustav Vasa. His sons Erik and John had already warred for the crown in the early years after their father's demise — but now the controversy revolved around Charles, then only living son of Gustav, who sought to wrestle it from his nephew Sigismund, the legitimate heir to the Crown (and that of Poland as well).

The decapitated nobility in the Old Great Square were men opposed to Charles; he made a concerted effort to crush his opposition in the civil war that had erupted two years prior. Of interest is the fact that Charles' own grandfather was executed in the Stockholm bloodbath, an event that signalled the start of Sweden's breakaway from the ill-fated Kalmar Union in the 1520s.

After a campaign by King Sigismund — in an attempt to take back control of his realm by force — had failed and Kalmar Castle had fallen to the usurper, the personal union of Poland and Sweden unraveled with the king officially deposed by the Riksdag in July of 1599. Charles assumed the regency in a period of much instability and uncertainty in the Swedish realm, but it was his son Gustav II Adolf, "the Lion from the North", that forged Sweden into a (arguably) great power in the 17th century.