Birger Jarl
Birger Jarl was the earl who ruled Sweden for eighteen years without being its king, under a king who was his own small son, and who in that time founded Stockholm, put down the last rising of the old nobility, took Finland in a crusade, gave the country its first laws against rape, abduction and the burning of homes, and made peace with Norway and Lubeck. He ended the two centuries in which the crown had alternated between two families by making it his own family's. The Folkung dynasty he founded reigned until 1364 and the two lions of his coat of arms are the arms of Sweden. He was a Folkung by birth, from the family that had held the earldom before, and he married the sister of the king, Eric, a lisping, lame and childless man. That made his sons the heirs. Eric made him jarl, the highest office under the crown, in 1248, and the next year he took a fleet to Finland, defeated the Tavastians and built the castle at Hameenlinna, in what Swedish tradition counted as the second of its crusades. Eric died in 1250 while Birger was in Finland, and the council elected the jarl's son Valdemar, a boy of eleven, before the father could be considered; Birger came home and ruled in his son's name until he died. The Folkung nobles who had expected the old system rose in 1251 and were beaten at Herrevadsbro, where the leaders were executed after being promised safe conduct, or so the rhymed chronicle says. He built Stockholm on the island at the outlet of Lake Malar about 1252, fortifying the channel through which the Estonian pirates had come to burn Sigtuna, and his letter to the people of Attundaland of that year, with Stockholm as its place of issue, is the city's birth certificate. His peace-laws, the edsore laws, made certain crimes offences against the king rather than the family, and he abolished the ordeal by iron. He married a second time the widowed queen of Denmark, and he died at his estate of Jalbolung in Vastergotland in October 1266 and was buried at Varnhem, where his grave was opened in 2002 and found to hold a man of his age with a healed cut across the face.
- Lived: 1210 CE – 1266 CE
- Nationality: Swedish
- Roles: jarl, regent, statesman
