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December 8, 2018 5 mins

Christina of Sweden was born on this day in 1626. In the new-style calendar, she was born Dec. 18. She's also covered in the October 20, 2014 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and it's December
eight Christina of Sweden was born on the day in

(00:24):
sixteen six and the old style Julian calendar and in
the new style Gregorian calendar that was December eighteen. Her
parents were King Gustav the Second Adolf and Maria Eleanora
of Brandenburg. They were the King and Queen of Sweden,
and her father had grown very concerned about whether he
would have an air before Christina was born. Her parents

(00:46):
had been through two stillbirths and the death of an
infant daughter. There were other people close to the line
of succession who had plenty of airs, so this was
caused for concern. When Christina was born slightly premature and
in a call the midwives announced that the king had
a son, and it wasn't until the following day, after

(01:07):
a lot of celebration of the birth of a long
awaited air that the midwives finally admitted that they had
made a mistake and that they should have said Christina
was a girl. This has led to some speculation about
whether Christina was intersex, or whether her body was just ambiguous,
or whether it was a matter of poor lighting and

(01:29):
the midwives seeing what they really wanted to see. Everyone
really really wanted a son regardless. Though the king decided
to raise Christina as a prince, he warmed up to
the idea of having a daughter, but he raised her
in many ways as a son as she grew up.
This suited her just fine. She was not very fond

(01:53):
of the things that women were expected to do during
the day, and her father wanted her to learn to
hide and fight and handle a bow, and she did
all of that. Not only that she did it really well,
she really enjoyed it. Her demeanor was just not at
all what people thought of as feminine. So it wasn't
all that uncommon for royal girls to have the same

(02:16):
education as their brothers and their male cousins, but it
was pretty uncommon for them to have been as excited
about fighting and hunting and whatnot as Christina was. When
Christina was five, though her father died, and her mother,
whose behavior and emotional state had become increasingly erratic, took
her away from her home and the cousins that she'd

(02:37):
been living with, where she had been pretty happy until
that point. Even though she was the only daughter of
the late King, Christina's ascension to the throne had to
be approved by Parliament, which was known as the Reeks Dog.
They ultimately did approve, and by the age of fourteen
she was attending council meetings. She became queen at eighteen,

(02:58):
although her formal coronation was and until she was twenty three.
By the time of her coronation, though she was already
thinking about abdicating. She had pulled some strings to get
a cousin named as her successor, insisting that she had
no desire to marry. It was the same cousin that
everyone wanted her to marry, and she did finally abdicate

(03:19):
and moved to Rome and converted to Catholicism. She seems
to have had some second thoughts about this abdication later on,
though she tried and failed to take over the throne
of Poland Lithuania, she hoped to become the Queen of
Sweden again after that successor she'd had names suddenly died
at a young age. But none of that worked out.

(03:39):
Christina wasn't ever known as a particularly good ruler. I mean,
she did decide to abdicate before she was even crowned.
But she was an extremely learned woman. She spoke multiple languages,
including of course Swedish plus Greek, Latin, German, French, Flemish,

(03:59):
at Italian, Spanish, and finish with also a little Hebrew
in Arabic. She helped start the first Swedish newspaper in
sixty five, as well as Sweden's first public opera house
and its first universal public school program. She collected a
huge amount of art and literature. Her collection of books

(04:19):
and manuscripts later on became part of the Vatican Library.
So even though she was maybe not the greatest as
a queen or a king, depended on how you wanted
to look at it, she did other stuff pretty well.
And she died in nine at the age of sixty two.
You can learn more about her in the October episode
of Stuff You Missed in History Class. Thanks to Casey

(04:42):
Pigram and Chandler Maze for their audio work on the show,
you can subscribe to the Day in History class on
Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and
wherever else you get a podcast. Tune in tomorrow for
the establishment of a state. No

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