Swedish

The Swedes are North Germanic people of the eastern Scandinavian peninsula, tracing to svear Tacitus in AD 98 called Suiones. Erik the Victorious united svear and gautar under one crown c. 980. Birka linked the Baltic to Byzantium and Abbasid trade. Saint Ansgar preached there in 829; by 1050 Sweden was Christian, its kings later pushing into Finland.

Feudalism never took root and peasants stayed free; Magnus IV abolished thralldom in 1335. In 1397 Sweden entered the Kalmar Union with Denmark and Norway; after the 1520 Stockholm Bloodbath Gustav Vasa revolted, taking the crown in 1523, leading the Reformation.

Gustavus Adolphus led Sweden into the Thirty Years' War until dying at Lützen in 1632; the 1658 Roskilde treaty marked the empire's widest extent. Poltava in 1709 and Charles XII's 1718 death in Norway began decline, confirmed at Nystad in 1721; Finland went to Russia in 1809, Norway to the crown in 1814. Swedish descends from Old Norse, near Norwegian and Danish.