144 military officers further deteriorated as salaries were withheld in part or in wholed** At this juncture, the regency for Charles XI gave the task of Implementing a program of reductions in government spending to the kammarkollegium under the leadership of Gustav Bonde, the treasurer of the realm. This action did not, however, result in any improvements for the service nobility. Instead of resuming control over the alienated estates and thus reconstituting the economic prerequisite for meeting the salaries of state servants, the college chose to reduce the number of civil servants and to lower salaries. Even pensions paid to retired officers were withdrawn. Because of warfare and continued alienation of crown estates—even Gustav Bonde saw to it that he increased his landholdings by further acquisitions of such estates—the situation deteriorated even further.^' Wholesale merchants, manufacturers, and other such groups were also dissatisfied with the fiscal policy pursued by the regency. Not only were these groups dependent upon an effective state administration for the operation of their businesses, but they also had vast claims against the crown for such things as unpaid deliveries of goods and cash loans, for which they now demanded payment. The strained economic and political situation was alleviated at the riksdag of 1680. The estates were presented with a royal proposal that expressed the interests of the groups mentioned above, underlining the need for seeing to it that the armed forces and the civil servants received their salaries and for paying off the debts of the crown.That the peasants, too, were committed to breaking the power of the aristocracy was quite natural, since it was they who would have had to bear an increased tax burden had the current trend of developments been allowed to continue. At the riksdag of 1680, all the groups opposing the aristocracy—the service nobility, the commercial interests, and the peasants—cooperated in forcing through a decision calling for an extensive resumption of crown lands which had been donated to private individuals. Indeed, this reduktionen, as it was called, was to apply to all the estates alienated to the nobility since the end of the sixteenth century. Through this measure, thecrown recovered the agrarian rents it had lost earlier; while the nobility retained ownership of a third of the arable acreage in the realm, the remaining two thirds were now controlled by peasants owing rents or taxes salaries. On the eve of the riksdag of 1680, for example, the principal income of Sten liielke, the treasurer of the realm, was some 11,500 dsmt derived from his estates, while his salary as president of the kammarkollegium was 3,600 dsmt; Kurt Ågren, “Gods och ämbete. Sten Bielkes inkomster inför riksdagen 1680,” Scandia, 31 (1965), 241. Carl Arvid Hessler, “Den svenska ståndsriksdagen,” Scandia, 8 (1935), 39. Edén (1941), 110. Nilsson (1958), 104.
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