the svea court of appeal in the early modern period 100 leading men were aware of the situation. Baron Gabriel Gustavsson Oxenstierna (1587 – 1640) wrote to his brother Axel Oxenstierna that “the country is so destitute […] and if [the war] continues for one or two years longer, we may likely say that we conquered land from others in addition to ruining our own.”284 The new financial impositions combined with the debasement of the Swedish copper daler hit the common taxpayer hard. No wonder that discontentment and revolt of the Swedish people was so feared by the king even in the 1620s that the Councillors of the Realm were ordered both privately and publicly to talk about the moderateness of the impositions and well as their necessity and utility for the Realm.285 Even later researchers have observed that during most of GustavII Adolf ’s reign, the “position of Sweden was in reality more threatened, circumscribed and insecure” than is usually imagined.286 Thus, it was judicious to perform some public relations exercises intended to stage the king as the supreme judge and guarantor of justice even if – in Michael Roberts’s words – “the antiquated administration could barely cope with an alarming breakdown of law and order.”287 Günter Barudio has attributed the failure of Gustav II Adolf to improve the situation outright after his succession more to the circumstances (lack of competent staff, erosion of law during wartime, the failure of courts in towns and in the countryside to correspond to the king’s demands) than to the king personally.288 Even so, the first years of the reign of Gustav II Adolf demonstrate a greater personal inclination to serve Mars than Justitia. Under such oppressive circumstances, the courts of appeal became one of the safety valves of the “Swedish war state” in which the onus on the peasantry especially grew incessantly. By having the new Court investigate and sentence high-profile cases of officials and noblemen defrauding the crown of tax incomes by adding taxable land to their tax-exempt holdings or as serving officials abused their position of trust to their financial ad284 Odhner, C.T. 1865 p. 4: “landet är så utblottadt […] och hvad det ännu ett år eller tu skall continuera, så må vi väl saga, att vi hafva vunnit land af androm och derutöfver ruinerat vårt eget.” 285 E.g., Instructions for the Council of the Realm during the king’s absence abroad (1625, 1626, 1627), Svenska riksrådets protokoll I, 1621–1629, ed. Kullberg, pp. xi-xii, xv, xviii, xxii. On the growing tax burden of the peasants, see also Odhner, C.T. 1865 pp. 382-390. 286 Ahnlund, Nils 1930 p. 27. 287 Roberts, Michael 1953 p. 2. 288 Barudio, Günter 1982 pp. 141-142.
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