general background – mia korpiola 49 vious attempts had failed? Did they become a permanent feature of Swedish legal life thanks to or despite Gustav II Adolf? First, one may observe that the reign of Charles IX seems to have been no particularly black period of injustice and lawlessness in Sweden. On the contrary, his reign saw many attempts to reform the Swedish legal system in the direction of a legal revolution in Sweden: ahierarchy of courts, centrally controlled judges, standardization and uniformity of law and attempted reform of the judiciary and the law. In fact, King Charles was very active in this sense, although a combination of raisons d’État, the turbulence of the era and a certain lack of political support made many of his reforms unsuccessful in the end. Charles IXpursued a policy partly begun during the reign of Erik XIVand, once established, the Court of Appeal came to borrow from the traditions of Erik’s High Court, which suggests that the reputation of that court was not perceived in the 1600s to be as dark as may have been assumed. There had been many previous attempts to (re)arrange the forms of royal jurisdiction ever since the late Middle Ages, but these experiments remained short-lived. What, then, had changed in 1614? As argued here, there was no previous acute judicial crisis in Sweden to explain the advent of the first Court of Appeal in 1614. But a severe crisis there was – as will be argued in the next chapter – of an economic and political nature caused by war. The survival of Sweden during the first decades of the Svea Court of Appeal hung on a thread because of the ongoing and recurrent wars necessitating the absence of the king abroad and his preoccupation by other state affairs than the administration of justice. Finally, the courts of appeal – children of war and crisis – outlived both. After the short-lived ducal superior courts had become extinct with the premature death of Duke Karl Filip, brother of Gustav II Adolf, in 1622, the royal Court of Appeal had no rivals. The courts of appeals were not only appellate tribunals but, in addition, combined the some of the duties of present-day ministries of justice on a provincial level, acting as collective chancellors of justice as guardians of law and justice for individuals receiving petitions for legal redress and controlling the lawfulness of the local and crown officials. The established Court of Appeal reinforced the image of the God-appointed good monarch, sheltering his people from injustice and abuse, while it helped to free the king and his closest officials from the routines of the day-to-day administration of justice during war.
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