While their Danish counterparts were best known for raids in England and France, and the Norwegians were wandering about the North Atlantic, the Vikings of Sweden sailed across the Baltic Sea and along the river inlets into the Russian frontier. Throughout the “Viking Age” they were well known for their far-reaching trade routes, reaching deep inland, even unto fabled Byzantium.

Moving into Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine down the Volga during the 9th Century AD, many of the Swedish Vikings settled in these eastern lands, where they came to be known as the Rus. After capturing the city of Kiev in c. 850, the Rus formed a state that survived for nearly 400 years (until the arrival of the Mongols).

Throughout the first millennium, Sweden itself was a loose collaboration of independent provinces. Although a number of early kings are mentioned in various Norse sagas, attempting to separate legend from factual history leaves their lineage and succession still somewhat muddled. Olof Skotkonung, son of Eric the Victorious, ruled from 995 until 1022, and is considered the first to truly unite the Swedish tribes, ruling over both Svealand and Gotaland.

Jealousies and internecine strife escalated between Danish and Swedish, factions, drawing in German principalities and the Hanseatic League. The Swedes attempted to gain greater autonomy for themselves over decades, and the matter came to a head when Danish King Kristian II executed a number of prominent people in Stockholm in 1521. This provoked a general revolution, led by the Swedish nobleman Gustav Vasa. He was crowned King Gustav I Vasa of Sweden by the nobility, successfully fended off Danish efforts to remove him, and ruthlessly crushed any opposition to his rule, and for this is generally seen as the father of the modern state.

Sweden was an early convert to nascent Protestantism under the direction of Gustav I, occurring at about the same time as Henry VIII's conversion in England (and under much the same set of circumstances, both being the result of long-simmering conflicts between the king and the pope). Sweden would continue to be a bastion of Lutheranism during the centuries that followed. King Gustav II Adolphus Vasa was one of Sweden's most famous kings, a redoubtable warrior on the Protestant side during the Thirty Years' War, who left Sweden the first-rate power in Northern Europe for the next century. Gustavus Adolphus died at the Battle of Lützen in 1632, and reign passed to his only child, Kristina (see her section for her life.)

However, Sweden's control of the Baltic region declined after the Great Northern War in the early 1700s, losing prominence to Russia and its allies—including the Danish-Norwegians. During the Napoleonic Era, Sweden lost the territory of modern Finland to Russia, and was pressed into another union with Norway in 1810 through the French Marshal Jean Baptiste Bernadotte—placed there by Napoleon as part of his reordering of Europe. The new king, who had been a Parisian Jacobin firebrand as a young man, was rumored to have had “Death to Kings” tattooed on his arm.

Eventually, the union with Norway was dissolved at the start of the 20th Century, to the relief of everyone. Rapid industrialization defined the early part of the 20th Century. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, the gift of the chemist and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel, who had come to desire to remembered as something other than an inventor of more efficient ways for people to kill each other.

Sweden had an unbroken policy of neutrality in European wars since the middle of the Napoleonic period. The morality of this policy during World War II was controversial at the time and which is still hotly debated by scholars today. But in the years that followed, Sweden was an ardent supporter of the international order, seeing it as a way to prevent global wars and other political catastrophes.

Sweden's long history has been one of iteration and reform of its political systems and governance, and it has succeeded in creating a stable, orderly, egalitarian society, with a high degree of equality for all its citizens. Having renounced military adventurism for two centuries, it has used those resources to develop the nation, and leads many rankings of quality of life. Sweden has been at the forefront of political solutions for international problems through the United Nations, and the Swedish economist and politician Dag Hammarskjöld served as the second Secretary General of that body and remains one of the best-regarded statesmen of the Twentieth Century. As the Twenty-First Century progresses, the nation continues to endorse its egalitarian principles, as applied to all the nations of the world—and thus Sweden enhances its reputation as a willing arbiter between parties seeking to establish a lasting peace.