Eric IX of Sweden

Eric IX of Sweden, known in Swedish as Erik Jedvardsson and later as Erik den helige (Saint Erik), was a king of the Swedes in the mid-twelfth century who after his death became the principal patron saint of Sweden. Almost nothing about his early life can be verified from contemporary records. Later medieval tradition names his father Jedvard (a form of Edward), a magnate, whence the patronymic Jedvardsson; his mother’s identity is not securely known. No reliable source gives a year or place of birth. He belonged to the Swedish high aristocracy at a time when royal authority was still regional and frequently contested between rival kin-groups.

He obtained the kingship around the middle of the 1150s, after King Sverker the Elder was murdered in 1156. Sweden was then divided among competing dynastic factions, chiefly the descendants of Sverker and the lineage that historians call the House of Eric. Erik’s power base lay in the Mälaren region, especially Uppland. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century legend portrays him as a lawgiver, a founder of churches, and a zealous Christian ruler who led an expedition into Finland together with Bishop Henry of Uppsala—the episode later called the First Swedish Crusade. Modern scholarship regards that crusade as poorly documented and possibly largely legendary; Bishop Henry’s own martyrdom story is likewise late and uncertain. What is clearer is that Erik reigned as a Christian king while the Swedish church was still under the metropolitan authority of Lund and before the creation of the archbishopric of Uppsala in 1164.

The medieval legend of Saint Erik states that he was killed on 18 May 1160 at Östra Aros, the trading settlement that developed into the city of Uppsala. After hearing Mass he was set upon by men of the Danish pretender Magnus Henriksson, who claimed the Swedish throne. The hagiography describes the king as wounded in the fighting and then beheaded; his blood was said to have produced miracles, and a spring was associated with the site. He was buried first at Old Uppsala, the old royal and cult centre, and his relics were later translated to the Gothic cathedral of Uppsala, where they have remained a focus of veneration. His son Knut Eriksson survived the dynastic wars, defeated Magnus and other rivals, and ruled Sweden from about 1167 to 1196, thereby securing the House of Eric. Later genealogical tradition identifies Erik’s wife as Kristina Björnsdotter, a woman of Danish royal ancestry; besides Knut, some sources attribute additional children to the couple, including daughters who married into other Scandinavian dynasties.

Erik was not canonized by a pope. His sanctity was recognized through the typical local process of the high Middle Ages: episcopal and popular cult, a written legend and liturgical office composed in the thirteenth century, and the political interest of his royal descendants and of the church of Uppsala. His feast on 18 May became one of the great days of the medieval Swedish calendar. In art he appears as a crowned king with a sword, sometimes with an orb or a banner. He is the patron saint of Sweden and of Stockholm, whose seal from the thirteenth century already shows his crowned head; that image remains on the city’s coat of arms. After the Lutheran Reformation the Church of Sweden kept his memory as a national and historical commemoration rather than as a cult of relics and miracles, while the Catholic Church continues to list him among the saints. Because the narrative sources are hagiographical and written generations after 1160, historians treat the documented king of a short, violent reign and the richly elaborated martyr-saint of later medieval Sweden as related but not identical figures.