Charles XI and Swedish Absolutism, 1660-1697The reading public outside Sweden knows little of that country's history, beyond the era in the seventeenth century when Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus became a major European power by her intervention in the Thirty Years' War. In the last decades of the seventeenth century another Swedish king, Charles XI, launched a less dramatic but remarkable bid to stabilize and secure Sweden's position as a major power in northern Europe and as master of the