This narrative covers Sweden's Age of Greatness (1632?1718) and the warrior-kings who governed that age. It chronologically describes the political and religious events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reveals how these events produced the climate for European global expansion, including the exploration and colonization of the New World. The story traces history through the reigns of Sweden's ambitious rulers, beginning with the presumably Swedish Goths who ravaged the Roman Empire in the 2nd century CE and continuing through the end of the empire in the early eighteenth...

Details the development of Scandinavia - Sweden in particular - from the end of the Ice Age, through a series of prehistoric cultures, the Bronze and Iron ages, to the Viking period and late Middle Ages. Special attention is given to Eastern Europe, where Sweden dominated commerce through the conquest of trade towns and the river systems of Russia.