to the gallows.

The king's soldiers and followers, excited by the slaughter and given
full license, now broke into many houses of the suspected, murdering the
men, maltreating the women, and carrying away all the treasure they could
find, and for some hours Stockholm seemed to be in the hands of an army
that had taken the city by storm.

For a day and night the corpses lay festering in the street, their bodies
torn by vagrant dogs, and not until a pestilent exhalation began to rise
from them were they gathered up and hauled by cartloads to a place in the
southern suburbs, where a great funeral pyre was erected and the bodies
were burned to ashes.

As for the tyrant himself, his bloody work seemed to excite him to a sort
of madness of fury. He ordered the body of Sten Sture the Younger to be
dug from its grave in Riddarholm Church, and it is said that in his fury
he bit at the half-consumed remains. The body of Sten's young son was
also disinterred, and the two were carried to the great funeral pile to
be burnt with the others. The quarter of the town where this took place
is still named Sture, in memory of the dead, and on the spot where the
great pyre was kindled stands St. Christopher's Church.

Such was the famous, or rather the infamous, "blood-bath of Stockholm,"
which still remains as a frightful memory to the land. It did not end
here. The dreadful work he had done seemed to fill the monster with an
insatiable lust for blood. His next act was to call Christina, the widow
of Sten Sture, to his presence. When, overwhelmed with grief and despair,
she appeared, he sneeringly asked her whether she would choose to be
burned, drowned, or buried alive. The noble lady fell fainting at his
feet. Her beauty and suffering and the entreaties of those present at
length softened the tyrant, but her mother was enclosed in a bag and
thrown into the stream, though she was permitted to be drawn out by the
people on their promise to the tyrant that he should have her great
wealth. But she, with her daughter Christina and many other women of
noble descent, were carried as hostages to Copenhagen and shut up in a
dreadful prison called the Blue Tower, where numbers of them died of
hunger, thirst and cold.

The massacre was not confined to Stockholm; from there the executions
spread throughout the country, and the old law of 1153 was revived that
no peasant should bear arms, Danish soldiers being sent through the
country to rob th