- Johan Skytte
Baron Johan Skytte (
Nyköping 1577 –Söderåkra March 25 ,1645 ), Swedish politician.Johan Skytte was son of the Mayor of
Nyköping , Bengt Nilsson Skräddare. While attending school in his home town and for the nine years he was studying at foreign universities, he used the surname Schroderus, a Latinised form of the German "Schröder" - his father's surname - which means "tailor ".Already at his return from his foreign studies in 1602, he was hired as tutor of the young Prince
Gustavus Adolphus ofSweden , the future king, and was ennobled the following year, taking the name "Skytte" after an extinct noble family from which he claimed descent on the maternal side.He was sent to
London in 1610 on a diplomatic mission, an attempt to seek the hand of Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of James I for the young prince. In1611 , he was made governor ofVestmannia , in1617 a high councillor and in1622 chancellor ofUpsala University , which he remained until his death. Skytte participated in drafting the 1617Coronation Oath of king Gustav Adolf.Having in 1624 been created a
baron ("friherre"), receiving the barony ofTuutarhovi in Ingria, Livonia, which had just been added to theSwedish Realm , and in 1629 appointedGovernor-General of Livonia,Ingria andCarelia , he was in 1632 appointed chancellor of the new "Academia Gustaviana" (University of Tartu ), in addition to his Uppsala chancellorship, and made plans for a new appellate court inTartu (in todayEstonia ). In 1632, Skytte returned from Livonia and was in 1634 made president of the Göta appellate court ("Göta hovrätt") inJönköping .The same year he became chancellor of
Uppsala University , 1622, Skytte donated the Skyttean professorship of Eloquence and Government to the university. His own house in Uppsala, the originally medieval building called the "Skytteanum", is still used by Department of Government; the "professor skytteanus" has his residence in an apartment in the house. Since 1995, the Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University awards an annual prize in Political Science (seeJohan Skytte Prize in Political Science ).Of the several schools in Sweden named after Skytte, one was actually founded on the initiative of Johan Skytte, the Skyttean school ("Skytteanska skolan") which was established in
Lycksele in Lapland in 1631, but moved toTärnaby in1867 . Because of this contribution to education in the relatively under-developed northern Sweden, theRoyal Skyttean Society inUmeå was named after him when it was established in 1956.
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