It was the 5th of november 1715. Charles XII and the Swedish army was in Stresow on Rügen’s east coast, and was on the verge of losing a battle would mean that Sweden lost its last bridgehead on the continent. A fiendeskott hit him in the chest and he and the few thousand-strong army was forced to retreat to finally see Rügen and Stralsund to fall into enemy hands.
Karl XII were treated by the royal physician Melchior Neumann in Stralsund, and after three weeks he was able to leave the city, in what today is Germany, and the Swedish army surrendered.
was his bloody clothes. And maybe have the shirt he wore found its way to Sweden and the tv-show this Thursday, where the historian Svante Ståhl in Visby showed up when the popular tv program came to the Borgholm castle ruin to play in the september 3 last year.
A shirt that raises curious questions and can be a part of Swedish history.
“I would really like to get up on the shirt belonged to Charles XII of sweden,” says Svante Ståhl, who learned of it five years ago, when he was called up by a man in Lübeck who took care of the estate of a colleague who had died.
Among the remaining items, there was an envelope with a shirt and a patch.
” Where was it that the shirt had belonged to Karl XII. The man wanted to submit it to a museum in Sweden and have me as förbindelseman. For various reasons, it was not so. But I contacted a dna-researcher and professor in Uppsala, Marie Allen, and then she got the money of two funds she was able to take up dna from the shirt.
and Svante Ståhl is long and tortuous. And myself he believes that all the indications are that the shirt is authentic, and once has been worn by the king of sweden:
” My research has shown that one of the local doctors who treated Karl XII got to keep the shirt. A hundred years later got the shirt from a collector in Hanover since been sold by the descendants of the doctor. When the collector died in 1886 donated the shirt to a relative, and when the last of the family died in 2013 found the envelope and I was contacted.
the Shirt is very short, flowery and lacking sleeves. A large hole after a shot is seen in the chest near the left arm. Around the hole a faded field of blood.
Self hope Svante Ståhl that it is possible to prove that the shirt really belonged to the Swedish king. A textilexpert has ruled that the fabric has been proven to come from Turkey, where Charles XII had been before he came to the siege of Stralsund in the end of 1714, and the frontal shot hole sits in exactly the place where the king had been wounded by a muskötkula in november 1715. The last step is to compare the dna that has now been published by professor Allen with what is on the other bloody clothing at the royal armoury.
“I hope to get experts interested in going further on this,” says Svante Ståhl.
On Thursday displayed the strange shirt up in the tv-show.
