Arnold Johan Messenius

Arnold Johan Messenius (Gdańsk, 1607 – , 1651) was a Swedish enfant terrible and Rikshistoriograf who was condemned to death and executed under the reign of Christina, Queen of Sweden.

Arnold was the son of the historian Johannes Messenius. He spent much of his youth in the fortress of Kajaneborg in Arctic Finland, where his father had been imprisoned on suspicion of being a Catholic and collaborating with the king of Poland Sigismund III Vasa and the Jesuits.

His father was sentenced to death in July 1616, but the king changed the sentence to prison, probably for life. Messenius wrote during his imprisonment Scandia illustrata, a history of the Nordic countries in 14 volumes, which treated Sweden's history from the deluge to Messenius' own time. When Messenius suspected that the government wanted to publish this work in its own name, he demanded freedom for his son, who was also imprisoned, and free passage for himself to wherever he wished. Shortly after Messenius died, and the government offered his widow, Lucia Grothusen, 500 Swedish riksdaler for Scandia illustrata. However, she left the kingdom with the manuscripts.

Arnold had a restless adolescence. In 1621, at the age of 14, the Swedish authorities locked him up in Uppsala in a boarding school run by Lutherans. He was forced to flee (1623) for being accused of what seems to be accidentally killing a classmate during a dispute and, after an adventurous escape through Norway and Denmark, he arrived in Gdańsk, where he was welcomed by his mother's family. In October 1623 he was accepted at the prestigious Jesuit Collegium Hosianum in Braunsberg (Poland), where his father also had studied, but, undisciplined, he left shortly afterwards. After wandering in Prussia, Poland, Silesia, Bohemia and Austria, he returned to Sweden in July 1624 in the wake of Krzysztof Radziwiłł, a noble Lithuanian Protestant and opponent of Gustav II Adolf of Sweden.

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