Axel Oxenstierna

Count Axel Gustafsson Oxenstierna af Södermöre was born on June 16, 1583, at Fånö manor, Uppland. Educated at the universities of Rostock, Wittenberg, and Jena, he was appointed Lord High Chancellor by King Gustavus Adolphus in 1612 at age twenty-eight.

Oxenstierna created the modern bureaucratic state: his Instrument of Government of 1634 established the world's first modern centralized civil service ministries and administrative divisions (län). Following Gustavus Adolphus's death at the Battle of Lützen in 1632, Oxenstierna directed Swedish armies and diplomacy throughout the Thirty Years' War, heading the regency for Queen Christina and securing Sweden's supremacy around the Baltic at the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.