Eric XIV, Swedish: Erik XIV (13 December 1533 – 26 February 1577) is King of Sweden from 1560 until he is deposed in 1568.
Eric XIV is the son of Gustav I (1496–1560) and Catherine of Saxe-Lauenburg (1513–1535).
He is also ruler of Estonia, after its conquest by Sweden in 1561.
While he has been regarded as intelligent and artistically skilled, as well as politically ambitious, early in his reign he shows signs of mental instability, a condition which eventually lead sto insanity.
Eric suffers from schizophrenia and some scientists claim that his illness burst out early during his reign time and others think that he became sick after the Sture murders.
However the psychiatrists who diagnosed him as schizophrenic did not question what the sources said about the king.
When Eric XIV is deposed it is important to make sure everybody understood that he was not fit to be king.
Today historians have questioned the truth of the sources of the slander of Eric XIV.
Eric, being deposed and imprisoned, in all probability was murdered with arsenic.
An examination of his remains in 1958 confirmed that it can safely be assumed he died of arsenic poisoning.
He had been crowned as Eric XIV, but it has been disputed and considered unlikely that he actually was the 14th king of Sweden named Eric.
He and his brother Charles IX (1604–1611) adopted numerals according to a mythological History of Sweden.
None of the Swedish kings named Eric before this one, of which there have been at least seven, are known to have used numerals.
An unsubstantiated saga about the first known of the mythological Swea chieftains named Eric has been staged by some authors in the early 5th century A.D.
