The Swedish King, as Finland’s ruler, establishes the small settlement of Helsingfors in 1550 in the south of this country on the tip of a small peninsula on the Gulf of Finland, as a fortress to maintain Sweden's control of the Baltic Sea and to keep such control from passing to Russia.

Gustav intends the town to serve the purpose of consolidating trade in the southern part of Finland and providing a competitor to Reval (today: Tallinn), a nearby Hanseatic League city that dominates local trade at this time.

In order to ensure the economic viability of the city, the King orders the citizens of several other towns to relocate to Helsingfors, but the order does not seem to have achieved its intended effect.

The Swedish acquisition of northeastern Estonia, including Reval, at the conclusion of the Livonian War in 1582, will cause the Swedish crown to lose interest in building up a competitor to Reval, and Helsingfors is to languish as a forgotten village for decades thereafter, its establishment as Finland’s capital, today a world-class city, still centuries in the future.