thumb|Trading near Pello, as depicted by the Carta Marina (1539). The Birkarls (; ) were a small, unofficially organized group that controlled taxation and commerce in central Lappmarken in Sweden from the 13th to the 17th century.
thumb|Trading near Pello, as depicted by the Carta Marina (1539). The Birkarls (; ) were a small, unofficially organized group that controlled taxation and commerce in central Lappmarken in Sweden from the 13th to the 17th century.
==Background== Birkarls (bircharlaboa) are first mentioned in 1328, when they are listed as one of the settler groups in northern Hälsingland, a designation that covered the western coast of Gulf of Bothnia all the way up and around the gulf to Oulu River.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).