6
DENMARK
The Baltic and European Conflict
Scandinavian involvement in the Thirty Years War linked Central European problems with a struggle for Baltic dominance. Like Spanish and French intervention, Swedish and Danish participation helped prolong and widen the conflict, rather than contributing directly to its causes. Scandinavian concerns remained distinct, with the Baltic struggle beginning well before the Central European strife, and rumbling on beyond the Peace of Westphalia. However, unlike the western powers, Denmark and Sweden were more closely involved with the constitutional issues at the heart of the Empire’s problems. In Denmark’s case, this was because its king was already an imperial Estate-holder and was deeply involved in the religious politics of northern Germany. Sweden was relatively distant at this stage, and indeed was regarded by most Germans as barely part of the civilized world. However, its intervention in 1630 seriously complicated imperial politics and resulted in Sweden becoming tied to the imperial constitution, both through its guarantee for the peace settlement and its acquisition of territory that remained part of the Empire.
Sweden and Denmark were joined in the Baltic struggle by Poland after 1599. Polish involvement linked Baltic affairs with those further east, notably the civil war in Muscovy, as well as with the troubles along its own southern borders with Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia. All three Baltic rivals were related by marriage and political alliances with German princely houses, including in the Danish and Polish cases with the Habsburgs. Trading interests added further connections to western countries like the Netherlands, and the Stuart monarchy in the British Isles. The latter were bound by the marriage of King James VI to Anne of Denmark in 1590.
Of the three rivals, Denmark was initially the most important as it had been at the heart of the Scandinavian Union of Kalmar since 1397. This had been a purely personal union, since Denmark, Sweden and Norway retained their own royal councils composed of leading nobles to safeguard their laws and interests.1 Denmark was also more closely linked to imperial politics, being governed since 1448 by a branch of the Oldenburg dynasty whose court spoke German. Other relations ruled the small principality of Oldenburg itself, while a further branch in Gottorp shared the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein with the Danish king. Schleswig lay entirely under Danish jurisdiction, but Holstein was part of the Lower Saxon Kreis and possession of it made both the king and his Gottorp cousin imperial Estate-members with representation in the Reichstag.
Danish pre-eminence within the Union of Kalmar was sustained by the subordination of Norway since 1387. The royal branch of the Oldenburgs governed around 1.18 million subjects by 1620, of whom two-thirds were in Denmark and the rest in Norway. There were another 185,000 in Holstein, while the Gottorps had 50,000 in their part of the principality, and twice that in Schleswig. Possession of the Faeroe Islands and Iceland added a few thousand more, but the combined total was still relatively small in European terms, being roughly comparable to that of the kingdom of Bohemia. Sweden and Finland had a combined population of 1.2 million in 1620, with a further 250,000 scattered in provinces along the southern Baltic (of which more shortly). Like the Danes and Norwegians, the Swedes and Finns were concentrated primarily in the southern portions of their respective countries, with the vast hinterland remaining virtually uninhabited.
The struggle for dominance of the Baltic followed the collapse of the Union of Kalmar in 1520–3 when the Swedish nobility rejected the Danish king and chose their own monarch. The two fragments of the former union, Denmark-Norway and Sweden-Finland, quarrelled over their bilateral relations while fighting internally over their forms of government. Both kings claimed the united legacy of the three crowns of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, and Denmark contested Sweden’s secession from the union, harbouring hopes of subordinating it again, or at least maintaining its own position as the dominant Baltic power. The dispute focused on the western Baltic, especially the Sound that gave the sole access to the North Sea. The practical issues were expressed symbolically in the contest for the exclusive right to the old coat of arms bearing the three crowns on a common shield. Rivalry did not preclude periods of relative quiet, even of cooperation, but nonetheless it led to six so-called ‘Northern Wars’ (in 1563–70, 1611–13, 1643–5, 1657–8, 1658–60 and 1675–9), before being settled in the last, Great Northern War (1700–21) that exhausted both rivals and allowed Russia to seize the eastern end of the Baltic.2
The early stages of the conflict saw Denmark retaining Scania in southern Sweden, restricting its rival’s access to the Sound to a narrow strip of land along the Göte river that drained Lake Vänern into the North Sea. This strategic corridor was secured by the coastal fortress of Alvsborg, next to the modern city of Gothenburg. It would remain a bone of contention until Sweden captured the entire western and southern coasts of the Sound in 1658. Sweden sought to secure its independence, and then to displace Denmark from pole position, both by driving it from the northern side of the Sound and by acquiring a more prominent European profile for the Swedish royal house.
Danish Wealth and Power
Neither monarch had the full support of his people for these wars. International rivalry required resources that the thinly populated Baltic found difficult to produce, heightening tensions between the kings and their subjects who had enjoyed a large degree of autonomy within the decentralized medieval union. Christian III emerged victorious from a civil war in Denmark to impose greater royal authority after 1536.3 Norway and Iceland lost their autonomy and were placed under direct royal rule, while Lutheranism was consolidated with a state church on the German model. The Danish Catholic bishops were imprisoned, at a stroke reducing the once-powerful council (Riksråd) to around twenty secular advisers who were obliged to swear an oath to an abstract concept of a crown transcending the life of an individual monarch. The king confiscated the Catholic church lands, amounting to a third of the cultivated area, giving him direct control of half of the country. The 2,000 nobles remained powerful through their possession of a further 44 per cent of the cultivated land. They were reconciled to the new order by being given greater authority over their tenants, who now slipped to the status of serfs. The elective character of the monarchy formally remained intact, however, and the Riksråd’s consent was still necessary to raise taxes or declare war.
The Danish settlement established a balance between a greatly strengthened monarchy and a still-powerful nobility. The king enjoyed autonomy beyond the Danish constitution through his persona as duke of Holstein, enabling him to circumvent the Riksråd. For example, Christian IV forced the councillors to back his war against Sweden in 1611 by threatening to start it anyway in his capacity as duke. The crown also intervened in landlord–peasant relations, imposing rent controls to retain residual loyalty from the rural population. Economic growth kept most nobles happy, as they profited from the booming grain trade. More subtly, the crown influenced the composition of the nobility by manipulating its feudal jurisdiction to award vacant fiefs to sympathetic families. By 1625 one-third of the nobility had accumulated three-quarters of the crown fiefs, creating an aristocracy closely allied to the monarchy. As their wealth allowed them to send their sons to foreign universities and on European tours, the aristocracy came to share the crown’s wider horizons, as well as its desire to defend Lutheranism and its pretensions to Baltic dominance.
Above all, the Danish king became immensely wealthy, largely freeing him from the fiscal constraints that emasculated his peers.4 The Sound tolls were the most obvious and strategically sensitive source of royal bounty. Denmark controlled all three passages between the North Sea and the Baltic: the two minor routes passed the islands off the Jutland coast, and the Oresund, or great channel between the islands and Scania that was the only practical route for large ships. Baltic trade was booming, fuelled by the symbiotic development of the western European population and the eastern European manorial economy. In addition to grain, the region produced timber, tar, hemp, copper and other vital ‘naval stores’ essential for all maritime nations. Nearly 5,400 ships passed through the Sound in 1583, three times the number which made the journey fifty years before. An increasingly sophisticated toll system combining weight and cargo value was developed at Elsinore, while additional toll points were established in northern Norway to tap the alternative route to Russia through Murmansk. Annual toll revenue surged tenfold between 1560 and 1608 to reach 241,000 riksdalers. Its real value was as an independent source of income that flowed directly into the king’s private account rather than the national treasury.5 The tolls also enhanced the king’s international influence, because he could reward allies with preferential rates that were vital in the highly competitive bulk transport market.
Rather like Spain’s silver, Denmark’s tolls obscured underlying economic and fiscal weaknesses that were only exposed once the country became involved in the Thirty Years War. Though it collected the tolls, it did not control the trade. Over half the ships passing through the Sound were Dutch, with the remainder mainly English and German. Denmark’s trading participation was restricted to producing some of the grain and timber for transport, as well as Norwegian deep-sea fishing. The Danish monarchy thus remained what is termed a ‘domain state’, heavily reliant on income derived from the crown lands that accounted for 67 per cent of royal revenue in 1608. The domain economy relied on barter, with the monarchy extracting produce directly from its tenants in lieu of rent. A large part was consumed directly by the royal court, or transferred as payment to officials who were only just beginning to receive salaries in coin. The remainder was sold on the market for cash.
The crown’s concern to emancipate itself from the nobility led it to avoid asking the Riksråd for regular funds. Taxes were used only as a temporary expedient during the 1563–70 Northern War and continued in its aftermath until 1590 to clear the remaining debts. The same procedure was adopted for the 1611–13 war with apparent success, creating a sense of optimism that was sustained by the economic boom that continued in Denmark until 1640, well beyond that elsewhere in Europe. Revenue from the crown lands continued to rise, producing annual surpluses of over 200,000 rd. after 1615. Despite spending vast sums on military preparations, Christian IV accumulated cash reserves worth at least 1 million rd., making him the third richest person in Europe after Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, reputedly worth 10 million florins, and his own mother, Sophia of Mecklenburg, who was worth 2.8 million rd. on her death in 1631. The Danish monarchy was in the unusual position of being a creditor rather than debtor. The king invested 432,000 rd. in his own East India Company that established a small colony at Tranquebar on the Coromandel coast. He also subsidized the whaling industry to undercut Dutch and British competitors, as well as promoting trade with Iceland, starting a silk factory in Copenhagen and other ventures intended to boost prestige and promote real economic development. By 1605 he had become banker to his nobility, and he extended further loans to help them weather temporary disruption in the manorial economy in 1618–23. This paid off politically by discouraging criticism of royal policies, while international loans complemented toll manipulation in winning foreign allies. However, the apparent wealth was deceptive. It gave the crown the means and confidence to embark on foreign adventures while obscuring the state’s shaky fiscal base. The tolls and grain exports would suffer if war failed to meet immediate success, especially as Sweden, the most likely enemy, was well-placed to disrupt both. And once the reserves had been spent, the crown had only the relatively inflexible domestic economy to fall back on, and lacked a sophisticated fiscal structure to tap even this.
Military expenditure consumed the lion’s share of royal wealth. The cash reserves gave the king an impressive first-strike capacity, enabling him to start major wars relatively rapidly. German mercenaries numbered no less than 24,000 in an army of 28,000 men when Denmark fought its first war with Sweden in 1563.6 Christian IV shifted the emphasis after 1596, concentrating on enhancing the country’s permanent defensive capability, while still relying on cash reserves to mobilize a strike force if needed. At least 1 million riksdalers were spent modernizing and expanding fortresses between 1596 and 1621. Eight major installations were completed to secure Scania and the other provinces in southern and western Sweden, while Christiana (modern Oslo) was built to protect Norway. Another two fortresses were developed on Själland, the largest of the islands, to cover Copenhagen. Three more were built to guard access into western Holstein: at Stade in the archbishopric of Bremen, Glückstadt on the north bank of the Elbe and Krempe just to its north-east. Other works were constructed to protect eastern Holstein, Schleswig and Jutland.
The militia was reorganized between 1599 and 1602 to provide trained manpower to garrison the fortresses and defend the country without the expense of maintaining a large army. Cavalry were formed from the feudal knights’ service (rostjeneste) owed by the nobles holding crown fiefs, while infantry were raised from the freeholders and crown tenants. The militia was consolidated into a national system in 1609 and reorganized in two stages, in 1614 and 1620–1, following the second war with Sweden. It now totalled 5,400 peasant conscripts serving for three years, drawn through quotas imposed on each district and paid by the crown directly from its domains’ revenue, while the nobles maintained twelve permanent cavalry companies. The crown accepted certain constraints as the price for the nobles’ cooperation, and agreed the militia would only be used for national defence. The conscripts defined this rather more narrowly than the crown, and those sent to build Glückstadt after 1617 quickly deserted. Christian’s reforms had distinct Danish roots, but he was certainly influenced by the Nassau militia and it is no surprise that he had Count Johann’s drill book printed in Danish. Like Johann, the king also believed a cadre of professional troops was vital to stiffen the conscripts and began maintaining around 4,000 regulars, many of them recruited in northern Germany. These formed the basis of the Danish strike force in 1611 and 1625, in both cases being supplemented by further mercenaries hired with the cash reserve, while the militia was mobilized to garrison the fortresses.
Christian also invested heavily in the navy, fully appreciating its significance in Baltic warfare. The Danish fleet in 1588 was already the same size as that of the English who defeated the Armada. Naval expenditure in 1618 was six times that consumed by the fortress programme, enabling total tonnage to be increased from 11,000 in 1600 to 16,000 by 1625. More importantly, the king invested heavily in new designs, building larger, more heavily armed warships, including the 44-gun Victor, launched in 1599, which was replaced by the 54-gun Store Sophia as flagship in 1627.7
Denmark and the Empire
Contemporaries and later generations speculated on the purpose of these armaments that are strikingly at odds with subsequent Danish history as a pacific minor power. Some have projected this later image back into the seventeenth century, arguing that the Riksråd represented true Danish interests of pacific non-alignment against Christian IV’s reckless personal ambitions. More recent research suggests that the king was also concerned for his country’s security and it was this that prompted his involvement in European affairs. The real reason behind the Riksråd’s objections was the nobles’ realization that royal adventures would affect their incomes and domestic political influence. Baltic interests remain paramount in Danish accounts of what followed, but the Oldenburg dynasty retained German roots and continued interest in the Empire. King Frederick II’s elder sister married the elector of Saxony in 1548, establishing firm ties to the premier Lutheran territory and so associating Denmark with the Saxon concern to preserve the 1555 religious and political settlement.8
Danish policy became more aggressive when Frederick’s son, Christian IV, achieved his majority in 1596. Having succeeded his father at the age of eleven, Christian spent eight years guided by a regency of four aristocratic councillors. The experience gave him a good insight into the mentality of his nobility and he learned how to manipulate their sensibilities. Denmark was the most powerful Protestant monarchy alongside England and both Frederick and his son regarded themselves as guardians of Lutheran interests throughout Europe; however, while outwardly orthodox, Christian remained a moderate who was driven more by his sense of duty to his kingdom than by religious goals. He was a man of restless energy, likely to plunge enthusiastically into projects, only to fall into despair at the first setback, before bouncing back with renewed confidence. A good organizer, he often wrecked his plans through impatience and a reluctance to delegate. Despite significant defeats, he passed into Danish consciousness as the country’s best-loved king, not least for his lively character, great appetite and energetic love life. A loveless first marriage to Anna Catherina of Brandenburg was followed by a succession of mistresses, culminating in a second, morganatic marriage to Kirsten Munk, a well-connected young Danish noblewoman who failed to return her husband’s devotion and later tried to murder him. A lack of passion did not preclude three sons from the first marriage. The eldest prince shared his father’s first name and passion for drink, but none of his intellect or vigour and predeceased him in 1647. Ulrik, the youngest, died at 22 in 1633, leaving only Frederick, the middle son, to succeed their father in 1648. The two early deaths could not have been predicted, of course, and for much of his reign, Christian was driven by his strongly Lutheran sense of family responsibility to provide for two princes who could not inherit the kingdom.
The search for suitable accommodation for the younger princes was one factor behind Christian’s intrusion into the politics of the north German imperial church. It would be wrong to reduce Danish strategy to a stark choice between ‘Baltic’ or ‘German’ options, since Christian’s policies served a number of complementary aims. Baltic domination was not simply a Scandinavian matter but involved Denmark’s standing in Europe, and this in turn related to the dynasty’s involvement in the Empire as the heart of Christendom. The Oldenburgs were related to most of the Protestant German princely families. Though Holstein lacked electoral status, the dukes’ own royal pedigree inclined them to act as if they were second only to the emperor in terms of rank and influence. Influence in the Empire reflected positively on Denmark’s standing elsewhere and would deter the upstart Swedes from interfering in what Christian considered his own backyard. The installation of his sons as Protestant administrators in north German bishoprics would not only give them status and incomes but would advance Denmark’s Lutheran credentials by safeguarding these lands for the German Protestants. The archbishopric of Bremen and the other prime targets of Danish ambitions lay in a ring from the North Sea round to the south of Holstein and up north-eastwards to the Baltic. Danish national security would be enhanced if these lands were in friendly hands, and Denmark would assume the dominant place in Lower Saxon politics. Finally, the church lands straddled the Weser, Elbe and other rivers draining north Germany into the two seas. Their possession would enable Denmark to extend its toll system into Germany and to assert supremacy over the powerful Hanseatic League.
The Hanseatic League began in 1160 and grew to encompass seventy German towns, as well as another hundred associate members from Flanders to Finland. It was the most successful of a number of medieval civic leagues, whose principal role had been to force European rulers to grant extensive trading concessions to their members. However, it failed to match the military potential of large monarchies and was in a slow, terminal decline. Many members saw inclusion within the Empire as imperial cities as a better guarantee for economic and political autonomy. Lübeck, the founding city, had already secured this, and others, like Magdeburg and Brunswick, saw Hanseatic membership as a means of escaping the jurisdiction of their own territorial ruler. The status of the Hanseatic towns was thus unclear; major cities like Bremen and Hamburg regarded themselves as autonomous yet they did not have full recognition as imperial cities.
The situation enabled Denmark to forge close ties with other north German princes who were also seeking to suppress civic autonomy and acquire bishoprics for their relations. Christian’s most important ally was Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who sought to subjugate the city of Brunswick and had already become administrator of Halberstadt in 1566. He married Christian’s sister Elisabeth, thus tying Denmark to the Guelph family who had long played a major role in imperial politics and were the most prominent secular princes in north-western Germany. Heinrich Julius favoured other Guelphs to follow him, notably his youngest son, Christian, who became administrator of Halberstadt in 1616. However, his widow promoted the career of Christian IV’s middle son Frederick, who was admitted to the Halberstadt chapter in April 1623 and groomed as successor. Heinrich Julius’s brother, Philipp Sigismund, was Protestant administrator in Verden and Osnabrück and also furthered Frederick’s career, ensuring his succession in Verden in 1623. Meanwhile, Prince Ulrik became administrator of the small bishopric of Schwerin, extending Danish influence to the east.
Bremen was the big prize. It was both the largest church land in the region and, as an archbishopric, the most prestigious. Its acquisition would give Denmark possession of both the Weser estuary and the southern side of the Elbe. Holstein already gave Christian part of the northern bank and he used this to assert claims to Hamburg, the largest, most vibrant and successful of all the Hanseatic towns. Arguing that the city belonged to Holstein, he deployed troops to force it to swear allegiance in October 1603. However, the burghers successfully took him to court and the Reichskammergericht ruled in their favour in July 1618. Christian retaliated by developing Glückstadt on Holstein land below the city from where he could levy tolls on ships passing between Hamburg and the North Sea. However, attempts to get Bremen were bitterly resisted by his Gottorp relations who had been administrators there and in the small bishopric of Lübeck since 1585. Relentless pressure forced them to accept Prince Frederick as coadjutor in November 1621, leading to his accession as archbishop of Bremen thirteen years later. Denmark now surrounded both Hamburg and the city of Bremen.9
THE DIVIDED HOUSE OF VASA
Sweden’s Brothers’ Quarrel
The growth of Danish influence in northern Germany was offset by that of its rival at the opposite end of the Baltic. Sweden’s rise as a European great power is one of the most remarkable stories of seventeenth-century international relations. Though the material basis of Swedish imperialism lay earlier in the conquest of the Livonian and Estonian ports, it was only Gustavus Adolphus’s victories in Germany in 1630–2 that brought international recognition of the country’s new status. Rapid expansion was accompanied by equally dramatic developments in religious and cultural life as the country’s elite sought European acceptance, while foreigners arrived bringing ideas and influences from across Europe.
Sweden’s internal development broadly followed that of Denmark. The monarchy emerged from a civil war after the collapse of the Union of Kalmar. Gustavus Vasa suppressed aristocratic opposition to hereditary rule and expanded the crown’s economic base by pushing its share of the 100,000 peasant farms to over 21 per cent, while reducing the proportion under the nobles’ control to 16 per cent. The rest were freeholders, in contrast to the situation in Denmark where their counterparts held only 6 per cent of all farms. These statistics underscore the relative weakness of the Swedish nobility who numbered only around four hundred families in 1600. A mere fifteen aristocrats held 60 per cent of all seigneurial land, leaving the rest mostly with fewer than ten peasant tenancies apiece. Nine out every ten Swedes were peasants, and virtually all economic activity was organized at household level because there were no manorial estates like those in Denmark or Poland. Social stratification was less extreme, and though life was relatively hard for all the inhabitants, the poor were not as impoverished as they were elsewhere. Peasants had thick black woollen coats, hats and gloves, and wore sturdy leather boots in place of the wooden clogs of most western Europeans. Nobles lived modestly, and though they were beginning to send their sons on grand educational tours by 1600, they had not yet adopted the more lavish lifestyles already popular in Denmark and Poland based around fine clothes, rich food and sumptuous country houses.10
The monarchy’s more immediate problems came not from recalcitrant nobles, but from feuds within the ruling dynasty in a situation broadly similar to that among the Austrian Habsburgs where rival brothers struggled for supremacy. Erik XIV, Gustavus Vasa’s eldest son, was initially accepted as king and began a policy of expansion in the eastern Baltic. He exploited the collapse of the Teutonic Order that had conquered the entire Baltic coast from Prussia through modern Lithuania and Latvia to Estonia but fell apart after its defeat by Poland at Tannenberg in 1410. The Poles captured western (royal) Prussia containing the Vistula delta, immediately east of Pomerania and the imperial frontier. They also seized the bishopric of Semgallia immediately north east of the rest of Prussia, thus cutting the Order state in two. Eastern Prussia escaped annexation solely because the grand master, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, converted to Lutheranism and secularized it as a duchy under Polish overlordship in 1525. His line died out after a long history of mental illness, and ducal Prussia passed to the Brandenburg Hohenzollerns in 1618. The remaining Teutonic knights struggled on as a separate Livonian Order in the area north beyond Semgallia, but came under growing Russian pressure in the mid-sixteenth century. They appealed to the emperor for assistance, but most German princes doubted whether the region belonged to the Empire, forcing the knights to follow the Prussian example and convert to Lutheranism, accepting Polish protection. Only those knights in the southernmost area were successful in this, joining the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1561 as the duchy of Courland (now western Latvia).11 Erik saw his chance to seize the rest of what was then known as Livonia and landed an expeditionary force that captured Reval (Tallinn) in June 1561, bringing Sweden and Poland to the verge of war.
In the event, it was the Danes who drew their swords in 1563, believing they had to strike before their rivals became established in Livonia. Since Erik’s actions had stirred both Polish and Russian hostility, Denmark also saw a chance to reconquer Sweden itself. One Danish force attacked Livonia, while another captured the strategic fortress of Alvsborg, triggering a crisis within Sweden. Duke Johan, Gustavus Vasa’s second son, had close ties to the Polish royal family, having married Katarzyna Jagiellonka in 1562, the sister of the last Jagiellon king of Poland. He conspired with his relatives and the small Swedish aristocracy to depose Erik, declaring him insane on the grounds of his marriage to a peasant girl and imprisoning him in 1568. Johan extricated his country from the war, agreeing to pay a large ransom to recover Alvsborg, but clinging on to Estonia, the most northerly part of the old Order state, at the cost of a protracted struggle with Russia that dragged on until 1595. The real beneficiary of this Danish-Swedish war was Poland, which annexed the rest of Livonia, thus securing much of the south-eastern Baltic coast.
Though Johan was recognized as the Swedish king in 1569, he was obliged to share power with a council of the realm dominated by the aristocracy. Relations became strained when his Polish ambitions led him to reverse the slow progress of the Reformation in Sweden and favour Catholicism. His son Sigismund was raised a Catholic, as were many Swedes at this time, and groomed to succeed the Jagiellon dynasty that died out in 1572. These efforts met with success when the Polish nobles accepted the Swedish prince as King Sigismund III in 1587. However, the situation grew more difficult with Johan’s death in 1592, leaving the absent Sigismund as his heir. Actual government passed to Karl, Gustavus Vasa’s third son, who had been made duke of Södermanland by Johan to stop him claiming the throne. In many ways the least attractive of the three brothers, Karl conspired to prevent his nephew displacing him, and so formally declared Sweden a Lutheran country in 1593. Sigismund was obliged to accept this when he finally arrived in Sweden, and also to leave government to Karl when Polish affairs forced him to return there. Religious, provincial and personal factors fuelled the formation of two factions around the uncle and his nephew. Matters came to a head when Sigismund returned at the head of a small Polish army in 1598. Karl rallied the burghers and peasants under the Lutheran banner and drove his nephew from Sweden in 1600, instigating the infamous Linköping Bloodbath to execute those aristocrats who failed to escape or change sides. The survivors accepted him as King Charles IX in 1604. This did not end the wider war, however, and the Poles evicted the Swedes from Livonia after the battle of Kirkholm in 1605, while the conflict dragged on to 1611. The Vasa dynasty was permanently split into hostile Catholic-Polish and Lutheran-Swedish branches, entrenching enmity between the two countries lasting into the eighteenth century.
The civil war left Sweden isolated. Protestant rulers continued to look to Denmark for leadership, regarding Charles IX as a usurper, despite his Lutheran credentials. Moreover, Charles overreached himself in an attempt to seize control of trade in the eastern Baltic. The conquest of Estonia and its port of Narva in 1581 closed Muscovy’s access to the Baltic and forced it to redirect trade through the Arctic, founding the port of Archangel in 1583. Charles now tried to intercept this trade by claiming Lapland and the north Norwegian coast (Finnmark). These regions were largely uninhabited but essential if Sweden was going to levy tolls on trade through the White Sea. The attempt precipitated the second Northern War in 1611. This essentially repeated the first. Denmark again demonstrated military superiority by taking Alvsborg and other strategic points, but its margin of victory was less convincing and it ended the war with the Peace of Knäred in 1613. Sweden renounced its claims to northern Norway and to Ösel Island in the Baltic, and again ransomed Alvsborg, paying 1 million riksdalers in 1616–19.12
Gustavus Adolphus and Oxenstierna
Sweden accepted these terms because Charles’s death in October 1611 left government in the hands of his seventeen-year-old son, Gustavus Adolphus, who, under Swedish law, could not be king until his twenty-first birthday. The aristocracy saw a chance to recover their influence lost by backing the wrong Vasa in the civil war. Many still sympathized with Sigismund and they used the Polish threat to force concessions. Coming against the backdrop of defeat by Denmark, the crisis could easily have led to renewed civil war, and there were already rural revolts against taxation levied for the war and the subsequent Alvsborg ransom. However, a deal was brokered by the 28-year-old nobleman Axel Oxenstierna who drafted the Charter of Accession in 1611 that the new king had to agree to before being accepted. The nobles’ domination of the council was confirmed and they were also left with the great offices of state, including the chancellorship that went to Oxenstierna. The council’s knowledge, advice and consent were required for declaring war, levying taxation and conscription. The crown also had to negotiate with the diet (Riksdag) composed of the country’s four Estates (nobles, clergy, burghers and freeholders) and which could set limits to taxes.
The small size of Sweden’s elite contributed to the success of this arrangement. There were no more than six hundred adult male nobles at this point, and only a few were active in central or provincial politics. Government was a series of personal relationships and it was Sweden’s good fortune that the two leading figures were not only exceptionally talented, but good friends. Gustavus Adolphus was one of the most remarkable figures of the seventeenth century and already attracted almost mythological status in his own lifetime.13 He clearly made a distinct impression on those who met him, certainly qualifying to be what later generations would label ‘charismatic’. In an age where personal impressions were central to political relations, he possessed the key ability to speak to people regardless of status without compromising his own standing or losing their respect. Such a gift was essential in a country where the king regularly came into contact with ordinary subjects, through his travels or dealings with peasants in the Riksdag and provincial assemblies. Swedish peasants were less likely to address their superiors in the submissive terms expected elsewhere: one told Gustavus that ‘if my wife were as well dressed as yours, King Gustav, she would look as lovely and attractive as the queen’.14 Though they did not dispute the general direction of royal policy, ordinary Swedes still needed to be convinced that it was necessary to dig deep into their pockets to pay for it or, more urgently, to see thousands of native sons drafted each year. Gustavus’s ability to present his objectives in persuasive language to different groups was a vital element in winning support for his far-flung plans.
His character also exerted an influence on events. Many contemporaries noted an impulsive streak. He was liable to violent outbursts which, though they usually remained verbal rather than physical, were soon regretted. Despite efforts to master his emotions, he remained acerbic and peremptory, but his restless enthusiasm could be infectious. Though he liked to weigh options and take advice, his quick temper often cut in and prompted a sudden change of direction. While he did plan methodically, he remained above all a man of action who personally drilled soldiers, tested new cannon and sailed warships. He kept his countrymen’s modest habits, living frugally while on campaign and self-consciously sharing his soldiers’ hardships, even to the point of drinking unboiled water – a highly dangerous habit that led to at least one serious illness. Exposure to the richer German diet after 1630 made him stout during his last two years. He had little time for pomp or ceremony, but appreciated their political utility to sustain his regal status. He also enjoyed the social occasions central to aristocratic and courtly life. When he discovered that there were not enough female partners at a ball in Frankfurt in 1631, he ordered reinforcements drafted in from the city.
His fame was magnified by his apparently charmed life. On several occasions his horse was shot from under him, or crashed through the thin ice of a frozen river. Friends were smashed to pieces beside him, yet each time he miraculously survived. It was said that a cannon ball entered the side of his tent and swerved to miss his head at the siege of Riga in 1621. Certainly, he was hit in the neck at Dirschau in August 1627 and though the bullet lodged permanently, he recovered, albeit with lifelong stiffness. Such episodes reinforced his faith in divine providence and belief that he was doing God’s will. Later writers, like the philosopher Hegel, took the king at his word and interpreted him as an instrument of world spirit, destined to unfold history. Gustavus grew up with his father’s propaganda that linked the Vasas’ dynastic struggle to the Protestant cause. He appears to have sincerely believed that these two interests were genuinely the same. While on a visit to Germany in 1620, he bribed a priest in Erfurt to let him secretly observe mass, an experience that confirmed all his prejudices about Catholicism. However, his own faith remained broadly evangelical rather than narrowly confessional, and he rejected the Swedish clergy’s demand to endorse the conservative Book of Concord in the 1611 Charter. He was also prepared to manipulate religious sensitivities for political ends. His father had well-known Calvinist inclinations and while Gustavus personally remained closer to Lutheranism, he did little to disabuse Calvinist German princes from their belief that he was one of their church.
Oxenstierna was the other figure in the partnership. Gustavus famously remarked of their relationship that ‘if my ardour did not put some life into your phlegm, we should never get anything done at all’.15 In some respects, the new chancellor was indeed the opposite of the king. Oxenstierna had travelled with his brothers to Rostock, Wittenberg and Jena to receive a good Protestant university education. He was the model undergraduate, growing accustomed to working late into the night and retaining this habit when he entered the Swedish administration in 1605. The elector of Saxony dismissed him as a ‘scribbler’, and he certainly voiced regrets that official business kept him away from his library and own intellectual interests. His formidable memory and attention to detail ensured his rapid rise as much as his aristocratic connections to Sweden’s leading families. Nonetheless, his privileged upbringing inclined him to arrogance and he could be blunt with colleagues, feeling that he alone knew best. Unlike the king, he lacked all sense of humour, but was at least blessed with good sleep, able to remain calm, cool and calculating under extreme pressure.
The Basis of Swedish Power
The partnership between Gustavus and Oxenstierna can be divided into five phases. The first six years were spent extricating the country from conflicts begun by Charles IX. Then followed a brief period of domestic reform that greatly strengthened Sweden’s ability to fight major wars. This was first put to the test after 1621 when Gustavus embarked on a protracted struggle with Poland lasting until 1629 (see Chapter 13). Intervention in Germany followed in 1630, before Gustavus’s death in battle two years later left Oxenstierna alone as guide for the king’s young daughter, Queen Christina.
Conclusion of the Danish and Russian wars by 1617 permitted the king and his chancellor to stabilize the Swedish monarchy by staging the long postponed coronation. They suppressed the autonomous duchies previously granted to members of the royal family to stop these becoming focal points for the intrigues of Catholic Swedish émigrés in Poland. Government was also reorganized, though here we should be careful not to make too much of the reforms. It is true that they became models for other countries, notably Brandenburg-Prussia, and the Russia of Peter the Great, but this did not happen until later in the seventeenth century following the widespread admiration for Sweden’s victories from the 1630s to the 1650s. The reforms were gradual, and did not represent a clear blueprint for rational change. The royal council (Råd) slowly detached itself from the noble Estate in the Riksdag and evolved into a professional body representing the government rather than a social group. This was related to the division of business along functional lines into specialist departments, or ‘colleges’, around the five great offices of state: justice, treasury, chancellory, admiralty, army. The colleges had emerged in practice by 1630 and were formally recognized in further reforms four years later. None of these changes was particularly remarkable. Indeed, most German territories were already well on the way to similar administrative developments a century before. But once Sweden started, it soon forged ahead in terms of efficiency, providing a platform for further fiscal and military reforms.
The imperative of paying the Alvsborg ransom forced Sweden to revise its finances, introducing new taxes based on a population census conducted with the clergy’s assistance. The new tax registers permitted permanent taxes from 1620 that no longer needed to be negotiated with the Riksdag. The nobles accepted them, because they enjoyed personal exemption, while their tenants paid only half the rate collected from those on crown farms. Sweden modernized its domain economy faster than its Danish rival, moving over to payment in cash rather than kind and intensifying efforts to produce goods that could be sold on international markets. Dutch experts helped introduce an urban excise tax in 1623, as well as double-entry bookkeeping into the treasury the following year that soon gave Sweden the most advanced accounting system in Europe. Others were hired to develop natural resources, notably the Dutch Trip and Geer consortium that effectively started Swedish industry in the 1620s. Under its guidance, annual copper production rose fivefold over the next thirty years to reach 3,000 tonnes, and iron and copper already accounted for 67 per cent of exports by 1637.16 Participation in international trade was a vital prerequisite for military expansion since it gave access to foreign credit. Sweden developed a network of agents in key commercial centres, like Johan Adler Salvius in Hamburg, who negotiated with foreign political and financial backers. The profits from the copper trade, together with more reliable domains’ revenues, were used as security for loans that the agents used to buy war materials and recruit mercenaries.
Large sums were spent on the navy, which was expanded to 31 sailing warships and 5,000 personnel by 1630. The navy served as both a bridge and a bulwark for the Swedish empire.17 Its offensive capacity lay in the ability to transport the army to the southern Baltic shore, or to the Danish islands, and then provide coastal support. It also offered the first line of defence to prevent an enemy reaching Sweden. Two different types of warship were required to deal with the varied character of the Baltic and its coasts. The waters off the eastern Swedish and southern Finnish coasts were shallow with narrow passages between numerous islands. The German coast from Mecklenburg to the Oder estuary was also generally shallow and covered by sandbanks, as were many of the ports further east. The Swedes developed small, oared vessels to support the army by operating close inshore and up the major rivers that drained into the Baltic. These galleys could also be used to defend Sweden’s own coasts, but larger, sail-powered ships were required for the main battle fleet to intercept the more powerful Danish warships at sea. The two ship types were combined for operations in the deeper waters off the western Swedish and Norwegian coasts where there were also numerous islands. Sweden could not afford two separate fleets and was forced to balance the need for deep-water battleships with shallow draught galleys for amphibious operations and coastal defence.
Sweden’s military reforms have attracted more attention than the naval developments. The country was divided into recruiting districts in 1617–18, using registers that had been compiled since 1544. Each district was to provide one regiment (later more) by regular conscription from all able-bodied males aged between 18 and 40. Some towns were exempt, as were the properties of the senior aristocrats and the iron-and copper-mining communities. As with the administrative changes, the Swedish military system took several decades to develop and was not formalized until 1634, when the army was fixed at 13 Swedish and 10 Finnish infantry regiments, and 5 Swedish and 3 Finnish cavalry regiments. Each regiment bore the name of the province that provided its recruits in a system that lasted until 1925. Conscripts from coastal areas were sent to the navy, though few were experienced sailors before they were drafted. Administration was improved by requiring each regiment to send regular muster returns to the College of War, while new disciplinary codes were issued in 1621 and 1632.18 Conscription was tightened in 1642–4 by the administrative grouping of farms into files (rotar), each group being obliged to pay for one soldier. This provided the basis for the final stage that came in 1682 with the Indelningsverket system that lasted until 1901. One farm in each group was now set aside in peacetime to support the soldier, whose neighbours cultivated the plot when the army mobilized.
Later writers have read much into these measures, especially in the United States thanks to the reception of Gustavus Adolphus’s legacy through the syllabus of the West Point military academy. The king is praised as ‘one of the outstanding soldiers of world history, who was perhaps also the greatest military architect and innovator of all time’ who developed ‘a completely original military doctrine’.19 Britain’s leading military theorist of the twentieth century proclaimed the king as the ‘founder of modern war’, because he was allegedly the first to appreciate the full implications of firearms and the first to plan a campaign with a clear objective.20 The Swedish military reforms created the ‘first modern army’, thanks to its apparent reliance on national conscription, a professional officer corps and its ability to fight both offensively and defensively.21
Such praise is the product of the teleological nature of most military history that searches the past for lessons and precedents for contemporary doctrine. Similar comments have also been made about Frederick the Great, the Prussian king who defeated Austria in the mid-eighteenth century using an army that was also raised partially by limited conscription. Both monarchs have been presented as warrior kings who won spectacular victories against seemingly impossible odds. Eighteenth-century Prussian successes, like those of seventeenth-century Sweden, have been ascribed to the allegedly national character of both armies, supposedly more motivated than their heterogeneous opponents. Yet, more than half of both forces were composed of paid professionals, many of whom came from other countries.22 Like Prussian conscription, Gustavus’s system was the expedient of a poor state with an under-commercialized agrarian economy on the fringe of Europe’s market networks. Conscription was a blood tax in a state that lacked enough cash to pay for more professionals. Contemporaries recognized this; draft quotas were debated along with ordinary taxes in the Riksdag. The quotas fell heaviest on the poor, since those without visible means of support were automatically drafted, while the other men in each parish drew lots. Furthermore, the preoccupation with Gustavus as ‘great captain’ obscures why the system actually worked. The largely pastoral economy of Sweden and Finland left production decentralized in peasant households where many tasks could be taken over by women in their menfolk’s absence. A far higher proportion of the male population could be conscripted than in the cereal economies of Central and eastern Europe, where men were required to work on their landlords’ fields.
Imperial Ambitions
The true significance of the reforms after 1617 lies in their transformation of Sweden from a defeated and humiliated minor power to one with the capacity to dominate the Baltic by the mid-seventeenth century. However, the development of a fiscal-military infrastructure only explains how the Swedes built an empire, not why they wanted one. This is a legitimate question, since there were many reasons for Sweden to avoid war: it was on the periphery of Europe, with few resources and no significant allies. Explanations for Swedish imperialism fall into two camps.23 The so-called ‘old school’ is represented by Gustavus Adolphus’s principal biographers, who argue that Swedish expansion was a defensive response to thwart Danish and Polish encirclement. While these writers do point to structural factors, such as Sweden’s geographical location and the European balance of power, their main emphasis is on human agency through the person of the king and his immediate circle. It was clear after 1600 that Sigismund was determined to recover the Swedish throne and was only constrained by the Poles’ unwillingness to back him. The dynastic division deepened with confessional antagonism, while Swedes were inspired by their national mythology as the successors to the Goths who had sacked ancient Rome.
The opposing ‘new school’ identifies the need to distinguish between motive and justification, claiming that defence was a propagandist device to mask commercial motives. Swedes wanted to control the lucrative Baltic trade, especially targeting Russian grain, furs and other goods. Tolls produced only 6.7 per cent of net state revenue in 1623, indicating both the lack of indigenous commerce and the reality of Danish control of the Sound. Just over 23 per cent came from the profits of the copper trade, but this was an extractive industry simply exporting raw materials, while nearly 45 per cent of revenue still came directly from royal domains. Such an economy promised neither great-power status, nor aristocratic riches. However, if Sweden conquered the eastern Baltic shore, it could tax Russian and Polish produce nearer source and so pre-empt the Danish tolls. Some have elaborated this strand of the argument to claim that the Swedish monarchy made war deliberately to enrich itself and its aristocratic allies. Certainly, involvement in war provided new opportunities, particularly for the nobility who emerged as a wealthier and more socially distinct group in this period. In 1633 nobles secured partial exemption for their tenants from the taxes introduced in the 1620s, whereas crown tenants still paid in full. Conscription also fell heavier on the crown lands and freeholders, one in ten of whom was drafted, compared to one in twenty noble tenants. Essentially wealth was being redistributed into the nobles’ pockets, since the lighter state burdens permitted nobles to take a larger share of peasant produce. They also profited more directly from war, since the crown was compelled to transfer royal rights in lieu of payment, in a manner similar to that occurring in Castile between Spanish nobles and the monarch since the 1590s.
While we should indeed distinguish between justification and motive, the new school remains, on balance, less convincing. Wealth accumulation remained a means to a variety of other ends. Most recently, Swedish imperialism has been explained by the desire of the country’s elite to prove itself on an international stage and gain recognition for themselves and their kingdom.24 A craving for recognition afflicted all European monarchs and aristocrats, but it is difficult to see why this motive should necessarily take precedence over confessional, dynastic and strategic interests. Rather, it is simply another facet of a more complex mix of motives that also varied according to the situation. We must remember that Gustavus, Oxenstierna and other key figures could not take decisions in a void, but were forced to react to circumstances beyond their control. Once Sweden’s imperialism was set in motion, developments assumed a certain internal logic from which it was difficult to escape. Since the country lacked resources for a protracted war, it had to borrow in order to mobilize and so gambled on a swift victory to capture the means to sustain solvency. However, the initial victories were never enough to provide either the necessary resources or adequate security for existing possessions. Further operations became necessary to sustain an empire that could not afford to stand still. Such structural factors only surfaced consciously when the king and his advisers talked about defence and their concern at the hostile intent of other powers. Defence was legitimate, in their eyes, because they were God’s servants on earth, defending the true faith and the king’s rights as divinely ordained sovereign.
Sweden and the Empire
Dynasticism provided the initial stimulus. Both Gustavus and the aristocrats who accepted him as king stood to lose if Sigismund reconquered Sweden. Gustavus’s concern at the plots of Swedish Catholic émigrés may seem fanciful, but it represented the seventeenth-century equivalent of the modern belief in coherent international terror networks. The Poles were thought to be plotting with the Habsburgs and French nobles to create a new Catholic crusading order dedicated to overthrowing the Lutheran Vasas. The Örebro Statute of 1617 ordered all Catholics to leave Sweden within three months, on pain of death. Catholicism was equated with treasonable contact with Sigismund, yet despite intensive surveillance, the authorities only managed to bring three Swedes to trial for assisting a German Jesuit to distribute Catholic literature.
International plots had to be confronted by an equally broad alliance of the righteous. Gustavus was already related to several important German Protestant families. His mother (Charles IX’s second wife) was Christina of Holstein-Gottorp, granddaughter of Philip of Hessen, one of the heroes of the Reformation. Gustavus was also related to the leading German Calvinist family through Charles IX’s first wife, Maria, the daughter of the elector Palatine Ludwig VI. Their daughter Katarina, Gustavus’s elder half-sister, married Johann Casimir, a representative of the Zweibrücken branch of the Palatines. The question of Gustavus’s own marriage began to loom large, since it was imperative that he produce a legitimate heir to forestall a Polish restoration. His family grew concerned at his relationship with Margaretha Slots, the Dutch wife of an army officer, who bore him an illegitimate son (Gustav Gustavsson) in 1616.
Negotiations were opened in 1615 for Gustavus to marry Maria Eleonora, eldest daughter of Elector Johann Sigismund of Brandenburg. The proposed match would link Sweden to a second Protestant electorate and promised distinct strategic advantages. Brandenburg was due to inherit ducal Prussia (as occurred in 1618), a territory that lay south of Livonia. With this in friendly hands, Polish Livonia could be outflanked, since Sweden already controlled Estonia to the north. There was also the possibility of neutralizing Danish influence in Brandenburg following Christian IV’s marriage to Johann Sigismund’s sister, Anna Catherina. However, the proposal placed the elector in a dilemma. A Swedish alliance might increase his leverage with Poland over Prussia, but equally could incur King Sigismund’s long-term enmity. The elector’s wife was Anna of Prussia, who feared the Poles would sequestrate her homeland if the marriage went ahead, and so declared she would rather see her daughter in the grave than in Sweden. Alternative proposals of marriage arrived from Denmark and Poland, intensifying the pressure. All suitors clearly overestimated Brandenburg’s potential, since it was the weakest of the four secular electorates. The attention went to Maria Eleonora’s head and she developed a passion for Gustavus, whom she was not allowed to meet privately until her fate had been decided.
Gustavus lost patience and, ignoring the advice of relations and councillors, appeared in Berlin in April 1620. He could scarcely have picked a worse moment. The elector had just died, and his son and heir, Georg Wilhelm, was away in Königsberg seeking Polish confirmation of his Prussian inheritance. After a frosty reception by the dowager electress, Gustavus gave in to his brother-in-law, Johann Casimir, and dashed off to Heidelberg to meet a much-praised Palatine princess instead. No sooner had he gone than Anna had a change of heart, fearing a Polish match for her daughter would have even worse repercussions. Gustavus returned and worked his magic at a private meeting with Maria on 18 June. The betrothal was announced the following day and his future wife and mother-in-law travelled to Stockholm for the wedding in November. Georg Wilhelm wisely stayed in Königsberg throughout, loudly protesting that he had nothing to do with the business.
The match was a disaster for all concerned. Gustavus had married for political reasons and described his intelligent, sentimental wife as ‘a weak woman’. She hated her new home that contained nothing more than ‘rocks and mountains, the freezing air, and all the rest of it’.25 She had wanted a husband, but married a king. He found her jealous possessiveness irritating. Worse, she failed to produce the longed-for son, bearing two daughters of whom only the second, Christina, survived as the sole legitimate heir. Swedish law permitted female succession, but the bulk of the population found the idea very strange. Gustavus’s nephew, Charles Gustav, son of Johann Casimir, was deliberately raised with Christina as a possible replacement, and indeed followed her on to the Swedish throne as Charles X after her abdication in 1654. The political advantages also failed to materialize. Georg Wilhelm studiously avoided antagonizing Poland and was duly enfeoffed with Prussia. Gustavus Adolphus regarded his brother-in-law with mounting exasperation and finally little more than contempt once Sweden entered the Thirty Years War.
Though the marriage brought little personal or political reward, it is important in two respects. It illustrates the general significance of dynasticism in European relations, indicating not merely the importance of male family members, but also the roles of their female relations. More specifically, it indicates how limited Sweden’s horizons were at this stage. Gustavus had rejected the option of wider ties with the Palatinate in favour of a less important German family closer to the Baltic coast. Sweden was in no position to assume the mantle of Protestant champion, a role that still very much belonged to Denmark.
POLAND-LITHUANIA
A Noble Commonwealth
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita) was the largest, and potentially most powerful, of the three contenders for Baltic domination. By 1618 it covered 900,000km2, twice the size of France, and encompassed the area of not only modern Poland and Lithuania, but also Latvia, Belarus and the western half of the Ukraine. Even though it was thinly populated, it still mustered 11 million inhabitants, or around three times the number of Denmark and Sweden combined. Like its two rivals, the Commonwealth was a composite state, but one in which the various parts retained greater autonomy and where the monarchy remained considerably weaker.26
The kingdom of Poland and grand duchy of Lithuania remained distinct after their Union of Lublin in 1569, but accepted a common monarch who was elected by the Sejm, or parliament that met in a field outside Warsaw every two years. As in the Empire, the elective principle did not preclude de facto hereditary monarchy. The Jagiellon dynasty ruled Poland from 1386 until 1572, and was followed after a brief interval by the Vasas between 1587 and 1668. However, politics developed differently from Central Europe where the leading nobles acquired constitutional rights through the possession of hereditary lands and titles. The Polish nobles (szlachta) considered themselves the descendants of an ancient race of conquerors who collectively ran the country as equals. Apart from a few Lithuanians, none of them had titles, and their status rested on the hereditary possession of the royal offices of palatine responsible for a province, governor of a district, or castellan of a castle. While other posts remained in the royal gift, some of the most important – like that of grand hetman commanding the army – were retained for life by the successful candidate. The nobles thus acquired a stake in government largely beyond the monarch’s influence. However, they varied greatly in wealth, with a few like the Radziwills possessing vast estates, and the majority being comparatively poor, sometimes little better off than peasants. Regardless of wealth, the nobles considered themselves as ‘the nation’ and saw the constitution as an expression of their liberties. Ambitious nobles used landownership to support a national political role through the Sejm and in regional alliances, or ‘confederations’ (rokosz), permitted by the constitution against royal tyranny.
The Commonwealth’s internal conflicts were primarily political rather than religious. Its decentralized structure and consensual political culture encouraged a more relaxed approach to religious pluralism than that of Central or western Europe. Like the Transylvanians, the Commonwealth’s leaders sought to avoid sectarian violence through agreements recognizing parity and demarcating jurisdictions and rights. Political consensus was accompanied by irenicist or peace-making efforts to bridge the theological divide by finding common ground between the confessions. For example, the Greek Orthodox community acquired full parity with Catholics in Lithuania after 1563, and the two faiths merged into the Uniate or Greek Catholic church in 1596, which retained Orthodox ritual but submitted to papal authority. Lutheranism spread especially in the German-speaking towns of royal Prussia, but these communities deliberately distanced themselves from their co-religionists in the Empire by rejecting the Book of Concord and forging closer ties to Polish Protestants instead. The latter included Calvinists and Bohemian Brethren, as well as Lutherans. Their representatives negotiated the Sandomierz Consensus in 1570, a supra-confessional statement intended to avoid doctrinal disputes. It received royal approval, despite objections from Catholic bishops, thus including Protestants within the Commonwealth’s constitution.27
Royal power depended greatly on the king’s ability to win the trust of his leading nobles through the slow process of building support through the representative institutions. The regional assemblies of nobles (Sejmiki) sent delegates to the Sejm where full agreement of all envoys was necessary for decisions to be binding. This arrangement effectively gave individual nobles a veto on all legislation, and the Sejm broke up six times between 1576 and 1606 without deciding anything. Unable to persuade the nobles to back his efforts to recover the Swedish crown, Sigismund III became increasingly secretive, but unlike Christian IV in Denmark he had no independent income to finance his schemes. He resorted to measures similar to those employed by the Austrian Habsburgs to foster a loyal clientele within their Estates by favouring Catholics in royal appointments. Having ejected the Swedes from Livonia in 1605, Sigismund planned wider reforms, including the adoption of majority voting in the Sejm and permanent taxation. The result was a noble rebellion in 1606, coinciding with Bocskai’s revolt in Habsburg Hungary, both involving the defence of aristocratic liberties. However, unlike in Hungary, the revolt lacked a strong confessional character, because the Polish Protestants were too few to rebel without Catholic support. They were forced to mute their confessional grievances to forge the Confederation of Sandomierz on the basis of political resentment at Sigismund’s plans. This was not as widespread as they hoped, because the great landowners remained loyal to the king who, despite all his faults, had respected their role. The confederates’ support was reduced largely to the disaffected nobles who resented the magnates’ growing wealth, and the rebellion collapsed in 1607.
Polish Resilience and Strength
This violent episode seems to confirm the standard picture of Polish politics as anarchic. Like the Empire, the Commonwealth has often been dismissed as ineffective and out of step with the general European trend towards stronger, more centralized states. Ultimately, the nobles paid the price for their liberties when their country was partitioned out of existence by the three absolute monarchies of Austria, Prussia and Russia between 1772 and 1795. The later conditions should not be transposed to the seventeenth century, however, when the Commonwealth was one of Europe’s most powerful and successful states. Once Sigismund re-established trust among his nobles after 1613, the Sejm voted substantial and sustained increases in taxation, with only one meeting (1615) failing to reach agreement. Unlike other countries, the Commonwealth managed to wage warfare without accumulating a large debt. Moreover, it generally defeated every enemy it faced, until the Cossack Rebellion of 1648–54 precipitated a period known as the Deluge, when the country was invaded by the Swedes, Russians, Transylvanians and Brandenburgers. Even this crisis was weathered and the Commonwealth demonstrated its resilience by making a major contribution to the defeat of the Ottomans before Vienna in 1683.28
Polish military potential has been underestimated because its forces were not organized along western lines. There was a small permanent force of 3–5,000 light cavalry, called the Quarter Army (Kwarciani) after the proportion of royal revenue designated to sustain it. This was used to patrol the south-eastern frontier against Tartar raids, and could be increased only if the Sejm voted additional taxes. However, the king had his own royal guard and could conscript around 2,000 peasant militia (Wybranieka) from the crown lands. He could also call upon the private armies of the great nobles that could be summoned as a feudal levy for national defence. The levies generally took months to assemble and often became opportunities for nobles to voice grievances rather than fight. However, the eastern-style of raiding warfare provided ample chance for booty and so attracted volunteers willing to serve as light cavalrymen. The Commonwealth also began registering Ukrainian Cossacks from 1578 as a border militia, similar to that of the Habsburg Military Frontier, and had 10,900 men on the books by 1619. The Poles relied on their hussars, or armoured lancers, supported by medium cavalry (Pancerni), together forming half or more of a typical field force. Such troops could be very effective even against soldiers trained in the modern Dutch manner. The Swedes deployed 10,900 men at the battle of Kirkholm, including a large number of Germans and other mercenary infantry, but were virtually annihilated by 2,600 Polish cavalry backed by only 1,000 foot soldiers.29 The Commonwealth also responded to developments elsewhere, raising so-called ‘German’ infantry and cavalry trained to use disciplined fire tactics. Many of these were indeed Germans and other foreigners, but the onset of war in Central Europe, together with the Polish nobles’ suspicion of outsiders in their king’s army, prompted such formations to be recruited largely from their own people by the 1630s. The Commonwealth forces thus combined eastern and western tactics, as they needed to do given that they faced enemies from both directions.
Wars with Russia and Sweden
The Polish-Swedish struggle was put on hold after 1605 by the implosion of Muscovy, where a succession of pretenders claimed to be Dimitrii the last Riúrik prince, who had in fact died in 1591. The ensuing ‘Time of Troubles’ offered both Sweden and Poland the opportunity to seize Russian territory. Sigismund intervened in 1609, intending to make his son Wladyslaw the new tsar. The quarrelling Russian factions eventually accepted Michael Fedorovich Romanov instead in 1613, founding a dynasty that lasted until the 1917 Revolution. Sigismund abandoned his intervention by the Peace of Deulino in December 1618, retaining Smolensk, which had been captured in 1611 and brought the Commonwealth frontier well east of the Dnieper. The gain was offset by Sweden’s Russian conquests after 1613 when peace with Denmark enabled Gustavus to exploit Russia’s difficulties. The new tsar ceded Ingria and Karelia by the Peace of Stolbova in March 1617, giving Sweden control of the entire Gulf of Finland and shutting Russia out of the Baltic until the early eighteenth century. However, Sweden failed to monopolize access to Russian trade, because Denmark still held the northern route past Norway to Archangel. Though expectations remained high, Sweden never derived great wealth from Russia and already after 1617 Gustavus shifted his target westward along the southern Baltic shore towards Poland.30
Gustavus was overconfident after Stolbova and tried to exploit the Commonwealth’s ongoing struggle with Tsar Michael by invading Livonia from Estonia in 1617. Hetman Kristof Radziwill and a large army relieved Riga the following spring, obliging the Swedes to accept a two-year truce. Permanent peace was impossible, because Sigismund refused to renounce his claims to Sweden. The wars with Lutheran Sweden and Orthodox Russia enhanced Sigismund’s Catholic credentials, and attracted expressions of goodwill from Spain and the papacy. Sigismund reciprocated, improving ties with the Austrian Habsburgs who had opposed his election in Poland in 1587. Relations had remained strained over conflicting interests in Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia, but Sigismund nonetheless established a close connection with the Inner Austrian branch of the Habsburgs after 1592.31 Dynastic marriages led to a formal alliance in March 1613 that promised mutual assistance against rebels, a term that implied the Swedish Vasas, but took a very different meaning with the outbreak of the Bohemian Revolt five years later.