Prussian success at creating a strong state depended on a line of soldier-kings, and for a brief period Sweden under the Vasa dynasty - which also ruled Finland - followed this pattern as well. Gustavus Adolphus, the most dynamic of these kings, came to the throne as a teenager, when Sweden was fighting Denmark, Poland, and Russia. He was
Largely victorious in these wars, gaining control of a number of Polish and Russian ports and dominating trade in the Baltic. He created a more systematic bureaucracy, opened primary and secondary schools supported by the government, and promoted trade and shipping. After significant victories by the emperor’s forces, Gustavus Adolphus entered the Thirty Years War on the side of the Protestants, pressing all the way into southern Germany with his troops, some of whom had been forcibly conscripted in what was Europe’s first nationwide draft. He died on the battlefield, but his very able chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna (1583-1654), kept command of the army, and Sweden gained a huge amount of territory, becoming the most powerful state in northern Europe, despite the fact that the population of Sweden itself was tiny, only a million in comparison with France’s twenty million.
Gustavus Adolphus paid for his wars by selling royal lands to wealthy nobles, though this was a short-sighted solution, as it made the land tax-free. Nobles also received salaries or pensions for serving as army officers, and after the king’s death, they asserted their power and privileges. Swedish political history for the next two hundred years saw a series of such noble bids for power, alternating with periods in which kings tried to become absolutist on the French or Prussian model. What made the Swedish case distinctive was the fact that peasants were also active players in this struggle. In the later seventeenth century, Swedish kings forced the higher nobility to give back about half the land they had bought, and then sold it to peasants and lesser nobles, making it taxable. These groups then provided support for the monarch in his moves to assert more centralized control, at least until King Charles XII (ruled 1697-1718) led an army against the Danes, Poles, and Russians in the Great Northern War. Defeated as much by the Russian winter as by actual battles, as Napoleon and Hitler later would be, Sweden lost all of its Baltic possessions. Charles escaped to Istanbul, where he spent several years trying, unsuccessfully, to make an alliance with the Ottomans. On finally returning to Sweden he was shot in the head, perhaps by one of his own troops.
The assassination of Charles XII ushered in what Swedish historians call the “Age of Freedom,” a fifty-year period in which the Swedish national assembly, called the Riksdag, ruled the country and the power of the elected monarchs war extremely limited. The Riksdag was the only assembly in Europe that included a house with peasant representatives, though the nobles, clergy, and townsmen who made up the other three houses were suspicious of the peasants and often held secret meetings that excluded them. This was a prosperous period economically for Sweden, and the Riksdag encouraged science and manufacturing; in 1731 it chartered the Swedish East India Company to expand trade with China and Southeast Asia. Disastrous losses in still more wars, however, against first Russia and then Prussia, provided an opportunity for a reassertion of royal control. Gustav III (ruled 1771-92) restored absolutist government in 1772 with a coup d’etat, throwing the leaders of the Riksdag in prison.
Gustav also died by assassination, his successor was forced to abdicate after military losses, and the Swedish nobility chose the next several kings, much as the English gentry had engineered the choice of monarchs several times in the seventeenth century. By this point Sweden had lost Finland and all of its other Baltic territories to Russia, and was no longer a major power; the Swedish East India Company went bankrupt in 1813.
Poland experienced similar struggles between the nobles and the kings for political dominance, but here the noble class, called the szlachta (pronounced “shlahta”), was completely successful. In the sixteenth century, the szlachta affirmed its right to elect the kings of Poland, and throughout much of the seventeenth century it elected younger members of the Vasa family who had married into the existing Polish dynasty and whose older brothers or cousins ruled Sweden. The seemingly endless wars between Poland and Sweden were thus due in part to family jealousies and conflicts. Warfare in the seventeenth century was generally disastrous for Poland, which lost the Baltic areas to Sweden and Ukraine to the Cossacks, cavalry warriors who lived in independent self-governing communities north of the Black Sea, many of them former serfs who had fled Russia. The Cossacks - the word comes from the Turkish word for robber or adventurer - used the opportunity to murder tens of thousands of Jews, asserting that Jews were agents of Polish oppression. Under the leadership of an able military leader elected king, John III Sobieski (ruled 1674-96), Polish troops were key to the defeat of the Ottomans outside Vienna, but Sobieski could not use these military successes to obtain more power for the monarchy or to reform the way the Polish parliament (Sejm) operated. The Sejm itself was paralyzed by the practice of the liberum veto, which allowed a single member to defeat any measure.
The eighteenth century saw a string of devastating wars on Polish soil, some involving foreign combatants and others primarily civil wars, with foreign powers intervening on the side of one faction or another. Between 1768 and 1772, Russian armies won a series of victories against the Turks, which alarmed Austria, which began making preparations to invade Russian-held territory. Fearing a resumption of Europe-wide fighting just five years after the treaty that ended the Seven Years War, Frederick the Great of Prussia proposed that instead of gaining land from the Ottoman Empire, Russia should be given part of Poland. This expansion of Russian holdings would be balanced by similar expansions in Prussia and Austria, as they also would take parts of Poland. The deal was agreeable to all three powers, and Poland lost half its population in this partition, with the Polish king and parliament unable to do anything about it. Political reforms and national revolutions were also unable to stop two further partitions in 1793 and 1795, and Poland disappeared from the map of Europe.
World History
