Maritime state formation and empire building in the Baltic (III)

 

Protection selling and empire building, 1570–1650

The peace which was concluded in late 1570 was in practice only valid between the two Nordic kingdoms.14 Lübeck had been promised that Sweden should open the Narva trade and pay an indemnity for captured ships. It was never paid and Sweden chose to ignore those parts of the peace treaty which Lübeck alone could never enforce. Sweden continued to fight Russia in Estonia and to blockade Russian-held Narva, although the blockade might be passed if ships bought a Swedish licence. Lübeck tried to force the blockade in the 1570s but was no longer powerful and many of her ships were captured. Finally Narva was taken by Sweden in 1581. Swedish hopes that this port, and Reval, would develop into large and profitable centres for Russian trade with Western Europe proved illusory however. War between Sweden and Russia continued up to 1595, but on the naval scene it was one-sided as only Sweden had a navy, which she used to support the army in coastal areas and on the lakes of Ladoga and Peipus.

While the Swedish navy was mainly engaged in the Gulf of Finland, the Danish navy in the 1570s definitely secured the Baltic as an area where neutral ships might sail unharmed as long as they followed the rules set by the two Nordic sea powers. Outside the Sound, intense privateering and piracy went on in connection with the civil wars in the Netherlands and France. Frederik II sent out warships which patrolled the Skagerack, Kattegatt and the Norwegian coast in order to discourage this type of violence. Similarly he sent out ships to patrol the Baltic where ships with Russian commissions as privateers attempted to profit from violence while Polish privateers captured ships sailing to Russia. He also discouraged Polish attempts to create a navy in order to gain better control over Prussia and Danzig. Captured pirates were brought to Helsingör at the northern end of the Sound for public execution in order to show foreign seafarers that they got something for the protection money they paid. In 1580 the two Nordic powers negotiated an agreement on various old conflicts, including how their warships should behave when they met at sea, thus avoiding events like that which caused the war in 1563. This détente made it possible for the Nordic powers to reduce their navies which in the 1570s had been maintained by large shipbuilding programmes.

By the 1580s the Baltic was pacified and the Danish king began to think in terms of an extended maritime dominion over the North Atlantic and the Arctic, a dominium maris septentrionalis. The trade route to Archangel had first been used in 1553 and it had become increasingly important for Dutch and English trade with Russia. This was the result of a Russian desire to trade from a port of their own, Western interest in avoiding the Sound Toll and improved shipbuilding technology which allowed merchantmen to sail a route often in inclement Arctic weather. Danish attempts to raise customs on the northern trade proved illusory. There were no natural choking point where a custom might be raised and no threats from piracy which could motivate protection.

The pacification of the Baltic was very important. The German towns largely abolished their own organisation for convoys and trade protection inside the Baltic, thus making the Hanse obsolete. The Dutch used the opportunity to develop peaceful shipping and trade in the Baltic. They began to make large-scale investment in this trade and in the Nordic countries (especially Swedish industry), and Dutch shipping interests began to develop cheap cargo-carriers, the fluits, specialised for the non-violent Baltic trade. They were largely unarmed and designed to sail with small crews, thus making profit from the fact that ships no longer required large crews for defence. Just as the maritime interests in Western Europe developed efficient armed merchantmen for dangerous waters (such as the Mediterranean) the Dutch responded to the new market conditions in the Baltic by innovative combinations.

By the 1570s and 1580s the Baltic had become a unique haven for seaborne trade in a Europe where civil wars, piracy, loosely controlled privateering and unpredictable royal actions causing high protection costs for shipping were the norm. The Baltic, only a few decades earlier a rather backward area, suddenly enjoyed the benefits of unhindered peaceful trade.

In 1587 the Swedish crown prince Sigismund, a keen Catholic with counter-Reformation ambitions and twice married to Habsburg princesses, was elected king of Poland-Lithuania. When he inherited the Swedish throne in 1592, he nominally became the most powerful ruler in the Baltic. Actually, he was quickly challenged by his Protestant and power-hungry uncle, Duke Karl, who had created his own power base in Sweden, including his own (nominally mercantile) navy. The crisis developed into a civil war, in which Karl gained full control of Sweden by 1599. Both sides built many ships during the war (Karl in Sweden and Sigismund in Finland) and the Swedish navy was permanently increased. From 1600, Karl (IX) started a war of conquest in Polish Livonia. On land it did not go well for Sweden, but the navy began to blockade Riga, one of the largest ports in the Baltic. By 1610, this had caused a crisis with Denmark where the naval-minded King Christian IV (r. 1588–1648) regarded the blockade as an infringement of his dominion. He sent out his fleet which broke the blockade. Karl IX also had territorial ambitions in northern Norway and in early 1611 Christian persuaded his council to support an attack against Sweden. That country was by then heavily engaged militarily in Russia, in order to ‘protect’ Russian allies during the civil war there, and not in the best position to fight a defensive war against its western neighbour.

The war revealed that the Danish navy was in a better shape than the Swedish. On paper the latter was stronger with a total displacement of around 24,000 tonnes against 15,000 tonnes. But the war began with an excellently led Danish surprise attack on Kalmar, an important fortress city and naval base in southern Sweden. It was blockaded from land and sea and, when it fell, Swedish warships totalling around 7,000 tonnes had to be sunk to avoid capture. In 1612 the Danes could also take Älvsborg (Gothenburg) – Sweden’s only port to the West – with its naval squadron. The remaining Swedish fleet had no inspired leadership, some ships could not be fitted out for sea service, and the Danish fleet gradually got the upper hand in the Baltic. The war was clearly a Danish victory, but the Danish aristocracy was not interested in its continuation when Sweden made concessions on the original points of con flict. Peace was concluded in 1613. No major battles took place at sea.

In 1617 Sweden and Russia concluded a peace in which Russia lost her coastline in the innermost part of the Gulf of Finland – the area which Peter I retook a century later when he founded St Petersburg and Kronstadt. In 1621 Sweden, now ruled by Gustav II Adolf (r. 1611–32), began to use its increasingly efficient armed forces for ambitious offensives.20An amphibious operation was launched against Riga, one of the largest cities in the Baltic. 13,000 soldiers were transported across the Baltic and took the city after a siege. In the following years the navy supported the army in further campaigns in which Livonia was conquered. These conquests gradually undermined the Danish dominion of the Baltic and created a case for an enlarged Swedish dominium maris Baltici, as it was difficult for Denmark to deny Sweden the control of the sea lines of communication to Swedish ports. Christian IV attempted to balance the Swedish expansion with an expansionistic policy in Germany.

In Poland, Sigismund III Vasa attempted to create a navy in the 1620s. He hoped that it might be joined by a major Spanish fleet which should give him the strength to return to Sweden. The 1620s was a period of Spanish naval revival which made this idea fairly realistic. The dynastic power struggle within the Vasa family and its Habsburg connections with the great wars on the continent was one factor behind the great expansion and modernisation of the Swedish armed forces. In 1626 another major amphibious expedition of around 13,000 men sailed to Prussia. Here, the Polish fleet could be blockaded and Sweden gain control over the Vistula estuary, the main artery for east–west trade with Polish grain. The Poles increased their fleet but, with the exception of a successful late autumn attack in 1627 against a small Swedish squadron, it could not achieve much. When a truce was concluded with Poland in 1629 Sweden kept ports in Prussia and the right to sell licences to trade for six years, a major source of income to the Swedish state. It was mainly the Dutch merchantmen which paid for these licences and as Dutch trade now was under serious threat from a Habsburg fleet in the Baltic the Prussian licences became a kind of Swedish protection selling to the Dutch.

The background was that the Thirty Years War in Germany had spread to the Baltic. The Danish king had been defeated on land in 1626 when he led the Protestant army, and the combined forces of the German Catholic League and the Habsburgs reached the Baltic coast where the emperor attempted to create a navy. The Danish fleet easily protected the Danish islands, but the main purpose of the Habsburg fleet was not invasion. It was actually funded by Spain, which hoped to attack Dutch trade in the Baltic, and it was joined by the small Polish fleet.23 This was the first serious challenge to Nordic seapower for nearly a century and one of several causes of the Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years War when Denmark was forced to conclude peace in 1629.

The Swedish invasion of Germany was a major operation against enemy-held territory. In late June 1630 the initial assault force landed on the island of Usedom in the Oder estuary. By 10 July, 20,000 soldiers had been landed and their strength was gradually built up by additional troops shipped to the area. In the early months of the invasion the army relied on seaborne supplies. The Habsburg fleet was captured in early 1632 when Wismar capitulated. By then, Sweden was deeply involved in the German war and the German Baltic coast had been secured for Sweden. It remained so for the rest of the Thirty Years War when naval operations became the routine tasks of supply and sea control.

Swedish successes on the continent worried the Danish king who in the late 1630s raised the Sound Toll to finance armaments, interfered with Swedish export trade through the Sound (especially the important weapon trade), and put out political feelers to the Habsburgs. This annoyed Sweden, the Dutch merchants and the powerful Dutch-Swedish arms trader, Louis De Geer. In late 1643 the main Swedish army in Germany suddenly marched into Jutland and the Swedish home army attacked Scania. The plan was that the two armies should join in an attack on the Danish islands and Copenhagen. This required command of the sea. The whole Swedish fleet was mobilised and in order to increase its strength further, Louis De Geer was commissioned to hire a fleet of armed merchantmen in the Netherlands. Dutch and English armed merchantmen and their crews enjoyed much prestige. Such ships had defeated the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, they had been hired by Venice, France and (in 164 1) even by Portugal as warships and in 1639 they had provided a valuable addition to the Dutch warships when the Spanish main fleet was totally defeated in the Channel.

In May 1644, a fleet of 21 hired Dutch armed merchantmen sailed to Lister Dyb on the west coast of Jutland to receive instructions from the Swedish army commander. They were twice attacked by Danish squadrons of warships, the first time with king Christian IV in personal command. In terms of total displacement the armed merchantmen were roughly equal to the Danish force in the first battle, and had a superiority of about 50 per cent in the second, but in spite of that they suffered badly. Mainly armed with 12-, 8- and 6-pounders and lightly built, the merchantmen were severely damaged by the heavy-calibre guns on the purpose-built warships. Dutch seamanship saved the ships but they quickly returned to the Netherlands. This was an unexpected setback for a type of armed force which had been a successful instrument of warfare for decades. As the Dutch had been used to fighting Spanish and Portuguese purpose-built warships with armed merchantmen, these failures indicate that northern warships were now superior to the types of warship used in southern Europe – they probably had heavier armament, possibly stronger hulls and more manoeuvrability. The actions at Lister Dyb foreshadow the demise of hired ships in battles against major warships which was one of the main lessons of the first Anglo-Dutch war of 1652–4.

The Danes were able to engage the enemy before his forces were united. In June 1644 the Swedish main fleet sailed to the southern Baltic. On 1 July the Swedish and main Danish battle fleets fought their first full-scale battle since 1566. Thirty Danish ships of 300 to 1,300 tonnes (total displacement around 18,000 tonnes) met 34 Swedish ships of 300 to 1,700 tonnes (total around 24,500 tonnes) and fought an indecisive action off Kolberger Heide between Germany and the Danish isles .26 The Swedes had the windward position and made four attacks but many ships failed to close the enemy. Losses were slight – the Danish rigsadmiral (Lord High Admiral) was one of the few killed and king Christian one of the few wounded. This failure to turn quantitative superiority into victory made it impossible to invade the Danish islands and developments in Germany forced the main Swedish army to turn south. In early August the Swedish fleet returned to Stockholm. It sailed at the same time as the hired Dutch ships made a successful passage through the Sound and reached Kalmar.

Christian IV thought that the worst was over. He decommissioned most of the fleet and concentrated the army against the Swedes in Scania. In earlier wars the Swedish navy had not operated in the southern Baltic during the autumn, but now it could use Swedish-controlled German ports as bases to return to for the winter. In October, a Swedish fleet of 14 warships (c. 8,500 tonnes) and 19 hired Dutch ships (c. 9,000 tonnes) arrived in Danish waters. It was met by 15 Danish warships (total c. 8,000 tonnes). The Danes may have thought that this was an invasion, and the fleet was their only defence as the troops had left the islands. They decided to fight the much superior enemy, and at the battle of Femern on 13 October their fleet was almost annihilated: 10 ships were captured and two burnt by fireships. The Swedish warships concentrated on the major Danish ships, while the minor units were attacked by the armed merchantmen. The vulnerability of the merchantmen was shown once more when one of them was sunk by a large Danish ship. No Swedish invasion took place in this year or the next but the Danish-Norwegian navy was no longer in control of its home waters.

The consequences were disastrous. The Dutch merchants decided that the time had come to show their dissatisfaction with the increased Danish Sound Toll. Many in the Dutch Republic wanted to join forces with the Swedes and inflict a decisive defeat on the Danish king, but they could not get a majority for this hard line. Sea power might, however, be used in flexible ways and, as a compromise, a Dutch fleet of 49 ships (partly armed merchantmen) was sent to the Sound. Under its protection, 300 Dutch merchantmen sailed through the Sound without paying the Toll. The Dutch intended to use Danish resistance as a pretext for joining Sweden but the Danes carefully avoided being provoked. Instead, they concentrated on blocking the southern end of the Sound to the Swedish fleet. This was successful, but Denmark-Norway had to sign a disadvantageous peace in which important territories, including the islands of Gotland and Ösel and province of Halland, were lost. The traditional Swedish freedom from the Sound Toll was extended to ships from all Baltic and German provinces conquered by Sweden. The Dutch obtained a lowered Sound Toll. The Danish role as protection-seller to Dutch trade seemed to be close to an end, as much of the Baltic was now controlled by the Swedish empire. However, in a few years, the Dutch and the Danes formed an alliance, and during the Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652–4 and 1665–7 the Danish fleet was mobilised to protect Dutch trade in the Baltic in exchange for Dutch subsidises.

The war of 1643–5 and the peace of Westphalia in 1648 (where Sweden gained large territories in northern Germany) settled the power struggle in the Baltic in Swedish favour.

In the next war in the 1650s, Sweden made further major territorial gains from Denmark-Norway, but, in these years, the new balance of power at sea in Western Europe began to show its effects in the Baltic. During the first Anglo-Dutch war of 1652–4 both sides built large battle fleets. These could also be used for interventions in the Baltic and in the 1650s the Dutch navy began to support Denmark, and to limit Swedish ambitions in Prussia. After that, the Dutch and the English realised that they might influence Baltic power politics and trade by threatening to use their battle fleets not only against an already defeated power, as in 1645, but also against the strongest power in the Baltic.

After more than a century of Nordic dominance of the Baltic Sea, the great entrepôts for Baltic trade were back on the naval scene. In the Middle Ages, Lübeck had been the great entrepôt and also the leading sea power in the region. After 1650, Amsterdam could use the Dutch navy to protect her trading interests, and later the English merchants could also rely on the English navy to keep the Baltic open for their trade. Just as Lübeck had once done, these western entrepôts could influence Nordic power politics through control of the sea lines of communication. This was mainly due to a new type of state formation in Western Europe where territorial power and merchant capital had joined forces in a way that the north German cities and territories never managed. Nordic naval power, based on efficient organisation of territorial resources and protection selling to foreign shipping, had dominated the Baltic Sea from the early sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century. From then on the Baltic was integrated into the European state system where control of the European seas belonged to the strongest battle fleet or combination of battle fleets.