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

From mercantile to monarchic sea power

This chapter is a brief description of the decline of the German Hanse as an economic, political and naval organisation as well as of maritime aspects of Danish and Swedish state formation. It also gives a violence-control orientated explanation of the rise of the Dutch trade hegemony in the Baltic. It describes how the new Nordic naval forces were used for territorial state building but also as instruments for selling protection where the increasingly centralised Nordic monarchies were able to enforce a practical joint monopoly of violence at sea in the Baltic. Denmark-Norway and Sweden became effective rulers of their own territories (thus making piracy impossible) and used their warships to discourage various Baltic interest groups from interfering with trade. The main loser was the city of Lübeck which lost its old position as middleman between the Baltic and Western Europe. The most obvious winners were the Dutch who could send large numbers of cheap and unarmed merchantmen to the Baltic without interference from competitors. But most towns around the Baltic as well as the territorial states also benefited from lowered transport costs and increased competition between merchants from the Baltic and Western Europe.

In the late Middle Ages, the Baltic had been a region where political and military power had been strongly connected with trade and the control of markets. The role of territorial states had been very limited in comparison with the population and resources of the territorial societies. The states in the Baltic were the Nordic union (Denmark, Sweden and Norway), the Polish-Lithuanian union, the North German principalities (Pomerania, Mecklenburg and Holstein) and the German Order (the Teutonic knights) which controlled Estonia, Livonia, Courland and Prussia. The Nordic union, which for some decades in the early fifteenth century had been a strong political unity, was gradually developing into a single Danish-Norwegian state ruled by a king and the aristocracy, and a Swedish state ruled by various aristocratic factions. The Nordic states had long coasts and were dependent on maritime lines of communication both for trade and the transfer of resources and military power within their territories.

The central governments in these states as well as in the German principalities were often weak. Local power-holders could exercise strong power, they frequently started armed feuds with central governments and they were often tempted to use armed force against maritime trade in order to gain profit. For long periods the island of Gotland was controlled by groups beyond the control of central governments and they used it as a base for plunder of trade. Poland-Lithuania, a large and populous state, was only marginally a Baltic power and its kings only intermittently developed a maritime policy. The trading cities in North Germany (Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund and others) and in the Eastern Baltic (Danzig, Riga, Reval, Narva and others), were practically independent and most of the territorial princes had little or no power on the sea.

As the territorial states in the Baltic had only limited ability to mobilise the resources of their territories, the cities preferred to co-operate with each other for mutual protection. Their main instrument of co-operation was the German Hanse confederation. The Hanse was often divided on political and economic questions but, up to the early sixteenth century, it could organise the most powerful fleet in the Baltic. Essentially the Hanse was a trading cartel and a loose federation which enforced law and order along the trade routes. The trading cities controlled most of the major ships in the region and these could easily be converted to men-of-war. The cities also had easy access to cash and credit with which they could hire mercenaries. Armed merchantmen and mercenaries gave them an advantage in regional power struggles with territorial princes and competitors. Unlike Renaissance Italy, however, the German cities were not strong enough to take control over territories. Such a development was soon to take place in Holland and Zeeland, with interesting results on the naval scene.

The rich trading city of Lübeck often behaved as a major political and naval power and as the centre of an informal maritime empire around the Baltic. The key to this was its geographical position between the Baltic and Western Europe which enabled Lübeck to control the trade over land to Hamburg. In the Middle Ages this was a very profitable trade route and her economic strength gave Lübeck the ability to develop a network of trade with the Nordic countries based on privileges and the ability to protect trade with armed force. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Dutch, and to some extent English, shipping expanded in the Baltic, primarily for the transport of cheap bulk cargo (salt, grain, timber). Lübeck retained its position as a middleman for the rich trades, but the Dutch penetration of the Baltic was a threat to her position as the central entrepôt for the Nordic countries. Direct contacts with the Dutch brought the Nordic and Baltic economies closer to the expanding markets of Western Europe. For Lübeck, limits on the trade through the Sound (Öresund) and the preservation of the old trading privileges in the Nordic countries, became burning political issues which guided its Baltic policy in the early sixteenth century.

The security condition for maritime trade in the Baltic in the medieval period was similar to that in other parts of Europe. Trade was vulnerable to local power-holders who might use violence. Foreign ships and their cargo might be captured in order to redeem real or alleged injuries and this might escalate into full-scale wars, usually fought at sea. Piracy (or peace-time privateering) was possible when territorial states were weak and the ruling elites often had the right to use violence. Small-scale violence was more or less perpetual, and numerous territories and ports were controlled by autonomous rulers who might make profit from plunder by protecting pirates. This made it easier for regionally powerful merchants to get access to the most profitable opportunities for trade, and for Lübeck and some other powerful trading cities, their ability to act as strong naval powers made it possible to get extensive trading privileges from the Nordic states. They were parts of political agreements, often concluded after successful interventions in power struggles between and within the Nordic countries.

During the sixteenth century the political situation in the Baltic drastically changed. The two Nordic kingdoms developed into centralised monarchies with strong gun-armed navies. The ability of German trading cities to intervene in Nordic politics was eliminated. The German Order was dissolved and its territories in the eastern Baltic (Estonia, Livonia, Ösel, Courland) became bones of contention between Sweden, Denmark, Poland-Lithuania and Russia. The decline of the Hanse as a sea power did not stimulate the princes in northern Germany to develop naval policies which might have integrated the interests of the trading towns with the surrounding territories. Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Prussia did not seriously compete with the Nordic powers at sea. Except for a few convoy ships belonging to large cities and brief attempts to create a Brandenburgian navy in the seventeenth century, German sea power ceased to exist from 1570 to about 1850. Polish attempts to create a navy were actively suppressed by the two Nordic powers. Up to the advent of Russia as a naval power in the early eighteenth century, they had the only navies in the Baltic.

As the Nordic powers had small mercantile marines and weak merchant capital, their navies could not be financed from incomes derived from domestic trading interests. Instead, they were paid by taxes raised on landed interests and customs duties paid by foreigners. Both activities could be characterised as protection selling, and the most obvious example of this is the Sound Toll raised at Helsingör. It was based on the theory that the Danish kings protected shipping passing through the Skagerack, Kattegatt and the Baltic Sea, areas over which they claimed that they had a dominion (dominium maris Baltici). As the incomes from the Toll went to a state which spent much of its income on the navy the theory gradually turned into practical reality. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (before taxes on land increased) the Sound Toll was an important part of the state incomes in Denmark. For the kings, it was especially important that it flowed directly into their coffers without interference from the powerful aristocracy with which they had to share power in the Danish-Norwegian state up to 1660. It was paid by foreigners, not by Danes, and the kings could use it to support a navy which was their main instrument of power. The Toll and the navy were interconnected instruments of centralisation and state building which made the Danish kings more powerful than most European rulers of territories with strong aristocracies.

The Swedish kings began to look for similar opportunities to increase their financial base for state building. This stimulated the creation of the Swedish Baltic empire where one aim was to gain control over the trade between Russia, Poland and Western Europe in order to raise customs duties. As the empire building involved Sweden in wars with major territorial powers (Russia, Poland-Lithuania, finally the Holy Roman Empire and German territorial princes) it is normally treated as a military enterprise but it was based on Swedish control of the sea lines of communication. The Swedish navy was a pre-condition for the creation of what actually was the last maritime empire of Europe. It was the Swedish state which turned maritime – Swedish mercantile capital and long-distance shipping were weak up to 1650.

Nordic state formation interacted with the great increase in trade through the Baltic which was a major part of the transformation of European trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Grain from Poland, exported through Prussia, became a major object of European trade and the Baltic also became the predominant export area for naval stores: timber, masts and spars, pitch, tar, hemp, linen, cast-iron guns and high-quality iron for shipbuilding. West European dominance in shipping and naval warfare was closely connected with easy access to the Baltic. From the early seventeenth century, Sweden became Europe’s largest exporter of copper and iron which further increased the importance of Baltic trade. The most important carriers of this trade were the Dutch and, during the seventeenth century, Dutch capital also became predominant in the organisation and financing of the trade.5 Trade and shipping were important objects of taxation, and states that developed efficient naval and military organisations for violence control might profit from this new major source of income.

From a maritime perspective, it is important to remember that the borders between the Nordic states were different from today up to 1645 and 1658. Finland was an integral part of Sweden while the provinces east of the Sound, which since 1658 have been southern Sweden (Scania, Halland and Blekinge) were eastern Denmark in this period. Denmark-Norway was in control of all territories bordering the Kattegatt, Skagerack and the Sound, except the Göta älv estuary (Gothenburg) where Sweden had its only western port. The island of Gotland was Danish until 1645. Swedish territories were centred around the central and northern Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Finland and the great lakes in Sweden while the Danish-Norwegian state controlled territories around the Skagerack, Kattegatt and the Danish straits with also a large but thinly populated Atlantic empire in the North: northern Norway, Iceland and the Färöes. Both states were built around maritime lines of communication.

 

(To be followed)