Peter the Great (54 page)

Part Three

THE GREAT NORTHERN WAR

MISTRESS OF THE NORTH

The
Baltic is a northern sea, brilliant blue in sunlight, murky gray in fog and rain, and deep gold at sunset when the world turns the color of the true amber which is found only on these shores. On its northern coasts, the Baltic is fringed with pine forests, fjords of red granite, pebble beaches and a myriad of tiny islands. The southern coast takes a gentler form: there, a green shore is lined with white sand beaches, dunes, marshes and low mud cliffs. Long stretches are edged with shoals and sand spits outlying shallow lagoons a dozen miles wide and fifty miles long. Through this flat and marshy country, four historic rivers make their way to the sea: the Neva, the Dvina, the Vistula and the Oder, all pouring fresh water into the sea, so that the prevailing current is out of the Baltic. For this reason, it is difficult for salt water to enter the Baltic, and there are no tides at Riga, Stockholm or the mouth of the Neva.

It is the lack of salt that brings the ice. Winter comes to the Baltic late in October with heavy frosts at night and flurries of snow. By October, in the days of sailing ships, the foreign vessels were leaving, heading down the Baltic, their holds filled with iron and copper, their decks piled high with timber. The native Baltic captains steered their ships into port, unrigged them and left the hulls locked in the ice until spring. By November, water in the bays and inlets was already covered with a thin scum of ice. By the end of the month, Kronstadt and St. Petersburg were frozen in; by December, Tallinn and Stockholm. The open sea did not freeze, but drifting ice and frequent storms made navigation difficult. The narrow sound between Sweden and Denmark was often choked by floating drift ice, and some winters the channel was sheeted over. (In 1658, a Swedish army marched across the ice to take its Danish enemy by surprise.) The northern half of the Gulf of Bothnia is solid ice from November until early May.

Spring loosens the ice and once more the Baltic comes to life. Then, in Peter's day, the fleets of merchantmen would begin arriving from Amsterdam and London, steering through the three
mile-wide channel of the sound, with the low cliffs and the famous castle of Elsinore to starboard and the hills on the Swedish shore to port. In June, the Baltic was filled with sails: Dutch merchantmen, the cobalt-colored water creaming back from their rounded bows, the wind filling their hu
ge mainsails; and stout, oaken-h
ulled English vessels, sent to load the pine masts and spars, tar and turpentine, resins, oils and flax for sails without which the Royal Navy could not survive. Through the short northern summer, under bright blue skies, ships crisscrossed the Baltic, anchored in its harbors, tied up to the quays, the captains ashore dining with merchants, the seamen drinking in bars and lying with women.

The port cities and towns of the Baltic were, and remain today, German in character, with cobbled streets and medieval stone buildings marked by high-pitched roofs, gables, turrets and battlements. The ancient town of Reval (now Tallinn), capital of Estonia, is centered on a medieval citadel perched on a great, craggy upthrust of rock. Swallows dip and soar around its high, round towers, and blond Estonian children play under the blooming chestnut trees and lilacs in the park beneath the massive walls. Riga, the capital of Latvia, is larger, more modern, but the old town on the bank of the Dvina River is also a world of cobbled streets and German drinking houses, topped by the Baroque spires of St. Peter's and St. Jacob's churches and the mighty Dom Cathedral. Outside the city, a wide white sand beach framed by dunes and pine trees runs for miles along the Gulf of Riga.

In Peter's day, the architecture, the language, the religion and the entire cultural flavor of these small states were alien to those of the colossal Russian mass adjacent to them. Ruled by the Teutonic Knights and later a German aristocracy, constituents of the Hanseatic League and the Lutheran Church, they retained their cultural and religious independence even after Peter's army marched from Poltava, captured Riga and absorbed these provinces for 200 years into the Russian empire.

To the north, in a world of forests and lakes, lies Sweden, in Peter's time at the peak of its imperial power. From the southernmost coast on the Baltic to the north beyond the Artie Circle, Sweden stretches for a thousand miles. It is a land of evergreens and birches, of 96,000 lakes, of snow and ice. As in northern Russia, the summers are short and cool. Ice forms in November and breaks up in April, and only five months are without frost. It is a cold, sternly beautiful land, and it has bred a race of hard, uncomplaining people.

In the seventeenth century, there were scattered over all this vastness only a million and a half people. Most were farm families, living in simple wooden cabins, using wooden plows and making their own clothes as they had for centuries. Between one farm and the next, and between the small towns and villages, travel was slow and hazardous. The roads were poor and, as in Russia, it was easier to travel in winter when a sleigh or sledge could glide over the surface of the frozen lakes. Hiding from the icy winds, Swedish peasants spent the endless winter days huddled around their warm stoves or sharing the public baths which were the most efficient means of getting the chill out of their frozen bones.

Sweden's primary exports were the products of its mines: silver, copper and iron. Iron, essential in both peace and war, was the most important, and provided half of Sweden's export trade. Most of this trade went through Stockholm, the capital, which in 1697 had a population of about 60,000. The city was located on Sweden's east coast which is fringed with a belt of islands protecting the coastline from the open sea. This belt is thickest at the point where the Gulf of Bothnia joins the Baltic. From the sea, a main channel, the Saltsjo, leads for forty-five miles through the mass of islands to Stockholm on the mainland. Here, at at juncture of lakes, rivers and the Saltsjo, medieval Stockholm was built, a little walled town of narrow, winding streets, gabled fronts and thin church spires, similar to those of other North German and Baltic towns.

In the seventeenth century, Stockholm became an important commercial port. Dutch and English merchantmen thronged the harbor and tied up at the broad shipping quay to load Swedish iron and copper. As the city's docks, shipyards, marketplaces and banking institutions grew, the town expanded to other islands. With increased wealth, the church spires and roofs of public buildings were sheathed in copper which glowed a brilliant orange when touched by the rays of the setting sun. The luxurious tastes of Versailles reached into the city's palaces and the mansions of the nobility. Ships which had sailed from Sweden carrying iron returned from Amsterdam and London bringing English walnut furniture, French gilt chairs, Dutch Delft china, Italian and German glass, gold wallpaper, carpets, linens and ornate table silver.

This wealth was built on empire as well as on iron and copper. The seventeenth century was Sweden's hour of greatness. From the accession of seventeen-year-old Gustavus Adolphus in 1611 to the death of Charles XII in 1718, Sweden stood at the pinnacle of its imperial history. The Swedish empire covered the entire northern coast of the Baltic and key territories along the southern shore. It embraced all of Finland and Karelia, Estonia, Ingria and Livonia, thus lapping completely around the Gulf of Bothnia and the Gulf of Finland. It held western Pomerania and the seaports of Stettin, Stralsund and Wismar on the North German coast. It commanded the bishoprics of Bremen and Verden, which were west of the Danish peninsula and gave access to the North Sea. And it held most of the islands of the Baltic.

Trade was even more important than territory. Here, Sweden's supremacy was secured by the planting of her blue-and-yellow flag at the mouth of all but one of the rivers that flowed into the Baltic: the Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland; the Dvina, which met the sea in the marshy ground near Riga; and the Oder, which reached the Baltic at Stettin. Only the mouth of the Vistula, flowing north through Poland and emptying into the Baltic at Danzig, was not Swedish.

That these vast territories should be possessed by a crown whose own people numbered scarcely a million and a half was the achievement of Sweden's great commanders and sturdy soldiers. The first and greatest of these was Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, savior of the Protestant cause in Germany, whose campaigns led him as far as the Danube and who was killed at thirty-eight while leading a cavalry charge.* The Thirty Years' War, which continued after his death, ended with the Peace of Westphalia, which richly rewarded Sweden's efforts. Here it gained the German provinces which gave control of the mouths of the Oder, the Weser and the Elbe. These German possessions also resulted in the anomaly that Sweden, Protestant Mistress of the North, was also a part of the Holy Roman Empire and occupied seats in the imperial Diet. More significant than this hollow power, however, was the access to Central Europe which they gave Sweden. With these territories serving as beachheads on the

*Gustavus Adolphus was succeeded by his only child, a six-year-old daughter who was to become the legendary Queen Christina. Assuming full royal power at eighteen, Christina ruled Sweden for ten years from 1644 to 1654. Her passion was learning. She rose at five a.m. to begin reading. Foreign scholars, musicians and philosophers, including Descartes, were enticed to her court by tales of her genius and her largess. Then, suddenly, at twenty-eight, she abdicated, pleading that she was ill and that the burdens of ruling were too heavy for a woman. The real reason, however, was her secret conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, which was illegal in Protestant Sweden. The throne went to Christina's cousin, who became King Charles X and the grandfather of Charles XII. Christina herself left immediately for Rome, where she lived for the remaining thirty-four years of her life, a friend of four popes, !a magnificent patroness of the arts and the lo
ver of Cardinal Azzolini.

continent, Swedish armies could march anywhere in Europe, and that made Sweden a force to be reckoned with in every European calculation of war and peace.

Sweden, in sum, was a phenomenon—a great power, but one with weaknesses. It was not only satiated with conquest, it was over-extended. It had many advantages: hard-working people, disciplined soldiers, kings who commanded brilliantly on the battlefield. Nevertheless, to maintain its position, it also needed wisdom. The nation's strength had to be husbanded, not flung into wild, new adventures. As long as its monarchs understood this and acted wisely, there was no reason that Sweden should not remain indefinitely the Mistress of the North.

The seeds of the Great Northern War lay in history and economics as well as in Peter's longing for the sea. The struggle between Russia and Sweden for possession of the coastal lands on the Gulf of Finland was centuries old. Sweden had been the enemy of the city-states of Moscow and Novgorod since the thirteenth century. Karelia and Ingria, which spread north and south of the Neva River, were ancient Russian lands; the Russian hero Alexander Nevsky won the name Nevsky ("of the Neva") by defeating the Swedes on the Neva River in 1240. During Russia's Time of Troubles following the death of Ivan the Terrible, Sweden had occupied a vast belt of territory which even included Novgorod itself. In 1616, Sweden gave up Novgorod, but kept the entire coastline anchored in such fortresses as Noteborg on Lake Ladoga, Narva and Riga, continuing Russia's isolation from the sea. Tsar Alexis had made an attempt to regain these lands, but he had been forced to abandon it. His more important wars were with Poland, and Russia could not fight Poland and Sweden simultaneously. Swedish possession of the provinces was reconfirmed by the Russian-Swedish Peace of Kardis in 1664.

Nevertheless, in Peter's mind these were Russian lands, and Russia was suffering substantial economic loss from their being in foreign hands. Through the Swedish-held ports of Riga, Reval and Narva flowed a wide river of Russian trade, and on this trade Swedish handlers and toll collectors levied heavy duties, and the Swedish treasury fattened. Finally, of course, there was the pull of the sea. In Vienna, when he found the Emperor determined on peace, Peter understood that he could not make war alone on the Ottoman Empire, and realized that his access to the Black Sea was blocked. But here was the Baltic, its waves lapping a coast only a few miles from the Russian frontier, which could serve as a direct avenue to Holland, England and the West. Presented with a chance to repossess this territory by making war on a boy king in

the company of Poland and Denmark, he found the temptation irresistible.

Yet, the war might still not have begun had fate not suddenly dispatched to the scene a dedicated man to stir the potent brew. Johann Reinhold von Patkul was a patriot without a country. He was a member of the old Livonian nobility, the hardy Germanic descendants of the Teutonic Knights, who had conquered and held Livonia, Estonia and Courland until the middle of the sixteenth century. After the severe defeats inflicted on the Knights by Ivan the Terrible, the Teutonic order was dissolved and Livonia fell into the hands of Poland. But the Poles were harsh masters, insisting on the Polish language, Polish laws and the Catholic religion, and eventually the Protestant Livonians sought the protection of Protestant Sweden. In 1660, after a long struggle, Livonia became a Swedish province and, as such, shared in the political affairs of the rest of Sweden. These included the famous and widely resisted "reduction" policy of Charles XI. After the early death of Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish aristocracy had rapidly increased its relative power in the state, at the same time making itself hated by other classes of the population. On the accession of Charles XI, both the new King and the Swedish Parliament were determined to reduce the influence of the aristocracy by granting the King absolute power. One effective means was to demand the return to the crown of numerous lands parceled out to the nobles for administration. (The noblemen had begun to treat these lands as their own hereditary estates.) This "reduction," begun in 1680, was applied with ruthless severity, not only to Sweden itself, but to all provinces of the Swedish empire, including Livonia. This command struck Livonia all the more painfully because only two years earlier Charles XI had solemnly affirmed the rights of the Livonian barons, expressly promising that they would not be subjected to any "reduction" which might be imposed. The barons protested the confiscation and sent emissaries to Stockholm to plead their case.