The fall of the House of Sweden

“Stormaktens undergång” is a book in Swedish by history professor Dick Harrison, who has been extremely productive lately. Not another month goes by without Harrison releasing a new title, it seems. No hard feelings, by the way. I kind of like his short books, both because they are easier to read than his usual tomes á la doorstopper, and because they seem to contain almost as many facts as the longer ones!

“Stormaktens undergång” (The Fall of the Great Power) deals with the reign of two Swedish kings, Karl XI (reigned 1660-1697) and his son Karl XII (reigned 1697-1718), sometimes known in English as Charles XI and Charles XII. In 1660, Sweden was a great power in northern Europe. In 1718, the great power had already started to unravel after Swedish defeats in the Great Northern War, and Sweden would soon become a relatively weak nation politically and militarily, although still prominent in other ways (most notably science). Harrison tries to tell the story of the unraveling, and since both Karls were virtual dictators, in this particular case “the history of Sweden” really is “the history of its kings”. However, Harrison has decided to concentrate on politics and wars, rather than on the personality traits of the two monarchs. This may be a weakness in the narrative. Judging by other accounts, the individual idiosyncrasies of Karl XII in particular were very important.

I previously reviewed Bengt Liljegren´s “Karl XII: En biografi”. It´s interesting to compare Liljegren´s take with Harrison´s. I was somewhat surprised that Harrison (a left-liberal pacifist) is so understanding towards Karl XII, the warrior-king par excellence. He constantly paints the king´s actions in as “rational” a light as possible. The decision to wage war in Poland rather than to pursue the Russians after the Battle of Narva was simply a mistake, and even the later decision to march on Moscow looked relatively rational at the time, at least from Karl XII´s perspective. Until that time, the Swedish army, often commanded by the king in person, was virtually undefeated. He didn´t or couldn´t know that Czar Peter the Great had reorganized and modernized the Russian military after the defeat at Narva. By contrast, Liljegren views Karl XII´s actions as major strategic blunders from a man with a reckless, adventurist and authoritarian streak, who simply refused to face reality squarely. I have to say that I´m more convinced by Liljegren´s scenario…

Liljegren points out that while Karl XII has usually been hailed by later generations of right-wing nationalists, leftists prefer his father Karl XI. This is probably not a reference to the contemporary left (which seems to think that history began yesterday), but to more old fashioned leftists. I think Strindberg liked Karl XI, and so does that perennial intellectual gadfly on the Swedish table-cloth, Jan Guillou. I already knew the answer to the riddle, but if you don´t, Harrison offers a handy summary (although he never discusses the later representations of Karl XI, nor Karl XII for that matter).

While Karl XI did fight a brutal war in Scania, most of his reign (and most of his realm) experienced an unprecedented period of peace during a time when wars were perennial. Karl XI was realistic enough to realize that the Swedish great power simply couldn´t expand anymore. Instead, he embarked on a policy of credible deterrent or peace-through-strength. This created the seemingly paradoxical situation that while Sweden became a super-militarized state with one of Europe´s best trained armies, it was also mostly at peace. What makes Karl XI interesting is that he decided not to heavily tax the peasantry to finance the expanding state apparatus and military. Instead, he attacked the high nobility, confiscating almost half of the lands owned by this particular estate. Karl XI also promoted the low nobility and the educated commoners, thereby creating a kind of meritocracy. Peasants were allowed to purchase land previously owned by the nobility, and the peasant estate expanded its political influence, especially at the local level. (Nationally, the king was the absolute ruler.) 

Karl XI abolished the last remains of serfdom in Estonia and Livonia, where he attacked both the Swedish and the Baltic German nobility. New cities were established, often to the detriment of entrenched local elites. Thus, it´s possible to see Charles XI as a kind of “bourgeois revolutionary from above”. According to popular legend, Karl XI would often show up in remote parts of the country incognito to help the poor and the downtrodden. In this capacity, he was known as “Grey Cap”. While these stories are myths, it *is* richly ironic that the regime which confiscated most private property in Swedish history was that of an absolutist 17^th century ruler, rather than the 20^th century Social Democrats…

Of course, not everything was well in the realm of Karl XI. His brutality in fighting the “snapphanar” in Scania, a kind of peasant-based or brigand-based guerillas who wanted the region to revert to Danish rule, has already been mentioned. The king was a strict confessional Lutheran, an orthodoxy enforced everywhere in the Swedish Empire. His reign is also associated with witch-burnings, often after the testimony of small children had been procured or enforced, although Harrison believes that the witch-craze mostly took place during the rule of the caretaker government before Karl XI´s legal maturity. Above all, Karl XI was an absolutist monarch who ruled the entire kingdom alone, without the approval of Parliament (although it did rubberstamp his decisions).

After Karl XI´s death, the son and successor Karl XII could use this centralized militarist-absolutist state, where everyone was used to obey “God” and the King, to his satisfaction – with disastrous results. Harrison points out that despite all the hardships in Sweden under Karl XII (about one half of the male population was killed during the Great Northern War), there were no peasant rebellions or other outrages against the absolute ruler – this becomes doubly strange if we take into consideration that Karl XII wasn´t even in Sweden for most of his reign, instead waging wars abroad. Was the dictatorship *that* hard? Were people too weakened by famine, pestilence and drafts from resisting? Or had the population been effectively brainwashed by the Karoliner kings into actually supporting them? Harrison seems to veer towards this latter option…

That´s both a frightening and fascinating thought.

“Stormaktens undergång” is recommended reading on a rainy day, if you understand the recent version of the language of the erstwhile Swedish Empire…