Aggressive and Violent Peasant Elites in the Nordic Countries, C. 1500-1700 by Ulla Koskinen

Author:Ulla Koskinen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Sweden and the Nordic Seven Years’ War

The Nordic Seven Years’ War was mainly a conflict between Sweden (which included present-day Finland) and Denmark (which included Norway), but it also involved the important Baltic sea power of Lübeck and the Kingdom of Poland. It began in the summer of 1563, when there was an escalation of hostilities between the two young Nordic rulers, Frederick II of Denmark (r. 1559–88) and Eric XIV of Sweden (r. 1560–68). When the war started, Danish troops soon conquered the important fortress of Älvsborg which had served as Sweden’s only access to the sea in the West. For the following seven years, Swedish and Danish troops would wage war by raiding the border provinces in order to deprive the other of logistical support. The war went on until the end of 1570 when a peace treaty was finally concluded in the Baltic port of Stettin. 16

While the Danish monarch ultimately relied on mercenary troops raised from the recruiting markets of Germany and the Netherlands, the Swedish army relied mainly on conscripted or newly recruited peasant soldiers. Such army units, originally raised to supplement domestic or foreign elite troops, now had to lead expeditions into hostile territory in provinces like Scania (Skåne), Blekinge, Halland, Bohuslän, Jämtland and Trøndelag. Although King Eric of Sweden commanded a considerable force of regular troops, these had to be supplemented by locally raised peasant militias to wage war on a grander scale. While some of the peasants were forced to join army campaigns a long way from home, the others had to contribute in kind by supplying taxes and food for men and horses. The peasant elites of Sweden were therefore directly involved in the expansionist military plans of its rulers in a way that their Danish and Norwegian counterparts were not. 17

The following analysis will focus on the conflicts that occurred when the Swedish state tried to mobilise peasant militias as well as newly recruited soldiers for army campaigns into foreign territory. I will also address how King Eric and his officers tried to solve the problems by bargaining with the peasant leaders, and the strategies used by the peasants to counter the demands of war. The main thrust of the argument is that large-scale war created both problems as well as opportunities for the Swedish government and its subjects. The Seven Years’ war was only the first in a series of armed conflicts that would last for more than a century. The inevitable consequence of this would be an ongoing militarisation of Swedish society, and an increasing social divide between the established peasant freeholders who stayed at home and the conscripted soldiers. However, this Swedish military state was a long time in the making. The wars of the early Reformation period caused great havoc in the provinces targeted by army operations, but they were ultimately less devastating than the prolonged state of international warfare in the seventeenth century. This makes it all the more interesting to study the relationship between the government and peasantry at the beginning of this “period of the great wars”.

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