2. Preparing for Take-Off : Th e Early Eighteenth Century Northern Politics and Peter the Great On the political stage, the seventeenth century in northern Europe had not been lacking in drama and bloodshed, and the eighteenth similarly started with major military turbulence, especially in the north-eastern corner. Th e Great Northern War, which lasted from 1700 till 1721, was to have far- reaching consequences for many years to follow. Largely connected with Sweden’s Baltic supremacy in the previous century, the war started with a number of states – Russia, Denmark-Norway, Poland-Lithuania and Saxony – uniting in a Northern Alliance against Sweden. But the architect of the war was Russia. In July 1700, the country negotiated a thirty-year truce with the Turks, providing security to the south, but the fi reworks on 18 August to celebrate the happy event actually carried an ominous warning, because the very next day Russia declared war on Sweden (Wilson 2009, 71). In Russia as well as Sweden there was a young and extremely ambitious monarch on the throne. Both were destined to leave indelible marks on national as well as European history. When the war broke out, the Swedish King Carl XII was no more than eighteen and had only acquired the reins of power three years earlier; Russia’s Peter I, who was later to earn the epithet “the Great”, was twenty-eight, and had eff ectively only ruled the country since 1696. Carl XII has been called the last of the great Swedish warrior kings, and in the fi rst phase of the war he certainly achieved some stunning military victories. Though the Alliance opened hostilities by attacking Sweden in February 1700, the Swedes dealt a crushing blow to the Russians at Narva later in the same year by routing an army four times the size of their own. Carl then moved swiftly, attacking Poland in 1701, taking Warsaw and Cracow the following year, and again defeating Peter the Great at Pultusk in 1703. When he invaded Russia a few years later, however, he met fierce resistance, and by this time the modernisation of Peter’s army was well underway. The Russian leader had also established a navy, based primarily in Arkhangelsk, and in 1703 he founded St Petersburg – later to be called the Venice of the North – in order to further secure his hold © PETER FJÅGESUND, 2014 | DOI 10.1163/9789401210829_004 Peter Fjågesund - 9789401210829 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NCDownloaded-ND from 4.0 Brill.com09/24/2021 license. 06:27:33PM via free access 118 Th e Dream of the North on his northern territories and the vital access to the Baltic. Th e Swedish empire in the region was tottering; in June 1709 Peter won a great and decisive victory at the Battle of Poltava in the Ukraine, eff ectively spelling the end of Swedish dominance and marking the rise of Russia as a major regional power. By 1715 Sweden had lost all its Baltic and German territories, and during one of several lacklustre attempts to wrest Norway from the hands of Denmark, Carl XII was killed under mysterious circumstances during a siege at Fredriksten Fortress (present-day Halden in southern Norway) in December 1718. In a series of treaties from 1719 to 1721, the map of Scandinavia and the Baltic was largely transformed, and after another war between Russia and Sweden from 1741 to 1743, the new power structure was further confi rmed by the Treaty of Åbo, in which Sweden ceded large parts of southern Finland to Russia. Although by this time, Peter the Great had been dead for nearly twenty years, Russia had acquired a position it was not to lose again: due to Peter’s mammoth eff orts it was now fi rmly part of “the governing part of Europe” (Wilson 2009, 100). In Britain, the new century started less violently, but still with plenty of political drama. In the early spring of 1702, William III (of Orange) died, and left the throne to his sister-in-law, Queen Anne. More importantly, however, Anne’s twelve-year reign witnessed an event that was going to have profound repercussions not only in Britain but also in northern Europe as a whole, namely the union of 1707 between England and Scotland. Since 1603, when the Tudor line had died out with Queen Elizabeth I, and the Stuart James VI of Scotland had become James I of England, the two kingdoms had in practical terms been governed as one. Nevertheless, with the benefi t of hindsight it is clear that it was really the political union between the two rival kingdoms that gave a boost to both of them and that was an essential precondition for the spectacular success of a surprisingly united Great Britain in the following two centuries. In 1707 both nations were on the threshold of great things, not least Scotland, which later in the century was to fl ourish and produce breathtaking achievements in a wide range of areas. Admittedly, this development was not self-evident in the fi rst decades of the eighteenth century. After Queen Anne’s death in 1714 and the ascension of George I of Hanover, the union and the new royal family were still to experience the attempted Jacobite coup (1745–46), led by Bonnie Prince Charlie, to re- establish the Stuart dynasty. Still, the period from 1690 to 1750 witnessed a steady consolidation of Britain’s position: the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, the Union of 1707, the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and the fi nal defeat of the Stuarts in 1746 were all events that served to establish Britain as an important northern and fi rmly non-Catholic power, both important Peter Fjågesund - 9789401210829 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:27:33PM via free access Preparing for Take-Off : Th e Early Eighteenth Century 119 preconditions for the development after 1750 of a distinctly alternative culture to that of southern, Catholic Europe.1 A further factor contributing to the gradual shift of focus to the north was the continuing exploration and exploitation of the arctic regions, now expanding into hitherto unknown and uncharted waters as well as territories. Incidentally, this intensive eff ort, whose hunger for breaking ever new boundaries is intimately associated with an insatiable and constantly developing scientifi c curiosity, also led to the discovery of the Arctic’s polar counterpart, the Antarctic. In 1694, the Dutchman Abel Tasman’s account of his voyage half a century earlier, during which he discovered Tasmania, was fi nally published in an English translation, followed three years later by the English buccaneer, scientist and three- times circumnavigator William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World, creating a widespread curiosity about the Southern Ocean (Gurney 2007, 15). Th en from 1698 to 1700, the future Astronomer Royal Edmond Halley made a scientifi c voyage to the same waters, observing drifting ice from the south. It was not until 1739, however, that the Frenchman Bouvet de Lozier made the fi rst discovery of land as far south as 54° S. It proved only to be a small island, later to be named Bouvetøya,2 however, and nearly a century was still to pass before a human being set foot on the Antarctic continent. In the polar regions of the North, on the other hand, exploratory eff orts were on a grander scale altogether, largely due to the man who was probably the most forward-looking and energetic power player of the period, namely Peter the Great. Even during the fi rst years of his reign, when he was still largely under the infl uence of his advisors, he must have grasped the strategic and economic potential of the enormous Siberian territories, in most of which the tsar’s authority was still weak or non- existent. After alarming clashes between Chinese and Russian groups in the border areas with China, the Treaty of Nerchinsk was signed in 1689 (Frank 1998, 125).3 1 Th e Treaty of Utrecht ended the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) and prevented a union between the crowns of Spain and France, thus ending French hegemony in central Europe and further paving the way for British expansion. 2 Th e island is currently a Norwegian dependency; its offi cial name is therefore Bouvetøya. 3 Th e treaty was generally respected for nearly two centuries, but it was after one of the breaches of the treaty that Peter the Great engaged an English diplomat, John Bell, to re-establish peaceful relations with the Chinese emperor. According to Bell’s own account, he “set out from St Petersburgh the 14th of July, 1719, in company with Messieurs Lange and Grave, attended by a few servants; the fi rst was a native of Sweden, and the other of Courland [region of Latvia]” (Bell 1806, 114). After an eventful and successful journey of about 20,000 km, “[we] arrived safe in the capital city of Mosco [sic], on the 5th day of January 1722, where we found his Czarish Majesty, and all the court, who had lately arrived from St Petersburgh, and preparations were making for grand fi re-works [sic], triumphal arches, and other marks of joy, on account of the peace: With which I shall conclude my journey” (ibid., 396). Peter Fjågesund - 9789401210829 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:27:33PM via free access 120 Th e Dream of the North Having thus established a workable border to the south, the next question was how to pursue the Russian expansion to the north.