Thinking outside the Baltic Swedish ambitions in Norway at the height of the Great Power Era Master’s thesis, 45 credits Author: Elias Norgren Supervisor: Henrik Ågren Seminar chair: Peter Ericsson Date of defence: 31/5 2021 Semester: Spring 2021 HISTORISKA INSTITUTIONEN Abstract The purpose of this study is to examine the seldom researched Swedish geopolitical interests in Norway in the rst half of the 17th century, with the brief 1658 conquest of Trondheim as its central event of inquiry. Through the study of privy council protocols and chancellor Axel Oxenstierna’s correspondence, the study builds a case for the conuence of security, commerce, and the concepts of nations as the inuencing factors that shaped Swedish imperial foreign policy in the decades leading up to the dramatic war of 1658, yielding a theoretical construction of the Empire’s Baltic doctrine, or the Oxenstierna doctrine, as an explanatory model for Sweden’s early modern expansion patterns. Subsequently through understanding of the Empire’s expansionist rationale leading up to 1658, the conquest of the Norwegian province of Trondheim is put in a new light as having been an interruptive and complicated re-imagining of what the Swedish Empire should be. Keywords: Swedish Empire, Denmark-Norway, Baltic Sea, Axel Oxenstierna, state formation, geopolitics, commerce, early modern nationalism. Acknowledgements Much gratitude is owed to Erik Opsahl from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim for his knowledgeable feedback in the initial stages of this work, and for his invaluable recommendations of Norwegian research on the topic, without which this project would likely never have taken o. A thanks is also owed to Georg Stenborg at the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University for his aid in translating particularly dicult Latin sentences. Contents List of maps 1 List of abbreviations 1 Introduction 2 Prologue: Historical background 2 The understudied Swedish 17th-century outlook on Norway 4 Theory 8 Rike as a practical political unit 8 The conglomerate state 14 Early modern nationalism 15 Geopolitics and concepts of nations hand in hand 18 Sources and method 19 Disposition 23 Norway and the Swedish Empire 24 The far north before and after the Treaty of Knäred 24 The Russian trade 26 Swedish Lapland as a Baltic zone 27 The Torstenson War 29 The peaceful war 30 Ambiguous Bohuslän 31 The ephemeral North Sea orientation 33 The wars of Charles X Gustav 36 Post-Oxenstierna policy 36 Norway as a planned second kingdom of Charles 40 Trondheim as a Swedish province 42 The council questions the king 44 Post-Charles policy 46 Conclusion 49 The coincidence of commercial opportunity, geography, and rike 49 Northwestward reorientation and reversal 51 What the fate of Bohuslän can tell 54 Epilogue 55 Sources and literature 56 Printed sources 56 Bibliography 56 List of maps Map 1 3 Map 2 25 Map 3 32 Map 4 43 List of abbreviations AOSB Axel Oxenstiernas skrifter och brefvexlingar SR Svenska riksdagsakter SRAR Svenska ridderskaps och adels riksdagsprotokoll SRP Svenska riksrådets protokoll 1 Introduction The development of the physical extent of a state is arguably one of the most important aspects of its history, and the history of the society which it enveloped. The shifting of territory from the grasps of one political sphere to another can be of enormous signicance to the future prospects of all involved parties, both the population, and the states themselves. Even if the territorial shift is a temporary disturbance to the balance of power, resembling a mere ash in the long run as it is rapidly undone by outside intervention, as European history so often goes, the importance of a redrawn map in its time must not be underestimated in our time. This is an investigation into the 17th-century Swedish ambitions of expansion into Norway, centered around the peculiar conquest of the county of Trondheim in 1658. Prologue: Historical background From its revival as a sovereign state under the leadership of Gustav Vasa in 1523 all the way up to the end of the so-called Great Power Era (stormaktstiden) in 1721, Sweden was a country beset by a will to expand in all directions. The rst land gains to this ambition were obtained in 1561, when the Estonian city of Reval (the modern city of Tallinn), and in time, the entirety of Estonia, sought Swedish protection during the disintegration of the crusader states in the eastern Baltic. A near-constant warring with its neighbours in the rival dual monarchy Denmark-Norway, Poland-Lithuania, and Russia resulted after some setbacks in a wave of military conquests in western Russia, with Karelia and Ingria adding to the young empire in 1617. Successes on the battleeld against Poland expanded the eastern Baltic domains further south to encompass Livonia, which was shortly followed by a number of highly successful campaigns in the Holy Roman Empire against its Catholic emperor in the 1630s. Although Sweden would come to lose its king Gustav II Adolf early on, Sweden had established itself rmly in Pomerania, and stood to gain this province along with a number of scattered additional minor territories in Germany at the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Beginning in 1643, Sweden came to a decisive head with Denmark-Norway in the so-called Torstenson War (the Hannibal War in Norwegian), in which it conquered Jämtland, Härjedalen, Halland, and the islands of Gotland and Ösel (west of Estonia), for the rst time greatly expanding its territory in Scandinavia. A second war with Denmark broke out in 1657, while the army of King Charles X Gustav was belligerent in Poland. In a rapid response, King Charles quickly marched to overrun the Danish mainland, and crossed the winter-frozen sounds protecting the islands of Fyn 2 and Zealand in early 1658. Besieging the Danish capital, a resounding peace treaty was soon composed together with English and French mediators, wherein Sweden stood to gain Bohuslän, Skåneland (containing the two provinces Scania and Blekinge), the wealthy eastern half of Denmark. The island of Bornholm in the south Baltic was also procured, and this is also where the Norwegian county of Trondheim enters the picture. Map 1. The Swedish Empire in 1658. Territories have their year of conquest in parenthesis. Trondheim and Bornholm would be lost by 1660. A number of complicating factors surrounding the radical peace treaty soon had King Charles commit another attack on Denmark later the same year. Swedish eorts to capture Copenhagen were halted by Danish-allied Dutch eets, and French and English objections to the continued expansion of Sweden prevented any further conquests. An Imperial-Brandenburgian-Polish army pressured Sweden in Germany and the occupied parts of Denmark. At the nal peace negotiations in 1660, the defeated Swedish Empire was forced to return the island of Bornholm to Denmark, 3 and the conquest of Trondheim was likewise reversed, removed from the image of the Swedish Empire as suddenly as it was added to it. Swedish control of the remainder of the former Danish provinces was however conrmed, setting Sweden on a path to peace and recovery from several decades of exhausting wars.1 The understudied Swedish 17th-century outlook on Norway There is a rich scholarly tradition of research into the Swedish Empire, which has been variously dened using many dierent theoretical parameters. Some research has emphasised the Empire as a maintained eort to defend Sweden from aggressive neighbours, by having an upper hand on them in their own territory and in eect bringing the war to their soil and keeping it out of Sweden.2 Other research has instead stressed the Swedish Empire as a construction founded in the opportunity to take advantage of the increasingly important Baltic trade, rather than necessary actions of realpolitik.3 English historian Michael Roberts, who presented the aforementioned respective positions as the ‘old’ and the ‘new school’, furthermore even speculated that the Swedish Empire had dimensions of a “deep national psychological need [...] for self-assertion”, and may have been the result of a structural exploitation by a small noble class.4 The explanations for the why of the Swedish Empire are many, and there are likewise a plethora of accounts of its what. Most centrally, it was structurally a conglomerate state,5 and economically and militarily a strictly Baltic state.6 While it is true that Swedish rule historiographically left its by far biggest mark on Estonia, Latvia, and Germany, it had an oft-forgotten impact on regions outside of these, which has to a large degree been neglected by modern scholars. It is seldom reected upon that Sweden with the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658 expanded not only to the more integral province of Scania, but also gained the province of Trondheim in central Norway. This coastal fell region containing the seat of an archdiocese and with its heart at the largest fjord in Norway, while only being held for less than two years and permanently ceded back to Denmark-Norway in 1660, is 1 This general overview is based on Michael Roberts’ lecture The Swedish Imperial Experience, 1560-1718 (1979), and is complemented by information from Jerker Rosén’s contributions to Den svenska historien (1967). 2 Roberts, 1979, pp. 12–18. My own bachelor’s thesis Jus Belli: Frameworks for the Swedish occupation of Pomerania 1630–1648 (Norgren, 2018, unpublished) arrived at the conclusion that most positions in Germany that Sweden was conceded at the end of the Thirty Years’ War were demanded with security motivations, and that the same concerns motivated the initial interest in Pomerania. 3 Roberts, 1979, pp. 26–28.