Charles XII

King of Sweden (r. 1697-1718)

• Born: June 17, 1682
• Birthplace: Stockholm, Sweden
• Died: November 30, 1718
• Place of death: Fredrikshald (now Halden), near Oslo, Norway

As one of the greatest kings of the Vasa Dynasty, Charles XII defended Sweden and won many victories for his country during the Great Northern War against Russia, Poland, and Denmark. He brought Swedish power to a high point, but he also initiated its decline.

Early Life

The future Charles XII was born to loving parents, the reigning Vasa king of Sweden, Charles XI, and his wife, Ulrika Eleonora, a former Danish princess. As a child, Charles was frail but physically active. He survived a case of smallpox and throughout his life loved riding and hunting. Charles also appreciated and enjoyed his formal education. While he was uncomfortable and awkward speaking Swedish, he was learned in Latin, German, and French. He liked reading biography and military history and studying religion and mathematics (which he often applied to problems of ballistics and fortifications). His heroes were Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. As a young man, he was often wild, extravagant, irreverent, and drunken, but as king he became pious and abstemious, drinking no alcohol stronger than beer. He was always strong-willed and stubborn.

Charles was the first king of Sweden born to absolutism, and from the beginning of his reign he expanded upon the absolutist powers of the Swedish throne. Charles XI died in 1697, and a regency was established for his fifteen-year-old son and successor, but it lasted only a few months. In 1697, at age sixteen, Charles XII crowned himself king in Stockholm rather than in Uppsala, as dictated by tradition, and he omitted the traditional oath as well. His first official acts were to build and restore several palaces, setting the stage for a lavish court life, and to enlarge and modernize the Swedish military establishment (for example, by introducing flintlocks and bayonets).

Life’s Work

Unquestionably, the most important event of Charles’s reign was the Great Northern War (1701-1721), yet he had little directly to do with its coming about and was one of its casualties before it was over. The war was largely caused by the dynamic and ambitious czar of Russia, Peter the Great, who was ten years Charles’s senior. Mistaking the new Swedish king’s youth and inexperience for ineptitude, Peter gathered to his emerging Russian Empire two of Sweden’s other historic rivals, Poland and Denmark, in an initial alliance and seized an apparent moment of vulnerability to go to war with Sweden.

In the opening weeks of the war, Charles moved swiftly and decisively, catching the enemy alliance almost completely off guard and proving himself to be a military genius. He soon came to be called the Lion of the North. In 1700, with the aid of England and the Netherlands, he defeated Denmark and quickly turned to Poland. The price for Anglo-Dutch support had been a pledge of Swedish neutrality during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in which England and the Netherlands engaged France, whose King Louis XIV was Sweden’s tacit ally.

In Poland, Charles quickly defeated the Polish-Lithuanian-Saxon armies and established a position of dominance, and the defeat of the Russians at Narva at the end of 1700 caused Peter to initiate a reorganization of his forces. In 1703, however, Russian victories along the Baltic Sea led to the founding of Peter’s new capital, St. Petersburg. In 1704, Charles deposed the Saxon king of Poland, Augustus II, and replaced him with Stanisław I Leszczyński, forcing Poland into a temporary alliance with Sweden and clearing the Russians from Polish territory. The mastery of Poland at this time marks an important high-water mark of Swedish power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Charles secured his rear flank in 1707 by signing a treaty with Prussia and a convention with the Holy Roman Empire to protect his earlier invasion of Saxony.

After concluding a secret alliance with the Cossack leader Ivan Stepanovich Mazepa in 1708, Charles launched an invasion of the Ukraine. Peter’s military reforms bore their first fruits with the great Russian victory over the Swedes and Cossacks at Poltava in 1709. The Swedish army was destroyed, Charles and Mazepa were forced to flee to the Ottoman Empire, and Augustus was reinstated as king of Poland. The Russo-Danish-Polish-Saxon alliance was reconstructed, and, in 1710, Charles responded by forming an alliance with Turkey. The Russians were then decisively defeated in a battle at the Pruth River in which Peter the Great was captured in 1711. Consequently, the peace that followed was dictated by the Turks, and Charles returned to the Ottoman Empire. Russia mainly lost territory in the Azov region on the Black Sea, which it had secured from Turkey in 1700.

Sultan Ahmed III and Charles had a falling-out in 1713, all Russo-Turkish hostilities ceased, and Charles was forced to return to Europe in 1714 to defend Swedish-occupied Stralsund. In 1715, the Netherlands, Britain, Prussia, Bremen, Verden, Holstein, and Hannover declared war on Sweden, and Stralsund fell to the Danes and Prussians. Charles invaded Norway in 1716, and in 1717 Peter finally failed in his attempts to secure an alliance with Louis XIV. Charles was killed in the trenches at the Siege of Fredriksten in 1718.

While as a warrior-king on campaign Charles lived a spartan, sober, and even pious existence, the Great Northern War nevertheless took a formidable toll on Sweden and its Baltic empire. With the king’s continued absence from Stockholm, the absolutism of the monarchy began to erode. Because Charles remained unmarried and had no direct heir to the throne, while he was away at the war his weaker sister, Ulrika Eleonora, became the de facto head of state. The resurging power of the Swedish parliamentary forces, especially of its upper house, and the increasing demands of the prolonged war began to force change on the monarchy. In 1711-1714, while Charles was in Turkey, administrative and economic reforms were enacted in Sweden, allowing for new taxes to pay for the war in return for economic and political concessions on the part of the monarchy. Perhaps Charles believed that he could reestablish the absolute authority of the monarchy upon his return to Stockholm, but he never did return. Upon Charles’s death in battle, he was succeeded to the throne by Ulrika Eleonora. She gradually lost more power to the nobility and clergy under a new constitution.

After 1715, Russian successes in Finland and the Baltic area, which eventually came to threaten Stockholm itself, and the general political and economic exhaustion resulting from a war of more than two decades finally forced Sweden to agree to an end to the hostilities. Under the Treaty of Nystadt in 1721, peace was formally declared, and Sweden lost some parts of its Baltic empire (for example, the province of Ingria, surrounding St. Petersburg, was lost to Peter the Great’s newly declared Russian Empire). The Treaty of Nystadt was by no means a victor’s peace. Instead, it led to better relations in the changing spectrum of Baltic and other powers in Northern Europe, culminating in Sweden’s participation in the allied coalition against Napoleonic France less than a century later.

Significance

Charles XII was a single-minded and ambitious absolutist ruler and a formidable soldier who neglected the real needs of his kingdom and its empire for foreign adventure and personal glory. Of the twenty-one years of his reign, he spent all but three away from Stockholm fighting in the Great Northern War. Through his military triumphs, he revitalized, for a time, the power and status of the Swedish Empire. This revitalization recalled the days of the greatest Vasa king of Sweden, Gustavus II Adolphus, and the Thirty Years’ War and has caused many historians to consider Charles second in importance only to Gustavus among the ruling members of the Vasa Dynasty.

However, the Great Northern War and Peter the Great also were Charles’s and the Swedish Empire’s undoing. The Russian victory and the Treaty of Nystadt marked Sweden’s fall and its replacement as a great power by Peter’s new Russian Empire. With this treaty, the tacit French-Turkish-Swedish anti-Habsburg coalition came apart too, and Poland was reduced to little more than a Russian puppet-state on the road to partition. Last, the reign of Charles signaled the beginning of Sweden’s transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy under the later Vasa and Bernadotte Dynasties.

Bibliography

Bain, R. Nisbet. Charles XII and the Collapse of the Swedish Empire, 1682-1719. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895. A standard biography of Charles, presenting a detailed account of his life and times. Dwells on his military prowess and sees his ambition as his undoing and that of the Swedish Empire.

Bengtsson, Frans G. The Life of Charles XII, King of Sweden, 1697-1718. London: Macmillan, 1960. A more modern, but nevertheless standard, biography. Bengtsson portrays Charles in a more positive light than Bain does, but on the whole Bain’s life of Charles reveals more to the reader.

Buzzi, Giancarlo. The Life and Times of Peter the Great. Translated by Ben Johnson. London: Hamlyn, 1968. This popular account of Charles’s principal rival includes several sections on Charles and the Great Northern War. Profusely illustrated.

Englund, Peter. The Battle That Shook Europe: Poltava and the Birth of the Russian Empire. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003. Military history by a Swedish historian describing the decisive battle in the Great Northern War. Examines the impact of the war on Russia and Sweden.

Hallendorff, Carl, and Adolf Schück. History of Sweden. Stockholm: C. E. Fritze, 1938. This standard history of Sweden has a good chapter on Charles and puts him into perspective with the rise and fall of the Swedish Empire under the Vasa Dynasty.

Hatton, R. M. Charles XII of Sweden. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968. The best biography of Charles in English. A well-researched, well-documented, well-written, and balanced study of the man, his country, and his times.

Lisk, Jill. The Struggle for Supremacy in the Baltic, 1600-1725. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968. Follows the rise of Swedish and then Russian power in the Baltic arena in the seventeenth century through the Great Northern War and the death of Peter the Great. Includes two important chapters on Charles and the Great Northern War.

Massie, Robert K. Peter the Great: His Life and World. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980. A Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Peter the Great. Thorough and well written, with information on Charles primarily in chapter 24. Charles is treated fairly and not overshadowed by Peter when they are both center stage.

Roberts, Michael. From Oxenstierna to Charles XII: Four Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Collection of four essays about Swedish history, including an essay examining the controversy surrounding the death of Charles XII.

Warner, Oliver. The Sea and the Sword: The Baltic, 1630-1945. New York: William Morrow, 1965. Essentially a general modern naval history of the Baltic basin. Includes a good and rather extensive chapter on Charles, Peter, and the war.