Swedish Empire

The, the, the Livonian Order becomes a Protestant, secular kind of institution and ends up on the wrong side of Ivan the Terrible.

So there's this huge afterlife of how the Teutonic Knights, the, the kind of, the long echo of the crusading m- movement gets bowed up in these new border conflicts with, uh, with Russia and, and the Swedish Empire and so on.

So I think this gets to the central idea of your book, that what holy war does is it transforms the self-image of the Scandinavian peoples, and it changes their culture.

Well, not so much changes it, but redirects its focus, where you're not swinging the Hammer of Thor, but the Cross of Christ, and you're still swinging a weapon, it's just what you're swinging at changes, and instead of raiding monks at Lindisfarne off coasts of Ireland and England, you're now going into the Holy Land, you're going into the Baltic regions, and the focus changes, but the methods are still similar.

There we are.

Well, what is it about? It's for and against the great Swedish Empire, which Gustavus Adolphus and other members of the Vasa dynasty had put together in the late 16th, early 17th century.

From a very small demographic base, the Swedes had conquered pretty well the entire Baltic littoral, including the Eastern Baltic, all of which, of course, today is either Finland or Russia or the Baltic states.

They created a huge empire.

Only just over a million of them.

The amazing thing is they managed to hang on to it for as long as they did.

The Great North War is essentially about that, about the Swedish Empire cracking up and various other powers intervening to get their slice, including, incidentally, George I, King of England.

He took a good old slice for Hanover at the end of the war.

It was also a recognition of Sweden as one of the great military powers of Europe, granting it territory in Pomerania and elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, projecting its influence over most of northern Germany.

Indeed, for the rest of the 17th century, the Swedish Empire was considered one of the most powerful on the continent, even establishing their own colony in the New World, New Sweden, located on the site of the modern-day city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Though the age of the Swedish Empire only lasted for about a century, the ideas put forward by Gustavus Adolphus lasted much longer.

His military tactics and organizational style was studied and copied by generals for generations after his death, in particular by Napoleon Bonaparte, who used Gustavus' theory of superior firepower to conquer most of continental Europe.

What's more, he left a legacy as being a staunch defender of the Protestant religion, and because of his efforts, the idea that an individual was able to choose their own religious belief and practice it without interference from the government remains an integral part of most modern countries.