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When Charles XII became king in 1697, he also inherited
an army of 65 000 man. Considering the limited resources of Sweden, its
army’s size was impressive but still just enough to match the two largest
armies of Sweden’s enemies in the previous conflict (the Scanian War
1675-1679). The eternal enemy of Sweden, Denmark-Norway, had an army of
36 000 men. And the opportunistic state of Brandenburg-Prussia , which
desired Sweden’s German possessions, had an army of more than 22 000 men.
Add to that the huge army of Russia, which even though it was of limited
quality, could field an army of 120 000 men for the Azov campaign against
the Turks in 1695. Furthermore there were several other German states with
disproportionately large armies and appetites for territorial expansion.
Most notably the Electorate of Saxony with a growing army which had reached
18 000 men when it to the great surprise of Sweden started the Great
Northern War by attacking Riga in 1700, with Denmark and Russia following
soon after.
The outbreak of war in 1700 forced Sweden to expand its
already large army. During the first years of the war the army gradually
increased in size until it peaked in 1707 with a strength of about 115 000
men. At that time Sweden had knocked out Denmark and Saxony from the war and
only Russia remained. But Russia too had expanded its army. The Swedish main
army was destroyed in the Ukraine in 1709 and during the following years a
large number of Swedish fortresses with its garrisons fell to the enemy
coalition, which now Denmark and Saxony had re-joined and from 1715 also
included the German states of Prussia and Hanover. The latter state had then
an army of up to 20 000 men while the Prussian army at the same time had
grown to about 40 000 men. The Swedish army on the other hand reached its
nadir in 1716 when the last overseas fortress fell and was then reduced to a
mere 40 000 men. Charles XII strengthened the army to 60 000 men while
preparing for the Norwegian campaign of 1718 but this was now just enough to
match the size of Denmark-Norway’s expanded armies. Sweden was still
hopelessly outnumbered and after the death of Charles XII the army suffered
great losses during their hasty and ill prepared retreat from Norway. At the
closing stage of the war the Swedish army was only about 45 000 men strong,
which would also be the peacetime strength of the now greatly reduced
Swedish kingdom.
Recruitment
The Great Northern War and the limited resources of
Sweden meant that the Swedish army had to rely on many different methods of
raising regiments. The main difference is between the provincial regiments
and the enlisted (värvade) regiment. The latter category consisted of
regiments which were recruited by their colonels in a manner similar to most
other armies. These were soldiers who for a sum of money had volunteered to
serve in the army for a period of time. About 25 000 men of the army
Charles XII had inherited were enlisted soldiers. The remaining 40 000 men
belonged to the former category which was more diverse. But all the infantry
regiments could trace their origin to the system of conscription set up by
Gustav II Adolf in the 1620s, which is called “the older indelningsverk”
as opposed to “the younger indelningsverk” created up by Charles
XII’s father Charles XI after the Scanian War.
The provincial cavalry regiments were recruited by
administrative units called “rusthåll”. In charge of each rusthåll
was a “rusthållare” who in exchange for tax reductions supplied
the army with a cavalryman and a horse. The rusthållare was normally
a wealthy peasant but in central Sweden there were also many cases of
noblemen being rusthållare and these individuals could be in charge
of more than one rusthåll. This system of recruitment for the cavalry
was used in both the older and the younger indelningsverk. Some
restrictions had been put in place for the rusthållare in the
provinces which had been conquered from Denmark and Norway 1645 and 1658.
The Crown had deemed the local inhabitants there (especially Scania) to be
too unreliable for military service so the rusthållare had been
forced to recruit only proper “Swedes”. However, Charles XII removed the
last of these restrictions in the beginning of his reign.
The older indelningsverk had created permanent
provincial regiments (usually one for each administrative county) which
would form the backbone of the Swedish army during all its wars to come.
The recruitment of the infantry regiments basically followed the same
procedure as ordinary taxation, which meant that conscriptions had to be
approved by parliament and the ratio of conscripts had to respect the
privileges of various groups in the society. So for example if one in ten of
every able bodied man was to be conscripted, the peasants working land owned
by the nobility or the Church only had to provide half that ratio (one in
twenty). And those peasants of the nobility who were living less than ten
kilometres from a noble estate (i.e. within the “freedom mile”) were exempt
all together from conscription. Further exemptions or reductions were also
given to workers who were essential for the economy, such as the mining
industry. However, when war broke out the need for more soldiers meant that
all had to carry their weight and temporary provincial regiments were
raised. The exact methods could vary from each war but in the Great
Northern War so called “Estate Dragoons” (ståndsdragoner in Swedish
but also referred to as “Priest Dragoons”) were raised from the estates of
the nobility and the Church. And the mining districts supplied the army with
“Mountain battalions” (bergsbataljoner), soon merged into a “Mountain
regiment”. In this context we can also mention the “Adelsfane” regiments
which were permanent cavalry units raised by the nobility in exchange for
their privileges.
The permanent provincial regiments could also be
strengthened by additional conscription which would raise the ratio of able
men going to the army. These additional conscriptions were however unpopular
and a different method of recruiting the permanent regiments was introduced
already when the older Indelningsverk was established. In the
province of Dalarna the peasants rejected conscription and made an agreement
with the Crown in 1621 that they instead of conscription would recruit and
maintain 1 400 soldiers at all time. How this worked in practice was that
the province was divided into 1 400 permanent “rotar” (“rote”
in singular) with each of them responsible for the upkeep of one soldier.
The size of the rote was based on how much they paid in taxes and not
on population size. This model was later adopted by other provinces such as
Jämtland and Västerbotten. After the Scanian War the Indelningsverk
was reformed so that all provincial infantry regiments were to be recruited
by the peasants rather than by conscription, thus creating the “Younger
Indelningsverk”.
The reformation of the Indelningsverk was however
not finished when the Great Northern War began. Österbotten Regiment which
comprised the northern half of Finland, where the peasants had rejected the
new model, would continue with conscription until 1733. The province of
Scania had suffered so much from the Scanian War that the plan to recruit
two infantry regiments there was postponed. So during the Great Northern War
the province was instead subjected to repeated conscriptions. In the
beginning these conscriptions were used to replace losses of other temporary
regiments but from 1711 they were used to create regiments of their own.
From the Crown’s point of view the upside with the
Younger Indelningsverk was that it provided a reliable source of
manpower. The older system had suffered from desertions (with conscripts
fleeing to the woods rather than reporting to their regiment) which meant
that the Crown never knew how many conscripts that would actually arrive to
the army. With the new system it was the job of the land owning peasants to
find willing recruits and pay them what was needed for them to enlist,
because if they failed with this they would themselves be forced to join the
army.
The downside with the new system was that the number of
soldiers the peasants was obliged to provide was fixed and could, according
to the signed contracts, not be expanded in times of emergency. However,
this proved to have little effect when the war broke out in 1700 as the
Crown asked for and was given additional recruits by the peasants.
The manner in which the peasants provided additional
recruits was to create so called “männing” regiments. All the existing
rotar were grouped in threes to recruit an additional soldier
which were called “tremänningar” (= three men [-ings]). These were then used
to create new regiments which were promised to stay and defend the homeland
while the permanent regiments were sent overseas. The same thing was done
with the rusthåll which provided recruits for the cavalry regiments.
The promise to keep all these regimens in the homeland was however not kept.
The Finnish 3-männing regiments were shipped over to the Baltic provinces
already in 1700 and many of the Swedish 3-männing regiments followed the
next year. Finland felt so exposed by the absence of troops that they raised
so called double regiments. If the permanent regiment had a strength of
1 000 men the double regiment would consist of 667 men (together with the
333 men raised to the 3-männing regiments this effectively doubled the
recruitment from that regimental district). In Sweden proper the measures
taken were not as drastic, but there too a second wave of männing-regiments
was raised. Those provinces that had seen their 3-männing regiments shipped
overseas had to recruit a 5-männing regiment (the rotar were grouped
in groups of five with each raising a new soldier). Those provinces where
the 3-männing regiments had stayed home had to raise a higher ratio of
soldiers so they created 4-männing regiments.
The männing regiments were, except in Finland, a one off
recruitment. The rotar in Sweden proper were thus not required to
replace losses as they did with the permanent regiments. So too keep these
männing regiments up to strength conscripts from Scania were used as well as
enlisting volunteers. The number of regiments also dwindled through mergers
so all in all their provincial character was gradually hollowed out. The
last of the männing regiments that had been sent overseas were lost in the
Russian campaign 1707-1709 and after Poltava new waves of männing regiments
would be created in the same manner as in the beginning of the war.
The Indelningsverk also had rotar and rusthåll
which supplied the navy with sailors. In an effort to boost the size of the
army Charles XII transformed these into seven infantry regiments in 1717.
These were however disbanded after the King’s death and the men were
returned to the navy.
All these provincial units were recruited in Sweden
proper and Finland but there were potential supplies of man power in the
Baltic and German provinces as well. Traditionally the regiments recruited
from these areas were enlisted, but during the Great Northern War Sweden
tried to create provincial regiments through conscription, so called
national militia regiments (“lantmilis”). In the Baltic provinces of Estonia
and Livonia this was actually even more ground-breaking since this meant
large scale recruiting from Estonian and Latvian speaking peasants,
something that had not been done before because of language difficulties.
Unlike the Finnish nobility which spoke both Swedish and Finnish, the Baltic
nobility usually only spoke German and the regiments had thus primarily been
recruited in the German speaking cities. Unfortunately these Baltic national
militia regiments would be very unlucky as the war did not go well in the
Livonian theatre, and the remaining regiments were destroyed in 1710 when
Russia conquered the Baltic provinces. That year a national militia was
created in the German provinces. But these were of a lesser quality, they
were apparently not issued uniforms, and also short-lived.
While both provincial and enlisted regiments were
generally recruited within the borders of the Swedish realm, there were some
distinctively foreign elements. The most notable of these were the Vallacks
which were recruited in Poland and served as light cavalry in a role akin to
later day hussars. These continued to serve in the Swedish army as late as
the Norwegian campaign of 1718.
The successes against Saxony in the early part of the war
also led to a large number of prisoners of wars being captured which were
then recruited and used to raise “Saxon” units. The most colourful of these
units was a French grenadier battalion which previously had been captured by
the allies in the battle of Blenheim and then given to the Saxons who lost
them to the Swedes in the battle of Fraustadt 1706. These French were then
retaken by the Saxons the same year in the battle of Kalisz but yet again
handed over to the Swedes as a condition of the peace treaty at Altranstädt.
Apart from a brief interlude when they were press ganged to fight with
Hungarian rebels against the Austrians (!) they then served the Swedish king
as horse grenadiers until the fall of Rügen 1715, after which the remaining
soldiers found a new home in the Prussian army…
A Swiss battalion, with the same prehistory as the
French, also served in the Swedish army. Other foreign elements were the
four Holstein-Gottorp regiments in Swedish service 1714-1715, although this
duchy had very strong ties to Sweden and its duke was a likely successor to
Charles XII. The Swedish king was also duke of Pfalz-Zweibrücken near the
French border and had a regiment raised there in 1712 to help defend
Sweden’s endangered German possessions
The officers
Unlike their Danish and Russian opponents the Swedish
officer corps was almost exclusively of native stock. The ratio of noblemen
in the officer corps was also relatively small. At the start of the war 58 %
of the officers were noblemen (in Sweden proper), and by 1719 this number
had dropped to 34 % as a result of both heavy casualties and a vastly
expanded officer corps. Nobility was thus not a requirement to be an
officer, although a military career was a good way to become a nobleman.
Those who reached the rank of major were more or less automatically elevated
to the nobility. Having a good family background was however necessary and
those officers who were neither noblemen nor members of an officer family
were in most cases the sons of priests.
Other than a good family background the only requirement
to become an officer was spending a couple of months to do the so called
“rank passage”. This was a way for an aspiring officer to learn his trade by
beginning to serve as a private and then gradually serve in all the other
ranks until he became an officer. This requirement was introduced by
Charles XI and was not well received by all. The future general Adam Ludvig
Lewenhaupt for example was a count and he thought that it was beneath his
dignity to serve as a common private so instead he began his military career
by serving the Holy Roman Emperor.
The officers of the permanent provincial regiments (also
called the “indelta” regiments) distinguished themselves in the manner in
which they were paid. Rather than receiving cash salaries they were given an
indelning (= allotment) which consisted of a homestead and rights to
the tax revenue from adjacent farms (hence the name indelningsverk
which means “allotment office”). This was meant to exactly match the cash
salaries of the enlisted regiments, but this system was never adjusted after
it was organised in the 1680s and 1690s. That had the beneficial result that
“indelta” officers were not affected by inflation which hollowed out the
cash salaries of the officers in the enlisted regiments during the course of
the 18th century. The indelning was however connected to
each individual rank in the regiment so every time an officer was promoted
he had to change his indelning, and the exact value of them was
dependent on how well the predecessors had taken care of them. This is a
likely cause to the form of corruption called “accord” which is primarily
known from the period after the Great Northern War but is believed to have
originated in the “indelta” regiments already during the 17th
century. The accord was the large sum of money an officer had to pay to his
predecessor in order to receive his promotion. This might originally have
been motivated as a way for an officer to receive compensation for
improvements he had done on the indelning, but in the middle of the
18th century this practice had, despite of frequent bans from the
government, spread to all army regiments and the accords were then so huge
that they represented several years of income, effectively a barrier for
less affluent persons to become officers.
Organisation
The great variation in recruitment in the Swedish army
also meant a great variation in organisation. But the standard strength of a
Swedish infantry regiment was 1 200 men divided into eight companies of 150
men. In battle these were grouped into two battalions of 600 men each. In
addition each company had in peace time five NCOs (fältväbel,
sergeant, rustmästare, furir and förare) and three
officers (captain, Lieutenant and ensign). Each regiment was led by a
colonel, lieutenant-colonel and major who also acted as company commanders
(hence an eight company regiment would only have five captains). After the
war broke out the number of officers and NCOs was temporarily doubled in
most regiments
The largest regiment was the Guard which eventually
reached a strength of 2 592 men divided into 24 companies of 108 men each.
It fielded four battalions with one of them being a grenadier battalion. The
largest provincial regiment was Närke-Värmland Regiment with 1 674 men in
ten companies of unequal size. Many provincial regiments in Finland and
northern Sweden only had about a 1 000 men (but still eight companies).
One third of the infantry in the field armies was
equipped with pikes which was a weapon the Swedes used to good effect in
their aggressive battle field tactics. The other two thirds were armed with
muskets and bayonets with some of them being grenadiers. In the provincial
regiments the grenadiers were dispersed among the regular companies while
they had their own companies in the enlisted regiments. Garrison units
generally did not have pikes and after the battle Poltava there was a trend
to replace pikes with muskets in the field regiments as well, even though
this was greatly opposed by the absent king.
The normal establishment of a cavalry regiment was 1 000
men divided into eight companies of 125 men each. The tactical unit was the
squadron which at the start of the war may have been formed by two companies
but was later identical with a company. Each company had four NCOs (one
quarter master and three corporals, who unlike in the infantry held NCO
rank) and three officers (same as in the infantry), and just like in the
infantry these numbers were doubled in most regiments in the beginning of
the war.
While technically mounted infantry the Dragoons were,
with just one exception (Jämtland), used as cavalry. Their main distinction
being that they cost less and rode horses of lesser quality. Due to the
limited resources of Sweden most mounted regiments that were raised when the
Swedish army was expanded in the Great Northern War were dragoon regiments.
The proper cavalry regiments were with the exception of männing regiment
almost exclusively regiments that had existed before the war. The largest
dragoon regiment was the Life Dragoon Regiment which was raised in Sweden
proper in 1700 and eventually became 1 500 men strong (also the only new
enlisted regiment from that region during the war). The smallest dragon unit
was likely Gotland’s Priest Dragoons, which was a tiny outfit of just 50
men. They never left the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, serving as
their only defence force.
The largest cavalry regiment was Livregementet
with 1 505 men in twelve companies. This was a provincial regiment recruited
in several provinces in central Sweden. The smallest provincial cavalry unit
was Jämtland Cavalry Company. The most legendary cavalry unit was the
Drabant Corps which became a separate all officer unit in 1700. As the
official body guard of Charles XII it fought in all his battles with great
distinction. Its official strength was 200 men even though casualties and
promotions to other regiments made it difficult to maintain that size.
Deployment
When Charles XI had finished reorganising the Swedish
army, it had as previously stated, a strength of 65 000 men. The enlisted
regiments were used as garrison troops in the fortresses while the
provincial regiments were dispersed in their regimental districts. These
provincial soldiers were effectively part time soldiers who spent most of
their time at their homesteads working as farmers on land they had been
allotted to by the peasants according to the Indelningsverk.
The provincial units comprised In Sweden proper of 15
infantry regiments (including Jämtland Dragoon Regiment), 7 cavalry
regiments, one cavalry company and one dragoon squadron. All in all 18 000
infantry and 8 000 mounted troops. In Finland there were seven infantry
regiments (7 000 men), three cavalry regiments (3 000 men) and a dragoon
squadron (313 men). Together with the 600 men strong Swedish Adelsfana
(which was recruited in both Sweden and Finland) the combined strength of
the provincial regiments was 37 000 men (not counting officers and
NCOs).
The enlisted regiments can be divided into three
geographic groups, Sweden, Germany and the Baltic. The Baltic regiments
counted 6 500 men distributed in four infantry regiments, one cavalry
regiment and three minor Adelsfane units. The German possessions were
defended by about 10 000 men (seven infantry regiments, two cavalry
regiments and two minor Adelsfane units). In Sweden proper there were 5 200
enlisted soldiers in four infantry regiments, among these were the then
1 900 man strong Guard located in Stockholm while the others were
garrisoning fortresses on the west coast from Malmö to Gothenburg. In this
category we should also add the artillery which was organised as a 1 888 men
strong regiment, although it was dispersed to 42 different locations. All in
all about 23 600 enlisted soldiers (again not counting officers and NCOs).
All the enlisted infantry regiments, with the exceptions
of the Guard, would continue to serve as garrison units throughout the Great
Northern War as the field armies would be primarily composed of the
provincial regiments.
The peace time deployment was based on fear of a war
against Denmark, and in anticipation of just that the Swedish army increased
its size already before the outbreak of war by raising a German dragoon
regiment in Bremen in 1699. Furthermore five provincial infantry regiments
and one cavalry regiment were transferred from Sweden proper to the German
possessions. The garrison of the Livonian city of Riga was also strengthened
by one Finnish regiment and parts of two other Finnish regiments. However,
the defence of the Baltic provinces were poorly neglected and after the
Saxons attacked Riga the remaining Finnish regiments were transferred to the
Baltics as well.
When the war broke out the army was enlarged with newly
raised provincial regiments. The männing regiments alone represented over
21 000 men and they were joined by 2 000 priest dragoons and two mountain
battalions. Most of these new units were deployed to defend Sweden’s eastern
borders against Russian attacks.
But the Baltic provinces had to contribute more to their
own defence so by using conscription a national militia was set up in the
Baltic provinces. In Estonia four infantry regiments of this kind were
raised. In Livonia the organisation was different since the governor general
was sceptical to the quality of the conscripted Latvians and Estonian
peasants. He raised 13 independent militia battalions of about 300 men each,
thinking the smaller size would make them easier to manage. On the island of
Ösel a 500 men strong militia battalion was raised bringing the total
infantry strength of the militia to about 7 000 men. Four independent
dragoon squadrons were also raised in a provincial manner but these had a
combined strength of just under a 1 000 men. Conscription was however not
enough. Not even for the militia regiments to which enlisted soldiers were
added as the war dragged on. In Estonia, Ingria and Livonia a further 6 600
men were recruited through enlistment in 1700 (11 regiments and battalions).
Additional enlisted units would follow which would bring the total to 4
dragoon squadrons (about 2 000 men) and 11 infantry regiments and battalions
(about 8 000 men). Losses made it however difficult to reach the projected
numbers and by the end 1710 all Baltic regiments had been destroyed except
for an Ingrian dragoon regiment.
Furthermore the main army in Poland was boosted by a
growing number of dragoon regiments (eleven in 1707). Apart from the Life
Dragoons recruited in Sweden and the French horse grenadiers mentioned
previously these were recruited from ethnic Germans. Only one enlisted
infantry regiment was recruited for the Polish theatre before 1706 and it
was used to garrison the city of Elbingen. The other enlisted infantry units
that came into being after the battle of Fraustadt were created by
recruiting prisoners of war. These were short-lived and there were never
more than five units of varying size at the same time. After 1711 only one
regiment remained (located in Sweden proper). Those German regiments that
had stayed in Poland and avoided the disaster in Ukraine retreated to
Sweden’s German possessions where they and the regiments already there
eventually met the same fate as the Baltic regiments. After the fall of the
last German fortress in 1716 only one German dragoon regiment remained, and
it had just been created from survivors from nine different regiments (two
of which who had previously been created in the Ottoman empire by survivors
from the Poltava campaign)
The Swedes had been fortunate to have knocked out Denmark
early in the war but that did not really change the nature of the Great
Northern War as a war on three fronts. The Danish army had been left intact
and was expected to re-enter the war when given an opportunity. For this
reason about a quarter of the soon more than 100 000 strong Swedish army
remained in Sweden proper and in the German possessions to guard the border
from Danish aggression. These were much needed troops as the originally
largest share of the Swedish forces struggled in the Baltic provinces while
Charles XII deployed his best troops in a five year long campaign in Poland
to knock out Saxony from the war. When Charles XII finally succeeded with
this in 1706 he was free to turn on Russia with the largest field army he or
any other Swedish king had ever commanded, 44 000 men. But the events of the
Russian campaign led not only to the destruction of this army but also of
the remaining field army that had guarded Livonia. The following years the
Swedish suffered great losses in men and territory as fortress after
fortress and yet another field army capitulated to the enemy forces. A late
surge of the Swedish army’s strength in Charles XII’s last years, which
among other things created an independent grenadier battalion as well as the
previously mentioned naval infantry, was not enough to change the outcome of
the war.
When the war was over the Swedish army reorganised. The
permanent provincial regiments were restored to its former strength with the
exception of territorial losses for some Finnish regiments near the new
border, resulting in the reduction of 431 rotar and 270 rusthåll.
An additional 400 rusthåll in the Swedish west coast were transferred
to the Navy. But all in all these losses were very marginal and the Swedish
provincial regiments were close to the same strength as before the war. It
was instead the enlisted part of the Swedish army that was severely reduced.
Only six enlisted infantry regiment remained (7 800 men) plus the artillery
regiment and the Pomeranian Adelsfana. This represented an army of just 45
000 men and unlike in 1700 when the Swedish army was twice as large as any
of its neighbours (except Russia) the Swedish army after 1721 was smaller
than any of its neighbours (except Mecklenburg). Sweden was no longer a
great power.
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