The Crown of the Baltic - A Map of the Month TL

In 1680, with war euphoria still riding high from his defeat of the invading Danish army, King Charles XI of Sweden decided to found a new city. In any normal case, this would be nothing out of the ordinary - Swedish kings had practiced the mercantilist strategy of concentrating local trade by building cities and diverting trade to them for centuries - but there was very little normal about this city. Located on a small island almost two and a half statute miles off the mainland, founded through an illicit land purchase, and grown through a series of heavy-handed measures, the city of Karlskrona was clearly meant as something more than a simple market town. The Navy quickly made it one of its largest bases, the population skyrocketed from a single family in 1679 to ten thousand people (making it the third biggest city in the Swedish realm) in 1700, and there were even rumours that the King planned to move the seat of government there at a favourable juncture.

However, with the onset of the Great Northern War, and the economic struggles that came with it, the city's growth abruptly stopped, and any plans that may have existed for a capital move were scuttled forever. Since then the city has essentially only seen one period of growth - from the coming of the railway in 1870 to the end of the Second World War in 1945, during which it grew from ten thousand to thirty-five thousand souls - and were it not for its military connections and the larger-than-usual number of dialects in the area, the city would be no more significant than any other mid-sized city in Sweden. It lives on as a monument to its own former glory, to a time when it appeared to matter to the country and world at large, and its inhabitants stubbornly refuse to recognise its loss of status. Yes, if the Centauri Republic were a Swedish city, it would surely be Karlskrona.

But what if this were not the case? What if the city really did enjoy the status it could have? Well, that's what this TL aims to explore.



This TL will consist of a number of updates, some penned my Makemakean and some by myself, and accompanying these will be a series of maps showing the city's growth at various points in time. The initial chapter will be one of mine, detailing the effects of the decision on the city itself.

Every Swedish child above the age of ten knows the story of how Karlskrona was founded. King Charles XI wanted a naval base that would be easy to protect from foreign attacks and relatively ice-free all year round. Such a location was found at Trossö, in the eastern part of the newly-conquered county of Blekinge, but the landowner, a freeholder by the name of Vitus Andersson, steadfastly refused to let go of the island. Eventually, the King was forced to appropriate the island by force, which basically meant he had the deeds taken and Andersson imprisoned. When you're an absolute monarch you can feel free to play fast and loose with the law. An old folk legend claims that Vitus, with his dying breath, laid a curse upon the new city: it would be afflicted by a terrible plague, then burn to the ground, and finally be reclaimed by the sea in a flood.

However, the new city founded on Trossö (King Charles, a man not known for his modesty at the best of times, named it Karlskrona, or "Charles' Crown" as it might be rendered in English) had other problems to face. Perhaps the foremost of these was that most essential of real-estate attributes: location. While Trossö was as close to the perfect naval base as makes no odds, the island was located about three miles off the mainland and over five hundred yards from the nearest island to the north. To put it lightly, this made it a less-than-ideal location for a marketplace, and initially very few burghers were interested in taking up residence in the Swedish King's vanity project. Again, the King saw fit to use less-than-civil methods of promoting the city's growth. The nearby city of Ronneby, an ancient marketplace dating back to the 13th century, saw its city status revoked, and all of its inhabitants were forced to move to the new city. According to a popular legend, the King's men confiscated all of the windows and doors in Ronneby, and threatened to burn the edifices belonging to any house whose inhabitants refused to move to the new city. There is no historical evidence to back this, but whether or not the coercive methods used involved doors, they weren't met well by the locals, and eventually the strategy had to be given up.

Another popular legend links the disobedience of the Ronnebyites to the uprisings happening in the Scanian woods at the same time, and suggests that the resistance was due to remnant Danish patriotism. As the story goes, the King set forth to build a new capital on newly-conquered ground, and the burghers and peasants of Blekinge, seeing their chance at returning to the Danish fold slipping away, decided to make a last stand against the new overlords by scuttling the new city before it could begin to grow.

This tale presents so many historical inaccuracies that it's hard to know where to begin. Not only were the Blekings not particularly Danish in their national allegiance (frequently proclaiming neutrality in the many border wars the two countries fought), there was little in the way of actual armed resistance against Swedish rule - the farthest the Ronneby protests got was resisting the forced move to Karlskrona. Finally, and perhaps most egregiously, when Karlskrona was originally built, it was not intended to serve as the nation's capital, or at least not at once. Indeed, some thirty years went by between the city's founding and the decision to move the Government there, and another ten before it was actually moved. The reasonable explanation is probably that the locals simply resented what was undoubtedly a heavy-handed move by the powers that were, not that they resented the powers that were as such.

The second problem was an even more crucial one: there was no water supply. This may seem rather ironic given the city's location, but it's worth remembering that while brackish, the water in the Baltic Sea is far from drinkable. This seems not to have occurred to the city planners, so when the first people arrived in the city, a small crisis erupted. Initially this problem was resolved by shipping water from nearby Lyckeby, whose wide river provided ample freshwater [1], but it was realised that a more permanent solution would be needed, and a few years after the city's founding, a water tower was erected at the Grand Square. This tower was torn down in 1846 to make room for the new Chancery House [2], leaving the aptly-named Vattnaberget (Water Mountain) [3] as the only source for the high-pressure water network needed to supply the hilly city.

The city was founded in 1679, but it would be another thirty years before the final decision was taken to move the capital away from the cold, medieval city of Stockholm and down south to Karlskrona. Historians disagree on what pushed Charles XI to make this decision, but an important factor was almost certainly a desire to locate the government and the High Seas Fleet in the same place, so that the King would need to travel less to get between his administrative duties and his military ones. This ideal grew all the more current in the face of the Great Freeze of 1708, when an army headed for the Baltic provinces to support Stanislaw Leczynski and the Polish realm against the Russians ended up stuck in Stockholm after the sudden onset of a harsh winter caused the waters around the capital to freeze almost overnight, trapping the expeditionary fleet in port. In the spring of 1709, immediately before heading out to war at the head of a smaller force to be joined by Finnish and Baltic soldiers, King Charles signed a memorandum declaring his intention to move the capital to Karlskrona "as soon as the City can be refitted for this dignity". When the war ended two years later, the planned reconstruction of the east wing of the Stockholm Castle never came to pass, and instead the effort was placed on constructing a new royal palace in Karlskrona.

The site chosen for the royal seat was in the southeastern part of the city, overlooking the sea and the fortifications built around the naval port [4], and Tessin the Younger, the master of the Swedish Baroque, was called upon to plan out the new palace. This was to be a far more urban, palatial structure than the chiefly military structure the Stockholm Castle had been. There were four wings, each one of which was designed to evoke a different aspect of the realm and kingship [5] - the west wing symbolised the King and the masculine, the east wing the Queen and the feminine, the south wing symbolised Authority, and the north wing symbolised the Nation [6]. Between the east wing and the water was to lie a large garden commanding views of the sea and the port, and in the middle of the west wing there was a large gate, to allow the mounted life guards easy access to the courtyard [7].

Since the city's surroundings had already been bled dry of workers to construct the city itself, a number of German workers were shipped in from Swedish Pomerania to build the castle. Baron Görtz, the King's right-hand man, managed to secure financing by selling large numbers of bonds to Dutch and French merchants, and with their aid construction finished by 1725. King Charles moved in the year after.

[1] This river still supplies water to most of eastern Blekinge today.
[2] IOTL the tower still stands, although it's no longer a water tower - as of now it forms the core of an art museum.
[3] This mountain is the tallest in Karlskrona by quite far, and IOTL it's known as Bryggareberget (Brewer Mountain) after an old brewery located at its foot.
[4] IOTL this area is where (among other things) the Lord-Lieutenant's residence is, and while that's obviously a smaller building, the area is large enough to house a castle nearly as large as the one built in Stockholm IOTL.
[5] This structure is broadly similar to the OTL Stockholm Castle that was built at about the same time (the previous one having been all but destroyed in a fire at the close of the 17th century).
[6] Again, this is broadly similar to the Stockholm Castle, with the exception that the northern and southern wings have been switched - the side representing Authority now faces the naval base, and the original rationale for having that on the north facade (to radiate royal power) is moot as the facade would face regular city blocks rather than a large downward slope and then the sea, as in Stockholm.
[7] The Stockholm Castle has a separate courtyard west of the west wing for the life guards to use, but this was not included in the Karlskrona plans due to lack of space on the west side of the castle.

This looks great. Where exactly is the city?

Historyman 14 said:

This looks great. Where exactly is the city?

Click to expand...

Here. Though it's worth remembering that a lot of the areas connecting it to the mainland is reclaimed, so the modern city isn't nearly as isolated as it was back then.

Time for my chapter, then!


From "The Rise and Fall of the Swedish Empire", (1997, Caroline University Press, Karlskrona).

On January 12th 1712, a one-eyed German nobleman stepped off a frigate in the old capital of Stockholm. His name was Georg Heinrich von Görtz, and he had come to the newly founded capital of Charles XI in the capacity of Minister to the Swedish court for the small Duchy of Holstein-Gottorp, ruled by Swedish king's son-in-law, Frederick IV [1]. Though he didn't have a drop of Swedish blood in his veins, and though he spoke the Swedish language with a very distinct accent, in less than a decade, he was to rise to become the second most powerful man in the realm.

Like so many great men and women in history, Görtz' rise would come about from the curious advantage of being an outsider at a time when an establishment was suffering a great crisis. Charles XI manifold wars, in particular the recent Great Baltic War that had been fought to grant the Polish crown to the Swedish king's candidate Stanisław I Leszczyński, had left the realm in terrible financial peril, and none of Charles XI:s advisers seemed capable of prescribing the right medicine needed to cure Sweden of her maladies. Görtz, having received his education in and served in a court on what the Swedes ignorantly referred to as "the Continent" [2], was thus presented with the opportunity to bring in a fresh point-of-view.

To acquire liquid funds, the Holsteiner minister begun by proposing that the Crown were to issue government bonds, a novel scheme for raising money that had only recently been invented by the Bank of England [3] and which thitherto had remained untried in Sweden. The maturity was set at four years with an interest at six percent, the security guaranteed in "Sweden's Realm's Subjects and Settler's movable and immovable property", and a new tax was to be introduced, the procurement fee, to finance the repayments. Anticipating that the yet war-torn Sweden to a large extent would be lacking in investors willing to take the risks associated with these novelities, Görtz stressed the need for the Crown to look for the bulk of the buyers overseas, mainly in the Great Britain, France and the Dutch Republic.

While this started to bring in more cash for the Crown, Charles XI soon concluded that the inflow wasn't sufficient to help fund the constructing of his new capital as fast as he desired, and so, coercive measures were soon introduced to get the bonds into domestic circulation as well. Poorhouses, schools and churches were ordered to hand in their liquid funds to the Crown in exchange for government bonds, and mines were forced to purchase bonds for considerable amounts if they wished to maintain their minting privileges. [4]

However, the scheme for raising money that Görtz is probably best remembered for is his (in)famous emergency coins. Though despised at the time, many economists in the 20th century have praised Görtz for his ingenuity, calling it centuries ahead of its time. In order to pay the Crown's massive debts, a policy of minting new coins whose nominal value was larger than their actual value as metal was introduced. This was considered very dangerous at the time, and Görtz was well aware of the risks associated with the policy. Sweden wasn't a stranger to the perils of inflation: Stockholms Banco had in 1661 become the first European central bank to print banknotes, and had in 1664 also become the first European central bank to collapse due to printing too many banknotes. Nonetheless, the king allowed himself to become persuaded, and followed the Holsteiner's advice.

The effects of this advice was to prove tremendously fruitful for the Crown, and when Charles XI called the first Riksdag to Karlskrona in 1715, Georg Heinrich von Görtz was in the possession of great political capital. Nonetheless, the person with the greatest political support was of course the King himself. The realm was at peace with all its neighbours, larger than it had ever been, and beginning to recover from the effects of almost a century of costly wars of conquest. Charles XI had managed to obtain the blanc cheque of royal absolutism de facto at the Riksdag of 1682, but it had never formally been codified into law. The King's great objective for this new Riksdag was to update the Constitution of 1634 to this effect.

Behind the scenes, Charles XI relied almost completely on the advice of Görtz who was to become the unofficial author of the new constitutional framework. The last legal fictions affirming the Riksdag as a rubber stamp assembly were now officially removed, rendering the Riksdag to merely act as advisers to the king without any formal powers at all. It was decreed that the Riksdag was to assemble and give advice on the monarch's request, and only on the monarch's request, that any other attempt at a national meeting was to be considered rebellious and that all formal powers that has formerly been granted to the Riksdag was now transferred to a new body known as the Procurement Committee (Upphandlingsutskottet), whose members were all to be appointed by the King.

The institution of the Procurement Committee can be seen as the pinnacle of the governmental reforms that had taken place during the last decades. As early as 1680, Charles XI had in a move to prevent the centralization of power around a single government minister abolished the office of Realm Chancellor that had existed since Medieval times. By the constitution of 1715, the King was automatically made President of the Procurement Committee, and he was to execute the powers of this office vigorously throughout the rest of his reign. However, the means for the eventual centralization of power around a government minister (which some Evolutionary Historians [5] consider inevitable) were at the same time laid down in the constitution in the office of Realm Secretary (Rikssekreterare), which functioned as second-in-command in the Procurement Committee. The inaugural holder of the office would of course be the most trusted Baron von Görtz.

At the same time, the Realm Council (Riksrådet) which up to that point had functioned as the "cabinet" of government would in effect be abolished in a devious way. The Constitution of 1715 merely added a novel clause that said that it was up to his Majesty's pleasure to decide the number of Realm Councillors the kingdom was to have. Having been granted this power, Charles XI conveniently decided that for his purposes, zero seemed a reasonable number. [6]

Though a modern reader might learn of these events with revulsion, it is worth to note that at the time, the only people to protest were members of the nobility. Traditionally, Swedish history had been marked by informal political alliances between the King and the peasantry against the nobility, and since the Riksdag of the Estates had historically been dominated by the nobility, most people in the lower classes greeted the news of their feudal overlords' having been made politically irrelevant with celebration.

On November 11, 1715, Charles XI dissolved the Riksdag. It was to be the final Riksdag of his reign, and the last Riksdag that Sweden were to see for many decades to come...

[1] In OTL, Frederick IV of Holstein-Gottorp died in battle in 1702 fighting in the wars of Charles XII. Seeing Charles XI didn't die in cancer in TTL, there was no need for the Holsteiner duke to die a soldier's premature death at the age of thirty, and so he's still alive here.

[2] They still do this in OTL for some reason. Strange, seeing the Scandinavian peninsula by any reasonable definition is part of the Eurasian continent.

[3] In 1693, to fund the War of the Grand Alliance, to be specific.

[4] Pretty much all of this happened in OTL as well, only that there was still a war raging at the time, making it very difficult for Görtz to have the liberty to look for many investors overseas.

[5] Evolutionary History appear to be this timeline's terminology for what we would call historicism, the notion that the development of history inevitably moves towards a particular end. See for example Whig historiography which holds that society will inevitably evolve towards liberal democracy or Marxian historiography which holds that society will inevitably evolve towards a socialist society following a violent revolution.

[6] If you think this seems comically absurd and implausible, do note that Gustav III of Sweden in OTL managed to abolish the Realm Council in exactly the same way in the late 18th century, working against a far more antagonistic and powerful Riksdag.

Gonna take this to today?

Unknown said:

Gonna take this to today?

Click to expand...

The plan is to get it to 1980 (the 300th anniversary of Karlskrona's founding), but it remains to be seen how far we actually get before the entry period ends.

From 300 Years of Wisdom, Caroline University Press, Karlskrona, 1966:

The genesis of what was to become Caroline University is actually not to be find in Karlskrona at all, but in the city of Lund. On December 19, 1666, in the hope of helping to speed up the cause of the Swedification of the recently acquired province Scania, the minority government of Charles XI had founded the Royal Carolinian Academy, primarily intended to educate priests in the traditions of the Church of Sweden. Despite high hopes, the academy soon found itself in a precarious situation owing to its geographical location: In 1676, the Danes invaded Scania in a last effort to reconquer the province, and the academy was forced to cancel its operations, suffering financially from the destruction brought about by the war, with only four professors surviving the invasion. To recommence its mission, these four gentlemen wrote to the king and thus received monetary support from the Crown. This would however not spell the end for the problems for the early university.

In 1716, owing in great deal to the strained economy of the realm as a whole, the university once more went bankrupt, and the faculty again appealed to the king for support. Charles XI, at this point entirely dedicated to building his new capital in the nearby province of Blekinge, saw the opportunity to boost the growing prestige of Karlskrona and took it. He made the professors of Lund an offer. He would once again come to aid of the Royal Carolinian Academy, on the condition that they moved all their operations to the new capital. Left with no choice, the faculty accepted, and plans were drawn up for a new institution to house them on Östra Bergåsa on Wämö...


From Goertziana: The Life and Times of Georg Heinrich von Görtz, Didrik Häggqvist, 1995:

As the years went by and the king started to decline in health and political initiative, he would delegate increasingly more responsibilities in the Committee of Procurements to his trusted Realm Chancellor Görtz. It may well be because of the stress caused by these increasing responsibilities put on a man already in control of the nation's financial and foreign policy that Görtz started looking for a person that he too could delegate his authority to, but it may just as well be that already by this point Görtz was trying to decide upon a dauphin for his position as Realm Secretary. It did not take long before he found the ideal candidate in Count Carl Gyllenborg.

Carl Gyllenborg was not part of the ancient nobility of Sweden. On the contrary, he was the son of an immigrant from Thüringia in the Holy Roman Empire by the name of Jacob Wolimhaus. This German had served the government of Charles XI more than adequately, and he had married the daughter of the Mayor of Stockholm, his blood finally being made blue by the king when he was raised to the nobility in the earlu 1680s. For a name he had taken Gyllenborg [1].

His son had followed in his fathers footsteps, entering into the service of the Swedish government, by the middle of the 1710s rising to become Sweden's minister to the Court of St. James. While in Great Britain, he had made a fortunate by marrying a wealthy Tory widow and a reputation as a scholar and researcher by publishing the treatise New discoveries of the dangers of Popery [2]. Despite this apparent disdain for Roman Catholicism, he was more than happy to aid Görtz and his king by representing Swedish interests in negotiations with Jacobites in London conspiring to bring about the return of the Stuart Pretender to the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland, making use of his wife's connection. [3]

It was in no small part thanks to the machinations and intrigues of Carl Gyllenborg that Charles XI finally did agree to assemble a fleet in Gothenburg to sail for the cause of James III, and that a government-in-waiting among discontent Tories was formed in London. These two factors played a considerable role in ensuring that the Glorious Counter-Revolution of 1718 became a success, when George I of Great Britain was driven out of his new kingdom, and forced back to Hanover.

In recognition of his remarkable services and the risks he had taken on behalf of the Swedish government, Gyllenborg was rewarded by being made the Swedish minister to the court of Versailles, the most prestigious ambassadorship the Swedish government had to offer. France was Sweden's closest ally, and for over a century, Sweden had relied upon subsidies from France to fight her wars. When Gustavus Adolphus had sailed for the continent to defend the Protestant faith, it had been with his pockets stuffed with Catholic French silver, and the government was hardly going to forget it. Again, Gyllenborg served at his station with distinction, and when he arrived in Stockholm after a decade abroad in 1725, Görtz persuaded the King to make him a member of the Committee of Procurements.

[1] Swedish for "Gilded Fortress".
[2] I am not kidding, he actually wrote a treatise with that name in OTL as well. I have been looking for a copy of it for over a year now but to no avail.
[3] Sweden was actually involved in negotiations with House Stuart and France to aid the Jacobite cause in OTL as well, and Gyllenborg was the Swedish government's man in London.

King Charles XII, who succeeded his father upon the latter's death in 1727, was an enthusiastic proponent of the Karlskrona's expansion, and among other things arranged for the construction of an imposing new Palace of Nobility on Drottninggatan, largely a move to placate the now-powerless nobles, and orchestrating the move of the Göta Court of Appeals to the city in 1733, from its original location in Jönköping.

Following the court move of 1733, the move was considered complete, even though the Svea Court of Appeals, located in Stockholm, remained the highest-ranking court in the nation [1]. This caused a large-scale influx of people. What had been a nearly uninhabited island in the middle of the Blekinge archipelago less than fifty years prior was now the third biggest city in the country, and the growth would continue at the same pace for a long time.

The biggest source of employment for the lower classes in the city was the naval shipyard, which saw steady expansion more or less throughout the 18th century, most notably the construction of the "Mandible" (Underkäken), a series of landfills joining four islands south of Trossö, the main island, and serving both as a shield for the naval port and as a site for military-related buildings. Another important installation with an anatomical name was the "Ten Fingers Dock" (Tiofingerdockan), a series of ten docks laid out in a fan shape on the southwestern coast, between Trossö and the former island of Björkholmen.

This rapid expansion caused an increased need for workers, and they were initially housed in small wooden shacks in the neighbourhoods of Västerudd and Björkholmen, both of which lay on hills near the shipyard. These areas soon proved insufficient, and in the 1740s the nearby island of Saltö was ceded to the city by the parish of Nättraby [2] and planned out for settlement, with a street grid drawn up and a church built in the southwest of the island. The neighbourhood built on Saltö proved slightly less cramped and unsanitary than Björkholmen, but only slightly.

It wasn't just the lower classes that were moving to Karlskrona in droves though. Young nobles looking to curry favour with the King, rich burghers wanting to take their business where the money was, and landowning peasants wanting to escape their perceived inferiority to local nobles by seeking a new life in the ever so slightly more egalitarian city, all made their way to Karlskrona. Though fewer than the workers, they were normally accustomed to a higher standard of living, and as such placed a greater strain on the city's housing market. It wasn't easy to find a comfortable solution, since more and more of Trossö was taken up by government buildings [3] and the islands around it were, with few exceptions, extremely hilly.

However, by the 1750s the overcrowding was so bad that drastic measures needed to be taken, and a plan was drawn up for an entirely new neighbourhood on the island of Wämö, between Trossö and the mainland. The street grid would be centred on two wide, tree-lined avenues, one running from a square at the location of the city toll to the buildings of the Caroline University [4], connecting to the mainland via the existing road, and the other running from the square to the summer residence built for the royal family at Gräsviken. The streets crossing these were to run in concentric V shapes, all turning at a street immediately between the two and running for one block west of the western avenue (named Sveagatan) and two blocks east of the eastern one (Götgatan).

Because of the unfavourable terrain in the area, the Galgamarken [5] hill had to be dug up. The soil was used to fill out a marsh on the northwestern coast of Trossö, creating a small amount of new space there as well. With the ground somewhat flat, the streets were laid out and the lots sold off to various private owners, who proceeded to build on them. Building heights and facades were strictly regulated for the lots facing the two main avenues, but on the side streets the rules were less stringent, and smaller, less stately houses sprung up, many of them used by the servants of the wealthy families living in the large townhouses along the avenues. The area was soon nicknamed "Malmen" in imitation of the four suburbs of Stockholm [6], and the name stuck fairly quickly - today the name "Malmen" is more commonly used for the island at large than "Wämö" [7].

Amidst this expansion there was a large cultural revival, spurred on by Charles XII's warm interest in (and patronage of) the arts, both visual, musical and dramatic [8]. The Royal Theatre at Malmtorget was inaugurated in 1759, three years before King Charles' death, but even before then Karlskrona had a prominent place in Swedish theatre. Some of the first-ever entirely Swedish plays were originally performed in the Old Tennis Court (Gamla Bollhuset) next to the Royal Palace, and with the King's patronage such names as Taube [9] and Wennerström [10] began to ascend in fame, first in Sweden and then in Europe at large. The sciences flourished as well, particularly with the arrival of the Enlightenment in the 1750s, but by that point the world was already familiar with Sweden's biggest star of the period: Carl Linnaeus. The Smålander vicar's son [11] and botanist spent much of his career at the Caroline University, first as a student and then as a natural philosophy researcher, and his estate at Marielund [12] became a haunt for botanists from across Europe. It was there that he originally thought up much of his theories on taxonomy, and after his death he donated the grounds of the estate to the university. Today it forms the core of the Caroline University's Marielund campus.

But all was not sunshine and roses for the new city. In 1791, a large fire broke out in the northeast of Trossö. This was more or less inevitable given the poor state of fire prevention at the time [13], but even so it came as an unfortunate surprise, particularly with the War of the Triple Alliance going on. By the time the fire had been put out, much of the northern half of the island lay in ruins. However, King Charles Frederick spared no expense in rebuilding the city, transforming the neighbourhood from a working-class area populated by poor fishermen into a new, Protectorate-style [14] palatial city, finalising the decades-long process of gentrification that had been sweeping eastern Trossö since the capital move. This also extended the rigid street grid that characterised much of the rest of the city to the area, visually binding it together with Malmen in a way that would become important later in the city's history…

***

[1] The four Courts of Appeals, or hovrätter in Swedish, were the highest judicial instances in the country until the Supreme Court was established. The oldest one, the Svea Court of Appeals, was established to serve as a sort of supreme court, ranking above the landsting that held sway over each historic province. However, when the latter were abolished in 1634, three new courts of appeals were created to fill the void left. The courts are, in order of establishment, Svea (covering the centre and north of Sweden proper), Göta (covering the south of Sweden proper, including the Scanian provinces from 1658 onwards), Åbo (covering Finland and Ingria), and Riga (covering Livonia and Estonia). Today only the former two remain in Sweden, though they are supplemented by a number of new ones, and Åbo additionally still exists although it is now in Finland.
[2] Which, somewhat tangentially, is now a commuter-belt suburb of the city, and the location of yours truly.
[3] This still isn't nearly as bad as it's going to get though - by the TL's present day most of the island is going to be taken up by government buildings and offices.
[4] As Makemakean covers in his part of the TL, the nascent Caroline Academy (what would in OTL become the University of Lund) was persuaded to move to Karlskrona in exchange for royal funding. It's located in the centre of Wämö, with the main building on the exact spot of the OTL city council chambers.
[5] Literally "Gallows Grounds" - I'm not going to insult your intelligence by explaining what that hill was previously used for. IOTL it's still around, and a large council estate has been built on top of it.
[6] Norrmalm, Södermalm, Västermalm and Östermalm - the word malm meant "sand heap" in medieval Swedish, but since the areas around Stockholm were host to large sand-filled ridges, it gradually took on the meaning of "suburb".
[7] Similarly to how Åsön in Stockholm is far more commonly referred to as Södermalm, for the principal neighbourhood on it, than by its proper name.
[8] This might seem a bit weird given Charles XII's OTL reputation as the Soldier King, but it's worth remembering that the war he fought for most of his reign IOTL was a defensive one, and that he was noted prior to the war for taking an interest in the theatre and in architecture. Since his father lives through the wars of the early 18th century, Charles XII becomes known first and foremost as a patron of the arts.
[9] The Taube family is a noble family of Baltic German origin, and was originally involved primarily in military matters, but are today mainly known as a family of artists and thespians, prominently folk singer and gaucho (no, I'm not making that up) Evert Taube. ITTL, Carl Edvard Taube, who was court chaplain and bishop of the Order of the Seraphim IOTL, makes a career as a poet and playwright instead of taking the cloth, and establishes his family's OTL reputation a century early.
[10] Gustaf Wennerström, unlike Taube, is an entirely invented character, which is justifiable given that the different capital means different people living there, and as such people who were intricately connected to Stockholm IOTL (such as Bellman) won't rise to fame ITTL, or at least not to the same level.
[11] Swedish vicars are, of course, Lutheran, and therefore not celibate.
[12] Marielund is located in the north of Nättraby parish, and is one of the largest agricultural estates in the region - indeed, when the municipal system was originally introduced and suffrage was weighted based on the value of one's real property, whoever owned Marielund practically owned the town council as well.
[13] Plus, Vitus had foreseen it. A manically-depressed peasant with a grudge against the subject matter can never be wrong.
[14] This refers to the neoclassical, somewhat minimalist style favoured by the British Republic, and the Protectorate in particular, following the Second Glorious Revolution. It's broadly similar to OTL's Empire style, but not exactly the same.

And here's a map of Karlskrona in 1800.

Would I be completely incorrect in assuming that due to the Swedes helping with a Jacobite Restoration, La Consolatrice (i.e. Louisa Maria Therese Stuart, the Princess over the Water) has married Carl XII?

So I assume the Great Northern War went very differently if King Charles XI's reign has extended into OTL's Charles XII. Please tell me we're not getting this city at the price of the Last Viking

thekingsguard said:

So I assume the Great Northern War went very differently if King Charles XI's reign has extended into OTL's Charles XII. Please tell me we're not getting this city at the price of the Last Viking

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He remains, though he's known primarily for his cultural patronage, diplomatic acumen and… ambiguous sexuality ITTL, so his reputation is rather different. (Before you start to think we're making some sort of mockery, all of those qualities are attested IOTL, though they were overshadowed somewhat by the fact that he was attacked by four countries at once and beat three of them.)

Ares96 said:

He remains, though he's known primarily for his cultural patronage, diplomatic acumen and… ambiguous sexuality ITTL, so his reputation is rather different. (Before you start to think we're making some sort of mockery, all of those qualities are attested IOTL, though they were overshadowed somewhat by the fact that he was attacked by four countries at once and beat three of them.)

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Oh, I was aware - though it does seem Carolus Rex is going to have to work a bit harder to earn that moniker ITTL. Or a Sabaton album

A Sweden-focused thread and it's a POD I've never seen to boot!

So far, I'm really liking it even if it takes glory away from my beloved Stockholm. Liking all the butterflies too.

Swede said:

A Sweden-focused thread and it's a POD I've never seen to boot!

So far, I'm really liking it even if it takes glory away from my beloved Stockholm. Liking all the butterflies too.

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I'm from Karlskrona, so from the moment I joined AH.com it was more or less inevitable that I should do this PoD. And yes, I also love Stockholm (the city, not the thing it represents), and it will certainly remain a large city ITTL, although it obviously loses prestige this way. Though on the bright side, there was no fire ITTL and the old castle still stands.

thekingsguard said:

Oh, I was aware - though it does seem Carolus Rex is going to have to work a bit harder to earn that moniker ITTL. Or a Sabaton album

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I was going to say. I saw them live once, described Charles as a "crazy badass motherfucker"; from what I've heard an accurate description.

Sulemain said:

I was going to say. I saw them live once, described Charles as a "crazy badass motherfucker"; from what I've heard an accurate description.

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That's about accurate. A crazy, badass motherfucker who also had a deep appreciation for the theatre and never once took sexual interest in any woman.

Strategics and War Games

From "The Rise and Fall of the Swedish Empire", (1997, Caroline University Press, Karlskrona).

Whether it was due to a cynical desire to cultivate his image as a Spartan warrior-king that history books would remember him as, or whether it in fact was due to a heartfelt sense of common identity with his soldiers, Charles XI:s decision to celebrate the 1730 Christmas mass with a company of infantrymen i Småland was one he would just precisely live to regret. Within days, he was suffering from pneumonia, and in the early hours of the new year, the king's heart finally stopped beating. Charles XI had ruled Sweden for over seventy years, and at his passing Sweden covered more territory than she had ever done in her long history...

From King Charlie Dozen and the Golden Age of the Carolinian Empire[1], by Valdemar Johansson:

Having spent the past four days by his father's side as he lay on his death bed, the Charles personally were the one to close the king's eyes. Realm Secretary Görtz, also present in the room, having been awaken from his sleep a few hours earlier by the Royal Life Medicus [2] who feared the end was at hand, went down on his knees, as did everyone else. In line with Swedish tradition, he repeated the line to be said at the passing of a monarch: "The King is dead. Long live the King!" Charles, now the Twelfth, silently rose, and accepted the company's kisses to his hand. He then declared his desire to retreat to the Royal Chapel and for Görtz to await further instructions. As the sun rose, the King emerged from the sanctuary and ordered the Realm Secretary to assemble the Committee of Procurements.

The Committee promptly accepted Charles as their new king and sovereign, and proceeded with business. The new King had no desire to make any immediate changes to his father's policies. All officials and members of the committee were retained, and the King gave a speech thanking Herr Görtz and Gyllenborg in particular for their loyal service to his father for the past decades. The King did however find it necessary to express his concern over the growing national debt, and informed his ministers that it was his desire to see his reign be one of peace...

[...]

Charles XII would go down in history as one of Sweden's great philosopher-monarchs in the vein of John III and Christina, seemingly more interested in his scholarly and academic pursuits than by the business of actually running the country, the details of which he often conferred to trusted allies such as Georg Heinrich von Görtz and Carl Gyllenborg. The King took great interest in the Caroline Academy interred by his father, and wished to transform it into a great European center of learning after the molds of the universities of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge.

The king had a passion for the subject of mathematics, and would often discuss the matter with learned Swedish scholars such as Christopher Polhem while yet Crown Prince. Charles had at one point, finding the Arabic numerals with their base in 10 insufficient, proposed a new system of numerals with a base of 64, drawing up new symbols and coining new names and a new naming system for counting. He argued that this would greatly profit everyone, as 64, unlike 10, could be divided without a remainder by both 4 and 8. It had taken Polhem quite some time, effort and stress to persuade his Majesty to abandon these grand schemes, arguing that his subjects would not have as sharp a mind as their sovereign to handle a numeral system with a base of 64 [3].

Nonetheless, the King soon found more interesting pursuits in the field of mathematics than numeral reform when he came across the writings of the Hanoverian polymath Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. Charles XII was enchanted by the beautiful minimalism that seemed to permeate everything that Herr Leibniz touched, from his notations in infinitesimal calculus to his moral philosophy and theology, which greatly resonated with the King's own rigid, austere Lutheranism, and he would for years at times express his dismay that he first became aware of the German thinker's work a few years after the latter's death.

Still, the devil it would seem, quite literally was in the details, and the King was more than bothered by Leibniz' notion of infinitesimals which appeared to him an almost fatal flaw in an otherwise supremely elegant theory, a ghost that Newton himself had not been able to exorcise, and which through the criticism of such men as the Irish bishop George Berkeley seemed to threatened the very foundation of differential and integral calculus. Taking it upon himself as his duty to fix this problem himself, the King set up a contest without a time limit and with a considerable prize sum for whoever could improve the branch of mathematics by in a rigorous manner removing the ills of the infinitesimals. He then sent forth notifications of this to all the major universities in Europe, hoping that this would bring the needed attention to the subject.

This was a decision he would later come to regret, as he was soon flooded by letters from diverse European amateur mathematicians hoping to make a fortune who thought that they had found the solution, often, much to the King's dismay, only demonstrating that they had entirely misunderstood not only what the problem actually was, but the most basic principles of geometry as well. It would first be long after the King's death that d'Aramitz in 1786 found the rigorous reformulation that we apply to this day. [4]

Another great interest of the King was the academic study of warfare, an irony considering that he never himself had the fortune to lead an army to battle [5]. He had since childhood been a great admirer of the ancient Greek and Roman commanders, and he keenly read the Annals of Tacitus over and over again. This was still the era of the Newtonian revolution, and many people were still fascinated by the notions of empiricism, that things could be measured, quantified and explained using mathematical formulae [6]. Charles XII had himself come across the writings of Sir Isaac Newton by ways of studying the work of Leibniz, and he was curious to see if the discipline of military strategy in a similar way could be studied from a purely analytical point of view.

With this in mind, the King sent out messengers across the continent and the British isles to look for old generals and commanders from all the great wars that had recently engulfed Europe - the War of the Grand Alliance, the Great Turkish War, the War of the Spanish Succession - and who had fallen on poverty and hard times. Charles XII offered them a dignified retirement in Sweden, with a pension and minor estates if they would be willing to travel north to his Caroline Academy in Karlskrona and agree to extended interviews with his scholars of their strategical decisions, experiences and musings. Surprisingly many actually accepted, and over the course of Charles XII:s reign, the bookshelves of the Department of War Science at Caroline Academy became increasingly filled with detailed minutae and analysis of nearly every battle of notoriety in Europe for the past century.

For a long time, this was considered a matter of ridicule on the European continent. Nobles, kings and emperors would joke that the King of Sweden didn't understand warfare or how to study the subject properly (that was, on the battlefield). Still, when the King allowed his mathematicians to study the records, the project slowly but certainly began to bear fruit, and it was from studying the best tactics to employ when in the knowledge of the tactics likely that your opponent is about to similarly to pursue that the mathematical discipline of strategics [7] were to spring, and eventually to flourish...


[1] In Sweden, Charles XII is styled Karl XII and often referred to popularly as "Kalle Dussin", Kalle being a nickname for Karl and dussin being Swedish for dozen. It thus follows that a reasonable translation of-... Well, you get my point.

[2] Official title of the King's personal physician.

[3] I am not kidding, Charles XII did this exact same thing in OTL, only difference being that he made it as a spare time activity during the Great Nordic War.

[4] D'Aramitz' approach is practically identical with what we call using the epsilon-delta-definition of a limit.

[5] This author is clearly blissfully ignorant of Charles XII:s fate in OTL.

[6] Ask Thande. He knows more about the crazy ways in which people abused and misunderstood empiricism in this period.

[7] What we in OTL would call game theory.

Sorry for my infrequent posts in this thread (I'm pretty much driving Ares96 crazy ), I've been sort of busy. I'll try to get another chapter up within twelve hours!