Could the danish intervention have worked?

how would the Danes succeed in achieving their goals in the thirty years war and if they do what happens next?
 
From what i could gather from my sources, the danish window of opportunity was small as the country and its armies were short on allies with free time.
But if Denmark can be lucky by, say, avoiding the Battle of Dessau Bridge or winning the Battle of Lutter, thus forcing the HRE to negotiate, then they'll be able to propel themselves to great heights of power, at about equal footing with Sweden.
I can see them annexing Mecklenburg, Lübeck, Hamburg, and the Stade region.
 
So I was Thinking if the Danes decisively won the battle of Lutter than how would it change their position in Europe long term?
 
The first aspect we should make clear is that Denmark was seen as a greeater power than Sweden at the time of the intervention. But Sweden had made the military reforms which put them ahead of Denmark in OTL. Denmark had some weaknesses which made the intervention harder for Denmark. First was inferior military command, Christian IV was an average military commander at best, while other commanders was raised among the small Danish and Holstein nobility, the Danish army was build on a small high quality royal guard, a high quality marine force, urban defensive militias and small weak peasant militia. In time of war, the Danish army used foreign mercenaries (The navy on the other hand was one of the better one in Europe). This structure meant that Denmark needed large amount of currency reserve to go to war. The defeat in OTL meant that those currency reserves was depleted.

Sweden on the other hand had superior military command based on the Swedish burghers and nobility and a conscript army. This meant war was cheap for the Swedes.

So did Denmark have some strengths versus the Swedes. The answer are yes, Sweden was fundamental a rogue state, it often broke agrements, it didn't declare war before it attacked and because war was cheap and gave giant fortunes to the Swedish elite, it had a interest in keeping wars going. The Danish royal house was old with a high degree of legitimacy and it was better than Sweden at diplomacy.

But what does this means? It means that if Denmark won at Lutter (it was closely run), and avoided being defeated, they could likely hava made the emperor meet tham at the negotiation board.

So what demand would Denmark likely push. The Danish king would demand the emperors respected the Lutherans right to practice their faith, he would likely push that the emperors accepted the Danish king as protector of the True Faith (fundamental making a attack on Protestants a casus belli), the right to raise customs on the Elbe (and maybe the Oder and Weser), Bremen-Verden became a hereditable fief of his son Frederik and Schwerin a fief of his son Ulrik. Beside that I expect that he would demand that colonel of the Lower and Upper Saxon Circles became a hereditable title for his line and that Pomerania, Pinneberg and Oldenburg in case of their line dying out would go the Christian or his descendants.

Christian IV would on his side accept the Emperor as king as Bohemia (which would keep Lutheranism/Hussism as state religion) and they would likely reach some kind of agreement about Palatinate (as Frederick V was married to Christian's niece, I expect that Frederick would at least keep his Rhineland possessions).
 
  1. The Western powers follow through with their promises of subsidies meaning the Danish Council of the Realm is sufficiently assured to sanction the royal desire to intervene. As a consequence Christian IV has more money and thus more troops.
  2. Seeing the power of the protestant army, the princes of the Lower Saxon Circle supplies more troops to the union forces.
  3. Christian doesn't fall of his horse just before the Battle of Lutter and is thus far more level-headed in his command.
  4. Tilly is completely beaten at Lutter and the catholic forces dissolve.
  5. Emboldened by this and fearing further Danish supremacy in Germany - Gustavus Adolphus intervenes as well from his campaign in Poland.
  6. Caught between the Danish/protestant and Swedish forces, the emperor gives in.
  7. Denmark gains control over the estuaries of the Elbe and Weser (and as @Jürgen said the crucial right to levy customs stemming from the riverine trade. Combined with the income from the Sound Due this would make the king incredibly wealthy). Christian IV had spent much of the time between the end of the Kalmar War and the intervention by securing his spare sons positions as diocesan administrators in protestant bishoprics.
  8. Basically, the Lower Saxon Circle turns into one big Danish protectorate.
  9. Sweden gains concessions in the east.
  10. Frederick V is restored to his Palatinate holdings - depending on the scale of the victory, we could perhaps also restore him to the Bohemian crown. Although I'm not too certain on the ASB-prooffness of that particular deviation.
  11. Massive. MASSIVE butterflies for the rest of Danish history.
 
It's important to understand that the disastrous outcome of the intervention crippled Denmark both economically and politically. The countryside was impoverished with Jutland especially ravaged. Domestically the nobility utilised the failure to strengthen its power by subjecting Frederick III to the most constraining royal charter ever seen, which was done as a reaction to the cavalier way Christian IV had circumvented his own constitutional limitations when it came to forcing through the intervention. Internationally, it left Denmark isolated with an aggressive and vengeful neighbour to the North who had reaped all the fruits of victory at the Peace of Westphalia - directly paving the way for the catastrophic loss of the Sound provinces (a third of the kingdom's ancient lands and population) in 1658/59 and by extension, the absolutist coup d'etat in 1660 that brought Denmark into the modern era.

IF Christian succeeds not just at Lutter, but also manages to secure a lasting peace, then the changes - as the outline of OTL above suggests - are massive. Let's say the Lower Saxon Circle is turned into a Danish archipelago of protectorates (Christian had already made Hamburg bend the knee and had attempted in the 1620ies to subjugate Bremen as well, but wavered in face of stark councilar opposition), the city states would most likely become subservient to the king directly. There's a crucial constitutional crux in that, as the incomes garnered for the royal purse (like the Sound Due) belonged to the KING and not the realm - which meant the aristocratic opposition in the Council of the Realm had no fiscal control over what that revenue was spent on. This is important because this extra economic muscle would allow Christian and his successors to marginalise the aristocracy even further which in turn would most likely lead to a swifter centralisation and a quicker development of absolutism - which is very much needed if the state is to become sufficiently strong to tackle the rising Swedish threat.

A nice change would also be the absence of a resurgence of the Lutheran orthodoxy. The defeat of the intervention and the subsequent pillaging of Jutland by rampant imperial armies was directly interpreted as the manifestation on earth of God's divine scourge over his wayward creatures. This meant an upturn in puritanism and the implementation of even more draconian laws against witch-craft. Christian IV was a pretty staunch Lutheran, so I won't go so far as to say that we might see a more innovative/tolerant religious policy, but at least hundreds of innocent women would be spared the agony of being burnt at the stake (technically a ladder, but hey).
 
OK, so the Lower Saxon Circle is a danish protectorate and I assume that the Hohenzollern's are not a threat to that yet?
 
George William of Brandenburg was a rather weak-willed ruler treading a careful path of benign neutrality at the time. In OTL he was more or less forced by Gustavus (his own brother-in-law no less!) to aid the protestant cause.
 
The question is if these new areas will allow Denmark to be strong enough to stand against the eventual powers that dislike the position of Denmark at the gate of the Baltic. If not it will probably be dismantled.
 
The question is if these new areas will allow Denmark to be strong enough to stand against the eventual powers that dislike the position of Denmark at the gate of the Baltic. If not it will probably be dismantled.
Depends entirely on Denmark.

If the Danes still more or less fold to the Netherlands on trade issues, the Dutch-Danish Duumvirate can dispose of the Baltic as it likes and Sweden will be little more potent against it than Prussia was against France during the 7YW period (can't win, but probably won't get smashed by the Danes)... but the far more logical choice is for the Danes to think they can rule the Baltic alone, leading to a Dutch-English-Swedish(-Polish) pact attacking them, stripping them of at least one but probably all of the Elbe, Weser and Skane.

If the latter is chosen and succeeds, Denmark is back to square one. If it somehow wins against this triple alliance, though, it'll have another chance to offer preferred status to the Netherlands or England and go from there - but persistent Danish-only policies will lead to repeated conflict with the Atlantic powers until Denmark is either weakened enough or caves to one of them (on trade, at least). Mind, in the process the Netherlands (and probably England) will be seriously hurt, so if the Danes time it right they might drag one of them down with it (say, French invasion of the Netherlands proper).
 
If the Danes still more or less fold to the Netherlands on trade issues, the Dutch-Danish Duumvirate can dispose of the Baltic as it likes and Sweden will be little more potent against it than Prussia was against France during the 7YW period (can't win, but probably won't get smashed by the Danes)... but the far more logical choice is for the Danes to think they can rule the Baltic alone, leading to a Dutch-English-Swedish(-Polish) pact attacking them, stripping them of at least one but probably all of the Elbe, Weser and Skane.

Denmark and the Netherlands came into conflict because the former raised the Sound Due quite drastically to pay for the devastation of the kingdom after 1629. With the extra revenue from the riverine tolls and a largely unscathed nation, I don't see that happening. Even the vastly expensive Kalmar War didn't prompt Christian to raise the Sound Due.
 
If such a Denmark is smart, they will choose to support England. The Netherlands can be beaten by the military, and Denmark even after the loss in 17th century were capable of doing that, but England requires Denmark to be able to defeat them at sea, and while IMO Denmark is one of the few nations in Europe that have the naval tradition to compete with England it is still a long shot.
 
Yeah, IIRC England at this point in time still has a 'weak enough' navy that while they would probably win against Denmark it might be a close call, largely depending on their admiral tactical strength on the day. But in any case it would be a pyrric victory for Denmark nearly no matter what, while at worst a inconvienience for England delaying their naval superiority for a decade or two
 
If such a Denmark is smart, they will choose to support England. The Netherlands can be beaten by the military, and Denmark even after the loss in 17th century were capable of doing that, but England requires Denmark to be able to defeat them at sea, and while IMO Denmark is one of the few nations in Europe that have the naval tradition to compete with England it is still a long shot.

No that would not be smart, Netherlands can't be beaten by Denmark in the 17th century.
 
IIRC, England had a very limited commercial interest in the Baltic and the political ambitions of the Jacobean court wasn't really at odds with those of Denmark. It was only around 1700 when both Denmark and Sweden had passed their zenith that England practised intervention to secure the balance in the North on the eve of the War of Spanish Succession. Besides, England is busy deposing Charles I, fighting the Dutch and murdering the Irish.

The major potential for conflicts would be with the Dutch and the Swedes. Those two forces combined would be a very dangerous threat to Danish hegemony in the North. The Dutch were interested in mercantile access to the Baltic which is why they switched between supporting Denmark and Sweden as unitary control over the Sound was directly against their economic interest. However, if the Dutch are placated by no high-rise in the Sound tariffs they would find it difficult to justify such a war. However, who's to say that the butterflies doesn't make France focus on the Low Countries in lieu of its lacking intervention in the TYW. Maybe the Dutch are far too preoccupied with keeping Louis XIV away from their borders to engage in mercantile adventures in the Baltic?
 
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