The Baltic League
"...he who can exercise the most influence in Germany, will be he who controls Europe..."
- Apocryphal, early 19th century
The Baltic League was meant to do one thing and one thing alone: recreate a League of Armed Neutrality and remake the Baltic, particularly her once-Hanseatic ports, into a Russian lake. Its members were Russia, Sweden (by force), Denmark and Prussia; the League built upon Denmark's suzerainty over the Kattegat and Swedish politics, and the Russian-Prussian military understanding that had quietly come into play by 1811. With the relaxation of the Continental System, and the withdrawal of Britain from the Baltic after the Battle of Ostersund, Russia was poised to dominate the region like never before. Indeed, the economic dominance of Russia over Baltic ports increasingly bent the agrarian, estate-focused economies of Sweden and Prussia towards St. Petersburg's thriving port and its growing merchant marine - and Navy, which Russia's booming economy and flush tax coffers could by mid-decade afford to subsidize at a much higher rate.
The Russian-Prussian "understanding" was not a formal alliance per se; such a move would have created much alarm in Paris and Vienna. Frederick William III was not particularly interested in anything other than his church consolidation project, besides; Prussia's grievous losses at Tilsit had left him humiliated, embittered and, already shy and indecisive, reluctant to make a major power play less his pride be damaged again. Where Prussia had a common interest with Russia, though, was in checking the Duchy of Warsaw that was sandwiched between them; said Duchy had been carved out of Prussian lands at Tilsit and its existence angered both states considerably. The tensions between Prussia and Warsaw increased when the daughter of King Frederick August of Saxony, Maria Augusta, and Warsaw's civic leader Jozef Poniatowski had their first son, Jozef August; the hereditary Duke of Warsaw - and, more dangerously, potential future King of Poland if the geopolitical winds blew the wrong way - had been born. The bond between Saxony and Warsaw had now been tightened; this was a problem for both states.
It did not help matters that Saxony was one of the leading states within the Confederation of the Rhine, in concert with Westphalia and Bavaria to dominate the Union; they were generally seen as the kings aligned with the French. Opposing them were three duchies; Oldenburg, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and, curiously, Murat's Berg. The latter was mostly due to the eccentricities of Murat himself, who hated being dictated to and desired more influence in Frankfurt, specifically trying to cajole, flatter and control Prince-Primate Karl von Dalberg, who in theory was the head of state of the loose Confederation. The former, however, were aligned with Russia and Prussia respectively, and Mecklenburg-Schwerin desired entry into the Baltic League, which would entrench its ties with friendly Prussia and, theoretically, boost prosperity for influential merchants in Rostock.
With the dismantling of Hanover and Britain's exit from its substantial position of influence over Germany, exercising power over the Confederation became a geopolitical matter. Napoleon was unamused by Denmark's entry into the Baltic League, after he had assisted the state in defeating Sweden and revenging itself upon Britain for Copenhagen; that Oldenburg and Mecklenburg-Schwerin seemed likely to swing into the Russian camp more formally, and thus give Tsar Alexander much more than merely familial influence in Germany - to say nothing of returning Prussia to a position of importance in Germany, an eventuality the Confederation was designed to block - was a substantial problem and potential point of friction within the informal alliance between Paris and Moscow.
The Congress of Erfurt seemed a distant memory all of a sudden, and as 1811 dragged on, it was an open question what the resolution in Germany would be and if the Confederation could survive. The widely divergent internal politics of the various Confederated states did not help matters; administration ranged from the Napoleonic model to reformist South German kingdoms to conservative, unflinching arbiters of the old feudalistic ways. The Confederation's structure did not lend itself to cohesiveness and its foundation had been ad hoc; it was primarily a military alliance first and foremost, an organized German state second. Neither Napoleon nor Tsar Alexander wanted a unified Germany that they could not dominate, nor did Prussia, and Austria
certainly did not accept the idea that it had lost the Holy Roman Empire at Pressburg only to see Germany formally unified under some other power. The tensions were at a simmer at first, but as Dalberg began a fierce debate over how much of an economic union the Confederation would be as Hamburg thrived as a "neutral" port but was hammered by duties on overland transport, there seemed to be dark clouds on the horizon over a part of Europe that had experienced them repeatedly before, and the British Cabinet began to wonder if Germany and Warsaw were not the ideal wedges to re-isolate Napoleon once more...