Military of the Swedish Empire
Swedish Imperial Army | |
---|---|
Svenska Stormaktens Armé | |
Erik Dahlberg (1693-1702) Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld (1706–1721) | |
Notable commanders | General Carl Gustaf Armfeldt General Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt |
Personnel | |
Military age | 16–60 years old |
Conscription | Yes |
Active personnel | 22,834 (1630) ~77,000 (1700) ~150,000 (1721) |
Reserve personnel | 127,166 (1630) |
Deployed personnel | 150,000 (Thirty Years' War) 200,000 (Great Northern War) |
Industry | |
Foreign suppliers | Brandenburg England France United Provinces |
From 1611 to 1721,
However, despite great successes on the battlefield, inadequate economy and small manpower caused the demise of the Swedish Empire, which ended its 110-year period as a great power in 1721.
Finland was an integral part of Sweden during the Swedish Empire. At the time of the Thirty Years' War, Finns represented an essential part of the Swedish army. Roughly 2/5 from the infantry and 3/7 from the cavalry in the army were from Finland.[4] They served in their own units which used Finnish as their main language. Commands were also given in Finnish.[5] The Finnish cavalry in the Swedish army was called Hakkapeliitta after their battle cry "Hakkaa päälle!". Approximately 110,000 soldiers from Finland lost their lives serving the Swedish Empire between 1617–1721; taking into account the contemporary number of inhabitants in Finland, this is roughly equivalent to 1,000,000 20th century casualties.[6]
Military of Gustav II Adolf
Background
Upon inheriting the Swedish throne in 1611, Gustav II Adolf (Gustavus Adolphus in
Organization
Gustav II also introduced a new regimental system, in which every province would be able to maintain one regiment of 3,264 men, divided in twelve companies of 272 men each. Four such regiments were to be active in mainland Sweden at all times (numbering 13,056 men), and another two regiments would be stationed in the eastern parts of the empire, giving Sweden a standing army of 19,584 men. Cavalry forces were organized in a similar fashion, with 13 companies (six Swedish, four Finnish and three noble), every company having 250 men and an equal number of horses (meaning that the Swedish army possessed 3,250 cavalrymen). While in military service, the provincial regiments were divided into field regiments of 1,176 men in eight companies of 147 men each – these comprised 21 officers, 54 pikemen and 72 musketeers. This system of field organization enabled small and mobile groups with high-quality leadership, excellent communication and unrivaled firepower. It is believed that the army of Gustav II Adolf was the first military to utilize effective combined arms tactics in renaissance history, and that the Swedish Empire was indeed the most successful fighting force of the Thirty Years' War.[7]
Equipment and tactics
The Swedish army at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War was equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry of domestic designs, including the leather cannon – a lightweight artillery piece that could fire at a fast rate and maneuver during the battle with only a handful of infantrymen (as opposed to the hostile artillery, which consisted almost entirely of enormous cannons that were very difficult to move even with horses). However, the cannon itself could quickly overheat and Gustavus had to rely on superior infantry and cavalry to defeat the Holy Roman Empire.
The common "gallop cavalry" were armed with
Invading the Holy Roman Empire
The main challenge for Gustav II Adolf was to defend the Lutheran faith against the Catholics of the south (according to Swedish geography; "the south" was actually present-day Germany and Poland and should not be confused with today's southern Europe). To do this he realized that he had to defeat the Holy Roman Empire on the field of battle; this was the dominating Catholic state in Europe which had begun enforcing its faith upon small Protestant nations in Germany, most notably Sweden's ally of Pomerania. This action provoked Sweden to initiate an invasion, and after landing in allied territory the superior Swedish army easily defeated an Imperial force at Frankfurt one year after establishing a beachhead in northern Germany. Although the state of Magdeburg, one of Sweden's few allies in the region, were overwhelmed by an Imperial army and had their capital city burnt to the ground with its citizens slaughtered, this only served to make the Holy Roman army underestimate their adversaries, being crushed in the following battle of Werben by a less numerous Swedish force. But no truly decisive battle was fought until 17 September 1631, when the Swedish Royal Army supported by Protestant Saxony engaged an imperial army of 35,000 men at Breitenfeld, resulting in the destruction of roughly 70% of Tilly' army with fairly low casualties on the Swedish side.
Sweden's limited manpower meant that from early on, the army had to rely on a majority of foreign soldiers, mainly from Germany, but also from Scotland or England (at least until the beginning of the English civil war). In 1648, the Swedish army in Germany (commanded by Carl Gustaf Wrangel) nominally comprised 62,950 men of which 45,206 were Germans and 17,744 Swedes.[8] In spite of this composition, the Swedish army was a coherent fighting force, well-disciplined and trained, and strictly led. Many foreign officers could attain high ranks, such as marshal Alexander Leslie, William of Saxe-Weimar, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, Hans Christoff von Königsmarck or, later Otto Wilhelm Königsmarck and Bernhard of Baden-Durlach. During the thirty years war, as the Imperial army had defeated many Protestant states from 1618 to 1629, German Protestants increasingly looked to the king of Sweden as their main protector and many enlisted in his army. The Swedes could also easily pay foreign troops thanks to French subsidies. This policy continued in later wars.
The Swedish army peaked at 140,000 troops in 1632, the majority of the regulars being German recruits. However these troops were spread out so individual battles remained relatively small; the king's personal strike force was only 16,000 men at Mainz.[9] In addition to Germans, about 30,000 mercenaries from Britain (80% Scots) served in the Swedish army from 1631 to 1639, a large chunk of the 111,950 Britons who fought in the Holy Roman Empire between 1620 and 1644 (most of the rest fought with the French, Dutch, or Danish).[10] Per Swedish military archives, around 150,000 Swedish and Finnish soldiers died in the 1621 to 1648 campaigns: 40,000 in the 1621-1629 in the Prussian and Livonian wars, and 110,000 in the 1635-1648 war in Germany. Wilson estimates that another 400,000 foreigners (mostly Germans) died in Swedish service in the period, as conscripts or mercenaries. These figures are considerable, considering that Sweden and Finland together only had a population of 1.2 million in 1620.[11]
Campaigns against the south
Reforms of Karl XI
Background
Although the new allotment system was created during the rule of
The Carolean Army
The Carolean Army | |
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Military of Gustavus Adolphus |
As the
Collapse of the Swedish Empire
General outline of the continental war
In the beginning of the Great Northern War in 1700,
References
- ^ Frost 2000, pp. 133–134
- ^ a b Isacson, Göran http://www.militarhistoria.se/serier/krigforingens-mastare/gustav-ii-adolf/. Militär Historia, nr 3, 2010.
- ISBN 978-0-582-06429-4.
- ISBN 978-952-222-606-8.
- ISBN 9780880292603.
- ISBN 9789522346384.
- Napoleon Bonaparte.
- ^ The later thirty years war, Guthrie
- ^ Wilson, Peter (2009). "Europe's Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War." Page 484.
- ^ Wilson, table 1.
- ^ Wilson, p. 169.