Receiving the Enemy: Involuntary Hospitality and Prisoners of War in Denmark and Sweden, 1700–1721

Abstract

This chapter studies how host communities in the Danish town of Aarhus and the Swedish town of Uppsala approached the question of providing security in everyday interaction with prisoners of war during the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Blomqvist argues that the prisoner policy of the Danish and Swedish crown tapped into established systems of public hospitality, modeled on the billeting of military personnel. The crown employed norms of hospitality to mobilize local resources for the war effort, delegating the cost of feeding and guarding the prisoners onto the host community. At the same time, negotiations between the state and the host community regarding the legitimacy of the prisoner policy redefined the very notions of hospitality. The prisoner policy relinquished the idea that public hospitality was founded on a fundamental solidarity between members of the community of the realm. Prisoners of war were entitled to hospitality, despite the fact that they were not members of the realm, but, quite the opposite, identified as enemies. Instead, the prisoners were expected to compensate their host by performing labor. Through service arrangements, the prisoners were formally placed in a subordinate position to their hosts and employers, expected to serve and obey. This negotiated hospitality served both as an integrative and an excluding force in the two towns.

In the context of providing hospitality, the act of receiving the enemy arguably constitutes one of the most extreme situations imaginable. The question of how hosts and guests are to defuse potential conflicts are relevant in every act of hospitality, but seldom are they as acute as when they identify each other as members of opposing sides in an ongoing war. A case that captures this problem in the early modern period is the interaction between civilian communities and prisoners of war.

The Great Northern War (1700–1721) resulted in large-scale migration all around the Baltic Sea, and a part of this movement was the forced migration of prisoners of war. Fighting for geopolitical dominance in northern Europe, the warring parties of Sweden, on the one hand, and a coalition of Denmark, Russia and Saxony-Poland, on the other, captured tens of thousands of soldiers over two decades of conflict. Some of these captives regained their freedom in the field, whether through escape or prisoner exchange, but many others were removed from the warzones and brought to towns and villages in the hinterlands. Their arrival brought the native population into direct and everyday contact with enemy soldiers and, as many of these prisoners remained in captivity for years or even decades, they became part of the host community’s experience of wartime migration, just as much as more traditional groups of migrants.

In this chapter, I study how the host communities in the Danish town of Aarhus and the Swedish town of Uppsala approached the question of providing security in everyday interactions with prisoners of war. What role did notions of hospitality play in the treatment of these prisoners? How did the hosts react to the presence of enemy soldiers? And what internal and external factors influenced this interaction?

The Great Northern War occurred at a time when the treatment of prisoners of war was undergoing significant changes. On the one hand, the state’s successive monopolization of warfare meant that captured enemy soldiers were transformed from the private booty of their captor to state property. On the other, the treatment of prisoners was increasingly regulated by the emerging notion of international laws of war. But, even though there were many motives for taking prisoners in the field, the early modern state was less interested in actually keeping prisoners for a longer period of time. According to the military ideals of the time, captivity was intended to be a brief experience. Rather than incarcerating captive enemy soldiers, captors generally preferred to either press them into their own forces, or exchange them as soon as possible.¹ And yet, this ideal appears to have been increasingly difficult to uphold in the course of the early modern era. Warring states found themselves stuck with large numbers of captive soldiers and the question of what to do with them. The Great Northern War is a case in point. Exchange negotiations broke down repeatedly between Sweden and the coalition states even as the war kept dragging on year after year. As a result, many prisoners of war remained in captivity for decades.²

In many ways, these prisoners of war constituted an extreme example of strangers in the host community. Besides their distant geographical origin and their foreign customs, their perceived strangeness was reinforced by the fact that they were identified as enemies of the realm. Their presence in the host community was involuntary, decreed by the captor state, and the length of their stay was indefinite, dependent as it was on the developments of international politics. What especially marked these prisoners out as a group, however, was that they presented the host community with a dual problem of securitization. On the one hand, there was the question of how to prevent the prisoners from escaping and returning to active service; on the other, there was the question of how to protect the host community from the potential threat that these captive soldiers presented.

In this chapter, I demonstrate how established notions of public hospitality allowed the Danish and Swedish crown to mobilize local resources for supporting prisoners of war. However, this hospitality had to be negotiated between the state and the host community, particularly in the face of growing demands for wartime labor and the wider military developments on the international scene. The result of these negotiations, I argue, was a process of social integration, which served as a mechanism for providing security in the everyday interactions between prisoners and hosts.

Captivity as Public Hospitality

Previous research suggests that notions of hospitality played a significant role in the early modern notion of war captivity. Captivity reflected the social order of early modern society in the sense that the social hierarchy was reproduced through the contrasting treatment of officers and common soldiers. Scholars have in particular emphasized how this hierarchy was expressed in the hospitality with which captors usually received captive officers. Acts of hospitality toward vanquished foes can be seen as expressing ideals of knightly chivalry and notions of restricted, civilized warfare, but they were fundamentally founded on a distinct sense of class solidarity shared among the officers of both sides. The ruling elites of Europe generally recognized each other as social equals, and captors therefore tended to treat high-ranking prisoners of war as something like distinguished—although involuntary—guests.³ Captive officers were granted extensive privileges on the basis of their word of honor that they would not exploit their relative freedom to escape.⁴ They were allowed to maintain a lifestyle that reflected their social status, retaining their own servants and cooks; they could rent comfortable accommodations, at their own expense; and they were invited to partake in the social activities of the local elite.⁵ Obvious examples from the Great Northern War include the Russian prince Alexander Archilovich Bagrationi (1674–1711) and the Swedish field marshal Magnus Stenbock (1665–1717) who, during their years of captivity, were regular guests of the royal courts in Stockholm and Copenhagen, respectively.⁶

This hospitable treatment of captive enemies should not be overly idealized—captivity could well be full of hardships, even for captive officers—but it clearly reflected the social hierarchy of early modern society, characterized, as it was, by its social exclusivity. The fraternization among the officers naturally excluded the common soldiers, who were neither highborn enough to be let into the noble salons, nor deemed honorable enough that they could be released on parole. Although this chivalrous hospitality was reserved for the higher echelons of society, other forms of hospitality likely influenced the treatment of the common soldier.

Gabrielle Jancke argues that the early modern concept of hospitality was much broader than the modern definition: hospitality was not just a religious and ethical concept, but a legal one. In religious and ethical terms, hospitality was essentially perceived as an altruistic act of the host—it was a private act of friendship, which established a reciprocal relationship between host and guest. Early modern jurists, by contrast, conceptualized a distinction between this form of private hospitality on the one hand and, on the other, a form of public hospitality which was defined as necessary rather than voluntary.⁷ Jancke writes that hospitality in this latter sense was considered a matter for society as a whole, rather than for the individual, and she links this concept to the household-based economy of early modern society. As most production took place within households, hospitality was a crucial strategy that enabled resource mobilization for public ventures. Legal texts and philosophical tractates consequently recognized public hospitality as a fundamental component of the social order.⁸

This concept of public hospitality was legitimized as a necessary expression of the common good of society. In contrast to the act of private hospitality which was based on a community of friendship—that of the table companions (Ger. Tischgenossen)—the act of public hospitality instead manifested the community of the realm. This was a community based on the principle that all members of society, united by common norms and laws, had an obligation to provide for the needs of the common good, which translated into a duty to offer certain acts of hospitality. In effect, Jancke argues, providing public hospitality was seen as an act of submission. Accepting his duty to show hospitality, the host recognized the authority of king and crown as well as displayed his loyalty to the realm.⁹

There were many forms of public hospitality, but one of the prime examples was the billeting of military personnel.¹⁰ In a time when dedicated military barracks were rare, civilian households were required to accommodate and feed soldiers for the length of their stay in the host community. According to Jancke, these billeted soldiers served as concrete representations of the state in the local community and, as such, hospitality toward these soldiers symbolically reaffirmed the political order and its legal norms.¹¹ But the military billeting also demonstrates that inherent to this concept of public hospitality was the notion that it need not have been voluntary nor consensual.¹² An obvious indication of this is the fact that the state sometimes employed military billeting as a weapon with which to subdue dissident communities.¹³ Billeting was generally perceived as a heavy burden by the affected communities—not just in terms of its material demands, but because of the resulting tensions it produced within individual households.¹⁴ Scholars argue that many of the conflicts between soldiers and civilians resulted from the fact that soldiers refused to recognize their position as guests in the household, thus challenging the authority of the family father.¹⁵

This notion of public hospitality, I argue, was crucial for the treatment of prisoners of war during the Great Northern War. Few scholars have systematically engaged with the question of how the day-to-day management of early modern captivity was organized, but it is widely agreed that the state did not, by itself, possess the necessary resources to intern large numbers of captive soldiers for any lengthy period of time. Dedicated prisoner camps, like those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were out of the question.¹⁶ A common solution was to delegate the cost of captivity. Renauld Morieux, who studies the developing treatment of prisoners of war during the second half of the eighteenth century, demonstrates that the French and British crown relied extensively on private contractors to organize essentially every aspect of life in captivity.¹⁷ I will demonstrate that the Danish and Swedish crowns instead solved this problem by employing the concept of public hospitality.

Captivity in Aarhus and Uppsala: An Overview

Aarhus and Uppsala were two of the many towns in the Danish and Swedish realms that were forced to accommodate captive soldiers during the course of the Great Northern War. The archives provide unusually accessible sources on captivity in these two towns, both in a national and an international comparison. The main body of source material consists of, on the one hand, the archives of the local royal administration (Dan. Amt, Swe. Länsstyrelse) and, on the other, those of the local magistrates. These archives provide a diverse range of sources—correspondence between the communal authorities and the crown, minutes of the communal council meetings, court records, and, above all, a diverse collection of prisoner muster rolls.

Individually, these sources mostly provide only summary information on the prisoners of war, but compiling the scraps of information in a database proves them to be a rich window into the everyday organization of war captivity. This method allows me to partially reconstruct the activities of individual prisoners of war, starting from their arrival in the host community and following them until their departure. The fragmentary nature of the sources means, however, that generalized figures and conclusions—such as the exact number of prisoners in the community at a given time—need to be regarded first and foremost as estimations.

Despite differences with regard to their local and national context, the situations in Aarhus and Uppsala shared many similarities. Although small in comparison to the larger Europe-wide context, both towns were fairly sizable in the Scandinavian context and served as important regional economic and administrative centers. Furthermore, the war put both communities under severe economic and demographic pressure.

As the fifth largest town in Denmark, with approximately 3500 inhabitants, Aarhus was an important hub for both domestic and international trade and, as such, the war with Sweden was a severe blow to the local economy. A general decline in wartime shipping, the actions by Swedish privateers, and state demands for extensive military billeting put the local burghers under significant economic pressure.¹⁸ Besides the obligation to billet military personnel, from the summer of 1713 and onward came the demand to support large numbers of prisoners of war. After the surrender of the Swedish army at Tönningen in May of that year, thousands of Swedish prisoners were brought to Denmark and distributed in towns across Jutland and Zealand.¹⁹ Aarhus initially received a particularly large group of about 1200 prisoners,²⁰ but within a year this number had been significantly reduced. A number of prisoners supposedly escaped to Sweden, others were relocated to neighboring towns, and the remaining prisoners were increasingly dispersed over Aarhus’ surrounding countryside. By the spring of 1717, there were 71 prisoners permanently residing in the town²¹ with at least 150 further prisoners living in the neighboring rural parishes.²² Some of these prisoners eventually married local women and settled in Denmark permanently, but most of them would have returned to Sweden following the end of the war in 1720.

Uppsala, in turn, only had about 2500 inhabitants but was still one of the larger towns in Sweden by the outbreak of war in the year 1700.²³ The town was primarily known for its university, cathedral, and royal castle, making Uppsala a center for ecclesiastic and royal administration. The war years, however, ushered in a long series of local catastrophes. Fire destroyed large parts of the town in 1702, including the castle and the cathedral. In the early years of the 1710s, severe dearth resulted in a region-wide famine, closely followed by a plague epidemic that decimated the town population. Although the number of prisoners sent to Uppsala was smaller than those in Aarhus, they still constituted a significant presence in the community. A group of 28 Russian prisoners of war arrived in November 1709,²⁴ followed by a group of 43 Danish soldiers in June 1710.²⁵ Many of these prisoners fell victim to the plague epidemic in 1710–1711, but the 40 odd prisoners who survived remained in the town for several years, until 1716.²⁶

This overview highlights a significant difference between the two towns in terms of the composition of the prisoner population. In ethnic and confessional terms, the prisoners in Aarhus were relatively homogenous as a group, whereas the prisoners who arrived in Uppsala were far more diverse, demonstrated above all by the empirical distinction between Danish and Russian prisoners of war. It needs to be emphasized that the epithets “Danish” and “Russian,” in this context, were not inherently understood in ethnic terms, but were rather defined as administrative categories, identifying the prisoners based on which hostile state they served.²⁷ Yet, even so, the two groups displayed significant variety in terms of the geographical and cultural origin of the prisoners—particularly in confessional terms. Whereas the Danish prisoners were all Lutherans, the Russian prisoners were Russian Orthodox. This heterogeneity among the prisoners in Uppsala allows for an interesting comparison between the contrasting experiences of the two groups.

Delegating Responsibility

The question of how these prisoners were to be housed and fed was inevitably tied to the problem of security. Inspired by the model of military billeting, the Danish and Swedish crown relied on the host communities to support the prisoners during their time in captivity. As such, the royal authorities delegated much of the responsibility for the practical organization of captivity onto the host community and, crucially, this included the duty to provide much of the necessary security arrangements.

The situation for prisoners of war in Aarhus directly resembled that of billeted soldiers. The prisoners were lodged as guests in private households and administratively integrated into the pre-existing framework of military billeting, under the auspice of the so-called “quartering committee” (Dan. indkvarteringsvæsenet), normally tasked with arranging the quartering of regular troops.²⁸

In Uppsala, by contrast, the Danish and Russian prisoners were initially housed in the ruins of Uppsala castle. Although the burned-out shell had been marked for demolition following the city fire of 1702, there were still a number of cellar vaults beneath the building, which were deemed as appropriately secure accommodation for prisoners of war.²⁹ However, the host community was still responsible for feeding the prisoners, and the spatial segregation did not by any means isolate the prisoners from the resident population. The prisoners living in the castle were allowed to move about in the town during daytime, and several locals evidently visited the prisoners in their quarters to offer them food or drink.³⁰ Furthermore, during the course of their captivity, many of the prisoners eventually moved out of the castle to settle in the town proper, as they found employment in the service of local burghers.

Regardless of the way housing was arranged, the resident population was expected to ensure the security of these prisoners, both individually and collectively. In Aarhus, the individual hosts were held accountable for the prisoners living in their homes, and royal decrees threatened them with heavy fines in case a prisoner succeeded in escaping.³¹ Anecdotes further demonstrate that when a prisoner did run away, it was up to the individual host to track him down.³² Although the crown initially stationed a troop of 300 cuirassiers to keep the peace in the town, this responsibility eventually also fell on the burghers as the guard force was called away. The situation in Uppsala was similar. According to royal instructions from 1706, prisoners of war were subjected to a night-time curfew, starting at 9 p.m. in the summer or at 7 p.m. in the winter, and it was up to the individual hosts to ensure that the prisoners followed the regulations.³³ Extensive duties also fell on the burgher militia. Besides patrolling the streets at night, the burghers were supposed to provide six militiamen to stand guard over the prisoners in the castle, night and day.³⁴

This prisoner policy clearly prioritized the crown’s fiscal interests over questions of security. Advocating the principle of public hospitality, the crown delegated the cost of captivity onto the host community, but the policy necessitated a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, the state faced the problem of how to legitimize the demands of public hospitality in the eyes of the hosts. The host community, on the other hand, was left with the problem of how to provide security in the everyday interaction between hosts and prisoners. The solution to these two problems, I argue, was connected.

Legitimacy and Compensation

The prisoners’ claim to public hospitality was questionable. In many aspects, billeting prisoners of war was not that different from billeting regular soldiers, but the legitimacy of the military billeting arguably rested, to no small degree, on the fact that the soldier was an agent of the state and thus a manifestation of the common security interests of the realm. The prisoner of war was not—rather, he was a symbol of the external threat to the community. When the crown requested the host community to extend public hospitality to captive enemy soldiers it thus diluted the notion that public hospitality manifested the community of the realm, which Jancke sees at the fundamental legitimating basis for the concept.

Indeed, the host community in Uppsala and Aarhus did question the legitimacy of the prisoner policy. These protests were primarily associated with the prisoners’ arrival in the community. Local authorities argued that the demand to accommodate prisoners of war was unjust in face of the economic and demographic pressure under which the host communities had already suffered. The Aarhus magistrate complained bitterly to the local governor (Dan. stiftsamtmand) about the heavy burden which had been placed on the residents of the town. The request to accommodate 1200 Swedish prisoners—besides a number of regular army troops—resulted in such a shortage on housing, he claimed, that each household had to accept up to ten lodgers at a time. What was worse, other neighboring towns were said to be free from having to billet altogether.³⁵ The Uppsala magistrate was less vocal in his criticism, but appears to have allied with the regional governor (Swe. Landshövding) in protest against the prisoner policy. Writing to the Royal Council in May 1710, the governor declared that supporting prisoners of war in Uppsala would be outright impossible. Besides the alleged lack of secure facilities to house the prisoners, the present dearth meant that there was simply no food to be had in the entire region.³⁶ Individual burghers also continually protested against the extensive demands placed on the town militia to perform guard duty; they complained either formally, in the town hall,³⁷ or informally, by simply neglecting to undertake these duties.³⁸

That individual communities challenged state demands on local resources was not uncommon, but these local protests did not target the crown’s demands on billeting per se, but rather focused on the prisoner policy in particular. The dubious legitimacy of extending public hospitality to prisoners of war allowed the host community a venue to criticize wartime resource mobilization.³⁹

The protests focused attention on the question of how the state ought to compensate the hosts for their hospitality. From the outset, the Danish and Swedish prisoner policy stated that each prisoner of war was initially entitled to a daily prisoner allowance. Financed by the local war contribution tax, this sum was intended to cover the daily costs for food and accommodation.⁴⁰ In practice, the tax-funded prisoner allowance really served to compensate the prisoner’s host—a practice very similar to the system of military billeting.⁴¹ However, in recognition of the problem of legitimacy, the crown also proposed another kind of deal. In an address, primarily directed at the local elite of rural landowners and urban master artisans, the crown offered individual hosts the opportunity to employ prisoners of war as laborers, provided that they accepted full responsibility for feeding and watching over them.

The Swedish crown had already adopted this line on prisoner labor in 1706, as soon as large numbers of prisoners of war started to arrive in Sweden. On several occasions, the regional governor in Uppsala actively encouraged civilians to take prisoners into their service.⁴² Integral to the deal was that the prisoners currently quartered in the castle cellar would be allowed to move into the employer’s home.

The Danish crown’s policy on prisoner labor was more categorical, in the sense that it prescribed compulsory work-duty for prisoners of war. All prisoners, except for the old and infirm, were expected to “work for their fare.”⁴³ Initially, the act of hiring prisoner labor was voluntary, like in Sweden, but the Danish policy eventually went one step further. A royal decree from 1715 declared that each prisoner of war was to be permanently assigned to a particular employer, who would henceforth be responsible for accommodating and supporting him for the duration of the war. The plan envisaged dividing a total of 249 prisoners between members of the rural elite—mainly parish pastors and major landowners—and the burghers of the local towns.⁴⁴ The residents of Aarhus were eventually assigned 20 of these prisoners of war, besides a further 50 odd prisoners who were deemed unemployable and who were thus supported through the contribution tax.⁴⁵

In one sense, allowing civilians to hire prisoner labor was a continuation of the crown’s strategy to delegate the cost of prisoner upkeep onto the host community. Laboring prisoners lost their entitlement to the prisoner allowance, as the crown renounced its economic responsibility toward them; as such, each new laboring prisoner freed up tax revenue for other, war-related expenses. But, crucially, the state explicitly presented prisoner labor as a way to compensate the local elite for the effects of the wartime resource mobilization. Military conscriptions had resulted in a growing shortage of male laborers, and the crown proposed that prisoner labor would, to some extent, be able to fill in for the mobilized native work force.⁴⁶

This policy on prisoner labor, I argue, redefined the fundamentals of public hospitality. Instead of basing the claim to hospitality on the idea of a collective duty to the common good, hospitality was now conditioned on the prisoner performing labor.

This policy indeed appears to have been welcomed in the host communities as several members of the local elite were quite eager to hire prisoner labor. From Aarhus there is evidence suggesting that a veritable black market for prisoner labor emerged, where burghers and landowners bribed local representatives of the crown with offers of money and favors to acquire certain prisoners of war.⁴⁷ Some evidently tried to get hold of as many prisoners as possible, such as the baron Christian Güldencrone (1676–1746), one of the major landowners of the region. In 1715, he had been assigned three prisoners of war to his estate of Vilhelmsborg, in accordance with the royal prisoner policy, but by 1717 he was in the process of hiring another 12 prisoners.⁴⁸

Part of the success of the labor policy, particularly in Uppsala, was the fact that the prisoners provided local employers with a source of quality labor. Several of the prisoners who arrived in the town had received occupational training prior to enlisting in the army, which made them a valuable asset to local master artisans searching for apprentices. This is clearly demonstrated by a list of 20 Uppsala burghers who, already in 1706, declared their interest in hiring prisoner labor. More than half of these prospective employers were explicitly looking for prisoners with specific skillsets—from wagonmakers and carpenters to cobblers.⁴⁹ Later examples further yield cases of master artisans who successfully headhunted prisoners with certain occupational qualifications.⁵⁰

Many prisoners also seem to have welcomed the opportunity to work. The source corpus provides several examples of prisoners who explicitly appealed to the local authorities for the right to enter into service.⁵¹ Labor evidently offered the prisoners an opportunity to improve their material situation—this was particularly so for the prisoners accommodated in the cellar of Uppsala castle. Finding a position of employment gave them the chance to leave the cellar vaults for more comfortable accommodation in the town.

The position of these laboring prisoners must not be mistaken for slave labor. The royal authorities evidently intended that the prisoners would be a source of cheap labor, but this did not mean that the prisoners were bereft of all agency. Both in Aarhus and in Uppsala, employment could take the form of a regular service contract, such as the one between local judge Frans Roscher and prisoner Lorentz Bauman in Uppsala. According to a later description, the judge had approached Bauman with the offer of entering his service and eventually the two of them agreed that Bauman was to serve Roscher until Michaelmas (the customary end date for service contracts at this time) for a daily wage of 9 öre kopparmynt, in addition to food and lodging.⁵² The prisoners’ agency on the local labor market is particularly evident in the numerous indignant complaints about prisoners in and around Aarhus who left their appointed hosts to sell their services to the highest bidder.⁵³ In both towns, some prisoners even established independent businesses.⁵⁴

The Danish prisoner Hans Christopher Becker in Uppsala can exemplify a prisoner’s career during the course of captivity. Arriving in Uppsala in 1710, he was initially housed in the castle cellar, together with the other prisoners of war, but sometime in 1711 he was hired by a local burgher and moved to the employer’s house in town. The employer was, by all accounts, the master hatter Simon Novelius, who in addition to Becker also hired two other prisoners of war around the same time.⁵⁵ By 1713, however, Becker had left the hatter’s service, set himself up as a cobbler and applied to be accepted as a local burgher.⁵⁶ He married a Swedish woman and, judging by a later court case, he was able not only to support himself and his new family, but also to rent a small house or apartment.⁵⁷

Security Through Integration

Somewhat paradoxically, the policy on prisoner labor also appears to have been a solution to the problem of securitization. The fact that the state relinquished much of its direct control over the prisoners by allowing individual locals to hire them might have been expected to exacerbate the security problem. The result of this policy, however, was that the prisoners became integrated as members of local households—a process of integration that, in itself, appears to have functioned as a mechanism for providing security in the daily interaction between prisoners and hosts.

Maria Ågren argues that the division of labor in early modern households both served as a manifestation of social hierarchies and as a strong integrative force in society. Every person who was involved in household production—from the master and mistress to maids and farmhands—had a recognized position in the social hierarchy, both inside the household and in the wider community. Taking part in household production thus served as a fundamental basis for inclusion in a community.⁵⁸

Service in local households thus bound prisoner and host together into networks of social relationships. Although clearly hierarchical, the master–servant relationship was a reciprocal relationship of mutual obligations that secured for the prisoner a defined place in the life of the household. In contrast to billeted soldiers, prisoners of war were not simply passive consumers of the household’s resources, but active participants in its production.

Intermarriages between prisoners of war and native women appear as the most striking testimony of the process of integration. During the years of captivity, a number of prisoners in both Aarhus and Uppsala married native women and declared that they wanted to stay in the country permanently. In Aarhus, a muster roll from 1718 lists 11 prisoners who had married and settled in the town.⁵⁹ Similarly, 11 of the prisoners in Uppsala married local women between the years 1713 and 1715.⁶⁰ In some of these latter cases, local parish records imply how integration in local households helped anchor the prisoners in the local community. For example, when the above-mentioned prisoner Becker christened his newborn daughter in Uppsala cathedral, on July 9, 1713, the local baptism record names master hatter Simon Novelius, his former employer, as the girl’s godfather.⁶¹ The act of naming Novelius as the godfather of his daughter was clearly a way for Becker to demonstrate his local connections, and suggests that his relationship to the hatter was a crucial form of social capital, useful in legitimizing Becker’s presence in the community.

A significant product of this development was a shift in the temporal perspectives of both prisoners and hosts. From the outset, prisoners of war were inherently defined as temporary visitors. The length of their stay was never determined in advance, but they were ultimately expected to leave the community—either through the event of a prisoner exchange or because of the end of the war. However, as some of these prisoners became embedded in the host community through work, marriage and social relationships, their presence was increasingly perceived as something permanent.

This integration of prisoners into local networks of social relations seems to have provided a strategy for mitigating potential conflicts between prisoners and hosts. Despite their continued presence in the host community, there is a striking absence in the sources of any sense that the prisoners would have been perceived as constituting a physical threat to the locals. Court records from Uppsala offer an interesting perspective on this as the prisoners of war in the town became integrated into the local judicial system and subjected to the civil code of law.⁶² Local court records document a number of conflicts between prisoners and locals, but these cases do not suggest any general animosity between the two groups. The nine documented cases where prisoners of war were sentenced for brawls or assaults between 1710 and 1714 are more or less indistinguishable from other cases of interpersonal violence from this time.⁶³ Further, the eight cases where prisoners were sentenced for offenses of fornication or adultery testifies to their close interaction with members of the host community.⁶⁴ A general impression of the magisterial protocols is that the communal authorities viewed the local students and regular billeted soldiers as posing much larger threats to public order than the prisoners of war did.

Not all prisoners experienced this process on equal terms, however, and the contrasts between the groups of Danish and Russian prisoners in Uppsala is particularly striking. The Danish prisoners appear to have achieved a relatively high level of integration within the local labor market, as exemplified in the story of Hans Christopher Becker. All in all, of the 26 Danish prisoners who lived in the town between 1711 and 1716, at least 19 had some form of employment at one time or another.⁶⁵ These prisoners worked in a variety of different fields, some as artisan apprentices, others as garden servants at the royal estate of Ekolsund, and a few in more exotic occupations, such as one prisoner who was hired as the official town drummer. By contrast, accounts of the Russian prisoners’ activities are much rarer. The sources suggest that several of these prisoners carried out odd jobs now and then, but it is only possible to identify four who had any form of long-term employment.⁶⁶ The contrast between the two groups is even more evident when considering prisoner marriages in the town. All of the 11 prisoners who married local women in Uppsala belonged to the group of Danish prisoners. It thus seems that although the two groups lived in parallel in the town for almost six years, the Danish prisoners became increasingly more integrated in the community, whereas the Russians continued to live on the social periphery.

The most important factor behind this discrepancy seems to be the cultural clash that the Russian prisoners experienced in their interaction with the resident population. Arriving in Uppsala in 1709, the Russian prisoners appear to have had great difficulties in communication with the locals. A court record from November 1711, for example, suggests that communication was only possible through three-step interpretation.⁶⁷ However, probably more of a problem than the linguistic barrier was their Russian Orthodox faith. In confessional terms, the Swedish realm was a highly homogenous society at the beginning of the eighteenth century (as was the kingdom of Denmark). Known in historiography as the era of Lutheran orthodoxy, this was a time when the Lutheran state church had a major influence on the political and legal structures of the realm. Consequently, foreigners who professed a deviant faith were subjected to social and legal restrictions—for example, any Russian prisoner who wished to marry a Swedish woman first had to convert to Lutheranism.⁶⁸ Thus, the process of integration for prisoners who shared the Lutheran faith of the hosts (such as the Danish prisoners in Uppsala or the Swedish in Aarhus) was much smoother than it was for the Russians, whose religious traditions effectively marked them out as strangers.

The Geography of War

The developments in Aarhus and Uppsala did not occur in a vacuum, but were dependent on events taking place on the international scene. The geography of war, in particular, had a significant impact on the interaction between the prisoners and their hosts; the relative distance or proximity of enemy forces strongly influenced local perceptions of the level of potential threat that prisoners posed.

The two towns were, initially, situated far away from the actual theater of war and as long as the fighting took place overseas—in Poland, Pomerania, Livonia, and Russia—the prisoners seem to have been viewed as posing little in the way of an active threat to the host community. The situation in Uppsala changed drastically, however, between 1709 and 1716. After initial Swedish victories at the beginning of the conflict, the strategic situation of the realm deteriorated following the defeat of the Swedish field army at the Battle of Poltava, in June 1709. For the inhabitants of Uppsala, the most pressing concern was the advance of Russian armies into Finland, just on the other side of the Bothnian Bay. In 1713, Russian forces captured Helsinki, and in the following years, they successively occupied the whole of Finland.⁶⁹ In Uppsala, the arrival of large numbers of refugees from Finland would doubtless have increased the local awareness of the strategic setbacks in the east.⁷⁰

The proximity of Russian forces appears to have heightened tensions between the host population and the Russian prisoners in Uppsala. In April 1715, a burgher reported to the magistrate that a Russian prisoner had threatened a local innkeeper with what would happen to her in an anticipated Russian invasion. Supposedly, the prisoner had told the mistress of the house that “the Russians will soon be here to cut your breasts off […] and slap you on the mouth with them. The other hags they will make gunpowder out of.”⁷¹

Reflecting this development, the minutes of the Uppsala magistrate show how Russian prisoners of war were increasingly perceived as a growing security threat. Notably, concerns about the diligence of the burgher militia became a common topic in the magistrate’s sessions, a theme that had been virtually non-existent in previous years. Between August and October 1715 alone, the magistrate dealt with the matter in at least five separate sittings.⁷² There is no reason to suspect that this newfound interest in the burgher militia was spurred on by sudden laps in the militiamen’s sense of duty. Rather, it reflected the growing sense of direct military threat to the community. These concerns clearly became all the more alarming by the sudden escape of one of the Russian prisoners in August 1715. Following this incident, the magistrate gathered the local burghers to emphasize the considerable threat that the Russian prisoners constituted to the security of the realm. Living in the country for such a long time, these people could, supposedly, provide the enemy with invaluable information and they would do whatever they could to reach the hostile troops in Finland if they succeeded in their escape.⁷³ Importantly, however, these concerns were directed not toward prisoners of war in general, but specifically at the group of Russian prisoners. By contrast, there are no indications of similar tensions between the Danish prisoners and their hosts.

Concluding Remarks: Receiving the Enemy and Negotiating Hospitality

Throughout this chapter, I have argued that notions of public hospitality were instrumental for the treatment of prisoners of war during the time of the Great Northern War. The prisoner policy of the Danish and Swedish crown tapped into established systems of public hospitality, modeled on the billeting of military personnel. The crown employed norms of hospitality to mobilize local resources for the war effort, delegating the cost of feeding and guarding the prisoners onto the host community. In line with Jancke’s argument, the reception of prisoners of war in Aarhus and Uppsala testifies to the important role hospitality played in the structure of the early modern state.

At the same time, however, negotiations between the state and the host community regarding the legitimacy of the prisoner policy redefined these very notions of hospitality. The prisoner policy relinquished the idea that public hospitality was founded on a fundamental solidarity between members of the community of the realm. Prisoners of war were entitled to hospitality despite the fact that they were not members of the realm, but, quite the opposite, were identified as its enemies. Instead, the prisoners were expected to compensate their hosts by performing labor.

The result of these negotiations was a relationship between the resident population and the prisoners of war which combined two competing sets of roles. First of all, there was the relationship between hosts and guests. The prisoners were temporary, involuntary visitors in the host community and the resident population was charged with seeing to their needs. Simultaneously, however, the interaction was also characterized by the relationship between masters and servants. Through service arrangements, the prisoners were formally placed in a subordinate position to their hosts and employers, expected to serve and obey.

The dynamic between these partially conflicting sets of relationships seems to have served as a mechanism for providing security in the interaction between prisoners and hosts. I argue that this development was dependent on a number of factors internal and external to the host community. Crucially, the structure of the early modern household economy linked hosts and prisoners of war in networks of social relations. As farmhands, domestic servants, and artisan apprentices, the laboring prisoners actively contributed to the production of the household and were thus perceived as less of a burden by the host community. This dynamic was further reinforced by the wartime labor demand in the two towns. The growing labor deficit due to military drafts and epidemics made the laboring prisoners a valuable asset to local employers, but it also provided the prisoners themselves with a relatively strong bargaining position in the local labor market. Importantly, however, these local developments in Aarhus and Uppsala played out against the backdrop of the larger military and political developments of the Great Northern War. The local process of integration was conditioned by the relative distance to the theater of war, and tensions between prisoners and locals increased as the war advanced closer to home. In Uppsala, the Russian occupation of Finland and the perceived threat of a Russian invasion appears to have activated an increasingly hostile attitude toward the Russian prisoners on the part of the local population.

In conclusion, this negotiated hospitality served both as an integrative and an excluding force. Service in local households inserted prisoners of war in networks of social relations that fueled a process of integration, but this process appears to have been contingent upon cultural and religious conformity to the norms of the host community. Whereas the Danish, Lutheran prisoners in Uppsala succeeded in finding employment and marrying local women, the Russian prisoners continued to live on the social margins of the community, marked as strangers by their deviant faith.

Notes

• 1. Starting at the end of the sixteenth century, a system of bilateral treaties, so called cartels, was established in Europe, which structured the exchange and ransoming of prisoners of war. Such treaties generally stipulated that captives should be exchanged within four weeks of capture—preferably even within two weeks. Hohrath (1999: 163–165).

• 2. For an extended discussion on the breakdown of Swedish–Russian and Swedish–Danish exchange negotiations, see Almqvist (1942, 1944, 1945), Tuxen and Harbou (1915).

• 3. Hohrath (1999: 158).

• 4. Hohrath (1999: 154–157). For a further discussion on the dynamics of captivity and notions of honor, see Morieux (2013).

• 5. Blomqvist (2014: 27–33), Voigtländer (1999: 183).

• 6. Almqvist (1942: 67–68), Marklund (2008).

• 7. Jancke (2013: 198–221).

• 8. Jancke (2013: 198–201).

• 9. Jancke (2013: 204–205).

• 10. Jancke (2013: 198–201).

• 11. Jancke (2013: 204–205).

• 12. Jancke (2013: 198–201).

• 13. Lorenz (2007: 167). An example of such practice was the “dragonnades” in seventeenth-century France—a royal policy that explicitly targeted Huguenot (Protestant) households when quartering troops, in an attempt to force these households to convert to Catholicism. See van der Linden (2015: 21–22).

• 14. Kleinhagenbrock (2008).

• 15. Collstedt (2012: 222–224), Lorenz (2007: 175).

• 16. Scheipers (2010: 8), Hohrath (1999: 152–160).

• 17. Morieux (2019: 183–189). See also Rommelse and Downing (2018).

• 18. Degn (1998: 261 and 290–291).

• 19. Tuxen and Harbou (1915: 246–250).

• 20. Danish National Archive (hereafter DNA), Havreballegård og Stjernholm amter 1683–1799 (hereafter HSA), Dokumenter angående svenske fanger 1713–1721 (hereafter Dokumenter), Aug. 10, 1713.

• 21. DNA, Århus Rådstue (hereafter ÅR), Indkvarteringsvæsenet, Indkvartering af Svendske fanger 1713–1718 (hereafter Indkvartering), Feb. 22, 1717.

• 22. This rough estimation is based on figures from a number of prisoner muster rolls from Havreballegaard–Stjernholm Amt, collected by the royal governor von Plessen in the early months of 1717, and should be considered as the minimum number of prisoners in the region at the time. See DNA, HSA, Dokumenter.

• 23. Lilja (1996).

• 24. Swedish National Archive (hereafter SNA), Länsstyrelsen i Uppsala län (hereafter LUL), Landskontoret, Handlingar rörande ryska, polska, sachsiska och danska fångar (hereafter Handlingar), undated prisoner muster roll from Uppsala, plausibly from 1716.

• 25. SNA, LUL, Handlingar, Jan. 14, 1716.

• 26. Besides these two particular groups, Uppsala housed other prisoners of war both in the years before 1709 and after 1716, but for the sake of this particular study, I have chosen to focus on the above-mentioned groups of Russian and Danish prisoners, as they present the longest continuous presence in the host community.

• 27. A survey of 40 Danish prisoners of war, from June 1710, claims that sixteen of them originated from the electorate of Saxony, six from Norway, two from the Netherlands, one from France, and the rest from various German principalities. None of the prisoners came from the actual kingdom of Denmark. See SNA, LUL, Handlingar, June 21, 1710. For a further discussion on national categorization of prisoners of war, see Blomqvist (2014).

• 28. DNA, ÅR, Indkvartering, May 22 and May 26, 1713.

• 29. SNA Uppsala rådhusrätt och magistrat, dombok (hereafter Uppsala), Nov. 22, 1709.

• 30. See, for example: SNA, Uppsala, Jan. 12 and Feb. 20, 1711.

• 31. DNA, HSA, Dokumenter, Letters to the bailiffs of Nim, Bierre, Hads and Galten hundreds, Apr. 16, 1715.

• 32. DNA, HSA, Dokumenter, letter from Christer Sommer to royal inspector Eggers, Feb. 12, 1717.

• 33. SNA, LUL, Handlingar, June 26, 1706.

• 34. SNA, Uppsala, Dec. 1, 1709.

• 35. DNA, HSA, Dokumenter, Aug. 10, 1713.

• 36. SNA Defensionskommissionen, skrivelser från myndigheter och enskilda, vol. 208, May 25, 1710.

• 37. SNA, Uppsala, Oct. 3, 1715.

• 38. SNA, Uppsala, Aug. 24 and Oct. 5, 1715. Anecdotes from other Swedish towns testify to the fact that the dissatisfaction with guard duty was a national phenomenon. See Almqvist (1942: 123; 1944: 501).

• 39. For a further discussion on this topic, see Blomqvist (forthcoming).

• 40. In Sweden, this allowance amounted to the value of 3 öre silvermynt, in Denmark, to 6 schillings. DNA, HSA, Rescripeter, vol. 66, Apr. 5, 1715; SNA, LUL, Handlingar, Sept. 14, 1713.

• 41. Skjold Pedersen (2005: 351–353).

• 42. SNA, Uppsala, Dec. 18, 1711; May 30, 1713. On the Swedish policy on prisoner labour, see Blomqvist (2014).

• 43. DNA, ÅR, Indkomne breve Nov. 2, 1713; original quote: “at arbeide for deres føde”.

• 44. DNA, HSA, Rescripeter, vol. 66, Apr. 5, 1715.

• 45. DNA, ÅR, Indkvartering, Feb. 22, 1717.

• 46. SNA, Uppsala, May 30, 1706. Historian Kekke Stadin argues that army drafts severely hampered the economy of several Swedish towns during the war, see Stadin (1979).

• 47. DNA, HSA, Dokumenter, note from Peder Hansen Heyde to royal inspector Eggers, undated, but probably written in April 1715, and note from Pastor Niels Hejde, Apr. 24, 1715.

• 48. DNA, HSA, Dokumenter, Feb. 5, 1717.

• 49. SNA, LUL, Handlingar, letter from the Uppsala magistrate, June 27, 1706.

• 50. A prisoner muster roll from June 22, 1710 records the supposed occupational skills of the Danish prisoners in Uppsala. According to this document, prisoner Adam Grossman had received training as a hatter and Valentin Merkler as a tanner. A later account, from May 1711, demonstrates that the two had entered the service of master hatter Novelius and master tanner Åkerman, respectively. See SNA, LUL, Handlingar, June 22, 1710, May 6, 1711.

• 51. See, for example, DNA, HSA, Dokumenter, labour permit for Laurs Pohve, Oct. 19, 1717; SNA, LUL, Handlingar, attachment to extract from the minutes of the magistrate, June 20, 1714.

• 52. SNA Svea Hovrätt, Advokatfiskalens arkiv, Renoverade domböcker, vol. 902 (hereafter SHaa), Sept. 28, 1714.

• 53. See DNA, HSA, Dokumenter, Oct. 24, 1715; Nov. 4, 1716; Feb. 12 and 28, 1717.

• 54. See DNA, ÅR, Indkvartering, Apr. 6, 1718; SNA, LUL, Handlingar, Jan. 14, 1716.

• 55. SNA, LUL, Handlingar, undated prisoner muster roll, probably from the autumn of 1711.

• 56. SNA, LUL, Handlingar rörande Uppsala slott, undated prisoner muster roll, probably from June 1713.

• 57. SNA, Uppsala, Apr. 26, 1714.

• 58. Ågren (2017: 1–21).

• 59. DNA, ÅR, Indkvartering, Apr. 6, 1718.

• 60. SNA, Uppsala domkyrkoförsamlings kyrkoarkiv, Lysninga- och vigselböcker vol. 1, Feb. 8, Mar. 15, May 25 and June 14, 1713, Oct. 17, 1714; SNA, Uppsala domkyrkoförsamlings kyrkoarkiv, Födelse- och dopböcker vol. 1, July 9, 1713; SNA, Helga Trefaldigheten kyrkoarkiv, Lysnings- och vigselböcker vol. 1, May 27, 1714. See further SNA, Uppsala, Sept. 22, 1713, Feb. 25 and Dec. 4, 1714, Feb. 14, 1715.

• 61. SNA Uppsala domkyrkoförsamlings kyrkoarkiv, Födelse- och dopböcker vol. 1, July 9, 1713.

• 62. To what extent this legal integration of prisoners of war also happened in Aarhus is difficult to say. I have found few traces in local court records that would suggest that prisoners of war were placed under civilian jurisdiction, but the findings are inconclusive. Local court records remain largely unavailable for the timespan of this study, and the volumes to which I do have access have proven difficult to process.

• 63. See SNA, Uppsala, Jan. 29 and June 4, 1712, Apr. 7, 1713, Apr. 26 and Oct. 4, 1714; SNA LUL, Uppsala slottsrätt vol. 1, Sept. 28, 1710, Aug. 19, 1711 (two cases); SNA, SHaa, Sept. 4, 1713.

• 64. See SNA, Uppsala, Dec. 22, 1711, June 15, 1713; Sept. 11, Oct. 13 and Nov. 17, 1714; Jan. 17, 1716; SNA, SHaa, June 17, 1713; SNA Ulleråkers häradsrätt, Domböcker vol. 2, May 9, 1712.

• 65. This figure is based on information compiled from prisoner muster rolls and court records from the Uppsala magisterial court. See SNA, Uppsala, Apr. 11, 1715; SNA, LUL, Handlingar, May 6, 1711 and June 19, 1713; LUL, Skrivelser från Uppsala stad, Dec. 23 and 30, 1713.

• 66. A prisoner muster roll from 1712 declares two Russian prisoners to be working for the local postmaster and one for a Swedish colonel. A court record from the district court of Håbo mentions another Russian prisoner serving at the Brantshammar post station. SNA, LUL, Handlingar, Mar. 17, 1712; SNA, SHaa, July 17, 1713.

• 67. As the court passed its sentence, it was first translated by a local pastor, presumably from Swedish to Latin, and then by one of the Russian prisoners, presumably from Latin to Russian. SNA, LUL, Uppsala slottsrätt vol. 1, Nov. 28, 1711.

• 68. Blomqvist (2014: 55).

• 69. Aminoff-Winbeg (2007: 54–66).

• 70. Nauman (2019). See also Nauman’s contribution to this volume.

• 71. SNA, Uppsala, Apr. 11, 1715.

• 72. SNA, Uppsala, Aug. 25 and 29, Oct. 3, 5 and 15, 1715.

• 73. SNA, Uppsala, Aug. 25, 1715.