The Sixteenth-Century Inheritance

Abstract

In 1523, Sweden was a newly autonomous kingdom, poor and devoid of a bureaucratic structure; existing only in the shadow of its more powerful neighbors, its future status as an independent state seemed very unlikely. A century and a quarter later, Sweden was the predominant power in the Baltic and a guarantor of the Peace of Westphalia alongside its ally France. To be sure, it could be argued that the application of the label ‘great power’ to seventeenth-century Sweden is of questionable validity. Certainly Sweden never dominated European politics in the manner of Philip II’s Spain. Yet for nearly three decades it came very close. Its actions in the last half of the Thirty Years’ War, and for twelve years after the war’s close, determined the fate of other nations, and its diplomatic and military reach extended some distance beyond the horizons of its Baltic environs. Any academic distinction between what constitutes a ‘major power’ and what makes a major power ‘great’ is necessarily subjective, but given the weight of Sweden’s international influence between 1632 and 1660 it seems fair to rank Sweden among the great powers of Europe.