Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 30
Sep. 8th, 2021 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnIn which, despite the title, I would like to be told about the English Revolution, which is yet another casualty of my extremely poor history education :P :)
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
The Great Northern War opens
Date: 2021-09-26 09:30 pm (UTC)The 17th century was Sweden's glory days. Here is the best map I've been able to find for my purposes. Yellow is the Swedish empire.
Notice how they control:
- The eastern Baltic, all the way around the edge and down to the south (Livland=Latvia)
- Swedish Pomerania (Pommern)
- Bremen (southwest of Denmark)
Notice how these are coastal territories. That is highly desirable real estate. The parts I've pointed out will mostly get taken away from them by one power or another by the end of the war. All of this land has been contested for centuries. Sweden's been enemies with Moscow and Novgorod since the 13th century, fighting over this coastal land so they can have ports. Denmark and Sweden have been trying to kill each other since the fifteenth century. (One of my sources says they've fought at total of thirty wars.) Etc.
But right now, it's 1700, and Sweden is top dog. They control most of the really good ports, the islands, and the seas. Russia has no ports that will give them access to the Atlantic! (They have one, Archangel, way east in the Arctic, which is iced up 6 months out of the year and therefore only semi-useful. This is the remote place where Ivan VI was supposed to be sent, but Elizaveta worried it was too inaccessible, so she kept him slightly upriver. Not desirable real estate, is what I'm saying.)
Peter the Great wants that tiny strip of land on the east coast of the Baltic so he can have ports and shipping and trade and a functional economy, just like his heroes the Dutch and British! Denmark wants the tiny bit of land at the tip of Sweden that they used to control for a while before the ongoing Danish-Swedish tug-of-war gave it back to Sweden in the 17th century. They also want Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp. August the Strong, who just became king of Poland in 1697, wants to break the Swedish monopoly in the Baltic so he can ship his exports abroad and make money. And he wants better ports, like Lavonia (Livland in that Swedish map, Lavonia in 18th century English, Latvia today).
In 1697, Charles XII becomes king of Sweden. He's 14 years old. All his neighbors are like, "Sweet. We can take all the land we want. He's fourteen! What's he gonna do about it?"
(MT: They said, "She's a woman! What's she gonna do about it?")
So thinking that it would take the combined powers of Denmark, Saxony+Poland, and Russia about 5 minutes to divide up a Swedish empire run by a teenager, August the Strong, Frederik IV, and Peter the soon-to-be-Great start forming an alliance.
Except that this happened:
When Peter got back to Moscow from one of his many trips, he had two embassies waiting for him.
Embassy A: Charles XII's Very Official Swedish Embassy, asking to renew the existing peace treaty between Sweden and Russia.
Embassy B: August's Top-Secret Polish Embassy, asking Peter to join August and Frederik in partitioning the Swedish empire.
(Poland: "Some days you partition, some days you are partitioned.")
Knowing that he wants to go with Secret Partitioning Alliance, Peter plots with them while keeping a straight face in renewing the peace with Sweden.
To quote from Massie (he who is writing a bio of Peter that's generally pretty positive, so I'm going to assume this isn't just enemy propaganda):
The Swedes were aware of [the Polish ambassador's] presence and knew that some kind of treaty was being discussed, but thought it was a peaceful treaty and suspected nothing of the truth. To avoid arousing suspicions, the Swedes were received with honor by Peter, to whom they presented a full-length picture of their new young King on horseback. And to bolster the deception, Peter went through the formality of confirming the previous treaties with Sweden, but, as a slight salve to his conscience, he avoided kissing the cross at the ceremony of signature. When the Swedish ambassadors noticed the omission and complained, Peter said that he had already taken an oath to observe all treaties when he came to the throne and that it was the Russian custom not to repeat it. On November 24, the Swedish ambassadors had a final audience with the Tsar. Peter was genial and gave them a formal letter from himself to King Charles XII confirming the treaties of peace between Sweden and Russia.
Shortly thereafter, Sweden is pounced on by Frederik, Peter, and August.
The only reason it doesn't go down faster is that Charles XII is a military genius.
The reason it eventually goes down, is that Charles XII doesn't believe in compromise with people who've attacked you, he believes in total annihilation of your faithless enemies. He bites off more than he can chew. And so it is that Charles discovers why
getting involved in a land war in Asiainvading Russia in the winter is a bad idea; Peter builds St. Petersburg on the east coast of the Baltic; FW gets part of Swedish Pomerania, complete with Fredersdorf's hometown; George I gets Bremen; a greatly reduced Sweden becomes a constitutional monarchy (until Gustav), etc., etc.This war and how it started is also why Charles XII deposes August and puts Stanislas on the throne of Poland for a while. To quote Charles, when everyone is going, "Okay, we underestimated you, but the Russians have conquered Livonia, is Poland really your highest priority?!" he replies,
“Even if I should have to remain here fifty years, I would not leave this country until Augustus is dethroned. Believe that I would give Augustus peace immediately if I could trust his word. But as soon as peace is made and we are on our march toward Muscovy, he would accept Russian money and attack us in the back and then our task would be even more difficult than it is now.”
This is in 1703, when future inventor of military opportunism was -9 years old. :P
Hey, Goldstone provided me with a good opportunity to talk about the Great Northern War. I will continue learning more about it and will pass things on as I can!
Re: The Great Northern War opens
Date: 2021-10-01 04:08 am (UTC)The 17th century was Sweden's glory days.
until their time/date-keeping became so bad that they didn't know when to show up for battles and got annihilated --oh wait, sorry, you're going to tell me what actually happened(Poland: "Some days you partition, some days you are partitioned.")
LOL, omg.
Re: The Great Northern War opens
Date: 2021-10-01 04:49 pm (UTC)Absolutely! And me being me, you will hear about them. :D (He's not as much of a problematic fave as Fritz, but I *am* enjoying him.)
until their time/date-keeping became so bad that they didn't know when to show up for battles and got annihilated-- oh wait, sorry, you're going to tell me what actually happenedLOLOLOL, I had forgotten you'd said that!
Yes, I will tell you, but not just yet. I'm still early in the learning stages. I'm finally unblocked, though, thanks to Massie (thanks to Selena)! Massie's ~900 page book is great because he will actually take the time to spend pages and pages on people who aren't his hero, like Charles XII, Louis XIV, William III. There are entire chapters from Charles' POV, and they're very sympathetic ones, too. I may not trust all the anecdotes and I may be frustrated by the lack of footnotes, but I am getting the reader-friendly overview of the Great Northern War that is unlocking more dense books for me.
Aaaand, guess what! Hatton's bio of Charles XII that I've had my eye on for a year now, but didn't want to pay $50 for sight-unseen, is freely available for borrowing on archive.org! The interface is abysmal, but hey, it's free. It's how I made it through the Philip V bio and decided it was worth buying.
Also on archive.org (I really need to learn to check whenever I want a book): Hatton's bio of G1 (the one with Melusine and Petronella info), and, volume 1 of Derek Beales' 2-volume bio of Joseph II! (For some reason, not volume 2, but if I want volume 1 enough to buy it, I'll get 2 too. This at least allows me to see whether I want to pay for it, which is the main thing.)
All this is, uh, why I only finished chapter 5 and read chapter 6 of Goldstone this morning when I saw you had finished chapter 9, and I only skimmed.
The one thing Goldstone is doing is making me really wish I had finished the SR bio and had the ability to reread and look things up more easily. It's a good incentive to buckle down on my German!
Re: The Great Northern War opens
Date: 2021-10-05 04:54 am (UTC)