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cahnAnd in this post:
-luzula is going to tell us about the Jacobites and the '45!
-I'm going to finish reading Nancy Goldstone's book about Maria Theresia and (some of) her children Maria Christina, Maria Carolina, and Marie Antoinette, In the Shadow of the Empress, andselenak is going to tell us all the things wrong with the last four chapters (spoiler: in the first twenty chapters there have been many, MANY things wrong)!
-mildred_of_midgard is going to tell us about Charles XII of Sweden and the Great Northern War
(seriously, how did I get so lucky to have all these people Telling Me Things, this is AWESOME)
-oh, and also there will be Yuletide signups :D
-
luzula is going to tell us about the Jacobites and the '45!-I'm going to finish reading Nancy Goldstone's book about Maria Theresia and (some of) her children Maria Christina, Maria Carolina, and Marie Antoinette, In the Shadow of the Empress, and
selenak is going to tell us all the things wrong with the last four chapters (spoiler: in the first twenty chapters there have been many, MANY things wrong)!-
mildred_of_midgard is going to tell us about Charles XII of Sweden and the Great Northern War(seriously, how did I get so lucky to have all these people Telling Me Things, this is AWESOME)
-oh, and also there will be Yuletide signups :D
Re: The Great Northern War: Holstein Genealogy
Date: 2021-11-01 10:56 pm (UTC)1.
Sorry about the quality: that's Charles XI up there in the top right.
This family tree is why Peter III was:
- Duke of Holstein-Gottorp (son of the previous duke)
- Heir to the Russian throne (grandson of Peter the Great)
- Temporarily heir to the Swedish throne (great-nephew of Charles XII, great-grandson of Charles XI)
- Temporarily king of Finland (great-nephew of Charles XII, great-grandson of Charles XI).
To elaborate, 1742 was an iiinteresting year. I remind you that this is in the middle of the 1741-1743 war in which Sweden tries to get lost territory back from Russia.
James Keith is occupying Finland in the war and calling a diet to decide what to do next. There's talk of making Finland into a buffer state between Sweden and Russia, and Peter's voted king in October 1742.
At the same time, the Swedes are in a succession crisis, because Charles XII's sister has just died without leaving her husband an heir. So Peter, her great-nephew, is voted heir to the throne in October 1742.
Over in Russia, Elizaveta is also having a succession crisis, because she's just taken over the throne a year before, and she's in her 30s, unmarried, childless, and without good marriage prospects, so she names Peter, her nephew, her heir on November 7, 1742.
You can see that all these things were happening simultaneously, and as soon as everyone found out, two of the offers were taken back, and Peter got to keep his inheritance to the biggest and most powerful country, and unfortunately the one he had least personal connection to or interest in.
Going back to Sweden and elaborating a bit more, the vote for Peter played into class and party politics in Sweden, and was related to the ongoing war in Finland. The part relevant to our discussion is that the people who voted for Peter were hoping that his election would make Elizaveta happy and more lenient in her peace. Why would this make her happy?
Because Russia and Holstein had been allies. Peter's dad had lived at Peter the Great's court for a while, trying really hard to get Peter the Great to help get Schleswig back. Peter the Great apparently liked him, and he did make an effort! But critically, he did it after he had won his war, not after handing back the territory gained in the war and switching sides, and he didn't do so at the expense of Russian interests. Which meant he didn't end up expending the resources necessary to recover it for his buddy Peter's dad (Charles Frederick), and Schleswig remained in Denmark's hands. But you can see where future Peter III got the idea that Russia helping Holstein recover Schleswig was totally natural. He was just...really bad at politics.
2.
This family tree is why Catherine the Great is considered an appropriate bride for Peter (this and some intriguing by Fritz, who wants more Germans near the throne in Russia, to counteract Elizaveta and her Prussian-hating foreign minister Bestuschev).
3.
This family tree is how Catherine the Great is related to Ulrike's husband.
I need to end this post for now, but since the discussion has turned this way, I'll try to cover the Swedish succession crises (yes, two of them) briefly, with family trees, hopefully tomorrow. Remind me if I forget, one is relevant to Charles XII and the other to Ulrike!
Re: The Great Northern War: Holstein Genealogy
Date: 2021-11-02 05:48 am (UTC)Peter: *toasts to the health of the royal family* (Among other things, at least the novels etc. have him also toast to Prussia and Fritz for good measure)
Catherine: *does not stand up during said toast*
Peter: *sends messenger to the other end of the table to ask why Catherine didn't join his toast*
Catherine: *sends messenger back with the statement that since the royal family only consists of Peter, their son and herself, she did not think it appropriate to join the toast*
Peter: *shouting across the table* The royal family also includes the Dukes of Holstein! Are you slighting my family?"
Of course, as Mildred's family tree shows, Catherine was a Holstein on the maternal side herself. Which is why she did meet Peter for the first time when they were both children years in Germany years before they reencountered each other in Russia when AnhaltSophie was brought there as a potential bride for inspection by Elizaveta. Not all fictional takes on Catherine include this early encounter, but at least one of the Russian Ekaterina series does, in its opening sequence. (Of course, that onle also lets Fritz be present, which he assuredly was not, but it's a way to give little Peter reason for his hero worship by letting Fritz be nice to him.
(Speaking of people whom Catherine met when she was a child, Heinrich, alas, is not included in any tv or movie take on Catherine the Great I've seen so far. :( )
Re: The Great Northern War: Holstein Genealogy
Date: 2021-11-05 05:28 am (UTC)OMG Peter!
Heh, clearly they should film "You Should See Me in a Crown" :D
Swedish Genealogy and Succession Crises
Date: 2021-11-02 07:56 pm (UTC)The first succession crisis is when Charles XII steadfastly refuses to consider marriage until after the war is over, and is well aware the war might last twenty years, and that he keeps sticking his neck out in battle.
He said something very similar to what Fritz said in the 1730s about his failure to have kids with EC. Fritz said that thrones never lack for heirs, and Charles said Sweden would never lack a king. They were not wrong! But in Charles' case, he had two potential heirs: his younger, still-living sister, and his older sister's son.
Swedish succession law didn't provide a clear winner here. Charles was supposed to name his heir. And he refused to get involved. He treated both his sister and his nephew with affection, and didn't want politics breaking up the family. And he's supposed to have quipped, "I can't make myself obeyed now that I'm alive, what makes you think I'll be obeyed after I'm dead?"
So of course two parties developed as time went on. After he died, his sister and her party won. She became queen in 1718. She abdicated in favor of her husband in 1720. I've seen two reasons given by secondary sources: one is that she loved her husband too much to deny him anything. The other is that when absolute power was taken away and parliamentary government imposed on the monarchs, she wasn't interested in power if it wasn't absolute.
And then they never had kids, and when she died in 1741, that kicked off the second succession crisis. That's the one where Peter III, the son of the losing candidate from the previous succession crisis, the nephew, got elected as heir. Then that decision got reversed with Russian help, as
And then Ulrike and her husband made a play for absolute power, which backfired, and then their son, Gustav III, made Fritz and Heinrich finally agree on something when he actually pulled his self-coup off.
Re: Swedish Genealogy and Succession Crises
Date: 2021-11-02 08:47 pm (UTC)Re: Swedish Genealogy and Succession Crises
Date: 2021-11-02 09:21 pm (UTC)In the 18th century, you wanted to preserve the balance of power, while aggrandizing your own country as much as you could. So alliances were constantly shifting. Your enemy today was your friend tomorrow. It was rarely nearly as personal. Any nobleman could go serve in any army to get experience, and this was the done thing. The only restriction was that it wasn't cool to make them fight against their liege lord. (They could choose to join a different court and fight against their former lord, though; see Eugene.)
This is totally related to why so many people were switching sides at the end of the Great Northern War; preserving the balance of power suddenly went from "Fight against Swedish hegemony in the Baltic" to "Fight against Russian hegemony in the Baltic."
This is also related to why so many combatants were polite and even friendly with their enemies even while the war was going on. There was a good chance they had either been on the same side before or they would be soon. There was also a good chance that they were related. And they were willing to intermarry precisely because there was a good chance they'd either been on the same side, or were trying to get on the same side.
All this was notably *not* the case for the Jacobite rebellions. (They had shared ancestry, but they did not continue intermarrying.) Notice that that wasn't a case of two countries fighting against each other for territory, but a more ideological battle that *couldn't* end in compromise and future friendship: either there's a Hanover on the throne or a Stuart. And the way you treated your own rebellious subjects was very different from the way you treated your neighbor's subjects in war. All these things are connected.
That's also why it's not *that* surprising that Fritz said he was never MT's enemy and that he said he regretted her death. It really wasn't personal for him. (The surprising part is that she managed to overcome his misogyny enough to get a positive remark out of him, not that he said something nice about his enemy.) It *was* personal for her! But that was due to an unusual combination of him being the aggressor, her personality, and some ideological differences.
Even Charles XII, Mister "I do not end wars except by defeating my enemies," did not see his opponents as we would see Hitler or Stalin. They were more like rival CEOs than enemies-to-the-death: they can go golfing together after one of them loses market share to the other.
Actually, that reminds me of something I was reading recently. Biologist Sapolsky gave an interesting description of a case study done on dominance interactions among CEOs: during the negotiation, they pointedly didn't look at each other, communicated only through their minions, and kept their body language as stiff and unengaged as possible. Then once everyone was in the parking lot, the CEOs walked over to their fancy cars, tried out each other's tennis racquets, and started bonding. Sapolsky described this along the lines of (paraphrase) "At this point, their rival minion's face probably wouldn't even have registered in the facial recognition center of the CEO's brain. What was far more important now was to have someone who could commiserate about the hassle of paying alimony to a third ex-wife." In other words, their identity could shift situationally from "I am a member of this company" [country] to "I am a member of this class."
And class affiliation was far more permanent and ideologically significant in the 18th century than national affiliation. Nationalism took off later. (This is why later writers, both German and French, were/are so frustrated with the intensely passionate and lifelong Fritz/Voltaire relationship, when Voltaire should have been at Louis' court (French writers) and Fritz should have been way more German-aligned than he was (German writers)! And one reason that cosmopolitan Algarotti, who helped foreigners like Fritz acquire art treasures from Italy, fell way out of favor in the nineteenth century and is forgotten today. Nationalism.)
Re: Swedish Genealogy and Succession Crises
Date: 2021-11-02 10:18 pm (UTC)I read a book years ago about the PR surrounding war in the 20th century, all the propaganda required to sell your enemies as evil, and how they threatened you first (even if they didn't) and therefore it was okay to make war on them. I do wonder about the connections with the growth of democracy and of the public sphere to include basically all of the population. Like, if a lot of the population can't read, and there's no democracy anyway, why bother to have lots of propaganda convincing the population that your enemies are evil in order to motivate the war? Not committing to this theory, it was just something that occurred to me. OTOH, you get nationalism in the 19th century before you have democracy, but there's still a larger public sphere then than in the 18th century...hmm.
Re: Swedish Genealogy and Succession Crises
Date: 2021-11-03 02:09 am (UTC)(Not to mention, of course, that in the 19th Century once Prussia had completed its rise to the top the Prussian pov became the official German pov of history, and it took eons until this changed again.)
And then, near the end of 18th century, you get the French Revolution, and subsequently Napoleon, at which point it‘s both ideology and rising nationalism time everywhere. The war against revolutionary France after the executions of their royals was very much the antithesis to all those succession wars that dominated the first half of said century, and if you look at the text of the Marsaillaise, written during this time, you get the wish for the blood of the invaders to drench the acres of France and la patrie and what not. Which fits - here, you had to motivate and mobilize a great number of underequipped people, and then they actually won, to the great surprise of the monarchies allied against them. And then, of course, once Napoleon makes it to the top, he explicitly frames his territorial go getting in terms of France „liberating“ other countries via exporting the revolution‘s gains to them, while the fight against him gets increasingly framed in modern national and ideological terms in Spain, Russia and Germany, and the connection of having to motivate an ever greater number of less and less illiterate people is most definitely there!
Re: Swedish Genealogy and Succession Crises
Date: 2021-11-03 09:30 pm (UTC)Which predates Napoleon: the revolutionaries were already "liberating" other countries in the first half of the 1790s. It started with local protests in Alsace and Avignon to join with revolutionary France, and the leaders of the revolution decided that the "will of the people" trumped any treaties made decades ago by old regime monarchs with old regime monarchs. Then it quickly evolved to "If the people of other countries are too stupid to know they want freedom, we will have to 'liberate' them! Invade!"
Re: Swedish Genealogy and Succession Crises
Date: 2021-11-03 09:58 pm (UTC)I have got the impression that in most of the 18th century, religion and not politics was the great divider. Like, politics was something most people were pragmatic about, and you could associate with someone of a different political party socially. But for a Protestant to socialize with a Catholic could be shocking, or for someone from a more radical Protestant movement to socialize with a more conservative one.
Whereas today, who really cares that Joe Biden is a Catholic and not a Protestant; what people care about is whether he's a Democrat or a Republican.
But on the third hand, weren't there also a fair number among the 18th century elite who weren't actually particularly religious? Enlightenment, and cynicism about religion...
(Er, sorry about all my general questions and musings!)
Re: Swedish Genealogy and Succession Crises
Date: 2021-11-05 04:15 pm (UTC)Re: Swedish Genealogy and Succession Crises
Date: 2021-11-05 06:17 pm (UTC)That said, the reason I haven't replied to this wonderful question is that I've been waiting for
I have the same alchemy at work with my new boss, where he's prioritizing what projects get done when based on business needs, while I'm busy making sure all the boxes get checked and t's get crossed when we work on whatever we work on.)
Question-asking is also like pulling teeth for me, that's why it's so great to have people who I admire for just doing it!
My strength is "So where exactly was the Brüner Tor located in Wesel?" i.e. what we call detective work, which you saw in action when I tracked down the text of the bill that told us exactly what legal stance a captured BPC would have had in 1746. :)
And the questions you ask are not necessarily questions I would ask (Me: Can I have more gossip on X, Y, and Z? lol, I am a simple woman)
LOL! If not for your dedicated pursuit of the gossip, would the three of us have sustained a 2.7 million word interest over the last 2+ years? I beg leave to doubt it. :D
Re: Swedish Genealogy and Succession Crises
Date: 2021-11-06 09:52 am (UTC)My strength is "So where exactly was the Brüner Tor located in Wesel?" i.e. what we call detective work, which you saw in action when I tracked down the text of the bill that told us exactly what legal stance a captured BPC would have had in 1746. :)
I was quite impressed by that! : ) I mean, it wasn't obvious that the answer would be in a bill at all, it all could just have been contained in informal discussions between the main Hanoverian actors so that we would never know, or was contained in archived letters. But nope, actually debated in Parliament.
Meanwhile, I am getting nowhere on your question about the primary sources for BPC:s conversion to Anglicanism. : ( Searching Google books and Google scholar for keywords gets me nothing, but what I can say is that pretty much every book about BPC contains this claim, including lots of books from after the 90's, which is when you heard doubts of it. Most often there are no references for the claim. When there are, it's to some older book which I can't get hold of. The closest I've come to primary sources is Duffy, who quotes a letter from William King, who is one of the people who met BPC on his visit to England in 1750. But the letter doesn't directly mention his conversion, it's just about King's opinion on BPC in that meeting in general.
At this point I think I'd have to email one of the historians involved to ask what the primary sources are. I myself am inclined not to doubt it--it seems quite reasonable that if several people met BPC in London in 1750 and one of them was an Anglican priest who witnessed his conversion, that they would leave letters or other writings behind which confirm it, especially as I've seen quotes from a letter from one of these people. It seems unreasonable to me that reputable historians would keep claiming it if the evidence wasn't there, if it was questioned in the '90:s--but maybe I'm too trusting that historians will do their job. : )
I have also now read that BPC re-converted back to Catholicism around 1760 when he wanted the papacy to pay his bills.
Re: The Great Northern War: Holstein Genealogy
Date: 2021-11-05 05:23 am (UTC)Did you talk about the succession crises (!) ? I didn't notice it but there has been so much posting :D that I could very well have missed it!
Re: The Great Northern War: Holstein Genealogy
Date: 2021-11-05 10:35 am (UTC)