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cahn:) Still talking about Charles XII of Sweden / the Great Northern War and the Stuarts and the Jacobites, among other things!
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Great Northern War: Johann Patkul
Date: 2021-11-17 12:18 am (UTC)This ended up casting a long shadow. In the short-term, he made Sweden into a financially solvent state after his predecessor's ruinous wars. In the long-term...Well, it's a bit of a long story, settle in.
Sweden conquered Livonia, modern-day Latvia, in the seventeenth century. The local nobles had been promised that they would be exempt from the taking away of their estates, called reduction. And then C11 kept reducing their estates!
One Livonian noble, Johann Patkul, protested. Vehemently. In person to the king. C11 was like, "You seem upright and honest, and I like the way you spoke frankly. But I'm not changing my mind." So Patkul went off and wrote an inflammatory pamphlet, which resulted in C11 having him placed under the death penalty.
So Patkul decides to take Livonia back from the Swedes. He goes in person and (according to the books I've been reading, single-handedly, although that might be a little too neat to be true), convinced Frederik IV of Denmark, Peter the Great, and August the Strong that making war on Sweden when C12 was just a teenager was just the thing to do! One of my sources says he convinced August that the northern Baltic territories would support the campaign to make Poland a hereditary monarchy. August was all over that!
Now Charles is in a three-front war. He's not happy with Patkul.
Energetic and active, Patkul keeps moving around the courts of the major players in the war, advising them on how to conduct the war.
Eventually, he pisses off August/the Saxons enough that they have him arrested for treason and locked up. Peter the Great keeps trying to intercede for him, pleading for mercy and to have Patkul handed over to the Russians (who are much less pissed off at him) instead. August wavers.
He waits too long. After Charles has conquered Sweden, he demands the extradition of certain prisoners, ESPECIALLY Patkul. August, knowing that of all the people pissed off at Patkul, Charles is the MOST pissed off, is like, "Wait, no, can I get out of this?"
Charles: NOW, buddy.
Patkul: *ends up in Swedish captivity*
European monarchs: Have mercy on him!
Charles: You are confusing my chill toward my generals with my total lack of chill toward my enemies. This guy single-handedly started a three-front war against my country, which was minding its own business, to take advantage of my youth!
Patkul is broken on the wheel and decapitated. To quote Wikipedia:
Differing slightly, the accounts agree that Patkul, after a prolonged process of breaking his bones with the wheel, begged for his decapitation (crying "Kopf ab!") and rolled to the block on his own; the following decapitation did however not succeed until after several strikes.
See how we have a block here, meaning an axe was used, and several strikes were needed. Which is why I, if I were a murderer, would prefer to use a sword, in the hilarious words of
Btw, 19th century historian Bain says that while history has generally been kind to Patkul (Massie certainly has), treating him as a fearless patriot, he was actually quite awful to his peasants and just wanted the freedom to continue oppressing them.
Me, raised on stories of the slave-owning Founding Fathers: I don't know if it's true in this particular case, but the logic checks out!
Re: Great Northern War: Johann Patkul
Date: 2021-11-17 08:14 am (UTC)Me, raised on stories of the slave-owning Founding Fathers: I don't know if it's true in this particular case, but the logic checks out!
Well, quite. Tim Blanning wrote a review of the latest G3 biography for the London Review of Books, which seems looks like it‘s general tone is „G3: Slandered by Americans from Thomas Jefferson to Lin Manuel Miranda“ , „G3: A Much Better Man Than Most Of Your Founding Fathers Put Together“ and, to quote a contemporary (Samuel Johnson), „Taxation No Tyranny (Damn Yankee Tax Dodgers)“. Ever since reading the mighty rethoric welded against G3 in the American Revolution it always amused me that of all the Hannover Kings, Farmer George, arguably really the nicest, most virtuous of the bunch (and not just because he was the only one to not cheat on his wife), got to stand in for British Tyranny (tm), presumably because „Damn the British Parliament and British PM!“ doesn‘t have the same ring to it, but I‘m baffled this is treated as something new (either by the book or Blanning as the reviewer). (And it’s absolutely hysterically funny that Miranda writes him as the embodiment of Britpop, given that G3 didn’t have a flamboyant bone in his body. That’s what his son the Regent, aka Prinny, is there for.) I mean, maybe it‘s relatively new in the US? Despite Alan Bennett having an international stage and film hit with „The Madness of George III“ decades ago? Literary efforts aside, I don‘t recall G3 being presented as evil in my school days.
Otoh, it‘s a bit rich if the biography argues the slave owning Founding Fathers (plural, because it‘s cheap to pretend Jefferson was the only one - he so was not!) are worse than G3 because of the slave owning; the man did head an Empire which wasn‘t founded on paid labor, to put it mildly. On the third hand, Blanning‘s review claims the book argues that the first legal successes of the anti-slavery movement in Britain directly (notably the case that forms the heart of the movie Dido) contributed to the Colonials wanting their independence.
Aaaanyway: wanting independence for yourself while oppressing someone else really is a fine international tradition. To choose some non-British, non-US example that hits closer to home, the German states sold the war against Napoleon as the „Freiheitskriege“, with „liberty from the French Yoke“ being a big catch word. Except, of course, that a lot of the German freedom fighters also wanted the freedom to take back the granting of all civil rights to Jews, which they promptly did once the French were gone.
C11 and FW: another bit of difference might be that FW managed to actually sell most of his nobility on this whole service to the state (as many sons in the army as possible)/Prussia austerity idea by basically inventing the whole „Prussian mentality“ concept? Not single-handedly; like I noted in my write ups of the two F1 biographies, F1‘s teacher Danckelmann comes across as a proto FW style Prussian two generations early. But still. It‘s undeniable that if you compare Prussia pre FW‘s reign to Prussia ever after, FW managed a large scale mentality change - did C11 anything comparable?
Re: Great Northern War: Johann Patkul
Date: 2021-11-17 12:45 pm (UTC)I never learned this in school (perhaps for obvious reasons!), but I have run into it recently, forget where (might have been Blanning), and I made a mental note to look into it at some point. Would not surprise me!
FW managed a large scale mentality change - did C11 anything comparable?
Not sure, would need to reread the C11 section. It's worth noting that another monarch who wanted to create the same mentality change, with eerily similar rhetoric, was Peter the Great. He had more success than you might imagine, but much, much less than FW.
Re: Great Northern War: Johann Patkul
Date: 2021-11-20 06:45 am (UTC)Ha! Yeah, I'm trying to remember -- I don't think George III was specifically presented as evil or whatever at school, but what I remember from school was what you say, where George kind of was the public face of British Tyranny vs. Our Heroes the Founding Fathers, and so small!me, along with presumably everyone else, drew conclusions from that. (The Britpop thing is all LMM, and I think (?) it's supposed to be hilarious, because that was definitely not in my mental picture before LMM.)
...Of course for my kids, they seem to be getting extremely little history in school at all, so a lot of it they would be getting from places like Hamilton, so, huh, yeah, maybe I need to do some damage control there.
Aaaanyway: wanting independence for yourself while oppressing someone else really is a fine international tradition.
Yeah, fair. Seems like a human condition sort of thing, not to see what's going on there.
Re: Great Northern War: Johann Patkul
Date: 2021-11-20 02:05 pm (UTC)Yeah, similar. It wasn't that my history classes talked about how G3 was a terrible monarch or a terrible person. I barely remember G3 at all. What we talked about was how monarchy was bad, and how the lack of the rights that would end up in the American Bill of Rights was bad, and G3 and his ministers wanted to keep their subjects from having those rights, so we had to fight for them.
So less that G3 was terrible and more that he was not progressive enough, was the message I got. (Disclaimer: I haven't seen/listened to Hamilton.) I came away with a vaguely negative impression, but I certainly didn't have the sense that he was personally worse than any of the *other* monarchs we covered!
Re: Great Northern War: Johann Patkul
Date: 2021-11-21 01:09 am (UTC)Is this perchance The Last King of America, which Amazon algorithms have been trying to get me to buy for weeks and tried again just now? (Amazon: You bought a G1 bio recently and then read the sample of the G2 bio and added that to your wishlist, why can't we get you to check out the G3 bio? Me: TOO MANY BOOKS is why.)
Re: Great Northern War: Johann Patkul
Date: 2021-11-20 06:35 am (UTC)haha, wow, a story in which FW isn't the biggest cheapskate
Differing slightly, the accounts agree that Patkul, after a prolonged process of breaking his bones with the wheel, begged for his decapitation (crying "Kopf ab!") and rolled to the block on his own; the following decapitation did however not succeed until after several strikes.
...you know, my days of my being stupendously grateful I don't live in the past are certainly coming to a middle, to misquote Firefly :P