Charles XII: Warrior King reviewed in War in History 30

We recently received the unexpected news that Charles XII: Warrior King had been reviewed in issue 30 of War in History. This is a comprehensive and critical review of our book, but we appreciate the author's thorough approach. You can read the full review below:

The Great Northern War (1700–1721) has long been acknowledged as a central feature of the history of early modern Europe and a very important event for the future development of the European state structure. To publish a volume of essays dedicated to a controversially viewed king and name it ‘warrior king’ is risky, not least because Charles XII’s identity as an autocratic warrior king struggling for the preservation of the Swedish empire against overwhelming odds is a source of heroism to the far-right Swedes which causes discomfort in modern Sweden. The title would suggest that the volume will deal with purely military aspects of the Great Northern War, and Charles XII’s endless military campaigns across Denmark, Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Saxony. However, this volume builds upon the seminal work on Charles XII by Ragnhild Hatton demonstrating in an objective manner that Charles XII had not been a warmonger. The book strikes a balance between the so-called ‘old’ and ‘new’ schools of Carolean historiography presenting Charles XII in the light of the latest historical research.

The essays collected in Hattendorf’s book deal with broad thematic approaches to Charles XII. Gunnar Åselius, Lars Ericson Wolke and Christer Kuvaja deal with Swedish foreign policy, the maintenance of the Swedish army during the war and naval warfare, while other essays by Eric Schnakenbourg, Bülent Ari, Alptuğ Güney, Pavel Krotov and others, place Charles XII in historical context from a wider international perspective. Finally, the last part of the book contains two essays by Inga Lena Ångström Grandien and Nils Ekedahl examining on Charles XII’s portraits and the literary image of the Swedish king.

It is true that in some essays Charles XII does not feature much. The authors endeavour to present a general picture of the war from different perspectives. It is highly commendable that the book provides a reader with a skeleton outline of the British, Dutch, French, Ottoman, Austrian, Danish, Polish–Lithuanian, Russian and Prussian policies towards Sweden and their attitudes towards Charles XII throughout the war. This is the first time that such a wide variety of viewpoints have been assembled and published in English.

Some essays deal with the issues rarely discussed by the scholarship. The book contains a good essay by Christer Kujava on Swedish logistics (pp. 90–109), but on the other hand, the book lacks information on the Russian army. One may ask what the Russian army has to do with Charles XII, but very little is known about the maintenance of the Russian army – the Russian occupation of Finland in 1713–21 being the only exception – which was billeted on foreign soil and was largely maintained from external resources throughout the war. The Russians overcame the Swedes in resource mobilization which determined their victory in the war.

With his dramatic life, Charles XII has been an interesting literary subject, but there has been no general survey on Charles XII in literature. Nils Ekedahl provides a concise review of this subject. Majewska’s article on the Polish view on Charles XII (pp. 276–97) presents, in my opinion, an overly pessimistic image of the Polish– Lithuanian Commonwealth. It became subject to Russian interference in the post-Poltava period, but it had not yet lost its potential to rid itself of Russian guardianship, and the downfall of the Commonwealth was not a foregone conclusion from the end of the war.

Few scholars working on the Great Northern War read Polish. This is a considerable problem because in the last few decades Polish historians have published studies on different aspects of the war, especially about the conflict in Poland–Lithuania. The Polish dimension of Charles XII’s politics remains blurred in the book, which leads to several inaccuracies. The Russians would have been pleased if the Ottomans declared war not only against them but also against Poland–Lithuania, but they did not (p. 177). Although the Polish–Lithuanian nobility asked Peter the Great to mediate in the internal conflict against the Polish king Augustus II, the nobility decisively rejected the offer of the Russian guarantee of the Commonwealth’s constitution after peace had been achieved (p. 26). No doubt Poland would have coveted Lithuania in the 1700s, had it not been connected to Poland by a loose political union from 1385 and a real union which united both countries and established a new polity, called the Commonwealth, in 1569 (p. 326; probably Lithuania and Livonia are mixed). There were no Polish–Lithuanian nobles with their private armies (p. 104). Wealthy nobles, or magnates, no matter how rich could not afford to maintain a private army, but they may have recruited units which were paid by the state or district noble assemblies.

Finally, there are some technical issues. In Chapter 8, two footnotes are missing in the text, but they are included in the reference notes. Readers may also be puzzled by the decision of the editors to transliterate the Cyrillic scholarship titles into a Latin script in the list of the general bibliography but to provide an English translation of the same titles in the reference notes. Thus the book Rossia i Rech Pospolitaya by V. A. Artamonov on page 403 turns into Russia and the Rzeczpospolita on page 435. Despite these drawbacks, the book is a fine piece of scholarship written for the general reader and the specialist alike. On the other hand, the book is richly illustrated, which is enjoyable to read but dramatically increases the volume’s price making it highly unlikely that the book will be obtained by the general reader.

- Mindaugas Šapoka, Lithuanian Institute of History, Vilnius

Charles XII: Warrior King is available for immediate purchase via the Karwansaray Publishers webshop, through our partner Casemate Publishers, or on Amazon.com.