You may be familiar be Sweden, the land of meatballs, Ikea, Viking Metal and Europop
- all in one place!
But Sweden just kind of does its thing with its hippie Scandanavian siblings, it hasn’t
been a big hitter since the Viking Age, right?
Wrong!
[Intro]
Please welcome Charles the 12th, or Carolus Rex if you want to make obscure references
and sound as pretentious as I do, the boy king who actually gave a concerted effort to not
leave his kingdom in shambles!
Now you may be thinking to yourself: “Boy that’s a lot of Charleses, I never knew
Sweden had so many Charlses”.
That’s because Charles the 12th is actually the 6th Charles of Sweden, because Charles
the 9th, who was actually the third Charles, didn’t have access to Wikipedia, just a
book of Swedish history that was more fiction than fact and besides, all the other cool
European countries have really old monarchies, look at France, it’s Louis’s all the way down!
Technically he wasn’t even a Charles, he was a Karl, and he lived in Sverige, but hey,
Sweden can’t complain with Finland next door.
The truly wonderful thing about Charles is that I don’t have to talk about his early life
and his reign separately, because he got himself crowned when he was only fifteen!
As you might expect, his first few years were spent living pretty large.
If Brahe wasn’t enough to convince you that Scandinavians know how to party, the summer
of 1698 became known as the Gottorp Fury, when Charles and his cousin Frederick, galloped
through the streets of stockholm, knocking off people’s wigs, throwing furniture out
the windows, it was madness.
To be fair, Frederick was kind of a bad influence since after he left Charles got back to kingly
things, but then he came back to party like it’s 1699 and they got a bear so drunk that
it fell through a window -- it was really dangerous to stand underneath the palace windows
when Frederick was in town, you never knew what was gonna come out of there.
Sweden’s neighbors saw what was going on and figured he didn’t really need all that
land in Denmark and the Baltic states.
So Denmark-Norway, Saxony-Poland-Lithuana, and Russia, which believe it or not were ruled
by only three people at the time, decided they would take it off his hands.
Now usually I’d have to leave it at that but this month is special because I’ve got
my buddy Kinetic History here to offer a little background on why everybody was so ready to
gang up on poor Sverige.
Believe it or not, Sweden was one of the great European powers of this era.
Over the last hundred years it had slowly but surely built an impressive empire focused
on controlling this area here: the Baltic Sea, which was strategically important for
trade and the European economy.
This area had been one of great contest between the Swedish and Danish kingdoms, so much so
that there’s even a memorable name for this contest: dominium maris baltici.
After a long period of Danish control, Sweden finally succeeded in gaining dominion over
this area by the 1660s, but Denmark never took her eyes off it.
Sweden had fought and won big-time against some of the same nations in the Thirty Years’
War, including Russia, who had been cut out of the Baltic picture by the Swedish advance.
Tsar Peter the Great, who had been steadily working at modernising Russia and her military,
was looking to challenge its Western neighbour to reclaim its long-lost lands and access
to the Baltic Sea.
As Jack has already explained, Charles was a young king.
A very, very young king, and this naturally made him seem weak and incapable to Sweden’s
angry neighbours.
They believed – as we all would – that an eighteen-year-old monarch with a fondness
for throwing furniture out of palace windows would be an easy mark.
And so all it took was this guy, Johann Patkul, to conduct secret diplomacy with the leaders
of Russia, Denmark-Norway, Saxony and Poland-Lithuania and hey presto those nations formed into an
alliance against Sweden.
Then, on the 22nd of January 1700, the Great Northern War began and Charles’ reign was
never the same.
Thanks, mate.
He’s just released a behemoth of a video covering everything you need to know about
the Vietnam War, it’s pretty cool, you should check it out.
So Sweden was actually in the big leagues, can you believe it?
Just because Sweden was outnumbered doesn’t mean it was outmatched -- the Caroleans had
a reputation for being super well trained and totally bad-ass.
They lived up to that reputation, and Charlie wasn’t too shabby himself once he gave up
drinking -- sure the Russians alone came at him with an army three times the size at Narva,
but with a blizzard bearing down on the enemy, he gave the mighty Swedish battle cry “Leeerooooy!
mmmJeeeenkiiins” broke the Russian lines and sent them packing.
So much for Peter the Great.
Next he launched a counter-offensive on Poland, beat down an army twice his size at Fraustadt
and dethroned Augustus the Strong - It takes more than some Joe Schmo to beat guys with
these kinds of names
Unfortunately he may have gotten a bit too keen because he tried to take down Russia
once and for all by marching on Moscow in the winter, which as anyone who’s every
history’d before will know is perhaps the biggest military no-no you can make - especially
when it’s the coldest winter in the past 500 years.
Peter, in response, began the noble Russian tradition of steadily retreating and destroying
everything useful in operation “Russian Winter” which isn’t code for anything
it’s just that Russia really sucks in the winter.
Despite the odds, Carolus continued to find victory after victory, but the problem with
being the little guy is that it only takes one decisive defeat to throw you out of the ring
That defeat came in 1709 at the battle of Poltava where nearly the entire Swedish army
was killed or forced to surrender.
But ol’ Chuck wasn’t finished yet, by golly!
He fled to the Ottoman Empire, who hated Russia the way Scots hated other Scots.
He got the Ottomans to pick up where he had left off, but it wasn’t long before the
whole affair fizzled out.
So Charles and his band of fifteen-hundred Swedes were stuck in the Ottoman Empire in
what was effectively a Swedish colony paid for by the Sultan.
Eventually the people got sick of the government paying for Charles’ expenses, so they stirred
up a kalabalik and got him under house arrest so the government could pay for his expenses.
Finally he took the hint and returned to Sweden for the first time in fourteen years, only
to discover the country had become an absolute mess, this time because of more than defenestrated bear
In his absence the country was being slowly consumed by Russia, Saxony, Hanover, Denmark,
and even Great Britain because hey, they didn’t want to be left out.
Naturally the first thing Charles did was invade Norway -- it was so the Danes would
lose their supply lines, it actually made sense, but still.
He launched an assault on Norway… and was forced to retreat.
Then he launched another assault… and was forced to retreat, thinking to himself “Why
isn’t this working, where’s my mojo?!”.
In 1718 he gave it one more shot.
He was supervising the trench diggers that fateful night, boosting morale next to the
60 diggers who’d been shot already when -- bam!
Mmmm watcha say.
Mmm that you only meant well when -
Now in all likeliness it was a shot from one of the
Danes thinking “Hey look, he’s wide open!” but why accept historical evidence when there
are conspiracy theories to be perpetuated!
Let’s just say there were those on the Swedish side who wanted to see the war come to an
end, and Frederick the first was real quick to back out and drop Sweden’s high taxes.
But when Charles went down, he took the rest of the empire with him.
Its lands were ravenously devoured and power was quickly shifted away from the monarchy
and given to the parliament, which is... a real shame because Sweden wasn’t the hot
shot it used to be!
Sure Sweden made a progressive shift towards democracy and eventually entered the prosperous
Age of Liberty, but it’s not the same!
Special thanks to Bazran66 for suggesting this guy and giving me more than enough info
to work with.
If there’s someone you’d like to see me cover, let me know in the comments!
I can’t make any promises, but I’ve discovered that history is a big field and there are
a lot of cool people I don’t know anything about.
And, of course, a great big thank you to Kinetic History for working with me on this, go check
out his channel if you haven’t already.
See you next time.