The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (44 page)

GREAT NORTHERN WAR

Death toll:
370,000
¹

Rank:
90

Type:
hegemonial war

Broad dividing line:
everyone against Sweden

Time frame:
1700–21

Location:
eastern Europe

Major state participants:
Sweden vs. Russia, Poland, Denmark, Saxony

Minor state participants:
Turkey, Brandenburg, Hanover

Who usually gets the most blame:
Peter and his friends

Another damn:
European balance-of-power war fought with muskets

W
HEN AN UNTESTED TEENAGER BECAME THE NEW KING OF SWEDEN, THE
ambassadors from Denmark and Saxony came to Peter the Great with a scheme to break Swedish hegemony in the Baltic once and for all. They figured that it should be pretty easy to beat this child if every nation in northern Europe got involved. They were wrong. Sixteen-year-old King Charles XII of Sweden proved to be a natural at warfare, and he managed to stretch the war out for twenty-one years.

After coming up
with a handy excuse and issuing all of the proper declarations of war, each ally attacked the nearest bit of Swedish territory. King Charles of Sweden went straight for the Russian army that had invaded Estonia. At Narva in November, Charles attacked 40,000 Russians with 8,000 Swedes during a sudden snowstorm, which hid his approach and small numbers. The Russians crumbled and fled in panic, leaving 8,000 dead on the field. Meanwhile, 15,000 Swedes occupied the Danish capital and forced the Danes out of the war.

Peter immediately began to rebuild the shattered Russian army along western lines so that it wouldn’t be beaten so easily. Also, with characteristic stubbornness, Peter moved back into Swedish territory on the Baltic and began building his new capital, Saint Petersburg.

King Augustus of Saxony was also the king of Poland, so the Swedes marched into Poland next. After beating a couple of armies that got in his way, Charles put his own puppet on the throne in Warsaw. In August 1706, Charles turned against Saxony itself and occupied its capital at Dresden. Charles then forced Augustus to renounce the throne of Poland as the terms of peace.

In 1708, Charles took
his army of 40,000 out of Poland into the heart of Russia, but the vast distances proved disorienting. At first, he was planning to link up with 16,000 Swedes under General Lowenhaupt, who was coming out of the Baltic region with much-needed supplies, but Charles turned abruptly south instead in order to connect with some rebellious Cossacks among the wheat fields of Ukraine. This left Lowenhaupt’s force stuck in the middle of nowhere, where Peter wiped it out at Lesnaya in September 1708.

Trapped by the severe Russian winter, Charles’s Swedish army melted away to 18,000. In June 1709, Peter and 80,000 Russians caught up with him as the Swedes were attacking the Russian fortress of Poltava in
central Ukraine. Charles turned around and attacked the new army and came close to defeating it, but Peter had fresh reserves while Charles didn’t. Admitting defeat, Charles abandoned his smashed army and escaped into Turkey.

Poltava is usually held up as another classic example of why you shouldn’t invade Russia (see also “Napoleonic Wars” and “Second World War”), but the war didn’t end right away. Because all of the direct routes back to Sweden were blocked by his enemies, Charles didn’t get home for five years. Since the Turks were happy to see the war drag on as long as possible, they held on to Charles and refused the Russian extradition request. When the Russians sent a force to take him back, the Turks arrested the Russian ambassador and declared war, but their counteroffensive banged uselessly against Russia until they gave up. Finally, the Turks released Charles, who wended his way home through small, friendly German states.

In the meantime, Charles’s enemies had whittled away his rudderless empire. Peter took the war into Finland, which at the time was an integral part of Sweden. In order to deny Charles the use of Finland’s resources, the Russians devastated the countryside. Finns remember this as the Great Wrath, when the Russians looted crops and livestock and burned what they couldn’t carry. As hunger set in, the population of Finland plunged from 400,000 to 330,000.
²

By the time Charles got home, nothing remained of the Swedish empire but Sweden itself. Charles scraped up a new army and attacked Norway (a Danish territory at the time) but was killed in battle in 1719. With Cha
rles out of the way, peace became a possibility. The new Swedish king was willing to become a second-rate power. Over the next couple of years, diplomats arranged peace treaties in which all of the allies’ territory expanded and Sweden’s contracted.
³

WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION

Death toll:
700,000
¹

Rank:
61

Type:
dynastic dispute

Broad dividing line:
everyone against France

Time frame:
1701–13

Location:
western Europe

Major state participants:
France, Spain vs. Austria, Britain, Holland

Minor state participants:
Piedmont, Bavaria (French allies) vs. Denmark, Portugal (Austrian allies)

Who usually gets the most blame:
Louis XIV

Another damn:
European balance-of-power war fought with muskets

S
OMETIMES A NATION’S LUCK RUNS OUT. SPAIN HAD HAD A GOOD RUN,
but centuries of Hapsburg inbreeding had finally produced a king barely able to function as an adult—King Charles II of Spain. The sole surviving son of a marriage between an uncle and niece,
*
Charles was dysfunctional on far too many levels. He was unable to speak until he was four, and unable to walk until he was eight; the only adult activity he performed enthusiastically was shooting. Because of a massive, deformed jaw he was barely able to speak coherently or chew, and because of uncontrollable premature ejaculation, he produced no children. He was nicknamed “Charles the Hexed” because it was obvious that something awful had happened to him.

Charles’s archnemesis was also his brother-in-law. King Louis XIV of France had married Charles’s half sister, the oldest daughter of the previous king of Spain. As the “Sun King,” Louis set Europe’s standards of magnificence with his new palace at Versailles. By 1700, he had already fought four wars against the rest of Europe, trying to take the Spanish territories in Flanders and Burgundy along the eastern border of France. To keep France from gaining too much power, Austria, Britain, and Holland had established the ongoing Grand Alliance against him.

Charles the Hexed had always seemed doomed to a short life. Most people expected him to die in childhood, but he lasted a lot longer than anyone thought possible. Even so, with the extinction of the Spanish Hapsburgs imminent, the rest of Europe haggled at several conferences over who should get the inheritance. Several claimants and partition schemes were floated. It was finally decided to reboot the Hapsburgs in Spain using another Charles, the brother of Emperor Joseph of Austria, w
hile France would be placated with stray Hapsburg lands scattered around the continent.

Charles the Hexed grew annoyed at the way the other great powers talked about him as if he were already dead, carving up the Spanish Emp
ire without even consulting him. Out of spite, in 1700 on his deathbed, Charles altered his will to prevent the partition of his vast and magnificent empire. He gave the whole thing to the French claimant, his half sister’s grandson, who was also the grandson of King Louis XIV of France. This would link the two primary powers in Europe, leaving everyone else a distant second, so the rest of the world decided they had to stop this union.
²

Style of War

By this time, warfare had reached a plateau of development, which stabilized tactics and equipment for the next century. Flintlock muskets, which slammed a flint down to spark the gunpowder, had replaced the less reliable matchlocks, which dipped a smoldering rope against a touchhole. Bayonets had removed the need for pikemen to support the firing line. Uniforms became standardized to reflect nationality, although soldiers were still recruited from far and wide. Less than half of the army of Louis XIV was French.

European armies of this era had also gotten larger—too large for the main battle force to forage for food. Louis began this war with 375,000 soldiers and 60,000 sailors at his disposal—although individual field armies were usually around 60,000. These big armies were tied to supply lines anchored at fortified strongpoints. This slowed down the overall pace of warfare as armies focused on defending or capturing these forts one siege at a time.

Civilian camp followers still furnished most support functions. For example, the 26,500-man Swedish army campaigning in Russia at this time (see “Great Northern War”) was followed by 4,000 male servants, 1,100 nonmilitary administrators, and 1,700 women and children. They cooked, laundered, kept records, mended clothes, gathered firewood, hauled water, tended and butchered livestock, drove wagons, guarded the baggage while the army was fighting, nursed the wounded, and buried the dead.
³

The Spanish Succession

Louis XIV quickly moved into Spanish territory to stake his claim, and the Grand Alliance moved to stop him. Austrian forces under Prince Eugene of Savoy (a veteran commander of the Great Turkish War) invaded Italy to take the Spanish territories of Milan and Naples. The English general John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, fought the French to a standstill in the Low Countries. Marlborough had only recently been restored to the English king’s favor after having spent a few weeks in the Tower of London on charges (probably false) of plotting to overthrow the king.

The war came to a climax in 1704, when Marlborough marched to the Danube and joined with Eugene to take on the French army that was then rampaging through Germany. Although both armies were roughly equal in size at fifty-some
thousand, the Franco-Bavarian army had a strong position with their right wing anchored on the Danube. Their infantry was solidly imbedded in three villages, each about a mile apart (notably Blenheim on the river), with lines of cavalry stationed between these three strongpoints.

With a stealthy night march, the Anglo-Austrians got within striking distance undetected, so when morning came, the French had to scramble into line. Allied skirmishers and artillery bombardments against the villages tied down the French infantry, while Marlborough drove the bulk of his force against the cavalry in the center. After the French cavalry was driven off, their infantry was left isolated and surrounded. English musketry and bombardment then destroyed these pockets. By the time it was over, the French and Bavarians had lost 80 percent of their army to death, injury, or captivity, while the Grand Alliance had lost a mere 20 percent. This was the first major defeat of the French in over fifty years.

The Battle of Blenheim ended all combat on the Danube and removed the direct threat against Austria; however, the tide of war accidentally turned back to France’s favor in 1711 when Emperor Joseph I of Austria died without having produced any children who lived past childhood. His brother suddenly became the new emperor, Charles VI of Austria, in addition to his earlier position as the Austrian claimant to the Spanish throne. England and Holland panicked. An outright union of Spain and Austria was almost as bad as a union of Spain and France, so they worked out a deal with the French.

The final treaty signed at Utrecht split the inheritance. All of the Spanish territories in Europe, bar Spain itself, went to the Austrian Hapsburgs. Spain and the overseas colonies went to a side branch of the French Bourbons, which was to remain separate from the French throne.