Zwischen Arktis Adria und Armenien

Debating the Mercantile Background 367
English and Dutch economic and political interests in the White Sea trade route. But
secondly, Russian exports to the Swedish ports on the Baltic increased at the same
time. Russian merchants from Pskov and Novgorod now regularly visited Nyen and
Narva, while English, Dutch and other ships also frequented these Swedish ports.
In the light of these facts, it is not surprising that Attman interpreted Charles XII’s
(1697–1718) unfortunate naval expedition of 1701 to Arkhangel’sk as being the logical
outcome not only of this immediate stalemate but also of almost 150 years of
Swedish policy. And at the end of his booklet he stressed what other historians, particularly
Russian and Soviet ones, had also observed – that Peter the Great achieved
what Sweden in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been striving for: namely,
the re-routing of the Arkhangel’sk trade to the Gulf of Finland, to the port of his new
capital, St Petersburg, founded at the mouth of the Neva on the ruins of Swedish
Nyen. 68
Whereas Attman’s 1985 booklet was devoted to a period of seven decades, he published
in the following year an even shorter study, of some ten pages, which covered
the entirety of Sweden’s period as a great power: that is, from 1560 to 1721. This
article was laconically – not to say enigmatically – entitled The Architect of Sweden’s
Baltic Policy. 69 It was necessary either to be familiar with Attman’s previous
writings or to take a closer look at the text in order to discover whom he had in mind
when speaking of “the architect”:
John III, as the architect of Swedish Baltic policy, had drawn up the following progamme:
domination of both sides of the Gulf of Finland; attempt to establish Swedish positions
on the Arctic coast; re-routing of the Arkhangel’sk trade to the Swedish towns of Narva,
Viborg and Reval; planning of expeditions to Pskov and Novgorod; and overcoming the rivalry
between Sweden and Poland in the Baltic lands. Thereby he set the guidelines which
Swedish Baltic policy followed until [the battle of] Poltava [in 1709]. 70
The economic historian from Göteborg ended by stating nostalgically: “When Sweden
finally signed the peace of Nystad in 1721, the curtain went down on Sweden’s
Baltic policy, which had John III as its first architect.” 71 In an extremely condensed
form Attman presented here a synopsis of fifty years of research on Swedish great
power policy from Gustav Vasa (1523–60) to Charles XII. It is a coherent and
homogeneous interpretation of Swedish empirebuilding set against its mercantile
background, a late work of high abstraction.
The reaction of Michael Roberts to Artur Attman’s last, apodictic writings was
surprisingly positive. To a certain degree, evidently, the British sceptic was convinced
by the compressed and streamlined interpretation of the Swedish imperial
period offered by his Swedish opponent. Although in his document collection of
68 Ibid., 36–7.
69 Artur Attman, ‘Den svenska Östersjöpolitikens arkitekt,’ in Vetenskap och omvärdering. Till Curt
Weibull på hundraårsdagen 19 augusti 1986 (Göteborg 1986), 19–31.
70 Ibid., 24.
71 Ibid., 30.
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