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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

and navy, the heavy expenditure on fortification, did indeed necessitate increases of taxation at the Diets of the ’eighties. But by the beginning of the 'nineties ordinary revenue was morę than adeąuate to ordinary expenditure: for the first time sińce the reign of Gustav Vasa the king could live of his own.

Hand in hand with the reduktion went the new system of army maintenance, famous in Swedish history as the allotment system (indelningsverkeł).⁸⁸ This meant, in effect, the settling of the native conscript army upon the land. To each soldier and officer was assigned a farm, or a portion of the rent or taxes due to the crown from a farm; and all the men from one unit received their allocations in the area from which the unit was recruited. They were mustered at regular intervals for training and manoeuvres; but between times they were farmers, or cottiers, or labourers, according to their rank and the pay that was due to them. While smali mercenary forces held the bastions of empire beyond the sea, in Sweden and Finland the army in peacetime became territorial, self-recruiting (by the system known as standigt knektehall)³⁹ and above all self-supporting. The estates which the nobility lost by the reduktion provided lands and revenues which henceforward could be for ever reserved to the maintenance of the native troops.⁴⁰ Those troops were thus for the most part paid in kind. It was a deliberate return to the methods of the sixteenth century, to decentralized finance, to a natural rather than a cash economy; a reyersal, in short, of all the financial reforms associated with the names of Gustav Adolf and Axel Oxenstierna.⁴¹ There was an obvious danger that the army under such a system might degenerate into a half-trained militia, slow to muster and ineffective in a sudden emergency. As long as Charles xi lived his personal supendsion madę it certain that this would not happen. When Charles xn was attacked by his neighbours in 1700, the Swedish Citizen army mobilized with a precision and a speed which no contemporary State could emulate, moving by routes deter-mined long before, to prearranged halts ready supplied with necessities according to a standard Schedule. Everything, to the last detail, had been planned by Charles xi and his military coadjutors; and in 1700 everything went according to plan.⁴² Charles xi beąueathed to his son perhaps the best-trained and best-equipped army ever to leave the shores of Sweden.

OHARLES XI

After 1721, no doubt, it was a difFerent story. In the decades after the peace of Nystad the agricultural side of the soldicr’s life tended to obscure the military; the officer grew too attached to his bostalle, the soldier to his torp\ the old martial spirit was lost;⁴³ faction played havoc with the officer-class; army admin-istration sank into inefficiency. Hence the lamentable per-formances of the Swedish armies in the wars of the mid-eighteenth century. And there was one other disadvantage in indelningsverket: a system devised for maintaining an army at home in peacetime could not work well if that army were fight-ing overseas. It was precisely this consideration that had led Gustav Adolf and Axel Oxenstiema to try to tum as much of their revenue as possible into cash. To Eli Heckscher, of course, Charles xi’s work looked like a barbarization, a reversion to pre-mercantilist practice, an attempt by a man of narrow views and limited intelligence to tum back the current of economic history.⁴⁴ But at least it preserved Sweden from the possibility of anything resembling the Great Elector’s General-kriegskommissariał, with all the social and constitutional con-seąuences that flowed from it. And in fact it was entirely logical and appropriate, given Charles’s principles of foreign policy. Gustav Adolf wanted cash because he had to pay his troops in Germany; Charles xi paid in kind because he had no intention of fighting abroad if he could help it. His political and military system was neither designed for, nor suited to, protracted campaigns beyond the seas, and this was recognized both by his supporters and his critics. The author of Les Anecdotes de SuMe, writing shortly before Charles’s death, remarked that ‘la Suede ne peut faire aucun entreprise considerable sans 1’argent d’autruy’.⁴⁵ Charles xii’s ministers were of the same mind. After the battle of Narva, they insisted that foreign aid was a necessary precondition for carrying the war against Augustus 11 into Poland; and they felt that large explosive ąuestions such as that of Holstein-Gottorp must be settled by intemational action, sińce Sweden could no longer tackle them alone. It was Sweden’s misfortune that Charles xn was of the contrary opinion.⁴⁰ The days were gone, moreover, when foreign war offered attractions to the nobility. Nowhere did the reduktion make a cleaner sweep of noble donations than in the Baltic provinces.⁴⁷ The aristocracy could expect no repetition of the

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