Three Gates.
Self-organization elaborates in complexity as the system advances towards the chaotic edge.
-Ian Malcolm
Two great conflicts raged across the Europe of 1674, sucking in new participants and widening their destructive scope, as states entered the fray both willingly and not. In the west, the Kingdom of France, allied to the England of Charles II, struggled to overwhelm its Spanish, German, and Dutch opponents before its lengthening list of enemies were able to bring their mounting resources to bear. To the east, what had started as a Tatar and Cossack brushfire war against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had turned into a more or less full-blown conflict dragging in the Ottoman Empire, and threatening to involve Muscovy as well. Despite the stalemate in both wars, few actors felt the need or desire to peacefully end their role in the fighting. Instead, the participants assumed roles more and more intertwined with one another, making peace less likely and hardening the resolve of the coalitions involved. In 1674, the foreseeable future of Europe was more war.
Even those who did attempt to escape the cycle of bloodshed were rapidly dragged back into it. Chief among these was the Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm. Having concluded the Treaty of Vassem with an invading French army in 1673, he found himself propelled to victory in the Polish-Lithuanian free elections next year. Out of the frying-pan and into the fire: he had left the Dutch war and landed in the Ukrainian one. As the new king of Poland, he could not easily withdraw from the war without facing censure from the Sejm. He was on thin ice already over the coronation. Polish-Lithuanian kings needed to be Catholic, but initially the Calvinist Friedrich Wilhelm refused to convert; met with stringent resistance from the Sejm, he grudgingly took Mass and changed confessions. But the damage was already done to his Polish base of support, while his German subjects were horrified at his newfound papism. His erstwhile Lithuanian supporter Sapieha was already discussing plans to join in a konfederacja with the other electoral loser, hetman Jan Sobieski. The only way to deal with all of these opponents: divide and conquer, one by one.
While Sapieha was mollified by spoils-system government jobs for his relatives and allies, Sobieski was sent back to the Ukraine with 30,000 Commonwealth troops, accompanied by a further 10,000 Brandenburger infantry and artillery under Georg von Derfflinger. Once again, Sobieski was to move on Khotyn. Investing the fortress in May, the Polish sappers and Brandenburger artillery made short work of the defenses, and within a month the fortress garrison capitulated. But the Ottomans could hardly be expected to take this lying down, and they didnt. A relief force had arrived a few days too late to save the fort, and though it withdrew, it would doubtless return with reinforcements.
Grand vezir Fazıl Ahmed Paşa had departed Podolia after the 1673 campaign, so command responsibility devolved onto another able Köprülü general, Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa. He had failed to relieve Khotyn in June, but he refused to let the fortress go, with good reason. Khotyn commanded a position on the Dnestr River, blocking the route between Kamianets and the rest of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans could not afford to lose it, so Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa collected 50,000 men from area garrisons and by September was back on the road to Khotyn. But the Turkish army was too slow to move, and lost the element of surprise; while Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa dithered on the northeastern bank of the Dnestr, setting up his siege guns, Sobieski was already moving to attack. The Polish army crossed the Dnestr a few miles upriver and launched a dawn attack on the Ottoman camps on the 18th of September, achieving total surprise. Merzifonlu Kara Mustafas attempts to organize a defense collapsed, and by noon the Ottoman army was scattered. 25,000 men escaped southeast along the Dnestr, fleeing to the lands of the Crimean Khan. An Anatolian commander, Yeğen Osman, brought another 5,000 back to Kamianets, where they were promptly besieged. The rest were slaughtered or dispersed: Sobieskis victory was total.
This disaster ended the transitory Ottoman conquest of Podolia. Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa was disgraced, and forced to return to Rumelia. Kamianets itself was lost. After resisting assault for a few weeks, Yeğen Osman was forced to capitulate in October. After two bloody years, the Ottomans were right back where they started, and the Sultan was unwilling to sponsor another attack on Podolia. But he was similarly unwilling to totally abandon the resisting Petro Doroshenko and his cossacks. The Ottomans had failed to call on Doroshenko during the 1674 campaigning season, partly due to a feud between the cossack hetman and Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa. The new Turkish commander, Siyavuş Paşa, had no such problems. Though he was much older than his predecessor, he came from good Köprülü stock, and his stint as governor of Halep had given him experience. He was a formidable new foe for the Poles.
All of the European wars were intertwined, and events in France could impact the fighting in the Ukraine. This was graphically demonstrated in the winter of 1675. In January, a large Danish-Imperial army had invaded French Alsace. The vicomte de Turenne, the French commander in that sector, had fewer men, and was forced to fall back. De Turenne, though, had not earned a reputation as Frances greatest general for nothing, and he soon devised a plan to turn the tables. After pretending to go into winter quarters, and waiting for the allies to do the same, de Turennes army marched north from Belfort, totally surprising the Danish and Imperial troops. The overall allied commander, the Danish general Carl von Bernstorff, was unable to muster any effective resistance, and the troops he was able to collect were mowed down by the French at Molsheim. Within two weeks a shattered remnant of the allied army was sent reeling back across the Rhine.
This Alsatian defeat proved to be a revolutionary event for diplomacy in the north. Magnus de la Gardie, effective regent in Sweden for the young Karl XI, had been playing a precarious balancing game. Swedish finances were in such a poor state that without French subsidies, the kingdom would enter bankruptcy. Early in the Dutch War, de la Gardie had managed to get the French to pay Sweden subsidies merely for keeping a sizable army in Germany. The regent had claimed that with Swedish troops next to the borders of key Dutch allies in the north, those allies like Denmark-Norway, Münster, and Brandenburg wouldnt be able to commit to the war further south. But as those Dutch allies began to send more and more troops to Flanders and the Rhineland during 1673 and 1674, de la Gardies balancing act grew more and more difficult to maintain. Brandenburg may have left the war, but Danish troops were playing an ever-larger role in the fighting instead. When Alsace was invaded, France finally threatened to cut the Swedes off unless they joined the war.
The regent believed that he could risk the war after the Danish disaster at Molsheim. Much of Denmark-Norways regular army was now either dead or stuck in the Rhineland, tilting the odds in Swedens favor. Egged on by some of his top military commanders, de la Gardie succumbed to French pressure and signed an agreement to expand the subsidy in February 1675, in return for which Sweden would declare war on Denmark-Norway. Swedish regiments were reactivated and mercenaries were recruited from the Empire. In København, King Christian V and the Riksråd caught wind of Swedish preparations and frantically recalled von Arenstorff from the Rhineland, screaming all the while for aid from the Dutch and Imperials, but it was far too late. Denmark had pitifully few men able to resist when Simon Helmfelt and 20,000 troops marched into Danish Holstein in April. Three days later, Karl Gustav Wrangel crossed into Norway. War had come home to the House of Oldenburg.
The Swedish invasion set off a new diplomatic scramble in northern Europe, and key among the players was Brandenburg-Poland-Lithuania. Before his election, Friedrich Wilhelm had been greatly interested in acquiring Swedish Pomerania, abutting his own Pomeranian territory. He also wished to use participation in a war against Sweden to further the perennial Hohenzollern claims for the provinces of Jülich and Berg in the Rhineland. But on the other hand, over the last two years the Elector-King had been pledged to remain neutral at best in the Dutch war and subsidiary conflicts by the terms of the treaty with the French at Vassem. If he were to enter the lists against Sweden, he would need to also break with France prevent French recruiters from working in Brandenburger territory, annul the terms of Vassem, and lose face when the French divulged the treatys secret clauses (and possibly worse, knowing the vindictive nature of Kaiser Leopold). Too, he was growing all too aware of the suspicion with which he was regarded in Vienna. Leopold had no wish to see a new strong Vandal kingdom on his northern frontier. Imperial support for Hohenzollern claims in Jülich and Berg might not be forthcoming even if he sided with the notoriously mercurial Kaiser. All options seemed poor, so the Elector-King defaulted to inactivity and remained neutral. He was far too busy with the Ukrainian war and Polish politics, anyway.
Friedrich Wilhelms pacific policy was not shared by other states in northern Germany. Most of the Lower Saxon Circle was already aligned against the Swedes, eager to snag parts of the Swedish-ruled Duchies of Bremen and Verden. Some went all out. Christoph Bernhard von Galen, Prince-Bishop of Münster, was one of the latter, invading Bremen-Verden with a large force of mercenaries within weeks of the Swedish attack on Denmark. He was joined even by his perpetual rival, Johann Friedrich of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, and by the countess of Ostfriesland, Christine Charlotte. To even the petty rulers in north Germany, Swedens ill-guarded German possessions were low-hanging fruit.
If these powers had been joined by Brandenburg, things could have gotten very ugly very quickly for Sweden. But Friedrich Wilhelms neutrality kept Pomerania safe, and so Swedens German army could operate with impunity. Helmfelt and his 20,000 men one of the largest field armies Sweden could raise overwhelmed a scratch Danish force at Kolding in August under Jakob Duncan, and moved on to occupy most of Jutland by the end of the year. Sjælland and Fyn remained inaccessible due to the arrival of the Dutch navy in June. Sweden also scored victories in the north, where Oslo and Akershus fell into Wrangels hands. Ulrik Frederik Gyldenløve, the doughty Norwegian governor, was an able opponent, but he had few resources and scant time in which to marshal them. He was forced to withdraw to the interior of the country, where he was temporarily safe. Against this, the Danes had scored a victory over the Swedish fleet with the aid of Michiel de Ruyters Dutch squadron, winning solidly off Bornholm. But it was poor consolation for the loss of many of Christians most prized dominions.
Yet neither side thought of making peace despite the stunning and normally, war-deciding early Swedish victories. Christian V recognized that this was near the practical limit of the Swedes ability to damage him and his kingdom. They could not cross the Belts or the Sound while the Dutch and Danish allied fleet controlled the waves. Norway would be difficult at best for them to invade further due to the truly atrocious terrain, especially with the cunning Gyldenløve in command there. And the allies still had resources to bring to the fight. De la Gardie, too, refused to consider peace feelers. The entire reason Sweden had entered the war had been a desire to maintain the French wartime subsidies, which were still reaching Stockholm despite the allied naval victories. Ending the war, even if gains were made, would reduce Sweden to the state of fiscal ruin it had been in prior to the French subsidies. So: war would feed war. The all-important subsidies had to continue.
Brandenburg-Polish-Lithuanian neutrality in the northern war had allowed it to concentrate on the south well, as best a temporary personal union of personal unions can concentrate, anyway. Sobieski began to push into the Ukraine, where he punished Doroshenkos cossacks dearly for their betrayal nearly a decade ago. A daring Polish raid on Chyhyryn was met by a cossack force, leading to a pitched battle, in which Doroshenkos vaunted mercenary corps, the serdiuks, suffered heavy losses. Later in 1675 Siyavuş Paşa, having added his Ottoman and Tatar troops to Doroshenkos remaining cossacks, managed to hit back, overwhelming several isolated Polish detachments and fighting Sobieski to a draw at Cherkasy. Emboldened by these late-year victories, Doroshenko was soon up to his old tricks, stirring up trouble in the Muscovite-allied Left Bank hetmanate of Ivan Samoylovych and bringing the Muscovites dangerously close to considering an intervention southwest of the Dnepr.
The Commonwealth was clearly on the offensive, but recovering Podolia and pushing the line in the Ukraine further southeast was only enough to keep Friedrich Wilhelms political head above water. Fobbing off Sapieha had worked in the short run, but his main campaign promise remained unfulfilled. Attempting to remove Sobieski from the hetmanate extralegally would be bad enough, but Sapieha was simply a lousy general, and would be a disaster as hetman. In addition, Friedrich Wilhelm was having increasingly greater problems ramming his policies through the Sejm, which continued to demand that the war be run and won on a shoestring. Permission to call up more Polish troops was denied. During the deluge, Jan Casimir had persuaded the Sejm to allow him to institute a new system for levying infantry, the łanowa, which allowed the kings to call up men from noble and ecclesiastical lands, not just the royal demesne. The łanowa represented a vast potential force to be brought to bear, but without the Sejms permission it remained untapped. Friedrich Wilhelm was trapped in a deadly spiral: it did not appear as though he could win the war without more support from the Sejm, but the Sejm refused to grant him powers it thought were excessive, while demanding a standard of victory that the King could not attain without more support.
In short, it was a nightmare he lacked control over his own fate. For 1676 he was forced to commit to an offensive strategy to try to win the war, but with a dangerously low number of troops. And it probably would not have worked but for Petro Doroshenko. His pretensions of rule over both banks of the Dnepr had been taken too far after Cherkasy, and the Muscovites had had enough. During the intervening winter, the Muscovite local commander, knyaz Grigory Romodanovsky, petitioned the tsar for reinforcements and permission to attack the presumptuous Doroshenko. Artamon Matveyev, the boyar in control of the teenage Tsar Fyodor IIIs government, approved and dispatched more men. With the reinforcements in hand, Romodanovsky and the Left Bank hetman Samoylovych entered the war in the spring of 1676 by attacking Doroshenkos strongpoint at Kaniv. Coming between two fires, the Right Bank cossacks looked doomed, even with Siyavuş Paşa there to assist. While the Ottomans and Tatars were away dueling with Sobieskis army near Zhytomyr, Romodanovsky and company attacked Chyhyryn, denuded of its garrison, and sacked it.
News of the sack of Chyhyryn ruined what standing Doroshenko had left among his cossacks. When his lieutenants heard of the capitals fate, they seized their erstwhile hetman and delivered him to Romodanovsky. With that, the last Ottoman reason for prolonging the conflict disappeared. Upon receipt of Siyavuş Paşas report on the affair at the Porte, Fazıl Ahmed Paşa recommended securing a truce, and the Sultan concurred. By the Peace of Boiany of 1677, the status quo in most essentials was recognized. The Ottomans elected to continue recognizing Doroshenko as the hetman of the Right Bank, but gave up any claim to suzerainty over the region or any right to appoint the hetman. Such was the method by which the Ottoman Empire quietly extricated itself from the Ukrainian war.
Now that his foreign policy had met with success, the Elector-King was able to concentrate once more on domestic affairs, to the disappointment of the anti-Swedish coalition. For them, 1676 had been a decidedly uneven year. Early on, with the control of the waves, Dutch ships had transported von Arenstorffs army from Germany to Norway, where it was joined with Gyldenløves partisans. Wrangels army in Oslo and Akershus was now outnumbered, and the situation only became worse when the aged general himself got sick, unable to lead the army. Instead, he was replaced by a fortifications expert, Mardefelt, who was simply unable to command a field army. Gyldenløve quickly took advantage of his opponents inexperience and maneuvered him out of Oslo into an ambush at Trygstad, where Mardefelt himself was killed along with three thousand Swedish troops. The remainder fled to Bohuslän in disarray. Norwegian victories mounted as Gyldenløve switched the direction of his offensive from the south to his real objective: the formerly Norwegian territory of Jämtland. Here the Norwegian irregulars took an even heavier toll on the Swedes, who were outnumbered, poorly supplied, and poorly led. Gyldenløves success forced Karl XI to do what he had been putting off for some years: de la Gardie was ordered to assume a military command and defend the Norwegian border, while the King himself asserted full power in Stockholm. With de la Gardies arrival along with fresh troops, the Swedes stabilized the situation, having lost several important posts in Jämtland but retaining the important town of Östersund.
In Germany, the war rapidly became confused. Once the prince-bishop of Münster, with Danish, Frisian, and Lüneburger help, overran the last Swedish garrisons in Bremen-Verden, he began quarreling with his allies over the disposition of the spoils. Soon an open breach was made between Münster and Lüneburg, whose armies began skirmishing with each other. But Swedens performance elsewhere made it impossible to take advantage of the fratricide. At Altona, Rutger von Aschebergs Swedish cavalry, meant to guard the Elbe River, was badly mauled by more numerous allied horse. The Swedish had attempted to empty their pistols before engaging in hand-to-hand combat, but were overwhelmed by the volume of fire from the allies and forced to pull back. This left the Elbe line unguarded, so a Danish-Imperial army under the command of Reinhold von Hoven was able to cross unimpeded. Helmfelt didnt have the manpower to face down the new allied army, but by skillful maneuver was able to limit the allied gains that year to half of Holstein.
Once again, events in the French theater affected the war in the north. France had dispatched an expedition to Sicily to support a revolt against the Spanish there, and the French Mediterranean fleet dealt the Spanish a bad blow in the Straits of Messina when they tried to contest the landing. The Dutch now had to cover for the Spanish, and this meant withdrawing much of de Ruyters squadron from the Baltic. For 1676, a reduced Danish navy now had to try to patrol a much wider area, and Swedish ships began to slip through the cracks. Three Danish vessels were overwhelmed off Gedser by a much larger Swedish fleet under Lorentz Creutz that successfully ran the blockade and delivered badly needed money to Helmfelt in Jutland. The main Danish fleet under Niels Juel still maintained supremacy, though, and the Swedish recognized that they could not yet face Juel in battle.
Despite the failure of yet another attempt to lure the Elector-King into the northern war, the allies opened 1677 well. Juel and his fleet caught a sizable Swedish convoy off Öland and wiped it out in March, while von Hovens allied army in Holstein pushed on into Holstein-Gottorp. Helmfelt was unable to prevent the numerically superior allies from overrunning the duchy and capturing the fortress of Tønning. Gyldenløve in Jämtland put de la Gardie off balance and bloodied the Swedish nose at Hammerdal. The cunning Norwegian then had von Arenstorff attack Bohuslän, which had been denuded of Swedish troops; Tanum fell easily and the Norwegians advanced on Göteborg with naval support. In this time of mounting disaster, Karl XI relieved de la Gardie of his field command and took charge of the army himself. Collecting a small army of five thousand cavalry and two thousand infantry, the King raced south towards Halland and Bohuslän to try to stave off further defeats. Von Arenstorff too advanced as fast as he could, but in his haste to capture Göteborg left many of his troops behind. Still, when the Danish-Norwegian and Swedish armies confronted each other at Kungälv in May, von Arenstorffs army still outnumbered the Swedish, having 9,000 effectives with a higher proportion of infantry compared to 6,500 Swedes.
Von Arenstorff was largely unaware of the location and size of the approaching Swedish army, largely due to his deficiency in cavalry. Karl XI had kept horse pickets out in front of his main body, carefully keeping watch over the Danes. A few miles from Kungälv, von Arenstorff finally noticed one of these, and, thinking it was a major part of the Swedish army, began to deploy his troops into line of battle, while sending his cavalry to intercept the Swedes. Karl sent almost his entire cavalry force after the Danish horse, seeing the chance to pounce while the Danish infantry and cavalry were separate and could not support each other. Outnumbered, the Danish-Norwegian cavalry was overwhelmed and wiped out. The Swedish horse then took up positions on both flanks of the Danish infantry, which were still struggling to get into formation. Von Arenstorff, in his haste, positioned many of his men with their backs to a creek, and when the Swedish cavalry flanking attack came in the Danish infantry were scattered and slaughtered trying to ford the stream. Karl brought up his own infantry and delivered the coup de grace to what few Danish regiments still resisted. The Danish-Norwegian army was shredded, and its tattered remnants fled towards Bohuslän.
On the heels of the Kungälv victory came news of Swedish success in Jutland. Helmfelts army was running out of cash again, and he was reduced to 10,000 cavalry and 4,000 infantry. Determined to make a stand before losing all combat effectiveness, in July he moved purposefully to break the allied siege of Flensburg. Von Hoven, with 8,000 horse and 12,000 foot, broke off the siege and moved to fortify a point on Helmfelts route, Wallsbüll. Electing to attack the entrenched allied troops despite their numerical superiority in infantry, Helmfelt sent his foot soldiers into the teeth of the enemy fortifications. The Swedish infantry soon ran into trouble, but gave as good as they got in a three-hour sanguinary contest for control of the entrenchments. But Helmfelts attack would have been for nothing had von Ascheberg and the cavalry not come through. Before the battle, von Ascheberg, drawing on the experience of Altona the previous year, instructed his horsemen to dispense with the pistols: they were simply to charge with the saber, med gevalt, screw the pistols. At Wallsbüll this proved decisive. The allied cavalry were routed, and von Ascheberg turned his horsemen around the flanks of the fortified infantry line to strike the Danes in the rear. Once again, the Danish infantry collapsed in the face of the cavalry attack, and what followed was more a massacre than anything else. The pursuit only stopped at nighttime, ending the bloodiest battle of the Northern Wars up to that point: some 5,000 Swedes and 9,000 allied soldiers were dead on the field.
Yet despite crushing victory in two field battles, Sweden had problems converting tactical success into strategic success. Swedish possessions in northern Germany and Jämtland were still under occupation, and Denmark-Norway still held the waves. To make things worse, the Danish, recognizing their inferiority in field battles, sought to make their numbers tell through siege operations and irregular warfare. Gyldenløve in Jämtland continued to extend his control, for instance, despite Swedish attempts to bring him to heel. And it was the most Helmfelt could do to hold onto Holstein, mostly recovered in the wake of Wallsbüll. Offensives were out of the question. And this state of affairs persisted into 1678, as Helmfelt lost thousands of men to desertion. Unable to pay much of his army due to the allied naval superiority, his army was reduced to a sad remnant, barely equal to the scraps the allies could muster. The promising signs from the Baltic naval campaign in 1676 soon disappeared as Juel mounted more and more aggressive operations. He made an amphibious descent on Öland, capturing the island, and defeated several Swedish ships in the area. To balance this, the Swedes had some minor successes against Gyldenløve in Jämtland in early 1678, driving him back nearly to the border.
Once again, for the final time, events in Western Europe determined the course of northern warfare. By 1678, France had achieved most of its war aims, while the occupation of Gent in 1677 combined with victories in Roussillon proved to be a galvanizing force on the negotiators at Nijmegen in the United Provinces. In April, the French proposed moderate terms that the Dutch Staten-Generaal were happy to affirm. Next month, the Franco-Dutch peace accords were signed, providing for the return of all occupied Dutch territory, the end of the French fighting tariff of 1667 on Dutch trade, and some preferential treatment for Dutch merchants. With the defection of the Dutch, the other allies fell into line. In September, the Spanish were forced to agree to major territorial losses: Louis gained the Franche-Comté, Valenciennes, Bouchain, Ypres, St.-Omer, Aire, Cambrai, and Condé, among other fortified towns on the border with the Spanish Netherlands, and yielded none in return. Finally, the Kaiser agreed to a treaty in December that permitted the French to garrison Freiburg and provided terms for the duke of Lorraine to return to his duchy, but under such terms that he refused, so France continued to occupy it.
During the peace negotiations with the Kaiser, French troops had had the opportunity to campaign for a few months against their enemies in the Empire. The advent of an army under the command of de Luxembourg forced the prince-bishop of Münster and the duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg to temporarily set aside their differences. They were defeated all the same, at Paderborn, and French troops quickly compelled them to withdraw from Bremen and Verden. At the same time, the Swedes launched a long-planned offensive against Trondheim, aiming to secure it as rapidly as possible as a bargaining piece for the peace that was expected to be imminent. Gyldenløve, though his raids did do damage, was brushed aside, as Karl XI led 5,000 men on skis over the mountains. Despite Frances withdrawal from the war in December, Swedens superficial successes and the disappearance of Christian Vs allies finally brought Denmark to the table. The peace of Malmö of February 1679 was to the minds of many Danes a staggering defeat. The sole Swedish gain was Trondheim; outside of that, all possessions returned to their prewar holders. To add insult to injury, Christian V was forced to repeat his familys renunciation of claims to Skåne, Halland, Blekinge, and the other territories in southern Sweden lost during the 1650s.
It was a fragile peace, resented by many, both victors and defeated. But even a bad peace can last. This one was not fated to do so.
A promising avenue, then?
More of the same, probably fewer resources devoted to the area and slower expansion than OTL during the tenth century. Couldn't you have just read the last few pages? Not that I don't enjoy the opportunity for postcount...
