Livonian War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Livonian War ran from 1558 to 1583, a quarter-century fight over a stretch of Baltic coast in what is now Estonia and Latvia. On one side stood the Tsardom of Russia under Ivan IV. Against it formed a shifting coalition: the Dano-Norwegian Realm, the Kingdom of Sweden, and the union of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland. The prize was Old Livonia, an economically prosperous region with valuable ports and trade routes. Robert I. Frost described the place on the eve of the storm with brutal clarity. "Racked with internal bickering and threatened by the political machinations of its neighbours, Livonia was in no state to resist an attack." How did a wealthy region collapse into the hands of so many hungry monarchies? Why did Russia, dominant for twenty years, end the war begging for a truce? And what kind of state was so weak that its enemies could simply buy or invade its pieces one by one?

• 2. A Region Divided

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  The Livonian Confederation by the mid-16th century was a patchwork held together by little more than habit. Its territories included the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order, the prince-bishoprics of Dorpat and Ösel-Wiek, Courland, the Archbishopric of Riga, and the city of Riga itself. The cities of Riga, Dorpat, and Reval, along with the knightly estates, enjoyed privileges that let them act almost independently. The only common institutions were the regularly held assemblies known as Landtags. Rivalry was constant. The Archbishop of Riga and the Landmeister of the Order each fought for hegemony, and a schism had split the Order since the Reformation reached Livonia in the 1520s. The shift toward a Lutheran country was gradual, resisted by part of the Order that remained sympathetic to Roman Catholicism. The lesser nobles guarded their privileges fiercely. The Landmeister, the Gebietigers, and the estate owners all worked to prevent any higher, more powerful noble class from forming above them. Only the archbishopric of Riga broke this resistance. Wilhelm von Brandenburg was made Archbishop of Riga and Christoph von Mecklenburg his Coadjutor, backed by Wilhelm's brother Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach. Albert was the former Prussian Hochmeister who had secularised the southern Teutonic Order state and made himself duke in Prussia in 1525. The two men in Riga were meant to pursue Albert's dream of a hereditary Livonian duchy modelled on Prussia.

• 3. Hungry Neighbours

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  The Danish navy was the most powerful in the Baltic Sea, controlling the entrance to it, collecting tolls, and holding the strategic islands of Bornholm and Gotland. Around this dominant fleet circled rivals with their own ambitions. Sweden prospered from exports of timber, iron, and most notably copper, helped by a growing navy and its closeness to Livonian ports across the narrow Gulf of Finland. Before the war, Sweden had already tried to expand into Livonia, but the tsar's intervention stalled it through the Russo-Swedish War of 1554-1557 and the 1557 Treaty of Novgorod. Russia had grown into Livonia's eastern neighbour through its absorption of Novgorod in 1478 and Pskov in 1510, then grew stronger still by annexing the khanates of Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556. Russia's quarrel with the West was sharpened by its isolation from sea trade. The new Ivangorod port, built in 1550 on the eastern shore of the Narva River, was judged unsatisfactory because of its shallow waters. Ivan demanded that the Livonian Confederation pay about 6,000 marks to keep the Bishopric of Dorpat. The claim rested on the idea that every adult male had once paid Pskov one mark when it was independent. The Livonians promised to pay by 1557 but failed, and the negotiations collapsed. The Polish King and Lithuanian Grand Duke Sigismund II Augustus watched Russian ambitions with alarm. He supported his cousin Wilhelm von Brandenburg against Wilhelm von Fürstenberg, the Order's landmeister, hoping Livonia would become a vassal state like Prussia. The internal feuding turned violent. Von Fürstenberg captured the strongholds of Kokenhusen and Ronneburg in June 1556, while von Brandenburg and Christoph von Mecklenburg were captured and detained at Adsel and Treiden. Sigismund seized on the killing of his envoy Lancki as a pretext, invading southern Livonia with an army of around 80,000 and forcing the parties to reconcile at his camp in Pozvol. The Treaty of Pozvol of September 1557 created a defensive and offensive alliance aimed at Russia, and it provoked the war that followed.

• 4. The Order Dissolves

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  On the 22nd of January 1558, Ivan IV reacted to the Livonian turn toward Poland-Lithuania by invading Livonia. Local peasants greeted the Russians as liberators from German control. Russian troops took Dorpat in May, Narva in July, and laid siege to Reval. The Livonians struck back. Reinforced by 1,200 Landsknechts, 100 gunners, and ammunition from Germany, they retook Wesenberg and several other fortresses. Yet Dorpat, Narva, and many lesser strongholds stayed in Russian hands. The initial Russian advance was led by the Khan of Qasim, Shahghali, with two other Tatar princes commanding a force of Russian boyars, Tatar and Pomestnoe cavalry, and Cossacks who were then mostly armed foot soldiers. Russian victories followed a pattern of small campaigns and sieges, with musketmen smashing wooden defences under effective artillery support. Tsar's forces took fortresses like Fellin but lacked the means to seize Riga, Reval, or Pernau. The Livonian knights suffered a disastrous defeat at the Battle of Ērģeme in August 1560. Facing collapse, Livonia turned for help, first to Emperor Ferdinand I and then to Poland-Lithuania. Landmeister von Fürstenburg fled and was replaced by Gotthard Kettler. The first Treaty of Vilnius brought the estates of Livonia under Polish-Lithuanian protection in June 1559, though the Polish sejm refused to ratify it as a Lithuanian matter. The weakened Order met its end with the second Treaty of Vilnius in 1561. Its lands were secularised into the Duchy of Livonia and the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia and handed to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Kettler became the first Duke of Courland and converted to Lutheranism. The treaty included the Privilegium Sigismundi Augusti, guaranteeing the Livonian estates religious freedom under the Augsburg Confession, the Indygenat, and continued German administration.

• 5. Kings And Brothers

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  Bishop Johann von Münchhausen signed a treaty on the 26th of September 1559 that sold his territories for 30,000 thalers. The deal gave Frederick II of Denmark-Norway the right to nominate the bishop of Ösel-Wiek in return for a loan and Danish protection. Frederick named his brother, Duke Magnus of Holstein, who took possession in April 1560. Magnus pursued his own ends at once, buying the Bishopric of Courland without Frederick's consent and pushing into Harrien-Wierland, which brought him into direct conflict with Eric XIV of Sweden. In 1561, Swedish forces arrived and the noble corporations of Harrien-Wierland and Jerwen yielded to Sweden, forming the Duchy of Estonia. Reval accepted Swedish rule as well. Sweden wanted territory on the eastern Baltic to challenge Danish dominance and control the West's trade with Russia. The marriages of kings became weapons. Sigismund kept close relations with Eric XIV's brother John, Duke of Finland, who married Sigismund's sister Catherine in October 1562, preventing her marriage to Ivan IV. Eric had approved the match but turned furious when John lent Sigismund 120,000 dalers and took seven Livonian castles as security. That loan led to John's capture and imprisonment in August 1563. In response, Sigismund allied with Denmark and Lübeck against Eric XIV in October of the same year.

• 6. The Long Struggle

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  The dominium maris baltici was the name contemporaries gave to the struggle for control of the Baltic that the interventions of Denmark-Norway, Sweden, and Poland-Lithuania set off. After the intense early years, a period of low-intensity warfare began in 1562 and lasted until 1570. The Nordic Seven Years' War of 1563-1570 occupied Denmark, Sweden, and to some degree Poland-Lithuania in the western Baltic. Diplomacy kept shifting. Denmark and Russia concluded the Treaty of Mozhaysk in 1562, respecting each other's claims in Livonia. Sweden and Russia agreed a seven-year truce in 1564. Both Ivan IV and Eric XIV showed signs of mental disorder. Ivan turned against part of the nobility with the oprichina that began in 1565, throwing Russia into political chaos and civil war. When the Russo-Lithuanian truce expired in 1562, Ivan rejected an extension and invaded Lithuania. His army raided Vitebsk and took Polotsk in 1563, but Lithuania won at the Battle of Ula in 1564 and at Czasniki in 1567. The defeats, along with the defection of Andrey Kurbsky, drove Ivan to move his capital to the Alexandrov Kremlin while his oprichniki crushed the opposition he perceived around him. Diplomats kept failing to find a settlement. A grand party left Lithuania for Moscow in May 1566, ready to split Livonia with Russia, but Russian negotiators read this as weakness and demanded the whole of Livonia, including Riga. The Treaty of Lublin unified Poland and Lithuania into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, and a three-year truce with Russia followed in June 1570. The diplomatic insult of these years had a brutal edge. When John III sent a party led by Paul Juusten, Bishop of Åbo, to Russia in July 1569, the Governor of Novgorod ordered an attack on them, had their clothes and money taken, and paraded them naked through the streets. Soon after, Ivan and his oprichniki marched on Novgorod itself, where between 2,000 and 15,000 people were killed in an act of vengeance against the city's Orthodox church.

• 7. Russia At Its Height

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  Reval withstood a Russian siege in 1570 and 1571, the strongpoint that anchored Swedish Estonia against repeated assault. Around it the war turned savage. On the 23rd of January, a Swedish army of 700 infantry and 600 cavalry under Clas Åkesson Tott met a Russian and Tatar force of 16,000 under Khan Sain-Bulat at the Battle of Lode near Koluvere. The Russian advance ended with the sacking of Weissenstein in 1573, where the occupiers roasted some of the Swedish garrison leaders alive, including the commander. The brutality fed a wider war of vengeance. John's counter-offensive stalled at the siege of Wesenberg in 1574 when German and Scottish units of his army turned against each other. The war was a crushing financial burden for Sweden, whose German mercenaries were owed 200,000 daler by the end of 1573. John gave them the castles of Hapsal, Leal, and Lode as security, then sold them to Denmark when he could not pay. Magnus, meanwhile, found his ambitions starved of support. His efforts to besiege Reval faltered with help from neither Ivan nor his brother Frederick II, and the siege was abandoned in March 1571. Russia changed how it fought. After defeating Crimean and Nogai forces in 1572, Ivan wound down the oprichnina and adopted a new strategy. He relied on tens of thousands of native troops, Cossacks, and Tatars instead of a few thousand skilled mercenaries. Ivan's campaign reached its height when another 30,000 Russian soldiers crossed into Livonia in 1577 and devastated Danish areas in retaliation for the Danish acquisition of Hapsal, Leal, and Lode. The conquered territories submitted to Ivan or to his vassal Magnus, declared monarch of the Kingdom of Livonia in 1570. Magnus then defected from Ivan, having begun seizing castles without consulting the Tsar. When Kokenhusen submitted to Magnus to avoid fighting, Ivan sacked the town and executed its German commanders. The campaign turned next on Wenden, which the source calls "the heart of Livonia," the former capital of the Livonian Order and a symbol of Livonia itself.

• 8. The Tide Turns

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  Stephen Báthory, the Transylvanian prince, became King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1576 after a contested election against the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian II. Maximilian's death in October 1576 stopped the dispute from escalating. Báthory meant to drive Ivan IV out of Livonia, but first had to settle the resistance of Danzig, which ended with the Danzig War of 1577 and a payment of 200,000 zlotys to the city. He reshaped his army, recruiting mercenaries and accelerating the formation of the hussars, a well-organised cavalry that replaced the feudal levy. Swedish King John III allied with Báthory against Ivan in December 1577, even though Poland claimed all of Livonia and refused to accept Swedish rule of any part. The reversal came fast. A Polish-Swedish force took the town and castle of Wenden in early 1578. When Ivan sent an army of 18,000 men that September to retake it, they laid siege but met a relief force of around 6,000 German, Polish, and Swedish soldiers. The Battle of Wenden left Russian casualties severe and armaments and horses captured, dealing Ivan his first serious defeat in Livonia. Báthory then carried the war into Russia itself. He gathered 56,000 troops, 30,000 of them from Lithuania, and took Polotsk on the 30th of August 1579. He sent Jan Zamoyski with a force of 48,000 against the fortress of Velikie Luki, captured on the 5th of September 1580, after which garrisons like Sokol, Velizh, and Usvzat fell quickly. In 1581 the force besieged Pskov, a heavily defended fortress, but Polish parliamentary funding was dropping. Sweden meanwhile recovered the strategic city of Narva in 1581 with a hired mercenary army, and according to Russow's contemporary chronicle 7,000 Russians were killed there in retaliation for previous massacres. The fall of Narva was followed by those of Ivangorod, Jama, and Koporye.

  The Jesuit papal legate Antonio Possevino led the negotiations that produced the 1582 Truce of Jam Zapolski between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The source calls it a humiliation for the Tsar, in part because he requested it. Russia surrendered all the areas in Livonia it still held and the city of Dorpat to the Commonwealth, while Polotsk stayed under Commonwealth control. Captured Swedish territory, specifically Narva, could be kept by the Russians, and Velike Luki would return from Báthory's control to Russia. Possevino tried half-heartedly to honour John III's wishes, but the Tsar vetoed this, probably in collusion with Báthory. The armistice fell short of a full peace and was set to last ten years, later renewed in 1591 and 1601. The war with Sweden ended separately. The Tsar concluded the Truce of Plussa with Sweden on the 10th of August 1583, relinquishing most of Ingria while Narva and Ivangorod stayed under Swedish control. Scheduled for three years, it was later extended until 1590. During the talks Sweden made vast demands for Russian territory, including Novgorod, conditions probably meant only for bargaining. The settlement reshaped the region but did not end the fighting for long. South of the Düna, the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia found political stability based on the 1561 Treaty of Vilnius. North of the river, Báthory cut the privileges Sigismund had granted the Duchy of Livonia, treating the territory as spoils of war. Polish gradually replaced German as the administrative language, and the local clergy and the Jesuits embraced the Counter-Reformation with Báthory's help. The Livonian population did not convert en masse. Decades of further wars lay ahead, and the situation would remain in flux until 1710, when Estonia and Livonia capitulated to Russia during the Great Northern War, an outcome formalised in the Treaty of Nystad of 1721.