Sweden between the years 1611 and 1718 is known as the Swedish Empire.

The Peace of Westphalia

It was the exploits of Axel Oxenstierna and Johan Baner which alone enabled Sweden to obtain even what she did obtain at the great Peace of Westphalia congress in 1648. Her original demands were Silesia, she held most of the fortresses there, Pomerania which had been in her possession for nearly twenty years, and a war indemnity of 20,000,000 Riksdaler. What she actually got was:

    * Upper Pomerania, with the islands of Rugen and Usedom, and a strip of Lower Pomerania on the right side of the Oder, including the towns of Stettin, Garz, Damm and Gollnow, and the isle of Wollin, with the right of succession to the rest of Lower Pomerania in the case of the extinction of the Brandenburg Hohenzollerns;
    * the town of Wismar with the districts of Pod and Neukloster;
    * the secularized bishoprics of Bremen-Verden with the town of Wildeshausen; and
    * 5,000,000 Riksdaler.

These German possessions were to be held as fiefs of the Holy Roman Empire; and in respect thereof Sweden was to have a vote in the Imperial Diet and to "direct" the Lower Saxon Circle alternately with Brandenburg. France and Sweden, moreover, became joint guarantors of the treaty with the Holy Roman Emperor, and were entrusted with the carrying out of its provisions, which was practically effected by the executive congress of Nuremberg in 1650.

Dominions

Sweden's reward for the exertions and sacrifices of eighteen years was meagre, almost paltry. Her newly won possessions were both small and scattered, though, on the other national hand, she had secured the practical control of the Position of three principal rivers of north Germany - the Oder, the Elbe and the Weser - and reaped the full advantage of the tolls levied on those great commercial arteries. The jealousy of France and the impatience of Queen Christina of Sweden were the chief causes of the inadequacy of her final recompense. Yet, though the immediate gain was small, she had not dissipated her blood and treasure altogether in vain. Her vigorous intervention had saved the cause of religious liberty in Europe; and this remains, for all time, her greatest political achievement. Henceforth till her collapse, seventy years later, she was the recognized leader of Continental Protestantism. A more questionable benefit was her rapid elevation to the rank of an imperial power, an elevation which imposed the duty of remaining a military monarchy, armed cap-a-pie for every possible emergency. Every one recognizes now that the poverty and sparse population of Sweden unfitted her for such a tremendous destiny. But in the middle of the 17th century the incompatibility between her powers and her pretensions was not so obvious. All her neighbours were either decadent or exhausted states; and France, the most powerful of the Western powers, was her firm ally.

Domestic Consolidation

For the moment, Sweden held the field. Everything depended upon the policy of the next few years. Very careful statesmanship might mean permanent dominion on the Baltic shore, but there was not much margin, for blundering. Unfortunately the extravagance of Gustavus Adolphus's two immediate successors, Christina and Charles X, shook the flimsy fabric of his empire to its very base. Christina's extravagance was financial. At the time of her abdication the state was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the financial difficulty had superinduced a serious political agitation. The mass of the Swedish people was penetrated by a justifiable fear that the external, artificial greatness of their country might, in the long run, be purchased with the loss of their civil and political liberties. In a word, the natural equilibrium of Swedish society was seriously threatened by the preponderance of the nobility; and the people at large looked to the new king to redress the balance. A better arbiter between the various estates than Charles X it would have been difficult to find. It is true that, primarily a soldier, his whole ambition was directed towards military glory; but he was also an unusually sharp-sighted politician. He affected to believe that only by force of arms could Sweden retain the dominion which by force of arms she had won; but he also grasped the fact that there must be no disunion at home if she were to continue powerful abroad. The most pressing question of the day, the so-called "Reduktion", or restitution of the alienated crown lands, was adjusted provisionally at the Riksdag of the Estates of 1655. The king proposed that the actual noble holders of crown property should either pay an annual sum of 200,000 Riksdaler, to be allowed for out of any further crown lands subsequently falling in to them, or should surrender a fourth of the expectant property itself to the estimated amount of 800,000 Riksdaler. The nobility attempted to escape taxation as cheaply as possible by stipulating that November 6, 1632, the day of Gustavus Adolphus's death, should be the extreme limit of any retrospective action on the part of the crown in regard to alienated crown property, and that the present subsidy should be regarded as "a perpetual ordinance" unalterably to be observed by all future sovereigns - in other words, that there should be no further restitution of alienated crown property. Against this interpretation of the subsidy bill the already over-taxed lower estates protested so energetically that the Diet had to be suspended. Then the king intervened personally; not to quell the commons, as the senate insisted, but to compel the nobility to give way. He proposed that the whole matter should be thoroughly investigated by a special committee before the meeting of the next Riksdag, and that in the meantime a contribution should be levied on all classes proportionately. This equitable arrangement was accepted by the estates forthwith.

Charles X had done his best to obviate the effects of the financial extravagance of Christina. It may well be doubted, however whether his own extravagant desire for military glory was not equally injurious to his country. In three days he had succeeded in persuading the Swedish estates of the lucrative expediency of his unnecessary and immoral attack on Poland but when he quitted Stockholm for Warsaw, on the July 10, 1654, he little imagined that he had embarked on an adventure which was to contribute far more to his glory than to the advantage of his country. How the Polish War expanded into a general European war; how Charles's miraculous audacity again and again ravished favours from Fortune and Nature (e.g. the passage of the Belts) when both those great powers combined against him; how, finally, he emerged from all his difficulties triumphant, indeed, but only to die of sheer exhaustion. Immediately after his death, the regency appointed to govern Sweden during the minority of his only son and successor, Charles XI of Sweden, a child four years old, hastened to come to terms with Sweden's numerous enemies, which now included Russia, Poland, Brandenburg and Denmark.

The Peace of Oliva

The Peace of Oliva on May 3, 1660, made under 1660. French mediation, put an end to the long feud with Poland and, at the same time, ended the quarrel between Sweden on the one side, and the emperor and the elector of Brandenburg on the other. By this peace, Sweden's possession of Livonia, and the elector of Brandenburg's sovereignty over East Prussia, were alike confirmed; and the king of Poland renounced all claim to the Swedish crown. As regards Denmark-Norway, the Peace of Oliva signified the desertion of her three principal allies, Poland, Brandenburg and the emperor, and thus compelled her to reopen negotiations with Sweden direct. The differences between the two states were finally adjusted by the peace of Copenhagen, May 27, 1660, Denmark-Norway ceding the three Scanian provinces to Sweden but receiving back the Dano-Norwegian province of Trondelag and the islands of Bornholm and Anholt which she had surrendered by the Treaty of Roskilde two years previously. Denmark-Norway was also compelled to recognize, practically, the independence of the dukes of Holstein-Gottorp. The Russian War was terminated by the Peace of Kardis on July 2, 1661 confirmatory of the Peace of Stolbova, whereby the tsar surrendered to Sweden all his Baltic provinces – Ingria, Estonia and Kexholm.

Thus Sweden emerged from the war not only a military power of the first magnitude, but also one of the largest states of Europe, possessing about twice as much territory as modern Sweden. Her area embraced 44,000 square km, a mass of land 18,000 square km larger than the modern German Empire. Yet the Swedish Empire was rather a geographical expression than a state with natural and national boundaries. Modern Sweden is bounded by the Baltic; during the 17th century the Baltic was merely the bond between her various widely dispersed dominions. All the islands in the Baltic, except the Danish group, belonged to Sweden. The estuaries of all the great German rivers (for the Niemen and Vistula are properly Polish rivers) debouched in Swedish territory, within which also lay two-thirds of Lake Ladoga and one-half of Lake Peipus. Stockholm, the capital, lay in the very centre of the empire, whose second greatest city was Riga, on the other side of the sea. Yet this vast empire contained but half the population of modern Sweden - being only 2,500,000, or about 56 souls to the square km. Further, Sweden's new boundaries were of the most insecure description, inasmuch as they were anti-ethnographical, parting asunder races which naturally went together, and behind which stood powerful neighbours of the same stock ready, at the first opportunity, to reunite them.