History of Estonia 101: Part Five

This is part five in a series which we hadn't updated for a good couple of weeks but, since nothing much has happened here in Estonia since then, we'll continue where we left off...

Since the PMC has been going for some 60 years here in Estonia, during which time we've seen such comings and goings as the regaining of independence, the imminent introduction of the Euro, and the Beatles concerts at the Lauluväljak, we feel fully qualified to present this, a multi part set of posts on the history of Estonia which will appear, now and again as we're given time.
There's unlikely to be anything new for Estonians, who therefore don't need to read on unless they want to check we're not peddling complete mistruths. The sources are likely to be the usual internet sites such as wikipedia and any links that arise therefrom, but this should save the reader some time in finding all this stuff themselves, the one or two books we have on the subject, and maybe the occasional word of mouth stuff.
You might also want to check out our posts about a year ago now, on the Estonian language.
At the very least we hope to dispel any misconceptions of Estonia being a slavic speaking country, being located in the Balkans or being a place with a lot of stones (although this last is in fact true)...


Part Five: of Gustavus Adolphus, Ivan the Terrible and Martin Luther

The very title of this piece indicates the nature of Estonia's bridging North, East and West, and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw influence from all three directions (plus the South if you include the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth).

As seen in the previous post, the Livonian confederation, which corresponded to modern day Latvia and Estonia and was made up of a patchwork quilt of bishoprics, medieval fiefdoms and the two most northerly Hanseatic ports of Riga and Reval (Tallinn) was shaky at best. The sixteenth century saw the cracks turn into gaping holes when in the 1550s, the disintegration led to the ever-opportunistic Russia moving in to fill the power vacuum, with a military invasion under Tsar Ivan IV (yes, the terrible) in 1558. Incidentally this was the same year that Elizabeth I ascended to the throne of England. She had nothing to do with the Russian invasion. Dorpat (Tartu - which as we have seen had beeb a Russian city in its foundation) and Narva, unsurprisingly, were taken and Reval was besieged. The Reval city council, then as now never slow on the uptake, appealed to the Swedish King Eric XIV for military assistance, which he duly obliged, presumably sensing easy pickings. From an Estonian perspective it would seem that it was a case of the lesser of two evils (or even the least of several); the country's northern and linguistic neighbour, Finland, had gradually come under Swedish domination through the course of the later middle ages and in any case Sweden had become something of a regional power by now. Traces of this period can even be seen on Estonia's coat of arms, which features three blue lions on a gold background (or 'Or, three lions passant guardant azure', if you want the proper heraldic description) which of course remain the colours on the Swedish flag to this day.

After the defeat of the Russians Sweden divided the country into two, the northern part constituing the 'Duchy of Estonia' (as had been the case in the thirteenth and fourteenth century, only this time Denmark had been the colonial power until its hasty selling off of its territory to the Teutonic knights) was secured after the Battle of Wenden in 1578; the southern half 'Swedish Livonia' covered roughly the same territory as the old Livonian confedaration (ie most of Northern Latvia) though this was not secured until much later, due to another regional power, the recently formed Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, having taken some Estonian lands. Many Estonians are unaware of this occupation, which was comparatively short lived, from the 1580s until Sweden's defeat of Poland-Lithuania in 1629.

Swedish rule under Gustavus II (Adolphus) saw an improvement in conditions for many people, with greater autonomy being granted to the peasantry in 1631 and the establishment of a printing press, a relatively new invention, at Tartu the following year. Not for nothing were these times (retrospectively) referred to as 'the good old Swedish times'. But they were not to last forever..

Denmark for its part did not give up without a fight this time (if you remember it had re-taken some Estonian territory in the form of the Bisopric of Ösel-Wiek (Saaremaa and Läänemaa) in the 1560s, but the baltic was clearly not big enough for two Scandinavian powers and the territory was ceded to Sweden. Since the Kingdom of Denmark included Norway, via a union of crowns, it could be said that the era represented a pan-Scandinavian intervention in the region, something that would not have gone amiss much later on in history...

In the meantime, the ruling classes would still have spoken 'low' German, i.e. the form spoken in much of northern Germany, and indeed been ethnic Germans, whilst the bulk of the populace spoke Estonian of course. The north German connection meant that it was only a matter of time after Martin Luther issued his '95 Theses' in 1517 for Lutheran ideas to percolate through; indeed the (Danish) Bishopric of Ösel-Wiek was Lutheran from the outset. Since the religious changeover was likely to have been carried through by the ruling classes, with presumably little protest from the ordinary folk one way or another, and the state by this time was becoming more and more stable under the new occupier, Estonia escaped the horrors of the religious wars of Western Europe. No counter-reformations, divorces, burnings or rival translations here. Either that or Lutheranism happened to sit well with Estonian's methodical and no nonsense way of doing things. Or alternatively that then as now they were not particularly pious people. Or all of the above...

Incidentally the first extant book to have been printed in the Estonian language (though printed at Wittenberg in Germany) dates from this period, a Lutheran catechism from 1535.

                          Albrecht Dürer's 'Three Mighty Ladies From Livonia' (1521)

Retrospective map (top) of medieval Livonia from the time of contemporary Swedish Estonia/Livonia, whose borders it roughly shared and below, less pretty but more cartographically rigorous map of Swedish Estonia /Livonia and environs.