ABSTRACT
The Baltic Sea is nearly a thousand miles long from furthest east to west. But for three narrow outlets to the North Sea, the Great and Little Belts and the Sound, it would be a lake; tides are small, the water is only slightly salt and therefore freezes easily. But several of the longest rivers in Europe flow into the sea: the Oder, Vistula and Dvina. Teeming with fish, endowed with excellent harbours, the sea played a dominant part in the lives of the states on or near its shores. The commodities produced in the Baltic states were important to the other states of Europe. The trade routes from the north and east of Europe to the west pass through the Baltic. The economies of the western powers came to depend increasingly upon those commodities because of the disruption and shortages directly or indirectly caused by war. Thus the Baltic was both the centre of a struggle for power among the local states and the concern of more distant powers: Holland, England, France, Spain and the Empire. The series of wars, small in scale by western standards, but intensive in relation to the size of the northern powers, which culminated in the Great Northern War should therefore be seen as it was by contemporaries, not as mere scrapping on the margins of Europe but as a vital part of the struggle of the larger states for lands, fortresses and markets. Like Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years War, Charles XII was to become a crucially significant figure.
