ABSTRACT
The year 1721 was in many ways a turning point for the history of central Europe. It saw the end of the Great Northern War (1700–1721), which marked the end of the often near-genocidal religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire. It also signaled the conclusion of the similarly near-genocidal wars between Catholic Poland-Lithuania and Orthodox Muscovy, on the one hand, and between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, on the other. This warring Central Europe of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was the theater in which Sweden launched vast military expeditions against and across the Holy Roman Empire, Poland-Lithuania, or Muscovy, even reaching the Ottoman Empire. Muscovy defeated Sweden, putting an end to the latter country’s dream of a Central European Empire. Even Sweden’s Baltic littoral provinces of Ingria, Estland, and Livonia were lost to Muscovy, alongside Karelia; for the time being Muscovy returned Finland to Sweden. Tsar Peter the Great had gambled on the permanence of his military victories and had ordered the construction of the port city of St Petersburg in Ingria already in 1703. A decade later, the Muscovian capital had been moved from Moscow to this brand new city, built in a European style. The 1721 Treaty of Nystad (now Uusikaupunki in Finland) reestablished peace between Muscovy and Sweden. In the same year, Peter the Great renamed Muscovy as the Russian Empire, though Sweden only somewhat recognized this claim two years later in 1723. Prussia, which had become a kingdom securing its independence from Poland-Lithuania in 1701, acknowledged this change in Muscovy’s official name immediately in 1721. Of its former continental empire, Sweden retained only the Scandinavian province of Scania (gained from Denmark) and a cluster of possessions in the north of the Holy Roman Empire. Poland-Lithuania remained independent, but continued losing territory to Russia and found itself in the latter polity’s sphere of influence. In 1772, when the Habsburgs, Prussia, and Russia partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for the first time, the Polish-Lithuanian monarch had no choice but to recognize Muscovy under its novel name of the Russian Empire, and also the change in the Prussian monarch’s title from “King in Prussia” to “King of Prussia.” Now the Prussian King was fully equal to all other monarchs of the royal rank.
