Gustaf Adlerfelt

Gustaf Adlerfelt (* 1671 in Stockholm ; † June 28 ^{. Schwed} / 8. July 1709 ^greg. In Poltava ) was a Swedish historian .

Life

Gustaf Adlerfelt came from a noble family and was a son of the court treasurer Carl Adlerfelt. His grandfather had been the governor of Reval . Gustaf received a careful upbringing and studied at Uppsala University , where he was particularly interested in history, learning different languages, as well as heraldry and genealogy. His first work was an eulogy in Uppsala in Latin for the birthday of the Swedish Crown Prince Karl, later King Karl XII. under the title Panegyricus… Carolo… Principi haereditario… consecratus et in splendido ordinis equestris palatio,… proclamatus die 17 Iunii, 1693, et ejusdem natali XII., a Gustavo Carlson (Stockholm 1693). Three years later, under the chairmanship of Peter Lagerlöf, he defended a dissertation on the order of knights ( Equites sive de ordinibus equestribus disquisitio, praeside Petro Lagerlöf , Stockholm 1696).

Adlerfelt left Sweden in 1696 and embarked on an extensive journey through part of Europe. After visiting the royal Danish court in Copenhagen and the ducal Holstein court in Kiel , he traveled via Hamburg and Berlin to Halle , where he stayed for more than a year to listen to Christian Thomasius' legal lectures . He then visited The Hague and in 1697 assisted the Swedish ambassador Nils Lillieroot in some delicate preliminary negotiations of the Rijswijk Peace . He then resided for some time in Paris , where he was in contact with James Fitzjames, 1st Duke of Berwick , and traveled to London in July 1699 , where he stayed for a little more than a month, before returning to Paris. He made diary entries on his travels.

After Adlerfelt had already been absent from Sweden for four years, he went to Stralsund via Aachen , Cologne , Hamburg and Wismar in the second half of 1700 and from there crossed by ship to Trelleborg , so that he returned to home soil in October 1700. He was now the King Karl XII. introduced by his brother-in-law, Duke Friedrich IV of Schleswig-Holstein, and appointed royal chamberlain. Due to an illness he could Karl XII. initially not accompanying him on his campaigns for a while and wrote a number of comments on Johannes Messenius ' Theatrum nobilitatis suecanae , which explain the history of the Swedish aristocratic families. At the same time he made the plan to keep an accurate and regular diary of the campaigns of Charles XII. and when he finally arrived at the king's camp, he learned of this great support for his project. Charles XII. ordered that Adlerfelt had to receive all documents important for his work and that all generals and officers should give him exact reports on their warlike achievements.

When the king allowed his generals to have their wives come to Heilsberg in 1704 , Adlerfelt seized the opportunity to marry Anna Kristina Steb (* 1682 - † 1722), the daughter of Bremen government councilor Johan Steb, who came from a German noble family he had promised marriage four years earlier in Wismar. This lady, who was fluent in several living languages, made a partial translation of a section of her husband's diary from Swedish into German on her return to Wismar and published it at her own expense. The work, entitled as the Warhaffter draft of the war deeds of Carl XII., Kings of Sweden (Wismar 1707) soon counted only a relatively few copies because some of them were lost when they were shipped to Sweden.

Adlerfelt accompanied Karl XII. during his wars in Poland and was placed in the service of Prince Maximilian Emanuel von Württemberg-Winnental . He continued his diary until the eve of the Battle of Poltava (1709), at the beginning of which he was fatally struck by a cannonball while he was standing by the king's litter.

Adlerfelt's manuscript was captured by the Russians after the battle with the luggage of the Prince of Württemberg, but came back into his hands and later to Stuttgart and finally came into the possession of Gustaf Adlerfelt's son Carl Maximilian Emanuel Johan in 1722, who translated it into French and as Histoire militaire de Charles XII, roi de Suède depuis l'an 1700 jusqu'à la bataille de Pultowa en 1709 (4 vols., Amsterdam 1740) published. Only the first three volumes of this work are a translation of Adlerfelt's diary, which closed shortly before the Battle of Poltava, while the last volume gives the account of another Swedish officer on the course of the battle himself, as well as some other valuable accounts. The diary simply gives the facts of the wars of Charles XII. again, but is accurate and believable. The work was reprinted in Paris in 1741 and also appeared in English ( The military history of Charles XII, King of Sweden… , 3 vols., London 1740) and German translation ( Life of Carl the Twelfth, King of Sweden , 3 vols., Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1740–42). An edition in Swedish that met scientific standards was published in 1919.

literature

• Adlerfeldt, Gustave d ' , in: Biographie universelle , 2nd edition, 1843ff., Vol. 1, p. 180.
• Adlerfeld, Gsutaf . In: Biographical Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge , Vol. 1 (1842), pp. 351f.
• Arthur Stille : Adlerfelt, Gustaf . In: Svenskt biografiskt lexikon , Vol. 1 (1918), p. 137 (Swedish)