Swedish Pomerania

Pomerania in the 17th century ( Blaeu Atlas )

Swedish Pomerania was the (western) part of the Duchy of Pomerania , with which the King of Sweden within the Holy Roman Empire was enfeoffed as a result of the division of Pomerania after the Greifenhaus died out in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 . After parts of Swedish Pomerania were transferred from the Swedish Empire to Brandenburg-Prussia in the Peace of Saint-Germain in 1679 and in the Peace of Stockholm in 1720 , Sweden ceded the remaining area to Prussia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 .

In the Thirty Years War

Due to the extinction of the other partial princes, Duke Bogislaw XIV was able to unite all of Pomerania in his hand in 1625 . During the Thirty Years War he initially remained neutral, but could not prevent imperial troops from occupying Pomerania up to Stralsund . Sweden first intervened in the war in 1628 with an aid contingent to defend Stralsund. In the spring of 1630 it first occupied the island of Rügen , landed on the island of Usedom in June under King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden and then pushed the imperial occupation troops out of the duchy by summer 1631. In the Szczecin alliance contract with the childless Duke Bogislaw XIV, which was backdated to July 10, 1630, Gustav Adolf overturned the Brandenburg-Pomeranian hereditary brotherhood set out in the Treaty of Grimnitz by securing the eventual succession in the event that Georg Wilhelm , the Elector of Brandenburg, should not comply with Swedish claims for compensation. After Bogislaw died in 1637 , the Elector Georg Wilhelm, enfeoffed with Pomerania by Emperor Ferdinand II, was unable to assert himself against the overwhelming Swedish occupying power. Sweden took over the civil administration there in the spring of 1638 after a period of about a year in which the ducal councils remained in office as Pomeranian councilors and appointed the commander-in-chief Johan Banér as the first governor general . He was subordinate to a lieutenant governor for Western and Western Pomerania . After lengthy negotiations with Brandenburg, which to compensate u. a. The Archbishopric Magdeburg and Halberstadt Monastery were divided in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648: Western Pomerania fell to the Electorate of Brandenburg , while Sweden received all of Western Pomerania and Rügen, the estuary of the Oder and a strip east of the Oder. Brandenburg and Sweden did not agree on the exact course of the border and the evacuation of the Kolberg fortress until the Szczecin border recession of 1653.

Swedish time

Pomerania after the border recession of 1653. The area designated as West Pomerania fell to the Crown of Sweden

Holy Roman Empire 1789, Swedish Pomerania in the north in brown

Sweden received the Pomeranian possessions as an everlasting imperial fief. That is why the Swedish kings ruled there with the title and rights of the former dukes from the Greifenhaus.

The Duchy of (Vor) Pomerania remained an independent imperial principality under constitutional law. The Swedish monarch became sovereign. He did not rule as King of Sweden, but as Duke of Pomerania. The territory was not an incorporated link in the Swedish state structure.

However, due to various domestic and foreign policy differences, Sweden only received the imperial investiture years later, and agreement with the estates on the state constitution was only achieved with the adoption of the regimental form of 1663 , which was primarily a revised version of the regimental constitution of 1634 , and the subsequent homage to the estates. In this constitutional form, that part of Pomerania belonged to Sweden from 1648 to 1806 and was subject to a governor or governor-general, who was appointed by the Swedish king and had to belong to the Swedish aristocracy . From 1663 to 1806 the King of Sweden, as Duke of Pomerania, had a seat in the Perpetual Diet of Regensburg .

The highest court of the areas ruled by Sweden in Germany was from 1653 the upper tribunal with seat in Wismar . When the Malmö pledge agreement of 1803 ended the Swedish rule over Wismar, it was first moved to Stralsund and then to Greifswald.

The possession of Western Pomerania had the advantage for Sweden of being able to participate in wars on the continent without endangering the heartland, but it made Pomerania a theater of war again and again. During the Second Northern War from 1655 to 1660, Swedish Pomerania served as a deployment and supply area. In the Swedish-Brandenburg War from 1674 to 1679, Swedish troops invaded Brandenburg again, but had to give up Western Pomerania completely after the lost battle of Fehrbellin . In the subsequent Peace of Saint-Germain, however, thanks to French intercession, Sweden only had to cede a strip of territory east of the Oder to Brandenburg.

Swedish Pomerania in the borders from 1720

In the Pomeranian Campaign in 1715 during the Great Northern War , King Frederick IV of Denmark took possession of Swedish Pomerania north of the Peene from 1715 to 1721 , while Prussia held the southern part and the Oder Islands. The Danes planned to annex their old area of interest to the Danish state in the long term and therefore carried out their own country survey, the Danish Lustration . Danish Governors General were General Franz Joachim von Dewitz from 1715 to 1719 and then General Jobst von Scholten until 1721 . In the Treaty of Stockholm, Denmark had to return these areas to Sweden, while the entire country south of the Peene with the capital Stettin remained in Prussian possession.

Since 1720 Swedish Pomerania consisted of Rügen and the Western Pomerania area north of the Peene. The capital became the Stralsund fortress. During the Seven Years' War , Swedish troops invaded the Prussian provinces of Brandenburg and Pomerania from there.

In the course of the dissolution of the Old Kingdom in 1806, the status of Swedish Pomerania under state law also changed. Since the estates refused to agree to a Landwehr demanded by the Swedish King Gustav IV Adolf , he revoked the previous estates constitution and the membership of Swedish Pomerania on June 26, 1806. This means that this territory left the Reichsverband even before the formation of the Rhine Confederation and the laying down of the imperial crown by Franz II . The introduction of the Swedish constitution and numerous reforms in the legal system, which had already been declared before the Greifswald state parliament in August 1806 , a. serfdom was abolished, and because of the French occupation that took place in July 1807, the administration did not come about, or only after a considerable delay.

Transfer to Prussia

The Prussian administrative district of Stralsund, formed in 1818, was identical to Swedish Pomerania from 1720 onwards

After two occupations by France and its allies in the Napoleonic Wars from 1807 to 1810 and 1812/13, Sweden temporarily regained its last remaining overseas province and from 1810 onwards at least partially implemented the reforms decided in 1806. In 1813, in a campaign against Denmark , Sweden conquered Norway, which had been in personal union with it until then . In the Peace of Kiel on January 14, 1814, Denmark was offered the prospect of acquiring Swedish Pomerania in return. Since Denmark could not pay the war indemnities imposed on Sweden, it agreed at the Congress of Vienna with Prussia that this Swedish-Pomerania should take over against cession of the Duchy of Lauenburg to Denmark and assumption of the Danish reparation payments to Sweden. The handover by the Swedish Governor General Wilhelm Malte I , Prince of Putbus, to the prussian representative took place in October 1815. Due to the agreed guarantee of the traditional legal system, the area, which was finally incorporated into the Prussian province of Pomerania as the administrative district of Stralsund in 1818, continued to enjoy a special status for a long time . Colloquially, Swedish-Pomerania is known as " Neuvorpommern " or "Neuvorpommern und Rügen". This was intended to make the distinction to the " Old Western Pomerania ", which had become Prussian as early as 1720, south and east of the Peene and the Oder stream.

literature

Helmut Backhaus: Imperial territory and Swedish province. Western Pomerania under Charles XI. Guardians (1660–1672) (= publications of the Max Planck Institute for History. Volume 25). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1969, ISBN 3-525-35330-8 .
Reinhart Berger : Legal history of the Swedish rule in Western Pomerania . Konrad Triltsch, Würzburg 1936.
Werner Buchholz : Swedish Pomerania as territory of the German Empire 1648–1806. In: Journal for Modern Legal History. Volume 12, 1990, pp. 14-33.
Werner Buchholz : Financial crisis and modernization - causes and consequences of the coup d'état Gustav IV. Adolf in Vorpommern 1806. In: Zeitschrift für Ostforschung. Volume 41, 1992, pp. 332-344.
Adrian Bueckling : The Swedes in Western Pomerania north of the Peene (= Wolgaster Museumschriften. Issue 6). 3rd, verb. u. supplementary edition. Nordlicht, Karlshagen / Usedom Island 2007, ISBN 978-3-9809640-3-6 .
Hans-Joachim Hacker : Pomerania as the scene of Swedish politics. In: 130 miles north: the journey of the Rüganer Arndt through Sweden in 1804 (= notebooks of the Ernst Moritz Arndt Society. Volume 10). Groß Schoritz 2006, ISBN 3-931661-05-9 , pp. 22-36.
Joachim Krüger : Between the Reich and Sweden. The sovereign coinage in the Duchy of Pomerania and in Swedish Pomerania in the early modern period (approx. 1580–1715) (= Nordic history. Volume 3). Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-8258-9768-0 , pp. 197-264.
Fritz Petrick: The end of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and Sweden's German States. In: 130 miles north: the journey of the Rüganer Arndt through Sweden in 1804 (= notebooks of the Ernst Moritz Arndt Society. Volume 10). Groß Schoritz 2006, ISBN 3-931661-05-9 , pp. 37-45.
Joachim Wächter : The constitutional situation in Swedish Western Pomerania. In: 130 miles north: the journey of the Rüganer Arndt through Sweden in 1804 (= notebooks of the Ernst Moritz Arndt Society. Volume 10). Groß Schoritz 2006, ISBN 3-931661-05-9 , pp. 46-52.
Johannes Friedrich Weise: The integration of Swedish Pomerania into the Prussian Union of States. Transformation process at the state and social level. Rostock 2005, ISBN 3-638-91521-2 .

Web links

Commons : Swedish Pomerania - collection of images

Wiktionary: Swedish-Pomeranian - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Most of the holdings of the Swedish-Pomeranian provincial authorities and courts are archived in the Greifswald State Archives . An overview of the holdings and some online research are possible. State Archives Greifswald

The Stockholm Reichsarchiv keeps other records on the history of Pomerania from the Swedish era, of which the Pomeranica collection and the Gadebusch collection are the most important. Under Riksarkivet on German they are also partially available online.

In the Stralsund city archive , Rep. 13 Stralsund is kept in the estates of the most important records on the activities of the estates in Swedish Pomerania, Rep. 13 Stralsund in the estates in the German Digital Library

The maps and descriptive texts of the Swedish land survey of Western Pomerania from the years 1692 to 1709 can be viewed under Project Geogreif .

Individual evidence

^ Martin Meier: Western Pomerania north of the Peene under Danish administration 1715–1721 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-58285-7 ( limited preview ).
↑ Joachim Krüger: An alternative to the Swedish land survey - the Danish lustration of northern Western Pomerania in the years 1717 and 1718. In: The Swedish land survey of Pomerania 1692–1709; Perspectives of an edition project; Contributions from the workshop on October 9th and 10th, 2010 in the Pomeranian State Museum Greifswald. Ludwig, 2011, ISBN 978-3-86935-050-9 , pp. 71f. ( Google Books ).
↑ Jens E. Olesen : Effects of Danish rule on the understanding and practice of tribunal activity. In: Dirk Alvermann, Jürgen Regge (Ed.): Justitia in Pommern. LIT-Verlag, Berlin / Hamburg / Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8258-8218-7 , pp. 111-132.

[1] Martin Meier: Western Pomerania north of the Peene under Danish administration 1715–1721 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-58285-7 ( limited preview ).

[2] Joachim Krüger: An alternative to the Swedish land survey - the Danish lustration of northern Western Pomerania in the years 1717 and 1718. In: The Swedish land survey of Pomerania 1692–1709; Perspectives of an edition project; Contributions from the workshop on October 9th and 10th, 2010 in the Pomeranian State Museum Greifswald. Ludwig, 2011, ISBN 978-3-86935-050-9 , pp. 71f. ( Google Books ).

[3] Jens E. Olesen : Effects of Danish rule on the understanding and practice of tribunal activity. In: Dirk Alvermann, Jürgen Regge (Ed.): Justitia in Pommern. LIT-Verlag, Berlin / Hamburg / Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8258-8218-7 , pp. 111-132.