Iron and copper turned thinly populated Sweden into a Baltic superpower
For about a century Sweden ruled most of the Baltic shoreline, an empire more than twice the size of the modern country but home to only around 2.5 million people. Its rise was paid for with metal: by 1685 iron and copper made up more than 80 percent of Swedish exports.
Historians usually date the Great Power Era from 1611, when Gustavus Adolphus took the throne, to 1721, when defeat in the Great Northern War stripped away much of the empire. With his chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, Gustavus built a formidable state. The crown drew heavily on the Stora Kopparberg mine at Falun, then Europe's largest copper mine, to fund its wars, and Sweden became northern Europe's leading exporter of iron and copper.
Intervention in the Thirty Years' War made Sweden the champion of Protestant Europe. At one point it controlled roughly half of the Holy Roman Empire's member states, though defeat at Nördlingen in 1634 cost it most of its German allies until France joined on its side. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 handed Sweden Western Pomerania, Wismar and Bremen-Verden as imperial fiefs, giving it a vote in the Imperial Diet. Overseas it planted New Sweden on the Delaware River in 1638 and built trading posts along the West African coast.
The peak came under Charles X Gustav. Under the 1658 Treaty of Roskilde, Denmark–Norway had to hand over Scania, Blekinge, Halland, Bohuslän, Bornholm and Trøndelag, about a third of its territory, although the last two were returned in 1660. At its height the empire covered some 1,100,000 square kilometres, held every Baltic island outside the Danish group and controlled the mouths of the great German rivers. Riga was its second city. Behind the glory lay strain: Queen Christina's spending pushed the state close to bankruptcy, and the Great Reduction of 1680 forced nobles to return crown lands.
Expansion had relied partly on weak neighbours, and they recovered. Charles XII won early victories but marched into Russia and suffered a decisive defeat at Poltava. By his death in 1718 the empire was badly shrunken, Finland went to Russia in 1809, and Swedish Pomerania was traded away after the Napoleonic Wars.
Source: Swedish Empire
