The sixteenth century is commonly judged to have been a transitional era in which older forms of war finance and military organization gave way to increasingly monetized and professional conflicts demanding more centralized state control over fiscal resources. The precise chronology of these changes and the degree to which the growing costs of early modern warfare drove, in Schumpeterian terms, the transition from “domain” to “tax” state continue to be the subject of lively discussion.Footnote 1 This longstanding scholarly preoccupation with locating the roots of European statehood in conflict-driven administrative and economic centralization was most succinctly encapsulated in Charles Tilly's oft-quoted dictum that “war made the state, and the state made war.”Footnote 2 However, as Tilly himself acknowledged, the past five centuries saw a stark decline from “something like 500 states, would-be states, statelets and statelike organizations” in the early sixteenth century to fewer than thirty by 1990—a process he characterized as “the work of consolidation.”Footnote 3 If the escalating costs of early modern warfare shaped the handful of states that came to dominate the modern continent, then those same forces evidently brought an end to the independence of a far greater number of cities, bishoprics, kingdoms, principalities, merchant leagues, and other late medieval sovereign territories. One such collection of small polities was the Livonian Confederation: a coalition of feudal domains, roughly contiguous with the modern republics of Estonia and Latvia, that was invaded by Czar Ivan IV “the Terrible” in January 1558 and subsequently partitioned by Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, and Denmark.Footnote 4
Most economic historians who have studied the series of interconnected sixteenth-century conflicts collectively referred to as the “Livonian War(s)” have focused on their ramifications for the stronger nations that invaded Livonia. This trend reflects the broader historiographical tendency to examine early modern military finance in the context of state formation, somewhat teleologically prioritizing the fiscal-military development of those polities that emerged as powerful, centralized nation-states. Consequently, in contrast to the enduring interest in the war economies of burgeoning powers like Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, and Muscovy, comparatively little attention has been afforded to Livonia's own finances on the eve of her dissolution. The Livonian Confederation was not a state—and certainly not a “fiscal-military state,” to borrow John Brewer's influential conceptFootnote 5—nor was it ever destined to become one. This fact should not preclude an examination of Livonian fiscal and military responses to the Muscovite invasion of 1558, even if those responses ultimately failed.
Livonia's fall has often been portrayed as something of an inevitability, with emphasis placed on the confederation's institutional weaknesses and on key military defeats suffered early in the war. The decisive significance of political and military factors is clear. Rather than revisit these comparatively well-known issues, however, this article examines specifically economic dimensions of the military challenge faced by Livonia in the three years between Ivan IV's 1558 invasion and the confederation's 1561 collapse. The first section is devoted to the employment of foreign mercenaries. The importance of these hired troops to the Livonian war effort, as well as the ensuing financial struggles to keep them paid and supplied, epitomized the dual currents of monetization and professionalization that were reshaping sixteenth-century European warfare. Despite growing scholarly interest in early modern mercenaries, their role in the Livonian War has received only sporadic attention.Footnote 6 The second section explores how a decentralized union of ecclesiastical statelets and Hanseatic towns struggled to muster the financial resources needed to resist a much larger neighboring power. In assessing the outcomes of these policies, the concluding section addresses the role played by the economic pressures of war in the dissolution of Old Livonia. Although concurring with Priit Raudkivi's observation that “the failure of Livonian statehood” is an “interesting question which deserves additional historical analysis,”Footnote 7 the objective of this study is not to speculate on what the Livonian authorities might have done differently to consolidate their loose confederation into a lasting state. Rather, the more modest aims are to investigate the nature of Livonian mercenary warfare from 1558 to 1561, elucidate the fiscal measures employed to meet the ensuing costs, and evaluate some of the immediate consequences.
Old Livonia has generally been seen as essentially “medieval,” and the end of its independence in 1561 is often equated with the end of the medieval era in the eastern Baltic. As a result, economic historians with an interest in the region prior to that date have focused on topics perceived to be characteristic of the Middle Ages, such as manorialism and Hanseatic trade.Footnote 8 This article instead seeks to bring an oft-overlooked corner of Europe into wider discussions of early modern mercenary warfare and war finance. The towns of the eastern Baltic littoral were hubs of commercial activity, but political disunity and decades of apathetic peace forestalled the development of domestic military capabilities that matched their prosperity. When war broke out in 1558, hiring mercenaries proved a ready means by which mercantile wealth could be converted into military force. However, although foreign mercenaries were essential to resisting the Muscovite invasion, they also drained the confederation's finances. Moreover, unlike in many other parts of early modern Europe, fiscal-military pressure did not lead to significant political and institutional centralization in Livonia. Faltering attempts to pool the confederation's resources for collective defense caused disputes between the regional authorities, stirred up old resentments among the estates, and ultimately hastened the confederation's fragmentation. At the same time, foreign powers leveraged promises of financial aid to court local power holders and insert themselves into Livonian affairs. Writing of the rise of Vasa Sweden, Klaus Zernack noted that “security politics … and economic gain went hand-in-hand from the outset.”Footnote 9 In contested peripheries like Livonia, which found themselves on the receiving end of other states’ empire-building projects, security and economy were joined just as inextricably. Here, however, the difficult fiscal-military balancing act of sixteenth-century warfare proved too great a challenge; internal divisions were compounded rather than overcome, expediting Old Livonia's disintegration and occupation by foreign powers.
Mercenary Recruitment and the Costs of Military Labor
Sixteenth-century governments faced no greater drain on their finances than war, and the growth in the scale, complexity, professionalization, and monetization of early modern conflict often tested the limits of their fiscal and logistical capabilities.Footnote 10 Maintaining military preparedness entailed a variety of costs associated with such activities as ship building, upkeep and modernization of fortifications, and procurement of artillery. In times of open conflict, by far the largest expense was hiring, paying, and supplying the soldiery. In the decentralized Livonian Confederation, the Livonian Order, the bishops, and the cities all hired their own troops, and the number of men employed by each of these regional power holders was in continuous flux. This, together with the inevitable limitations of sixteenth-century record-keeping, renders precise calculation of the entire confederation's net war expenses between 1558 and 1561 impossible. Nonetheless, although the nature of the evidence sometimes requires an approach that is more piecemeal than systematic, much pertaining to the conditions and costs of mercenary employment can be gleaned from Livonian correspondences, muster rolls, articles of war, chronicles, and other documentary evidence.
John Lynn has proposed a seven-stage typology of organizational military development in medieval and post-medieval Europe: “feudal, military-stipendiary, aggregate-contract, state-commission, popular-conscript, mass-reserve, and volunteer-technical.”Footnote 11 Sixteenth-century Livonian military forces were a composite of the first three of these stages, with domestic troops recruited through traditional networks of vassalage fighting alongside professional mercenaries mustered abroad and employed contractually. The battlefield importance of the knights of the Livonian Order, ostensibly the warrior elite of Old Livonia, was in a state of decline. Never numbering more than a few hundred men, they had struggled to recruit new members in the wake of the Reformation and the secularization of Prussia, and, by the mid-sixteenth century, many were elderly men with little or no military experience. Mobilization of the Estonian and Lettish peasantry had also become less common after armed uprisings had convinced the Baltic German elite to relegate the native population to more supporting roles.Footnote 12 The military duties of the burghers fluctuated according to several factors: the interpretation of laws governing their obligations; the particular circumstances of a given conflict; and the fact that some townsmen held rural properties that required them to render service to the Livonian Order or one of the bishops.Footnote 13 The towns remained hubs of military activity, but the active soldiering of the burghers progressively gave way to the expectation that they contribute financially.
As in many other parts of Europe, the growing ubiquity of mercenaries was inverse to the military participation of both the knighthood and the peasantry;Footnote 14 by the sixteenth century, professional mercenaries were the most effective element of the Livonian military. During the long decades of peace that preceded the outbreak of war in 1558, however, there had seldom been need to hire many of these troops, and the Livonians’ defensive capabilities suffered from chronic underinvestment and an insufficient pool of professional soldiers. Balthasar Russow, whose 1578 Chronica der Prouintz Lyfflandt is the most important contemporary account of the Livonian War, claimed that, on the eve of Ivan IV's invasion, the “very idle and militarily inexperienced Livonians had neither troops nor equipment” and were clad in “old rusty armor,” describing how when “the German Landsknechte passed through the provinces … the nobles and peasants, women, maidens, and servants gaped in surprise, as if they beheld a great sea monster. They had been unused to such strange guests before then.”Footnote 15 Evidently, these colorful soldiers of Middle Europe were still an unfamiliar sight on the shores of the eastern Baltic.
The polemical character of Russow's chronicle inclined him to exaggerate the administrative failings of the ruling elite.Footnote 16 Nonetheless, other accounts of the day support his contention that 1550s Livonia was dangerously unprepared for war. The February 1555 report of Joachim Burwitz, a Baltic German agent of King Gustav Vasa of Sweden, paints a damning picture of the confederation as divided and weak, noting that the population had not mobilized in recent memory and describing the knights of the Livonian Order as greedy, gluttonous, arrogant, and debauched.Footnote 17 Comparison may be made with the Revalian councillor Franz Schmedemann's scathing description of the Order's alleged vices and the knights’ failure to look to the needs of the land.Footnote 18 Bearing in mind that Russow, Burwitz, and Schmedemann shared a pro-Swedish disposition and thus a certain level of hostility to the Livonian Order, it is nonetheless noteworthy that all three specifically alleged underinvestment in the confederation's defenses and consequent unpreparedness for war. This impression is reinforced by foreign sources, such as Prince Andrey Kurbsky's firsthand account of the Russian invasion, in which the people of Narva are described as “completely inexperienced in [military] matters … [because] … they had lived for many years in peace.”Footnote 19
When, in January 1558, Livonia was invaded by battle-hardened Muscovite forces numbering in the tens of thousands, it was immediately apparent that the defenders would need far more professional soldiers. The previous year, a dispute with the Archbishop of Riga had prompted the Livonian Order to hire a number of mercenaries from Germany, and some had lingered in Livonia. These men were paid a monthly waiting fee of one gulden to remain at their employer's disposal, on the understanding that they would respond promptly if mustered for service.Footnote 20 In the meantime, unlike municipal garrisons or soldiers on active duty, they were permitted to supplement their stipend by engaging in other work, earning two incomes while the local authorities kept them on retainer. These troops were mobilized when the Muscovites invaded, but many more would have to be recruited from further afield.
Livonia's ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and mercantile elites enjoyed close ties with their counterparts throughout the Holy Roman Empire, and they quickly turned to these connections to gain access to trans-Baltic networks of military labor. Most foreign mercenaries were hired in northern Germany or Prussia and took ships across the Baltic from major commercial ports like Lübeck and Danzig (Gdańsk), which doubled as military recruitment hubs in times of war. Lists of soldiers stationed in Reval indicate that the men themselves originated from all over the German lands, and even a single Rotte (squad) could contain men from a variety of cities and regions.Footnote 21 Customarily, soldiers were paid an initial hiring fee (“Handgeld”) by a recruiter. They then made their way to Livonia to enlist in groups of one hundred to three hundred, with the ships’ captains receiving pay for transporting and feeding them during the crossing.Footnote 22 When money was scarce, commodities could be given in lieu of cash; in 1573, for example, captains shipping Scottish mercenaries to Sweden were paid in butter.Footnote 23
In the late summer of 1558, 1,200 Landsknechte recruited in Germany arrived in Livonia by sea, along with 100 gunners from Danzig and materiel from a number of other Hanseatic cities.Footnote 24 Christoph von Mecklenburg, the coadjutor of the Archbishopric of Riga, had already been recruiting troops in northern Germany for several months, and, in July, Gotthard Kettler, the Komtur of Fellin (Viljandi), had written to the Duke of Prussia to request that mercenaries be given free passage to Livonia to join the struggle.Footnote 25 On August 30, the arrival of some of these troops was reported to Duke Johan of Finland by Dr. Mattheus Friesner, a Revalian physician and informant to the Swedes, who notified the young duke that “five hundred German horses and riders have come to Riga, and it is, in fact, said that two thousand are supposedly coming to Riga via Prussia and Poland.”Footnote 26 Early the following year, in January 1559, Friesner again wrote to Duke Johan, this time to inform him that Christoph was leading 372 Reiter through Prussia into Livonia.Footnote 27 Itinerant mercenaries also made their way to the war zone of their own accord, in hope of finding employment upon arrival. This seems to have been the situation of the 50 cavalry and 150 Landsknechte who were hired by the Livonian Order in the late summer of 1559 after traveling to Livonia “at their own expense.”Footnote 28
The Landsknechte serving in Livonia were typically organized in much the same way as elsewhere. Mercenaries gathered at a muster point, where they were assigned to a Fähnlein (“banner” or “company”), each commanded by a Hauptmann (“captain”) and his staff. In theory, a Landsknecht Fähnlein contained 300 to 400 troops, but the number was often considerably lower due to desertion and casualties. In the case of mercenaries stationed in Reval, the size of a Fähnlein seems to have varied from 112 to 280, costing an average of 11,000 marks in wages every six months.Footnote 29 This reduced complement was not abnormal for the era, when the average size of the Landsknecht Fähnlein, the Swiss Haufen, and the Spanish tercio were all in decline as a result of both military attrition and the diminishing financial resources of those who employed them.Footnote 30 The Fähnlein was subdivided into Rotten (“squads”), ideally composed of about ten men. Surviving Munsterrollen of the Revalian Landsknechte from the year 1574 indicate that most of the Rotten in the city consisted of just eight men, although some contained as few as six and others as many as ten.Footnote 31 The total number of Rotten employed by the city at any given time appears to have fluctuated from fourteen to thirty-five. Elsewhere in Europe, between ten and twenty Fähnlein would form a Landsknecht Regiment. The Livonian strategy of sheltering in castles and fortified towns to avoid pitched battle against the more numerous Muscovites meant that they rarely deployed large field armies, so the Fähnlein remained the highest organizational unit.
To date, there has been no detailed study of Livonian mercenary recruiters or military enterprisers during the Livonian War.Footnote 32 A few general observations may be made. Foreign private military enterprisers did not play a central role in the raising of Livonian armies, nor did mercenary leaders exercise the kind of political influence seen in some other parts of Europe. Most often, recruitment was carried out by those with direct ties to the Livonian elite, such as members of the Livonian Order or confidants of one of the bishops. Militarily experienced noblemen were a natural choice, as their political contacts and military nous equipped them to navigate the mercenary markets of the early modern Baltic. In the summer of 1559, for example, Christoffer von Münchhausen, brother of Bishop Johannes of Ösel-Wiek and Courland, traveled to Denmark to hire mercenaries fighting in King Frederick's invasion of Dithmarschen.Footnote 33 Münchhausen was doubtless selected to undertake this mission because of his familial ties to a leading figure in the Livonian Confederation, his connections in Copenhagen, and prior experience gained as a mercenary officer in Germany and Spain. Mercenaries serving one of the larger towns were commanded by an Oberst (“colonel”) chosen by the town council; in the case of Reval, for example, this office was initially held by Friedrich von Sandsteden and later by Hermann Luhr. The Oberst was assisted by the Stadt-Kriegshauptmann, although little is recorded about the precise duties of this officer.Footnote 34 Despite being under the direct leadership of their own Hauptmann, mercenaries in Livonia were ultimately answerable to a member of the local elite, and mercenary leaders did not command the kind of power and prestige enjoyed by the condottieri of Italy or the enterpriser-colonels of the Thirty Years’ War.
For the mercenaries themselves, the doubtful promise of wages was often less enticing than the immediate receipt of Handgeld, the future prospect of plunder, and exemption from the restrictive social norms of civilian life.Footnote 35 Would-be recruiters required significant capital up front, both to induce soldiers to enlist and because the mercenary captains knew that their employers were likely to exhaust their funds and default on payment of wages.Footnote 36 At first, the Livonian Order offered to pay ordinary mercenary troopers (“gemeine Knechte”) four gulden, those of noble birth six gulden, and captains forty gulden per month.Footnote 37 Articles for the Revalian Landsknechte from the year 1561 indicate that these men were also paid four gulden each month.Footnote 38 This wage was consistent with that customarily paid to Landsknechte elsewhere.Footnote 39 The Livonians also offered a number of professional perks, promising to ransom any men captured by the enemy and to pay a pension to those who were incapacitated in battle.Footnote 40 When war broke out in early 1558, the under-equipped Livonian Order had just fifty arquebuses and therefore gave higher pay to mercenaries who had their own guns.Footnote 41 They also employed a number of the formidable Doppelsöldner (“double mercenaries”), elite troops whose experience and superior facility with specialist weaponry earned them twice the salary of a normal soldier.Footnote 42 Standard-bearers and drummers were also paid a double wage.
The terms of the mercenaries’ employment were outlined in their contract, referred to as the Bestallung or Kapitulation, few examples of which survive. As professional military laborers, mercenaries were acutely aware of their contractual rights and obligations. These were stipulated in the articles governing their conduct read out by their commanding officer at the Verlesung, a ceremonial gathering convened for this purpose.Footnote 43 The men swore solemn oaths to uphold their articles and stay true to their employers. In Livonia, it was customary to renew these oaths every six months. In one ceremony held at Riga on June 8, 1558, the troops promised to remain loyal, obey their officers, and not to desert; the obligations of their employers and the terms of their pay were also reaffirmed at this time.Footnote 44 The war and camp articles issued by the Archbishop of Riga in December of the same year reiterated the importance of swearing oaths of loyalty.Footnote 45
Under certain circumstances, mercenaries serving in Livonia could receive additional pay. Calculation of a month's service was reset after each successful siege or battle, and bonus payments were handed out before dangerous assaults on breaches.Footnote 46 Such inducements were frequently sweetened with offers of plunder. When Livonian forces commanded by Gotthard Kettler retook Ringen (Rõngu) in late October 1558, his mercenaries were initially unwilling to face the withering fire of the defending streltsy, but they stormed the castle when promised booty and coin. Rewards for particularly gallant actions were sometimes given to soldiers after the fact. Johann Renner recounts in his chronicle that, in December 1559, the Livonian Order gifted the officer Hans Uthermarcke a “samite garment from head to foot” as a reward for leading an attack on the castle of Lais (Laiuse) after he had been shot through the neck.Footnote 47 Only four of the eight companies of Landsknechte present at the siege had obeyed the order to assault the castle. Mercenaries were motivated by an ongoing calculation of the balance between mortal risk and material reward, as well as less tangible factors such as honor and esprit de corps, and it seems that the men besieging Lais were divided in their assessment of the potential risks and rewards. Further occupational attractions of the professional soldier could include exemption from such onerous duties as digging trenches and constructing siege works, tasks that could instead be assigned to conscripted peasants or even prisoners of war. In December 1558, for example, captured Russian soldiers were reportedly being used to construct defensive walls around Riga.Footnote 48
Despite the risks of soldiering and the common failure of employers to deliver their promised wages, multitudes of men traveled from near and far to enlist in the Livonian War and other conflicts of the day. Why was this so? Drawing simplistic equivalencies between civilian and military pay is problematic. Nonetheless, contextualizing the soldiers’ wages can elucidate both the magnitude of the expenses borne by their employers and the attraction of mercenary service to the troops themselves (bearing in mind, of course, that they often expected to derive most of their income from plunder). The ordinary Landsknecht's theoretical salary of forty-eight gulden per annum was similar to that of a skilled craftsman and about double that of an agricultural laborer in most parts of Germany.Footnote 49 The Doppelsöldner's salary of almost one hundred would have been an enviable income for a common man.Footnote 50 Professional mercenaries also typically enjoyed higher pay than local conscripts and volunteers. In Reval, for example, both foreign Landsknechte and townsmen participated in guard duty, and each group was led by a separate Wachtmeister (“sergeant” or “constable”). However, the Wachtmeister appointed to oversee the local guardsmen received a mere quarter of the pay afforded to the Wachtmeister of the mercenaries. One cannot precisely compare the wages paid to foreign mercenaries and those of Livonian workers in other professions because neither were uniform or constant.Footnote 51 It is clear, though, that employing large numbers of professional troops was a heavy financial burden.
Meeting the Costs: Livonian Fiscal Responses to Military Crisis
The Livonians’ forces swelled quickly as they mobilized to resist the Muscovite invasion. According to a report sent to Duke Johan of Finland, the Livonian Order's main army had grown to more than 7,000 professional infantry, 10,000 peasant conscripts, and 2,000 cavalry by October 1558.Footnote 52 Ongoing contributions to the Order's forces from the cities and the bishoprics are also described: 350 arquebusiers, 250 horses, and four falconets from Reval; 300 men from Riga; and so forth.Footnote 53 The scale of Livonian recruitment, the continuous arrival of more mercenaries, and a variety of other military expenses compounded financial pressures. Measures would have to be taken to meet the growing costs of this multifaceted fiscal challenge.
First, escalating military expenses necessitated the pooling of vast monetary resources. This posed both political and logistical difficulties, as the decentralized confederation's regional elites looked to their own interests and resisted interference in their financial affairs. The lack of a single paramount authority with the suasive or coercive clout to impose vital war measures on the recalcitrant burghers and bishops who controlled much of Livonia's wealth rendered the confederation ill prepared for a prolonged conflict. The situation was not ameliorated by the fact that the two highest authorities in the land, the Land Master of the Livonian Order and the Archbishop of Riga, were perennial rivals. Second, the Livonian economy was primarily based on manorialism and trade, with the nobility's estates producing grain for export through the Hanseatic towns. The seasonal agricultural cycle was not suited to providing the steady capital flow or the fiscal flexibility needed to finance an army, and the devastation caused by the war further compounded the difficulty of paying for it, as incessant Muscovite raiding despoiled rural estates. Lastly, the war accentuated internal political and economic divisions. The relationship between the manorial nobility and the urban merchants was often more competitive than symbiotic. The aristocracy begrudged the guilds’ monopoly on foreign trade, and city councils proved reluctant to fund the defenses of rural hinterlands. As the military crisis unfolded, the fractious regions and estates increasingly prioritized defending their own interests over those of the whole.
As a loose confederation of theocratic territories and semi-autonomous cities, Livonia's responses to the Russian invasion took the form of both collective and regional efforts. It would be difficult to dispute Heikki Pihlajamäki's assertion that we cannot speak of a true “administration” in “feudal” Livonia, although some of the confederation's constituent parts, especially the towns, had local administrations of their own.Footnote 54 The principal mechanism of centralized fiscal cooperation was the Landtag, a diet of estates from across the five realms.Footnote 55 A prime function of the Landtag was defensive coordination in times of war. The nature of the economy meant that revenue was collected locally and often reached the authorities indirectly through ecclesiastical, aristocratic, or mercantile avenues. This system benefited regional stakeholders, who jealously guarded their traditional rights and privileges, but it did not provide the quantity or liquidity of capital demanded by the monetized mercenary warfare of the mid-sixteenth century. The Landtag responded to military crisis by raising extraordinary war taxes, which, as throughout the Holy Roman Empire, were fiscal expediencies that were only likely to be endorsed by the estates in times of military need.Footnote 56 The lack of an executive arm meant that the confederation's diffuse elites were largely left to implement the Landtag's rulings as they saw fit (or sometimes not at all). Despite these challenges, the early years of the war do indicate some willingness for defensive cooperation.
The Landtag held at Riga on July 25, 1559, outlined a number of measures intended to strengthen the war effort. Noblemen were required to muster a third of their able-bodied male peasants, who would be divided into companies led and trained by Landsknecht officers. Regulations on the division of plunder and prohibitions against forceful requisitioning were agreed, along with the injunction that the cities keep the soldiery supplied. The Archbishop of Riga and the Livonian land master were each to command their own forces, but the whole army was to be subject to common regulations decided by council. A special war tax was levied, with the archbishop receiving all of his archdiocese's contributions and half of those from the city of Riga, and the land master would receive those from the Livonian Order's lands and the other half of the Rigan contribution.Footnote 57 Noblemen were required to pay two marks for every intact farm under their jurisdiction and one mark for farms that the Muscovites had already ransacked. For their part, peasants were to give one mark for the head of a farm, half a mark for his wife, and a farthing for anyone else over the age of twelve. Innkeepers paid the same as other peasants. Those living in villages and cities contributed one mark for every member of the household, regardless of age. The receipt of some of these taxes is mentioned in a letter sent to Land Master Wilhelm von Fürstenberg on August 29, 1559, and a list of contributions from officers of the Livonian Order and the Couronian nobility survives from August 31.Footnote 58 The Landsknechte themselves were asked to contribute ten marks for every hundred that they were paid, a stipulation justified by their receipt of a yearly income and other professional privileges.Footnote 59
Taxation was not the only fiscal measure undertaken by the Livonian authorities as they struggled to meet the costs of war. In January 1560, currency reforms were introduced, devaluing the Rigan mark from seventy per gold “Portugaleser” to eighty, already down from sixty a mere fifteen months before.Footnote 60 Correspondences between the Livonian Order, the Reval city council, the Revalian mint master, and the mercenaries stationed in the city reveal that, in July 1560, the Order was attempting to mint coins needed to pay the hired troops and repay their growing debts.Footnote 61 It appears that these efforts were not particularly successful. Rapid inflation and market confusion ensued, and many merchants simply raised their prices or continued to accept coinage at the old rates. It was the “poor peasants,” Johann Renner recorded, who were affected most adversely by the currency reevaluations.Footnote 62
Livonian elites also sought to acquire funds from overseas. By the summer of 1558, Land Master Wilhelm von Fürstenberg was already attempting to secure a huge loan of 200,000 thalers from Duke Johan of Finland in order to procure supplies and pay the troops.Footnote 63 He appealed for Johan's assistance again that fall, while Gotthard Kettler, who had assumed a position of functional leadership within the Livonian Order, wrote directly to King Gustav of Sweden to request a loan in mid-October of the following year.Footnote 64 Kettler, whose diplomatic outlook was broadly pro-Polish, was also in regular contact with King Sigismund Augustus and several Lithuanian magnates. The Poles expressed their friendship but explained their unwillingness to provide a loan to the Livonian Order, suggesting instead that Kettler continue to look to Sweden for funds.Footnote 65 The Holy Roman Empire lacked the appetite or capability for direct military intervention in Livonia, but it was seen as a potential source of financial support. In August 1559, Jorgen Syburg, castellan of Düneburg (Daugavpils), petitioned the Reichstag for aid, and the electors and estates agreed to levy a special tax of 100,000 gulden to assist the Livonian struggle.Footnote 66 An additional contribution of 200,000 gulden was approved by the estates the following year. Neither of these sums was ever raised, and, although the emperor continued to protest the Russian invasion, concrete aid from the empire was not forthcoming.Footnote 67 Pepijn Brandon has observed that early modern military finance in “times of exploding costs and permanent emergencies” relied both on domestic resources and on the “strength of commercial and financial networks abroad.”Footnote 68 The Livonians certainly had well-established commercial ties throughout the Baltic, but, during the struggle of 1558–1561, these failed to yield meaningful aid.
Keeping the troops paid and supplied was a challenge from the outset. Documentary evidence from 1558 to 1561 reveals broad pecuniary hardship, with long-standing resentments and tensions exacerbated by demands for money. Correspondences of the day tell of the burden placed on communities forced to host the mercenaries, regional commanders straining to keep their men paid and supplied, promises of imminent relief from the authorities, solicitations for pay from the mercenaries themselves, internal displacement of refugees, and widespread pillaging, mutiny, and desertion by unpaid troops. On March 3, 1558, for example, a mere two months after the start of war, the mayor and council of Riga reported to the Livonian Order that the mercenaries were costing so much money that the burghers were refusing to provide their wages, while the burghers countered that the other estates should be contributing more.Footnote 69 The council estimated that it already needed 15,000 thalers to pay the men. The issue was still unresolved in June, when the council reported that the burghers had not yet provided the money needed to pay the troops and pleaded with the Livonian Order to send 4,000 marks to the captain, Wolf Singehoff.Footnote 70 This was only the beginning.
On April 23, 1558, the mayor and council of the strategic border city of Narva had written to the Livonian land master to gripe about the quantity of supplies being consumed by the Revalian and Rigan Landsknechte garrisoning the city, while the city of Reval protested the costs of supporting these troops.Footnote 71 Reval's mercenaries, led by one Wolf Wigel von Strassburg, departed Narva on May 3, causing great consternation in the city, while the Rigan Landsknechte remained in the city and continued to appeal for their overdue pay. On May 9, a Rigan envoy, Jürgen Boemer, arrived at Narva with the intent to pay and then discharge the Rigan Landsknechte. Gotthard Kettler, who was camped a short distance away with the Livonian Order's field army, suggested that the captain of the Rigan troops, Wolf Singehoff, travel to Riga while his men remained at Narva. Singehoff protested that he wanted to pay the troops first. This dispute was still ongoing when an opportunistic Russian attack captured the city a few days later. The fall of Narva highlights how monetary disputes undermined the Livonian war effort by stoking resentments in wealthy cities like Reval and Riga that were expected to finance the defenses of the rest of the confederation, while lack of pay reduced the commitment of the mercenaries themselves. The failure to resolve these issues significantly contributed to the confederation's demise.
By the early summer of 1558, a series of Muscovite victories had sent a wave of panic across the region. Although these fears were of an overtly military nature, they cannot be separated from fiscal considerations. Two letters sent on July 23 by the mayor and council of Reval to the leaders of the Livonian Order reported that the burghers were struggling to find sufficient supplies and adequate housing for the mercenaries billeted in the city; funds were requested to appease the impetrations of the soldiery and assurances sought that the Order would come to the city's aid in the event of a Russian attack.Footnote 72 The Revalians, together with the nobility of the northern Estonian counties of Wierland (Virumaa) and Harrien (Harjumaa), dispatched legates to Copenhagen, but, wary of being dragged into a war against the Muscovites, the Danes responded only by sending war supplies.Footnote 73 Franz von Segenhagen, the castellan of the city's keep, abandoned his post to the pro-Danish Christoffer von Münchhausen, leading to a lengthy dispute among the Livonian Order, the municipal authorities, Münchhausen, and the mercenaries stationed in the castle (who now pledged their loyalty to the king of Denmark).Footnote 74 Money was a significant factor in the mercenaries’ decision to abandon the Livonian cause, with intelligence reports describing how the Landsknechte holding the castle had become “gantz unwillig” (“altogether indignant”) due to a lack of pay, which, by October 17, they had not received in four months.Footnote 75 The mood in Reval broadly reflected that of the confederation as a whole. Faced with difficulties of its own, the Order temporized, instructing the increasingly recalcitrant towns, vassals, and mercenaries to await the promised arrival of money from abroad and advising against turning to outside help from Denmark or Sweden, whose involvement in Livonian affairs was rightly perceived as threatening to the region's sovereignty.
In early 1559, a six-month (May to November) truce was negotiated—a window of peace that allowed Moscow to respond to a Tatar incursion from the south and for the Livonians to once again attempt to muster support from abroad.Footnote 76 Although the truce of 1559 offered welcome military respite, its timing was financially problematic and did little to ease political tensions. A small band of Livonian captives who had escaped imprisonment in Russia and made their way back to Estonia confided that the czar was anxious about the quantity of German soldiers being hired by the Livonians while he was fighting the Crimeans in the south.Footnote 77 Ivan's concerns mirrored the Livonians’ own perennial fear that the czar might use his enormous wealth to import foreign mercenaries and materiel.Footnote 78 A more pressing issue was the large quantity of recently hired Landsknechte whom the Livonians would now have to pay through the six-month truce without “putting them to use.”Footnote 79 It was becoming clear that any prolongation of the war—even a truce that might otherwise have been welcomed—would exacerbate rather than relieve the Livonians’ financial woes.
Strategically undesirable logistical compromises became necessary to maintain the war effort. Over the winter of 1559–1560, for example, troops were dispersed across the confederation. This was ostensibly to spread the burden of supply, but it also prevented the mercenaries from banding together to demand their overdue pay. Compromising military security in the name of fiscal necessity had a predictably deleterious effect on the confederation's defenses. Scattered in small groups throughout the country, mercenary units posted to remote castles and villages could do little to resist Russian raiders and survived by robbing the very communities that they had been tasked with defending (a practice that the Landsknechte euphemistically called “gardening”). By the spring of 1560, Gotthard Kettler could offer the Landsknechte only half the wage that they had been promised when they enlisted. The chronicler Salomon Henning noted that many of the mercenaries were refusing to stay in the field on the quite reasonable grounds that they had not been paid and that the harsh winter had rendered the countryside too barren to yield fodder or food.Footnote 80 Expenses were reduced through the dismissal of some of the costliest and best troops, such as Reiter and Doppelsöldner,Footnote 81 and there was a danger that the army would melt away as unpaid troops began to desert. Henning observed a clear causal connection between the Livonians’ inability to secure funds from abroad, their failure to pay the troops, widespread desertion, and the confederation's declining military fortunes.
One tried most diligently and earnestly to find any possible means of retaining the services of the mercenary cavalry and other German soldiers from abroad until they could be paid and mollified with money from the empire and with some funds expected from Sweden in return for certain guarantees of repayment mentioned above. When they realized that nothing was forthcoming from either of these two sources, some of them withdrew with flags furled and went elsewhere, thus bringing new calamities upon the greatly beset fatherland.Footnote 82
Although the situation was different in every region of the confederation, commonalities emerged: desire for protection from the Muscovites that the Livonian authorities could no longer provide; economic exhaustion; prioritization of self-interest over the preservation of the confederation as a whole; and the intrusion of foreign powers into local affairs. The process of dissolution gathered pace during the six-month truce of 1559. On September 26, Johannes von Münchhausen, who was both Bishop of Ösel-Wiek and Bishop of Courland, received 30,000 thalers for the sale of his dioceses to the teenaged Duke Magnus of Holstein, younger brother of King Frederick II of Denmark.Footnote 83 With Dorpat occupied by the Russians and the episcopal overlordship of Ösel-Wiek and Courland sold to a Danish prince, three of the confederation's five domains were now in foreign hands. Duke Magnus arrived at Arensburg (Kuressaare) on April 15, 1560, with five ships and several hundred mercenaries. Although foreign princes were technically forbidden to possess territory within the Livonian Confederation, many rejoiced at the Danish intervention and looked to Magnus and his backers in Copenhagen for salvation. The relationship between Magnus and the Livonian Order, however, was antagonistic and mistrustful. Land Master Gotthard Kettler would find himself conducting tense negotiations with Magnus at Pernau (Pärnu) when, on August 2, the Livonian Order's field army was caught and destroyed by a much larger Muscovite force at Ermes (Ērģeme), the decisive battle in the first phase of the Livonian War.Footnote 84
Following this crushing defeat, it was obvious that the war was lost, and defections from the Livonian cause continued through late 1560 and into 1561. In Estonia, the growing number of noblemen who flocked to the newly arrived Duke Magnus were drawn by the promise of security under Danish patronage, but also by more venal concerns. Many members of the Livonian gentry had taken up paid military service as members of the banners of cavalry referred to as “Hofleute,” which, at least in a strictly military sense, fought much like mercenary Reiter recruited abroad.Footnote 85 As the conflict wore on, the Livonian authorities proved no more capable of paying these men than their foreign troops, prompting many among the Hofleute to cast in their lot with Magnus. Likewise, as Jüri Kivimäe has recently described, the Estonian peasant uprising of 1560 was motivated in part by widespread dissatisfaction with the requirement that the peasants continue to pay taxes and provide labor for noblemen who had failed to protect them from the depredations of the Muscovites.Footnote 86 More and more of the foreign mercenaries also went unpaid or had to be released from Livonian service, and a wave of mutinies and desertions ensued, facilitating the Russian capture of some of the defenders’ strongest castles.Footnote 87
In the north, Gotthard Kettler continued to write to the town council of Reval and the mercenaries stationed in the city, promising that money was on the way from the Livonian Order, but the burghers responded by demanding either immediate aid or permission to seek out an alternative patron.Footnote 88 Writing to his brother, King Frederick, Duke Magnus noted that the city was in a turmoil of indecision, with some favoring Danish protection, others looking to the Swedes or Russians, and others advocating continued loyalty to the Livonian Order.Footnote 89 By late 1560, Sweden had emerged as the most viable candidate. The Swedish acquisition of Reval and the surrounding counties has generally been discussed in macroscopic, geopolitical terms as a first step in the establishment of Stockholm's incipient Baltic empire.Footnote 90 More exigent concerns also played a part in the establishment of Swedish control over the city. Informed by his agents in Estonia, Duke Johan of Finland correctly surmised that the Russian invasion could prove an opportunity for other powers to expand into the vacuum left by the disintegrating Livonian Confederation.Footnote 91 As his close advisor Henrik Classon Horn observed, the situation in Livonia was such that “whoever comes first, they will open the door for him.”Footnote 92 Official diplomacy between Swedish emissaries, the Revalian town council, and the local gentry was supplemented by more underhand approaches, as Swedish agents moved to gain effective control on the ground by bribing the mercenary garrison with promises of higher pay.Footnote 93 The council and noblemen swore fealty to Sweden in early June, with King Erik confirming Reval's municipal privileges on August 2, 1561.Footnote 94
With the remnants of the confederation slipping through his fingers, Gotthard Kettler made his final decision as Livonian land master: on November 28, he signed the Second Treaty of Vilnius, reestablishing the remaining independent portions of the Livonian Confederation (save Riga) as the newly formed Duchy of Courland and Semigallia and Duchy of Livonia, subject to Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. After almost four years of war, the Livonian Confederation had ceased to exist.
Analysis and Conclusions
Most of the foreign mercenaries who fought for the Livonians between 1558 and 1561 were Landsknechte and Reiter who served under terms similar to those that prevailed in the German lands whence they were recruited, albeit with some regional differences. These hired troops provided a means by which the region's mercantile wealth could be transformed into the kind of professional military force that was lacking in Livonia itself. Without them, the Muscovite invasion could not have been resisted for as long as it was. Nonetheless, mercenaries proved to be a double-edged sword, strengthening Livonia militarily but also exhausting her financially and exposing disagreements over regional contributions to collective defense. Further, while growing reliance on professional mercenaries proved a convenient means of circumventing feudal limitations on military service,Footnote 95 any reduction in the combat role of the vassals, burghers, and peasants was accompanied by a concomitant demand that they contribute monetarily to the support of the hired troops. Again, this stoked resentment among the estates, particularly as the authorities were incapable of providing the protection that they had promised in return. All the while, the growing inability to keep the soldiery paid precipitated a cycle of plunder, desertion, mutiny, and defection. All in all, the Livonian experience suggests that Machiavelli was only half right in his characterization of mercenaries as “inutili e pericolose”—they were certainly dangerous but proved far from useless.
In Livonia, the fiscal burdens of early modern mercenary warfare did not spark a military revolution or initiate a lasting program of institutional and economic reform, let alone give rise to the kind of more centralized state that was emerging (gradually and imperfectly) in other parts of sixteenth-century Europe. This is not to say that the Livonian Confederation was as atavistic or its leaders as indolent as has sometimes been claimed, both by contemporary critics like Balthasar Russow and by some modern historians, nor that Livonian responses to the challenges of early modern warfare should be seen as uniquely ineffectual in an era universally plagued by such inefficiencies.Footnote 96 Between 1558 and 1561, members of the Livonian elite did try to use their political and mercantile connections to secure much-needed military and financial aid from abroad, and there were faltering internal attempts to better coordinate the confederation's war effort. However, neither reliance on traditional aristocratic and Hanseatic networks nor palliative measures approved by the Landtag could adequately compensate for the failure to adopt the kinds of fiscal, military, and institutional reforms that were taking root in other parts of Europe—especially when faced with a Muscovite foe whose manpower and resources so greatly eclipsed Livonia's own.
Jeff Fynn-Paul et alia have proposed that all early modern states were faced with the “harsh reality of a limited supply of military resources” and that this forced them to “confront ‘the market’ in some way or another”—either by subverting it, working with it, or bringing it under the purview of the state itself.Footnote 97 The Livonians attempted, at times, to employ both of the first two strategies, in each case with only limited success. Market subversion took the form of requisitioning, currency devaluation, and embargoes; but these efforts were met by resistance from the assertive burghers and nobility, who had long used their economic clout to push back against attempts by the Livonian Order and the bishops to impinge upon their traditional rights.Footnote 98 Market cooperation in the military sphere manifested most obviously through the hiring of mercenaries. However, the more entrepreneurial characters among the Livonian elite often prioritized personal interests over the common cause. Christoffer von Münchhausen, for example, was tasked with leveraging his connections in Denmark to hire mercenaries for the Livonian war effort, but, all the while, he was also negotiating the sale of his brother's dioceses to Duke Magnus of Holstein and scheming to wrest control of Reval from the Livonian Order. The foreign mercenary captains proved to be equally unreliable partners, and many of the Livonian Order's own vassals abandoned the cause and embraced military enterprise in the service of other powers. As for market centralization, convening the Landtag for the raising of war taxes could provide some financial relief, but such measures should be understood as expedient solutions aimed at meeting an immediate fiscal deficit within an existing administrative framework, not as serious attempts to bring the economy under “state” control.
Given that the cost of early modern warfare is often thought to have stimulated institutional and economic centralization elsewhere in Europe, it is worth considering why the fiscal-military demands of 1558 to 1561 instead led to fragmentation in Livonia. First, timing was an important factor. When the Muscovites invaded in 1558, the Livonian Confederation had not fought a major war in half a century, and Livonia's military investments had failed to keep pace with those of her more bellicose neighbors. With the odds already stacked heavily in Moscow's favor, what efforts the Livonians did make were simply too little and too late. Second, Livonia's international connections proved to be a distinctly mixed blessing. The Livonian Confederation's most significant ties had always been to the Hanseatic League, the Teutonic Order, and the Holy Roman Empire. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Hansa was no longer the commercial titan that it had once been, and the 1525 secularization of Prussia and spread of the Reformation had weakened the Teutonic Order. Collectively, the empire remained formidable, but it was largely incapable of projecting its power, and military intervention on the far side of the Baltic was out of the question.Footnote 99 Bereft of support from their traditional allies, the Livonians turned to Poland, Lithuania, Denmark, and Sweden in search of financial assistance. However, these efforts did not yield many tangible results, and, as individual Livonian leaders and regional authorities began to conduct diplomacy independently, the war effort was irreparably fragmented.Footnote 100 When the major foreign powers did at last enter the fray, they did so on their own terms, offering the direct protection of overlordship.
The principal weakness of the Livonian Confederation on the eve of its downfall is widely held to have been its internal disunity. This system of regional autonomy had long benefited local elites, but it ultimately proved incapable of resisting encroachment by more centralized powers. Livonia was far from poor, but, as Rafael Torres Sánchez has observed, early modern warfare demanded not only money but also social consensus “for it to be raised and spent on military activity.”Footnote 101 In sixteenth-century Livonia, this consensus was not strong. The Livonian Order, the bishops, the cities, and the various estates had been willing to make grudging concessions to a system from which they profited and which protected their traditional rights and privileges. As elsewhere in the early modern world, however, the Livonian population was “deeply resistant to anything that interfered with normal economic life,” whether new taxes or threats to longstanding trade.Footnote 102 The inability to effectively resist the Russian onslaught, coupled with escalating demands of financial support for an increasingly futile war effort, removed much of the rationale that had held the loose union together. Should the confederation's dissolution between 1558 and 1561 therefore be seen as a failure of Livonian statehood?
In a sense, the question is presumptuous in that it ascribes to Old Livonia an ambition that was likely never held. Livonia's cherished confederal system functioned to protect the internal autonomy of its constituent members as much as to defend against outside threats, and it was largely by design that there was no sufficiently authoritative figure around whom a process of political centralization could begin. Older studies tended to see the Livonian Order's position within the confederation as that of a paramount authority with state-building potential (a scenario inviting comparison with Prussia), while the role of the bishops was often either de-emphasized or portrayed as an impediment to the Order's unifying ambitions. In contrast, recent scholarship has taken a more balanced view of the distribution of power, emphasizing the importance of negotiation and compromise. Juhan Kreem, for example, has made a strong case that the Order is best understood as but one of Old Livonia's constituent factions, while Madis Maasing has convincingly argued that the bishops of Ösel-Wiek, Dorpat, and Courland had a “decisive say” in Livonian affairs and a vested interest in maintaining the balance of power between the Livonian Order and the Archbishop of Riga.Footnote 103 Discussion thus shifts away from why the leaders of the Livonian Order—whose preeminence within the confederation was once accepted more or less implicitly—never formed a centralized administration and, still more speculatively, what might have happened if they had. Instead, we are left with the more fundamental question of why no prince, faction, or estate—the Order included—ever achieved a sufficiently dominant position to secure uncontested leadership of the confederation in the first place. If, as Nicola Gennaioli and Hans-Joachim Voth have argued, “statebuilding consists of centralizing the tax system, which increases the extent to which the ruler (and not local power holders) controls revenue collection,”Footnote 104 then the fact that none of the confederation's “local power holders” ever emerged as a clear “ruler” was a major impediment to the initiation of this process in Livonia.
Whatever the long-term trajectory of the confederation's internal political dynamics, there can be no doubt that the Muscovite invasion of 1558 starkly exposed the Livonians’ inability to defend their interests from a powerful external threat, as well as the certainty that those interests would be severely curtailed should they fall under the autocratic rule of Ivan IV. In this context, it is little wonder that many Livonians turned to outsiders like Duke Magnus and foreign powers like Poland and Sweden, who offered to protect local economic concerns and uphold traditional privileges. Margus Laidre's assertion that the tendency of every Livonian “small state” to seek foreign help on its own effectively “signed their death sentence” is certainly valid in the sense that those “small states” ceased to exist as independent political entities.Footnote 105 From a social and economic perspective, however, the Livonian Confederation always mattered most as a system that protected the status and prosperity of its leading members and privileged estates. When the challenges posed by the military crisis of 1558–1561 proved insurmountable within the existing political framework, it should come as no surprise that many Livonians found the means to safeguard their economic security through partnership with strong foreign rulers, in essence choosing to exercise what Richard Bonney has called the “exit option” often available to wealthy elites.Footnote 106 And, although incorporation into the empire-building projects of larger powers inevitably entailed a degree of political peripheralization, this was not always overly deleterious to traditional social and economic privileges.Footnote 107
In a broader European context, passing comparison has occasionally been made between the Livonian War and the Habsburg-Valois wars for dominion over Italy. Alexander Filyushkin, for example, has characterized both as struggles aimed at “tying microstates to new monarchies,” a feature also shared by the Dutch Revolt.Footnote 108 Detailed comparison with other conflicts of the age is beyond the scope of the present study, but it is worth briefly considering why, at least by the late 1550s, the Livonian Confederation proved less able to resist invasion by larger powers than did coalitions of small states elsewhere in Europe. First, although the major Italian polities were certainly much smaller than France or the Habsburg realms, they were quite powerful when compared with the statelets of the eastern Baltic littoral; indeed, several of the larger Italian states were individually more populous than the entire Livonian Confederation.Footnote 109 This discrepency suggests that caution is needed when proposing equivalencies between “small” polities across demographically dissimilar regions.
In addition to sheer size, there is what Raudkivi has termed the “quasi-colonialism” of the Livonian Confederation.Footnote 110 Socially and politically dominated by a Baltic German minority, the leadership of the Livonian Confederation was periodically replenished by influxes of newcomers from Germany. Like the crusaders and merchants who had established the territory in earlier centuries, many (though not all) of these ambitious men saw Livonia as a land of opportunity where they could achieve personal advancement, rather than as a true homeland.Footnote 111 Likewise, although the Teutonic Order and the Hanseatic League played a defining role in Livonian affairs, neither organization was itself Livonian. The Dutch and Italian struggles against foreign domination acquired proto-nationalistic overtones, with local resistance to invasion often coalescing around native leaders and homegrown political movements. In Old Livonia, where the ruling elites were themselves exogenous and the indigenous Estonian and Lettish majority was excluded from political power, it was much more difficult for such a process to take place. Rather than find new ways to muster domestic resources or overhaul the internal administrative mechanisms of the confederation, the first inclination of Livonia's rulers when faced with Ivan IV's invasion was to look to Germany for aid. When it became clear that salvation would not be forthcoming from the Holy Roman Empire, it was not such a radical step to turn instead to Poland, Lithuania, Denmark, and Sweden.
The experience of Livonia between 1558 and 1561 highlights the value of including smaller polities that did not undergo processes of state formation in broader discussions of early modern military finance and the economy of war. It is true that the ecclesiastical dominions and mercantile towns that made up the Livonian Confederation did not survive the transition from the late Middle Ages to the modern era as independent sovereign territories. By combining the traditional analytical emphasis on institutional structure and political sovereignty with an approach that foregrounds actual fiscal and military responses to the vicissitudinous challenges of early modern warfare, however, we can move beyond the common association of the peripheral with the passive. Livonian elites, like their counterparts in other small regions on the edges of expanding empires, actively pursued a variety of fiscal solutions to military crisis. The fact that many of these solutions met with decidedly mixed results should not encourage a return to the anachronistic understanding of minor polities as failed proto-states awaiting inevitable absorption by more institutionally advanced great powers. The picture that emerges instead is one of shifting networks of local stakeholders struggling to defend their interests against a messy backdrop of private military enterprise, factional cooperation and rivalry, personal ambition, entrepreneurial expediency, and the sheer will to survive.
