Franco-Swedish diplomatic correspondence during the Northern Seven Years’ war (based on materials from the national archives of Sweden)

Abstract

The article presents the publication of four official letters from Charles IX of France to Erik XIV of Sweden. The documents – original manuscripts preserved in the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm – are published here in full for the first time, accompanied by a Russian translation and scholarly commentary. The texts of the letters concern the peacekeeping mission of the French crown during the Northern Seven Years’ War, fought between Sweden and the Danish-Polish-Lübeck coalition, as well as the issue of the Narva navigation – the commercial activity of French merchants in Russian Livonia. In these letters, Charles IX, appealing to the discourse of friendship and concord that ought to reign among the rulers of the Res publica Christiana, urges Erik XIV to conclude peace with his enemies without delay, to refrain from hindering free trade in the Baltic, and to compensate French merchants harmed by the unlawful actions of the Swedish king’s subjects. Engaging with these sources supplements the existing approaches to the study of northern conflicts, which often focus primarily on the aims and actions of the core actors – the Baltic states – while the involvement of Western European monarchies has received relatively little attention. Meanwhile, under the last Valois rulers, the French kingdom, having returned after the Italian Wars (1494–1559) to its role as the principal opponent of Habsburg hegemony, began to expand its influence in northern Europe, gradually transforming itself from a Mediterranean monarchy into a power of the Baltic world. Its active mediation in the Northern Seven Years’ War, as well as the intensification of French commercial traffic, enabled the Valois dynasty to strengthen its position in the region, a development that would inevitably shape the emergence and implementation of France’s large-scale diplomatic projects for the geopolitical reconfiguration of the Baltic space.