| The Great Nordic War
| | Oversæt |
Anti-Swedish Alliance
The young Swedish king Karl XII, who succeeded his father Carl XI, was opposed by an alliance of states, which demanded revenge after Sweden´s conquests in the 17th century. Denmark, Russia and Saxony (including Poland) were in this alliance. However at this time Sweden were well prepared. Carl XI, who had also reformed the defence, which at this time consisted of 65.000 men and 38 war ships, had built a new naval port in Karlskrona. Finally the new border with Denmark at the Sound had been fortified extensively.
In the year 1700 a Swedish army under the command of Carl XII was transported from Helsingborg and Landskrona to Humlebæk in Zealand. Copenhagen was threatened and Denmark was forced to make a separate peace.
Carl XII continued his expedition towards Russia and Poland and advanced in eastern Europe, but when the Swedish fortune of war changed in the Battle of Poltava (1709) Denmark declared war on Sweden.
Karl 12. | 
The Swedes´ Landing in Humlebæk | 
The Bombardment of Copenhagen |
The Danish Helsingborg
The Danish main forces, which included 14.000 men landed in Råå in November 1709. Helsingborg defended itself with a garrison of 360 men and a Swedish unit of 1500 men were in the area around Rå. They could not defend the town and retreated.
Frederik IV took up headquarters in alderman Schlyter´s farm in the central Helsingborg and its citizens pledged allegiance to the Danish king. In Helsingborg Danish church services were introduced a Danish almanac according to the Gregorian calendar. This involved a difference of ten days.
Herman Schlyter´s House |
Magnus Stenbock in Helsingborg
The Swedish king was far away, so Magnus Stenbock, who was Scania´s general governor, organized the Swedish defence. He gathered a large army in Småland, as the Danes had entered Sweden all the way up to Karlshamn in Blekinge. Stenbock succeeded in gathering 16.000 men, who went into Scania in the end of January 1710. The Danes retreated towards Helsingborg and took up position north of town under the command of major general Rantzau.
February 28th 1710 the two armies clashed in the battle of Ringstorp outside Helsingborg, and it ended in a crushing Danish defeat, which Stenbock´s courier, Henrik Hammarberg reported to Stockholm.
Stenbock, Magnus | 
Message of the Victory of Magnus Stenbock | 
Memorial Stone for the Battle of Helsingborg | 
Fortification of the Swedish Coast | 
Helsingborg 2010 |
Back to Denmark
In Helsingborg Danish soldiers and pro-Danes were sent back to Denmark, among them alderman Herman Schlyter and the vicar Hans Jacobsen, who had cooperated with the Danes. In connection with the escape across the Sound all the horses were killed, which made it more difficult to get the town to function again. The truth is that Helsingborg did not recover for a hundred years. It was the last time that the Danes left Scania after a war.
Carl XII:s Final Attempt
The border between Denmark and Sweden had now been definitively determined. The Swedish king returned to Sweden after his unsuccessful campaign in Eastern Europe. He governed Sweden from Lund, where he had his headquarters from 1715 to 1718. At the time the government had built fieldwork on the Sound coast, in order prevent a Danish landing attempt. The remnants of this fieldwork can be seen at Barsebäck, Rå and Mølle.
Carl XII made one final attempt to strengthen Sweden´s foreign-policy position by attacking Norway in 1718, but he was killed in a trench outside the fortress Fredriksten. Now Sweden sought peace and the North did not have a big power anymore. From having been a means of communication, the Sound had been transformed into a border, where Denmark and Sweden guarded each other.
Sufferring and Misery
Sweden experienced two crop failures in 1709-10 and again in 1716-18, where a famine broke out and they had to mix bark and other things into the bread. The botanist Carl von Linné gave in posthumous works instructions of how to make the flour go further with 29 different kinds of plants. Here is what he said about the dandelion:
“The leaves can be eaten as cabbage and the root can be dried to bread, although it does have a somewhat bitter taste when fresh, but when dried it disappears.”
The Plague
In 1710 the plague reached Stockholm and at the same time it reached the Sound region, where it was spread to both sides of the Sound. Even though the Danes at this time had left Helsingborg the communication had not ceased. The plague was spread in the spring of 1711 from Elsinore to a number of fishing villages on the other side of the Sound: First Domsten, north of Helsingborg, then to Viken, Höganäs, Mølle and Arild.
Around two thirds of the population in these fishing villages died. Malmo was struck hard in 1712, where approximately one thousand people – almost half of the population – died. Ystad too, was struck.
The Plague in Elsinore
The last great plague epidemic in Elsinore 1709-11 is well documented and the struggle against the disease can be followed very well. In August 1709 the town had information from the police and commerce department that an infectious epidemic had broken out in Danzig. At one they took different measures, and ships from Danzig was not allowed nearer to the town that the distance of rifle shot. The ships were met on open sea by a boat with one man, who received papers, which later were to be destroyed.
That same year the king started his campaign in Scania, in connection with the Great Nordic War. It was therefore hard to maintain the quarantine. In August the year after, the quarantine was lifted against the ships from Danzig, but immediately after great parts of north Germany and the Baltic were declared infected. Local steps were taken in January 1711, among other places in Lappen, where the death figures started to rise. Priests and barbers, who took care of the sick in Lappen, were ordered to change clothes before they associated with others and the town´s magistrate ordered ”...that the cattle of the sick was not allowed to grass with those of the well, and that dogs and cats, who jumped from house to house and easily could spread the infections had to be put down. Even hens and ducks and especially pigeons were to be slaughtered immediately”.
Dead From the Plague |
Death
In the following months the epidemic raged at a controlled level, but in the beginning of May ti took on such proportions, that it was prohibited under the penalty of death to trafl from Elsinore to Copenhagen. May 25th the town was closed off by the military from Espergærde in the south tho Villingebæk in the north. The disease, which probably was the bubonic plague, culminated in August, when 100 persons died in the St. Olai parish and 31 in the St. Mary parish. In total, according to the priests´ reports to the magistrate 1809 people died almost a third of the inhabitants of the town. It was not until June 25, 1712 that the town again was opened for traffic.
Statistics of the time points out a clear connection between the many deaths and the will of the inhabitants to regenerate. The number of marriages rose markedly after the epidemic. One man´s loss is another man´s gain. |