Under the minimal oversight of a Swedish governor, the two provinces of
Estland and Livland essentially maintained their historical status quo through the
seventeenth century. German-speaking, Lutheran noblemen ruled in a communal
assembly (Landtag) and twelve-man executive committee ofLandrats. German
nobles staffed the judicial system, using German provincial law codified in 1740
(but never ratified by the Senate). The nobility formed a closed, exclusive landed
elite, their privileges codified in charters from Poland and later Sweden. Even
though peasants were not enserfed in Sweden, under Swedish rule Latvian and
Estonian serfdom was maintained. Terms, however, were not as harsh as they were
becoming in Russia: under Swedish law peasants had recourse to Swedish courts
and could sell their surplus product. Swedish rule also benefited the Baltic peasantry
with native-language elementary schools mandated for each parish in 1686. Intel-
lectual life was rich: colleges had been founded at Riga (1566), Vilnius (1579), and
Dorpat/Tartu (1583) in the Counter-Reformation; under the Swedes Dorpat was
upgraded to a university in 1632.
Peter I launched the Great Northern War precisely to win a Baltic presence,
founding his new capital of St. Petersburg in 1703 on Swedish land. The war years
were devastating here; famine (1696–7, 1709–10) and plague (1710) halved the
population by the 1710s (the population rebounded, more than doubling by the
1790s). Population loss was exacerbated by mass deportations from Dorpat and rural
Livonia in 1708; Russia also closed down the University of Dorpat until 1802 in
consolidating control. After aggressive moves of conquest, Russia adopted its typical
Figure 5.1The sixteenth-century bell tower, long the highest spire in the city, of the town
hall of Reval (Tallinn) stands on a foundation going back to the thirteenth century. It is said
to be the oldest town hall in Scandinavia and the Baltics. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
Western Borderlands in the Eighteenth Century 117