Reval > Tallinn Harjumaa Estonia
1227 CE
Worlds
The Great Crossroads
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The Knights of the Sword have been attempting to Christianize the peoples of the eastern Baltic, but by 1219 they are being hard pressed and turned to Denmark’s King Valdemar II for help.
Pope Honorius III, via the bishop of Riga, elevates Valdemar's invasion of Estonia into a crusade.
Valdemar raises an army and calls all of Denmark's ship to gather to transport the army eastward.
Once assembled, the fleet numbers fifteen hundred ships.
When the army lands at Reval, located on Tallinn Bay, an inlet of the Gulf of Finland, the chiefs of the Estonians, who have come under the influence of the Orthodox Russians, sit down with the Danes and agree to acknowledge the Danish king as their overlord.
A few of them allow themselves to be baptized, which seems a good sign.
While suing for peace, the vastly outnumbered Estonian-Russian forces are clandestinely building their troop strength.
While the Danes are attending mass three days later, thousands of Estonians launch a surprise five-pronged counterattack on the Danish camp on June 15, 1219.
Confusion reigns and things look bad for Valdemar's crusade.
Luckily for him, Vitslav of Rügen gathers his men in a second camp and attacks the Estonians from the rear.
After destroying Reval, Valdemar builds a fortress on the site—called Tallin, which means "Danish castle" in Estonian—garrisoning it with soldiers to enforce conversion to Western Christianity.
The legend traces the origin of the Danish national flag, a white cross on a red field, to this encounter, called Battle of Lyndanisse, also known as the Battle of Valdemar.
Although myth holds that it fell from heaven during the battle to give victory to the Danes, is probably based on the war flag of the Holy Roman Empire.
The order of the Brothers of the Sword had conquered Southern Estonia while Denmark had taken the North, and the two agreed to divide Estonia, but quarreled over the exact borders.
The King of Denmark had agreed in 1220 to submit southern Estonian provinces Sakala and Ugaunia that were already conquered by Sword Brethren.
Bishop Albert had submitted to Denmark the Estonian provinces of Harria, Vironia and Jerwia.
The Livonian Brothers of the Sword conquer all Danish territories in Northern Estonia in 1227.
...laying siege to Reval (Tallinn).
Ivan’s goal is the vital access to the Baltic Sea.
Eric, whose major foreign policy objective is to free Sweden's Baltic Sea trade from Danish control, immediately sends troops into the area, seizing the region of present northern Estonia.
He first seeks allies in western Europe, unsuccessfully bidding for the hand of England’s Queen Elizabeth.
Realizing the advantage of controlling ports on the eastern Baltic coast, Erik obtains sovereignty over Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia) and its adjacent territories.
The Swedes are left by 1602 only with control of Reval (Tallinn, Talin, Rewl), ...
The Russian Famine of 1601-1603 has meanwhile killed about half the Estonian population.
A five thousand strong army—mainly Finns but including some Dutch mercenaries—led by Anders Lennartson of Forstena lands in 1605 in Estonia, a few miles from Reval.
Swedish king Gustav II Adolf founds the Revalsche Gymnasium or Gymnasium Revaliense (Gymnasium of Reval) in Tallinn, Estonia, in 1631.
Today known as the Gustav Adolf Lyceum or Gustav Adolf Gymnasium (Estonian: Tallinna Gustav Adolfi Gümnaasium), it is one of the oldest extant secondary schools in Europe.
...a fifth of the population of Estonia.
The famine occurs in a period known as the Little Ice Age.
Cold springs and summers characterize the climate in Europe during the 1690s, when temperatures are generally estimated to be 1.5°C lower than the average during the Little Ice Age.
This impacts other countries: France suffers the worst famine since the Middle Ages and ice floes form in the Thames, while Lake Constance and Lake Zurich freeze over completely.
The availability of salt, a vital ingredient for preserving meat and fish, had been impacted by the colder climate.
Portugal, the main source of salt to the Baltic region, had been affected by excessive rain, making salt production difficult.
The shortage of salt means that meat and fish produces cannot be preserved, reducing stockpiles available for consumption.
Harvests in Estonia had been poor in the years 1692 to 1694, due to the shorter than normal summer growing seasons and longer winters.
Seed stocks had been reduced as a result.
Excessive rain had fallen in the summer of 1695, almost constantly from June 24 to September 29.
This excess rain had destroyed crops and hay as the low lying land was flooded, resulting in a shortage of seed for the following autumn and spring sowing seasons.
The winter of 1695-96 had been extremely cold, and the early spring thaw was short-lived when winter conditions returned in March 1696, delaying sowing of the little available seed until the end of May.
The return of heavy rains in the summer had wrecked the harvest, with only between a fifth and a quarter of the seed planted being harvested.
In some areas the crop yield was a little as three percent.
Many peasants were destitute and hungry by the end of the summer in 1696; farmhands, servants and even some members of the nobility were reduced to begging.
Famine had taken hold by the autumn and the death rate had begun to rise in October.
The winter of 1696-97 is so severe that corpses will not be buried until the following spring.
An estimated seventy thousand people—one fifth or fourth of Estonian population—have died during the Great Famine.
Estonia and Livonia are seen at this time as the granaries of the Swedish Empire, shipping in large quantities to Sweden and Finland.
As these provinces hold low status in the empire, priority is given to the fulfillment of export quotas.
The Government in Stockholm is slow to react to the developing famine and does not relax their policies until 1697 when it is too late.
Peter the Great, as one of his main pretexts for declaring war against Sweden in 1700, will cite the Great Northern War, the inadequate provisioning of his retinue of two hundred and fifty people and horses by the Swedish Governor Generals in 1697 as they passed through the province during the famine.
Behind its walls in August was a population of about twenty thousand people , composed of the regular inhabitants, soldiers, refugees and the inhabitants of the surrounding villages, which had been demolished by the defendants on August 18.
By mid-December, about fifteen thousand of them have died of the plague, and the number of inhabitants has been reduced to nineteen hundred and ninety inside the walls and two hundred in the adjacent villages.
The rest had either fled elsewhere, or in the case of the surviving Swedish troops and some citizens, had been allowed to leave by ship after the surrender, carrying the plague to Finland.