Cavalry

Torsten Stålhandske’s Dutch adventure

GARS had the honour of fighting in the Staatsen army in de Slag om Grolle, the greatest European 17th century event, last October. There were no Finnish troops present at the historical Siege of Grolle of 1627, but in fact Finnish soldiers did take part in the Dutch-Spanish war six years later. In the late summer of 1633 the Dutch paid for Swedish cavalry to join Frederick Henry’s invasion of Brabant. The force of around 1000 Swedes and 650 Finns was led by legendary commander of Finnish ”Hakkapeliitta” cavalry: Torsten Stålhandske. Colonel Stålhandske had just been wounded in the siege of Hameln but apparently not very seriously: he, like many other famous commanders of the time, was rumoured to have been bulletproof by magical means.


Born in Borgå, Finland, Torsten Stålhandske had Swedish father, Finnish mother and was raised by Scottish stepfather. He was friends with several Scottish officers in Gustavus Adolphus’s army and because of that his deeds are well covered in William Watt’s “The Swedish Intelligencer”, where is noted that Stålhandske ”speakes excellent good english”. 
Photo: Tomb effigies of Torsten Stålhandske and Christina Horn in Turku Cathedral, Finna.

Mustered in 22th of August, the Swedish force was paired up with 3000-strong contingent of Hessian horse, and when Hessian commander Dalwig resigned Stålhandske was put to the head of the whole force and appointed as Hessian generalmajor: a bit later he received the same rank also in Swedish army, so the Dutch adventure did benefit Stålhandske’s career development. It did less impact militarily: the enemy commander, Marquis of Aytona, avoided confrontation so apart from a couple skirmishes in September there was very little action or effect. For the latter part of their service, Stålhandske’s force was sent to set up a camp on the Maas river. 

There were also problems with payment, so parts of the cavalry force resorted to looting. The Hessians especially were quick to start terrorizing the peasantry (the Dutch complained that they only had joined the fight because they’d already eaten everything in Westphalia) but a bit later, while stationed in Liege, also the Stalhåndske’s own men did their share. Dutch reports from the beginning of October speak of  ”…met rouven ende plunderen van adelijk huijsen ende geheele dorpen”. From the casualty lists we know that also Finns did fight with the civilians and one trooper was sentenced to death, probably for pillaging.  


Prince of Orange Frederick Henry, stadtholder of Netherlands. His first impressions of the Stålhandske’s men’s equipment were not so terrific: ”…de Septembre Stalhans arriva avec cinq cents chevaux aucunement bons hommes mais mal armés & montés.” Memoires de Frederic Henri Prince d’Orange

Soon after the clashes with civilians of Liege the Swedish-Finnish cavalry was released from Dutch service and sent back across the Rhine. The Dutch paid Swedish crown 600 000 guldens for the short (under two months) and quite irrelevant service of Stålhandske’s men: a huge sum, twice the size of annual subsidiary Sweden received from the France. It was not a particularly hard campaign for the Finns: casualty lists mention four cavalry troopers fallen in the Netherlands: Simo Karppi, Lasse Mortensson, Mats Grelsson, and Matts Mattson. And then Eskil Hendrichson was murdered by peasants and Jaakko Larsson was executed. 

More on the subject:

Detlev Pleiss: Der Zug der finnischen Reiter in die Niederlande via Wesel 1633 (1998)
Sebastian Jägerhorn: Hårdast bland de hårda : en kavalleriofficer i fält (2018)

von Essen’s infantry regiment in 1626-1628

Story continues from previous post about the battle of Weichselmünde 1628. Now we take closer look at the Finnish infantry present at that battle. The sources are the same, Hakkapeliittain Historia II by Arvi Korhonen (1942) and Pohjan Prikaatin Historia by Stig Roudasmaa (1984).

Alexander von Essen’s infantry regiment was formed in 1626 as a result of king’s military reforms: in Finland, three large landsregements were divided into smaller, more numerous regiments, themselves organized after new Dutch model. The new länsregements were clearly provincial in character, even though during Gustavus Adolphus’s time they were not yet officially named after their provinces but after their colonel. The von Essen’s regiment was reqruited from Ostrobothnian province and later came to be called the Ostrobothnian Infantry Regiment, with province’s coat of arms in its flag.

Ostrobothnia province (Pohjanmaa in Finnish, Österbotten in Swedish) is in northwestern part of Finland, the eastern shore of the Bothnian Gulf: coastline of fishermen’s villages on the islands and small towns trading furs and tar, and flat inland part with wealthy and rebellious peasantry.

Botnia Orientalis in Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina from 1539. ”They build ships here” written near Närpes.

During 17th century, not much unlike today, the coastal villages of Pohjanmaa were predominantly Swedish-speaking and the inland Finnish-speaking. So also the von Essen’s regiment was bilingual with some companies, like Colonel’s and Major’s, drawn entirely from coastal villages and thus Swedish-speaking in character, while von Falkenberg’s (later Hume’s) company was made of men from the Finnish-speaking areas like Ilmajoki and Laihia. Lichton’s regiment was drawn from extreme north part of the province, Kemi and Ii areast that reached far into the wilderness that is modern Lapland.

And to add to two native languages, there were the multinational officers, with names like Suther, Lichton and Hume (Scots) and Schultz and von Falkenberg (Germans). There were also several native Swedish officers and some Finns too. The commander of the regiment, Alexander von Essen, was himself a Baltic German from Estonia. Before becoming commander of the Ostrobothnian regiment at the age of 31 years, he had already served in Prince of Orange’s lifeguard and in Venetian, Spanish and Polish armies.

Link to colonel von Essen’s biography

The regiment was first gathered in one place at 27.7.1626 in the city of Turku, Finland. There were 1123 men waiting for ships to take them to Prussia and to war. Equipment was lacking, most of the men were dressed in their own clothes, in Finnish peasant style that was not suitable for parades. Many were unarmed. In the last minute the regiment received a shipment of hundreds of muskets and pikes and several hundred meters of cloth for new uniforms. Also new flags were received, 24 infantry flags for two regiments (the other was Horn’s regiment). Too bad we don’t know what those flags looked like!

Folk Costume of a Peasant from Österbotten. Anonymous watercolour, end of 17th c. Nationalmuseum Sweden.

We can assume that the clothing situation improved during the war and by 1628 the regiment was mostly dressed in military fashion instead of peasant clothes. At least the hardware was fine: from the beginning of August 1627 we have list or regiments weaponry.

The whole regiment had 485 muskets and bandoliers. Most companies had full 72 musketeers but two companies had only 42. Every company had full 54 pikes, 432 in total. Every pikeneer had an armour (steel harness) and a helmet, also about one quarter of the musketeers had a helmet too. There was a sword virtually for every man, 1024 in total. On the summer of 1627 the regiment had around 1050 men, but at least 150 of them were ill at any given time.

For almost the whole duration of king’s Prussian war the von Essen’s regiment was part of the field army while the other Finnish regiments were garrisoning Livonian castles and cities. So amongst Finnish infantry units the von Essen’s unit was the one that saw the most action in the campaign – a similar role the Hastfehr’s Savolax infantry has later in the German campaign.

The field army in Prussia, beginning of June of 1628, Dirschau (now Tczew, Poland)

Cavalry

Cavalry, foreign (mercenary) 16 companies
Cavalry, Swedish 23 companies
Cavalry, Finnish 7 companies
Cavalry total 46 companies 3769 men

Infantry

Infantry, foreign (mercenary) 33 companies
Infantry, Swedish 32 companies
Infantry, Finnish 8 companies
Infantry total 76 companies 7641 men

Only Finnish infantry unit in the field army was von Essen’s regiment. Even though the foreign infantry regiments were probably more presentable than the Finnish regiment, it was still seen strong enough to be the main body of king’s daring secret attack on Polish and Danzig fleets in the end of June (look at the previous post in the blog).

This is the list of von Essen’s eight companies, their officers and strengths before the battle of Weichselmünde at the end of June 1628:

von Essen’s eight companies, June 1628

Company commander Lieutenant Fähnrich Marching strenght (incl. officers) Sick Original area of recruitment
Col. Alexander von Essen Hindrich Ledebur Fromholt von Rosen 122 6 Nykarleby, Jakobstad
Maj. Nils Larsson Hindrich von Stammer Johan Plöger 116 12 Malax, Närpes
Capt. Anders Persson Jöns Elofsson Joachim Höfring 96 18 Kalajoki, Pyhäjoki
Capt. Joachim Schultz Peter Brieger Gert von Schrowe 99 4 Vörå, Lapua
Lt.Col. Casper Koskull Wadsten Jönsson Bengt Hindersson 111 22 Kronoby, Karleby
Capt. Patrick Hume Hans Nilsson Thomas Hume 104 13 Ilmajoki, Isokyrö, Laihia
Capt. Norman Suther Grels Thomasson Hans von Horn 98 42 Kemi, Ii
Capt. John Lichton Wadsten Meier William Lichton 96 36 Oulu, Hailuoto

Liminka

Every summer a new conscription run was made in the homeland and the regiment was reinforced with 437 new recruits in the summer of 1627 and 304 men in 1628. They were shipped to Prussia in small groups, some boats sailing from as far as Oulu (Uleåborg). The boats were not warships but small, locally-made one or two-masted cargo ships called kuutti/kreijari or skute/krejare and leased from the burghers of coastal towns. It took at least a month to sail from Oulu to Pillau and it was probably not a pleasant experience for new soldiers. Apparently all ships and most of the new soldiers made their way to Prussia safely. After the sea journey they were free to start dying from diseases.

More information about the Ostrobothnian shipbuilding and period’s shipping from these websites (in Swedish mostly):

http://sydaby.eget.net/swe/typ.htm

http://axelnelson.com/skepp/hukert.html

In the first two years of the regiment lost 254 men, around 20% of its original strength, most of them to diseases. This does not include the new recruits that also of course also died in droves. The actual fighting killed less than 100 men.

Finnish infantry and 30 Years War

Thirty Years’ War was fought in Central Europe from year 1618 to 1648. Sweden joined the war properly in 1630 and Swedish forces remained in Germany to the end of the war. The whole reign of Gustavus Adolphus, from 1611, had been time of almost constant war: Sweden fought against Russia in Ingria (1611-1617), against Poland in Livonia (1617-1618 and 1621-1626) and in Prussia (1626-1629) and several times against Denmark. After the death of Gustavus Adolphus and towards the end of the German war, wars against old enemies Poland and Denmark started again. State of war was effectively the normal state of things, short periods of peace were spent getting ready for the next war.

Whole area of modern Finland belonged to the Kingdom of Sweden during the 17th century and Finnish troops were well represented in Swedish military. Finnish cavalry (“Hackapelites”) and their exploits in German War are well known especially amongst Finns, and have a somewhat mythical reputation thanks to 19th and 20th century writers. In reality, much bigger number of Finns fought in infantry. While cavalrymen were volunteers (drawn mostly among the sons and servants of welthier farmers, with tax exemption and freedom from feared conscription as motive of volunteering) native Swedish and Finnish infantry were conscripts, drawn from the peasant class.

During the early-17th century wars against Poland and Russia a very large proportion of Swedish army had been Finnish in origin, but in Thirty Years War the Swedish field army was actually mostly comprised of foreign (German, Scots, etc.) mercenaries: native Swedes and Finns were a minority. Often concripted troops were also given tasks in guarding and garrisoning the North-German towns and castles and saw less action in battlefield than mercenaries. Nevertheless, a small number of Finnish infantrymen were present in most of the famous battles of Thirty Years War, like Breitenfeld and Lützen.

GARS mainly re-enacts Finnish infantry from Savolax infantry regiment during the German campaign of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (1630-1632) but our equipment can mostly be used also in a larger timeframe from the beginning of the Livonian war in 1621 to the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648.