Of the two seas that top and tail the European peninsula, the Baltic occupies a subordinate place in the European imagination. Poets and holidaymakers have preferred the scents of thyme and lemon blossom of the south to the notes of tar, timber and herring that ride the cooler air of Europe's northern ports. There exists no encompassing socio-cultural study of the Baltic to rival Fernand Braudel's encyclopaedic epic of the Mediterranean. Yet the Baltic played a crucial role in the shaping of modern Europe, as Alan Palmer demonstrates in this engaging historical panorama.
Northern Shores is not really a history of the Baltic as such, but of the peoples who lived on its coasts. At the centre of Palmer's vivid and readable chronicle is a narrative of conflict. From the ninth century, heavily armed Vikings poured across the Baltic in supple, dragon-headed ships no longer than a cricket pitch to establish footholds on the Baltic littoral. By the 14th century, the German soldier-colonists of the Teutonic Order were locked in a desperate territorial struggle with the Poles and Lithuanians. In the 17th century, the Baltic became the theatre of a bitter five-way power struggle between Swedes, Danes, Russians, Germans and Poles. Only in the 19th century did the Russian empire expand westwards into Finland and Poland to establish itself as the hegemon of the eastern shores. The last chapters of this book document the agonising struggle of the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Poles to emancipate themselves from Soviet control.
If the Baltic was an axis for power-political conflict, it was also, as Palmer makes clear, a space of encounter and exchange. The cultural imprint of the Hansa, a multinational medieval commonwealth of Baltic trading cities, is still discernible today, despite its decline as a commercial entity in the 16th century. Merchants and even sea-going peasant traders congregated in the coastal towns to buy and sell salt, furs, and timber, communicating in the Low German patois that served for commerce and navigation.
This was a region of overlapping ethnicities and diasporal communities. Not until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the advent of mass nationalism, did these complexities give rise to bitter ethnic conflicts. The last-ditch struggles of the Baltic and Polish Germans against the territorial revisions agreed at Versailles fed the right-wing radicalism that would ultimately consume the Weimar Republic. And the expulsions that followed the defeat of the Third Reich removed forever those German populations whose language and mores had sustained the urban culture of the southern Baltic shores from the Middle Ages.
Only since the 1990s, with the withdrawal of Russia from the Baltic republics, does it seem plausible to imagine the regeneration of those networks of communication, tolerance and exchange that once made the Baltic a living commercial and cultural organism.
Alan Palmer, who has written more than 30 books on historical themes for a general readership, recounts his story in the lucid, unjudgmental diction he has made his own. This is not a romanticising chronicle that makes a fetish of strangeness. Palmer sees in the exploits of his protagonists the workings of a pragmatic human calculation. He makes characteristically deft use of historical comparison, weighing the catastrophic defeat of the Teutonic Order by Poles and Lithuanians at Tannenberg in 1410 against the blow struck by the English against the French at Agincourt five years later. The makeshift marine evacuation of Soviet troops trapped in Tallinn by advancing German forces in August 1941 is compared in passing with the British flight from Dunkirk one year before. In this inconspicuous fashion, Palmer brings home the meaning of remote events and integrates the details of his narrative with broader historical processes.
Palmer also has an admirable eye for the telling detail. In the early spring of 1808, for example, during the Napoleonic Wars, the Danes attempted to fix time-fused explosives to balloons and fly them across the øresund into Swedish Scania. When this failed, they loaded the balloons with leaflets urging the Swedes to overthrow their king and join Denmark in founding a Scandinavian kingdom - a first experiment in what would later be called "leaflet-raiding". (It is not known whether the weather-beaten leaflets that survived the passage had any motivating effect on the Swedish rustics who found them.)
Palmer also records the fate of the five huge Zeppelin hangers built by the Germans in Latvia during the First World War in preparation for the planned bombing of Petrograd. The bombings never took place and between 1924 and 1930 the hangars were dismantled and transported to Riga, where they provided the capital with a huge covered market that is still operating today. Such vignettes add colour, but they also convey a sense of how the resourceful people of the Baltic littoral found solutions to the predicaments of geography and history.
- Christopher Clark is the author of 'Kaiser Wilhelm II' and is writing a history of Prussia for Penguin