Livonian War in the Context of the European Wars of the 16th Century
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[1] St.-Petersburg State University
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- Localización: Russian History, ISSN 0094-288X, Vol. 43, Nº. 1, 2016, págs. 1-21
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
Livonian War (1558–83) was not a local Baltic war, but a European conflict. What was the place of Livonian War in the context of European wars of the 16th century? Europe in this era experienced colonial wars, wars of independence, religious wars, Turkish wars etc. The Livonian War bears the strongest resemblance to Italian wars of 1494–1559. Those were wars about tying microstates to new monarchies. In part, a similar process took place in Livonia. It was a microstate with an obsolete socio-political hierarchy unable to fight back (the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order). Several new European monarchies, including Sweden, Poland, Lithuania, Denmark, and Russia, sought to divide it. Russia's participation in the conflict set it apart from the Italian Wars. Europe immediately and unconditionally recognized the right of the Jagiellon, Oldenburg, and Vasa dynasties (but not that of the Rurikide dynasty) to divide the Baltic. Livonian War was also a more complex multi-faceted phenomenon for new European monarchies (especially for Sweden and Denmark), than it was a war similar to Italian wars of the first half of the sixteenth century (that is, a war for the takeover of microstates by stronger and more modern kingdoms going through a phase of active development). The same can be said of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in that it went through this active phase during the Livonian War and formed the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth. Poland also positioned itself as a state whose higher mission was to act as a shield protecting the “Christendom" from “Eastern barbarians," among whom Russians were numbered, portrayed in a similar fashion to Turks. For Russia, this war evolved from a local border conflict to a war for the annexation of the Baltic States, and finally, for Russians, the war became a holy war against a foreign foe
