Studia Maritima

At the beginning of the Great Northern War, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, August II Wettin, established a privateer flotilla under his own flag, whose task was to combat Swedish shipping. The aim of this article is to show the reasons for its establishment, organization, military operations in the Baltic, and the influence it had on the early stage of the war. The study is based on the analysis of documents available mainly in the Riksarkivet in Stockholm, the Rigsarkivet in Copenhagen, and the Hauptsaatsarchiv in Dresden, as well as using reports from European press titles at the time. The presented research shows that the reasons for establishing privateers were problems in Danish-Saxon cooperation at sea. The organisation of the flotilla began in May 1700, yet the privateers did not appear in the Baltic until late October of that year. Their small number (most likely no more than 6 ships) resulted in low effectiveness; Only a few Swedish vessels were captured. However, this was enough to cause a short-term stagnation in Baltic shipping and provoke an armed response from the Swedes by engaging part of their fleet in fighting the kapers, who were finally pacified in July 1701. The circumstances of their establishment also prompt the question of to what extent the flotilla’s activities had only a military basis, and to what extent they were political, calculated to draw the neutral Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into the conflict. The actions of the privateers, conducted under a flag identified as Polish, also found wide resonance in the European press, which was the first and last such case in the early modern era.