The Pirate History Podcast · Matt Albers

Episode 351 - The First Northern War(s)

·40 min·2 clips

Hungarian horsemen used a musket with a battle axe on the end.

Matt starts with a weapon question. A familiar video game blade seems fictional at first, but he says the historical record and reputable military historians point the other way, and that gives the episode an immediate jolt. The fighting gets messier from there. He explains that pirate swordplay was rarely the neat, single-blade fencing pose people imagine; cutlass work usually came with an axe or knife in the other hand, because the goal was to finish the job on a cramped deck. Ships matter here too. He then widens the lens to shipboard hand-to-hand combat and to the caravel-built hull that helped change northern waters. The caravel had long roots in the Mediterranean, but the Hanseatic League brought it into northern Europe, where speed and durability translated to trade power. He lays out how the league built a monopoly on Baltic trade and a near-monopoly on the North Sea, leaving kingdoms with fewer options. In the middle 1400s, Denmark made the last major push against that power and lost badly. The first major blow to the league came from Queen Margaret I of Denmark, the Queen of Norway, after she married King Hakon VI of Norway. Hakon spent much of his reign in wars with Sweden and in dynastic conflict with Holstein, briefly taking the Danish throne when the country lacked a ruler. Those wars took their toll, and he died at 40, probably of a stroke or maybe a heart attack, leaving Margaret, then 30, to carry the story forward.

As heard by us

A fake-looking pirate weapon opens into real trade power and northern conflict.

A video-game-looking blade opens into a story about shipboard combat, the Hanseatic League, and Denmark's failed challenge to northern trade power.

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Why you'd press play

You want pirate trivia that turns out to be real.

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