Finland

Finland formed the eastern half of the Swedish realm from the middle ages until 1809, and its money was Stockholm’s money. Medieval Åbo reckoned in marks and öre; from the seventeenth century accounts ran in daler, a name that conceals three different things — daler silvermynt, daler kopparmynt at a third of its value, and the riksdaler specie of about 25.7 grams of fine silver, which alone kept its metal. After the Riksbank’s notes were made inconvertible in 1745 the realm ran on a de facto paper standard, and the daler of the state accounts drifted far below its nominal silver, so any Finnish sum from that era must be converted at the market rate rather than at par or the result will be wrong by a third. The archival record is unusually good, because crown bailiffs’ accounts, fortification accounts and Riksdag grants were all kept centrally and survive in the Swedish Riksarkivet and the Finnish National Archives, while the Black Book of Åbo Cathedral preserves the medieval church’s charters. The territory is interesting here because its largest single undertaking was drawn and directed by one man and paid for by a parliament that argued over every daler of it.

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The Swedish Riksdag’s Appropriation for Augustin Ehrensvärd’s Sveaborg and Lovisa Fortifications 1753

In January 1753, after the Riksdag in Stockholm had heard out a year of criticism of his work, the artillery officer Augustin Ehrensvärd was allowed back to Finland with 975,000 daler silvermynt voted for continued building at the sea fortress off Helsingfors and at Lovisa. Ehrensvärd had drawn the plan, won its approval from Fredrik I in November 1747, and held the royal commission to direct the works, so the sum buys a design and its execution together on what became the largest construction site in the Nordic countries. The unit is the depreciated daler silvermynt of Sweden’s fiat era rather than a weight of silver, so it is converted through the Stockholm market rate of the ducat in 1753 instead of at par; a cross-check through the riksdaler and the year’s gold to silver ratio agrees to within a third of one per cent. The grant covers both Sveaborg and Lovisa, not the fortress alone.

~516,300g

Gardberg, Carl Jacob. “Ehrensvärd, Augustin.” Biografiskt lexikon för Finland, Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland; Edvinsson, Rodney. “The Multiple Currencies of Sweden–Finland 1534–1803,” in Exchange Rates, Prices, and Wages, 1277–2008. (Sveriges Riksbank, 2010), tables A4.7 and A4.8; Augustin Ehrensvärd’s archive, Nationalbiblioteket, Helsinki.