On the fields of Napue

The final land-based field battle of the Great Northern War took place in the small village of Napue, Finland, on February 19, 1714.

I took a day off from work and spend 9 1/2 hours driving there and back to see the field (as my spouse called the trip). Of course, all the museums were closed at the time as the summer season is really short in Finland and they hadn’t opened yet. That didn’t stop me as I’d have likely no other chances this summer to go there.

The modern war memorial erected more than a century ago. It has a sign with roughly the following text: “The Expanses of Ostrobothnia. You can prove that we fought on this field. We did not fall back an inch from the path of duty and patriotism, but we fell in our place to the last man, leaving to future generations a legacy of our obligatory example of standing on the side of the fatherland in hard times, just as we stood on this field and, if necessary, fall to the last man, just as we fell on this field.“

The Battle of Napue

This was the final large-scale battle that took place on the Finnish front in the Great Northern War and essentially destroyed the Swedish army there. From now on I will call this a Finnish army, because it was made of Finns with very few Swedes (officers mostly).

After the decisive Battle of Poltava, the war had taken a serious turn for worse for Sweden. Russia and Denmark had planned a final blow by Denmark invading southern Sweden and, at the same, Russia keeping pressure up in the north, in Finland. Although the Danes had been repulsed in the Battle of Helsingborg (my recent playtest report), Peter the Great had already taken over the Baltic states and by the summer of 1713, his troops also conquered large parts of southern Finland. The Swedish-Finnish army was in a bad shape and did not offer battle until thei commander was replaced with General Carl Gustav Armfeldt.

The village of Napue, in the Isokyrö (Storkyrö) area, was the scene for the final and decisive battle in the Great Northern War in Finland. Image from Google Maps.

Armfeldt decided to engage the advancing Russians in Napue, a small village in the historical Ostrobothnia region along the road towards Vaasa, an important coastal town. It was a now or never moment and he also counted on the local villages to supply him with enough militia to contest the larger Russian army.

The Finnish army set up their regiments in such a way, that they would make strong assault against the enemy before they had fully deployed on the battlefield.

Map of the battle. Black are Russians and white are Finns. The Russian columns were advancing along the river from right to left. The river was frozen in February. Image National Library of Finland.

Armfeldt’s plan almost worked but he simply didn’t have enough troops. The 5,500 Finns were overstretched against the 11,000 Russians with almost half being cavalry. The Russian left infantry wing was engaged with a famous Carolean charge and almost crushed even with the reserves coming in. The plan was to break the line in one place and then roll it up and force the enemy to flee. It was very close until the 2,000 strong Russian cavalry bypassed the Finnish line on its left and hit the rear.

As the almost intact Finnish cavalry fled, the remaining infantry was overwhelmed and ended up being slaughtered. Local towns that had supplied militia lost 40-70% of their male population, and the whole army took 2/3 as casualties, mostly dead.

A mass grave of the fallen behind the Isokyrö church built in 1510s, on the location of an earlier wooden church from early 1300s.

The aftermath was brutal – the start of the Great Wrath. This is a time when the occupiers took a free hand of murdering, pillaging, raping, torturing, taking slaves, and so forth. For the next several years, these communities were savaged mercilessly. The intention was to create a scorched-earth buffer zone against Sweden to prevent any incursions in the future. It worked for sometime.

The battlefield is peaceful farmland today. People go about with their lives, perhaps occasionally remembering those who fell on the snow-covered field in February, 1714.

(Added June 13, 2025) The battlefield as defined in the online database managed by The Finnish Heritage Agency.

Experiments

As there are no games covering this battle (as far as I know), I have experimented using some existing systems with the hopes of being able to have a scenario released sometime in late 2025 or during 2026. It was quite encouraging to see that even with little preplanning, the game seemed to flow fairly historically, provided some special rules were added for historical accuracy.