The issue of Swedish literary spoils of war from the Czech lands has long attracted attention not only in scholarly literature but also in the broader public sphere. Based on current research, the total number of books removed by Swedish troops in 1646 and 1648 from Mikulov, Olomouc, and Prague is estimated to exceed 25,000 volumes. The confiscated libraries often ranked among the most important book collections in the Czech lands at the time, and their transfer affected not only the domestic cultural environment but also the development of book culture in Sweden. Current mapping of surviving books indicates that only between 20 and 25 per cent of the volumes have survived to the present day. Nevertheless, these books, in combination with the original catalogues, constitute an important source for the study of pre-White Mountain Czech book culture.
As early as the late eighteenth century, some Czech scholars drew attention to the fate of manuscripts and printed books removed from the Lands of the Bohemian Crown at the close of the Thirty Years’ War. Earlier research, however, focused primarily on describing the most prominent individual items and did not attempt a systematic documentation of the surviving books. Basic questions therefore remained unanswered: how many volumes have survived, what was their significance for Czech book culture, and what role did they play in the environments into which they were transferred.
These questions are addressed by a long-term research project carried out at the Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where systematic mapping of surviving books has been underway since 2017. The project aims to collect, analyse, and make accessible to both scholars and the public information on all extant volumes dispersed across Europe.
To date, approximately 4,300 books have been identified, of which roughly three quarters have already been physically examined and documented in detail. The research has confirmed the extraordinary scale of this cultural transfer: books originating from the Czech lands are today held in more than sixty European institutions. The largest collections are preserved in the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm, the university libraries in Lund and Uppsala, the cathedral library in Strängnäs, and the municipal library in Västerås. Significant groups of books have also survived in the Royal Library in Copenhagen and in the Vatican Library.
Since 2018, the results of this research have been gradually made available through the portal Swedish Literary Spoils of War from the Czech Lands. The portal includes a database of surviving books with detailed bibliographical and provenance information, often supplemented with photographic documentation. The database allows searching by original owners and libraries, places of confiscation, and current locations.
In addition to the database, the portal offers an interactive map of current locations, visualisations of the routes taken by Czech books across Europe, digital copies of original catalogues, an analysis of the Strängnäs auction catalogue of 1765, as well as further popularising texts and audiovisual materials summarising the results of the research. The portal thus serves not only scholars and students but also a wider public interested in history and book culture.
Research on the Swedish literary spoils of war is linked to international cooperation. Key partners of the project include the libraries in Uppsala, Strängnäs, and Västerås, where long-term systematic provenance research is being conducted. The project is supported by several grant and institutional funding sources: between 2017 and 2021 it was developed within the Strategy AV21 programme; in the period 2022–2024 it was supported by the Czech Science Foundation; and it is also funded on a long-term basis through research support resources of the Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Since 2025, the research has formed part of the research focus of the Centre for the Research of Book Culture at the Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
In the autumn of 2025, the publishing house Scriptorium released a new monograph by Lenka Veselá entitled Swedish Literary Spoils of War from the Czech Lands. The book is based on long-term research carried out within a project mapping the fate of Czech libraries removed to Sweden at the close of the Thirty Years’ War.
The volume traces the complex trajectories of approximately 25,000 books and manuscripts – from their confiscation in the years 1645–1648, through their transport and incorporation into the Swedish cultural environment, to their modern rediscovery in European institutions. A central part of the publication consists of virtual reconstructions of the confiscated libraries, which in this way symbolically return, after centuries, to the sphere of Czech cultural memory.
An English-language edition is currently in preparation with the publisher Brill.
