564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
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On what foundation stands the warrior's pride? How just his hopes let Swedish Charles decide? A frame of adamant, a soul of fire, No dangers fright him and no labours tire. Her love, her fear extends his wide domain, Unconquered lord of pleasure and of pain.

No joys to him Pacific sceptres yield. War sounds the trump. He rushes to the field. Behold surrounding kings their power to combine. And one capitulate, and one resign. Peace courts his hand, but spreads her charms in vain. Think nothing gained, he cries, till naught remain. On Moscow's walls till Gothic standards fly, and all be mine.

beneath the polar sky. That was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the greatest Englishman of all time, in his poem The Vanity of Human Wishes, which was published in 1749. Swedish Charles, the hero of that splendid passage, is not just the supreme antagonist of Peter the Great, a worthy rival to the theme of our ongoing series.

but one of the most charismatic and extraordinary characters in all of European history. He is the King of Sweden, and he is a magnetic, terrifying, swashbuckling, obsessive oddball.

Which is to say, Dominic, that he is one of the great romantic heroes of history. And Dr. Johnson writes about him in due course. Byron will write about him as well. And he is a great theme of poetry right the way up to the present day. And this is the man who, at the end of the last episode, Peter the Great has decided he will take on. That's right. So we're about to get into the Great Northern War, a 21-year war that completely reshapes the map of Europe.

And as you said, Tom, we had two episodes last week about young Peter the Great. What an extraordinary character he is with this enthusiasm for kind of inserting bellows into people. All the carry on with the Streltsy, these kind of murderous pikemen. It's a kind of, it's like a murderous stag do, isn't it? His whole life. His whole life. But that is not Charles's vibe. You know, it really is. I don't want to go into the kind of Game of Thrones ice and fire cliche, but there is a little element of that, isn't there? Because Charles the 12th,

who I guess in the English-speaking world is not as well-known as he used to be, but certainly in the 18th and 19th century, he seemed an absolutely titanic and a romantic hero. He is the perfect antagonist for Peter. He similarly enjoys a prank when he's a young man, but then he becomes this very icy, sort of obsessive, driven, and brilliant military commander. And the clash between these two men, their rivalry, is going to change the destinies

not just of Russia and Sweden, but of Poland, of Ukraine, of huge swathes of Northern and Eastern Europe. What's interesting also about him, you said that he's faded from probably the popular historical memory, but

Everybody knows about Hitler's invasion of Russia. Everyone knows about Napoleon's invasion of Russia. But Charles really is the prototype for this. He is the man who first reveals to Europe how difficult, effectively impossible it is to defeat this new superpower which is emerging on the eastern flank of Europe. Absolutely. And his invasion of Russia is...

arguably the bizarrest of them all because he just ends up wandering hundreds of miles in the wrong direction. He ends up in the Ottoman Empire. He does indeed. Let's remind ourselves where we ended last week. We were in August 1700. Peter has been home, got home from his great embassy, his travels to England and the Dutch Republic and so on. He has signed a peace treaty with the Ottomans. News of that treaty reached Moscow on the 18th of August and then on the 19th, the Kremlin issued a

a proclamation. The great Tsar has directed that for the many wrongs of the Swedish king, and especially because of the Tsar's journey through Riga, you may remember that his gap year in Riga didn't start well. He considered that Swedes had been very inhospitable. And I like that degree of pettiness. Yeah. He suffered obstacles and unpleasantness at the hands of the people of Riga. And so his soldiers shall march in war on the Swedish towns.

And they say at the beginning they have two war aims, the provinces of Ingria and Karelia. So that's the area around what is now St. Petersburg and the area, the sort of the Finnish-Russian borderlands. And Dominic, the key thing about that is that they are about the Baltic Sea. They do indeed. So it would give Peter what he so desperately wants, a seaport that is not Archangel, that's on the Baltic coast. And the claim there is, Peter says, these provinces have all...

have always historically belonged to Russia and we are just reclaiming what is rightfully ours. And actually, Vladimir Putin invoked this very proclamation a few months after launching his war in Ukraine. He said, I'm doing exactly what Peter the Great did in 1700. I'm reclaiming what was taken from us and what is rightfully ours. Now,

As this might suggest, the Swedes and the Russians are old enemies. So the Swedes have been fighting the cities of Novgorod and Moscow, the ancestors of Peter's realm, since at least the 13th century. And in recent years, the Swedes have very much had the upper hand. So in what was called the Time of Troubles in the early 1600s,

They had bitten off a chunk of northern Russia. And for the whole of the 17th century, the Swedes have controlled Finland. They've controlled the Baltic coast of Estonia and Latvia and these two provinces, Ingria and Karelia. And that, as you say, Tom, basically means that Russia is, it sounds weird to say it, is effectively landlocked because it only has one port, Archangel, and

And that port is frozen for half the year. So that's the only way that the trade to Holland and England, the two countries that Peter really cares about,

can be carried on so let's talk a little bit about sweden you know i'm a great scandi file i love the sweet i like the joylessness of the swedes i like the kind of the grim ruthless kind of i like that aspect of their personality the shard of ice the shard of ice exactly so their empire i mean it sounds mad now to a lot of people no doubt to talk about the swedish empire but

Their empire is an amazing institution because Sweden is such a small country. It's only got one and a half million people. So what's Russia about this point? Eight million or something? The Swedes, they have this very agricultural population, farmers. They're spread across the vastness of the Swedish landscape. I mean, even today, Sweden is not densely populated at all. They have some natural resources. They have silver and copper and iron.

And those they export through Stockholm, which in the 17th century becomes one of the great ports of Northern Europe. So if anyone who's been to Stockholm, to the old town. Gamla Stan. Gamla Stan. It's beautiful. It's amazing, isn't it? With the sort of orange buildings and the sort of copper roofs and the churches and all that. And so this is basically a 17th century creation. They get very rich from exporting all these things and they pour all that money into these military adventures.

So most famously, Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years' War, which is a sort of forerunner, I think, of the Great Northern War. When you look at the map, you're kind of, what are the Swedes doing in Bavaria or wherever they are? It's kind of just roaming madly like they're basically playing a video game or something. Well, it's interesting because today we associate Sweden with pacifism and neutrality. Yeah.

But there are two great periods of kind of military efflorescence in Swedish history, which the Vikings is obviously the first. But this is the second through the 17th and early 18th century. They are marauding all over Europe. And they behave. They're incredibly fearsome. I mean, if the Swedes turn up, if you're living in a sort of small German town and the Swedish army appears on the hill, you're like, oh no, because they always behave with unbelievable brutality.

and sort of no quarter and all that kind of thing. Anyway, by 1700, they control not just the Baltic, they control much of Norway. They control parts of northern Germany as well. So Bremen, Wismar, Western Pomerania, these are all effectively Swedish possessions. And so the Baltic effectively is a Swedish lake. It is, exactly, exactly. And what lies behind all this is what's probably at the time the world's most advanced, most efficient killing machine, the Swedish army.

So the 17th century, early 18th century, the age of the military revolution, as it's called, firearms, forts, huge armies, you know, far, far bigger than anything at the dawn of the 17th century. And Gustavus Adolphus is the guy who's really the kind of, he's the great military innovator. He is one of the great progenitors of this. And what backs it up? You need an infrastructure of organization, of training, of drilling, of

and finance and a state and a bureaucracy. So in other words, the military revolution rewards countries with very well-organized tax-raising bureaucracies. So Sweden and then England later on, of course. And the consequence of that is that you can have a standing army, which hasn't been seen really in Europe since the Roman Empire. Exactly. And you have, what is it, the pikemen can also fire with flintlocks. And it's kind of this idea that you stab and you shoot people.

At the same time. That's right. With bayonets, the bayonet is a key thing. And so that becomes the new innovation, doesn't it? That replaces the pike. But essentially it's terrifying, as you said, to be confronted with this very, very

menacing military machine. Yeah, modern, I think. It's also a really modern military machine. So the Swedes are pioneers of, so your brother's podcast would enjoy this, combined arms operations. So infantry, cavalry and artillery working really closely together. And you can only do that if they're perfectly drilled, very well organized. Everybody knows their place in the plan.

The Swedes also, I think, have a kind of, there's a religious dimension. Well, that's why they're in the Thirty Years' War. That's why they're in the Thirty Years' War, exactly. So they're Lutherans. Some historians say it gives them a sense, not just a mission, but a kind of fatalism.

Charles XII, who we'll come to, famously said, I shall fall by no other bullet than that which is destined for me. And when that comes, no prudence will help me. In other words, there's no point in me trying to save myself or to worry about the risks. God has already decided and there's

There's no point in me stressing about it. I'll just die when I die. And that bullet has been prepared somewhere. And there's no point me even stressing about it. But also if God has chosen you to be his sword, then you have to surrender to that sense of purpose. And that's something that Charles obviously embodies, but Gustavus had as well. And actually,

Dominic, when I went to see Aston Villa play against Leipzig, I took the opportunity to pop up to Wittenberg. And in the church there, there was a plaque marking where Gustavus Adolphus' coffin had been laid as it was brought back from the depths of Germany. And that sense of...

cutting edge military efficiency and kind of religious certitude. I mean, it's a terrifying combination. Yeah, I think absolutely. And nobody incarnates it better than Charles XII. So he was 10 years younger than Peter the Great. He's born in 1682. His father, Charles XI, was very pious.

and had trained him from birth effectively for war. So when he's four years old, he's riding behind his father at military reviews. At six years old, he's taken away from his mother and the ladies of the court and he's given to military and male tutors. At seven, he shoots his first fox.

at eight. What is it about foxes? Yeah. The kings of Northern Europe are just terrible towards foxes. Yeah, Augustus the Strong, the fox tosser from the last episode. He'll be reappearing in the next couple of episodes. So when he was eight, Charles killed his first deer. When he was 10, he killed a wolf. And when he was 11, he killed his first bear. He loves killing bears. There is a lot of bear murder in this episode, isn't there? He's a very terse, serious, stoical man, a young man. He's obsessed with honour.

He's obsessed with his own integrity. He's very bright. He reads Latin. He reads Moliere and Racine in the original. Every morning, he spends an hour discussing the Bible with a bishop, and he carries a biography of Alexander the Great with him wherever he goes, which is rather like...

Didn't Alexander the Great have a special box then he travels with the Iliad. So this is effectively, you know, he models himself from Alexander and you can actually see his mad campaigns do have that, that sort of Alexandria and spirit. Well, that's what, uh, Samuel Johnson's poem is doing because it's echoing a satire by juvenile, the Roman poet. And so he's casting very much as a kind of classical hero. Yes. Like a Hannibal, like a Hannibal, very explicitly like a Hannibal. Yeah. So when he's 15, Charles.

He succeeds the throne because his father dies young. And they originally, they say, well, I have a regency council because he's so young. Within months, he scraps that and says, no, I want to run everything myself. And a sign of his character is that when he recreates

rides to his coronation he says I will not be crowned king at my coronation because I consider myself king already so no one else will crown me and he actually rides to the service with the crown already on his head which a lot of people find quite shocking but it's a sign of his sort of willfulness you know he will shape history to his designs rather than allow history to kind of happen to him as it were but also presumably it illustrates his sense that he has been chosen by God and he doesn't need a church to mediate between that exactly right

Exactly. And I think that sense of being chosen by God also fuels his extraordinary courage. That point about, you know, the bullets has already been chosen that will kill me because as a teenage King, you know, he ignores all the advisors who say, who's your air. You need to kind of take care of yourself, all of this kind of thing. He will get up early and he'll go off riding through the snow with a page kind of leaping over walls, um,

He loves to rate sledge, to have kind of sledge races. He loves hunting bears armed only with a wooden pitchfork. Yeah, that's mad, isn't it? He gets the bear in the fork and then he leaps on it and throttles it. I mean, just insane behavior. Yeah. So...

So people who worry, you know, that sort of teenage boys are spending too much time in their basements playing on video games and not getting it. I mean, they would learn. This is the model of somebody who gets out, enjoys the great outdoors, tests himself, finds an outlet for his kind of burgeoning masculinity. And doesn't he, he's on a horse and he just rides off a cliff. Yeah.

Just for the bands. There's a lot of stuff like that. Like Peter the Great, he loves war games. And he'll have war games at sea with kind of water cannons instead of real cannons. And at one point, he sees one of his friends swimming and he says...

And he can't swim. And he says, that looks like it's quite easy, is it? And it says, yeah, it's very easy. And he jumps into the Baltic and then almost drowns and has to be dragged out. But that's exactly his vibe. I mean, just jumping into the Baltic on its own is mad. Now, the interesting thing, some historians have subsequently said they think he was gay because he never married and he never had any, as far as we can tell, any relationship of any kind.

I think that's probably wrong because there's no evidence that he was gay or that he, because he said again and again, I am married to the army. I will not settle down until I've, you know, wiped the floor with the rest of Europe. There was a moment when it looked like he might have an interesting career as a prankster on the level of Peter the Great. So in 1698, his cousin, the Duke of Holstein, Gotthorp, came to Stockholm to marry Charles's sister.

And they got up to all kinds of amusing japes. They set wild hares loose in the Swedish parliament and chased them through the parliament. They used the palace windows for pistol practice. They threw cherries at Charles's ministers. They rode through the streets knocking people's hats off and stealing their wigs.

And they also, the best bit, which I think is apocryphal, to be fair, is they had a competition to see who could behead the most sheep in a specific stretch of time. Isn't there also more bear action? They get a bear drunk. That's right. They did get a bear drunk. And push it out of the window. That's right. Yeah. This was called the Gotthorp Fury. It was like this was one last binge. It was like a bit of a stag do. One last binge before a life of domesticity. By the time Charles turned 18 in 1700...

He's put all the pranks behind him. He's become very serious. He's given up drinking strong liquor. He sleeps half of every night on the floor to toughen himself up. In winter, he sleeps in a barn to prepare himself for life on campaign. And he's also ashamed of being very fair skinned and spends loads of time trying to get his get sunburns in order to, again, to kind of toughen his skin up. So very, very Spartan sort of ethos.

And you could argue, I suppose, now if you were a Dane or something, you would say this is absolutely typical of the Swedes, wouldn't you? Because the Danes have very disobliging views of the Swedes. They think they're all sort of cold, driven, obsessive. And there is a little bit of that, I think, about Charles. And possibly you could argue about Sweden and Germany at this point, because you could argue... I think it's very impressive. A commitment to ascetic militarism. I'm not a very ascetic person deep down, but I kind of...

wish that I was, you know, I'd like to be more Swedish generally. I think there is a downside to this and this is partly what brings on the great Northern war. Sweden held the province of Livonia, which is now kind of Estonia and Latvia since 1660.

And it was dominated by Baltic German barons who were the descendants of the Teutonic Knights. We do love a Baltic German baron. Yeah, you've got to love a Baltic German baron. But over time, the Swedes had been kind of whittling away at the powers of these Baltic German barons and confiscating their lands and generally making themselves very unpopular. And the spokesman for the Baltic barons was a guy called Johan Reinhold von Patkel. And he was...

you know, a tremendous fellow. He's very intelligent. He's very brave, dashing. He's fluent in Greek and Latin. And the Baltic chaps sent him to Stockholm. They said, go and plead our case in Stockholm and say, like, stop confiscating our lands and being nasty to us. And when he arrived in Stockholm, the Swedes, living up to their reputation in Europe in the 17th century, they said, you're obviously a terrible man. No one cares what you think. And they sentenced him to death

So he fled West in disguise and he then spent the next sort of months and years plotting to build an anti-Swedish coalition.

And he went first to the King of Denmark, Frederick IV. The Danes hate the Swedes. They want to get the province of Skåne in southern Sweden back. That's the place you see in Wallander in the TV series. Yes, Henny Mankell. Yeah. So they want to get Skåne back and the Danes are well in. Then he goes to see our old friend, fox tossing champion, Augustus the Strong.

Augustus the Strong has only recently been elected King of Poland and he's very keen to impress their Polish nobles. And so that's on top of him being Elector of Saxony. Elector of Saxony, that's right. Stacking up the titles. Exactly. And he loves the thought of conquering Livonia, Estonia and Latvia. And Pat Cole says to him, look, you know, when we build this coalition, this will be dead easy. I mean, he genuinely says you'll be in Riga for Christmas. He's not aware of Peter the Great's Riga obsession. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So Frederick and Augustus agree this deal. The Danes will attack the Swedes in North Germany and then Skuna, southern Sweden. And Augustus will march troops from Saxony, his Saxon army, and maybe some Poles into Livonia. So the Swedes will be fighting two different adversaries on two different fronts, and they'll be overwhelmed. And then Pat Cole, the guy who's put this together, says, look, we can actually go one better. Why don't we get Peter the Great in on this as well?

We'll get the Russians to attack in Ingria, the area now around St. Petersburg, and that will distract the Swedes from defending Riga. And this will be great. Now, the thing is that when they put this deal together, everybody thinks of the Russians as a sort of slightly ludicrous junior partner because the Russians never win wars.

And Pat Cole actually says to the Poles, the Russian infantry would be most serviceable for working in the trenches and for receiving the enemy's shots. In other words, they really will be cannon fodder. But they don't think it's a bad idea to give the Russians access to the Baltic. They don't think this is, I mean, a kind of foolish step. They're aware that there's a slight risk, actually. So Pat Cole says to the Poles at one point,

We have to bind the hands of the Tsar so he doesn't get in ahead of us. Obviously, we don't want him to take Estonia and Latvia. We don't want him to take Tallinn and Riga and all of that because that's really destined for Poland. So they are kind of where I think...

that there's a danger. But just to be clear, they are offering him the region where in the long run, St. Petersburg will be. So they are giving him that window onto the Baltic Sea. But right at the very end of the Baltic, it doesn't occur to them that he would end up with Estonia and Latvia as well, but they'll give him a little foothold. That's the bribe, basically. By the beginning of 1700, the deal is done. The Poles, well, I said the Poles,

It's actually Saxon troops that Augustus the Strong is using. He sends them in first into what's now Latvia to besiege Riga. A few weeks later, the Danes strike into Holstein, so North Germany. And as we've seen,

In August, Peter the Great joins the war as well. Now, they think Charles is only a teenager. We can wipe the floor with this bloke. He's just a stripling. And they're quite wrong, of course. Charles is in the forest. And guess what he's doing? He's hunting bears. Oh, God. More bear murdering. I know. When news comes that Augustus has struck, he greets the news completely calmly. And he says, well, we'll make King Augustus go back the way he came. And then later...

He gets the news a few weeks later, the Danes have joined the war as well. And he says, it's curious that both my cousins, Frederick and Augustus, wish to make war on me. So be it. But King Augustus has broken his word. Our cause then is just and God will help us. There's a sort of very admirable stoicism, certainty and calm about Charles, which has, as we will see, has a dark side if you're too certain of victory in war. Yes.

Yeah. But he spells out his kind of sense of mission to his council, doesn't he? He says, I have resolved never to begin an unjust war, but also never to end a just war without overcoming my enemy. So essentially, he is committing himself to a war to the death. He says, I will not stop until I've got my revenge. And these cousins of mine who've attacked me, you know, will have paid the price. And a big spoiler alert, Charles will have multiple opportunities to end the war.

are not terribly disadvantageous terms, but he refuses them all. He says, no, no, no, we go right to the end on this. I've been wronged and there'll be absolutely no compromise whatsoever.

So, on the 13th of April, 1700, Charles leaves Stockholm, says goodbye to his closest relatives, who were his grandmother and his sister. And believe it or not, he will never see them or Stockholm. But at first, the war goes brilliantly for Charles. It's pretty obvious that this allied coalition have completely underestimated him and miscalculated. Instead of dividing his forces as they thought he would, he does the sensible thing. He keeps his forces together and he deals with his enemies better.

one by one. So first, he smites the Danes. The Danes behave very foolishly. They've sent all their army into Holstein to try and capture it, which means that when he lands his army in Zeeland and marches on Copenhagen, they're completely helpless. So within months, he's knocked the Danes out of the war completely. I mean, they've had what Theo would call, they've had a shocker. Next is Peter the Great. Peter the Great's initial objective was the coastal fortress of Narva, which

which is now, I think it's on the border of Estonia and Russia. And Russia had ruled it fleetingly, I think, in the 16th century. It had a very sort of classic kind of Baltic story. It was originally Danish, Baltic German, but had briefly been Russian. And now it's Swedish. And Peter turns up. He arrives with 40,000 men. Now, most of these...

or a lot of these are his play soldiers that he had had in the previous episodes. So the people he'd been training in his teens, but I guess the majority are serfs, conscripted Russian serfs. They're not really professional soldiers at all. They look good because he's put them in what he calls German uniforms with

They wear dark green coats and they wear black tricorn hats. So no caftans. No caftans. Absolutely no caftans and no beards. But they really just don't know what they're doing. They arrive outside Narva at the end of 1700. The siege goes very, very slowly. It's raining. They're all very miserable. And then stunning news.

To their disbelief, Charles has landed in Southern Estonia with 10,000 men and he's marching on Narva. And they've got 40,000. But this thing you see, when we go through all these numbers, the Russians always have more, but they're absolutely terrified of the Swedes because everybody says, well, you can't beat the Swedes. You could have 100,000 men and you won't beat 10,000 Swedes because they're brilliant. They're so well-organized. They've got the latest muskets. They've got bayonets. They've got God.

You know, you might as well just run away right now. They are super troopers. They are super troopers. Very good. I like to think there'll be a lot of ABBA puns in this series. By the time Charles reaches Narva, Peter himself was already gone. He's actually gone to get reinforcements from Novgorod. But this is a very bad look because it looks like he's run away. No. I mean, Peter the Great, he's insanely brave. He is. But you know what? I mean, this is terrible PR for Peter. The Swedes, as you said, are outnumbered four to one.

But they basically absolutely wiped the floor with the Russians. The Russians lost 9,000 men killed and wounded and 20,000 men captured and all their artillery captured. The Swedes lost fewer than 700 men. So the Swedes just win a massive victory. It's a huge humiliation for Peter. And the Swedes then struck a medal, a medallion that showed Peter running away. And it had two biblical quotations. On one side, it said, Peter stood and warmed himself up.

And on the other side, it says, he went out and wept bitterly. And obviously for Peter, who's very proud, this is a big deal. Being teased by Lutherans. Exactly. An Orthodox, yeah, an Orthodox Tsar of Russia would not like that at all. For Charles, who's obviously 10 years younger than Peter, he's won his first big battle.

And he absolutely loves it. And he's been doing exactly as you would expect. He's been riding around in full view of the Russian guns. He's been taunting their gunners and snipers. He's had

Horses shot from under him. He is living the dream. This is what he's always wanted. There were descriptions of him at the time by other Swedes. They say he seemed drunk with happiness at the end of that battle. But he complained. He said, there was no pleasure in fighting with the Russians, for they will not stand like other men, but they run away at once. The massive downside, I think this first battle gives Charles a total contempt for Peter and for the Russians and a really, really devastating

dangerous belief in his own invincibility. He just thinks that I will never lose. This is, I love this. This is brilliant. It's everything I've dreamed of and I can't possibly lose. I'd like as much of it as possible, please. And actually one of his officers said, even at this point, a guy called Count Stenbock,

He said, the king thinks now about nothing except war. He no longer troubles himself about the advice of other people. And he seems to believe that God communicates directly to him what he ought to do. So our Catholic and Orthodox listeners may well say this is the great downside of having a Protestant military leader, because he's in direct communication with the Almighty and

And this can lead you astray. Robert K. Massey, Peter's great biographer, says in this sense, while Narva was Charles's first great victory, it was also the first step towards his doom. Goodness. So we will have a break now. And Dominic, when we come back,

Let's find out how the great Northern war continues. I'm William Gouge, a Vuri collaborator and professional ultra runner from the UK. I love to tackle endurance runs around the world, including a 55 day, 3,064 mile run across the US. So I know a thing or two about performance work. When it comes to relaxing, I look for something ultra versatile and comfy. The Ponto Performance Jogger from Vuri is perfect for all of those things.

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Hello, welcome back to the Rest of History. And while you have been listening to those adverts, or not listening to the adverts, of course, if you are a member of the Rest of History Club, Dominic, the Great Northern War has been cracking on, two years have passed, and essentially it's turned into something reminiscent of the First World War, hasn't it? A kind of attritional slog. It has indeed. So we don't normally do this, but the Great Northern War is so long that we've skipped two years in the break. Yeah.

So what's happened in the meantime is that Peter has not panicked after losing the Battle of Narva. He has got a top general, a commander-in-chief who's a veteran diplomat who's very pro-modernizing and whatnot.

not who is called boris sheremetov and so he's the the zukov of this yes he is exactly he is he is the he is the guy who is going to basically marshal russia's enormous manpower to try to fight off this kind of supposedly invincible um swedish killing i mean and just to say stalin looks to peter the great yes you know in the great crisis of the nazi invasion doesn't he so it's

very aware of these kind of parallels. So the Russians have been trying to modernize in their army and drilling and kind of trying to conscript more people and whatnot. Meanwhile, why didn't Charles just strike into Russia right away? Now, some of his officers after the battle of Narva said, why don't we go on now to the Kremlin? Why don't we depose Peter? We could bring back Peter's sister Sophia to rule because she's still knocking around in a monastery. They can see all the downsides straight away.

They don't have supplies. You know, they've all got dysentery, classic things that you have in wars in Eastern Europe. Charles says, no, no, no. We'll leave Peter for the time being. Actually, I want to really knock out Augustus the Strong. Because it's personal there, isn't it? It's personal. Let's knock out Saxony and Poland.

So actually, this is a really, really fateful decision. He leaves Peter alone because he underestimates Peter. And he says, let's concentrate on Augustus. And he thinks, God has appointed me, actually, to punish Augustus. Augustus promised him that he would never go to war with him. Then he broke his word. Augustus has been hurling foxes around and killing badgers and stuff. And breeding an enormous number of children. 364 children. Yeah. Charles doesn't win the proof of that, does he? I mean, I wonder whether there's a degree of...

I mean, you say that he despises Peter as a war leader. Yeah. But I guess his contempt for Augustus is a kind of deeper, more moral one. Yeah, I think so. I think he regards Augustus as faithless,

Um, sort of shiftless false fleeting purger. Exactly. So for various reasons, it takes a long time for this to get going in 1702. He marches on Warsaw. Uh, he smashes Augustus's army, but you know, Poland is a big place and basically he ends up chasing Augustus around Poland for what seems like months, if not years.

And while all that's happening, that's great for Peter because Peter can now work on this new army, which is conscripted from Serfs and Ukrainian Cossacks. He can get his factories to start producing thousands of the latest flintlock muskets, teach his men how to use the latest bayonets. They melt down loads of church bells for artillery. By the summer of 1782, the Russians have sorted themselves out. And with Charles gone...

They're able to now move their troops into inland Livonia, Latvia, Estonia, and they're burning farms and villages and taking thousands of civilian prisoners. And so, Dominic, this is essentially the first time in Russian history that it is mobilizing the immensity of its resources, which are both kind of in terms of physical resources, but also population.

and investing in this strategy of creating a wilderness so that potential invaders will not be able to penetrate into the heartlands of Russia itself. Yeah, that's a very good point, Tom. This is really the first moment in history that you have the Russian state realizing that its strengths lie in its colossal reserves of manpower and mobilizing that, and also the terrain. And its size. Yeah, size, exactly, sheer size.

Now, I've said the Russians are rampaging through Livonia, the Cossacks often doing a lot of the rampaging and taking lots of prisoners. And I said that deliberately because there's one prisoner in particular that becomes incredibly important. There's a town in Latvia today called Aluksna, which at the time I think was called Marienburg, kind of German name.

And there, the Russians captured among their prisoners was a 17-year-old girl who was probably called Marta Skavronska or in Russian, Skavronskaya. So when they captured her, she was the girlfriend or mistress of a Swedish dragoon.

And before that, she'd been a servant girl for the local priest. And before that, she had probably been born into a Catholic peasant family in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. So that's the sort of eastern half of this great Polish Commonwealth. Marta Skowronska can't read, she can't write, but she clearly has some kind of je ne sais quoi because

Because Sheremitev, the commander, takes her on at some point as a servant girl. And then in 1703, she's taken up by another guy called Alexander Menshikov. Now, we haven't mentioned Menshikov really yet, but he has a massive part to play in Peter's life.

He had possibly been a stable boy at the Royal estate. We don't really know. We definitely know that he had served in all those sort of war games that Peter liked to do. And he had quickly become Peter's great favorite and his closest friend. He is the sort of Charles Brandon figure of Peter's court. And he's replaced the Swiss guy.

who was charles's great favorite before that and he's died in his name i can't remember france lafour yeah exactly him he has become his great drinking partner his buddy his carousing partner and he's very greedy and ambitious menschkoff he becomes an important commander for peter but he's kind of always festooning himself with kind of he loves bling he loves titles all of that a bit kind of uh guring yeah i suppose only not as fat yes and not as evil i think it's fair to say but it

But acquisitive. Yeah, very acquisitive. Anyway, Martha or Martha becomes his maidservant and probably his mistress. And while she is living with Menshikov, she converted to Orthodoxy and she took the name Ekaterina Catherine. And then he took her to Moscow and she met Peter. And Peter says, oh, what a tremendous woman, young girl. I'd like her as my mistress and takes her up as...

his mistress. What it was about Catherine that appealed to Peter is, I guess, slightly unclear. His book for Robert K. Massey calls her a sturdy, healthy, appealing girl in the full bloom of youth. That's very much the way he likes to describe women, isn't it? Exactly. A sturdy, handsome girl. Yeah. A buxom wench. There's a lot of that. I think he does use the word buxom quite a lot. He does. So she's not like tremendously glamorous or good looking, but there's something about her

Her sort of, dare I say, her kind of rustic simplicity. I don't know. Well, doesn't he call her mother? Yes. A bit like John Lennon with Yoko. So maybe there's a kind of mature, you know, he's missing mum. Possibly. She's many years his junior, but she does kind of mother him. They become very close very quickly. She bears two sons, Peter and Paul, in 1704 and 1705. They both die in infancy. And then in 1707,

an extraordinary thing peter and marta or catherine as she now calls herself are married in secret they're married privately and when you think that she is not even russian she's she's an illiterate lithuanian peasant girl who was subsequently converted to orthodoxy and you think about all those bridal shows that they would have yeah you know when he was growing up

I mean, this is a massive, massive departure from convention. It must have been unbelievably shocking. But maybe again, for Peter, that's part of the fun of it. I think that is probably part of the fun of it. Again, it's breaking a taboo. Actually, the thing is, everybody really liked her. So people would say, she's so jolly. She's very generous. She loves a drink. She loves a joke.

She would go on campaign. So very unlike Charles XII. Oh, he would have hated her. I mean, they would not have got on at all. And whenever Peter has one of his fits or his tantrums or his rants, she will kind of calm him down and stroke his head and, you know, all this sort of thing. Because he's presumably still having his tantrums.

twitching and he's twitching all the time. And actually the twitching becomes very bad when he's under pressure in the war because the war's going badly for him for a long time. So he's twitching like, I mean, he's twitching like anything. So you need someone to just kind of rub and calm him down. Exactly. Like a startled horse. Exactly. So that's one great addition to Peter's life. And the second is not a person, but it's a place. And this is massive, isn't it? It's huge. It's historically, I mean, it couldn't be bigger with Charles off.

In Poland, the Russian army are able to rampage a bit around Ingria, this area. The Russians are rampaging around Ingria. Yeah, I love it. That is what this podcast is all about. So...

In 1702, they capture a Swedish fortress called Nöteborg, which is on Lake Ladoga. So people who listen to a Harold Hardrada series will remember Harold Hardrada passing this way centuries earlier. You do love a Northern War, don't you? I love a Northern War. I love a Northeastern War. I can't get enough of this. I guess if you spent so much of your professional career trapped in Harold Wilson's mind in 1973 or something. Bare hands.

killing and the frozen wastes of the North. Yeah, could not be a more refreshing change. In 1703, they take a second Swedish village, which is called Nianskans, which is just inland from the Baltic. And this now gives Peter

The whole province of Ingria, which was one of his key war aims, he gives them access to the Baltic and it gives him the entire course of the river Neva. When he gets this, he thinks to himself, well, my goal, my real goal was to capture Riga, which would be the ideal Baltic port. But the Swedes still have it. So now I'm just, since I've got the river Neva and access to the sea, I might as well just build my own version of Riga, a new port.

It's an extraordinary thing to do because, of course, this land might only be briefly occupied. I mean, the Swedes might try to get it back. The war is still going.

And the surroundings are incredibly desolate. Well, doesn't Neva in Finnish literally mean swamp? Yeah, it's swampland. It's swampland. It's full of mosquitoes. It's incredibly boggy and miserable. The weather is terrible. It's windy. It's kind of foggy. It often gets frozen. He doesn't care. On the 16th of May, 1703, he says to his sort of sappers and workmen,

Get cracking on a fortress. We'll name it after St. Peter and St. Paul. And he stays nearby, you know, because he loves to, he loves a lathe, doesn't he? He loves a bit of carpentry. So he stays in a log cabin.

which you can still see today, by the way, nearby. And the St. Peter and Paul Fortress. Yes. Which, of course, you can also see. But that at the time is built on an island, isn't it? So it's surrounded on all sides by the Neva. Kind of the Neva and marshes and stuff, bogs. So actually, that is one advantage of the inhospitability of the terrain, is that, I mean, it's pretty defensible. Yeah, exactly. Well, as we'll see, he never loses it.

So by the autumn of 1703, the first merchant ships are arriving from England and Holland. Peter says, if you keep coming, I'll give you massive tariff reductions. He's the very opposite, isn't he, of that chap in Washington, D.C. Because whereas President Trump likes a tariff, Peter the Great does not like a tariff. So by 1704, he's building a shipyard.

And over time, he clearly begins to expand his ambitions. And he thinks, well, rather than just a trading port, why don't we build a real city that will actually end up eclipsing? And so year after year, he's issuing these edicts saying, I want carpenters, I want masons, I want laborers, bring them north to work on this new city. We're going to build houses, we're going to build churches, we're even going to build palaces. And just to be clear about this,

They are working in horrendous conditions and tens of thousands of them die. Well, isn't the famous thing that is said about this city that it is built on bones? Yes. That the foundations of this city are the corpses of all the labourers who have

sunk into the bog. Exactly. And died of hypothermia, of dysentery, of scurvy. They died of malaria even because of the mosquitoes. Everybody says this is literally the worst place on earth. This is a terrible, terrible place. But Peter is unrelenting and he even says to his sisters, to his courtiers, to the nobility of Moscow, come and live in my new city. Because he hates Moscow. He does hate Moscow.

And one of his sisters said, this place is absolutely, unbelievably dreadful. And I quote, it will not endure after our time. May it remain a desert.

But of course it does endure, Tom, because the name of this city? St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg, exactly. Can I just ask you about that? Yeah. So it's not Petrograd. No. St. Petersburg. Yeah. So why does it have the German name? So I think there are two reasons. One, obviously in the Baltic, generally, places had German names. But also, is it not perhaps...

Peter's window on the window on the West. Yeah. His, his, his modernizing ambitions. The fact that it is always from the beginning, it's looking Westwoods, not Eastwoods, I think, because it's conceived as the equivalent of those great cities in

you know, along the Baltic, those kind of Hanseatic style cities of Riga and Tallinn and whatnot, all of which at the time had German names. What's happening in the rest of Russia? It's fair to say that Peter's hand lies very heavy because to pay for all this and to pay for his war in his new city is levying all kinds of new taxes. There's a tax on births, on funerals, on wheat, on beds, on hats. There's even a tax on mustaches as we knew there was already a tax on beards. But he's got a mustache, Peter. Yeah. Well, probably pays. Is he taxing himself? Eh,

I would doubt very strongly that the Tsar would pay tax. He's also conscripting absolutely unbelievable numbers of men. So 300,000 men into the army, 30,000 men to build fortifications at Azov down in the south.

Hundreds of thousands brought to work in St. Petersburg. There's a lot of discontent. So he has a new secret police under his mate Fedor Romodanovsky to publish, and I quote, treason by word or deed.

And that's sort of set by word. You know, that's a slightly ominous. So that's the spoken word as well as the written word. Exactly. And there are rebellions. And the rebellions tend to follow a set pattern that people will say Peter is too authoritarian. He is unorthodox. He is too pro-German. All of this. I mean, on the unorthodoxy and the pro-Western character. I mean, he is also instituting all kinds of reforms at the same time, isn't he? Yeah. So even as he is playing the role

the despot, he's also playing the liberal. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can be both. He can in many ways. I mean, I think we'll get into this maybe in our final episode.

How much is he a progenitor of the enlightened despotism that we associate with the later 18th century that arguably reaches its culmination in Napoleon? So somebody who is simultaneously authoritarian and reforming. For instance, he's just got married. He's got rid of all that, you know, the stuff of the father handing the whip over to the bridegroom and all that kind of stuff.

And essentially he's saying that people can marry whoever they like. Exactly. And he's set up new schools, newspapers, printers, and so on. In some ways you would say, well, that will encourage freedom of thought and freedom of speech and so on. So a kindly man. But robust, I think it's fair to say. Yeah, so there are these rebellions. So it's entertaining to read the justifications. So Astrakhan...

1705, the rebels say, we're standing up, and I quote, for the Christian faith and against shaving and German dress and tobacco, and because we and our wives and children were not admitted into God's church in the old Russian dress. So these things that we've talked about as other trivialities, beards and clothing and so on,

They are very important to people. I mean, they symbolize something deeper, which is Russia's, what they see as Russia's distinctiveness. And it's placed as the third Rome, as the carrying the candle of the true faith. A rebellion by Cossacks in 1707 on the River Dorne.

because of rumours that he was going to outlaw beards completely. We cannot be silent on the account of the evil deeds of wicked men and princes and profit makers and Germans. We cannot forgive them for diverting us from the true Christian faith with their signs and cunning tricks. And so in that sense, the fact that

St. Petersburg has a German name must make it seem like the absolute embodiment of everything that they hate. I think so. And I think there are always people, there have always been people in Russia, probably not so much today, but for a long time there were people in Russia who thought that

This was the wrong turn. You know, this is a symbol of where we went wrong, where we lost our Slavic traditions and our kind of Orthodox roots. And so Moscow and St. Petersburg from this point on are the twin poles within Russia. Exactly. So that's Peter, but what's happened to Charles? What's Charles been up to? So we left Charles heading into Poland to deal with Augustus the Strong, winning loads of battles against Augustus. He'd captured Krakow, the kind of ancient royal capital of Poland.

But Augustus keeps kind of melting away. And as time goes on, there are sort of worrying reports coming in from the Baltic. So Charles hears that Peter has got his act back together, that he has captured these towns, that he's founded St. Petersburg, that he does end up capturing Narva in the long run.

He gets reports from Sweden, Charles. People are hungry. They're tired. They've lost the grain supply from Livonia. They're becoming exhausted of the war. But Charles just will not stop. I mean, he's won far more battles than he's lost. And, you know, he's seen off any, this coalition effectively, but he will not come to terms. He says to his courtiers,

Augustus broke his word to me and I have to punish him. Even if I should remain here, that's in Poland, for 50 years, I will not leave this country until Augustus is dethroned. And eventually in 1704, he bullies the Polish parliament the same into deposing Augustus. He gets them to meet outside Warsaw. He rings the field with Swedish musketeers.

They vote Augustus out because remember in Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, it's an elective monarchy. And they install a Swedish puppet who's called Stanisław Leszczynski. So impressed. Yeah, you enjoyed that. I didn't have to mention his name, but I thought I'd do it just to...

Because that is a name with a lot of Zs and Cs. Yeah. That's all I'll say. Love it. I wasn't practicing all weekend, honestly. That's the right way. Now, Augustus, he doesn't give up. I mean, he's a great character, really, with his fox tossing and his... Bending horseshoes and things. Yeah, 6,000 children.

He escapes into Hungary in disguise. He rendezvous with the Russians in what's now Belarus. He slips past Charles and gets back into Poland, presumably hoping to head back towards Saxony, because of course he's still king of Saxony. So by 1706, I mean, this really is turning into like a game of a mad game of risk that's got completely out of hand. Yeah. Off to invade Kamchatka. Yeah. Charles thinks, well, I'm just going to invade Saxony as well now.

So he invades Saxony and his logic here is this is Augustus's heartland Saxony. This is the only way to knock him definitively out of the war. And again, it goes brilliantly. The Saxons are absolutely knackered to the people of Saxony. When they hear the Swedes are coming, remember the 30 years war. And they just like, oh no, this is the worst thing that could possibly happen. So within weeks,

Charles and the Swedes have occupied Leipzig and Dresden. I mean, you wonder why he didn't do it before, to be honest. Yeah, after faffing around in Poland. Going into woods and bogs and things. I suppose. But I mean, it is a mad thing, isn't it? The Swedes occupying Leipzig and Dresden. I mean, we're sort of mentioning that as though it's nothing. But they're hundreds of miles away from Sweden at this point. But they've got a track record, I said. Gustavus Adolphus. They love it. In Wittenberg. The transformation of the Swedish psyche after this. I mean, I guess it's because it's so traumatic what happens.

is kind of, I can't think of many equivalents in history of a people who have been just so unbelievably ruthless and warlike and then turn into Greta Thunberg. Well, anyway. So Saxony is now prostrate before him. And after a lot of military and diplomatic faffing around, which you don't need to go into,

Augustus finally surrenders. He abdicates as king of Poland formally, and he breaks his alliance with Russia. And what is worse, I mean, Augustus is very faithless. Because what is worse, one of the conditions for this surrender is he has to hand over this guy, Johann Reinhold von Patkel,

Oh, the Baltic Baron. Baltic Baron who'd put this whole thing together. And is that, that's Charles insisting on that? Charles insists on that. He's very vengeful. After promising that he wouldn't, Augustus has him locked up without food and water for five days. I guess a lot of people have a stereotype that the Russians are unprofessional.

unbelievably ruthless. But actually in this, Peter is quite sentimental. He says, I don't think you should give this guy Pat Cullover. I mean, that's really bad form. But this is a guy who'd been nouting his, you know, the Streltsy to death. That's true. I mean, I'm not having this kind of... But in this respect, he's kindly. He's a kindly man. He's not. But in this respect, Peter says, I don't think we should hand Pat Cullover. I think that's really bad. And Augustus specifically promises, I'll never do that. And then literally the next thing he does is to hand him over.

So it's not just the Russians who love a bit of torture. The Swedes had Pat Cole broken on the wheel by an executioner with a sledgehammer who hit him 15 times with the sledgehammer to break all his limbs. Oh, God. And Pat Cole was screaming and shouting, take off my head, take off my head, because he wanted them to put him out of his agony. But then the executioner was not very good with the axe. He was better with a sledgehammer. He was a sledgehammer man, really.

And it took him four goes with a country axe before Pat Cole's head was off. Well, I mean, the moral of that is don't betray your overlord, I guess. Yeah, no, don't. So at this point, we're entering 1707. And let's be honest, everything has gone brilliantly, really, for Charles. I know there's St. Petersburg. He's lost that. But apart from that, Danes are knocked out. Poland and Saxony are basically his puppets.

His men adore him. They think he's invincible. All across Europe, Charles XII is seen as the celebrity, the superstar of the age. And tales of his adventures, rather like with Alexander the Great or Hannibal or whoever, spread all over Europe. He doesn't wear armor. He won't wear a hat.

People are amazed by this. He won't wear a hat while he's on campaign. He doesn't wear warm clothes when it's snowing. He dines on bread and water. He sleeps on bare boards with his men. He reads every night from the Bible and he makes his men kneel to pray. The army, while they're marching, they have to all kneel and pray. In the snow. Yeah, twice a day. All of this kind of thing. He's like Oliver Cromwell on steroids, basically. From all over Europe.

People send ambassadors to basically get him on side. So Louis XIV sends an ambassador and says, look, you know,

Why don't we, the French and the Swedes, team up, we'll divide Germany between us, divide Europe between us. Wouldn't this be brilliant? Just to be clear, I mean, France has 20 million people. Yeah. Sweden has 1.5 million. Yeah, whatever it is. Exactly. And they're treating as equals. Exactly. And then the other great man of the age, the Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill, the great hero of English arms.

He went personally to Charles's headquarters in a place called Oldtrenstedt in Saxony with a letter from Queen Anne to basically say, please don't get into bed with the French. Yeah. You know, Marlborough thinks Charles XII is amazing. I mean, Marlborough, who we think of as the great commander of the age, he can't get enough of Charles XII. But Charles XII thinks Marlborough is overdressed, doesn't he? He does. A bit foppish. And his language is flowery. Really? Yeah.

His language is too flowery. God. But the Swedes still say that about everybody, don't they? I mean, you wouldn't have Charles XII building himself an enormous palace like Blenheim, would you? No, you absolutely would not. So I think even at this point, 1707, even Peter thinks...

you know, I'll probably never be this guy. But this guy really is Alexander the Great. There's no point in fighting on. And actually, Peter starts looking around for someone to mediate. He went to the French first and he said, if you will sort out a peace deal for me, I'll actually help you against the English. What? I thought he loved the English. I know. Shocking. That's not showing much gratitude for the English allowing him to

have wheelbarrow races across gardens. But get this. Then he sends his ambassador to go and see the Duke of Marlborough. And he says, look, if you can get Queen Anne to mediate with the Swedes, I will give you Marlborough. You can have your pick of the principalities of Kiev, Vladimir and Siberia. I'll give you 50,000 ducats a year. I'll give you the highest Russian honor, the order of St. Andrew. And I quote a Ruby as large as any in Europe.

Wow. So the Duke of Marlborough could be the overlord of Kiev. Yeah. I mean, that would be a diplomatic solution, wouldn't it? That would be amazing. I wonder if anyone thought of that. It would have been an amazing thing if it had happened. But it doesn't happen because they will never reach a truce because Peter will not give up St. Petersburg. He's invested so much in it, not just emotionally. And Charles will never concede St. Petersburg. But also, Charles doesn't want peace. Charles just thinks, I have the best army in Europe. I

I never lose. Why would I give up anything in the Baltic? Why would I make the slightest concession? Because when I turn finally to deal with the Russians,

I will wipe the floor with them. And so as he's sitting there in Saxony, Charles, in the summer of 1707, he has a much better idea than a deal with the Duke of Marlborough. His idea is, I'll lead my invincible army east through Poland, into Russia, into Moscow itself, and I'll sit in the Kremlin and I will dictate the terms myself. So I've got two questions on that, on that strategy. The first is, is there no sense that he's learned his lesson from all this kind of

herring around Poland and finding it impossible to pin down his enemy there. And also why doesn't he just march on St. Petersburg? Because I think he thinks that if he takes St. Petersburg,

So what, you know, Peter will still be, he wants to crush Peter. He wants to decapitate the Russian state. He wants a war of destruction. Total war. Total war, I think, exactly. I think he's, at this point, slightly believing his own publicity. He wants a campaign like an Alexander style. He wants to go into Persepolis. Well, again, again, we are going to be doing a series on Hannibal after this. The echoes of Hannibal that Dr. Johnson picked up on.

I mean, I guess Hannibal attacks Rome, the absolute heart of the enemy. And I suppose that's what Peter is doing. But I mean, it's kind of a massive undertaking, isn't it? But I guess that...

Charles doesn't have the example of himself or Napoleon before him. Right. What he does have is the example of the Poles who occupied Moscow. Of course. A hundred years earlier. So it's been done. At this point, it is totally doable. It's been done. Now, there are people who say, really? So his Polish puppet, there's been an opportunity to show off again. His name, of course, Tom, is Stanislaw Leszczynski.

His Polish puppet says, really? The Kremlin, are you sure? And Charles says explicitly, listen, you can't live next door to this unjust czar who begins a war without any good cause. The power of Muscovy must be broken and destroyed. In other words, kill the snake.

And he draws up this plan. He will march with majority of the Swedish force through Poland, through the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and he will be drawing off Russian troops from the Baltic that way. That will allow a second Swedish advance to come south from Riga with supplies from Sweden. These two armies will meet in Western Russia before the final advance on Moscow.

So all summer he makes his preparations, recruits tens of thousands of extra volunteers from the Protestants of Saxony and Silesia. He has Swedish reinforcements brought to Poland. They have the latest swords. They have blue and yellow Swedish colored uniforms. They even have new Bibles and hymn books. Because, of course, there's a religious dimension to this. Very new model army, isn't it? Very new model army. The spirit could not be higher.

And so on the evening of the 26th of August 1707, there's a big prayer service, a final prayer service for Charles's troops. And the next morning he rides out of Ultronstedt, his Saxon headquarters, at the head of his army. He's commanding the largest army ever commanded by a Swedish king. It is the most lethal military machine in Europe, victory after victory, and they are bound for

for Moscow and what will surely be a triumph that will resound down the ages. Well, Dominic, what could possibly go wrong? Members of the Restless History Club can find out how Charles XII's invasion of Russia goes right now by listening to the next episode in this epic series on the life of Peter

Peter the Great. If you're not a member and would like to do that, then of course, you know what you have to do. You can sign up at therestishistory.com. If not, we'll be back on Thursday with the next installment of The Great Northern War. Goodbye. Goodbye. Bye.