566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
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It was after dread Poltova's day, when fortune left the royal Swede, around a slaughtered army lay no more to combat and to bleed. The power and glory of the war, faithless as their vain votaries' men, had passed to the triumphant Tsar, and Moscow's walls were safe again.

until a day more dark and drear and a more memorable year should give to slaughter and to shame a mightier host and haughtier name, a greater wreck, a deeper fall, a shock to one, a thunderbolt to all.

The beginning there of Lord Byron's poem, Mazepa, which he wrote in 1819. And obviously, Dominic, he was writing there in the shadow of Napoleon's invasion of Russia and the failure of his attempt to capture Moscow. But Byron, although he was famously obsessed by Napoleon, is still very much aware that the Great Northern War, this great...

titanic clash between Charles XII of Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia, that that conflict was more than fit to stand comparison with the storm and drang of the Napoleonic Wars. And it's kind of tribute, isn't it, to just how deeply the events of the summer of 1709, a century on,

continue to reverberate through Europe. Yeah, absolutely, Tom. And it's interesting, isn't it, that in the English-speaking world, I think by and large the Great Northern War has now been forgotten or slightly overlooked. I think it's been eclipsed, hasn't it, by the War of Spanish Succession and then the Napoleonic Wars and then, of course, the World Wars of the 20th century.

But at the time when Byron was writing, these characters, Peter the Great, Charles XII, and the character who gives his name to that poem, so that's Ivan Mazepa, the hetman, the hetman of the Cossacks, who we talked about last time. These are great romantic heroes, aren't they? They are...

They are individuals standing astride the course of history and shaping it to their will. I mean, that's how people like Byron thought about it. Yeah, and they are heroes with a deep shade of darkness. Well, we've already had the tremendous business of Charles XII's Foot, which we were entertaining our assistant producers with just now because they missed yesterday's recording. I know. So a boot full of blood and splintered bone. Squashing. There's loads of blood and splintered bones to come.

in today's episode and indeed the final episode of this series. And behind all this is a really major political and diplomatic shift. It's because what we're talking about today is one of the most decisive battles in European history. It's the death knell of one empire, the Swedish Empire, the birth of another, the Russian, and it redraws the map of Eastern and Northern Europe for centuries to come. Well, right the way into the present. I mean, the consequences of the Battle of Poltova...

are with us right now. They are indeed. Absolutely. So, Tom, shall we remind ourselves where we've got to for those people who are not members of the Restless History Club and are not continuing directly from episode four? Go for it. So the Great Northern War has been raging since 1700. People remember that the Swedish Empire are facing this coalition of Denmark, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Russia. Charles XII had invaded Russia in the summer of 1707, planning to reach Moscow and dictate terms to end the war there.

But everything went wrong. People remember that his supply column under Count Löwenhaupt was routed. There was a lot of poor behavior from the Swedes. They got drunk, didn't they? Indiscipline, I think it's fair to say. And so Charles decided to change his plan and to go on a massive diversion. South, away from Sweden. Yeah, away from Sweden and away from Moscow into Ukraine, where he would team up with the Cossack leader, Ivan Mazepa. They had that terrible winter. 3,000 men froze to death.

And now Charles has been cornered outside the town of Poltava, some 200 miles east of Kiev. And he is outnumbered at least two to one. He has had this terrible foot injury and nearly died, but then he's come back from the dead. And on Sunday, the 27th of June,

He summoned his generals and said, come on, let's do this. Let's just go for it. Death or glory, a final showdown to decide this war once and for all. And Dominic, that was always what he was going to do, because if in doubt, he attacks. Exactly. He's very much of the Custer and Alexander the Great and Nelson school of thought. He absolutely is. And these are tremendous friends of the rest of history. It's fair to say that Custer does sometimes let himself down, doesn't he?

So, darkness falls on the Sunday evening and let us sketch the scene. The Swedes are camped west of this fortress of Poltava. There's about 30,000 Swedes. And that's about half the force that Charles had set off with. Yeah, and he's been hoping for all these reinforcements from the Crimean Tatars and the Poles and whatnot, who, remember, didn't turn up at the end of the last episode. But his assumption is that one Swede is worth 10 Russians. And that's pretty much everybody's assumption because the Swedes are the finest fighters in Europe.

The downside, of course, is they're frozen. They're sodden. They've got no feet. They've got no gunpowder and no food. But even so, they still kind of fancied their chances because they're so good. Now, behind the fortress on the other side is the River Voskla, which runs north to south. So you've got to imagine that on the right-hand side of the picture.

Further north, on the same side of the river, the western side, as the Swedes, are 80,000 Russians under Peter the Great, his top general, Boris Sheremetyev, and his great drinking pal, Alexander Menshikov, who we talked about before.

Now, if the Swedes do want to attack them, they're going to be charging north towards the Russians and they will have to get past six defensive earthworks, which are known as redoubts. I do love it when you talk about predispositions. Oh, love it. Well, that's nice. So there's more redoubts to come. Each of these redoubts are about 100 feet tall and the Russians have built them on the road from Poltava. So they're kind of like makeshift forts, I suppose. If the Swedes can get past these redoubts, they will reach Peter's camp.

And Peter's camp has been fortified with this big earth and ramparts and trenches and loads and loads of cannons. So it's effectively a fort. So the Swedes, they have it all to do. And Peter, I think, is very confident that he will win. For the first time in this entire story, the Russians have the upper hand. Because really, if even a draw is a win for him, because he has massive manpower, massive resources, he's on home turf, all he has to do is to avoid defeat.

And he has issued that proclamation that you read very resoundingly at the very beginning of this series. Remember the address to the troops? You're doing this for your kin, for Russia. Yeah, the one that Putin's so fond of. The one that Vladimir Putin is so fond of, exactly. Now, what's Charles thinking? Charles, he knows that his men are exhausted. They haven't eaten for about six months, all of this. However...

He is still confident that their superpower, which is their discipline, their training, their extraordinary fighting spirit will be enough. And partly because of that, he says to Ivan Mazepa, look,

You stay out of this. We don't need the Cossacks because they'll just get in the way and they're undisciplined and they'll be riding around shouting and stuff and firing randomly into the air. We don't want that. We don't need your men, which is an extraordinary thing to say. Yeah, considering he's only, I mean, there's 6,000 men and he's only got 30,000 and he's facing, what, 80,000 or something? Exactly, 80,000. So Charles himself is not going to fight, obviously, because he's only got one workable foot and he's just on a stretcher. He's going to be with the infantry fighting

But he's going to be carried the whole time. And he's surrounded by 24 bodyguards. So he's not even really able, he can't even really sit up. So he can't actually see the battlefield. So he's just looking up at the sky. He's just looking up at the sky and everything is being described to him. And I guess that this is a real problem because he is an incredibly competent general. And as we have seen from previous episodes, his two deputies aren't.

Well, do you know what? I think you're being too harsh there, Tom, because actually his deputies, I mean, we can talk about them. So the field command is going to go to Field Marshal Carl Gustav Reinskjold, who we talked about last time, who has, if you remember, he's full of shrapnel. He was wounded randomly and he's full of shrapnel.

He is actually reputed to be one of the best cavalry commanders in Europe. He's very brave. He has that sort of Swedish stoicism. The downside with him is that he's exhausted and not very well because he's full of shrapnel, and he's very bad-tempered, as you might expect. Well, you would be, wouldn't you? Every time you sit down, you feel a bit of shrapnel digging into your bum. Now, the other guy...

is Count Löwenhaupt, the man who made a terrible mess of bringing in the supply train. Now, he also is regarded as a very, very competent commander. He's Sweden's best infantry general. The problem is that Reinskild and Löwenhaupt absolutely despise one another. They won't even really speak to each other.

And normally it's fine because Charles is in control, but Charles is lying down staring at the sky. I mean, I'm sure they're competent, but they're not geniuses. And what you need in a situation like this is a kind of Alexander the Great level of charisma and military genius. I think that's fair. I can't disagree with that at all.

Which Charles XII so far had provided. Exactly. So as dusk falls, they make ready to strike the next morning. And their plan is this. Just before dawn, they will move out very quickly. They will leave their artillery behind because it will slow them down and because their gunpowder is waterlogged. They'll just rush past these redoubt, ignoring the fire from the defenders. And then they'll form up on the plain beyond.

The Swedish cavalry will clear out Alexander Menshikov's dragoons, and then the Swedish infantry will pin Peter's troops back inside this sort of encampment. And either they will lure Peter's troops out to be destroyed, which is quite a big ask, I think it's fair to say, or they will blockade them in this fort until they starve. And the Swedes think, well, this is a great plan. This is obviously going to work.

So at about 11 o'clock night falls, we're in summer, remember, so it's get start very late. The Swedes break camp. They move to their assembly points. Charles has got dressed in his full uniform with a sword, even though he's lying down on the stretcher. He's carried to the front where Rainskild and Löwenhout and co are waiting. The watchword is exchanged. It's with God's help in Swedish, because as we said last time,

that that's a really important element of this. These Swedish Lutherans think they're doing God's work and that God is smiling on them. While they're waiting for everyone to arrive, Reinskjold and Löwenhaupt have this gigantic row before they've even started. Reinskjold shouts at Löwenhaupt and he's overheard by officers saying, where the hell are you? He says, can't you see that everything is in confusion? I don't need your help. I expected better of you, but I can see that I was wrong, which obviously isn't. No, I mean, that's not good for morale, is it?

If Theo said that to us before we went on stage at the Royal Albert Hall, Tom, that would not be ideal preparation. I mean, he does say it. He does talk like that to us. I'd have a breakdown. I'd cower. I'd whimper. The Swedes don't whimper. So while the Swedes are not whimpering, they hear this hammering sound out in the darkness. And Reedsgould sends scouts to investigate. And they come back. They've made a shocking discovery. In the night, the Russians have been building yet more earthworks. These redoubts.

right in the path of where the Swedes plan to advance. And the Swedes will have to go round them, and that means they would have to break into kind of two wings passing on either side of them.

And just as the scouts are kind of digesting this, they are spotted by the Russians in the darkness. And they hear there are pistol shots in the night. They hear the ominous sound of a drum beating far away in the night. So they get back to the Swedish lines and they tell this to Reinskjold. And he says, look, we're clearly going to lose the element of surprise here. We have to ride now.

before it gets light or we'll never have this chance again. And Charles XII says, you know, go for it. Brilliant. So they amend their plan. Basically, they're going to divide into three divisions, the army. On the left-hand side is Field Marshal Rainsgild with the cavalry and a third of the infantry. They're going to go past the redoubts on the left-hand side, rush past them and then form up on the grasslands beyond. Then on the right-hand side, so imagine the other side, is Löwenhaupt with

with six infantry battalions so they'll go on the other side of these redoubts closest to peter's camp and then they'll rendezvous with reinskjold and that leaves a sort of middle division of six infantry battalions under a guy called major general roos and they say to him right you deal with these forts these kind of earthworks in the middle distract them while we're passing on either side

Now, to explain all this, they've probably took longer to explain it than I did and explained it in perhaps a more detailed and coherent way. They've lost a lot of time. So it's now about four o'clock in the morning and the sun is beginning to rise and they can hear the first sounds of cannons firing from the Russian redoubts. The Swedes finally begin to advance and it really is an amazing scene. It's like a scene from a Ridley Scott movie or something. The sun is rising over the grasslands of Ukraine.

There's these orderly blocks of Swedish musketeers. They're marching over the steps in their blue uniforms. There's the cavalry in their kind of blue and yellow coats marching

cantering and trotting on ahead soon they get to the first earthworks and just as planned the swedish army kind of divides and they sort of go around them like the sea kind of parting around them while in the middle major general ruse's battalions get stuck in against the redoubt and actually get a bit bogged down straight away so the russians fight back very fiercely

And Rus' battalions end up getting dragged into a long kind of firefight. So they get left behind. They sort of dig in in this fight against the forts, which means that the other two wings are pressed on and left a third of the Swedish infantry behind from the very beginning, together with the Cossacks.

Right, well, of course, that's miles away. So now it's about five o'clock and the sun is fully up. As planned, most of the Swedish troops, not this group under Rus, but most of the Swedish troops are now moving on to the grasslands behind the Russian redoubts. And at first, Rainskjold and his men are absolutely delighted. They think everything is going to plan. Charles is brought up on a stretcher.

People are redressing the wound on his foot because it's bleeding all the time. And some of the officers actually say, Your Majesty, congratulations. Everything is going according to plan. This is going to be a great day. And then Rainscout looks around. He says, Well, where's the right wing of the army under Löwenhaupt? They should have joined us by now.

And actually what has happened is that Löwenhaupt has swung off more than a mile to the right, partly to keep away from the Russian fire from the little forts, but also because he cannot wait to get stuck into Peter's camp.

And he doesn't even care that he has become detached from the main body of the army. He says to his officers, I'm actually sick of Field Marshal Rainskill talking to me like I'm a lackey or a servant or something. You see, I mean, you say that he's a good commander. He seems terrible. He's always wandering off and getting lost. The truth is we've probably missed out because remember, we skipped over a lot of the Great Northern War.

There were an awful lot of Swedish victories against the Poles and the Saxons or whatever. Okay, well, he's not covering himself with glory here. Have you ever commanded a Swedish infantry division in battle, Tom? No, I haven't. But I think that if I had, and I had a reputation as being the best infantry commander in Europe, I hope that I'd do a bit better. I don't think you'd behave quite as courageously as Leuvenhavn does. Because...

Rainscourt sends him a messenger very quickly and says, what are you doing? Come back. Come and reform with us. And the messenger arrives just as Leuvenhaupt is ordering his men to storm the southern rampart of Peter's camp.

And to give you a sense of the odds here, that's 2,500 men charging 30,000 Russians. Okay, I mean, that's courageous, but courage doesn't necessarily equate to military competence. No, no, that's true. But it's an extraordinary sign of the Swedes' self-belief, which often really matters and is such a huge factor in battle. I mean, the test is whether it's going to work out well. So let's see. Exactly. Anyway, Lervenhap gets the message, break off the attack. And we'll never know because he does break off that particular attack. So

So he says, fine, all right. He disengages. He orders his men to rejoin the main force. That's two miles to the west. So it's now six o'clock. At six o'clock, around about now, Peter's guns open up from the Russian camp, hammering the Swedish army.

The Swedes, of course, can't fire back. They've left their artillery behind because of speed and because of waterlogging issues. They're kind of sitting ducks, and at one point a cannonball actually bounces off Charles' stretcher, but it doesn't kill him. So God is really smiling on him now. The Swedes take a long time to sort themselves out. About an hour, Rainscold sends messengers back to Roos at the Redoubt saying, come on, hurry up, what are you doing? Leave those alone. Actually, what has happened is that Roos has got completely sort of bogged down

and he's lost half of his men to Russian fire. By the time he does decide to withdraw, he's completely lost track of where he is and what's going on. There's smoke everywhere, so you cannot even really see where you are.

He tells his men to withdraw into a nearby wood. So that's very Battle of the Little Bighorn, isn't it? Exactly the same kind of scenario. At that point, Menshikov's dragoons come thundering in with their sabres drawn, and it's an absolute bloodbath. About 2,000 of Rus' men are cut down or captured. So that means...

Really, about a third of the Swedish infantry have been annihilated from that point onwards. A very little cost to the Russians. A very little cost to the Russians. The Russians have not lost many men at this point. And of course, the Russians can afford to lose loads because they have loads. So Rainskjold up on the grasslands is waiting and waiting. And that third division never turns up. And at about nine o'clock, he says, I'm going to have to make a decision. Now, we could attack the Russian camp as planned. But he's like you, Tom. He's a little bit more cautious.

He says, the Russian guns are causing absolute carnage. I'm thousands of men short of what I should have. Actually, do you know what? I think the odds are too great. Let's fall back a bit. Let's rejoin the troops that we've left with the baggage and whatnot. And then we'll see where things stand. Let's not risk everything in a sort of reckless throw of the dice. And he gives the order to retreat. He says, all right, prepare to march out and march backwards. And it's at that point that Peter the Great, who has just been sitting there in his camp,

that he strikes and that he rolls the dice. It is the single most important military decision of Peter's life, and the timing is absolutely perfect. I always think it must be like the scene in The Return of the King when the doors of Minas Morgul crash open and the Witch King appears and the great army of Mordor marches out for the attack on Minas Tirith.

This is what happens. So basically, suddenly, the entrances of Peter's camp crash open,

The bridges crash down over the defensive trenches and then tens of thousands of Russian troops are pouring out of the camp and lining up for battle. They've got their swords, they've got their muskets and their very modern bayonets at the ready. And so previously they'd been a mass of shambles, but are they now? Absolutely. Everybody had always said, oh, the Russians are useless. Now they've got these nice green uniforms. They're very well drilled. They're very well organized. This is the kind of Russian army, the like of which the Swedes have not seen before.

And Peter is there. He's so conspicuous. He's on an Arabian horse that was given him by the Ottoman Sultan. He's wearing a green guard's uniform. He's got his black tricorn hat. He's got his big boots. He's so tall. Yeah. He looks unbelievably impressive. And Field Marshal Rainsgild says to the Swede, stop the retreat. We have no choice now. We have to turn, wheel about, and prepare for battle. So it's now 10 o'clock. This is the crucial hour.

The Swedes are unbelievably outnumbered. So the numbers that are facing each other at this moment is about 5,000 infantry of the Swedes with no artillery at all against 24,000 Russian infantry with 70 cannons.

And the Swedes, you know, they know that they're really up against it. And the only way they can win is A, if God is on their side and B, they're just their spirit and their training and their courage and all of that. Or if Frodo drops the ring into the crack of doom. It's the only way. Exactly. And there's a wonderful scene which you would, you know, a sort of Ridley Scott style director would love this.

Rainscroll rides up to Count Lovenhaupt, the man with whom he's had this massive long-running feud, and he holds out his hand to him and he says, Count Lovenhaupt, you must go and attack the enemy. Bear yourself with honour in his majesty's service.

And Löwenhaupt takes his hand and he says, in God's name then, and may his grace be with us. So they've made up. It's an amazing scene. Very touching. And he gives the signal and the Swedish drums start beating and they begin to advance this kind of thin blue line against this vast green crescent. The Russian guns are firing faster and faster. They're ripping holes in the Swedish line, but the Swedes just keep coming. They're not firing. They're just advancing, you know, onwards and onwards.

The Russian musketeers start firing, so there's a kind of hailstorm of musket balls. But still the Swedes keep coming. They don't fire a single shot. They want a kind of close action. Very Nelson at Trafalgar, actually. And they're closer and closer, just marching steadily. And then finally the Swedes are on them. And as always when the Swedes attack, it is this kind of storm of muskets and bayonets and slashing swords everywhere.

They are not the best soldiers in Europe for nothing. They smash into the Russian line. They start to push it back. On the right-hand side, they are pushing the green coats backwards. For a moment, it feels like the Swedes are going to do it. And actually, amid all this, Peter is supposedly three times brought close to death. So once a Swedish musket ball knocks off his hat, another Swedish musket ball hits his saddle.

And a third Swedish musket ball, I can sense what you're going to say about this, Tom, is deflected by a cross around his neck that once belonged to the Emperor Constantine the Great. That definitely happened. Yeah, of course that happened. That's not a story from Russian propaganda at all. Of course, had Peter fallen...

The result of this might have been very different. And the map of Europe might look different today. But he doesn't fall. God is with him, not with the Swedes. And what happens next is a very familiar story from other battles that we've done in this podcast. As the Swedes press forward, the gaps between their left and right become wider and wider. Peter throws in more reserves. The Swedes become engulfed and sort of encircled, especially on the right side.

Their momentum slows and as they slow and as the Russians kind of swarm around them, their morale begins to waver and then to break. And then the first Swedes begin to run.

And then it proves infectious. It's like their momentum has carried them so far, but no further. Kind of like the adrenaline suddenly dropping. Exactly right. So much of when you read A Cancer Battle, so much of it is about self-belief. And they've had their self-belief has sustained them to an extraordinary level, not just in recent hours. But all through that terrible winter. Yeah. But now they've reached everybody has a breaking point.

Löwenhaupt said afterwards, I begged, threatened, cursed and hit out, but all was in vain. It was as if they neither saw nor heard me. And remember, these are the most disciplined troops in Europe, if not the world. And Charles XII in his litter is kind of crying out in a feeble voice, isn't he? Swedes, Swedes. Yeah. And he can't rally them either. No, he can't. And actually, it's like the waves breaking over the top of them. You know, this sort of wave upon wave of kind of green coats. A tsunami. A tsunami, exactly. Exactly.

And in just half an hour, this Swedish infantry that had advanced with such courage has been almost completely destroyed. And the cavalry has been decimated by Russian cannon fire. Rainskjold was captured. Charles is almost captured. His stretcher bearers are shot down. Another officer, remember Charles has got this terrible foot. Another officer drags him onto a horse. But in the chaos...

The bandages come off his foot. The wound reopens and blood starts pouring out of his foot. This first horse that he's put on is shot from under him. They have to drag him up and put him onto another horse. There's blood everywhere. Somehow they get away with him and they meet up with Löwenhaupt, who's also managed to get away, and they gallop south with what is left of their army.

So in just a few hours, the Swedes have lost 10,000 men killed, wounded or captured. The Russians have lost just 1,500 killed and they've had about 3,000 wounded. So a stunning victory for Peter's army. Peter has the captured Swedish officers brought to his tent and Field Marshal Reinskild is exhausted, kind of presumably covered in soot and blood and sweat and whatever, is brought into his tent.

Peter says, why did you invade such a vast country with so few men? How could you dare to do that? How could you have the recklessness? And Rainsfield says, my king ordered it. It was my duty to obey. And Peter loves this answer. He calls for wine and he says, a toast, gentlemen, to my teachers in the art of war.

And Rainskjold says to him, well, who is that, your majesty? And Peter says, you gentlemen. Very gallant, very impressive. And Rainskjold says, then well have the pupils returned thanks to their teachers. It's all very kind of, you know, well played, well played. Now, meanwhile, what of Charles? Charles, later that afternoon, regroups with the Cossacks. I mean, they really should have taken the Cossacks, I think. The remains of the Swedish army in his baggage train.

They all need to get away because obviously they're going to be destroyed. The only route, ironically, is even further south, even further away from Sweden. So they say, well, let's do it. They're riding through the afternoon and the evening.

They're exhausted. They're obviously utterly crushed. They are frightened. I don't think Charles is frightened. Probably not. No, everybody else is frightened. Well, it's ridiculously hot, so they're all dripping with sweat. I mean, God, they can't win. It's either they're freezing or they're just absolutely boiling. Charles is delirious. His wound is in a terrible state. He's slipping in and out of sleep. He keeps saying, where's Rainskild? And everyone says, he's been captured, Your Majesty. And he just doesn't seem to register that. After two days, they reach the river Dnieper.

And they don't have many boats. They don't have enough boats to get across. And the Russians are chasing them. And basically, they're not going to get the whole, there's about 14,000 of them. They're not all going to get across. Who's going to go? And Charles says, well, obviously, I won't go. I'll stay here.

And his officers fall to their knees and beg him, you have to go, you cannot be captured. If you are captured, Sweden is defeated and out of the war. Our only chance is if you can get away and maybe you can raise support among the Tatars or the Ottomans. That's our only chance. And very reluctantly, Charles agrees. And he is transported across the River Dnieper with the wounded and the Cossacks and what remains of his drabant elite bodyguard that we talked about last time.

He gets across the river and they turn west across the grasslands heading towards the river Bug. That's a great name for a river, isn't it? It is the river Bug. And that, it's an important river because that is the frontier with the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. He's entered the Ottoman Empire now. He's entering the Ottoman Empire. And the men on the other side watched him go, watch and watch until finally he disappears from sight.

And what will become of him? We will find out, Tom, after the break. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. Peter has triumphed at Potava, one of history's most decisive battles, and Dominic

One of the measures of how decisive it is, is that Peter's conquests in the north and more specifically on the Baltic are now secure. And that means that St. Petersburg is secure. And so he actually writes letters to his wife, doesn't he, and his family and his friends. And he says that his victory at Poltava is the final stone in the foundation of St. Petersburg. Yeah, that's absolutely right. But it's arguably much more than that. It's the

the final stone in the foundation of Russia as a great power. Well, let's just do a counterfactual, because counterfactuals kind of serve to emphasise the consequences of what does actually happen. Let's suppose he had lost Poltava. How different would history have been? I think it could have been very different. A lot of people listening to this might say, well, Russia was always fated to become a great power anyway. But remember, in the 17th century, Russia had been...

a basket case for a long time. It could easily have been one again. So if Charles had won, there would have been nothing to stop him advancing on Moscow. Imagine he'd taken Peter prisoner. He would have ridden into Moscow. He would possibly have installed a kind of Swedish client like he did our friend Stanislaw Wleszczynski in Poland. He might have gone for Sophia, Peter's sister. He might have brought Sophia back, exactly. Possibly after he had gone,

There would have been a rising against Sofia or whoever it might be. There might have been civil war. It might have been Peter's camp against Sofia's. Who knows? And there are all kinds of predators lurking on the borders, aren't there, who might have kind of gobbled up bits. The Cossacks might have declared independence. Right. The Ottomans, the Poles and so on and so forth. Certainly Russia would have lost the Baltic and probably would have lost Ukraine. And I suppose also it would have severely damaged Peter's policy of westernisation.

Yeah, which would have been blamed, right? We lost our soul and we lost the war. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think what it would also have done is it would have left Sweden as the paramount power, probably in the Baltic. So Sweden would conceivably have kept Estonia, Latvia, the provinces of Livonia, as they were called, which, you know, when you get to the Napoleonic Wars and the Swedes are a much bigger player and the Russians aren't,

you know maybe things would have changed in between those those two points but but i think history would look would look very different absolutely and peter knows that i think because that's why pultava is so important to him and he celebrated the anniversary of the battle every year for the rest of his life and he he lets everyone in europe know doesn't he he sends kind of letters to everyone um and his swiftest courier interestingly goes to the duke of marlborough um

So, you know, Charles XII's only rival for the title of best commander in Europe. Exactly. So Peter held a formal triumph at the end of the year in St. Petersburg. And as always, I mean, this is your point, Tom, about the westernizing imperative, but

It's based on the Roman model. The troops march in beneath classical arches. They drag all the Swedish battle flags to the dirt. They make the Swedish officers march. In all such events with Peter, there's this weird element of play acting and role play. He marches as an ordinary officer, and it's his friend Fedor Romadonovsky

who presides over the triumph as the kind of mock czar. And what happens to the Swedes, to the prisoners? Well, this is such an interesting side note, actually. The generals were very courteously treated. So they were often exchanged for Russian prisoners.

or they were sent home as messengers with peace offers from Peter, which, of course, the Swedes completely ignored, as is their want. Some more junior officers actually chose to join the Russian army. This was not unusual. They were not expected to fight their own country, but they would be sent to fight the Kazakhs or the Tatars or something. The rest of the junior officers were sent to Siberia,

And they basically settled down and they became teachers, goldsmiths, tailors. You know, they brought trades with them, their previous trades. Well, they kind of merged into the vastness of the Russian population, did they? They did. But if you were a common soldier, it wasn't a great fate, actually. A lot of them were sent to the mines in the Urals or they were sent to work in the dockyards of St. Petersburg. A lot of them probably died eventually because those are grim fates.

So when peace finally came in 1721, out of the 40,000 men who had marched into Ukraine with Charles XII, only about 5,000 ever went home. So that kind of tells its own story. Now, you mentioned about Peter writing to everybody. He becomes now an extraordinary European celebrity.

So the British who had previously thought, you know, Charles XII is the great man of the age now have to hastily recalibrate. The Duke of Marlborough actually wrote to his ally, Lord Godolphin. He said, what a melancholy reflection it is that after constant success for 10 years, Charles XII should in two hours mismanagement and ill success ruin himself and his country.

And all these people who've previously been Charles XII fans suddenly becoming Peter Stans. Peter Stans. So the most shameless example is the philosopher Leibniz, who had previously said he loved the Swedes so much that he wanted to see their empire stretch all the way to Mongolia.

And now Leibniz said, oh, Peter's victory was for the good of the human race. He's a man whom God has destined for great work. And he wrote to Peter and said, would you like me to design the medal for you to celebrate your victory? Shameless. Yeah, it is shameless. It's very kind of

tech billionaire after November 2024, isn't it? Invited to Peter's inauguration. Exactly. Sit in the front row. And everybody now wants to ally with Russia. So the Danes re-enter the war. They invade southern Sweden. Augustus the Strong, our fox-tossing friend, he cancels his abdication as king of Poland. He invades Poland from Saxony and he reclaims his throne from the puppet Stanislaw Fleschinski.

who now leaves this story sadly, so I won't get the chance to say his name. So he tosses foxes, but he is himself a jackal. He is a jackal. There's a very funny scene when Augustus and Peter meet for the first time after this in a place called Torun, which we talked about in our episode about the wonders of Poland, famous for its gingerbread. They meet in Torun.

And Peter said to Augustus, oh, how are you doing? You know, good to see you again. By the way, where's that ceremonial sword that I gave you? And Augustus is very embarrassed. He said, oh, I love that sword, but actually I've left it behind in Dresden.

And Peter says, what a shame. But as luck would have it, I've got another one for you. And he reaches for this sword and he hands it to Augustus. And it is the original sword which the Russians had found in Charles XII's baggage in Poltover. Red faces all round. Red faces all round. And from this point onwards, Augustus, who previously had been Peter's equal, or perhaps had even seen himself as Peter's senior figure, is very obviously a Russian client. And Augustus,

And actually Poland from this point onwards is little more in some ways than a Russian protectorate. So all the Baltic conquests which had been earmarked for Poland, Russia takes them. And in the long run, of course, Poland will end up being partitioned. And so this is for the first time that the shadow of Russian power is spreading across Eastern Europe. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Now, what about Charles?

See, because we left him riding into the Ottoman Empire. What's happened to him? Well, as soon as word reaches Constantinople, Charles XII has crossed the river Bug and is in the Balkans. The Sultan, Ahmed III, he's a very amiable person. He loves a bit of poetry and painting and flowers. He's your kind of bubbling fountain. Yeah, Sherbert. Yeah, Sherbert's kind of school of Ottoman Sultan.

And he says, well, you know, Islam tells us we should be very generous when we welcome refugees. And he says, we'll put Charles and his men up. We'll build a refugee camp for them on the River Dniester, which is near the splendidly named town of Benda in Moldova, in modern day Moldova. So Charles...

I mean, his wound is slowly getting better. He's very downcast. He's not as downcast as Ivan Mazepa, who's come with him. He dies effectively of a broken heart, I think, just depression. So Charles is in Benda, in his camp, and everybody thinks, well, he'll be there for weeks, a few months. But I suppose the issue is how does he get back? Yeah. So the obvious way home really is by sea because Peter and Augustus block him on land.

Louis XIV of France offers him a ship. He could turn to the English or the Dutch. They also talk about offering him ships. But with all of these things, the price would be Sweden must join that particular side in the war of the Spanish succession. Which is raging. Yeah, which is now raging. And Charles doesn't want to do that because he's already fighting the Great Northern War. He doesn't want to fight two wars. And actually, Charles thinks to himself, well...

maybe this isn't such a bad thing. Charles is so madly optimistic. I admire this about Charles, this sort of India rubber, he'll always bounce back. So he says, maybe this is all for the best. I can talk to the Ottomans, persuade them to enter the war, and it'll work out okay. So he doesn't stay for a few weeks, and he doesn't stay for a few months. He actually stays in Benda for three years, which is

Now, as it happens, the Ottomans do actually end up at war with Russia because Peter keeps saying, will you please expel the Swedes? I can't tolerate the fact that you're having this kind of Swedish king living in a camp just inside your border. And eventually he sent an ultimatum in 1710 and the Sultan said, well, no, we're not having this. And he declared war on Russia.

Peter drew up a very ambitious plan to march into what are now the parts of Romania, the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which are Ottoman vassals. And he said, I will liberate the Orthodox peoples of the Balkans. He also kind of aspired to retake Constantinople in his wildest dreams. I don't think that was ever possible.

No, but it's part of his image, isn't it? So it's rather similar to the bullet hitting the cross of Constantine and bouncing off. Wasn't that there was a parade before he leaves for the war against the Ottomans where his guards have red banners with the cross that Constantine saw in his vision? And it says by this sign, you will conquer, which is...

you know, what Constantine had seen. So he's obviously making play with this idea. You know, I mean, this is the third Rome. Let's get the second Rome back. I am the heir of Constantine. Yeah, he is. Yeah, you're dead right. And I think this is in the long run enormously significant because this is really the first time in history that the Russians claim themselves to be the champions of

all Orthodox Slavs and particularly Balkan Orthodox Slavs. Because effectively Russia is the only independent Orthodox power, isn't it? And it's now a superpower. So obviously that for Orthodox Christians, this is quite a significant development. It is. Absolutely it is. And although it doesn't go well at all, in fact it goes disastrously wrong for Peter, it

It will have, I think, huge consequences because if you think back to the series we did about the road to the First World War, the origins of the First World War, this idea of Russia as the protector of the Slavs, even though they're hundreds of miles away, and protector of Orthodox Christians in the Balkan Peninsula, and that Russia has this kind of tenuous claim to Constantinople, this would be enormously significant in the build-up to 1914. Anyway...

The expedition at the time goes horribly wrong. Peter ends up being cornered by this massive Ottoman army. Fortunately, the Grand Vizier, who's called Baltaci Mehmet Pasha,

is a kind of quite elderly figure, and he doesn't really fancy an all-out war, and he basically lets Peter go with minimal concessions. Peter has to give up Azov, which had meant so much to him. So that's in the north of Crimea. Yes, exactly. He has to give that up and scrap his southern fleet and scrap all his ambitions in the Black Sea. But that's pretty much about it, and Peter's quite relieved about that. Now, when Charles hears that Peter's been allowed to

He must be livid. Well, he disgraced himself. He rode to the Grand Vizier's camp and he burst into his tent in muddy boots, which the Turks regarded as a dreadful social faux pas.

And Charles said, what are you doing? You know, you're mad to let Peter go. The Turks by this point, I mean, Charles has been hanging around for a lot longer than they expected. And they're actually sick of him. So they just ignore him. We'll come back to the growing rift between Charles and the Turks. So Peter has to give up on the Black Sea and he devotes himself to the campaign in Europe. Now, the crazy thing is the Swedes, you would think, are now out of the war.

You'd be quite wrong. The Swedes have lost most of their empire, Ingria, Finland, Riga, Tallinn, the Baltic. Sweden was ravaged by famine after that terrible winter of 1708-9. Then there was a plague.

Sweden has lost unbelievably about a third of its population during this war. Everybody else has piled in against them. It really is like a kind of computer strategy game, which has gone horribly wrong for the player because they are now facing a coalition of Russia, Saxony, Poland, Denmark. Hanover and Prussia are about to join in.

And Charles sends a message from his camp at Bender. And he says, perfect. The odds are in our favor. I will not concede a single scrap of Swedish ground. No way. And actually, the Swedes fight very doggedly. So the war now moves to kind of northern Germany, Bremen and Pomerania and stuff.

And Peter piles in against the Swedes there, which is great for him because he loves going to the West. He visits a spa. Yeah. Oh, he does go to a spa. Yes. So we haven't had a German spa yet, but Peter goes to one because he's had a violent colic. Yeah. And so he goes to this spa in Carlsbad.

And he drinks the waters and he's hanging out with all those, you know, enormous Germans with moustaches and things. Yeah. And apparently he had been suffering, according to the British ambassador who'd been accompanying him, a violent looseness. Oh, no. Would a German spa clear that? I think it would give you constipation, wouldn't it? Right. All that sulphur? I guess so. I don't know. I've never been to a German spa. Well, in the final episode, we'll find some very peculiar goings on with Peter and mineral water.

So that's something to look forward to. I'll tell you what he also does in the sightseeing. Do you see this? He goes to Wittenberg to commune with Martin Luther. So he went to Luther's grave. Did you go to Luther's grave? Yes, we did. We went to Luther's grave. But unlike Peter the Great, we didn't manage to get into Luther's house. Right. Because it was shut for renovations. So when Peter goes to Luther's house, the curator showed him an ink spot on the wall.

And the curator said, this is where Martin Luther saw the devil and he threw an ink pot at him. And Peter, he did not behave appropriately. He behaved scornfully. He said, did such a wise man really believe that the devil could be seen? And the curator said, would you like to sign the wall next to the ink spot? You know, Peter the Great was here. Very impressive. Like a visitor's book.

And Peter wrote, next to the ink spot, this ink spot is quite fresh, so the story obviously is not true. That's very graceless. I thought Luther saw the devil when he was shut up in a castle. In his tower. Yeah, in a tower. So this is obviously a... It's just made up. It's just a tourist trap. Well, Peter's right. I mean, he's right to be sceptical, but I still think it's a bit inconsiderate of his host. Yeah, but he's consistently behaved inconsiderately. Think about John Evelyn's garden. Yeah.

And with his own son, as we will see in the next episode. So Peter's off signing ink spots. Charles is in Moldova. The Ottomans are absolutely sick to death of Charles now. He's turned this temporary camp into a permanent Swedish base. He's built a brick compound. He's got a chancery. He's got officers' quarters, a stables. The Turks are like, what? This is bonkers.

And this mad story reaches a climax in January 1713 when the Sultan and his vassal, the Khan of Crimea, cook up a scheme to kidnap Charles from his camp and get him out of their country. What, just buy him on a ship? Take him to Poland. They're going to take him over the Polish border and just dump him. They're sick of him. The Swedes get wind of this and prepare for a siege.

And crazily, it ends up in a massive battle with 12,000 Tatars and Ottoman Janissaries attacking this Swedish camp. How many Swedes are there? About kind of 60 or something? Yeah, there's like a few hundred, I think. Charles is cornered in his own house under fire from Turkish artillery. The Turks burst in and start looting all his possessions. Charles charges at them. He's got his foot back now, which is great. He sort of runs them through with a sword, all of this kind of thing. The Janissaries set his house on fire.

Charles then starts necking loads of brandy, which is the first alcohol he's touched. Yeah, he doesn't normally do that, does he? No, he's just so excited at the thought of a battle, I think. Because he loves battles. Happy, I would think. He's happy. He leads his men in a breakout of the camp. They end up being surrounded by Turks, thousands of Turks. There's a lovely description.

description of this in Robert K. Mass's book on Peter the Great. He says, Charles was bleeding from nose, cheek, ear and hand. His eyebrows had been singed off. His face and clothes were black with gunpowder and reeking with smoke and his coat was torn into strips. But he had his usual air of calm, almost amused, unconcerned. Well, he's happy again, isn't he? He's back in his element. And after all this, the Sultan is very embarrassed and says to Charles, well, I'm so sorry things got out of hand.

I promise you it won't happen again. And here's an amazing thing about this. I love this detail. This incident was called by the Turks the Kalabaluk. It comes from a Turkish word meaning a crowd. And the term Kalabaluk passed into Swedish and Finnish, where to this day it means a ruckus or chaos because of this bizarre incident.

So Charles hangs around Turkey for another 18 months and then finally the Sultan agrees a deal with the Habsburg Emperor that will allow him to travel overland through the Austrian Empire and through Germany without being intercepted. And does Charles go at a leisurely pace? No. Charles behaves exactly as you'd expect. So he's got a big group of men of Swedes who are riding. He

He insists on riding ahead of them with just one man. And he insists just for the sort of the larks of going in disguise with a dark wig and a fake mustache and a fake passport in the name of Captain Peter Frisk. It's kind of interesting, isn't it? That he in so many ways is a mirror image of Peter because that's exactly what Peter would have done. You know, the disguise, the travels, the kind of adopting a junior rank. Yeah, it's bonkers.

And what is even more bonkers is, so he doesn't go to Sweden. He makes straight for this city called Stralsund, which is one of the remaining Swedish footholds in northern Germany, under siege. He arrives late at night in November 1714, banging on the door. The guard opens up. Oh my God, it's the king. I can't believe it.

Charles has ridden for 1,296 miles at a pace of more than 100 miles a day. Very impressively, he's not taken his clothes or his boots off once during this trip. Presumably by this point, his foot is no longer super-rating. So his sock wouldn't be caked with pus and blood. No, I don't think so. Bits of splinter.

And they say to him, oh, my God, Your Majesty, unbelievable that you're back after so long. Would you like to go to Stockholm? He says, no, I've come here to take part in the siege. Were you mad? So it's yet another doomed cause because the city is clearly going to fall.

He stays there for 11 months and literally sort of hours before it falls, he is finally persuaded to leave. And for the same reason that he doesn't want to be taken captive. He doesn't want to be taken captive. And so on Christmas Eve, 1715, he sets foot on Swedish soil for the first time in 15 years. And he finds Sweden in an absolutely ravaged condition.

So the Russians have been raiding it incessantly. Its farms have all been destroyed. What men are left are hiding in the woods to avoid being conscripted. They've lost control of Finland. And actually, I fell down a massive rabbit hole reading about this. I ended up reading academic articles about the Finnish demography in the early 18th century. This is a period of Finnish history known as the Great Wrath. I mean, who knew? Well...

The Swedes have kind of lost control, not just of Finland, but also of the Gulf of Finland, haven't they? Because they have ships of the line, but the Russians have galleys. And so there's a kind of mad Civilization IV type battle where, amazingly, the galleys win. The Battle of Hanku. And so as a result of that, there's no opportunity for the Swedes to maintain their control of Finland.

And actually, Finland is ravaged by famine and by plague. But also the Russians, I think it's fair to say, behave very badly in Finland. So they flog thousands of people in public. There's a lot of rape. There's a lot of murder. They, I think, rather distastefully, they bake Finns in ovens, which I think is poor. It's kind of fairy tale. Yeah. They enslave tens of thousands of women and children, sell them to the Crimeans, take them down to the Crimea.

And some Finnish historians, this is the rabbit hole down which I fell, think the Finnish population fell by half during this period. Now you would think, confronted with this on his return to Sweden, Charles might say, maybe now is the time to end this war. But no, he says, now is the time. You know, now is the time to invest. The stocks will only rise. So he gets a new chief minister.

called Baron von Goertz. I mention him only because I was pleased to see that he has an artificial eye, which is exactly as you would expect from a chief minister at this stage in the war. He says, massive new taxes. Let's go back to the old strategy. We'll knock our enemies out one at a time. Denmark first, then we'll do a Hanover, then we'll do a Prussia, and then we'll build up to invading Russia again. Brilliant. So there's a kind of Frederick the Great approach, because Frederick the Great, who I guess...

in the next generation will be the great military commander. Yeah. I mean, he similarly faces the seeming ruin of his hopes and does actually emerge triumphant. So maybe it's not completely mad of Charles XII. I don't know. Some of his ministers said to him, how long do you think this will take, Your Majesty? I mean, really? We've been fighting for so long. And he said, I think maybe 40 years should do it. I mean, you don't want to hear that. So he says, well, we'll start against the Danes and we'll start in Norway.

So October 1718, he marches on Christiana, which is now Oslo. And in his way, there's a fortress called Frederiksten. And he...

As always, very Nelsonian, he puts himself in the thick of the action, I think partly because he knows there is no other Swedish army. He has to inspire his men because it's this or nothing. So he's constantly putting himself in harm's way. And in the evening of the 30th of November, he's in the trenches outside Frederikston. And the Norwegians are firing kind of firebombs from their cannons, which light up the sky. And then their snipers, their sharpshooters, can fire down at the Swedish sappers. About 9.30 that night, Charles climbs up the promenade

parapet of a trench and some of his aides say oh be careful your majesty you know watch it come come down and he ignores them completely and he's leaning on the top of the trench he's kind of got his head on his hand looking out when they hear a sound as one of them puts it as if a stone had been thrown by great force into some mud and charles's hand falls away from his head and he's completely still just looking out at this fortress and then one of the officers says lord jesus the king has been shot

And he has. He's been hit by a Norwegian musket ball in the temple, which killed him instantly. And that was the end of him. So, I mean, he goes the way he would have wanted to go, I guess. Exactly. Just in an instant. That's it. The Swedes abandoned the campaign and they, for the first time in 18 years, Charles returned to Stockholm, albeit in an embalmed condition. And the news spreads across Europe. This extraordinary meteor of the age is dead. Peter was in St. Petersburg when the message arrived. And there were a group of officers there.

And the story goes that he was visibly moved and tears sprang to his eyes. And he said, my dear Charles, how much I pity you. Does sound like Peter could have done it. Do you think it's a bit Julius Caesar and the head of Pompey? I mean, I guess it's the winner's prerogative, isn't it? The winner does take it all, including the right to...

To do some performative weeping. Yeah, to do some performative weeping. And there was also a lot of performative mourning. So he ordered the Russian court into a week of mourning for his great rival. Even now, crazily, the war didn't end for another three years. What? Yeah, the Swedes fought on for another three years and madly, madly,

Britain joined the war on Sweden's side. George I piled in. Why? Because he was worried about the balance of power in the Baltic. As a lecturer of Hanover, the Baltic mattered to him. And he was worried that the Russians were too powerful. And here's the maddest thing. You know what actually ended the Great Northern War? It wasn't the death of Charles XII. It was the South Sea bubble. How so? It was the stock market crash in Britain that brought Sir Robert Walpole to power as the first prime minister of the United States.

And Walpole, his whole policy was based on no foreign wars, sort of peace and prosperity at home, a polite and commercial people. Let's make loads of money. He sold out a British ally who's been fighting against Russia. Well, I mean, that kind of is what I'm saying. Make Britain great again. Yeah, exactly. So he's basically says to the Swedes, look, I'm not going to fund this war. This is you're clearly going to lose. It's mad.

So the new Swedish king, who was called Frederick, decided he would settle. And in September 1721 at Nystad in Finland, his envoy signed a treaty that basically dismantled the Swedish Empire, gave it all away to Russia, pretty much, in the Baltic. But Sweden itself retains its integrity, does it? Sweden itself maintains its integrity, exactly. But...

Karelia, Estonia, Latvia, Ingria, they all went to Russia. And its footholds in Germany were all lost as well. So we'll end with Peter. The news of this treaty, I mean, the Great Northern War, which really did live up to its billing. I mean, it's gone on for, what, more than 20 years? Huge celebrations in St. Petersburg. Free wine and beer and fireworks and masked balls.

And at the end of October, so a month later, Peter went to the Senate, which was a new institution he had set up in St. Petersburg. And he said, I will cancel all unpaid taxes to celebrate the war. And the Senate and the Holy Synod said to him, wonderful, Your Majesty. And in return, we'd like to offer you a new title.

Peter the Great, father of the fatherland and emperor of all Russia. So in Latin, which would appeal to you, Tom, pater patriae imperator. So very Augustus. Augustus, exactly. Father of his country and emperor, not just Caesar, but Augustus. So he's not just Constantine, he's now Augustus. Exactly. And he agrees. And there are huge shouts from the crowd, vivat, vivat, long live the emperor.

And then Peter gave a speech, which again reminds us of this kind of Roman heritage.

He said,

in force of arms. And those are words that I suspect would resonate in the Kremlin today. And probably do resonate in the Kremlin today. But Dominic, that's not the end of the story, is it? Because obviously, if Peter is pledging Russia to eternal strength,

He's not going to be around forever. And so he needs an heir who he can be confident will display the same strength, the same interest in forts and ships and military matters that Peter has always displayed. And whether his son, Alexei, is qualified to play that part. And if he's not, what Peter is going to do about it will be the themes of

our final episode in this series. So lots of stuff, father-son relationships still to come. If you want to hear it immediately and you're not a member of the Rest Is History Club, you know what you've got to do. The rest is history.com. Alternatively, just sit it out. Wait. Episode six will be with you on Thursday. Thank you, Dominic. Brilliant stuff. And thank you everyone for listening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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