Pod Insights The Rest Is History 566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3) About this episode Why was the greatest and most climactic battle of the Great Northern War, the Battle of Poltova, one of the most important in all European history? What drove Charles XII of Sweden to invade Russia in the Summer of 1707, in the lead up to that totemic clash? Exactly what happened on the day of the Battle? Would both Peter the Great and Charles survive it unscathed, if at all? And, who would triumph on that bloodsoaked battlefield?
Join Dominic and Tom for one of the most dramatic events of their journey through the bombastic life and reign of Peter the Great so far, as they describe the Battle of Poltova, and the day that changed Europe forever.
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Producer: Theo Young-Smith
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Transcript 11,822 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Tom Holland? This episode is brought to you by AutoTrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at AutoTrader makes it way easier, really.
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1:29 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.
1:38 Tom Holland? Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know coffee. You make it, add milk, drink it. Nothing more, except...
1:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Except, when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the 1700s, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.
2:04 Tom Holland? And suddenly, you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialised.
2:10 Tom Holland? Makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us? And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Visit tiktok.com forward slash discover more.
2:39 Tom Holland? It was after dreadful Tova'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.
3:24 Tom Holland? 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's, you know, he was famously obsessed by Napoleon, is still very much aware that the Great Northern War, this great Titanic clash between Charles the 12th 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 are sentry on. Continue to reverberate through Europe.
4:09 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 the 12th, and the character who gives his name to that poem, so that's Ivan Mazepa.
4:34 Tom Holland? The Hetman.
4:35 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
4:51 Tom Holland? Yeah, and they are heroes with a deep shade of darkness.
4:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, we've already had the tremendous business of Charles the 12th's foot, which we were entertaining our assistant producers with just now because they missed yesterday's recording.
5:04 Tom Holland? I know. So, so a boot full of blood and splintered bone, squashing.
5:09 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
5:35 Tom Holland? Well, right the way into the present. I mean, the, the consequences of the Battle of Potova are with us right now.
5:42 Dominic Sandbrook? They are indeed. Absolutely. So, Tom, shall we remind ourselves where we've got to for those people who are, who are not members of the Restless History Club and are not continuing directly from episode four?
5:53 Tom Holland? Go for it.
5:54 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 the 12th 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 Luvenhaupt was routed. There was a lot of poor behaviour from the Swedes.
6:18 Tom Holland? They got drunk, didn't they?
6:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Indiscipline, I think it's fair to say. And so Charles decided to change his plan and to go on a massive diversion.
6:26 Tom Holland? South, away from Sweden.
6:28 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. Three thousand 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 has 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.
7:06 Tom Holland? And Dominic, that was always what he was going to do. Because if in doubt, he attacks.
7:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. He's very much.
7:11 Tom Holland? Of the Custer and Alexander the Great and Nelson school of thought.
7:15 Dominic Sandbrook? He absolutely is. And these are tremendous friends of the rest of history. It's fair to say, although 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.
7:30 Tom Holland? And that's about half the force that Charles had set off with.
7:34 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
7:41 Tom Holland? But his assumption is that one Swede is worth 10 Russians.
7:45 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Vorskla, 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 the Peter the Great, his general, top general Boris Sheremitev, and his great drinking pal Alexander Menschikov, who we talked about before. Now, if the Swedes do want to attack them, they're going to be charging north towards
8:27 Dominic Sandbrook? the Russians, and they will have to get past six defensive earthworks, which are known as redoubts.
8:32 Tom Holland? I do love it when you talk military dispositions.
8:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, lovely. 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 his big earthen ramparts and trenches and loads and loads of cannons, so it's effectively a fort. So the Swedes, they have all to do, and Peter, I think, is very confident that he will win. This, for the first time in this entire story, the Russians, you know, 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.
9:20 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
9:29 Tom Holland? Yeah, the one that Putin's so fond of.
9:31 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
10:05 Tom Holland? Yeah, considering he's only, I mean, they're 6,000 men, and he's only got 30,000, and he's facing, what, 80,000 or something?
10:10 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. 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.
10:30 Tom Holland? So he's just looking up at the sky.
10:31 Dominic Sandbrook? He's just looking up at the sky and everything is being described to him.
10:34 Tom Holland? 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.
10:45 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 commander is going to go to Field Marshal Karl Gustav Renskilde, 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's very, 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.
11:18 Tom Holland? Well, you would be, wouldn't you? Every time you sit down, you feel a bit of shrapnel digging into your bum.
11:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, the other guy is Count Lovenhaupth, 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 Renskilde and Lovenhaupth 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.
11:46 Tom Holland? I mean, I'm sure they're competent, but they're not, they're not geniuses. And what you need in a situation like this is kind of Alexander the Great level of charisma and military genius.
11:56 Dominic Sandbrook? I think that's fair. I can't disagree with that at all.
11:58 Tom Holland? Which Charles the 12th so far had provided.
12:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So as dusk falls, they make ready to strike the next morning. And their plan is this, that 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 redoubts, 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, you know, I mean, 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
12:44 Dominic Sandbrook? 11 o'clock, night falls. We're in summer, remember, so it gets dark 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 Reinschild and Lovenhaupt 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, Reinschild and Lovenhaupt have this gigantic row before they've even started. Reinschild shouts at Lovenhaupt and he's overheard by officers saying, where the hell are you? He says,
13:27 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, but- 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 Reinschild 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.
14:09 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Rensguld 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 the 12th says, you know, go for it. Brilliant. So they amend their plan. Basically, they're going to divide into three divisions, the army. On
14:49 Dominic Sandbrook? the left hand side is Field Marshal Rensguld 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 Lervenhaupt 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 Rensguld. And that leaves a sort of middle division of six infantry battalions under a guy called Major General Rus. 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
15:32 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. Cantering and trotting on ahead. Soon they get to the first earthworks and just as
16:13 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Roos's battalions get stuck in against the redoubts and actually get a bit bogged down straight away. So the Russians fight back very fiercely and Roos's 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, with the Cossacks, so miles away. Yeah. So now it's about five o'clock and the sun is fully up. As planned, most of the Swedish
16:56 Dominic Sandbrook? troops, not this group under Roos, but most of the Swedish troops are now moving on to the grasslands behind the Russian redoubts. And at first, Renskilde 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 still 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 Renskilde looks around, he says, well, where's the right wing of the army under Løvenhaupt? They should have joined us by now. And actually, what has happened is that Løvenhaupt 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
17:41 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Renskilde 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 and... 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'd hope that I'd do a bit better. I don't think you'd behave quite as courageously as Løvenhaupt does because
18:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Renskilde 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 Løvenhaupt 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.
18:42 Tom Holland? Okay, I mean, that's courageous, but courage doesn't necessarily equate to military competence.
18:46 Dominic Sandbrook? No, no, that's true, but it's an extraordinary sign of the Swede's self-belief, which often really matters and is such a huge factor in battle.
18:55 Tom Holland? I mean, the test is whether it's going to work out well, so let's see.
18:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. Anyway, Lervenhap gets the message, break off the attack. And we'll never know because he does break off that particular attack. 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's 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. Renskold sends messengers back to Rus at the Redoubt saying, come on, hurry up.
19:43 Dominic Sandbrook? What are you doing? Leave those alone. Actually, what has happened is that Rus 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 see, even really see where you are. He tells his men to withdraw into a nearby wood.
20:05 Tom Holland? So that's very Battle of the Little Bicorne, isn't it?
20:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly the same kind of scenario. At that point, Menshikov's dragoons come thundering in with their sabers drawn, and it's an absolute bloodbath. About 2,000 of Rus's men are cut down or captured. So that means really about a third of the Swedish infantry have been annihilated from that point onwards.
20:28 Tom Holland? A very little cost to the Russians.
20:29 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Renskold, 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, 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 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
21:14 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, you know, 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
21:55 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
22:04 Tom Holland? And so previously, they'd been a mess of shambles, but are they now?
22:08 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 organised. 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 Guards uniform, he's got his black tricorn hat, he's got his big boots, he's so tall, he looks unbelievably impressive. And Field Marshal Rainskill says to the Swedes, 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.
22:53 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. Rainskold rides up to Count Lovenhaupt, the man who, you know, 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.
23:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Bear yourself with honour in His Majesty's service. And Lovenhaupt 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.
24:21 Dominic Sandbrook? And they're closer and closer, just watching 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. 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. You know, 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,
25:02 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
25:13 Tom Holland? That definitely happened.
25:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, of course that happened. That's not a story from Russian propaganda at all. Of course, had Peter fallen, the results 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. Their momentum slows, and as they slow, and as the Russians swarm around them, their morale begins to waver and then to break.
25:55 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
26:04 Tom Holland? Kind of like the adrenaline suddenly dropping.
26:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly right. So much of, when you read accounts of battles, 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.
26:18 Tom Holland? But all through that terrible winter, and yeah.
26:21 Dominic Sandbrook? But now they've reached, everybody has a breaking point. Lovenhaupt 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.
26:35 Tom Holland? And Charles XII in his litter is crying out in a feeble voice, isn't he? "Swedes, Swedes."
26:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
26:40 Tom Holland? And he can't rally them either.
26:42 Dominic Sandbrook? No, he can't. And actually, it's like the waves breaking over the top of them. You know, this wave upon wave of green coats.
26:50 Tom Holland? A tsunami.
26:51 Dominic Sandbrook? A tsunami, 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. Rennes Gild was captured. Charles is almost captured. His stretcher bear is 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 Lovren Haupt, who's also managed to get away.
27:33 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Rainskill, who's exhausted, kind of presumably covered in soot and blood and sweat and whatever, is brought into his tent. And Peter says, "Why did you invade such a vast country with so few men? You know, how could you dare to do that? How could you have the recklessness?"
28:15 Dominic Sandbrook? And Rainskill says, "My king ordered it, it was my duty to obey." And Peter loves this answer. He asks, he calls for wine and he says, "A toast, gentlemen, to my teachers in the art of war." And Rainskill says to him, "Well, who is that, Your Majesty?" And Peter says, "You, gentlemen." Very gallant, very impressive. And Rainskill 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, that 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.
28:59 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 sort of 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 either freezing or they're just absolutely boiling. Charles is delirious, his wound is like, is in a terrible state, he's slipping in and out of kind of sleep. He keeps saying, "Where's Rainskill?" 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.
29:44 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 now to 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
30:29 Dominic Sandbrook? river Bug. That's a great name for a river, isn't it? It is the river Bug. And that's, 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 some after the break.
30:57 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.
31:36 Tom Holland? This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.
31:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?
32:19 Tom Holland? So they asked over 100,000 people. And what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.
32:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Ask yours at claude.ai/RestIsHistory and keep thinking.
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33:14 Tom Holland? Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. Peter has triumphed at Poltova, 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, his family and his friends? And he says that his victory at Potava is the final stone in the foundation of St Petersburg.
33:47 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
33:55 Tom Holland? Well, let's just do a counterfactual, because because counterfactuals kind of serve to emphasize the the consequences of what does actually happen. Let's suppose he had lost Poltava. How different would history have been?
34:07 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 with our friend Stanisław Wuleczynski in Poland.
34:39 Tom Holland? He might have gone for Sophia, Peter's sister.
34:42 Dominic Sandbrook? He might have brought Sophia back, exactly. Possibly after he had gone, there would have been a rising against Sophia or whoever it might be. There might have been civil war, it might have been Peter's camp against Sophia's, who knows?
34:53 Tom Holland? And there are all kinds of predators lurking on the the borders, aren't there, who might have kind of gobbled up bits? The the Cossacks might have declared independence.
35:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, the Ottomans, the Poles, and so on and so forth. Certainly, Russia would have lost the Baltic and probably would have lost Ukraine.
35:08 Tom Holland? And I suppose also, it would have severely damaged Peter's policy of westernization.
35:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, that which would have been blamed, right? We lost our soul and then we lost the war.
35:17 Tom Holland? Yeah.
35:18 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 could 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 two points, but I think history would look very different, absolutely. And Peter knows that, I think, because that's why Pultavna is so important to him, and he celebrates the anniversary of the battle every year for the rest of his life.
35:57 Tom Holland? And he lets everyone in Europe know, doesn't he? He sends kind of letters to everyone. And his swiftest courier, interestingly, goes to the Duke of Marlborough. So, you know, Charles XII's only rival for the title of best commander in Europe.
36:13 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 westernising imperative. 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. As 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 Ramadonovsky, who presides over the triumph as the kind of mock czar.
36:48 Tom Holland? And what happens to the Swedes, to the prisoners?
36:51 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
37:31 Tom Holland? Well, they kind of merged into the vastness of the Russian population, did they?
37:35 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
38:02 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 the 12th 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 the 12th should in two hours, mismanagement and ill-success ruin himself and his country. And all these people who've previously been Charles the 12th fans, suddenly becoming Peter-stands. Peter-stands. 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.
38:46 Dominic Sandbrook? And now Leibniz said, oh, Peter's victory was for the good of the human race. He is 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 Fleszcinski,
39:31 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 the 12th baggage in Poltova. So
40:16 Tom Holland? Red faces all round.
40:18 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 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.
40:43 Tom Holland? And so this is for the first time that the shadow of Russian power is spreading across Eastern Europe.
40:48 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 the 12th has crossed the river Bug and is in the Balkans. The Sultan, Ahmed the Third, he's a very amiable person. He loves a bit of poetry and painting and flowers. He's your kind of bubbling fountain.
41:16 Tom Holland? Yeah.
41:17 Dominic Sandbrook? And
41:17 Tom Holland? Sherbet.
41:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, Sherbet, 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 Dniesta, which is near the splendidly named town of Bender 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 Bender in his camp and everybody thinks, well, he'll be there for, you know, weeks, a few months.
42:02 Tom Holland? But I suppose the issue is how does he get back?
42:04 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 could off, 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.
42:26 Tom Holland? Which is raging.
42:27 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. Yeah, Charles is so madly optimistic. I admire this about Charles, this sort of India rubber, you know, he'll always bounce back. So he says, maybe this is all for the best. You know, I can talk to the Ottomans, persuade them to end of 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 Bender for three years, which is demented. 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
43:12 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
43:35 Tom Holland? He also kind of aspired to retake Constantinople in his, in his wildest dreams.
43:41 Dominic Sandbrook? I don't think that was ever.
43:43 Tom Holland? No, but it's part of his image, isn't it? So that 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, 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.
44:13 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
44:30 Tom Holland? 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.
44:41 Dominic Sandbrook? It is. Absolutely, it is. And although it doesn't go well at all, in fact, it goes disastrously wrong for Peter. 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,
45:24 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
45:34 Tom Holland? So that's in the the north of Crimea.
45:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly. 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 get away.
45:50 Tom Holland? He must be livid.
45:51 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 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.
46:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Sweden was ravaged by famine after that terrible winter of seventeen oh eight to nine. Then there was a plague. Sweden has lost unbelievably about a third of its population during this war.
46:47 Tom Holland? God, that's a ma- oh dear.
46:49 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 favour."
47:10 Dominic Sandbrook? "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.
47:27 Tom Holland? He visits a spa.
47:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. Oh, he does go to a spa, yes.
47:30 Tom Holland? So we haven't had a, we haven't had a German spa yet. But Peter goes to one because he's, he's had a violent colic.
47:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
47:39 Tom Holland? And so he goes to, 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 mustaches and things.
47:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
47:49 Tom Holland? And apparently he had been suffering, according to the British ambassador who'd been accompanying him, a violent looseness.
47:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh no. Would a German spa clear that?
47:58 Tom Holland? I think it would give you constipation, wouldn't it?
47:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
48:00 Tom Holland? All that sulphur.
48:01 Dominic Sandbrook? I guess so.
48:02 Tom Holland? I don't know. I've never been to a German spa, but.
48:03 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, he went to Luther's grave. Did you go to Luther's grave?
48:20 Tom Holland? Yes, we did. We went to Luther's grave. But unlike Peter the Great, we didn't manage to get into Luther's house.
48:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
48:26 Tom Holland? Because it was shut for renovations.
48:29 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 was, he did not behave appropriately. He behaved scornfully. He said,
48:47 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 skeptical. 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.
49:31 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 bang him on a ship? Yeah, take him to Poland. They're going to take him over the post board and just dump him. They're sick of him. The Swedes get wind of this and prepare for a siege.
50:11 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 half 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 or 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. He's just been, because he loves battles. Happy, I would think. He's happy. He leads his men in a breakout of the camp.
50:54 Dominic Sandbrook? And they end up being surrounded by Turks, like thousands of Turks. There's a lovely description of this in Robert K. Mas'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."
51:17 Tom Holland? Well, he's happy again, isn't he? He's back in his element.
51:19 Dominic Sandbrook? And after all this, the Sultan is very embarrassed and says to Charles, "Well, I'm so, 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.
52:01 Tom Holland? And does Charles go at a leisurely pace?
52:03 Dominic Sandbrook? No, Charles behaves exactly as you'd expect. So he's got a big group of men of Swedes who are riding. He insists on riding ahead of them with just one man. And he insists, just for the sort of-
52:14 Tom Holland? The larks.
52:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Just for the larks of going in disguise with a dark wig and a fake moustache and a fake passport in the name of Captain Peter Frisk.
52:24 Tom Holland? 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.
52:35 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Straalsund, which is one of the remaining Swedish footholds in northern Germany, under siege. He arrives late at night in November seventeen fourteen, 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.
53:08 Tom Holland? Presumably by this point, his foot is no longer superating. So his sock wouldn't be caked with parson blood.
53:15 Dominic Sandbrook? No, I don't think so.
53:15 Tom Holland? Bits of splinter.
53:17 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
53:37 Tom Holland? And for the same reason that he doesn't want to be taken captive.
53:39 Dominic Sandbrook? He doesn't want to be taken captive. And so on Christmas Eve seventeen fifteen, 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. So 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 Wroth. I mean, who knew?
54:16 Tom Holland? 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.
54:32 Dominic Sandbrook? The Battle of Hanku.
54:33 Tom Holland? And so as a result of that, there's no opportunity for the Swedes to maintain their control of Finland.
54:38 Dominic Sandbrook? And actually, Finland is ravaged by famine and by plague. But also the Russians, I think it's fair to say, behaved 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.
54:57 Tom Holland? Kind of fairy tale.
54:58 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, hmm, 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 Goetz. 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, um, let's go back to the old strategy. We'll
55:43 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
55:50 Tom Holland? 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.
55:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
55:58 Tom Holland? I mean, he, he similarly faces the seeming ruin of his hopes and does actually emerge triumphant. So maybe it's not completely mad of Charles the 12. I don't know. I mean,
56:09 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Frederiksten, and the Norwegians are firing kind of firebombs
56:54 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 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 is 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.
57:39 Tom Holland? So, I mean, he goes the way you would have wanted to go, I guess.
57:41 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 with a group of officers. 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."
58:12 Tom Holland? Does sound like Peter could have done it. It's a bit, 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.
58:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, do some performative weeping. And he, 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.
58:38 Tom Holland? What?
58:39 Dominic Sandbrook? And, yeah, the Swedes fought on for another three years, and madly, madly, Britain joined the war on Sweden's side. George the First piled in.
58:49 Tom Holland? Why?
58:49 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 the 12th, it was the South Sea Bubble.
59:04 Tom Holland? How so?
59:05 Dominic Sandbrook? It was the stock market crash in Britain that brought Sir Robert Walpole to power as the first prime minister. And Walpole, his whole policy was based on no, you know, foreign wars, sort of peace and prosperity at home, a polite and commercial people, let's make loads of money.
59:23 Tom Holland? He sold out a British ally who'd been fighting against Russia.
59:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Well.
59:27 Tom Holland? Is that what you're saying?
59:28 Dominic Sandbrook? And that kind of is what I'm saying.
59:30 Tom Holland? To make Britain great again.
59:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly. So he's basically says to the Swedes, "Look, I'm not going to fund this war. Like, 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 seventeen twenty one, at Nistad in Finland, his envoy signed a treaty that basically dismantled the Swedish Empire, gave it all away to Russia, pretty much in the Baltic.
59:53 Tom Holland? But Sweden itself retains its integrity, does it?
59:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Sweden itself maintains its integrity, exactly. But Karelia, Estonia, Latvia, Inghria, 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 twenty 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 that 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.
1:00:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Peter the Great, father of the fatherland and emperor of all Russia. So in Latin, which would appeal to you, Tom, pater patriae imperator.
1:00:54 Tom Holland? So very Augustus.
1:00:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Augustus, exactly. Father of his country and emperor, not just Caesar, but Augustus.
1:01:00 Tom Holland? So he's not just Constantine, he's now Augustus.
1:01:03 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, by our deeds in war, we have emerged from darkness into the light of the world. And now those whom we did not know in the light respect us. I want our whole nation to recognize the direct hand of God in our favor during the last war and in the conclusion of this peace. It becomes us to thank God with all our might, but while hoping for peace, we must always remember the fate of the Greek monarchy, meaning the Eastern Roman Empire, the empire of Constantinople, and we must never grow weak in force of arms.
1:01:46 Dominic Sandbrook? And those are words that I suspect would resonate in the Kremlin today.
1:01:52 Tom Holland? 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 the series. So lots of stuff, father-son relationships still to come.
1:02:37 Tom Holland? 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. TheRestIsHistory.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.
1:02:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Bye bye.
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