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- [00:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Thank you for listening to the Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes ad free listening, early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community, go to thereestishory.com and join the club that is thereestishistory.com.
- [00:27]
Tom Holland
I saw his majesty King Charles XII a great way off, with a suite of sight, some 50 horsemen riding along a column of waggons. His majesty came at last to mine and inquired who I was. The colonel replied, this is the unfortunate ensign piper of the guards, whose feet were frostbitten. His majesty then rode up close beside the waggon and asked me, how is it with you? I replied, ill enough, your majesty, for I cannot stand upon either foot. His Majesty asked, have you lost part of your feet? I told him that heels and toes were gone, and to this he said, a trifle, a trifle. And resting his own leg upon the pommel of his saddle, he pointed to half the sole, saying, I have seen men who lost this much of their foot, and when they had stuffed their boot, they walked as well as before. Turning then to the colonel, his Majesty asked, perhaps he will run again. The colonel replied, he may thank his God if he can so much as walk. He must not think of running. As his majesty rode away, he said to the colonel, he is to be pitied, for he is so young. So that was Ensign Gustav Peiper of the Swedish guards, who had lost both his heels and most of his toes to frostbite, talking to Mr. Motivator himself, Charles XII of Sweden, in April 1709. It's a trifle, a trifle.
- [02:04]
Dominic Sandbrook
I love that.
- [02:05]
Tom Holland
Half his foot gone. Dominic, this is classic territory for armies that invade Russia, isn't it? Soldiers losing their feet to frostbite, probably kind of eating straw, all that kind of thing.
- [02:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, we think that now, but they didn't think that then. So if you remember, we are in the frozen grip of the Great Northern War, the great struggle, the titanic showdown between Peter the Great of Russia and Charles XII of Sweden for mastery of the north and the east of Europe. And when Charles set off, if you remember, everybody was terribly optimistic and there was no thought of frostbite or missing toes and heels, certainly no thought of stuffing a boot with straw to make up for the loss of your foot.
- [02:48]
Tom Holland
They would be celebrating in the Kremlin. That was the plan.
- [02:51]
Dominic Sandbrook
That's what they thought. So listeners will remember from the last episode that Peter had seized part of the Baltic coast and he'd founded his new city of St. Petersburg amid the bogs and marshes. But all the momentum seemed to lie with the ultimate Scandinavian. I mean, surely he'd be played by Alexander Skarsgrd, wouldn't he?
- [03:10]
Tom Holland
Of course he would, yeah.
- [03:11]
Dominic Sandbrook
He would be hunting bears with a pitchfork. He'd be sleeping outside, won't even wear a hat. If you remember from the last episode, he'd gone through Poland, he'd gone through Saxony, he had deposed fox tossing champion Augustus the Strong as king of Poland and now he's decided to go east. August 1707. He's ordered this thousand mile march on Moscow to depose Peter the Great and redraw the map of Europe. However, as your reading from Gustav Piper suggests, things don't go according to plan. So let's get into exactly what went wrong. As soon as the Swedes crossed the border from Silesia into Poland, they discovered that the Russians had been expecting them. So the Russians have moved into Poland themselves. Peter had sent in his Cossack and Kalmik, their kind of Central Asian horsemen, into Western Poland and there, there had been a preview of what would come in the rest of the campaign. So they had basically tried to turn the whole place into a desert. They'd burn the towns, they'd smash the bridges, they'd poisoned the well.
- [04:16]
Tom Holland
And does this come as a surprise to Charles, or do you think he'd been expecting this?
- [04:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think he'd been expecting a bit of it, but the sheer scale of it, the ruthlessness of it, is terrifying to the Swedes. Of course, the Swedes are a long way from Sweden. I mean, their supply lines are very stretched and I think they are probably taken aback a bit by just the absolute single mindedness of it. But of course most people think that the Swedes are going to win. Even in Moscow, most people think the Swedes are going to win. So we have reports, you know, letters and things from foreign diplomats in Moscow, an Austrian envoy. No one spoke of anything except for flight or death. The foreigners, not just to Moscow, but of all the neighboring towns, applied to their ministers for protection, as they feared not only the harshness and rapacity of the Swedes, but also a general rising and massacre in Moscow, where people are already embittered by the immeasurable increase of the taxes. So they have a couple of previews of some of the issues in this series. So the terror of the Swedes, who are famous for their rapacity, but also Peter has basically put Russia onto a total war footing. And that of course creates great tensions, as we will see in the second half of this episode. So Peter is in Warsaw, where when he hears the news that Charles is advancing, he's occupied Warsaw, and he says to his generals, look, we're not going to fight them in Poland. Poland, very flat country. The Swedes will probably smash us. We must withdraw east and they head back to what's now Belarus. And while they're doing that, his great friend Alexander Menshikov, who's commanding his dragoons.
- [05:50]
Tom Holland
So he's the guy who's very avaricious, who's risen from the streets.
- [05:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
Risen from the streets, exactly. And the guy who introduced him to Catherine, now his wife. So Menshikov will try to delay the Swedes at the river crossings on the river Vistula and the Niemen. So the kind of the rivers which have already appeared in the rest is history, because we may remember that when we did Hitler's war on Poland, this is where the Poles hoped to withdraw in 1939. Peter is very, very anxious at this point. If you think of Peter the Great as a man of sort of unflappable, formidable stoicism, that is quite wrong. Peter is very jittery. He's twitching.
- [06:27]
Tom Holland
I mean, he's literally twitching.
- [06:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
He's literally twitching. He's facing all sorts of rebellions in the east and the south of Russia. He spends weeks in bed with fever. He seems depressed. What's worse for him, his greyhound has died. And he has to send his greyhound, who's called Lizetka, back to Moscow and he orders that she be stuffed for him.
- [06:48]
Tom Holland
I mean, that's something he's very into, isn't it? That he's picked up in Amsterdam, is watching how corpses can be either stuffed or preserved in the equivalent of formaldehyde.
- [06:57]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. And I think, had he not bought a swordfish and some other creature in London, a crocodile, I think. Yeah. So he's very into all this. And it probably is no coincidence that it's at this point in November 1707 that he marries that mistress that Menshikov had introduced him to, Catherine, because he's clearly feeling emotionally very fraught and he's very dependent on her at this point. So he goes back to Moscow for Christmas, and then on the 8th of January, 1708, he leaves to rejoin the army in the west. And he's on his way to. He receives one of multiple bombshell messages that will be occurring during this episode. The Swedes are advancing much more quickly than anybody anticipated. This is the Swedes great trademark. They're incredibly aggressive and decisive and swift. They've already crossed the River Vistula and they are Heading towards the eastern border of Poland.
- [07:50]
Tom Holland
So a blitzkrieg.
- [07:51]
Dominic Sandbrook
It is a bit of a blitzkrieg. So what has actually happened? Menshikov was meant to try and stop them on the Vistula near Warsaw. What had happened is they had completely skirted the Polish capital. They had crossed the Vistula further north. And now they are heading through eastern Poland towards the Masurian Lakes and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Now we're in, you know, the winter. 1707, 1708.
- [08:17]
Tom Holland
So why is he invading in winter? Why do they keep doing this?
- [08:20]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's a thousand miles. I mean, you don't have much choice over the seasons. But also if you go through Poland in the winter, then by spring, summer you'll be in Moscow. That's his thinking.
- [08:30]
Tom Holland
But it still seems mad.
- [08:31]
Dominic Sandbrook
You can't win with the Russian weather because later on in this episode, not only will it be very cold, it will also be punishingly hot. I mean, this is just fine. I think, Tom, the window that you're looking for doesn't really exist of lovely, moderate, English style temperate weather.
- [08:44]
Tom Holland
It does just strike me though that Charles xii, Napoleon, Hitler, they all launch their invasions kind of late.
- [08:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think that's harsh on Charles xii. Really, I do. I think he set off, as we'll see, he often goes into winter quarters and stops and then waits and then moves again when the spring comes. Okay. I mean, this is a long process. Anyway, they're going through into Lithuania. It's all very boggy. It's kind of thick forests and stuff. And the Swedes are absolutely living up to their reputation. So when they go into a village and they say to the peasants, give us all your food. If the peasants don't do it, they will hang the peasants children in front of them.
- [09:20]
Tom Holland
So that is, I mean, again, it's very Operation Barbarossa.
- [09:23]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's very Operation Barbarossa.
- [09:25]
Tom Holland
Did you know that just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Swedes sent Hitler a statue of Charles xii? Did they? To mark his birthday.
- [09:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
I did not know that. That's an amazing fact. Why did he not learn the appropriate lesson?
- [09:39]
Tom Holland
I don't know. Lessons of history.
- [09:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, the lessons of history. We always love a lesson of history, don't we? Well, actually, we always say there aren't any lessons of history.
- [09:46]
Tom Holland
I think in this case we can say that invade Russia in the winter would be definitely a lesson.
- [09:51]
Dominic Sandbrook
All right, so we're in January, the end of January 1708. They're moving so fast. They've already reached the eastern frontier of The Grand Duchy of Lithuania. And this is the town of Grodno, or Hodna, as it's called now, on the river Niemann, which is now in Belarus. Charles's scouts go ahead and they say there are Russian troops moving into the town. We must seize the main bridge over the Niemen first. And Charles says, great, I'll do it. Because remember from last time, he is, you could say, cocky, hubristic, but also possessed with a sense of, you know, God has chosen him. God has already decided when he'll die, so there's no point in him trying to avoid it. And he's a great one. Rather than sort of Nelsonian spirit of leading by example. I put myself in the thick of the action. My men will follow with about 700 Swedish cavalry. He advances on this bridge and he finds the Russian cavalry already there. Three times more Russians than there are Swedes.
- [10:46]
Tom Holland
Is that going to put him off?
- [10:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, of course not. He's the King of Sweden. It's a really Hollywood scene. He leads his horsemen down. The river is frozen. They cross the frozen river. Some of the other Swedes storm onto the bridge. The Russians are stunned. They didn't expect this. Charles is like slashing with his sword, firing off shots with his pistol. The Russians completely panic and start to fall back. There are loads more Russians inside the town, but they panic. Oh, my God, the Swedes are coming. And they evacuate too.
- [11:16]
Tom Holland
And so presumably this is confirming Charles in his sense that the Russians are hopeless.
- [11:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
Of course, the Russians are useless. Here's the thing. One of those Russians who runs away is Peter the Great.
- [11:25]
Tom Holland
Wow.
- [11:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
He was in the town and so Charles was actually within, I don't know, a few hundred yards possibly, or mile or whatever of capturing peter. Weirdly, like 700 Swedes and thousands and thousands of terrified Russians. I mean, this is just how this war is working. But Peter completely believes in Charles's reputation, the Swedes reputation. So he and his army are in full retreat behind the river. And that's brilliant for Charles. He's managed to cross the Lithuanian border. So he now puts his troops into winter quarters. It's the end of January, and he says, right, now we stop. Now we rest, we wait for the end of the winter. So Tommy, he is heeding your. Your words about the Russian winter.
- [12:04]
Tom Holland
Are the Russians attacking him? Are they kind of picking off foragers and that kind of thing?
- [12:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, they're in winter quarters too. See, it's so cold. Charles has already covered almost 600 miles, so he is halfway to Moscow and he's really barely been challenged now. Being in winter quarters is not a great laugh. They all get dysentery. But Charles is very, very optimistic. He says to his men, I want you to prepare the maps now for the second leg. And that's the journey all the way to Moscow. And his quartermaster says to him, it is yet far hence to Moscow. And Charles says, and I quote, when we will begin to march again, we shall get there, never fear. And actually, across Europe at this point, everybody thinks Charles will get there. So Queen Anne's government in London, which up to this point has still been recognizing Augustus the strong as the true king of Poland, now says, no, no, it's obvious that Augustus and Peter are finished.
- [12:58]
Tom Holland
And so who do they recognize as King Dominic?
- [13:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Our old friend, Stanisaw Fleschiski, famous for his very easily pronounceable name.
- [13:05]
Tom Holland
Do you know, I could honestly hear you say that all day.
- [13:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
Love it.
- [13:09]
Tom Holland
Say it again.
- [13:09]
Dominic Sandbrook
Stanisaw Fleschiski. That's a strange fetish that you have, Tom, but I applaud it. So Peter is doing exactly as you would expect him to. He tells his men what he calls a belt of total destruction. A hundred miles wide along all routes heading north, south or east from the Swedish camp. Every village must be burned, every single scrap of food or fodder removed. I want the land to be a desert for the Swedes. He is assailed by the same doubts as everybody else. Peter comes down with a terrible fever in the early months of 1708. He has to miss the Easter services because he is so ill. And he says to his friends, you know, I'm so exhausted, I'm so tired, I'm so anxious, all of this. So the summer comes. And now on the 9th of June, Charles orders his men to continue the march. Now his main force is about 35,000 men, which you might say is not that big. But if you heard the last episode, listeners will remember that there was a second Swedish force going to come down from Riga.
- [14:14]
Tom Holland
Yeah, up in the north.
- [14:15]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right, exactly. Which has got a massive supply chain from Sweden. So they have thought about this, and this is under a guy called Count Leuvenhaupt. And these two armies are going to rendezvous before the advance on Moscow. Now, Peter has many more men, more than 100,000, but they're really spread out across the front. And everybody knows the Swedes have a track record of beating armies much larger than themselves. You know, the odds are, you could say, more or less. Even so, Charles sets out at the beginning of June. His men cross the river Berezina and they are now heading towards Smolensk, western Russia. And then they turn south. It's pouring with rain. They are trudging through a sea of mud and of course they don't have much food. They're still waiting to meet up with the 2nd Army. And at the end of the month, they meet a Russian army at a place called Holovcin, which is now in Belarus.
- [15:12]
Tom Holland
Just, you're just hitting out the park.
- [15:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
I'm just doing it for the names.
- [15:15]
Tom Holland
Because there are yet more wczy. I mean, honestly, so impressive, Dominic.
- [15:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
So they meet at this place, Khlovcin, and once again the Swedes win. It's a sort of all guns blazing frontal assault on the Russian line. His men wading across the river, blasting with their muskets. The Russians falling back, you know, soon after dawn. Yet again, you know, a win for Charles in his kind of win column. However, there is a difference this time. This is really the first time that the Russians retreat in really good order. They don't panic, they don't throw their guns away, they don't run. It's all very calm and considered. And the thing is with each of these battles, even though the Russians are kind of retreating each time and they are always losing more men than the Swedes, but they can replace those men. There are no more Swedes once Charles has lost his men. So in this one, The Russians lost 1600 men, the Swedes 1250. But the Russians can easily find another 1600 men. The Swedes can't find 1250.
- [16:19]
Tom Holland
And that is presumably it's not just because they are in the depths of Russia, but also because the reserves of manpower back in Sweden are flat.
- [16:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. The reserves of manpower are pretty much exhausted, as we will see, I think, in next week's episode in Sweden, people are so desperate to avoid now serving the army. I mean, the left were really the dregs and they are all taken to the forest or cutting off fingers or shooting themselves in the leg or something in order to avoid going, because, I mean, no one wants to go on campaign to Russia. So at a place called Mokilev, which was later the headquarters of Nicholas II in the Great War, Charles stops. He has reached the river Dnieper, which is the border, the historic border of kind of Russia proper. And here he stops on the western bank and he waits because this is where he's going to rendezvous with Count Leuvenhaupt and the Baltic army with all the ammunition and the food and the supplies for the attack on Moscow. And it's here that Charles's plan really starts to go wrong. So Leeuwenhaupt, the guy who was commanding the Baltic army, is a very, very dutiful, serious, slightly melancholy man, Charles called him. He called him the little Latin colonel.
- [17:34]
Tom Holland
I thought he was German.
- [17:35]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, but he calls him Latin, I think, because they like. He reads a lot of Latin.
- [17:38]
Tom Holland
Oh, I see. Not because he's like an Italian.
- [17:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, I don't think he's. I don't think he's voluble and doing excessive gesturing or anything like that. I think quite the opposite, actually. I think he's very reserved. And Leeuwenhaft is the kind of man who will follow his orders to the absolute letter, you know, in the face of the most overwhelming danger. But he's not great at thinking for himself and using his own initiative. Now, he had set off from Riga late. It had taken him ages to get these 2,000 wagons of supplies together. He's got about 12,000 men, and he's made very, very slow progress through Latvia and Lithuania again. The problem is the weather. It's pouring with rain. The terrain is so wet and muddy that these wagons are always getting stuck and. And his men are having to effectively build kind of makeshift roads of timber for the wagons to roll over them as they go through these kind of marshes and whatnot. Charles waits and waits for Leuvenhaupt in Mogilev. He waits for a month, then he waits for another month. It's now the middle of August, and there was still no sign of this Baltic relief column. His men are getting very restless and their horses have run out of fodder, out of food. So now he thinks, okay, I won't wait any longer. I'm just going to press on and this guy can catch up with me later. So he crosses the Dnieper, and by the 11th of September, he is just 50 miles outside Smolensk. But they really don't have any food at this point, and the mercenaries he has hired from Germany are very, very unhappy. You know, we've signed up for this. This. We thought this was going to be a great campaign, and we're just incredibly hungry. Everywhere they look, there's a huge pool of black smoke over the fields. The fields are burning so thick, it was said that it blotted out the sun. And at night in the darkness, they can see the red glow of the countryside burning all the way to Slamensk, because, of course, Peter's men have set it alight. So now Charles faces a fateful decision he could go back to the river, to the Dnieper, to the rendezvous point and wait for Leeuwenhaupt. Or change direction. Instead of continuing towards Slaminsk and then Moscow, he could turn south towards a Russian province called Sveria, which is on the border of modern day Ukraine. Now, why would he do that? The answer, because the fields there haven't been burned, so they could rest in this area, they could get the food they need, and then perhaps they could turn back towards the road to Moscow. And Charles is a gambler. He hates going back, he hates retreating. So it's pretty obvious which he's going to pick. He's never going to go back to the river to the rendezvous point. He's going to say to his men, yeah, why not? Why not head south towards Ukraine? We can find food there. And we know we're kind of going slightly off piste and off track, but.
- [20:28]
Tom Holland
A long way from Sweden.
- [20:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, yeah, we're going for a lot further away from Sweden, but we're only kind of going the wrong way so that we can go the right way later. That's kind of his. His thinking. So it is on the 15th of September, he says to his men, we break camp, we head south towards Ukraine. This will, by the way, will be the single most disastrous decision of his life, because three days later, Leeuwenhaupt does reach the rendezvous point on the Dnieper. And when he gets there, there's no sign of the king. But there are messengers who say to him, the King has changed his plans. He wants you to press on south as quickly as possible. But of course, Leeuwenhaupt and his guys are totally exhausted. They've been trudging through all this mud for months. So they start very miserably to head across the river and to head south. And then to his horror, his scouts report they can see Russian cavalry on the horizon. So the Russians are coming. And what's obviously happened is Peter, who up to this point has never been a great military tactician. You know, he hasn't actually been one of the great commanders of history by any means, but he has spotted this gap between the two Swedish armies, and he said, let's let Charles go to Ukraine. We'll deal with this Baltic relief column. Let's Hoover this up.
- [21:42]
Tom Holland
He's actually adopting Charles tactics.
- [21:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, I guess so.
- [21:46]
Tom Holland
You know, target one of your enemies and leave the other, and then, yes.
- [21:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
Target the weaker one. Deal with that and then we'll. Exactly, yeah. So by 28 September, Leeuwenhaupt has been cornered by Peter near a village called Lesnaya, with his back to the river. The numbers are roughly equal. The Swedes are exhausted, though, after this ridiculous march through all this mud. Peter orders the attack around midday. It lasts all afternoon. It's a horribly kind of attritional, muddy, bloody, miserable encounter. The Swedes, of course, because they're so good, even though they're exhausted, they equip themselves pretty well. And so as night falls and the snow starts falling inevitably, the honours are roughly even. And in fact, the snowstorm is so fierce they can't continue. The Russians fall back a bit and now Lewenhaupt has a choice to make. And he says to his men, look, we can't stay here. We're absolutely shattered. I can't face the second day of this. Our priority must be to head on south and catch up with the King. And that means we can't take this supply train with us, the thing they've been escorting all this way. He says we just have to destroy it. We don't want it to fall into enemy hands. These cannons that they have been dragging for hundreds of miles, they lift them out of the wagons and they bury them underground. And then they set fire to the wagons.
- [23:10]
Tom Holland
This doesn't seem a display of master strategy.
- [23:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, no, I suppose it isn't. What else could he do, though? The supply train is really slowing him down. I suppose he could stand and fight for a second day. Yeah, but his men are so tired that he thinks, you know, we're really risking disaster then.
- [23:25]
Tom Holland
Okay, so maybe I'm being harsh on him.
- [23:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
You're not, Tom. Because actually what then happens is a complete and utter catastrophe. And the Swedes behave in a very unscandinavian way, I would say. So they've set their own wagons on fire. And in the darkness some of the soldiers decide they will loot the wagons of their officers. And they get stuck into their brandy. They're all tanked up on brandy, which goes straight to their heads because they're so tired. Discipline completely falls apart. Some of the Swedes say, let's just run for it. And they run off into the forest, some of them even to say, we're doomed. Let's desert to the Russians. And the army begins to fragment. And in the darkness, Cossack horsemen kind of come out of the woods and set upon little kind of groups of the Swedish blokes staggering drunkenly around. And by dawn, as dawn breaks, Lewenhaupt has just about managed to restore order among his troops. But in the chaos of about 12,000 men. He has lost perhaps 6,000 overnight, who've either wandered into the snow, they've drowned, they've been picked off by the Cossacks.
- [24:28]
Tom Holland
Is this what inspires the Swedes to make alcohol so expensive?
- [24:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
Almost certainly they learned their lesson. Almost certainly. I hadn't thought of that, but, yeah, they have learned the lesson. So he's lost everything. He's lost all the clothing, the uniforms, the gunpowder, the muskets, the medicines, the cannons on which Charles was counting, a total and utter catastrophe. He manages to get the 6,000 men away and they stagger south towards Charles's camp in Sevieria, where they arrive 10 days later. And you can imagine Charles's face falling when he sees them. Like, where are all the wagons?
- [25:07]
Tom Holland
But can you. I actually imagine his face not falling.
- [25:09]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, you're probably right.
- [25:10]
Tom Holland
He would preserve his. His mask of sangfoir, but inside there'd be a little. Maybe a little twitch of his. His mouth.
- [25:18]
Dominic Sandbrook
Or maybe he would give a kind of cold half smile as he realized.
- [25:22]
Tom Holland
Like Svein Fortbeard.
- [25:23]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, a cold half smile as he realized that God had set him a tougher challenge than ever. But he would never doubt that it was a challenge he was bound to pass. He would sort of say, well, this will make the reports of my ultimate victory even more glowing. Yeah, that we've done it without all these supplies. Meanwhile, Peter is delighted. You know, effectively, he's knocked one of these two Swedish armies out. So Peter goes and holds a triumph. He has a triumph in Smolensk.
- [25:48]
Tom Holland
Well, it's the third Rome, isn't it? Why not?
- [25:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. He forces Swedish prisoners to march through the streets with their flags. He has. It's the first time, really, I think, that he does this, and it really imprints itself in the European imagination. He has battle descriptions and plans of the Battle of Lesnaya printed in Russian and in Dutch. Make sure they're sent to people all over Europe, because he, you know, he wants to win the publicity war, I guess. Of course, there's more good news for Peter. There was a third Swedish army advancing from the Baltic, which we haven't talked about at all, which was going to try and attack St Petersburg, but they ran out of food and they retreated before they even got anywhere near St Petersburg. So Peter is thrilled. Like suddenly, you know, for the first time in this entire campaign, he really has the upper hand. And against all the odds, I think he can sense that he's going to win this. And then on the 27th of October 1708, he gets a message from his friend Alexander Menshikov. And this really is a bombshell because Charles has broken camp and he is marching very swiftly into Ukraine.
- [26:54]
Tom Holland
So south, away from Moscow and Sweden.
- [26:57]
Dominic Sandbrook
Away from Moscow, but he's heading into the heart of Ukraine. Why? Because a man called Ivan Mazepa, the hetman of the Zaporizhzhian, host and leader of the Ukrainian Cossacks, previously loyal to Peter, has changed sides after 20 years. He has abandoned the Tsar of Russia. He has thrown in his lot with the Swedes. And with that, the balance of the war has tipped back towards Charles xii.
- [27:28]
Tom Holland
Goodness, Dominic. Another staggering twist. And we will take a break now to cope with the excitement of this moment. And when we come back, we will be continuing with the Great Northern War.
- [27:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
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- [28:16]
Tom Holland
This is Katy Kaye from the Rest Is Politics.
- [28:18]
Dominic Sandbrook
Politics us. And this is Anthony Scaramucci. I've spent over two decades reporting from Washington presidents while they come and go, the chaos that never changes. And I've been inside the eye of the storm. Eleven wild days in Trump's White House. I have seen how the sausage gets made and who's holding the knife. Yeah, that's not a nice image. But on the Rest Is Politics, US we break down the stories that are behind the headlines and we actually look at what they mean to America and the rest of the world as well. We're not just talking politics. We're talking about power. We've got both of us access, experience, and just enough cynicism to know when something smells a little off and how to trace it back to the source. No spin, no filter reporting the stories you won't hear anywhere else. If you want smart analysis, global context and a front row seat to the world's loudest demographic democracy. This is the show. It's from two people that have ringside seats, occasionally center stage in a country where court cases and campaign rallies share the same parking lot. The Rest Is Politics US New episodes every week. Hello.
- [29:32]
Tom Holland
Welcome back to the Rest Is History. Charles the twelfth is marching southwards and he is marching towards a country that has of course been in the news a great deal recently, and that is Ukraine. And Dominic, if there's one thing that people know about the history of Ukraine, it's unbelievably complicated, isn't it?
- [29:52]
Dominic Sandbrook
It is complicated. So Ukrainian history in the 17th century 101. So most of modern Ukraine had been part of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth for centuries. And you can divide its population incredibly roughly and simplistically into four groups. There's a Polish landowning elite in Ukraine, Polish speaking. There are millions of what were then called Ruthenian peasants. So these are the people that will become Ukrainians. In the towns in particular, there is a Jewish population. It's a great place for kind of Jewish settlement and Jewish culture. And there are lots and lots of kind of runaways, fugitives, freebooters, outlaws and adventurers. The people of what you might call the Wild east. And these were originally called Kazakhs or indeed Cossacks. These people have carved out their own kind of slightly semi nomadic existence on the steppes of Ukraine because these are.
- [30:51]
Tom Holland
The old stamping grounds of the Scythians, isn't it?
- [30:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, that's right.
- [30:54]
Tom Holland
So it's very suited to horse born raiders and all that.
- [30:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Who have their own kind of traditions and they've sort of developed, they're a real mix of kind of ruffians and ne' er do wells and exiles and whatnot. And over time, over the decades and the centuries, they've developed their own traditions, their own distinctive identity as Cossacks.
- [31:15]
Tom Holland
They love a furry hat.
- [31:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
They do love a furry hat. They also love a rebellion, and a very bloody rebellion at that. So in 1648, Tom, I'm sure you remember when we did the episodes on Ukraine many, many years ago, the story of Bogdan Khmelnytsky.
- [31:29]
Tom Holland
Of course I do. It's never out of my mind.
- [31:31]
Dominic Sandbrook
And his rebellion against his Polish overlords, the Cossacks had revolted. They had carried out the most hideous massacres of Jews and pogroms and stuff. And they'd revolted against the Poles and they had appealed to Moscow, to Muscovy for help. And so this had led to the formation of a kind of Cossack military state in central Ukraine, which was called the Zaporozhian Host or the Zaporizhzhian Hetmanate. And this was a vassal of the Russian Tsar. And this is where Charles is now heading towards the Zaporozhian Hetmanate. And the reason he's doing this is because he's been driven out of Siberia, the province of Russia where he was last, because the Russian army is now advancing very quickly. Ukraine has what he needs. It has fertile land that has not been burned and has loads of food. And it has this new ally, this new factor in the Game of Thrones. Who is the hetman of the Cossacks? Ivan Mazeppa, somebody about whom Lord Byron wrote.
- [32:35]
Tom Holland
He did, and a brilliant poem. And we might come on to what exactly Byron is writing about in due course, because Mazepa supposedly has quite an active adolescence, doesn't he?
- [32:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
He does, yeah. We'll definitely come on to that. So Mazeppa, this is very George R.R. martin like, in that. We're throwing in yet another colorful character. Mazeppa had been born in a place called Podolia, which is in the sort of southwest of Ukraine now towards the kind of Moldovan Romanian border. And it was then part, when he was born in 1645 at the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. He came from an Orthodox Ruthenian, that's to say Ukrainian family, but his parents sent him to Catholic schools and a Jesuit academy, and he learned Polish as well as Russian and Latin.
- [33:20]
Tom Holland
So actually, all these Latin speakers, I mean him and Charles, they all chat away in Latin.
- [33:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. Here's our answer to that internal rest is History Club question. Who would you like to invite to a dinner party? I'd invite Charles xii, Peter the Great, this guy Mazeppa. And they could all talk in Latin and Augustus the Strong tossing foxes in the background.
- [33:37]
Tom Holland
Peter doesn't speak Latin, does he? He does speak Dutch.
- [33:40]
Dominic Sandbrook
That's right, that's right. But I speak neither Dutch nor Latin, so.
- [33:44]
Tom Holland
Well, you could just serve the drinks.
- [33:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, exactly. Oh, no, you don't be serving the drinks at one of Peter the Great's dinner parties, because then it brings out the bellows and you're in real trouble.
- [33:52]
Tom Holland
You could handle the bears.
- [33:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. So anyway, this guy, Mazepa the Cossack, his father got him a job as a page at the Polish court and he became a sort of junior diplomatic official. He did odd jobs for the Polish king in Ukraine. But now we come to the story, Tom, that I imagine you're thinking of, which is that supposedly, when he was living on a country estate in northern Ukraine, he got into trouble for seducing a landowner's wife. And the landowner and his mates stripped this guy Mazeppa naked. They tarred and feathered him, they tied him to a horse and then they set this horse loose.
- [34:26]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [34:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
Galloping through the woods and through thorny thickets. When he finally got home. He was so scratched and blooded and battered that he was almost unrecognizable.
- [34:35]
Tom Holland
And Byron writes a poem about that. And his journey on the back of the horse is emblematic of the romantic spirit.
- [34:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [34:43]
Tom Holland
Crashing across the steps.
- [34:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
And you know what? This never happened at all.
- [34:47]
Tom Holland
I know, I know, but it's a great poem nevertheless. Yeah.
- [34:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
Okay. Well, you're going to be quoting Lord Byron next week's episode, aren't you?
- [34:53]
Tom Holland
Well, that is something for people to look forward to.
- [34:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, they can't wait. So many people desperate to join the Rest Is History Club. Just so they can hear that right now. Anyway, this guy, Mazeppa, he ends up working as a diplomat for the Cossacks. He travels around very widely. He goes to Russia, he goes to the Ottoman empire, and in 1687. So when he's in his early 40s, the Russians pick him as the new Cossack hetman, the new leader of the Cossacks.
- [35:16]
Tom Holland
It's a great job, isn't it, to be a Cossack hetman?
- [35:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
A brilliant job. Now, today in Russia, Mazepa is one of the great villains of history. You know, he really does rank among.
- [35:27]
Tom Holland
The sort of Benedict Arnold.
- [35:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right. Like a Benedict Arnold figure, because he betrays them and joins Charles xii.
- [35:32]
Tom Holland
But as with Benedict Arnold.
- [35:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [35:35]
Tom Holland
In fact, he's a bit of a hero.
- [35:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, well, Benedict Arnold, certainly, he was a patriot, and he was true to his loyal king. I mean, when I say a patriot, he was a patriotic British American. Yeah, we very much approve of that. But Mazeppa is not a sort of slimy, villainous. He's not like Littlefinger from Game of Thrones or something.
- [35:53]
Tom Holland
He's fun, isn't he?
- [35:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
He's bright, he's charming, he's ambitious, but he's very good at politics. Now, he's been the Cossack Hetman for 13 years. He's approaching 60 years old. And he's been playing this very complicated political and very tricky and dangerous political game. Because what he reminds me of are the people who are the kind of Russian client leaders today in the sort of Chechnya or Belarus or whatever.
- [36:16]
Tom Holland
Oh, all those people with the enormous orange beards. Right, Those kind of guys.
- [36:20]
Dominic Sandbrook
He's a person who has to basically ride two horses. He has to keep him in Moscow. You know, he can never alienate the government in Moscow, but at the same time, he has to show to his people that he's not just Moscow's puppet, that actually, you know, he's a very proud patriot and he's getting stuff out of Moscow that no one else could get, you know, and he's got to sort of please these two constituencies, I suppose, and his independence, therefore, is very important to him. So although he is dependent on Moscow to some degree, he has to appear autonomous. That really matters to the Cossacks in particular, because their frontier spirit. I don't want to degenerate into Cossack cliches, but they're proud frontier wild spirits. That's really important to them. But they began as runaways, right, as adventurers and outlaws and stuff. So Mazeppa has always been, you know, he's always been in with Peter in the great Sophia versus Peter stuff from the first week of this series. He'd been on Team Sofia for a long time, but they timed it perfectly and they defected to Peter just before Peter.
- [37:24]
Tom Holland
And so that's the kind of the marker of the political skills that you were talking about and which you need to.
- [37:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. Survive in the predatory world of Russian politics. Exactly. So Peter thinks this guy Mazep is lovely. You know, he's colourful, he's funny, he's very smart. Whenever he came to Moscow, you know, Peter gave him kind of honours. He gave him The Order of St Andrew, the thing that had been offered to the Duke of Marlborough. He gets Augustus the Strong to give him the Order of the White Eagle from Poland. So, you know, he festoons him with honours. The problem, though, is that once you get into the war and the total war, the price of being dependent on Moscow is getting higher and higher, because, of course, Peter's demanding conscripts, he's levying taxes on moustaches, as well as wills and births and deaths.
- [38:09]
Tom Holland
And I imagine that Mazepa has a tremendous moustache.
- [38:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh. And the Cossacks pride themselves, I imagine, on their moustaches and their beards. Peter is constantly saying, send me more laborers for St Petersburg, send me food for the army, all of this kind of thing, which creates great resentment among the Cossacks. And of course, Mazepa doesn't want to be blamed. Right.
- [38:30]
Tom Holland
Because they're a proud, independent people.
- [38:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
A proud, independent people. And what is more, they are a proud, independent Orthodox people. And they are as alarmed as anybody, if not more so, at this talk of cutting people's caftans in two, trimming people's beards, excessive shaving, Germanic ways. This stuff goes down really badly with.
- [38:51]
Tom Holland
The Cossacks, but, I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean that they will therefore side with a Lutheran invader, right?
- [38:57]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, not at all. You know, There's a lot of clean shaven Swedes.
- [38:59]
Tom Holland
I mean, they're all clean shaven, I imagine.
- [39:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly.
- [39:02]
Tom Holland
Apart from. What's his name? Benny. Benny from abba. He had a beard.
- [39:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. I mean, this is a really niche and obscure reference, but Sweden's best player at the 1990 World cup, it was a man called Glenn Stromberg. He had a massive beard and so.
- [39:15]
Tom Holland
Did Beyond Borg, the great tennis player. So actually it's not an absolute rule, is it?
- [39:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
We should definitely do when the rest of history has become really decadent.
- [39:23]
Tom Holland
We've run out of history on Swedish beards.
- [39:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
History's greatest Swedish. Yeah, that's. Yeah. I can't believe we're doing Chatham High street and we're not doing that. That's deranged.
- [39:39]
Tom Holland
I mean, chatter of High Street's an absolutely obvious topic.
- [39:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right. So to go back to what we were saying, you're dead right that all of this wouldn't necessarily encourage you to rebel. I think what changes everything is the war and the course of the war. Because by about 1706, when it looks like Charles is definitely going to win, Mazeppa has to start thinking, well, what do I do? You know, I've been loyal to Peter. I'm Peter's vassal. He doesn't want to end up like Augustus the Strong. He doesn't want to end up being toppled and deposed by Stanislav Lischens.
- [40:13]
Tom Holland
No, he definitely doesn't want that. I mean, I guess it's like the situation he faced with Sophia and Peter. You know, you've got to time your betrayal expertly, haven't you?
- [40:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
Time your betrayal. And his dream, I think, is that if he times his betrayal just right, Charles will make him king in some way or make him prince or basically he'll be able to establish a hereditary Cossack monarchy and Mazepa and his dynasty.
- [40:35]
Tom Holland
And Charles is not aiming to rule Ukraine.
- [40:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
No.
- [40:39]
Tom Holland
So there's a serious prospect of him being given full independence, I guess.
- [40:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, exactly right. And in the spring of 1708, so just at the point where we are in the story, Peter starts to get reports from another Cossack bigwig that Mazeppa is talking to the Swedes in secret. Now, as it happens, the reason that this guy informs on Mazeppa is that Mazepa has seduced his daughter, who's about, you know, 15, and Mazeppa is 60. So Peter discounts the rumors. He says, well, this is. This guy's. Clearly this is just sour grapes because Mazeppa's sleeping with this bloke's daughter. And then Mazeppa is able to have this guy beheaded.
- [41:16]
Tom Holland
Yeah, right, yeah, that's worked out well for him.
- [41:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
But not for the girl. I mean, this is bad news for the girl, right?
- [41:21]
Tom Holland
What happens to the girl?
- [41:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, her dad's just had his head cut off and she's a teenager and she's sleeping with a 60 year old man. Nothing good has happened to her.
- [41:27]
Tom Holland
That could be worse. I mean, she could have been murdered.
- [41:30]
Dominic Sandbrook
I suppose. So we don't know what it's like, you know what Mazepa's company is like though, do we, Tom? I mean, that might be a fate worse than death.
- [41:34]
Tom Holland
He could tell her amusing stories of his youth being tied to horses.
- [41:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
Can indeed. Now, the irony is, of course, at this point that Mazeppa does really decide to back Sweden after all.
- [41:43]
Tom Holland
Dominic, how is he gonna do this? Because I guess it's a very delicate process, isn't it, to portray someone like Peter the Great?
- [41:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
It is, it is. You have to time it perfectly. Now, all that summer, 1708, as Charles is kind of faffing around further north, more and more rumors are reaching Peter that Mazeppa is wobbling. And Mazeppa is holed up in the Cossack stronghold at a place called Baturin.
- [42:06]
Tom Holland
This is the great kind of. To the degree that the Cossacks have a capital. This is it, isn't it?
- [42:10]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly, exactly. And I sort of imagine it being like this sort of Dothraki in Game of Thrones or something. Of course you do. Yeah, obviously. And Peter summons Mazeppa. Come and explain yourself and explain what's going on. And Mazeppa sends a series of excuses to say that he's ill and he can't come, and then eventually goes to the extent of taking to his deathbed and getting a priest to give him the last rites.
- [42:32]
Tom Holland
I mean, that's kind of like trying to get off pe, taking it to a ridiculous extent.
- [42:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. But then, end of September 1708, yet more bombshell news. First of all, Charles is now heading straight for Baturin, hotly pursued by Russian armies. So the war is coming to Ukraine and the Cossacks are clearly going to have to pick a side.
- [42:56]
Tom Holland
Yeah, because they've got no choice now.
- [42:57]
Dominic Sandbrook
No choice. And secondly, Alexander Menshikov, Peter's great pal, is riding to Baturin himself with a party of dragoons to see if Mazepa really is dying.
- [43:09]
Tom Holland
Bringing a thermometer, take a temperature, and.
- [43:12]
Dominic Sandbrook
To choose his successor when he does die. Right. He actually hates Menshikov already and he thinks, oh no, nightmare. So he summons his 2000 closest and most loyal retainers. And they mount their horses and they ride out of Baturin for the Swedish camp to rendezvous with Charles. So when Menshikov finally arrives at the Cossack citadel with a small force of dragoons, he finds the Mazeppa is long gone. And he immediately reports to Peter disaster. Mazepora's deserted us and thrown in his lot with Charles XII.
- [43:47]
Tom Holland
But he's only taken 2000. He hasn't taken the rest of the Cossacks.
- [43:51]
Dominic Sandbrook
He's only taken 2,000. Exactly. He's then going to raise the rest of the Cossacks afterwards. So Peter acts very quickly and very decisively. He orders Menshikov and his dragoons to fan out across the countryside to prevent anybody joining Mazepa.
- [44:04]
Tom Holland
It does seem that Peter is getting the hang of war by this point.
- [44:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
He is. Peter is really making a series of very good decisions now, like very smart decisions. You could argue it's easy to do that when circumstances are in your favour.
- [44:14]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [44:15]
Dominic Sandbrook
But the Swedes are still a formidable adversary.
- [44:17]
Tom Holland
I mean, he's a guy who learns, doesn't he?
- [44:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, absolutely.
- [44:20]
Tom Holland
Well, we saw going around shipyards in Amsterdam and London. I mean, he's a man who enjoys learning things.
- [44:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. And he's making good, decisive, very ruthless but effective decisions. So he issues a public proclamation to the people of Ukraine and he says Mazepa is the new Judas. I mean, it's literally how he's described. He has defected in order to put the land of Little Russia, as before, under the dominion of Poland and to turn the churches and monasteries over to the Catholics. Now, the interesting thing about this, of course, is there's no mention of the Swedes or Lutheranism, but it's playing on the deep dislike that the kind of ordinary sort of Ruthenian peasants and the Cossacks have for their former Polish overlords.
- [45:05]
Tom Holland
Yeah, very cunning.
- [45:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
So what's happening with Mazeppa and Charles? Well, the Swedes have been delighted to see Mazepa. They've been very excited to see him. And of course, Charles is delighted because he thinks, well, when we get to.
- [45:17]
Tom Holland
His citadel, yeah, it's a Baturin. Baturin must be full of all kinds of supplies and goodies, which is what they need.
- [45:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
Supplies, gunpowder, fur, hats, shelter. Exactly. So by early November, they have crossed the rivers into the steppes of central Ukraine. And on the 11th of November, Charles's scouts glimpse Baturin on the horizon.
- [45:38]
Tom Holland
So, fire, food.
- [45:40]
Dominic Sandbrook
Welcome. But the closer they get, they see smoke rising overhead.
- [45:44]
Tom Holland
Oh, no.
- [45:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
Because Baturin is burning while Charles had been on his way. Alexander Menshikov's dragoons had stormed the Cossack capital. They had slaughtered 6,000 men, women and children. They had destroyed all the Cossack supplies and they had burned the fortress to the ground. And then they'd held this public ceremony where they had officially stripped Mazepa of his title as the hetman. They had dragged his portrait through the dust and then hanged it from the gallows beside the piles of butchered bodies. And then they got the Metropolitan of Kyiv, the sort of great churchman, to read a sentence of excommunication and anathema against Mazepa. And amazingly, this was read out in Ukrainian churches every year until 1869, which is one reason, I guess, why his name endures in Russia and Ukraine as this kind of great character of history. Of course, for the Russians, a great villain. Yeah. And now for Ukrainian nationalists, they see him as much more of a hero.
- [46:51]
Tom Holland
I mean, what is clear is that Charles XII and Peter the Great are two of history's great grudge holders.
- [46:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
They are.
- [46:59]
Tom Holland
I mean, they are titanic in the grudges that they hold.
- [47:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. But of course, this changes the picture for the war. First of all, it sends a very clear signal to all the other Cossacks. If you join Mazeppa and back Sweden, then Peter's wrath will be terrible, his retribution swift. To quote the Lord of the Rings, it means that Charles isn't going to get the food and supplies that he needs. And it kind of makes Mazeppa irrelevant now because he's just hanging around with Charles. But what can he bring Charles? He's no longer the leader of the.
- [47:30]
Tom Holland
Cossack, but surely also, I mean, on the geopolitics of the war.
- [47:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [47:35]
Tom Holland
It also means that it's mad that Charles XII is in Ukraine when he's a Swede who's aiming to march on Moscow. I mean, he's now essentially completely the wrong end of Europe.
- [47:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
He is. He's gone massively out of his way.
- [47:49]
Tom Holland
And with nothing to show for it. I mean, he's in as big a hole as he ever was. A bigger one, perhaps.
- [47:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Because now the Russians are chasing him. They're blocking the roads to the north. And as you say, he has no supplies. And now where are we? We're in Ukraine in November. Winter is coming. So now both sides hunker down for the winter. If you look at a map of Ukraine, the Swedes are in a place called Hadiya, which is roughly midway between Kyiv and. And Kharkiv. On today's map, the Russians are kind of blocking them in an arc to the northeast, stopping them from getting back up towards Moscow. Although they're both, you know, on campaign in winter, this is a lot better for Peter. He's on home terrain, he's got loads of manpower and he's got time on his side. And what's really crucial now is it's not just, as it were, the Russian or Ukrainian winter. It's a winter like no other, because we talked about this a long time ago. One of our early episodes about how the weather changed history. This winter of 1708-1709 is the worst winter in Europe for 500 years. The Baltic, the Seine, the Thames, the canals of Venice, even the Atlantic harbors, they all freeze over. There are all these reports from all over Europe of farm animals freezing to death in the fields. In France alone, half a million people froze or starved to death.
- [49:15]
Tom Holland
And Dominic, even more importantly, doesn't the wine in Versailles freeze?
- [49:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
It does. Yeah, right, exactly. The wine in Versailles froze. The British economy shrunk by a quarter and didn't recover its value for years. And in the open steppes of Ukraine, where there is no respite from the kind of howling snowstorms, it is just awful. And this is what we began with, that reading.
- [49:38]
Tom Holland
So this is where the bloke loses his foot to frostbite.
- [49:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
A Lutheran pastor who was with the Swedish army wrote afterwards, the spittle from people's mouths turned to ice before hitting the ground. Sparrows fell frozen from the roofs to the ground. You could see men without hands, others without hands and feet, some who had lost their fingers, faces, ears and noses, others crawling around on all fours. There were reports of kind of dragoons sitting on their horses, frozen solid with the reins in their hands, and they have to be sort of sawn off to get them off the horse. So in all, perhaps 3,000 men, 3,000 Swedes froze to death.
- [50:18]
Tom Holland
So how. How large is the force now?
- [50:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
Probably well under 30,000. I would have said.
- [50:23]
Tom Holland
That's a sizeable number then.
- [50:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
Now, the amazing thing is that Charles is still so reckless.
- [50:29]
Tom Holland
Not a scratch, but a trifle, as he said to that guy.
- [50:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, not a trifle. So in January, he tries to attack, just to sort of liven things up a bit. He says, well, why don't we attack this Cossack village nearby? And he sends 3,000 men to attack this village and he loses 400 of those men killed and 800 of them wounded. Men he can ill afford to lose. And one of the men who is wounded, and this will Be important later is his right hand man, who we haven't mentioned yet and we'll talk about him in the next episode, who is a guy called Field Marshal Carl Gustav Reinskold. And he's hit by shrapnel in the chest and never really recovers. So from this point onwards, Charles's right hand man is kind of badly wounded. In the middle of February, Charles tries to get out of his kind of winter quarters and go move east towards Kharkiv. But yet more freak weather. Thunderstorms, driving rain, floods. He has to go back. And by the time he's ready to move again in April, his men are half starved. They're completely bedraggled, their boots have rotted, their sodden uniforms are in rags and their gunpowder is so wet that their artillery is basically useless.
- [51:41]
Tom Holland
And also a lot of their artillery, of course is buried hundreds of miles to the north where what's his name had left them.
- [51:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, where Leuven. Count Leuvenhout left them. Exactly. Charles, of course, is still very jolly. He sent a letter to our old friend Stanislav Levcinski and said, my men are in very good condition and we're very close to winning the war. And I think he genuinely believes it, you know, he's so convinced that they can't be beaten and that God is on their side.
- [52:06]
Tom Holland
It's a road bump.
- [52:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. It's a bump in the road, but you know, we can see the end of light at the end of the tunnel. If I'm not mixing my transport based metaphors. One of his chief advisors, in fact his, his sort of chief minister is a guy called Count Piper. I don't think related to the Ensign Piper that we began with. He said to him, look, this is really the point where we should give up on this man scheme. Why don't we go west, back to Poland? And Charles said, no, no, no, no, what we actually need is to get reinforcements. And he says, we'll send messengers to Sweden. We will get the Polish Royal army under Leszczynski to join us. And I'm going to send envoys to the Crimean Tatars because they hate the Russians. And once we've got all them on board, we can march north and take Moscow, just as we thought. And the mad thing is that Charles is so confident that when Peter sent a captured Swedish officer to suggest a compromise, to say, come on now, should we have peace, should we have a truce? Charles did not even bother to reply because Peter was still saying, as part of the compromise, I'd like to keep St Petersburg. So I said, oh, well, if you want to keep St Petersburg, there's no. Yeah, nothing to be talked about. There's no way you're going to, you know, I'm going to win this war.
- [53:18]
Tom Holland
It's crazy or heroic, depending on your perspective, or maybe both.
- [53:23]
Dominic Sandbrook
One battle can change the course of history and Charles is a gambler, and gambles sometimes pay off. We did the Battle of Hastings a few weeks ago, didn't we? And that did change the course of history.
- [53:33]
Tom Holland
And talking of battles, where is Charles heading now?
- [53:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
So in the end of April, Charles says to his men, we'll break camp, we'll head southeast to a place where we can rendezvous with the Crimeans and with the Poles when they turn up. And the place he has in mind is a small town called Poltava on the bank of the River Vorskla. It's a kind of wooden fortress and it has a Russian garrison, about 5,000 men with cannons.
- [53:57]
Tom Holland
So it's quite like the kind of forts that you get in the American west in the 19th century.
- [54:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, a little bit. That's exactly how I imagine it, because I imagine this landscape, having never been to Ukraine, I imagine it as being sort of quite American west. Kind of Knobbler's Creek, Nobbler's Gulch. Exactly. So by May 1709, Charles's army is entrenched west of this town. Now, this is very unusual for the Swedes because they don't normally like sieges. A bit like their Viking forebears, actually. And many of Charles's officers are a bit confused why they're laying siege to this actually reasonably insignificant fort. And the reason, they think, is that actually the siege is a lure. He's hoping to lure Peter the Great to battle because Charles is confident in a set piece pitch battle, he will always win. This siege drags on for six weeks. The weather is now, ironically, becoming punishingly hot. You can't win.
- [54:54]
Tom Holland
No, you can't.
- [54:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
So the Swedes in their rags with their sodden gunpowder, are sort of dripping with sweat, being beset by flies.
- [55:03]
Tom Holland
Well, the Swedes don't like heat. They don't like heat except in a sauna.
- [55:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
I love a Swedish summer. As you know, I've been on holidays. Sweden.
- [55:09]
Tom Holland
I know you do, yeah.
- [55:10]
Dominic Sandbrook
I like a Baltic dip. I think it's lovely and sunny. I mean, Swedish tourist board should get in touch. I think it's really nice and sunny and I think it's not too hot and I like that.
- [55:19]
Tom Holland
Yeah, kind of one of those white beaches, but a Black sky overhead. It's very romantic.
- [55:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, that's Iceland. A black beach with a black sky.
- [55:28]
Tom Holland
We had it on Gotland.
- [55:30]
Dominic Sandbrook
Did you? Gotland is absolutely gorgeous. I really recommend Gotland to people.
- [55:33]
Tom Holland
We are approaching one of the great battles in world history and here we are talking about Swedish tourist spots.
- [55:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
Come on.
- [55:40]
Tom Holland
Discipline.
- [55:40]
Dominic Sandbrook
All right, so the Swedes are outside Poltava. So think of it this way. The Swedes on the left hand side of the picture, as you looked it, then the town, then a river. And then on the right hand side of the picture, on the eastern bank, the Russian army is assembling under Boris Sheremetev and Alexander Menshikov, who are then joined by Peter the Great. So all the kind of Russian big guns, all the lads. Exactly. Now, all this time, Peter's strategy has been to avoid a big battle with the Swedes. But now he's beginning to rethink. He has about 80,000 men. The Swedes have about 30,000, he thinks. And, you know, many of them with like, no toes.
- [56:21]
Tom Holland
And they haven't got any gunpowder either.
- [56:23]
Dominic Sandbrook
Gunpowder is all. Yeah, absolutely dripping with water. Peter's agents have told him that Poltava will probably fall by the end of June. He really needs to strike before that because he doesn't want Charles to get into the fort and then to use it as a base. So Peter summons his commanders and he says, look, this is the moment. We'll get our army across the river to the western bank and then we'll unleash our artillery and our weight of numbers against the Swedes. The difficulty is in crossing the river Vorskl. It's a wide, deep and marshy river. And he says, well, we'll cross further north, seven miles north of the town where it's a little bit shallower and we should be able to get across. The Swedes know that the Russians are going to do this. Their scouts have reported on it. So by about the 15th and 16th of June, they are on full battle alert. Their plan is set. Field Marshal Reinskild will take care of the Russians. He will let their vanguard across first and then he will fall on them and destroy them before the rest of the Russian force can join them. Is a good plan. And then the next day, Charles XII's birthday, fate takes a hand. So Charles is turning 27. And so far in these 27 years, he has laughed in the face of danger and death.
- [57:37]
Tom Holland
He's ridden the horses off cliffs, he's wrestled with bears.
- [57:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, he has gone in full view of Russian gunners and he's had horses shot under him and God has always smiled on him. But the story today on his birthday, will be very different. At dawn, he rides out with his elite bodyguard, who are called the Drabance, to inspect the Swedish defenses on the river. And Russian musketeers, just as usual on the other side of the river, open fire. And Charles completely ignores them. And he has just turned away to ride his horse back up the bank when a Russian musket ball smacks into the left heel of his boot, travels right through his foot and it comes out through his big toe. Now, unbelievably, or indeed believably, if you've been following Charles's career till now, he doesn't flinch. A Polish nobleman who's with him sees this, but Charles says, don't you dare say a word.
- [58:36]
Tom Holland
There goes your foot.
- [58:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
Good Lord.
- [58:38]
Tom Holland
So it does that kind of thing.
- [58:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. And then he continues the tour of the defences without saying anything for another three hours.
- [58:46]
Tom Holland
I mean, that is insane, isn't it?
- [58:48]
Dominic Sandbrook
I mean, can you imagine? I mean, if I had a blister, I'd be straight back to the camp and demanding medical attention.
- [58:53]
Tom Holland
He's a proper hero in that sense. I mean, if a hero is a kind of someone who is midway between, well, the mortal and the divine, I mean, that is superhuman.
- [59:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
This is such Alexander the Great behavior. Yeah, isn't it? It's absolute Alexander the Great behavior. So he gets back to the camp, riding his horse. Cause his foot in the stirrup, he is deathly pale when he gets back there and blood is literally oozing out of his boot. And as he tries to dismount, he puts his foot down. The pain is so overwhelmingly agonizing. He collapses in a dead faint. And they rush around him, they see there's all his blood pouring out of his boot. His foot has become so swollen, they have to cut his boot off. And they find inside the bones of his foot have been shattered. And his foot is full of splinters of bone.
- [59:39]
Tom Holland
Oh, you see, I feel like fainting just hearing that.
- [59:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
The doctors hesitate when they see this. They're like, oh, my God. And Charles, this is the best bit. He wakes up, he comes out, he looks at the doctors and there's this brilliant line. Slash away, slash away. And then he picks up a pair of scissors and cuts into his foot himself to open it up for them. I know.
- [60:03]
Tom Holland
So anyone who's prone to kind of, you know, moaning. Yeah, Bear that in mind.
- [60:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly.
- [60:07]
Tom Holland
Think of the Swedish king and man up.
- [60:10]
Dominic Sandbrook
So the news spreads through the Swedish camp. The king has been hurt. All this, Charles says initially, before he passes out. I'll be back in the saddle, you know, before you know it. In fact, his foot becomes very badly infected and he comes down with fever. Two days later, 19 June, the infection has spread up to his knee and the surgeons want to amputate his leg. And the only reason they don't is because they're terrified that when he wakes up, you know, he will have them attacked by a bear or something in punishment because the thought of losing his leg would be so dreadful for him. So they don't do it. By the 21st, two days after that, it is pretty clear to them that he will die within hours. And in fact, they've, at this point, his childhood servant has been summoned to his bedside to read him his favorite book, Boyhood Fairy Tales.
- [60:59]
Tom Holland
That's nice.
- [60:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
Isn't that touching? Now, meanwhile, Field Marshal Rainskild has come back from the river, which he was meant to be defending, to be with the King. And he says to the other officers, look, we can't fight this, you know, death or glory battle while the King is lying dying.
- [61:15]
Tom Holland
Why not?
- [61:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
They're so shaken by the loss of their leader, but also we need to be with him and we need to be on hand when he does die.
- [61:22]
Tom Holland
That's madness. Well, what would he want? He wanted to go and fight.
- [61:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
I suppose he would. But they're very loyal, aren't they?
- [61:28]
Tom Holland
But if you're loyal, you obey your king's orders. Well, I just feel Charles is, you know, he's. He's being let down left, right and center by all his. I suppose. I mean, he's appointed them, so it's his fault to that extent.
- [61:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, right, yeah. It's all Charles's fault, ultimately, is it? That's poor from you.
- [61:43]
Tom Holland
Well, he's in command.
- [61:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
You're absolutely right. Because while he's lying there on his deathbed, the Russians do cross to the western bank. Of course, they're still a long way. They're seven miles north of Poltava, but they're now on the same side of the bank as the Swedes.
- [61:55]
Tom Holland
And they've lost the chance to inflict, you know, a murderous descent on them, of course.
- [62:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
And the Russians have pulled off the most difficult bit of Peter's plan without really facing an enemy shot.
- [62:07]
Tom Holland
Oh, it makes me weep for the Swedes.
- [62:09]
Dominic Sandbrook
Then on 22 June, two dramatic developments. First of all, there's sort of movement in Charles tent and then to the light of his troops. He is brought out on a stretcher. He is not dead. The fever has broken. Against all the odds, he is still very weak, but he is alive, and he is kind of saluting to them. And then as he's lying there on the stretcher, the messengers arrive from the Poles and the Crimean Tatars. And guess what? The Crimeans aren't coming. Their Ottoman overlords have said, no, don't help the Swedes. And what is worse, the Poles aren't coming either. This bloke, Stanisaw Leszczynski, Charles's puppet, has completely let him down. He says, oh, my kingdom is too insecure. My rule is a little bit fragile. It'd be reckless for me to send an army to help you now.
- [63:05]
Tom Holland
I mean, he may have a great name, but that's poor behavior.
- [63:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
It is poor behavior. So Count Piper, at this point, the minister, he says to Charles, we must get out of here immediately. This is a disaster. We must head for the river Dnieper, cross it, get into Poland, sign a truce with Peter if we have to. We just have to escape with you and the army intact. And Charles says to him, under no circumstances, there'll be no retreat. There's no deal with Peter the Great. Now the thing is, Charles's mental state at this point must be very. I mean, that must be very fragile because he's nearly died. He's only just coming out of a fever, basically, the inside of his foot has been shredded. Hasn't eaten a square meal for about 12 months.
- [63:49]
Tom Holland
I wonder if. I mean, he's almost died, but he hasn't. Has God preserved him?
- [63:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think there's a big element of that. I think he's sitting there probably with a kind of sheen of cold sweat on his face, thinking, I've cheated death once again. Fate has spared me for higher things. And I think he also thinks, enough of this now. You know, Peter is only seven miles away. Let's finish this.
- [64:15]
Tom Holland
Let's have the pitch battle that I've always wanted.
- [64:18]
Dominic Sandbrook
I don't think he ever doubts that he will win it, because on the Sunday 27th June, five days later, they have their morning prayers. And then he calls his generals to his bedside and he says, the Russians may have the greater numbers, but we have the experience, we have the tactics, and we have God's support. If we take them unawares, if we strike first, we can trap them against the river, we can smash their army, and we could maybe even capture Peter himself. And if we do that, then we win the War, you know, in a morning. And he says, tomorrow outside Poltava, we will have the final showdown to decide the fate of Northern and Eastern Europe. Tomorrow, the winner takes it all, the loser has to fall.
- [65:01]
Tom Holland
We'll be standing small.
- [65:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, yeah. And so it is that in the early hours of the following morning, the final showdown, the battle of Poltava, begins.
- [65:13]
Tom Holland
Well, who will win it? There's only one way to find out and that is if you are a member of the Rest Is History club to go on and listen to our account of this epic battle right away. If you are not, then you can still do that by heading to therestishistory.com and signing up. Or you can wait until next week.
- [65:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, don't wait.
- [65:35]
Tom Holland
But whatever you choose, we will be back next time for the final showdown.
- [65:40]
Dominic Sandbrook
Goodbye. Goodbye. Hi everybody. You're still here right at the end of the episode. I'm very impressed by your commitment. But listen, I have a question for you. I want to ask you something in confidence. Do you sometimes listen to the adverts on these episodes and do you sometimes think, do you know what I wish that the listeners to this podcast, I wish they were listening to an advert about my brand rather than the other stuff that Tom and Dominic are promoting on here. If you have thought that, there is of course only one way to find out what that would be like, you can disrupt the the procession of adverts. You could be the next HSBC premiere or the many other tremendous companies that have advertised on the Rest Is History. And you could put your brand in front of millions of like minded listeners by advertising on the Rest is History and indeed the other shows on the Gohanger Network. Now you may be thinking, I don't know what the Goal Hanger Network is. Gohanger are the company behind this very show. And if you are in the market to increase the value of your brand, Gohanger would love to hear from you. You can register your interest or indeed your company's interest by going to goalhanger.com right now. And that is goal. G O A L hanger H-A N G E R dot com.