The ascendancy of France, 1598-1715

by Henry Offley Wakeman

But the allies soon found that they had reckoned without their host. Charles XII. of Sweden was one of those rare spirits who are born with a perfect genius for fighting. Without any gifts as a strategist, without any studied knowledge of the art of war, he was a born fighter. He loved fighting for fighting’s sake. He was never happier than when on campaign. He enjoyed the very hardships of war, and every soldier in his army knew that whatever might be his own privations, his king was sharing them all. With an unlimited belief in his own fortunes he succeeded in making every one else believe in them too. The enthusiasm of his army was unbounded. They willingly rendered to him an unquestioning obedience, and followed him gladly wherever he pointed the way. A man with such gifts was not going to wait until his unwieldy antagonists had united their forces. Early in May 1700 he sailed straight to Copenhagen and ended the Danish war at a blow. Frederick IV. could not defend his capital, and was obliged to accept the mediation of England and Holland, and to conclude the treaty of Travendal, by which he withdrew from the alliance with Poland and Russia. Leaving Denmark, Charles sailed to the Gulf of Finland where Peter was besieging the important fortress of Narva. Although he had only some 8000 men against Peter’s 60,000 Russians, he did not hesitate to order an attack. The huge undisciplined masses of Peter’s army were quickly thrown into confusion, and fled panic-stricken to their own country, leaving Charles the undisputed master of the Baltic coast. Turning southwards the Swedish king marched through Livonia and Courland into Poland, occupied Warsaw in 1702, defeated the king, Augustus the Strong of Saxony, who had been elected to the Polish crown on the death of John Sobieski in 1697, at the battle of Clissow, and drove him into Saxony. In 1703 he captured Thorn and Dantzig, procured the deposition of Augustus in an assembly held at Warsaw in February 1704, and imposed Stanislas Leczinski upon the Poles as king in his stead. He then resumed his course of military triumph, overran Lithuania, driving out the Russians in 1705, defeated Schulenberg at Frauenstadt in 1706, and finally invaded Saxony in 1707, where he forced Augustus to conclude the peace of Altranstadt in the September of that year, by which Stanislas Leczinski was recognised as king of Poland, and the unfortunate Patkul was surrendered as a victim to the cruelty of Charles, who, in defiance of every principle of humanity, had him broken on the wheel as a traitor.

Position of Charles XII., 1708.

When Charles XII. rested at Altranstadt in the winter of 1707–8, at the age of twenty-five, he felt himself with reason to be the wonder of the world. He was courted on all sides by the great powers, at that time distracted by the throes of the war of the Spanish Succession, and had he cared to play the rôle, might have posed as the arbiter of Europe. From Versailles came one of the most trusted diplomatists of Louis XIV., to remind the young prince of the long friendship of Sweden and France, and to entreat him to acknowledge the benefits of S. Germain en Laye by drawing his sword manfully for Louis at the crisis of his fate. But on behalf of the allies there appeared at the court of Charles metal still more attractive. Marlborough, the greatest soldier of the age, came personally to Altranstadt to plead the cause of Europe before Charles, with the laurels of Blenheim and of Ramillies still green upon his brow. His task was the easier one. He wanted not the assistance but the neutrality of Sweden. Charles was flattered by the attention paid to him, fascinated by the address of the hero diplomatist, and lent a willing ear to his suggestions. His Protestantism rejected the idea of an alliance with the author of the ‘dragonades.’ His desire for vengeance impelled him to come to close quarters with his enemy in the north. His soldierly pride shrank from committing himself to a war in which he would have to take a subordinate place. So in the spring of 1708 he turned his back deliberately on Germany and the Rhine, and marched to his ruin in the inhospitable north.

His invasion of Russia.

While Charles had been engaged in the conquest of Poland and Saxony, Peter had well employed the breathing space allowed to him in the diligent training of his undisciplined armies, and the occupation of the Baltic sea-coast on either side of the Neva. He had already overrun Ingria and Carelia, and had begun the fortifications and houses of a town at the mouth of the Neva, which was one day to be his capital city. Charles did not disturb himself over trifles of that sort. He struck, as was his wont, straight at the heart of his enemies’ power, and having made an alliance with Mazeppa, a hetman of the Cossacks, who promised to join him with a large force of those questionable allies, marched straight upon Moscow at the head of 30,000 men. Misfortune dogged his steps from the first. The roads were incalculably bad, the weather unexpectedly severe, progress was hopelessly slow. When no news had been heard of Mazeppa for some time, Charles, in order to try and open communications with him, left the main track, and plunged into the expanses of forest and morass which lie between Little Russia and the Ukraine. Winter surprised him on the march when he was still many hundreds of miles from Moscow. Food and supplies became very difficult to procure. Disease ravaged his army. Still with the courage of despair he pushed on. Spring found him exhausted but with his face still set towards Moscow. He was destined never to see it. Peter, at the head of immensely superior forces, fell upon Levenhaupt who was bringing a convoy to his aid and cut him to pieces. Battle of Pultava, 1709. Eventually he came up with the king himself at Pultava in the month of June 1709. The defeat of Narva was quickly avenged. Surrounded by the Russian forces, outnumbered two to one, the Swedes could only sell their lives dearly. Twenty thousand officers and men surrendered. Charles himself wounded in the foot made his way with a few companions across the frontier and took refuge with the Turks. The dream of his ambition was shattered at a blow, the work of Gustavus Adolphus was finally overthrown. Livonia and Esthonia with the important towns of Riga and Revel fell into the hands of the Czar. Russia made good her hold upon the Baltic, and took the place of Sweden as the leading power of the north.

War between Russia and the Turks, 1711.

The battle of Pultava, if it destroyed the power of Sweden, did not put an end to the war. Charles XII., from his refuge at Bender on Turkish soil, tried to stir up his hosts to take his part and declare war against Russia. Peter himself, flushed with triumph and ever steady to the policy of enlarging the sea boundary of his country, was by no means averse to the idea of driving back the Turkish empire from the Dniester to the Danube. The intense religious spirit of the Russians, always a potent factor in the policy of Russia in the East, impelled the Czar to put himself forward as the liberator of the oppressed Christians of Moldavia and Wallachia. But he was too wary to take the first step. After much hesitation the Sultan made up his mind. Urged on by his fear of seeing a Russian fleet in the Black Sea, he declared war against Peter in 1710, and the next year saw the Czar at the head of a large army on the Pruth. Fortune however now declared against him. By sheer bad management Peter contrived to get his army completely hemmed in between the river, the marshes, and the Turkish army, and was completely at the mercy of his enemies. Luckily for him the grand vizier was willing to treat for peace, and Peter was enabled to save himself and his army from an ignominious surrender, by giving back to the Turks the port of Azof, and destroying all Russian fortresses on Turkish territory. Charles XII. was sent back to his own dominions, which he found threatened from all sides by the Russians, the Danes and the Poles. For seven years he struggled in vain against superior forces abroad, and the disaffection of the nobles at home. Pacification of the North, 1720. By 1716 he had lost every acre of German soil. In 1718 a bullet shot by one of his own men terminated his career as he was besieging the fortress of Friedrickshall in Norway. The death of Charles XII. put an end to many intrigues, and made the restoration of a general peace more easy. Sweden had learned the lesson which her king had refused to learn. By a succession of treaties, which culminated in the peace of Nystädt between Sweden and Russia in 1720, Hanover became the possessor of Bremen and Verden; Augustus of Saxony was recognised as the rightful king of Poland, Prussia obtained part of Swedish Pomerania, with the islands of Usedom and Rugen, and the towns of Stettin and Dantzig; Frederick of Denmark was permitted to annex the duchy of Schleswig, but had to restore the rest of his conquests and possessions to Sweden, while Russia, the largest gainer of all, obtained Ingria, Esthonia, Livonia, and part of Carelia, and promised to surrender Finland.

While Russia was engaged in claiming the supremacy of the north at the hands of Sweden, Brandenburg-Prussia was pursuing a policy of steady and quiet growth under her undistinguished ruler. Creation of the kingdom of Prussia, 1700. It was the business of Frederick III. to consolidate what the Great Elector had won. Under him national prosperity quickly increased in a land which was no longer the theatre of war. The court became more splendid, roads and canals more numerous, manufactories more active, while the foundation of the university of Halle in 1694 marks a distinct advance in German culture. In foreign affairs he adhered steadily to the policy of his father, and sent his contingent of sturdy Brandenburgers to the assistance of the League of Augsburg with praiseworthy regularity. But the treaty of Ryswick contributed nothing either to his dignity or his possessions, and Frederick, profoundly dissatisfied, proclaimed aloud that if the great powers wanted his aid again he should exact his reward beforehand. In two years’ time the opportunity came, and Frederick, true to his word, insisted on the title of king, as the condition of supporting the Emperor in the matter of the partition treaties in 1700. It was some time before Leopold gave way. The thought of a kingdom in north Germany within the limits of the Empire itself was hateful to him, and opposed to the traditions of the Empire. He would have preferred to diminish, rather than to augment, the dignity and influence of the House of Hohenzollern. But necessity knows no law. Leopold wanted the aid of the Brandenburgers in the field, and could get them on no other terms. To save appearances it was arranged that Frederick should take his title from Prussia, which lay outside the German Empire, and accordingly in the year 1700 Frederick III. elector of Brandenburg, became Frederick I. king of Prussia. In the following year the Grand Alliance was set on foot, and the allied powers all recognised the new king in order to gain his help. Frederick fulfilled his part of the bargain faithfully enough. As long as the war lasted the Prussians fought steadily and well on the side of the allies, and the peace of Utrecht set the stamp of an international treaty to the newly made dignity, besides giving to Prussia the more substantial endowment of Spanish Guelderland.

Northern Europe at the end of the century.

The treaties of Utrecht and Nystädt, like those of Carlovitz and Passarovitz, mark the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. The history of northern Europe in the seventeenth century is the history of the effort of Sweden to obtain mastery over the Baltic and a footing in Germany; of the successful assertion by Brandenburg of leadership in north Germany; of the birth of Russia as a serious political power. Those questions, fought over so strenuously during the seventeenth century, received their final answer in the great treaties which usher in the next epoch. Sweden, stricken from her place of vantage, deprived of nearly all her German possessions, relegated to her own side of the Baltic, is dismissed into the obscurity of a third-rate power, from which she had been originally raised only by the quarrels of her antagonists, and the unprecedented personal ability of her sovereigns. Prussia, acknowledged as an equal by the monarchies of Europe, stands forth without rival as the unquestioned leader of the northern Germany, and is biding her time until the hour shall strike, which will permit her to wrest from the House of Habsburg the leadership of the German people, and inherit from it the duty of defending the German Fatherland. In the far north Russia, under its savage but capable ruler, has made her voice heard among the councils of Europe. Seated firmly on the eastern shores of the Baltic, she is bent on making herself into a commercial and maritime power, while in the far south-east corner of her empire, policy has already pointed the way along which her destiny must move. After the conquest of Azof in 1696, after the campaign on the Pruth in 1711, Turkey and Russia stand face to face in south-eastern Europe, and the Eastern Question has begun.