Voltaire's history of Charles XII, king of Sweden

by Voltaire

Some days after, the Sultan sent the King of Sweden, as the only answer to his complaints, twenty-five Arabian horses, one of which had carried his Highness, and was covered with a saddle enriched with precious stones, and with massive gold stirrups. With this present he sent a polite letter, couched in general terms, and such as seemed to show that the Vizir had acted with the Sultan’s orders. Chourlouli, too, who knew how to dissemble, sent five fine horses to the King.

Charles said haughtily to the man who brought them, “Return to your master and say that I do not receive presents from my enemies.” M. Poniatowski, who had already had the courage to get a petition against the Grand Vizir presented, had formed the bold plan of having him deposed; he knew that the Vizir was no favourite of the Sultan’s mother, and that he was hated both by Kislar-aga, the chief of the black eunuchs, and by the aga of the janissaries. So he urged them all three to speak against him. It was a strange sight to see a Christian, a Pole, an unaccredited agent of the King of Sweden who had refuged with the Turks, caballing almost openly at the Porte, against a Viceroy of the Ottoman Empire, and one who was, too, both a useful minister and a favourite of his master.

Poniatowski would never have succeeded, and the mere notion of his design would have cost him his life, had not a stronger power than those on his side given the last blow to the Grand Vizir Chourlouli’s fortune. The Sultan had a young favourite, who has since governed the Ottoman Empire and been killed in Hungary in 1716, at the battle of Petervaradin, gained over the Turks by Prince Eugene of Savoy. His name was Coumourgi-Ali-Pasha; his birth much the same as that of Chourlouli; he was the son of a coal-heaver—as the name signified—for Coumir is Turkish for coal. The Emperor Achmet II, uncle of Achmet III, meeting Coumourgi as a child in a wood near Adrianople, was so struck by his great beauty that he had him taken to the seraglio. Mustapha, Mahomet’s eldest son and successor, was taken with him, and Achmet III made him his favourite; he was then only selic-tar-aga, sword-bearer to the crown. His extreme youth did not allow him to stand for the office of Grand Vizir, but his ambition was to make it. The Swedish faction could never gain this favourite; he was never a friend of King Charles, or of any other Christian prince, or their ministers, but on this occasion he was unconsciously of service to the King. He united with the Sultana Valida, and the leading officer of the Porte, to bring about the fall of Chourlouli, whom they all hated. This old minister, who had served his master long and well, was the victim of the caprice of a boy and the intrigues of a stranger. He was deprived of his dignity and his wealth, his wife, daughter of the last Sultan, taken from him, and he himself banished to Cassa in Crimean-Tartary. The bul, i.e. the seal of the Empire, was given to Numan Couprougli, grandson of the great Couprougli who took Candia. This new Vizir was what misinformed Christians hardly believe a Turk can be, a man of incorruptible virtue and a scrupulous observer of the law, which he often set up in opposition to the will of the Sultan.

He would not hear of a war against Russia, which he thought unjust and unnecessary, but the same respect for the law which prevented him from waging war against the Czar, made him punctilious in the duty of hospitality to the King of Sweden. “The law,” he said to his master, “forbids you to attack the Czar, who has done you no harm, but it commands you to help the King of Sweden, who is an unfortunate Prince in your dominions.”

He sent his Majesty 800 purses (a purse being worth 500 crowns), and advised him to return peaceably into his own country, through the territories of the Emperor of Germany, or in some French vessels that were then lying in the harbour at Constantinople, and which M. de Feriol, the French ambassador, offered to Charles to take him to Marseilles. Count Poniatowski continued negotiations with the minister, and gained in the negotiations an ascendancy of which Russian gold could no longer deprive him in dealing with an incorruptible minister. The Russian faction thought that the best plan was to poison such a dangerous diplomat. They bribed one of his servants, who was to give him poison in his coffee; the crime was discovered in time; they found the poison in a little vial which they took to the Grand Seignior; the poisoner was judged in full divan, and condemned to the galleys, because, by Turkish law, crimes that have failed of execution are never punished by death.

Charles, still persuaded that sooner or later he would succeed in making the Turkish Empire declare against that of Russia, would agree to none of the proposals for his return in peace to his own dominions; he persisted in pointing out to the Turks as dangerous the very Czar whom he had long despised; his emissaries kept up their insinuations that Peter the Great was aiming at gaining control of shipping in the Black Sea; that, after having beaten the Cossacks, he had designs on the Crimea. Sometimes his representations roused the Porte, sometimes the Russian minister nullified their effect.

While he was thus letting his fate depend on the caprice of a vizir, and was forced to put up with the affronts as well as accept the favours of a foreign power—while he was presenting petitions to the Sultan, and living on hospitality in a desert—his enemies roused themselves to attack his kingdom.

The battle of Pultawa was at once the signal for a revolution in Poland. King Augustus returned thither, protesting against his abdication and the Peace of Altranstadt, and openly accusing Charles, whom he now no longer feared, of robbery and cruelty. He imprisoned Finsten and Imof, his plenipotentiaries, who had signed the abdication, as if in so doing they had exceeded their orders and betrayed their master. His Saxon troops, which had been the excuse for his dethronement, brought him back to Warsaw with most of the Polish counts who had formerly sworn fidelity to him, had afterwards done the same to Stanislas, and were about to renew their oath to Augustus. Siniawski himself joined his party, forgetting the idea he had had of making himself King, and was content as Grand General of the crown. Fleming, his first minister, who had been obliged to leave Saxony for a time, for fear of being given up as Patkul had been, managed matters at that time so as to bring over a great part of the Polish nobility to his master.

The Pope released his people from the oath of allegiance they had sworn to Stanislas. This step of the Holy Father, taken at the right time, and supported by Augustus’s forces, had no small weight in establishing the interests of the Court of Rome in Poland, where they then had no wish to dispute with the sovereign pontiff the chimerical right of meddling with the temporalities of kings.

Every one was ready to submit to Augustus’s authority again, and received without the least opposition a useless absolution which the Nuncio did not fail to represent as necessary.