Meanwhile Alexander Menshikov, Peter’s friend and general, watched with grim satisfaction as a particularly brutal Russian winter cut the Swedes off from supplies. When Spring came, Mazepa’s disgruntled Cossacks melted away with the snows. To rally what remained of his army, Charles impetuously besieged Poltava on May 12th,* but Peter joined Menshikov in leading a combined force of Russians and Cossacks to Poltava’s relief, outnumbering the Swedes two-to-one.
On Thursday July 8th, 1709, the Swedes were defeated in barely two hours. Charles, confined to a litter by a wounded foot and a fever, did some damage with a couple of pistols until a cannon ball smashed his stretcher. Peter anxiously summoned his doctor, but then news came that Charles and Mazepa had fled.
Charles spent five years as a guest of the Sultan in Constantinople. He returned home to find the Baltic dominated by Russian shipping from Peter’s new capital, the busy port city of St Petersburg. Increasingly cold-shouldered by Europe’s crowned heads, Charles launched a desperate assault on Norway during which he was killed in 1718, and in 1721 his successor Frederick I signed the Peace of Nystad with Peter, acknowledging a new Power in Europe.
* Poltava is a city now in the Ukraine, east of the River Dnieper. An anxious Peter had been braced for an assault on the strategically important Voronezh, which stands on a tributary of the mighty River Don and thus opened Peter’s way to Azov and the Black Sea, but to his delight and amazement Charles passed the city by.