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28 June 1709
Forces Engaged
Russian: 44,000 men and 100 cannon. Commander: Czar Peter the Great.
Swedish: 17,000 men and 4 cannon. Commander: King Charles XII.
Importance
Sweden’s defeat marked their decline and the arrival of Russia as a serious European power.
Historical Setting
Sweden had expanded from a Scandinavian power to a major force in European politics because of the statecraft and military genius of Gustavus Adolphus. He died in 1632 at the battle of Leutzen in the Thirty Years’ War and was succeeded by Charles X. Charles expanded on Gustavus’s strong performance by taking Sweden to its greatest limits and power by 1655. During the First Northern War, Charles defeated Poland and Denmark, but the war ended with his death in 1660. Peace lasted for four decades, until the reign of Charles XII, when Poland began showing its traditional restlessness under foreign dominance. In 1700, Polish King Augustus II organized the Northern Union, made up of Poland, Denmark, and Russia. Russia was the most enthusiastic supporter of the Union, not because it desired Polish liberation but because Czar Peter I wanted his country to supplant Sweden as the dominant Baltic power.
Charles XII was but 18 years of age when he rose to the throne of Sweden in 1700, but he did not lack for military talent. He made the first move of what came to be called the Second, or Great, Northern War by invading Denmark, which he viewed as the weak link in the enemy chain. With Copenhagen threatened, the Danes concluded a quick peace, signing the Treaty of Travedal on 28 August 1700. Although the Danes promised to remain passive and not aid their erstwhile allies, the fact that they possessed a strong fleet worried Charles because it was a potential threat to his lines of communication when he faced Poland and Russia.
Charles quickly turned eastward and landed 8,000 men at Livonia with the intent of relieving the besieged city of Riga, but instead marched on Narva when he learned that the attacking Russian force outnumbered the defenders by a four-to-one margin. The Russians remained unaware of Charles’s approach until he attacked them in a driving snowstorm on 20 November. The Russians were badly beaten, losing 10,000 dead, wounded, or taken prisoner, while another 30,000 fled, abandoning all their artillery and supplies. Charles next marched on Poland, where a 4-year campaign against King Augustus finally ended in Swedish victory with the signing of the Treaty of Altranstadt on 24 September 1706. Poland pledged to remain quiet, accepting Swedish puppet Stanislas Leszczynski in place of King Augustus. Charles spent the winter reorganizing and resupplying for the campaign against Russia the following year.
While Charles was defeating Denmark and Poland, Czar Peter had spent his time reorganizing his own army after the embarrassment at Narva. He also built up his fleet in the Baltic at the same time that he was building his capital at St. Petersburg, at the mouth of the Neva River. By not marching to the aid of his allies, Peter had had the time to significantly upgrade his military strength. He needed it; Charles invaded out of Poland on 1 January 1708 with Moscow as his goal. As is so often the case, the Russians were able to slow the invading army by gradual withdrawals and a scorched-earth policy. Accomplishing the desired goal of depriving Charles and his army of supplies, the Swedish king marched his forces southward to join with his new ally, Ivan Mazepa, hetman of the Cossacks. That move meant that the supply line that Charles wanted to maintain became badly strained, and Peter took advantage of that. He attacked a force under Swedish General Carl Lewenhaupt at Lesnaia on 9 October 1708. Lewenhaupt commanded a force of 11,000 marching to reinforce Charles, but after the defeat at Lesnaia only 6,000 got through, and without artillery or supplies.
The Battle
The winter of 1708–1709 was spent in skirmishes between Peter’s army and the combined Swedish-Cossack force, during which time Charles’s force of 40,000 was cut almost in half because of combat and the severe cold. In the spring of 1709, Charles decided to press on to Moscow, rather than reinforce his army. Along the line of march lay the town of Poltava on the Vorskla River. Charles laid siege to Poltava on 2 May. Peter sent his cavalry commander Menshikov to distract and observe the Swedes, while he both put down a Cossack rising along the Dnieper River and convinced the Turkish government to stay aloof from this struggle. The Turks not only stayed out of it, temporarily at least, but also forbade Crimean Cossacks from aiding the Swedes. With his rear covered, Peter marched on Poltava, arriving in early June. He established a camp on the west bank of the Vorskla, a few miles north of Poltava.
The Russians defending Poltava had held out much longer than Charles had anticipated, and the Swedish king was running low on both food and gunpowder. To make bad matters worse, on 17 June Charles was wounded in the foot, making it impossible for him to lead his troops in battle with his normal energy. With 40,000 Russians now in the neighborhood, he should have lifted the siege and withdrawn to Poland, but instead he decided to fight Peter. When Peter learned of Charles’s wound, he too thought that the time for battle had come. Much closer to Poltava he built a new camp, a fortified square with the east flank on the Vorskla and the south flank along a marshy wood with a stream running through it. That wood and stream separated the Russian camp from Poltava. Peter was sure this new camp would provoke Charles to attack, and he was correct.
Charles’s army began its march to battle at 0300 on 28 June 1709. They had to move west from Poltava and then turn north to enter a gap between the aforementioned woods and a marsh farther west. Between the woods and marsh, Peter had built six redoubts to slow any advance and then began building four more perpendicular to the six. The result was a T formation with the crossbar between the woods and marsh and the upright pointing at the oncoming Swedes, who had to divide their forces to either side. Charles left 5,600 men behind to cover Poltava and guard the base camp, leaving him with but 12,500 men for his attack. Although Charles moved his men in the dark of night, Peter learned of the operation and quickly established a line of mixed infantry and cavalry behind the line of six redoubts.
Charles was forced by the redoubts to split his force, half to the east and half to the west; he was carried on a litter with the left, western force. His plan was to rush past the fire of the redoubts to engage the Russians behind, who he was sure would not stand and fight; he remembered their shoddy performance at Narva and assumed nothing had changed. The problem with this plan was that he refused to share it with his subordinates for, like Alexander of Macedon, he was a hands-on, lead-from-the-front commander who liked to be in the midst of battle to act and react as circumstances dictated. Because he was on a litter, though, he could not do that, and his primary subordinate, General Rehnskjöld, was not allowed to act on his own initiative. Overcentralized command doomed the Swedes.
On the left flank, the attacking Swedes soon swept past the redoubts and drove back the Russians on the far side. On the right, however, General Roos proceeded to attack the redoubts to reduce or capture them. That meant that he not only made slow progress, but he suffered lots of casualties. When, late in the morning, Charles was ready to press his attack on Peter’s camp, he had but half his army with him because Roos was bogged down and soon surrounded and captured. The troops in the center of the attack also managed to break through the line of redoubts and, driving Russian troops before them, were in a position to wheel right and storm the Russian camp. This force, under Lewenhaupt, received orders to retreat and join with Charles, however, thus losing their momentum and giving Peter time to prepare his army. Who sent the order to Lewenhaupt was hotly debated at the time, for both Charles and Rehnskjöld denied sending it, but, with the shifting fortunes of battle and the conflicting reports of success and failure, it could have been sent almost at any time in the previous few hours.
While Charles redeployed his forces on the plain behind the redoubts, Peter brought 40,000 men out of his camp, along with 100 cannon. Charles certainly should not have attacked this greatly superior force, at least until the artillery he had back at Poltava was brought up, but his disdain for the Russian troops over-rode good sense. Four thousand infantry and cavalry advanced across the open plain into the teeth of the Russian guns, and they were mowed down by the hundreds. Peter rode constantly through his own lines shouting encouragement and giving orders. Charles was unable to do so, and thus his uninspired men had no chance of breaking the Russian line. By noon, Charles was obliged to leave the field.
Results
Charles left behind 3,000 dead and 2,800 prisoners, including General Rehnskjöld and four other generals. Charles gathered up the troops that he had left at Poltava and they made their way east and south. At the junction of the Vorskla and Dnieper Rivers, he found all boats destroyed, but he built enough rafts to escape with 1,000 men. The remainder were captured on 30 June. Charles fled to seek refuge with the Turks, Russia’s traditional enemy, who granted him sanctuary.
Peter scored a major triumph at Poltava, but almost threw it all away. Rather than consolidating his victory, he pressed a campaign against Poland while demanding that the Turks surrender Charles to him. Instead of Charles, the Turks sent 200,000 troops to the Russian frontier. In the spring of 1711, Peter declared war on Turkey and soon found himself in command of 38,000 starving men along the River Pruth, with the region devastated by the Turks, who outnumbered him five to one. On 11 August, the Turks attacked and were beaten back. Their commander, Grand Vizier Baltaji Mehmet, entered into negotiations with Peter and soon granted him and his army parole. A few days’ siege would have brought Peter’s army to its knees, but instead he lived to fight another day.
War continued between Russia and Turkey on one front and Russia and Sweden on another, while Charles remained in Turkey arguing with his allies. Russia and Turkey signed the Treaty of Adrianople in 1713, but not until 1721 did Russia and Sweden sign the Treaty of Nysted; Charles XII had been killed in battle 3 years earlier. Thus ended the Great Northern War after 21 years, and Sweden, which entered the war as such an important power, exited it a broken country.
Russia, on the other hand, replaced Sweden as the major power in the Baltic region. In the Treaty of Nysted, Russia received Livonia, Estonia, and Ingermanland on the Baltic as well as the Finnish Karelia territory. Peter, who had long envied European progress, had access now to what the west could provide. He imported experts on almost everything to drag Russia into the modern world, and technical advisors as well as intellectuals stayed in St. Petersburg to fulfill his dreams. This brought a facade of western civilization to Russia, which the aristocrats were able to appreciate, but the mass of Russian peasantry remained poor, ignorant, and exploited. Peter’s wars and building projects killed tens of thousands; as much as 20 percent of the Russian population died during his reign. Many of them died in the military, which Peter was determined to make the equal of any European army or navy. When he died, the Russian navy possessed forty-eight ships of the line, and the army had more than 200,000 regulars and 100,000 reserves.
Although Russians began to act like Europeans, their Asian heritage lingered on. Peter had to remedy that to build the empire he wanted. The only way to do that was to adopt European government administrative techniques and philosophies to provide the necessary regular taxation power he needed. The western administration, however, employed eastern ruthlessness in execution, and more dead Russians were the result as Peter suppressed any objections to his actions. Although he did introduce a number of western social reforms, they rarely applied to the masses, who continued to work and produce the labor and taxes, just as they had done for centuries. That resource, coupled with the land and mineral resources that Peter developed, brought Russia overnight into Europe as a country to be reckoned with. Although its power waxed and waned over the following centuries, Russia was here to stay on the world scene. “A new threat to Europe had arisen; again Asia was on the move, but this time her Mongoloid hordes were girt in the panoply of the West” (Fuller, A Military History of the Western World, vol. 2, p. 186).
Had Peter lost at Poltava, it is certainly questionable if Sweden would have bent Russia to its will. If the Turks had not let Peter go from the River Pruth, Turkey may well have emerged as the major eastern power that Russia became because the struggle between those two countries never ebbed, and Russian military power certainly acted as a curb to Ottoman desires in eastern Europe.
References:
Creasy, Edward S. Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. New York: Harper, 1851; Fuller, J. F. C. A Military History of the Western World, vol. 2. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1955; Hatton, R. M. Charles XII of Sweden.
Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine
