565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)

31:18So actually all these Latin speakers, I mean him and Charles, they'll chat away in Latin. Yeah, here's our answer to that internal Restless History Club question. Who would you like to invite to a dinner party? I'd invite Charles XII, Peter the Great, this guy Mazepa, and they could all talk in Latin. And Augustus the Strong, tossing foxes in the background. Peter doesn't speak Latin, does he? He does speak Dutch. That's right. That's right. But I speak neither Dutch nor Latin. Well, you could just serve the drinks. Yeah, exactly. Oh, no, you don't want to be serving the drinks at one of Peter the Great's dinner parties, because then he brings out the bellows and you're in real trouble.

31:50You could handle the bears. 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 mate stripped this guy mazeppa naked they tarred and feathered him they tied him to a horse and then they set this horse loose yeah galloping through the woods and through thorny thickets.

32:27When he finally got home, he was so scratched and bloodied and battered that he was almost unrecognisable. And Byron writes a poem about that. And his journey on the back of the horse is emblematic of the romantic spirit. Yeah. Crashing across the steps. And do you know what? This never happened at all. I know, I know. But it's a great poem, nevertheless. Yeah, okay. Well, you're going to be quoting Lord Byron next week's episode, aren't you? Well, that is something for people to look forward to. Well, they can't wait. So many people desperate to join the rest of this history club, just so they can hear that right now.

32:57Anyway, this guy, Mazepa, 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. It's a great job, isn't it? To be a Cossack hetman. A brilliant job. Now, today in Russia, Mazepa is one of the great villains of history. You know, he really does rank among the sort of Benedict Arnold. Right. Like a Benedict Arnold figure because he betrays them and joins Charles XII. But as with Benedict Arnold, in fact, he's a bit of a hero.

33:35Yeah. 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 Mazepa is not a sort of slimy villainous. He's not like Littlefinger from Game of Thrones or something. He's fun, isn't he? 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.

34:14Oh, all those people with the enormous orange beards. Right. Those kind of guys. He's a person who has to basically ride two horses. he has to keep him with 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 their proud frontier wild spirits that's really important to them but they began as runaways right as adventurers and outlaws and stuff so mazepa has always been you know he's always been in with peter in the great sophia versus peter stuff in the first week of this series he'd been on Team Sophia for a long time, but they timed it perfectly and they defected to Peter just before Peter.

35:22And so that's the kind of the marker of the political skills that you were talking about and which you need to 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.

35:59Because, of course, Peter's demanding conscripts. He's levying taxes on moustaches, as well as wills and births and deaths. And I imagine that Mazepa has a tremendous moustache. Oh, and the Cossacks pride themselves, I imagine, on their moustaches and their beards. Peter is constantly saying, send me more labourers 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, Mizeppa doesn't want to be blamed. Right. Because they're a proud independent people. A proud independent people. And what is more, they are a proud independent Orthodox people.

36:35And they are as alarmed as anybody, if not more so, at this talk of cutting people's kaftans into trimming people's beards, excessive shaving, Germanic ways. This stuff goes down really badly with the Cossacks. But, I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean that they will therefore side with a Lutheran invader, right? No, not at all. You know, there's a lot of clean-shaven Swedes. I mean, they're all clean-shaven, I imagine. Exactly. Apart from, what's his name? Benny. Benny from ABBA. He had a beard. Yeah. I mean, this is a really niche and obscure reference, but Sweden's best player at the 1990 World Cup was a man called Glenn Stromberg.

37:11He had a massive beard. And so did Bjorn Borg, the great tennis player. So actually, it's not an absolute rule, is it? We should definitely do. When the rest of the history has become really decadent, we've run out of history. I've played on Swedish beard. History's greatest Swedish beard. Yeah. That's, yeah. I can't believe we're doing Chatham High Street and we're not doing that. That's deranged. I mean, Chad of High Street's an absolutely obvious topic. 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, Mazepa has to start thinking, well, what do I do?

37:58You 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 Stanislaw Fleshgins. 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? 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, a Mazepa in his dynasty.

38:33And Charles is not aiming to rule Ukraine. No. So there's a serious prospect of him being given full independence, I guess. 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 Mazepa is talking to the Swedes in secret. Now, as it happens, the reason that this guy informs on Mazepa is that Mazepa has seduced his daughter, who's about 15 and Mazepa is 60. so peter discounts the rumen she says well this is disguised clearly this is just sour grapes because moseppa's sleeping with this bloke's daughter and then moseppa you'd say but to have this guy beheaded yeah that's right yeah so that's worked out well for him but not for the girl i mean this is bad news for the girl right what happens to the girl 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 it could be worse i mean she could have been murdered i suppose so we don't know what it's like you know what moseppa's company is like though do we tom i mean that It might be a fate worse than death.

39:32He could tell her amusing stories of his youth being tied to horses. He can indeed. Now, the irony is, of course, at this point, that Mazepa does really decide to back Sweden after all. Dominic, how is he going to do this? Because I guess it's a very delicate process, isn't it, to portray someone like Peter the Great? 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 rumours are reaching Peter that Mazepa is wobbling. and Mazepa is holed up in the Cossack stronghold at a place called Baturin. This is the great kind of, to the degree that the Cossacks have a capital, this is it, isn't it?

40:08Exactly, exactly. And I sort of imagine it being like the sort of Dothraki in Game of Thrones or something. Of course you do. Yeah, obviously. And Peter summons Mazepa, come and explain yourself, explain what's going on. And Mazepa sends a series of excuses to say that he's ill and he can't come. And then eventually he goes to the extent of taking to his deathbed and getting a priest to give him the last rites. I mean, that's kind of like trying to get off PE, taking it to a ridiculous extent. 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.

40:49So the war is coming to Ukraine and the Cossacks are clearly going to have to pick a side. Yeah, because they've got no choice now. 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. Bringing a thermometer, taking temperature. And to choose his successor when he does die. Right. He actually hates Menshikov already. And he thinks, oh, no, nightmare. so he summons his 2 000 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 that mazepa is long gone and he immediately reports to peter disaster mazepa has deserted us and thrown in his lot with charles for 12th.

41:45But he's only taken 2 ,000. He hasn't taken the rest of the Cossacks. 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. It does seem that Peter is getting the hang of war by this point. 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 favor yeah but the swedes are still a formidable adversary i mean he's a guy who learns doesn't he yes absolutely well we saw going around shipyards in amsterdam and london i mean he's a man who yeah enjoys learning things 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.

42:48Now, 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 Ruthenian peasants and the Cossacks have for their former Polish overlords. Yeah, very cunning. So what's happening with Mazepa 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 his citadel. Yeah, so Bacurin must be full of all kinds of supplies and goodies, which is what they need. Supplies, gunpowder, fur hats.

43:24Shelter. Exactly. So by early November, they have crossed the rivers into the steps of central Ukraine. And on the 11th of November, Charles's scouts glimpse Bacurin on the horizon. So fire, food, welcome. But the closer they get, they see smoke rising overhead. Oh, no. 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 had held this public ceremony where they had officially stripped Mazepa of his title as the hetman.

44:08They 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 Kiev, 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. And now for Ukrainian nationalists, they see him as much more of a hero. I mean, what is clear is that Charles XII and Peter the Great are two of history's great grudge holders.

44:56They are. I mean, they are titanic in the grudges that they hold. 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 Mazepa 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 Mazepa irrelevant now, because he's just hanging around with Charles. But what can he bring, Charles? He's no longer the leader of the Cossack. But surely also, I mean, on the geopolitics of the war, 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.

45:41I mean, he's now essentially completely the wrong end of Europe. He is. He's gone massively out of his way. And with nothing to show for it. I mean, he's in as big a hole as he ever was. A bigger one, perhaps. 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 hadiah which is roughly midway between kiev 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 on campaign in winter.

46:26This 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 harbours, they all freeze over. There are all these reports from all over Europe of farm animals freezing to death in the fields.

47:08In France alone, half a million people froze or starved to death. And Dominic, even more importantly, doesn't the wine in Versailles freeze? 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 steps 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. So this is where the bloke loses his foot to frostbite. A Lutheran pastor who was with the Swedish army wrote afterwards, The spittle from people's mouths turned to ice before hitting the ground.

47:46Sparrows 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 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. Oh, God. So in all, perhaps 3 ,000 men, 3 ,000 Swedes froze to death. So how large is the force now? Probably well under 30 ,000, I would have said. That's a sizable number then. Now, the amazing thing is that Charles is still so reckless.

48:27Not a scratch, but a trifle, as he said to that guy. 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 was 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 Reinskjeld. And he's hit by shrapnel in the chest and never really recovers.

49:04So from this point onwards, Charles' 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 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 and also a lot of their artillery of course is buried hundreds of miles to the north where What's his name?

49:43He left them. Yeah, well, Count Leuvenhaupt left them. Exactly. Charles, of course, is still very jolly. He sent a letter to our old friend Stanislav Leschinski 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. It's a road bump. Exactly. It's a bump in the road. But, you know, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, if I'm not mixing my transport-based metaphors. One of his chief advisors, in fact, his chief minister, who's 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 mad scheme.

50:24Why don't we go west back to Poland? And Charles said, no, 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 us in Petersburg.

51:09Charles said, oh, well, if you want to keep a speed speed, there's nothing to be talked about. There's no way you're going to, you know, I'm going to win this war. It's crazy. Or heroic, depending on your perspective, or maybe both. 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. And talking of battles, where is Charles heading now? So at 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 so it's quite like the kind of forts that you get in the american west in the 19th century yeah a little bit that's exactly how i imagine it because i imagine this landscape having never been to Ukraine.

52:04I imagine it as being sort of quite American West. Yeah. Kind of Nobler's Creek. Nobler'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.

52:44This siege drags on for six weeks. The weather is now, ironically, becoming punishingly hot. You can't win. No, you can't. So the Swedes In their rags With their salt and gunpowder Are sort of Dripping with sweat Being beset by flies Well the Swedes Don't like heat They don't like heat Except in a sauna I love a Swedish summer As you know I've been on holidays Sweden I know you do Yeah I like a Baltic dip I think it's lovely And sunny 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 Yeah Kind of one of those White beaches But a black sky overhead It's very romantic.

53:23Yeah. That's Iceland, a black beach with a black sky. We had it on Gotland. They do. Gotland is absolutely gorgeous. I really recommend Gotland to people. We are approaching one of the great battles in world history. And here we are talking about Swedish tourist spots. Come on. Discipline. 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 look at 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 sheremitov and alexander menschikov who are then joined by peter the great so all the kind of russian big guns all the lats 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 many of them with no toes.

54:19And they haven't got any gunpowder either. 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 Vorskla. 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.

54:58The 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 Rainskjord 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. It's 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. He's ridden horses off cliffs. He's wrestled with bears.

55:39Yeah, 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 drabants to inspect the Swedish defences 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's 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 I say a word.

56:34There goes your foot. Good Lord. So it does. That kind of thing. Exactly. And then he continues the tour of the defences without saying anything for another three hours. I mean, that is insane, isn't it? I mean, can you imagine? I mean, if I had a blister, I'd be straight back to the camp and demanding medical attention. He's a proper hero in that sense. I mean, if a hero is a kind of someone who is midway between the mortal and the divine, I mean, that is superhuman. This is such Alexander the Great behaviour. Yeah. Isn't it? it's absolutely Alexander the Great behavior so he gets back to the camp riding his horse because 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 this 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.

57:37Oh. You see, I feel like fainting just hearing that. 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 says 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. So anyone who's prone to kind of moaning, bear that in mind. Exactly. Think of the Swedish king and man up. 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 before you know it.

58:18In fact, his foot becomes very badly infected and he comes down with fever. Two days later, the 19th of 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, 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, at this point, his childhood servant has been summoned to his bedside to read him his favourite boyhood fairy tales.

58:57That's nice. Isn't that touching? Now, meanwhile, Field Marshal Rainscult 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. Why not? 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. That's madness. Well. What would he want? He'd want them to go and fight. I suppose he would, but they're very loyal, aren't they? But if you're loyal, you obey your king's orders. Well...

59:30I just feel Charles, you know, he's being let down left, right and centre by all his... I suppose, I mean, he's appointed them, so it's his fault to that extent. Oh, right. Yeah, it's all Charles' fault ultimately, is it? That's poor from Utah. Well, he's in command. 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. And they've lost the chance to inflict a murderous dissent on them. Of course. And the Russians have pulled off the most difficult bit of Peter's plan without really facing an enemy shot.

1:00:05Oh, it makes me weep for the Swedes. Then, on the 22nd of 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 Stanislaw Fleschinski Charles' 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 I mean he may have a great name but that's poor behaviour it is poor behaviour 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 rivers of Nipah 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 i wonder if i mean he's he's almost died but he hasn't has god preserved him 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.

1:02:05And I think he also thinks, enough of this now. Peter is only seven miles away. Let's finish this. Let's have the pitch battle that I've always wanted. I don't think he ever doubts that he will win it. Because on the Sunday, the 27th of 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 eastern europe tom the winner takes it all the The loser has to fall.

1:02:58We'll be standing small. Yeah. Yeah. And so it is that in the early hours of the following morning, the final showdown, the Battle of Poltava begins. 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. Yeah, don't wait. But whatever you choose, we will be back next time for the final showdown. Goodbye. Goodbye.