Who won the Battle of Narva?
Sweden won a decisive victory at Narva on 30 November 1700, when the eighteen-year-old king Charles XII attacked through a blinding snowstorm and shattered a Russian army roughly three times the size of his own that was besieging the fortress. The Russian siege lines were split, thousands of men surrendered and all their artillery was lost. It was one of the most lopsided victories of the age, but Peter the Great rebuilt his army and reversed the verdict at Poltava in 1709.
On 30 November 1700 a heavy snowstorm blew across the fields around Narva, straight into the faces of the Russian soldiers manning the siege lines. Out of it came a Swedish army perhaps a third their number, led by an eighteen-year-old king. Within hours the besieging army had been cut to pieces, its commander had surrendered and the road home was choked with men who had thrown down their muskets. Narva announced Charles XII to Europe. It also taught Tsar Peter I the hardest lesson of his reign.5
Background: a war meant to be easy
For most of the seventeenth century Sweden had been the strongest power in northern Europe, so dominant that the Baltic was called a Swedish lake. By 1700 it ruled most of the sea's shores, including the provinces of Estonia, Livonia and Ingria that it had taken from Russia and Poland in the previous century. Its neighbors had never accepted those losses. When the boy king Charles XII inherited the throne in 1697, at fifteen, Denmark, Saxony-Poland under Augustus II and Russia under Peter I saw their chance and joined against him, expecting a quick and profitable war.6 › The Great Northern War
They were badly mistaken. Charles struck first at Denmark, landing on Zealand and forcing the Danes to make peace at Travendal in August 1700. He could then turn east, where the Russians had marched on Narva, the Swedish fortress on the river of the same name near the Gulf of Finland, in Estonia.7 › Battle of Napue, 1714
The siege of Narva
Peter's army, around 35,000 men with its artillery, reached Narva in September and threw a wide ring of siege works around the town. Tacitus.nu, the Swedish military history site of Örjan Martinsson, puts the besiegers at 35,000 to 38,000. The guns opened fire on the fortress in late October, but they did little damage, and the besiegers were soon short of ammunition.8
To keep any relief army out, the Russians dug in behind a line of ramparts, ditches and batteries facing the open country, which soldiers of the day called a contravallation. That line was their weakness. It ran in a great arc around the town and was far too long for the army behind it to man properly. There were no reserves behind it, so an attacker could choose where to strike while the defenders were strung out along its whole length.9
Armies and commanders
Charles XII had a small army of veterans and, as he would show again and again, a taste for attacking at once. His force at Narva is put at about 8,000 men by HistoryOfWar and by the authors of the EBSCO account, Edward Keleher and Taylor Stults; Tacitus.nu counts 10,537. Either way it was outnumbered by roughly three to one.10
The Russian army was larger but uneven. Many of its soldiers were raw recruits, but it also had experienced units, among them the two Guards regiments, the Preobrazhensky and the Semyonovsky. As the Swedes approached, a screen of Russian cavalry under Boris Sheremetev fell back before them rather than stand and fight.11
Then, on the eve of the battle, Peter himself rode away. He left the camp on 29 November and handed command to Charles-Eugène, duc de Croÿ. Swedish soldiers believed the tsar had simply fled. Keleher and Stults note that historians still disagree whether fear of the coming battle drove him, or a search for reinforcements and ammunition.12
The battle in phases
The approach. Even the date of what followed needs care. Sweden then kept a calendar of its own, so Swedish records date the battle to 20 November, while the Russians, on the Julian calendar, wrote 19 November; on the modern Gregorian calendar it was 30 November 1700. On that day Charles came up to the Russian lines. Rather than rest his tired men and dig in, he decided to attack at once. He chose not to assault the whole line but to break through at two points, in columns, and so cut the stretched Russian army into pieces.13
The storm. The weather took his side. A heavy snowstorm blew straight into the eyes of the Russians, who could hardly see the Swedish columns coming. The attackers were at the ditch and over the rampart before the defenders could organize.14
The breakthrough. Within a short time the Swedes were through the line in two places. The Russian army was split into three parts, each now fighting on its own and unable to support the others in the snow. The Russian cavalry fled at the first charge.15
The rout. Panic spread along the broken line. Thousands of men fled toward the river behind them, and many drowned trying to cross it. Their commanders lost control. De Croÿ and other officers of the headquarters rode over to the Swedes and gave themselves up.16
Turning point: the Guards hold, and then surrender
Not every Russian unit broke. Near the river, the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards, with the Lefortovo regiment and men who had rallied to them, drew their artillery wagons into a barricade and fought on behind it, and the Swedish attacks could not break them. Other Russian units held their ground too. The battle was not yet entirely won.17
But the Russian army no longer had anyone to direct it. With its commander gone over to the enemy, the remaining Russian forces gave up the fight and capitulated, so many of them that the Swedes could not hold them all. In Chirkin's reading of the Swedish diaries, the surrender saved Charles from a dangerous second day: his own men were exhausted, and large Russian forces were still on the field.18
Aftermath
The Swedes took the whole of the Russian artillery and many of the army's banners, and ended the siege. Some of those banners survive in the Swedish state trophy collection at the Army Museum in Stockholm, catalogued as taken at Narva on 20 November 1700. There were far too many prisoners for the small Swedish army to guard or feed, so Charles kept only the officers and generals and let the rank and file go home, most of them without their muskets. Russian losses in killed and wounded are given as about 8,000 by EBSCO, 8,000 to 9,000 by Tacitus.nu and 10,000 dead by HistoryOfWar; Chirkin, drawing on Russian figures, puts the whole loss, killed, wounded, captured and drowned, at about 7,000. Swedish losses are estimated at anywhere from about 600 to 2,000.19
The victory made Charles famous across Europe, but his army was too weak and too far from home to follow it up with an invasion of Russia. Instead he turned south against Augustus of Saxony and Poland and spent years campaigning in Poland-Lithuania, where he won a string of victories. Peter used the respite. He rebuilt his army, trained and equipped it on western lines, and gained the time he needed to make it a match for the Swedes.20 › Battle of Lesnaya, 1708
Narva itself fell to the Russians in 1704, while Charles was away in Poland. A medal struck for Peter, now in Royal Museums Greenwich, shows the storming of the town and records that it was taken by force on 9 August, Old Style, which is 20 August on the modern calendar. Five years later the reformed Russian army met Charles himself at Poltava and destroyed his army. He escaped to Ottoman territory and was killed in battle in 1718. The peace of 1721 confirmed Russia's conquest of Estonia, Livonia and Ingria.21 › Battle of Poltava, 1709
Legacy and memory
For Sweden, Narva was the great victory of a great war that it went on to lose. Tacitus.nu calls it the greatest military victory in Swedish history, and Chirkin the only unconditional victory the Swedes won over the Russian army in the whole war. For Russia, Chirkin writes, three centuries of historians have treated the defeat as a hard but necessary lesson that drove Peter's reforms and helped turn Russia into an empire.22
The story of a raw, panicking Russian army was partly Peter's own creation. John Rickard of HistoryOfWar notes that Peter later exaggerated how inexperienced his soldiers had been, to make his reforms look all the more impressive, while more impartial observers saw a core of well-drilled infantry and a properly run siege. The Swedish diaries that Chirkin studied bear that out in part: they record Russian units that fought back fiercely even as the line collapsed.23
Visiting Narva today
Narva is now a town in the northeast of Estonia. In 1936 a monument to Charles XII and his victory was raised there, crowned by a lion. It was destroyed in World War II. A new lion, a slightly altered replica, was inaugurated on 18 November 2000, close to the castle and in time for the battle's 300th anniversary.24
