Battle of Poltava, 1709: The Fall of the Swedish Empire

On a summer morning in 1709, an exhausted Swedish army stumbled forward across the open steppe near the town of Poltava, deep in what is now Ukraine. For nine years King Charles XII had seemed unbeatable, marching from one victory to the next. Now, far from home, short of food, powder and hope, his soldiers advanced into the guns of a Russian army their king had once written off. By noon the northern balance of power had shifted for good.²

Background: the road into Russia

The Great Northern War began in 1700, when Denmark-Norway, Saxony-Poland and Russia attacked a Sweden ruled by an untested teenage king. Charles XII turned on them one by one. He knocked Denmark out of the war in a summer, and in November 1700 at Narva, outnumbered about four to one in a snowstorm, he routed Peter's army. HistoryNet's Jonathan Jordan writes that Charles came away from Narva with a lasting contempt for the tsar and his army. He then spent years in Poland deposing Augustus II, while Peter rebuilt his forces and took the Swedish lands on the Baltic, where he founded St Petersburg.³ › Battle of Narva, 1700

In 1707 Charles finally turned east, intending to force a lasting peace by beating the Russian army and marching on Moscow. Peter refused the pitched battle the king wanted, retreating and burning the country as he went. In the autumn of 1708 Charles turned south into Ukraine to find food and an ally: the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa, who feared that Peter meant to abolish the autonomy of his Hetmanate. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine notes that Mazepa negotiated in secret with Charles and sided with him openly only when the Swedish army entered Ukraine.⁴

Both hopes failed. Peter's men destroyed Mazepa's capital, Baturin, and the hetman joined Charles with only a few thousand followers instead of the host that had been promised. Worse, the great supply column General Adam Lewenhaupt was bringing from Livonia was caught by Peter at Lesnaya in October 1708 and lost its guns and wagons; only about half its men reached the king. Then came the winter of 1708 and 1709, the coldest in living memory, in which thousands of Swedes died of cold and hunger.⁵

In May 1709 Charles laid siege to Poltava, a small fortress town on the Vorskla river held by a Russian garrison with Ukrainian volunteers. Military History Matters notes that his delay had given the town time to strengthen its walls and garrison. The siege dragged on, ammunition ran short on both sides, and the Russian field army closed in.⁶

Armies and commanders

On 17 June 1709 by the Julian calendar, his twenty-seventh birthday, Charles was shot through the foot while riding along the river near the Russian lines. Both R. Nisbet Bain and Jonathan Jordan of HistoryNet describe him finishing his inspection, losing a great deal of blood, before he would let the wound be treated. The wound turned feverish and left him unable to ride. Command in the field passed to Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Rehnskiöld, who loathed Lewenhaupt, the infantry commander, and did not share his plans with him.⁷

Peter, learning that the king was out of action, brought his main army across the Vorskla north of the town and dug a fortified camp. In front of it he built a line of earthen redoubts, with a second line at right angles to the first, so that any Swedish attack would have to pass through crossfire. Counts of his army vary widely: the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives 42,500 men and 102 guns, Military History Matters over 40,000, and Britannica and Bain about 80,000.⁸

The Swedish army was far smaller and in poor condition. Charles insisted on keeping up the siege, so troops had to be left to watch the town, guard the baggage and cover the river; Military History Matters puts the force that actually attacked at about 16,000, half cavalry and half infantry, Britannica at 17,000, and Bain at barely 13,000. They were short of musket balls, their powder was poor, and they took only four guns into action, trusting to the bayonet and the sword as they had at Narva.⁹

The battle in phases

The redoubts. The Swedes formed up around midnight on 7 to 8 July, but the cavalry was late, dawn was near before the columns were ready, and the Russians spotted them. At about 4 a.m., as the sun rose, the infantry went forward in columns. Most of the army swept past the redoubts on either side, and the first two were stormed. But at the third, Major General Carl Gustaf Roos was thrown back and committed his whole detachment, some 2,600 men, a large part of the Swedish infantry, to taking it.¹⁰

The cavalry fight and Roos's loss. Behind the redoubts the Swedish cavalry fought Menshikov's dragoons for an hour. When the Russian horse was pulled back, the main Swedish body re-formed on the plain beyond, but Roos never rejoined it. Peter saw his isolation and sent Menshikov with infantry and dragoons to cut him off; Roos's men were cut down or driven toward Poltava, where they surrendered later that morning.¹¹

The order to halt. On the Swedish right, Lewenhaupt's battalions had drifted toward the Russian camp and were preparing to storm it when they were ordered to halt. Bain writes that it is still not known who gave that order, and Military History Matters that nobody admitted to it. The chance was lost, and the battalions were called back to the main body.¹²

Turning point: the Russian infantry

At about 9 a.m. Peter led his army out of its camp: some 30,000 infantry in two lines on a front about a mile wide, with guns in front and cavalry on the flanks. Against them Rehnskiöld could form fewer than 5,000 infantry in a single thin line, overlapped at both ends. The Swedes attacked anyway. Russian guns switched to grapeshot as they came close, and volleys of musketry swept the ranks. On the right the Guards broke into the first Russian line, but on the left the battalions stalled under the fire, a gap opened, and Russian infantry poured into it.¹³

The Swedish line dissolved. The cavalry came up too late and too few to save it, and Menshikov's dragoons rode around to fall on it from behind. Charles's litter was hit by a cannonball; HistoryNet and Military History Matters both say that all but three of his two dozen bearers and escorts were shot down, and the king barely escaped death or capture. By late morning the Swedes had been routed.¹⁴

Counting the cost

The Swedish army lost about 6,900 men killed and wounded and some 2,800 prisoners, by the counts of HistoryNet and Military History Matters; the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives over 9,300 dead and nearly 2,900 prisoners. Among the captured were Field Marshal Rehnskiöld and the king's chief minister, Count Carl Piper. The Russians lost 1,345 killed and 3,290 wounded, figures all three sources share.¹⁵

Aftermath: Perevolochna

The beaten army fell back south along the Vorskla to its meeting with the Dnieper at Perevolochna, where there were not enough boats to carry it across. Charles crossed with Mazepa and a small escort, about 1,000 according to Military History Matters, 1,500 according to Britannica, and some 3,000 Swedes and Cossacks according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, and escaped into Ottoman territory. Lewenhaupt and the rest of the army, between 12,000 and 16,000 men in the different accounts, surrendered to Menshikov the next day without a fight.¹⁶ › Skirmish at Bender, 1713

The surrender sealed the disaster. Britannica writes that the Russians killed or captured the entire Swedish army except for the king and his followers. Charles spent the following years in the Ottoman Empire, and, in Jordan's words, he would never again decide the fate of nations.¹⁷

Legacy and memory

For Sweden, Poltava ended its age as a great power. Britannica calls the battle the end of Sweden's status as a major power and the beginning of Russian supremacy in eastern Europe. The war dragged on for twelve more years, but Sweden never recovered its strength. Peter, Jordan writes, had turned his backward army into one that could beat the best in Europe.¹⁸ › Battle of Napue, 1714

For Ukraine the battle meant the loss of what autonomy the Hetmanate still had. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine writes that Poltava brought Russian military rule to the Hetman state and the steady curtailment of its self-government, and Military History Matters counts the loss of Ukrainian independence among the battle's results.¹⁹

Who lost Poltava has been argued ever since. Britannica points to a plan that demanded speed and daring from an army whose king could not move and whose generals either lacked daring or failed to understand what he wanted. Military History Matters lays the ultimate responsibility on Charles for not issuing clear orders, and adds the feud between Rehnskiöld and Lewenhaupt. Bain, writing in 1895 with clear sympathy for the Swedes, dwells on the order that stopped Lewenhaupt at the gates of the Russian camp, when victory, he believed, had seemed within reach.²⁰

For Russia, Poltava became the founding victory of an empire. Military History Matters describes it as the moment Russia gained a firm foothold in Europe, and Britannica as the beginning of Russian supremacy in the east of the continent. Nine years earlier Charles had routed Peter's army at Narva; Poltava was the reckoning.²¹