The Skirmish at Bender, 1713: when the Ottomans evicted Charles XII

It was a Sunday in the depth of winter, and outside the Ottoman fortress of Bender an army of Janissaries and Tatars with cannon was closing in on a camp of Swedes. Their target was the King of Sweden, who had been their sovereign's honored guest for three and a half years and now refused to leave. By evening his house was in flames and Charles XII was a prisoner. Few guests have outstayed their welcome so spectacularly.²

Background: a refugee king

Charles XII had spent the first years of the Great Northern War beating the coalition of Russia, Denmark-Norway and Saxony that attacked Sweden in 1700. Then he invaded Russia, and on 28 June 1709 (Swedish style) his army was defeated at Poltava, in today's Ukraine, while he, wounded in the foot, could not lead it in person. Three days later the remains of the army surrendered at Perevolochna, and Charles fled with a small following into Ottoman territory.³ › Battle of Poltava, 1709

He reached Bender, the Ottoman fortress on the Dniester, at the turn of July and August 1709: the Swedish biographical dictionary says late July, the Bender fortress museum 1 August. How many came with him is told differently: the museum speaks of about 1,500 men, Voltaire of 1,800 Swedes, Poles and Cossacks fed at the Sultan's expense, while Bain has only some 500 survivors of the rear guard arriving. The Seraskier of Bender, Yusuf Pasha, received the king with every honor and offered him the keys of the fortress.⁴

Charles chose to camp outside the town. At first the Swedes lived in tents along the Dniester; then they built huts and houses, and the camp at the village of Varnitsa grew into a small town, with the king's own house in the middle, built with walls thick enough to serve as a fortress. There he drilled his men, rode three horses into exhaustion a day and played chess.⁵

The Sultan paid. Voltaire puts Charles's allowance at 500 crowns a day; Bain, writing in 1895, at 125 to 150 pounds a day; and Charles borrowed heavily from merchants besides, scattering money among his officers and the Janissaries of his guard. The Turks gave him a nickname, Demirbaş, which Voltaire and Bain render as “Iron Head” and Middle East Eye as “the fixture”, the guest who would not leave.⁶

The two sides

Charles did not rest. He worked to bring the Ottomans into the war against Peter the Great, helped bring down a Grand Vizier he thought bribed by Russia, and in 1710 the Porte declared war. In July 1711 the Grand Vizier, Baltaci Mehmed Pasha, trapped Peter's army on the Pruth, then let it go in exchange for a peace treaty. Charles rode to the Ottoman camp too late and, by Bain's account and the Bender museum's, told the Vizier that it was a pity such a fine army had not been better used. He went on intriguing until the Vizier was dismissed that November.⁷

But Sultan Ahmed III did not want another war, and Charles's meddling wore out the Ottomans' patience. When he was asked to leave, he set conditions the Porte could not meet; the sources recall them differently, from a larger escort and a large sum of money (Bain) to 6,000 sipahi cavalry, 30,000 Tatars and a loan (the Bender museum) or 70,000 soldiers (Middle East Eye). In the winter of 1712 to 1713 thousands of Ottoman troops and Tatars gathered around Bender under the Seraskier and the Crimean khan, Devlet Giray, to escort him home. When Charles took the money provided for the journey and then demanded more, the Sultan, in a speech to an extraordinary council, declared his guest's conduct an abuse of hospitality and ordered him removed by force.⁸

Why Charles chose to fight is still debated. The historian Ragnhild Hatton, writing for Britannica, held that he fought to avoid a plot to deliver him into the hands of his enemy Augustus of Saxony, and Voltaire too wrote that Charles was convinced the Khan and the Pasha meant to hand him over. Bain, following the Holstein envoy Fabrice and Charles's treasurer Grothusen, believed that his real motive was the wish to perform an exploit so extraordinary that posterity would hardly believe it.⁹

The fight in phases

The Janissaries refuse. Charles fortified his camp and laid in provisions, and waved away his chaplains and officers when they begged him not to fight his hosts. When the first assault was ordered, the Janissaries, many of whom had taken his money, refused to attack and swore that the Sultan's order was forged. A last delegation of old Janissaries with white staves came to offer him safe conduct; he refused to see them and sent word that he would shave their beards if they did not leave.¹⁰

The camp falls. On Sunday 1 February, 12 February by the Gregorian calendar that Voltaire uses, the assault came in earnest, with ten or twelve cannon. The Swedish soldiers in the entrenched camp, seeing resistance was hopeless, laid down their arms almost at once. Charles, on horseback between camp and house, cut his way back to his door with about twenty men; a shot fired in his face grazed him and took off part of an ear.¹¹

The house. The house itself was already full of Turks and Tatars looting it. Charles and his little band cleared it room by room with sword and pistol; one Janissary found hiding under the king's bed was spared and sent out of the window to tell the Pasha what he had seen. Then the defenders barricaded the windows and fired on the troops outside. Bain writes that a general assault was beaten off after three hours of fighting; Voltaire, that the musketry from the windows killed 200 men in a quarter of an hour.¹²

Turning point: the fire

Unable to take the house, the Khan and the Seraskier, who wanted the king alive, had it set on fire with burning arrows shot onto the roof. As the roof blazed and began to fall in, one of Charles's men proposed a sortie to the chancery building, about fifty paces away. The Swedes burst out of the door firing their pistols, but they were surrounded at once. Charles caught his spurs and fell, and a crowd of Janissaries seized and disarmed him.¹³

How many fought is told differently. Bain gives Charles 40 men in the house against 12,000 Turks and Tatars with twelve guns, a fight of eight hours, 200 Turks dead and only fifteen Swedes; Voltaire has about sixty officers, secretaries and servants shut in the hall. Both agree that the Janissaries, who admired him, had tried hard to take him alive.¹⁴

Aftermath

The captive was carried to the Seraskier's quarters, filthy with blood and powder but perfectly calm. About a week later he was taken south to the castle of Demirtaş (Timurtash) near Adrianople, today Edirne, and then to the little town of Demotika nearby. There he lay in bed for most of eleven months, while the Ottomans, as the Swedish biographical dictionary puts it, wavered between wanting to be rid of him and keeping him as a pawn against Russia.¹⁵

Only in 1714 did he agree to go home. He left Demotika on 20 September (1 October in the Gregorian calendar), with a slow train of officers, servants and Ottoman creditors; on 27 October he left them behind and rode across the Habsburg lands and Germany under a false name with one or two companions, reaching Swedish Stralsund in Pomerania at midnight on 11 November (21 November) 1714. Hatton counts the ride at fourteen days and nights.¹⁶

Four years later, in November 1718, Charles XII was shot dead in the trenches before the Norwegian fortress of Fredriksten, and the Great Northern War ended under his successors with the loss of Sweden's empire.¹⁷ › Battle of Narva, 1700

Legacy and memory

The fight made a sensation in Europe. Bain called it a struggle only comparable with the extravagant exploits of the medieval romances of chivalry, but he also judged that it did Charles more harm than good: it cost him his only ally, and many began to think him mad. Hatton insisted that Charles was not the simple soldier-king he had often been made out to be, and that from Bender he kept trying to reform Sweden's administration and finances.¹⁸

The event also left a word in Swedish. The Swedish Academy's dictionary defines kalabalik first as the violent, tumultuous fight in which Charles XII's camp outside Bender was taken on 1 February 1713, and then as any uproar or brawl. Middle East Eye traces it to the Turkish kalabalık, a crowd; Bain, in 1895, derived it from two Turkish words for the hunting down of difficult game.¹⁹

Bender today

Bender, or Bendery, is today a town in Moldova, on the Dniester. Its Ottoman fortress, which received Charles XII in 1709, is now a museum, and its website tells the story of the Swedish king's stay; the camp lay outside the town at Varnitsa.²⁰ › 1 February in military history