career of the Swedish
conqueror, and believed he might rise higher under Charles XII. than
under his rough, imperious master at Moscow. So he wrote the King that
he might rely upon him to join him with 40,000 Cossacks in Little
Russia. He thought it would be an easy matter to turn the irritated
Cossacks from the Tsar. They were restive under the severity of the
new military _regime_, and also smarting under a decree forbidding them
to receive any more fugitive peasants fleeing from serfdom. But he had
miscalculated their lack of fidelity and his own power over them.

It was this fatal promise, which was never to be kept, that probably
lured Charles to his ruin. After a long and disastrous campaign he met
his final crushing defeat at Poltova in 1709. The King and Mazeppa,
companions in flight, together entered the Sultan's dominions as
fugitives, and of the army before which a short time ago Europe had
trembled--there was left not one battalion.

The Baltic was passing into new hands. "The window" opening upon the
West was to become a door, and the key of the door was to be kept upon
the side toward Russia! Sweden, which under Gustavus Adolphus, Charles
XI., and Charles XII. had played such a glorious part, was never to do
it again; and the place she had left vacant was to be filled by a new
and greater Power. Russia had dispelled the awakened dream of a great
Scandinavian Empire and--so long excluded and humiliated--was going to
make a triumphal entry into the family of European nations.

The Tsar, with his innovations and reforms, was vindicated. For
breadth of design and statesmanship there was not one sovereign in the
coalition who could compare with this man who, Bishop Burnet thought,
was better fitted for a mechanic than a Prince--and "incapable of a
great enterprise."

Of Charles XII. it has been said that "he was a hero of the
Scandinavian Edda set down in the wrong century," and again that he was
the last of the Vikings, and of the Varangian Princes. But Mazeppa
said of him, when dying in exile: "How could I have been seduced in my
old age by a military vagabond!"

Ivan, Peter's infirm brother and associate upon the throne, had died in
1696. Another oppressive tie had also been severed. He had married at
seventeen Eudoxia, belonging to a proud conservative Russian family.
He had never loved her, and when she scornfully opposed his policy of
reform, she became an object of intense aversion. A