successful on both wings. Then one or two tactical blunders were
committed; and the tsar, taking courage, enveloped the little band in a
vast semicircle bristling with the most modern guns, which fired five
times to the Swedes' once, and swept away the guards before they could
draw their swords. The Swedish infantry was well nigh annihilated, while
the 14,000 cavalry, exhausted and demoralized, surrendered two days
later at Perevolochna on Dnieper. Charles himself with 1500 horsemen
took refuge in Turkish territory.

For the first time in his life Charles was now obliged to have recourse
to diplomacy; and his pen proved almost as formidable as his sword. He
procured the dismissal of four Russo-phil grand-viziers in succession,
and between 1710 and 1712 induced the Porte to declare war against the
tsar three times. But after November 1712 the Porte had no more money to
spare; and, the tsar making a show of submission, the sultan began to
regard Charles as a troublesome guest. On the 1st of February 1713 he
was attacked by the Turks in his camp at Bender, and made prisoner after
a contest which reads more like an extravagant episode from some heroic
folk-tale than an incident of sober 18th-century history. Charles
lingered on in Turkey fifteen months longer, in the hope of obtaining a
cavalry escort sufficiently strong to enable him to restore his credit
in Poland. Disappointed of this last hope, and moved by the despairing
appeals of his sister Ulrica and the senate to return to Sweden while
there was still a Sweden to return to, he quitted Demotika on the 20th
of September 1714, and attended by a single squire arrived unexpectedly
at midnight, on the 11th of November, at Stralsund, which, excepting
Wismar, was now all that remained to him on German soil.

For the diplomatic events of these critical years see SWEDEN: _History_.
Here it need only be said that Sweden, during the course of the Great
Northern War, had innumerable opportunities of obtaining an honourable
and even advantageous peace, but they all foundered oh the dogged
refusal of Charles to consent to the smallest concession to his
despoilers. Even now he would listen to no offers of compromise, and
after defending Stralsund with desperate courage till it was a mere
rubbish heap, returned to Sweden after an absence of 14 years. Here he
collected another army of 20,000 men, with which he so strongly
entrenched himself on the Scanian coast in 1716 that his com