found himself in a
cold and desolate country (as Napoleon was afterwards tempted to _his_
ruin), with his army dwindled down to twenty-five thousand men, while
Peter had one hundred thousand, with ample provisions and military
stores. The generals of Charles now implore him to return to Sweden, at
least to seek winter quarters in the Ukraine; but the monarch,
infatuated, lays siege to Pultowa, and gives battle to Peter, and is not
only defeated, but his forces are almost annihilated, so that he finds
the greatest difficulty in escaping into Turkey with a handful of
followers. That battle settled the fortunes of both Charles and Peter.
The one was hopelessly ruined; the other was left free to take as much
territory from Sweden as he wished, to open his seaports on the Baltic,
and to dig canals from river to river.

But another enemy still remained, Turkey; who sought to recover her
territory on the Black Sea, and who had already declared war. Flushed
with conquest, Peter in his turn became rash. He advanced to the
Turkish territory with forty thousand men, and was led into the same
trap which proved the ruin of Charles XII. He suddenly finds himself in
a hostile country, beyond the Pruth, between an army of Turks and an
army of Tartars, with a deep and rapid river in his rear. Two hundred
thousand men attack his forty thousand. He cannot advance, he cannot
retreat; he is threatened with annihilation. He is driven to despair.
Neither he nor his generals can see any escape, for in three days he has
lost twenty thousand men,--one half his army. In all probability he and
his remaining men will be captured, and he conducted as a prisoner to
Constantinople, and perhaps be shown to the mocking and jeering people
in a cage, as Bajazet was. In this crisis he shuts himself up in his
tent, and refuses to see anybody.

He is saved by a woman, and a great woman, even Catherine his wife, who
originally was a poor peasant girl in Livonia, and who after various
adventures became the wife of a young Swedish officer killed at the
battle of Marienburg, and then the mistress of Prince Mentchikof, and
then of Peter himself, who at length married her,--"an incident," says
Voltaire, "which fortune and merit never before produced in the annals
of the world," She suggested negotiation, when Peter was in the very
jaws of destruction, and which nobody had thought of. She collects
together her jewels and all the valuables she can find, and sends