ogance of a victor, replied, "I will treat with the Czar at
Moscow."

He never reached Moscow, but was constrained to turn southward to the
Ukraine, where he hoped to gain the aid of the Cossacks, under their
chief, Mazeppa, a bitter enemy of the czar. In this march his men
suffered terribly, more than half of them dying from hunger and cold. He
had met that same enemy which Napoleon afterwards met in Russia, a winter
of bitter severity. In the spring he had only about eighteen thousand
Swedes and about as many Cossacks under his command, but he persisted in
his designs. During the wintry cold he had shared in the privations of
his men, eating the same coarse food, while his only means of warming his
tent was to have heated cannon balls rolled along the floor.

The crisis came in the summer of 1709. Peter, who was keenly on the
alert, had succeeded in winning to his side the Cossack chiefs, leaving
Mazeppa without any followers. Then he intercepted the Swedish general
Levenhaupt, who was marching with a new army to the aid of his king, and
overwhelmed him with an immense force of Russians. Losing all his baggage
and stores and more than half his men, Levenhaupt succeeded in reaching
the king's camp with only six thousand battered and worn soldiers.

Charles had now only eighteen thousand men, and was in such sore need of
food and clothing that he laid siege to the city of Pultowa, hoping to
obtain supplies by its capture. Here he was met by Peter with an army
three times his strength, and in the decisive battle that followed
Charles was wounded and his army utterly defeated, only three thousand
escaping death or capture. Charles himself narrowly escaped the latter,
and only by a hazardous and adventurous flight over the steppes reached
the town of Bender, in the Turkish realm.

[Illustration: From stereograph, copyright by Underwood and Underwood,
N.Y. THE RETURN OF CHARLES XII. OF SWEDEN.]

Here the sultan, the bitter enemy of Russia, gave him refuge and treated
him with much kindness, though he found the young Swede a very
troublesome guest. In fact, at Charles's suggestion, the sultan went to
war with Russia and got the czar into such a tight place that he only
escaped by bribing the Turkish vizier.

Infuriated at his enemy's escape, Charles became so violent and unruly
that the sultan tried to get rid of him, giving him large sums of money
to pay his debts and make preparations to leave. When Charles spent all