Ragged and battered, the tattered remnants of the Swedish army fly South.
Charles hopes to find succour within the Ottoman Empire.
But Peter is hard on his heels.
Nearly starving, suffering from the heat, the remaining Swedes raced South until they arrived at the very border of the Black Sea.
But as the local prince haggled over prices for boats to ferry them into the Ottoman Empire, Peter overtook the Swedish Rear Guard.
Eight hundred were lost. Only five hundred remained.
But those five hundred made their way into the Sultanate. There, they were treated regally. Given food and drink,
even allowed to set up an almost autonomous colony, which the Ottomans helped them to build.
But Peter did not relent. As his forces approached the border of the Empire, he demanded that Charles be handed over.
The Sultan, who was no friend of the Russians, refused.
So Peter decided to force the issue. He would bring war to the Ottoman Empire itself.
His army, augmented by forces from Moldovia, plunged towards Pluth River. Where they were rapidly cut off by the giant home army of the Ottoman Empire.
For a moment, it looked as though Peter and his entire force might fall into the Sultan's hands.
But where Peter and his subordinates clearly lost the war, you might argue that they had won the peace.
Deftly using diplomacy to extricate his army, Peter was allowed to leave the Ottoman territory with his army intact,
for little more than an agreement to give Charles safe passage back to Sweden,
and a handful of very minor territorial concessions.
But this was not good enough for Charles.
He pushed the Sultan to make war on the Russians.
The Sultan had no interest in such a costly project.
He was basically like,
"We won you the right to go home, man, just go home."
Charles then decided to be the ultimate bad house guest,
and declared:
"Alright, I live HERE now."
To which the Sultan replied,
*Sigh* "Dude, come on."
And Charles responded,
"I WILL cut you."
At which point, the Sultan, in his infinite patience, said,
"Look, I will give you ten thousand pounds, if you will just leave."
Charles took this payment, and then like any bad house guest, said,
"Alright, I WILL leave..."
"...IF you give me 8,000 more."
At which point, the Sultan was like,
"Okay, time to call the sheriff."
Before remembering,
"Oh wait, I'M the sheriff."
And then promptly surrounded Charles' small force and threw him into jail.
After cooling his heels for a while, Charles was, at last, allowed to return to Sweden.
And it was at this point that Good 'Ol Augustus the Strong, deposed King of Poland, returns to the spotlight.
After having a good long think, he had finally decided,
"Y'know, I have heard good things about 'winning.' New plan, let's try that."
He was super excited about this plan (and I mean, why wouldn't he be? It's a pretty solid plan).
Anyway, he proceeded to basically roll Swedish forces back to the very borders of Polish-Lithuanian territory,
Then, after a heroic last effort from the Swedish troops, he bottled them up in a fortress in Holstein-Gottorp.
And when no aid came to save them, he forced them to surrender.
The last truly major army of the Swedes had vanished.
So the dominoes began to fall.
Russia, Norway, and Poland-Lithuania were already at war with Sweden.
Those who had fallen out of the alliance due to previous defeats were now back in.
Then, the King of England got into the mix under his other title as Elector of Hanover, and then,
so did Prussia. So at this point, Sweden is basically at war with all of Northern Europe.
Their resources are tapped, and the great armies that had swept them to empire were now shattered or imprisoned.
But Charles was not deterred.
Never one to surrender, never one to make peace, he raised what forces he could, and kicked off a campaign in Norway.
And this began pretty well. He cut his way through the thin Danish-Norwegian defenses, threatening to overwhelm
the knife at the back of Sweden. But then, disaster struck in the Baltic.
Norwegian naval forces ambushed the Swedish fleet, nearly wiping it out.
This left Charles unable to resupply, and he was forced to retreat once again.
Meanwhile, in Finland (Which was part of Sweden at the time), the Russians had invaded.
Initially, the going was slow. The Russians were impeded by poor roads and bad weather,
But Peter, with his love of ships, settled on a new course of action, one where
the Russian offensive would be centered on the coastline, where men and material could be rapidly be transferred by sea.
The Swedish commander in Finland was continually on the retreat, having neither the men nor the supplies
necessary to contest the Russians. For this, he was recalled and replaced with a man who was much more
likely to agree to the native Finns' demand for a fight.
And fight they did, twice.
But long gone were the days when Swedish forces could beat the Russians 8:1, or even 2:1.
The Swedish army in Finland was almost made up entirely of Finnish troops, not the Swedish core
who had done so much at the outset of the war, only to be eventually wiped out in Russia.
This Finnish army was beaten back both times.
This all occurred just before the Swedish navy got stomped outside of Norway,
(And I'm sorry for how confusing all these timelines are, but at this point, everything is kinda happening at once.)
The Swedish fleet was sent out to help the Finnish forces, to take some of the pressure off, but Peter,
great lover of sailing ships that he was, ironically used a fleet of galleys to blaze past them on a day in which the sea was calm.
Soon, the Finnish front was untenable, and what troops were left were recalled
to defend Sweden itself.
But Charles was not yet done.
He planned a return to Norway. He knew there was exactly one hope.
He needed to capture the fortress of Frederiksten, the very same place he had just lost his fleet failing to capture.
He raised another 22,000 men for his last attempt to turn things around.
Their campaign in Norway was hard-going, always in want of rations,
having to swim across rivers,
or climb whole mountains to achieve the positioning that Charles wanted.
But despite this suffering, Swedish discipline won out. And through this privation,
The army had never truly wavered, because they had always the example of their king,
who always took the roughest tasks for himself.
By November 1718, they made it to the fortress. Charles himself
led an assault on the outer works and overwhelmed them with his loyal grenadiers.
Things were progressing nicely, but now the fortress had to be breached.
On the 30th of November, Charles went to inspect the trenchworks,
laughing and joking with the men,
He encouraged them in their work. Then, as night fell,
The defenders put burning wreathes on the fortress wall to illuminate the surrounding ground.
The king suspected that they might sortie out and try to smash the progress made on the siegeworks,
before returning to the safety of their fort.
So he climbed to the lip of the trench to get a better look.
A nearby French officer (who had just joined the Swedes)
called out to him,
"That is no fit place for your majesty. Musket balls and cannonballs have as little respect for the king as for the common soldier."
The king simply responded:
"Don't be afraid."
And one of the common Swedish officers told the Frenchmen,
"Eh, let him be. The more you warn him, the more he'll expose himself."
The moon now washed the whole battlefield in a pale light.
Soldiers worked, officers directed,
and then,
there was a soft wet sound.
No louder than that of a rock gently dropped into a pool...
The king was dead.
A shot had passed through his left temple and out the right.
He died where he lay:
right at the top of the trenchworks.
The succession passed to his sister, but the spirit of the army was gone.
A retreat was made, and preparations to defend the homeland began.
But defense was only a dream.
From 1719 to 1721, Sweden suffered brutal raids and incursions from the Russians,
until, at last,
they were forced to make peace.
Sweden had to cede almost all of its territory (Except for the home country itself and Finland.
Which, after an occupation known as "The Great Wrath", the Russians agreed to leave be).
The grand dream of Charles...was smashed.
And with it, the Swedish Empire.
Sweden would never again rise to such a position of prominence on the world stage.
But as Charles' dream lay in ruins, Peter's became a reality.
Russia pushed westward,
gaining ports along the Baltic coast.
More importantly, they proved that they were a power on the rise.
That no longer could calculations about European politics be made...
...without factoring the Russians in.
Thus, the Great Northern War ends.
And the wheel turns as one empire falls...
...and another rises.
[Music]