Charles XII: The Last Great King of the Swedish Empire

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Hello and welcome to another episode of Biographics! I’m your interim host, Carl Smallwood, and today we’re talking about Charles XII, the last great king of Sweden. As with all the videos here at Biographics, this one is based on an original article submitted to us by a member of our writing team, in this case, Ben Adelman. Follow them on social media below if you are so inclined. While you’re down there, you can click that like button, leave a comment with suggestions or feedback, and subscribe if you want to see more videos like this. You know, some might think I should ask that at the end of the video, but YouTube analytics show that the earlier I ask, the more likely people are to do those things. Isn’t that fun? Let’s get to it!

At the dawn of the 18th century, Europe found itself torn apart once again by war. While the great powers of the West were fighting over who should inherit the Spanish Crown, in the north, another life-and-death struggle for territory and honor was taking place. Sweden is a peaceful country today, but 300 years ago, it was a force to be reckoned with, boasting one of the most feared armies in Europe. The king, Charles XII, was a warlord without peer, proving extraordinary in his generalship despite his very young age. Yet, for all of his victories on the battlefield, Charles XII would prove to be the Swedish Empire’s undoing, leading his country to disaster with his stubbornness and refusal to compromise. This would eventually set all of Sweden’s neighbors against him, and he would live to see most of Sweden’s vast territorial gains conquered by his enemies before dying in a futile effort to restore the situation.

But before that, let’s start at the beginning. Charles, also known as Carl (with a C) or the proper spelling, Carl (with a K), was born on June 17, 1682, in Stockholm. His father, King Charles XI, had ruled Sweden since he was a small boy, thanks to the premature death of his own father. Sweden had propelled itself to the ranks of the great European empires in the 1600s, acquiring vast stretches of territory around the Baltic Sea largely as a result of victories on the battlefield. They had even established a colony in the New World called New Sweden on the banks of the Delaware River in modern-day United States.

The secret to Sweden’s success was the strength of its army. In a time when most armies in Europe consisted of poorly trained conscripts, Sweden had trained a professional military machine that routinely defeated every opponent sent against it. It’s noted that some of the finest generals from this period wore the Swedish Crown, including Gustavus Adolphus, the famed Lion of the North. Unfortunately, since most of Sweden’s successes had come at the expense of their neighbors—Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia—they were left almost totally surrounded by enemies eager for revenge.

Charles XI had fought numerous wars in the decade before the younger Charles’s birth while also tackling domestic issues caused by the costs associated with Sweden’s rapid rise to power. Charles was the only son to survive infancy, meaning that a lot of pressure was put on him from a very young age since he was to eventually inherit the crown. Prince Charles was known for being highly intelligent, particularly in the fields of science and mathematics. He also learned quite a bit about war from his illustrious father, regularly accompanying the king on military maneuvers and troop inspections from a very young age.

Charles XI eschewed most of the pomp and circumstance associated with kingship, preferring to dress in rough clothes and eat simple food. His son followed his example and took it even further. Throughout his life, Prince Charles rarely drank alcohol, preferred to sleep rough in the woods with his men instead of in his grand palace, and certainly spent more time praying than feasting. He also systematically avoided members of the opposite sex during his lifetime; he never married, fathered no children, and had no known mistresses. This has caused some speculation that Charles may have been homosexual, asexual, or simply driven by his deep religious faith to wait until he found the right woman.

Charles XII ascended to the throne at the tender age of 15 after his father died in 1697. He spent the next few years consolidating his power, and reformers found themselves dismayed at the young king’s emergence as just as much of an absolute monarch as his ancestors were, if not more so. While he was unfailingly polite to his advisers and always listened to their counsel, he would ultimately make his own decisions and stick to them, no matter how unpopular they proved to be.

Fallen intrigue soon brought the young king into conflict with his neighbors. An alliance was formed between Tsar Peter of Russia, King Frederick of Denmark, and Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland-Lithuania, directing their combined military might against Sweden. They figured that with a young king on the throne—Charles was 18 when the war began in 1700—and by attacking from all directions at once, they could overwhelm their historic enemy and reverse their territorial losses of the previous generation.

Charles readied his country for war, directing his army and navy to first attack Denmark, which was attacking his ally, the Duke of Holstein. When he left Stockholm to join his troops, no one realized it at the time, but this would be the final time the king would ever see the capital of the country he ruled. The Swedish fleet outmaneuvered their Danish counterparts to land Charles’s army near Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen. In concert with allied English and Dutch forces, they bombarded the city for six days until Frederick capitulated and was forced out of the alliance against Sweden.

Charles then turned his forces toward the eastern end of his empire, particularly the large Russian army commanded by Peter that was laying siege to the city of Narva in the Swedish-controlled provinces of Ingria (today the border between Estonia and Russia). Charles’s lieutenants were apprehensive at the thought of facing the Russians, not only because the Swedish army was exhausted from the forced march through harsh terrain and foul winter weather just to reach Narva, but also because the army they faced was four times larger than their own. However, in a critical twist of fate, the Tsar had left his army the day before Charles’s army arrived on the scene.

On November 30, 1700, as the Swedes approached the Russian trenches outside Narva, Peter was not in command of his troops. The man Peter had appointed for command was a German baron named Charles de Croy, who had been sent from Saxony as a diplomatic envoy but was asked by Peter to take command due to the lack of experience among his Russian commanders. The story goes that de Croy refused multiple times to take on this command and was basically coerced into doing it. Not only was he relatively inexperienced and did not speak the language of the majority of the men he was leading, but he was also nursing a terrible hangover from Russian vodka.

The Swedes had no way of knowing any of this at the time, and when Charles ordered his army to attack the Russians, his advisers feared the worst. Just as the battle lines were being formed, a ferocious snowstorm whipped up. Charles’s advisor told him to call off the attack until it had blown over, but Charles astutely pointed out that the storm was blowing right into the faces of the Russians while it was at the backs of the Swedes. He wanted to use this to his advantage.

The Battle of Narva was a tremendous success for the Swedes and for Charles XII. The poorly trained Russians had trouble even seeing the approaching Swedes until they were almost on top of them, and poor communication meant that de Croy could not bring his overwhelming numerical superiority to bear on his enemies as the Swedes stormed the trenches and proved their skill in hand-to-hand combat. The result was a massacre; the Russians died by the thousands, many of them drowned in the frozen Narva River when the bridge they were fleeing across broke under their weight. By the end of the battle, the Swedes had killed, wounded, or captured some 18,000 Russians while suffering only 2,000 casualties themselves. Overnight, the Swedish king was the terror of Europe.

However, the victory at Narva had a dangerous downside. It made Charles extremely overconfident in the capabilities of both himself and his army while also causing him to underestimate his opponents, especially the Russians. With Denmark out of the war and Russia’s army annihilated, Charles turned his attention to the last remaining enemy he had, Augustus of Saxony, the Polish king. Alarmed by the sudden collapse of his allies, Augustus attempted to sue for peace, but Charles would hear nothing of it. Before setting off on his campaign, Charles famously told the Swedish Parliament that he had resolved to never fight an unjust war but to never end a legitimate one except by defeating his enemies.

To that end, he invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1701, aligning himself with the confederation of Polish nobility that was dissatisfied with Augustus’s rule. After capturing Warsaw, Charles marched to Kliszow, where Augustus was gathering his army. The two met in the Battle of Kliszow on July 19, 1702, when Charles decisively defeated a Polish-Saxon army twice the size of his own force. Augustus was able to escape with most of his army, but much of his prestige in Poland had been destroyed, and Sweden began to attract more Polish magnates to its side. By 1704, he had managed to convince enough to join his side that they voted to depose Augustus and elect Charles’s preferred candidate, Stanisław Leszczyński, in his place. However, Stanisław had no independent power base, which meant that Charles needed to spend even more time and resources fighting Augustus and his allies to keep his man on the throne.

It was not until 1706, when Charles marched his army into Saxony itself, that he was able to force Augustus at sword point into agreeing to the Peace of Altranstädt, which confirmed Stanisław’s claim to the Polish throne and ended Augustus’s participation in the war. This had taken some five years, but Charles had finally gotten what he wanted. Whether it would have any benefit to Sweden, however, his advisers were grave about at this point. Charles was in a potentially very powerful position; he had a victorious army, a sparkling military reputation, and he just so happened to be positioned at the borders of Western Europe, which was locked in a dense conflict of its own—the War of the Spanish Succession.

The conflict, which pitted France and Spain against England, Holland, and Austria, had been raging since 1702 with no clear winner in sight. The injection of Swedish arms on either side could very well tip the balance in either’s favor, but Charles declined to take on any role in the conflict to the west, supposedly convinced not to intervene through the personal machinations of the English commanding general, the Duke of Marlborough. This was not the first time that Charles refused to play the role of arbiter of Europe, and like before, it was because he had personal business to settle with his enemy, and in this case, that was Russia.

While Charles had been diplomatically busy in Poland, Tsar Peter had been trying as fast as possible to modernize the army that had been beaten so badly by Charles at Narva. In 1703, he founded a new port city on the site of a captured Swedish fortress, naming it St. Petersburg. The next year, he finally captured Narva after a long and costly siege. Peter had captured much of Sweden’s eastern territory, but not all of it, including the main Swedish fortress of Nyen in modern-day Latvia. Charles’s advisers had been begging him for years to end his seemingly unprofitable campaign in Poland and concentrate on Russia, whom they viewed as the real enemy, but Charles would not be persuaded. He was convinced that Peter and his army were no real threat and could be easily dealt with when he was good and ready, just as he had done many years before.

On New Year’s Day 1708, Charles was finally ready. He led his army not to recapture the Baltic territories he lost but on an audacious invasion of Russia itself. He ultimately aimed to march directly on Moscow, take it, and force Peter from the throne, just as he had done to Augustus. It was certainly a bold move—too bold in the opinion of his advisers—but Charles would not be persuaded. He was an absolute monarch in every sense of the word and had to listen to no one’s counsel, either in Stockholm or on the battlefield.

Initially, Charles met with some success in the field, just as he had everywhere he’d gone since 1700. He was able to take advantage of the weaknesses in the Russian command structure once again. The Tsar was not with his army, and the two leading commanders, Sheremetev and Mikov, were said to have clashed on strategy in the monarch’s absence. The result was another decisive victory for Charles at Holowczyn in July 1708, which allowed him to continue onward with his invasion unimpeded directly towards Moscow.

Unable to defeat the Swedes outright, Peter and his generals instead turned to a scorched earth strategy, clearing the countryside for miles around the Swedish army’s advance of any food or resources. They lured the Swedes deep into Russian territory, not offering battle but instead wearing Charles down through sheer attrition. Then winter set in, and anyone who has spent any real time online consuming content around military history knows there’s one real rule when it comes to warfare in Europe: don’t invade Russia in the winter. Charles XII was seemingly not aware of this rule.

Russian winters have a pretty nasty reputation, but this particular winter was one of the coldest Europe had seen in 500 years, and the Swedish army suffered terribly. By the spring of 1709, half of Charles’s soldiers were gone—frozen or simply starved to death. But still, the Swedish king would not retreat. Instead, he laid siege to the town of Pultava in Ukraine, hoping to seize the supplies there. It was where Peter found him.

The Russian army Charles faced at Pultava in 1709 was not the same one he had beaten at Narva in 1700. Peter had done much to reform his troops as part of his mission to westernize Russia from the ground up. It was also massive, numbering some 75,000 men. The Swedish army wasn’t the same either; worn down by hunger and almost a decade of near-constant campaigns far from home, they numbered less than 20,000. Making things worse was the fact that Charles wasn’t able to lead his army personally; he had been wounded in the foot some days earlier and couldn’t walk or ride. He was resigned to being borne on a litter at the rear, forced to leave active command to his subordinates.

It was probably around this point that the Swedish king realized he had been led into a pretty nasty trap by Peter. He reasoned that the only way to keep himself from being starved into submission was to attack the Russian army before their fortifications were complete. So, on July 8, 1709, the Battle of Pultava began. As they had many times before, the Swedish troops advanced gloriously against their enemies with all the valor that a century of victories could give an army, and they fought valiantly too, as they had before. But this time, there were simply too many Russians—Russians that were disciplined enough to stand up under the musket fire and go toe-to-toe with the Swedish lifeguards in hand-to-hand combat. This time, it was the Swedes who broke and ran, Charles having no real choice but to go with them as he watched his army disintegrate before his eyes.

Three days later, at Perevolochna, the destruction of the Swedish army was made complete. The remaining troops were compelled to surrender to the Russians, unable to go any further. Only Charles and 500 cavalry escaped, crossing the border into territory controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were no friends of the Russians, and they welcomed the Swedish king, who set up court in exile in the fortress of Bender. He ended up spending the next five years there, refusing several peace proposals that would see him return to Sweden. It was as if Charles was unwilling to concede defeat, instead occupying himself with diplomatic intrigues. His most successful effort was convincing the Ottomans to go to war with Russia in 1710, providing the king with a huge Turkish army to do battle with Peter. But Peter had intrigues of his own and successfully bribed the Grand Vizier into making peace with him, sending Charles back to Bender.

The rest of his schemes—ranging from clandestinely supporting the Jacobite rebellion in Britain to bribing Indian Ocean pirates to colonize Madagascar on Sweden’s behalf—were somewhat less successful. In the meantime, Sweden suffered defeat after humiliating defeat as Russia conquered the rest of Sweden’s Baltic possessions, including Finland in 1710. Meanwhile, Sweden’s defeated enemies rose back up again, as enemies are wont to do, with Augustus regaining the Polish crown and Denmark resuming their attacks against Swedish possessions. As if all this wasn’t bad enough, more enemies decided to help stick the boot into Sweden, with opportunistic Prussia and Hanover entering the war to grab some territory for themselves.

At this point, virtually all the territory outside of the Swedish homeland was lost, her entire empire collapsed and carved up. Still, Charles would not give up. He only returned to Sweden in 1715 when he realized there was a real risk of losing his crown if he did not come home. After 15 years away, he found his kingdom in pretty dire straits. His demands for more troops and war materials over the years had decimated the Swedish economy. There were no more young men to work the fields, manufacturing and trade had all but dried up, and the population of his domains had shrunk by more than 10% since he’d left. Yet despite all of that, Charles still would not make peace—not without the restoration of all the territory that he lost, which nobody was willing to agree to because they had already defeated Sweden.

Instead, he set about rebuilding his army again so that he could once again go out on a campaign. This time, his target was Norway, for some reason. He felt that if he could wrest Norway from his enemies, he’d have open access to the North Sea, which would restore his trade links, particularly with the Dutch. He would also hopefully knock the Danes out of the war. Charles invaded Norway in 1716 and briefly managed to occupy the capital, Christiania (today Oslo), but he suffered a humiliating defeat and a number of setbacks, including the destruction of his supply fleet by the famed Norwegian naval hero, Peter Tordenskjold.

Not one to be put off, Charles tried again in 1718, this time at the head of an army of some 40,000 men. This time, instead of