Charles XII of Sweden
- For other uses of Charles XII, see Charles XII (disambiguation)
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Carl XII, Karl XII or Carolus Rex, (June 17, 1682 – November 30, 1718), the Alexander of the North, nicknamed in Turkish as Demirbaş Şarl (Charles the Habitué), was a King of Sweden from 1697 until his death in 1718. He was the fourth king of the Wittelsbach dynasty in Sweden. As a child, many people thought he was going to be sickly but Charles strengthened his body for war by riding horses bareback and hunting wolves in Sweden's fir forests.
When his father died, Charles assumed the crown at fifteen. He left the country three years later to embark on a series of battles overseas. These battles were part of the Great Northern War and many of them were fought against Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia.
His youth gave other nations a pretext to invade Sweden; Saxony, Denmark-Norway, Poland and Russia joined in a coalition to attack Sweden, beginning the Great Northern War. Charles XII, however, was a great tactician and defeated all of his opponents.
However, his strong tactical abilities were not accompanied by strategic and political wisdom. He is quoted by Voltaire as saying upon the outbreak of the Great Northern War, "I have resolved never to start an unjust war but never to end a legitimate one except by defeating my enemies." He took this resolution to an extreme level, which eventually resulted in the end of the Swedish Empire and its dominance of the southern Baltic Sea.
Campaigns
Campaign against Denmark, Russia and Poland
Charles's first campaign was against Denmark, ruled by his cousin Frederick IV of Denmark, which threatened a Swedish ally, Charles' brother-in-law Frederick IV of Holstein-Gottorp. For this campaign Charles secured the support of England and the Netherlands, both maritime powers anxious about Denmark's threats to close the Sund. Leading a force of 8,000 in an invasion of Zealand, Charles rapidly compelled the Danes to submit to the Peace of Travendal in August 1700, which indemnified Holstein to Sweden.
Denmark's defeat, however, and Sweden's ensuing rise to prominence in the Baltic region was viewed suspiciously by two other powerful neighbors, King August II of Poland (cousin to both Charles XII and Frederick IV of Denmark) and Peter the Great of Russia.
Russia responded by occupying the Swedish territories of Livonia and Estonia. Charles countered this by attacking the Russian garrison at the Battle of Narva. From the beginning, this was considered a headstrong move. The Swedish army of ten thousand men was outnumbered four to one by the Russians. Still, Charles attacked under cover of a blizzard, and effectively split the Russian army in two. Many of Peter's troops that fled the battlefield drowned in the Narva River and the battle was a crushing Swedish victory.
Charles, disregarding his advisors, did not pursue the Russian army. Instead, he then turned against Poland-Lithuania, which was formally neutral at this point, disregarding Polish negotiation proposals, supported by the Swedish parliament. Charles defeated the Polish king Augustus II and his Saxon allies at the Battle of Kliszow in 1702 and captured many important cities of the Commonwealth. After the deposition of the king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Charles XII filled the void with his own man, Stanisław Leszczynski .
Russian resurgence
Meanwhile, while Charles enjoyed easy victories in the Commonwealth, the Russian Tsar Peter the Great embarked on a giant military reform plan that soon produced results. The new Russian army had been greatly improved since their defeat at Narva. Russian forces had managed to retake Livonia and even established a new city Saint Petersburg there. This prompted Charles to make the fatal decision to attack the Russian heartland with an assault on Moscow, allying himself with Ivan Mazepa, Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks.
Peter the Great managed to cripple Swedish forces near the Baltic coast before Charles could combine his forces, and Charles' Polish ally, Stanislaw Leszczynski, was facing internal problems of his own. Charles expected the support of a massive Cossack rebellion led by Mazepa in Ukraine but the Russians destroyed the rebel army before they could aid the Swedes. The harsh climate took its toll as well, as Charles marched his troops through Ukraine.
By the time of the decisive Battle of Poltava, Charles had been wounded, one-third of his infantry was dead, and his vulnerable supply train destroyed. The king himself, incapacitated by a coma resulting from his injuries, was unable to rally the Swedish forces. The battle was a disaster, and Charles fled south to the Ottoman Empire, where he set up camp at Bender with about 10,000 men who were called Caroleans ("Karoliner" in Swedish). The Poltava Swedish disaster marked both the end of the Swedish Empire and the rise of Russian Empire.
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Exile in the Ottoman Empire
The Turks initially welcomed the Swedish king, who managed to incite a war between the Ottomans and the Russians. His expenses during his long stay in the Ottoman empire were covered from the Ottoman budget, as part of the fixed assets Demirbas in Turkish. However the sultan Ahmed III eventually tired of Charles' endless scheming and besieged the city. The Janitsars refused to shoot at Charles. The next day he was captured and put under house-arrest in Istanbul. During his time the King played chess and studied the Turkish navy.
Meanwhile, the king's old enemies Russia and Poland took advantage of his absence to regain and even expand their lost territories. England, an ally of the Swedes, defected from its alliance obligations while the Prussians also attacked Swedish holdings in Germany. Russia seized Finland and Augustus II regained the Polish throne.
Death
Charles succeeded to leave his imprisonment in the Istanbul and raced on a horse across Europe in just fifteen days to return to Swedish Pomerania. His efforts to reestablish his lost empire failed. It seems he had two Turkish style war-ships built in Sweden, the Yildirim ("The Lightning") and the Yaramaz ("The Rogue"). Again attacking Denmark, and the city Christiania, today Oslo, he was shot through the head and killed during a siege of the fortress of Fredriksten in Norway.
The exact circumstances around Charles' death are unclear. There are theories that he was hit by a bullet from a Norwegian musket, by a grapeshot bullet from a cannon, or even by a bullet made from one of his own uniform buttons. The button-bullet theory is coupled with speculation that he was shot from the Swedish side, making his death an assassination (at the time he was not very popular in Sweden due to the hardships the people suffered because of the constant wars) but this remains inconclusive. He was succeeded to the Swedish throne by his sister, Ulrika Eleonora. Von Görtz, his minister, was beheaded in 1719.
Legacy
Exceptional for abstaining from alcohol and women, he felt most comfortable during warfare. Contemporaries report of his seemingly inhuman tolerance for pain and his utter lack of emotion. The king brought Sweden to its pinnacle of prestige and power through his brilliant campaigning. However, his over-ambitious invasion of Russia coupled with the overwhelming power of a revived anti-Swedish coalition brought about Sweden's downfall as a Great Power.
Scientific contributions
Apart from being a monarch, the King's interests included mathematics, and anything that would be beneficial to his warlike purposes. He is attributed as having invented an octal numeral system, which he considered more suitable for war purposes because all the boxes used for materials such as gunpowder were cubic. According to a report by contemporary scientist Emanuel Swedenborg, the King had sketched down a model of his thought on a piece of paper and handed it to him at their meeting in Lund in 1716. The paper was reportedly still in existence a hundred years later, but has since been lost. Several historians of science suspect that either the multi-talented Emanuel Swedenborg or the brilliant inventor Christopher Polhem – also present at the meeting in Lund – may have been the true inventor behind this feat, or at least a main contributor.