Voltaire's history of Charles XII, king of Sweden · Voltaire
BOOK V
The state of the Ottoman Porte--Charles retires to Bender--His occupations--His intrigues at the Porte--His plans--Augustus restored--The King of Denmark attacks Sweden--All the King’s other territories are invaded--The Czar keeps festival at Moscow--The affair of Pruth--History of the Czarina. ACHMET the third was then Emperor of the Turks. He had been placed on the throne in 1703, replacing his brother Mustapha, by a revolution like that which in England transferred the crown from James II to his son-in-law William. Mustapha was under the control of his Mufti, whom the people hated, and made his whole empire revolt against him. His army, with which he had reckoned to punish the malcontents, joined them, and he was seized, unceremoniously deposed, and his brother taken from the seraglio to be made Sultan, almost without bloodshed. Achmet confined the deposed Sultan in Constantinople, where he survived for several years, to the great surprise of the Turks, who had been accustomed to see the dethronement of their kings followed by their death. The only return the new Sultan made to the ministers, the generals, the officers of janissaries, and to those who had part in the revolution, was to execute them one after the other, for fear they should subsequently attempt another revolution. By the sacrifice of so many brave men he weakened the empire but strengthened his throne. Henceforth his mind was bent on amassing treasure. He was the first of the sultans who ventured to make a small alteration in the money, and to impose a new tax; but he was obliged to give up both these plans for fear of a rebellion, for the rapacity and tyranny of the Grand Seignior is felt only by the officers of the empire, who, whoever they may be, are slaves of the sultan; but the rest of the Mussulmans live in absolute security, with no fears for their lives, fortunes and liberty.
Such was the Emperor of the Turks, to whom the King of Sweden fled for refuge. He wrote to him as soon as he arrived in his territory. His letter is dated 13th of July, 1709. Several different copies of it are extant, which are all condemned as mere fabrications, but of all those which I have seen there is not one which does not display pride, and which was not rather in accordance with his courage than with his situation. The Sultan did not reply till towards the end of September. The pride of the Ottoman Porte made Charles feel the gulf that it considered existed between the Turkish Emperor and a Christian fugitive and conquered King of part of Scandinavia. Charles was, as a matter of fact, treated as an honourable prisoner. But he formed the design of turning the Ottoman arms against his enemies; he believed he could subdue Poland again, and reduce Russia to submission; he sent an envoy to Constantinople, but his best helper in his great project was Poniatowski, who went to Constantinople unofficially, and soon made himself indispensable to the King, agreeable to the Porte, and dangerous to the grand vizirs themselves.
One of those who seconded his designs most cleverly was a Portuguese doctor, Fonseca, living at Constantinople, a learned and able man, who had knowledge of men as well as of his own art, and whose profession gave him access to the Court, and often intimacy with the vizirs. I knew him well at Paris, and he confirmed all the details which I am going to relate. Count Poniatowski told me himself that he was clever enough to get letters through to the Sultana Valida, mother of the reigning Emperor, who had been at one time ill-used by her son, but was now beginning to recover her influence in the seraglio. A Jewess, who was often with the princess, was perpetually talking of the King of Sweden’s exploits, and charmed her by reciting them. The Sultana, by a secret inclination which most women feel for extraordinary men, even without having ever seen them, took the King’s part openly in the seraglio and called him “her lion.” “When will you,” she said sometimes to the Sultan her son, “help my lion to devour this Czar?” She even went beyond the strict rules of the seraglio so far as to write several letters with her own hand to Count Poniatowski, who still possesses them. However, the King was taken to Bender with pomp, across the desert formerly called the desert of Getæ. The Turks took care that his journey should be made as agreeable as possible; many Poles, Swedes and Cossacks, who had escaped from the Russians, came from different directions to increase his train. When he arrived at Bender he had 1,800 men with him, all fed and lodged, they and their horses, at the expense of the Grand Seignior.
The King chose to encamp near Bender rather than in the town. The Serasquier, Jussuf, had a magnificent tent pitched for him, and also furnished all his suite with tents; some time after the King built a house on this spot, and his officers followed his example. The soldiers, too, raised barracks, so that the camp became gradually a little town. The King was not yet cured of his wound, and had to have a decayed bone removed from his leg, but as soon as he could mount a horse he renewed his usual exercises, rising at sunrise, tiring out three horses a day, and making his soldiers drill. His only amusement was an occasional game of chess. If details are typical of character, it may be remarked that he always brought out his king in the game; he used him more than his other pieces, and so always lost the game. At Bender he found plenty of everything about him, rare good fortune for a conquered and fugitive king; for besides more than enough provisions and the 500 crowns a day he got from the Ottoman generosity, he got money also from France, and borrowed of the Constantinople merchants. Part of this money was used to carry on the intrigues in the seraglio, in buying the vizirs or procuring their downfall; the rest he distributed profusely among his officers and the janissaries who guarded him at Bender.
Grothusen, his favourite and treasurer, dispensed these bounties; he was a man who, contrary to the custom of a man of his station, was as eager to give as his master. One day he brought him an account of 60,000 crowns in two lines, “10,000 given to the Swedes and janissaries, and the rest eaten up by me.” “This,” said the King, “is the kind of balance-sheet that I like; Mullern makes me read whole pages for the sum of 10,000 francs, I like Grothusen’s laconic style much better.” One of his old officers, thought to be slightly covetous, complained to the King that he gave everything to Grothusen. “I give money,” answered the King, “to none but those who know how to make use of it.” This generosity often reduced him to such straits that he had nothing to give. Better economy in his liberality would have been more to his advantage and no less honourable, but it was the Prince’s failing to carry all the virtues to excess. Many strangers hurried from Constantinople to see him. The Turks and the neighbouring Tartars came in crowds; all honoured and admired him. His rigid abstinence from wine, and his regularity in attending public prayers twice a day, spread the report that he was a true Mussulman. They burned to march with him to the conquest of Russia.
During this life of leisure at Bender, which was longer than he had expected, he developed unconsciously a great taste for books. Baron Fabricius, nobleman of the duchy of Holstein, an agreeable youth who had the gaiety and the ready wit which appeals to princes, induced him to read. He had been sent to him as envoy from the Duke of Holstein, to protect the interests of the latter, and succeeded by the amiability of his manner. He had read all the French authors, and persuaded the King to read the tragedies of Corneille, and of Racine, and the works of Despreaux; the King did not at all enjoy the latter’s satires, which are by no means his best performances, but he appreciated his other writings, and when he read the passage in the eighth satire, where he calls Alexander a “frantic madman,” he tore out the leaf. Of all the French tragedies Mithradates pleased him most, because the condition of the King, conquered and breathing forth vengeance, was like his own. He pointed out to M. Fabricius the passages that struck him, but he would read nothing aloud, nor venture on a word of French. Even afterwards, when he met M. Desaleurs, the French ambassador to the Porte, a person of distinction, who only knew his mother-tongue, he answered him in Latin, and when the ambassador protested that he did not understand a word of that language he called for an interpreter, rather than express himself in French. Such were the occupations of Charles at Bender, where he was waiting till a Turkish army should come to his assistance.
His ambassador presented memoirs in his name to the Grand Vizir, Poniatowski, and supported them with his readily-acquired prestige. The intrigue succeeded entirely; he wore only Turkish dress, and he insinuated himself everywhere; the Grand Seignior had him presented with a purse containing 1,000 ducats, and the Grand Vizir said to him, “I will take your King with one hand, and a sword in the other, and I will lead him to Moscow at the head of 200,000 men.” But the first minister soon changed his mind. The King could only treat, while the Czar could pay; he did pay, and it was the money that he gave that Charles used; the military chest taken at Pultawa provided new arms against the vanquished. No more mention was made of making war on Russia. The Czar’s influence was all-powerful at the Porte; they granted honours and privileges to his ambassador at Constantinople such as had never been enjoyed by a previous envoy; he was allowed to have a seraglio, that is, a palace in the quarters of the Franks, and to converse with foreign ministers. The Czar even felt strong enough to demand that Mazeppa should be handed over to him, just as Charles had demanded Patkul. Chourlouli-Ali-Pasha now found it impossible to refuse anything to a Prince who made demands with millions behind him. Thus the same Grand Vizir who had solemnly promised to take the King of Sweden to Russia with 200,000 men, had the impudence to propose to him that he should consent to the betrayal of Mazeppa. Charles was enraged at the request. It is hard to say how far the Vizir would have carried the matter had not Mazeppa, who was then seventy years old, died at this juncture.
The King’s grief and resentment increased when he heard that Tolstoy, who had become ambassador from the Czar to the Porte, was served in public by the Swedes who had been enslaved at Pultawa, and that these brave men were daily sold in the market-place at Constantinople. Besides, the Russian ambassador remarked aloud that the Mussulman troops at Bender were there rather as a guard to the King than for his honour. Charles, abandoned by the Grand Vizir, and conquered by the Czar’s money in Turkey, as he had been by his arms in Ukrania, found himself deluded, scorned by the Porte, and a kind of prisoner among the Tartars. His followers began to despair. He alone remained firm and did not show dejection even for a moment. He thought that the Sultan was ignorant of the intrigues of his Grand Vizir; he determined to inform him, and Poniatowski undertook this bold task. Every Friday the Grand Seignior went to the mosque, surrounded by Solacks, a kind of guard, whose turbans were so high that they hid the Sultan from the people. Any one who had a petition to present to the Sultan, must mingle with these guards, and hold the petition up in the air. Sometimes the Sultan deigned to take it himself, but generally he bade an aga take charge of it, and afterwards, on his return from the mosque, had the petitions laid before him. There was no fear that any one would importune him with unnecessary petitions, or petitions about trifling affairs, for at Constantinople they write less in a year than at Paris in a day. Much less dare any one present petitions against the ministers, to whom the Sultan hands them generally without reading them. But Poniatowski had no other means of conveying the King of Sweden’s complaints to the Grand Seignior. He drew up a strong indictment of the Grand Vizir. M. de Feriol, then Turkish ambassador from France, got it translated into Turkish. A Greek was hired to present it; he mingled himself with the King’s guards, and held up the paper so high, and so persistently, that the Sultan saw it and took it himself.
Some days after, the Sultan sent the King of Sweden, as the only answer to his complaints, twenty-five Arabian horses, one of which had carried his Highness, and was covered with a saddle enriched with precious stones, and with massive gold stirrups. With this present he sent a polite letter, couched in general terms, and such as seemed to show that the Vizir had acted with the Sultan’s orders. Chourlouli, too, who knew how to dissemble, sent five fine horses to the King. Charles said haughtily to the man who brought them, “Return to your master and say that I do not receive presents from my enemies.” M. Poniatowski, who had already had the courage to get a petition against the Grand Vizir presented, had formed the bold plan of having him deposed; he knew that the Vizir was no favourite of the Sultan’s mother, and that he was hated both by Kislar-aga, the chief of the black eunuchs, and by the aga of the janissaries. So he urged them all three to speak against him. It was a strange sight to see a Christian, a Pole, an unaccredited agent of the King of Sweden who had refuged with the Turks, caballing almost openly at the Porte, against a Viceroy of the Ottoman Empire, and one who was, too, both a useful minister and a favourite of his master.
Poniatowski would never have succeeded, and the mere notion of his design would have cost him his life, had not a stronger power than those on his side given the last blow to the Grand Vizir Chourlouli’s fortune. The Sultan had a young favourite, who has since governed the Ottoman Empire and been killed in Hungary in 1716, at the battle of Petervaradin, gained over the Turks by Prince Eugene of Savoy. His name was Coumourgi-Ali-Pasha; his birth much the same as that of Chourlouli; he was the son of a coal-heaver--as the name signified--for Coumir is Turkish for coal. The Emperor Achmet II, uncle of Achmet III, meeting Coumourgi as a child in a wood near Adrianople, was so struck by his great beauty that he had him taken to the seraglio. Mustapha, Mahomet’s eldest son and successor, was taken with him, and Achmet III made him his favourite; he was then only selic-tar-aga, sword-bearer to the crown. His extreme youth did not allow him to stand for the office of Grand Vizir, but his ambition was to make it. The Swedish faction could never gain this favourite; he was never a friend of King Charles, or of any other Christian prince, or their ministers, but on this occasion he was unconsciously of service to the King. He united with the Sultana Valida, and the leading officer of the Porte, to bring about the fall of Chourlouli, whom they all hated. This old minister, who had served his master long and well, was the victim of the caprice of a boy and the intrigues of a stranger. He was deprived of his dignity and his wealth, his wife, daughter of the last Sultan, taken from him, and he himself banished to Cassa in Crimean-Tartary. The bul, i.e. the seal of the Empire, was given to Numan Couprougli, grandson of the great Couprougli who took Candia. This new Vizir was what misinformed Christians hardly believe a Turk can be, a man of incorruptible virtue and a scrupulous observer of the law, which he often set up in opposition to the will of the Sultan.
He would not hear of a war against Russia, which he thought unjust and unnecessary, but the same respect for the law which prevented him from waging war against the Czar, made him punctilious in the duty of hospitality to the King of Sweden. “The law,” he said to his master, “forbids you to attack the Czar, who has done you no harm, but it commands you to help the King of Sweden, who is an unfortunate Prince in your dominions.” He sent his Majesty 800 purses (a purse being worth 500 crowns), and advised him to return peaceably into his own country, through the territories of the Emperor of Germany, or in some French vessels that were then lying in the harbour at Constantinople, and which M. de Feriol, the French ambassador, offered to Charles to take him to Marseilles. Count Poniatowski continued negotiations with the minister, and gained in the negotiations an ascendancy of which Russian gold could no longer deprive him in dealing with an incorruptible minister. The Russian faction thought that the best plan was to poison such a dangerous diplomat. They bribed one of his servants, who was to give him poison in his coffee; the crime was discovered in time; they found the poison in a little vial which they took to the Grand Seignior; the poisoner was judged in full divan, and condemned to the galleys, because, by Turkish law, crimes that have failed of execution are never punished by death.
Charles, still persuaded that sooner or later he would succeed in making the Turkish Empire declare against that of Russia, would agree to none of the proposals for his return in peace to his own dominions; he persisted in pointing out to the Turks as dangerous the very Czar whom he had long despised; his emissaries kept up their insinuations that Peter the Great was aiming at gaining control of shipping in the Black Sea; that, after having beaten the Cossacks, he had designs on the Crimea. Sometimes his representations roused the Porte, sometimes the Russian minister nullified their effect. While he was thus letting his fate depend on the caprice of a vizir, and was forced to put up with the affronts as well as accept the favours of a foreign power--while he was presenting petitions to the Sultan, and living on hospitality in a desert--his enemies roused themselves to attack his kingdom.
The battle of Pultawa was at once the signal for a revolution in Poland. King Augustus returned thither, protesting against his abdication and the Peace of Altranstadt, and openly accusing Charles, whom he now no longer feared, of robbery and cruelty. He imprisoned Finsten and Imof, his plenipotentiaries, who had signed the abdication, as if in so doing they had exceeded their orders and betrayed their master. His Saxon troops, which had been the excuse for his dethronement, brought him back to Warsaw with most of the Polish counts who had formerly sworn fidelity to him, had afterwards done the same to Stanislas, and were about to renew their oath to Augustus. Siniawski himself joined his party, forgetting the idea he had had of making himself King, and was content as Grand General of the crown. Fleming, his first minister, who had been obliged to leave Saxony for a time, for fear of being given up as Patkul had been, managed matters at that time so as to bring over a great part of the Polish nobility to his master. The Pope released his people from the oath of allegiance they had sworn to Stanislas. This step of the Holy Father, taken at the right time, and supported by Augustus’s forces, had no small weight in establishing the interests of the Court of Rome in Poland, where they then had no wish to dispute with the sovereign pontiff the chimerical right of meddling with the temporalities of kings.
Every one was ready to submit to Augustus’s authority again, and received without the least opposition a useless absolution which the Nuncio did not fail to represent as necessary. Charles’s power and the greatness of Sweden were now drawing to their last phase. For some time more than ten crowned heads had viewed the extension of Sweden beyond her natural boundaries, to the other side of the Baltic, and from the Duna to the Elbe, with fear and envy. Charles’s fall and absence awakened the interests and jealousy of all these princes, after they had lain dormant for a long time through treaties and inability to break them. The Czar, who was more powerful than them all together, making the best use of his victory, took Wibourg, and all Carelia, inundated Finland with troops, besieged Riga, and sent a corps into Poland to help Augustus to recover the throne. The Emperor was then what Charles had once been--the arbiter of Poland and the North; but he consulted only his own interests, whereas Charles’s ambitions were always of glory or vengeance. The Swedish monarch had helped his friends, and overcome his enemies, without exacting the smallest reward for his victories; but the Czar, rather a prince than a hero, would not help the King of Poland except on condition that Livonia should be given up to him, and that this province, for the sake of which Augustus had begun war, should belong to the Russians for ever.
The King of Denmark, forgetting the treaty of Travendal as Augustus had that of Altranstadt, had from that time thoughts of making himself master of the Duchies of Holstein and Bremen, to which he renewed his claim. The King of Prussia had long-standing claims to Swedish Pomerania which he wished to revive; the Duke of Mecklenburg was provoked at seeing Sweden still in possession of Wismar, the finest city in his duchy. This Prince had married the Emperor of Russia’s niece, and his uncle was only looking for an excuse to establish himself in Germany, after the example of the Swedes. George, Elector of Hanover, also wanted to enrich himself from the spoiling of Charles. This Bishop of Munster, too, would have been glad to have made some claims had he possessed the means to do so. There were about 12,000 or 13,000 Swedes defending Pomerania, and the other districts which Charles held in Germany; here was the seat of war. But this storm alarmed the Emperor and his allies. It is a law of the Empire that whoever invades one of the provinces should be considered an enemy to the whole Germanic body. But there was still greater difficulty involved, for all these princes, except the Czar, were then leagued against Louis XIV, whose power had for some time been as formidable to the Empire as that of Charles himself.
At the beginning of the century Germany found herself hard pressed between the French on the south and the Swedes on the north. The French had crossed the Danube, and the Swedes the Oder; if their victorious forces had united, the Empire would have been lost. But the same fatality that had ruined Sweden had also humbled France; yet some resources still remained to Sweden, and Louis carried on the war with vigour, though unsuccessfully. If Pomerania and the Duchy of Bremen became the seat of war, it was to be feared that the Empire would suffer, and being weakened on that side would be the less able to withstand Louis. To prevent this, the Princes of Germany, Queen Anne of England, and the States of Holland, concluded at the Hague, in 1709, one of the most extraordinary treaties ever signed. It was stipulated by these powers that the seat of the war should not be in Pomerania, nor any other German State, but that Charles might be attacked by his enemies anywhere else. The King of Poland and the Czar themselves agreed to this treaty, and had a clause inserted which was as strange as the treaty itself, to the effect that the 12,000 Swedes in Pomerania should not leave it to defend their other provinces. To safeguard the treaty it was proposed to raise an army, which was to encamp on the Oder, to maintain this imaginary neutrality. It was an unheard-of thing, to levy an army to prevent war! Those who were paying the forces were, for the most part, very much concerned to bring about the war they were pretending to prevent. The army was, by the treaty, to consist of the troops of the Emperor, the King of Prussia, the Elector of Hanover, the Landgrave of Hesse, and the Bishop of Munster.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.