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Updated: June 18, 2025
A magnificent festival was here arranged in commemoration of the great victory of Pultowa. Nine arches were reared, beneath which the procession marched, in the most gorgeous array of civic and military pageantry.
The Vorskla falls into the Borysthenes about fifteen leagues below Pultowa, and the Czar arranged his forces in two lines, stretching from one river towards the other; so that if the Swedes attacked him and were repulsed, they would be driven backwards into the acute angle formed by the two streams at their junction.
After Gluck came in, and while he was looking at the bodies in consternation, she came up behind him and pulled his robe, and asked him if he would not give her some bread. So he took her with him to his own home. There was a story that he was taken among the prisoners at the battle of Pultowa, and that, on making himself known, he was immediately put in irons and sent off in exile to Siberia.
At last he reached Pultowa, a village on the banks of the Vorskla. Peter hastened to meet him, with an army of sixty thousand, and one of the bloodiest battles in the history of war was fought. The Swedes performed miracles of valor. But valor could do nothing against overwhelming strength. A disastrous defeat was the result, and Charles, with a few regiments, escaped to Turkey.
It is surprising, however, how often they extricated him from his difficulties; and even in his last expedition against Russia, which terminated in the disaster of Pultowa, he would, to all appearance, have proved successful, if the Tartar chief, Mazeppa, had proved faithful to his engagement.
It was the work of a single ruler; who, himself without education, promoted science and literature among barbaric millions; who gave them fleets, commerce, arts, and arms; who, at Pultowa, taught them to face and beat the previously invincible Swedes: and who made stubborn valour, and implicit subordination, from that time forth the distinguishing characteristics of the Russian soldiery, which had before his time been a mere disorderly and irresolute rabble.
At Pultowa they witnessed the maneuverings of a battle, with its thunderings and uproar and apparent carnage the exact representation of the celebrated battle of Pultowa, which Peter the Great gained on the spot over Charles XII. of Sweden.
Charles, if any judgment may be formed of his designs by his measures and his inquiries, had purposed first to dethrone the Czar, then to lead his army through pathless deserts into China, thence to make his way by the sword through the whole circuit of Asia, and by the conquest of Turkey to unite Sweden with his new dominions: but this mighty project was crushed at Pultowa; and Charles has since been considered as a madman by those powers, who sent their ambassadors to solicit his friendship, and their generals "to learn under him the art of war."
The decisive triumph of Russia over Sweden at Pultowa was therefore all-important to the world, on account of what it overthrew as well as for what it established; and it is the more deeply interesting because it was not merely the crisis of a struggle between two states, but it was a trial of strength between two great races of mankind.
Charles XII. had taken a circuitous route towards Moscow, through the Ukraine, hoping to rouse the people of this region to join his standards. This plan, however, proved an utter failure. About the middle of June the two armies, led by their respective sovereigns, met at Pultowa, upon the Worskla, near its point of junction with the Dnieper, about four hundred miles south of Moscow.
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