Ehrenskjold thanked the Tsar and replied, "However honorably I may have acted with regard to my master, I did only my duty. I sought death, but did not meet it, and it is no small comfort to me in my misfortune to be a prisoner of Your Majesty and to be used so favorably and with so much distinction by so grat a naval officer and now worthy a vice admiral." Later, talking to the foreign envoys present, Ehrenskjold declared that the Russians had indeed fought skillfully, and that nothing but his own experience could have convinced him that the Tsar could make good soldiers and sailors out of his Russian subjects.
The victory at Hango cleared not only the Gulf of Finland but the eastern side of the Gulf of Bothnia of Swedish ships. Admiral Wattrang now quit the upper Baltic entirely, being unwilling to risk his big ships against the Russian flotillas to continue their westward advance. In September, a fleet of sixty galleys landed 16,000 men in the Aland Islands. Soon afterward, the larger Russian ships returned to Kronstadt, but Apraxin's galleys kept working their way up into the Gulf of Bothnia. On September 20, he reached Wasa, and from there he sent nine galleys across the gulf to attack the coast of Sweden, burning the Swedish town of Umean. As some galleys were lost and the winter ice was coming, Apraxin put his fleet in winter quarters, at Abo on the Finnish coast and across the Gulf of Finland at Reval.
The success of the Finnish campaigns spurred Peter to increase his shipbuilding program. Later, near the end of the Tsar's reign, the Baltic fleet consisted of thirty-four ships-of-the-line (many of them sixty- and eighty-gun vessels), fifteen frigates and 800 galleys and smaller ships, manned by a total of 28,000 Russian seamen. This was a gigantic achievement; to complain that Peter's fleet was still smaller than Great Britain's is to overlook the fact that Peter began without a single ship; with no tradition, shipwrights, officers, navigators or seamen. Before the end of Peter's life, some Russian ships were equal to the best in the British navy and, said an observer, "were more handsomely furnished." The only weakness that Peter could never overcome was his countrymen's lack of interest in the sea. Foreign officers— Greeks, Venetians, Danes and Dutchmen—continued to command the ships; the Russian aristocracy still hated the sea and resented the imposition of naval service almost more than any other. In his love of blue waves and salt air, Peter remained unique among Russians.
45
THE KALABALIK
Bitterly frustrated by his failure to prevent the peace made on the Pruth, Charles XII had worked doggedly to undo it. To some extent, the three subsequent short "wars" a year or two apart between Russia and the Ottoman Empire had been his work, although Peter's unwillingness to hand over Azov and to withdraw his troops from Poland had also been responsible. A promising opportunity had come with the third of these wars, declared by the Turks in October 1712. Then, a huge Ottoman army had assembled at Adrianople under the personal command of the Sultan. As part of a joint war plan, Ahmed III had agreed to send Charles XII north into Poland with a strong Turkish escort so that the King could rendezvous with a new Swedish expeditionary force under Stenbock's command. But when Stenbock landed in Germany, he moved west, not south, and he was eventually captured in the fortress of Tonning. Charles remained a king without an army, and the Sultan, reflecting on the uncertainties of invading Russia alone, had decided to make peace and return to his harem.
Thus, by the winter of 1713, Charles XII had been in Turkey for three and a half years. Moslem hospitality notwithstanding, most Turkish officials had grown weary of him. He was indeed a "heavy weight on the Sublime Porte." The Sultan wanted to make a permanent peace with Russia, but Charles' constant intrigues had made this difficult. It was decided, one way or another, to send Charles home.
Out of this decision developed a plot. Devlet Gerey, the Tatar Khan, had originally been an admirer of Charles, but his feelings had changed when the King refused to join the Turkish army marching to the Pruth. Now the Khan made contact with Augustus of Poland and worked out a plan whereby the King of Sweden would be offered a strong escort of Tatar cavalry ostensibly to cross Poland and return to Swedish territory. Once under way, the escort would be progressively weakened as parts of the force were detached under various pretexts. Across the Polish frontier, the group would be confronted by a strong force of Poles, and the diminished escort, too weak to resist, would surrender and hand over the Swedish King. Thus, both sides would profit: The Turks would get rid of Charles, and Augustus would have him.
This time, however, fortune was with Charles. A body of his men, disguised as Tatars, intercepted the messengers and brought the correspondence between Augustus and the Khan to the King at Bender. Charles learned that both the Khan and the Seraskier of Bender were involved in the plot; as best he could determine, the Sultan was not. For years, Charles had been trying to get away from Turkey, but now he made up his mind not to go. He tried to contact Ahmed III to tell him of the plot, but he found that all communication between Bender and the south had been cut. None of the messages he sent, even by roundabout routes, arrived.
In fact, the Sultan was anxious to see the last of Charles, but had worked out a different solution. On January 18, 1713, he gave orders to abduct the King, by force if necessary, but without harming him, and take him to Salonika, where he would be put on board a French ship which would carry him back to Sweden. Ahmed did not believe that force would be required. He did not know of the Khan's plot, and of course he did not know that Charles was aware of it. From this tangle of plots, partial knowledge and misunderstandings arose the extraordinary episode known by its Turkish name as the Kalabalik (tumult).
The Swedish camp at Bender had greatly changed in three and a half years. Tents had been replaced by permanent barracks built in rows as in a military camp, with glass windows for the officers and leather-covered windows for the common soldiers. The King lived in a large, new, handsomely furnished brick house which, with a chancery building, officers' quarters and a stable, formed a semifortified square in the center of the compound. From the balconies of his upper windows, he had an excellent view of the whole Swedish encampment and the surrounding cluster of coffee houses and small shops in which merchants sold figs, brandy, bread and tobacco to the Swedes. The settlement, called New Bender, was a tiny Swedish island lost in a Turkish ocean. But it was not a hostile ocean. The Janissary regiment posted to guard the King watched over him with an admiring eye. Here was a hero of the king that Turkey desperately lacked. "If we had such a king to lead us, what could we not do?" they asked.
Despite these friendly feelings, when the Sultan's orders arrived in January 1713, the air around the Swedish camp began to fill with tension. Charles' officers watched from the balconies as thousands of Tatar horsemen rode in to join the Janissaries. To confront this force, Charles had fewer than a thousand Swedes and no allies; seeing the massing of the Turkish forces, the Poles and Cossacks nominally under Charles' command had quietly drifted away and placed themselves under Turkish protection. Undeterred, the King began preparations to resist; his men began collecting provisions to last six weeks. To stiffen Swedish morale, Charles one day rode alone and unmolested through the waiting ranks of the Tatar army standing thickly "like organ pipes so close together on all sides."
On January 29, Charles was warned that an attack would come the following day. He and his men spent the night trying to build a wall around the camp, but the frozen earth made digging impossible. Instead, they created a barricade of wooden carts, wagons, tables and benches, and shoveled piles of dung between the wagons. What happened the following day was one of the most bizarre martial episodes in European history. As the dramatic tale resounded through Europe, people shook their heads, but of course, at the time, none who heard the tale knew that Charles intended simply to make a token stand to foil the plot to carry him off and betray him in Poland. Unable to inform the Sultan of this plot, he hoped by his stand to force the Khan and the Seraskier to pull back, wait and ask for new instructions from their master, Ahmed III.