566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)

Twas after dread Pultova's day, When fortune left the royal Swede, Around a slaughtered army lay no more to combat and to bleed, The power and glory of the war, faithless as their vain votaries men, Had passed to the triumphant czar. And Moscow's walls were safe again, until a day more dark and drear, and a more memorable year, Should give to slaughter and to shame a mightier host and haughtier name, A greater wreck, a deeper fall, a shock to one. a thunderbolt to all. The beginning there of Lord Byron's poem Mazeppa, which he wrote in 1819, and obviously Dominic he was writing there in the shadow of Napoleon's invasion of Russia and the failure of his attempt to capture Moscow. But Byron, although he's, you know, he was famously obsessed by Napoleon,

is still very much aware that the Great Northern War, this great titanic clash between Charles XII of Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia, that that conflict was more than fit to stand comparison with the storm and drang of the Napoleonic Wars. Um, and it's kind of tribute, isn't it, to just how deeply the events of the summer of 1709, a century on, continue to reverberate through Europe. Yeah, absolutely, Tom. And it's interesting, isn't it, that um in the English speaking world, I think by and large the Great Northern War has now been forgotten or slightly overlooked. I think it's been eclipsed, hasn't it, by

The War of Spanish Succession, and then the Napoleonic Wars, and then of course the World Wars of the twentieth century. But at the time when Byron was writing, these characters, Peter the Great, Charles XII, and the character who gives his name to that poem, so that's Ivan Mazeppa, the hetman, the hetman of the Cossacks, who we uh talked about last time, these are great romantic heroes, aren't they? They are they are individuals standing astride the course of history and shaping it to their will. I mean, that's how people like Byron thought about it. Yeah, and they are heroes with a deep shade of darkness.

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