Charles XII. was too much occupied to care for these insignificant events.  He sent word that when he had time he would come and burn down Peter’s wooden town.  He was leading a victorious army toward Poland, he had beheaded the traitorous Patkul, and everything was bowing before him.  The great Marlborough was suing for his aid in the coalition against Louis XIV. in the War of the Spanish Succession.  Flushed with victory, Charles felt that the fate of Europe was lying in his hands.  He had only to decide in which direction to move—­whether to help to curb the ambition of the Grand Monarque in the West, or to carry out his first design of crushing the rising power of the Great Autocrat in the East.  He preferred the latter.  The question then arose whether to enter Russia by the North or by way of Poland, where he was now master.  The scale was turned probably by learning that the Cossacks in Little Russia were growing impatient and were ripe for rebellion against the Tsar.

Peter was anxious to prevent the invasion.  He had a wholesome admiration for the terrible Swedish army, not much confidence in his own, and his empire was in disorder.  He sent word to Charles that he would be satisfied to withdraw from the West if he could have one port on the Baltic.  The king’s haughty reply was:  “Tell your Tsar I will treat with him in Moscow,” to which Peter rejoined:  “My brother Charles wants to play the part of an Alexander, but he will not find in me a Darius.”

It is possible that upon Ivan Mazeppa, who was chief or Hetman of the Cossacks at this time, rests the responsibility of the crushing defeat which terminated the brilliant career of Charles XII.  Mazeppa was the Polish gentleman whose punishment at the hands of an infuriated husband has been the subject of poems by Lord Byron and Pushkin, and also of a painting by Horace Vernet.  This picturesque traitor, who always rose upon the necks of the people who trusted him, whose friendships he one after another invariably betrayed, reached a final climax of infamy by offering to sacrifice the Tsar, the friend who believed in him so absolutely that he sent into exile or to death anyone who questioned his fidelity.  Mazeppa had been with Peter at Azof, and abundant honors were waiting for him; but he was dazzled by the career of the Swedish conqueror, and believed he might rise higher under Charles XII. than under his rough, imperious master at Moscow.  So he wrote the King that he might rely upon him to join him with 40,000 Cossacks in Little Russia.  He thought it would be an easy matter to turn the irritated Cossacks from the Tsar.  They were restive under the severity of the new military regime, and also smarting under a decree forbidding them to receive any more fugitive peasants fleeing from serfdom.  But he had miscalculated their lack of fidelity and his own power over them.

It was this fatal promise, which was never to be kept, that probably lured Charles to his ruin.  After a long and disastrous campaign he met his final crushing defeat at Poltova in 1709.  The King and Mazeppa, companions in flight, together entered the Sultan’s dominions as fugitives, and of the army before which a short time ago Europe had trembled—­there was left not one battalion.