It was some little time after this occurrence, that we heard of the defeat of the Czar by the Grand Vizier upon the Pruth.  The Czar, annoyed by the protection the Porte had accorded to the King of Sweden (in retirement at Bender), made an appeal to arms, and fell into the same error as that which had occasioned the defeat of the King of Sweden by him.  The Turks drew him to the Pruth across deserts supplied with nothing; if he did not risk all, by a very unequal battle, he must perish.  The Czar was at the head of sixty thousand men:  he lost more than thirty thousand on the Pruth, the rest were dying of hunger and misery; and he, without any resources, could scarcely avoid surrendering himself and his forces to the Turks.  In this pressing extremity, a common woman whom he had taken away from her husband, a drummer in the army, and whom he had publicly espoused after having repudiated and confined his own wife in a convent,—­proposed that he should try by bribery to induce the Grand Vizier to allow him and the wreck of his forces to retreat The Czar approved of the proposition, without hoping for success from it.  He sent to the Grand Vizier and ordered him to be spoken to in secret.  The Vizier was dazzled by the gold, the precious stones, and several valuable things that were offered to him.  He accepted and received them; and signed a treaty by which the Czar was permitted to retire, with all who accompanied him, into his own states by the shortest road, the Turks to furnish him with provisions, with which he was entirely unprovided.  The Czar, on his side, agreed to give up Azof as soon as he returned; destroy all the forts and burn all the vessels that he had upon the Black Sea; allow the King of Sweden to return by Pomerania; and to pay the Turks and their Prince all the expenses of the war.

The Grand Vizier found such an opposition in the Divan to this treaty, and such boldness in the minister of the King of Sweden, who accompanied him, in exciting against him all the chiefs of the army, that it was within an ace of being broken; and the Czar, with every one left to him, of being made prisoner.  The latter was in no condition to make even the least resistance.  The Grand Vizier had only to will it, in order to execute it on the spot.  In addition to the glory of leading captive to Constantinople the Czar, his Court, and his troops, there would have been his ransom, which must have cost not a little.  But if he had been thus stripped of his riches, they would have been for the Sultan, and the Grand Vizier preferred having them for himself.  He braved it then with authority and menaces, and hastened the Czar’s departure and his own.  The Swedish minister, charged with protests from the principal Turkish chiefs, hurried to Constantinople, where the Grand Vizier was strangled upon arriving.

The Czar never forgot this service of his wife, by whose courage and presence of mind he had been saved.  The esteem he conceived for her, joined to his friendship, induced him to crown her Czarina, and to consult her upon all his affairs and all his schemes.  Escaped from danger, he was a long time without giving up Azof, or demolishing his forts on the Black Sea.  As for his vessels, he kept them nearly all, and would not allow the King of Sweden to return into Germany, as he had agreed, thus almost lighting up a fresh war with the Turk.