THE BATTLE OF PULTOWA,
A.D. 1709.
"Dread Pultowa's day,
When fortune left the royal Swede,
Around a slaughtered army lay,
No more to combat and to bleed.
The
power and fortune of the war
Had passed to the triumphant Czar."
BYRON.
Pultowa
NAPOLEON prophesied, at St. Helena, that all Europe would soon be either Cossack or republican. Three years
ago the fulfillment of the last of these alternatives appeared most probable. But the democratic movements of 1848 were sternly repressed in
1849. The absolute authority of a single ruler and the austere stillness of martial law are now paramount in the capitals of the Continent, which
lately owned no sovereignty save the will of the multitude, and where that which the Democrat calls his sacred right of insurrection was so
loudly asserted and so often fiercely enforced.
Many causes have contributed to bring about this reaction, but the most effective and the most
permanent have been Russian influence and Russian arms. Russia is now the avowed and acknowledged champion of monarchy against democracy; of
constituted authority, however acquired, against revolution, battle and change, for whatever purpose desired; of the imperial supremacy of
strong states over their weaker neighbors against all claims for political independence and all strivings for separate nationality. She had
crushed the heroic Hungarians; and Austria, for whom nominally she crushed them, is now one of her dependents.
Whether the rumors of her being about to engage in fresh battles be well or ill founded, it is
certain that recent events must have fearfully augmented the power of the Muscovite empire, which, even previously, had been the object of
well-founded anxiety to all Western Europe.
!n 1851, it was truly stated, eleven years ago, that "the acquisitions which Russia has made within the
last sixty-four years are equal in extent and importance to the whole empire she had in Europe before that time; that the acquisitions she has
made from Sweden are greater than what remains of that ancient kingdom; that her acquisitions from Poland are as large as the whole Austrian
empire; that the territory she has wrested from Turkey in Europe is equal to the dominions of Prussia, exclusive of her Rhenish provinces; and
that her acquisitions from Turkey in Asia are equal in extent to all the smaller states of Germany, the Rhenish provinces of Prussia, Belgium,
and Holland taken together. That the country she has conquered from Persia is about the size of England; that her acquisitions in Tartary have an
area equal to Turkey in Europe, Greece, Italy, and Spain.
In sixty-four years she has advanced her frontier eight hundred and fifty miles towards Vienna, Berlin,
Dresden, Munich, and Paris; she has approached four hundred and fifty miles nearer to Constantinople; she has possessed herself of the capital of
Poland, and has advanced to within a few miles of the capital of Sweden, from which, when Peter the First mounted the throne, her frontier was
distant three hundred miles. Since that time she has stretched herself forward about one thousand miles towards India, and the same distance
towards the capital of Persia."
Such, at that period, had been the recent aggrandizement of Russia; and the events of the last few
years, by weakening and disuniting all her European neighbors, have immeasurably augmented the relative superiority of the Muscovite empire over
all the other Continental powers.
With a population exceeding sixty millions, all implicitly obeying the impulse of a single ruling mind;
with a territorial area of six millions and a half of square miles; with a standing army eight hundred thousand strong; with powerful fleets on
the Baltic and Black seas; with a skilful host of diplomatic agents planted in every court and among every tribe; with the confidence which
unexpected success creates, and the sagacity which long experience fosters, Russia now grasps, with an armed right hand, the tangled thread of
European politics, and issues her mandates as the arbitress of the movements of the age.
Yet a century and a half have hardly elapsed since she was first recognized as a member of the drama of modern
European history-previous to the battle of Pultowa, Russia played no part. Charles V. and his great rival, our Elizabeth and her adversary Philip
of Spain, the Guises, Sully, Richelieu, Cromwell, De Witt, William of Orange, and the other leading spirits of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, thought no more about the Muscovite Czar than we now think about the King of Timbuctoo.
Pultowa
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