Winter, and the Wolf

Modern climate scientists remain uncertain about the cause of the Great Frost, an exceptionally severe and deadly winter that afflicted Europe in 1709. Their educated guesses point to volcanic eruptions elsewhere in Eurasia, reduced solar activity, and a deepening of the contemporaneous Little Ice Age. About the season’s severity one cannot doubt. In France, crops failed, livestock perished, and trees exploded from frost. The coasts of Italy froze, trapping unsuspecting sailors and binding Venice to terra firma. In the northeast, the Baltic Sea remained a solid highway of ice until April. Throughout the continent, one million people died of exposure and starvation before the year was out. No one who survived had ever seen anything like it, the coldest winter in five hundred years.

Not your usual winter in Venice. (Le Lagon Gelee, Wikimedia)

The monumentally brutal weather and subsequent famine did not help France’s financial and military fortunes in the ongoing War of the Spanish Succession. It certainly contributed to the decisive defeat of Swedish forces in the Great Northern War. Charles XII of Sweden, until then undefeated, set himself against an unconquerable adversary when he chose to winter over in Ukraine. Thousands of Charles’s troops died of cold, and many more succumbed to starvation thanks to Tsar Peter’s methodical despoliation of his own countryside. When the main armies met at Poltava that July, a well-rested and well-fortified Russian force faced a drastically weakened Swedish one.* The Swedes put up a good fight for several hours, but eventually their battle lines buckled and split, and Russian infantry fell upon and destroyed them.

Poltava gold medal (1709), via coinsweekly.com

Charles lost 9,000 men, his dreams of imperial glory, and very nearly his throne. He fled to Moldavia, then a Turkish protectorate, and did not return home until 1715. The Swedish king's loss did not, however, become the Russian monarch's immediate gain. Peter decided to pursue his adversary into Ottoman territory, forgetting that offensive warfare is particularly risky in a place and time when roads were scarce, supplies ruinously expensive, and soldiers a wasting asset. Voltaire believed that the tsar had "too poor an opinion of his [new] enemy," and that enemy would eventually correct him: a Turkish army under Balaci Mehmet Pasa managed to capture Tsar Peter and his troops at the Battle of Stanilesti (22 July 1711). The Turkish government obliged Russia to sign a treaty surrendering the port of Azov and destroying several border forts. Perhaps the Ottomans could extracted better terms, but their officials seem to have realized what Peter did not, that human fortunes could prove as fickle as the weather, and one would do best not to follow Charles and Peter along the paths of hubris.

What of those too humble to merit the verbiage of Classical tragedy, the French peasants who starved in the countryside, the Prussian widows who froze to death in their cottages, the Swedish soldiers who sickened in their camps or bled out on the battlefield? The sovereigns who fought the Great Northern War built monuments to the Battle of Poltava and its fallen, who had traded their lives for a tiny share of glory. The civilian dead of the Great Frost and famine got at most a burial entry in a parish record. The cheapness and anonymity of their lives the annalists of the eighteenth century took for granted. The revolutions that ended the era had many goals, but one of them was, perhaps inevitably, the re-valuing of those humble lives and the giving of names to the nameless.          

Sources:

Jeremy Black, Warfare in the Eighteenth Century (Smithsonian Books, 1999), 164-63; Stephanie Pain, "1709: The Year Europe Froze," New Scientist, 7 Feb. 2009; Voltaire, History of Charles XII, King of Sweden, trans. Winifred Todhunter (E.P. Dutton, 1908), quote p. 215.



* The Swedes also had a significant disadvantage in artillery: they had only four field guns to the Russians’ 100.