Bourbons.[1]

[Footnote 1: See _Prussia Proclaimed a Kingdom_, page 310.]

More important still was the strife between Sweden and Russia. Sweden had
been raised by Gustavus Adolphus to be the chief power of the North, the
chosen ally of Richelieu and Mazarin. Her soldiers were esteemed the best
of the time. The prestige of the Swedes had, to be sure, suffered somewhat
in the days when the Great Elector defeated them so completely at
Fehrbellin and elsewhere. But Louis XIV had stood by them as his allies,
and saved them from any loss of territory, so that in 1700 Sweden still
held not only the Scandinavian peninsula but all the lands east of the
Baltic as far as where St. Petersburg now stands, and much of the German
coast to southward. The Baltic was thus almost a Swedish lake, when in
1697 a new warrior king, Charles XII, rose to reassert the warlike
supremacy of his race. He was but fifteen when he reached the throne; and
Denmark, Poland, and Russia all sought to snatch away his territories. He
fought the Danes and defeated them. He fought the Saxon Elector who had
become king of Poland. Soon both Poland and Saxony lay crushed at the feet
of the "Lion of the North," as they called him then--"Madman of the
North," after his great designs had failed. Only Russia remained to oppose
him--Russia, as yet almost unknown to Europe, a semi-barbaric frontier
land, supposedly helpless against the strength and resources of
civilization.

Russia was in the pangs of a most sudden revolution. Against her will she
was being suddenly and sharply modernized by Peter the Great, most famous
of her czars. He had overthrown the turbulent militia who really ruled the
land, and had waded through a sea of bloody executions to establish his
own absolute power.[1] He had travelled abroad in disguise, studied