Narva: the schooling defeat
1700 · Event
In a blizzard outside Narva, the eighteen-year-old Charles XII of Sweden destroys a Russian army four times his size in an afternoon. Peter's response defines him: he treats the catastrophe as a syllabus — recasting church bells into cannon, rebuilding the army on European lines — and says later that Narva was Sweden's gift: 'they beat us until we learned.'
On these timelines: Peter the Great's Revolution, Russia & the USSR, Scandinavia, the Nordic World & the Viking Age, Master
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- Battle of Poltava (1709)
- The tsar works incognito in the shipyards (1697)
- Nystad makes Russia an empire (1721)
- Grand Embassy of Peter the Great (1697)
- The tsarevich dies in the fortress (1718)
- Peter the Great's Westernisation of Russia (1698)
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Around 1700
- Glorious Revolution (1688)
- Salem witch trials (1692)
- Jacobite rising of 1745 (1745)
- Great Plague of London (1665)
- Siege of Vienna (1683) (1683)
- Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687)
- Walpole's premiership (1721)
- Peter the Great (1672)
- English Bill of Rights (1689)
- Catherine the Great (1729)