Except for the fact that it was the seat of an Ottoman serasker (governor) and the major listening post on the Ottoman Empire’s sensitive northern frontier, Bender, a dusty, provincial town on the Dniester, had little to distinguish it.

Charles XII and his followers expected to stay here only briefly as they planned to continue on to Sweden by way of Poland. The unexpectedly rapid deployment of Russian tr∞ps in Poland, however, forced a postponement of these plans.

Although he was well received by the serasker and the town’s inhabitants, Charles XII did not take up residence in Bender itself. Instead, he ordered his Swedes to set up camp on the outskirts of the town. Most of the Ukrainians followed suit, setting up their en­campment in Varnitsa, a small village near Bender located about 15 minutes’ march from the Swedish camp. Becauseofhis failing health, Mazepa stayed in the town where he could be looked after more conveniently. The heneralna Starshyna, however, some of whom had begun to toy with the idea of asking the Tsar for a pardon, t∞k up residence in Jassy in Moldavia. About nine months after the arrival of Charles XII, the refugee colony in Bender was enlarged by the arrival of several thousand of Stanislaw’s sup­porters who, led by Jozef Potocki, the wojewoda of Kiev, had fought their way through Hungary and Poland in order to join the Swedish king. Thus, within a year, a rag-tag force of about 8,000 men had gathered in Bender. Of these, about 500 were Swedes (later their number would rise to 1,365), over 2,000 were Poles, and about 4,000-5,000 were Ukrainian Cossacks. As Charles XII began to re­establish his contacts with various European courts, the town took on a cosmopolitan character; the diplomats, couriers, secret agents, and military men turned Bender into a mini-center of international diplomacy and intrigue. As their plans evolved, Charles XII and his allies began increasingly to view the town as the base from which they hoped to recoup the losses they had suffered at Poltava and Perevolochna.