The victories at Poltava and particularly at Perevolochna, may have been t∞ complete to have been entirely to Peter Γs advantage.

As a result, with his army almost completely destroyed, Charles XII was forced to seek refuge in Bender. This involved the Tsar in a predicament he would have dearly wished to avoid, for, suddenly, the focus of the Northern War was transferred to the south where the Russians were least prepared and most vulnerable.

Not that the Ottomans were l∞king for such a confrontation. In fact, since Karlowitz (1699), they had been assiduously trying to avoid any conflict with European powers, even to the point of ignoring the ever more strident pleas of their Crimean vassals for help against the Russians.¹ However, the appearance of Charles XII and Mazepa suddenly brought the problem of the Tsar’s alarm­ingly increasing power to the steps of the Porte. It also had a cata­lytic effect on the internal tensions within the empire itself. The struggle between the old military establishment with its belligerent anti-Russian policy and the rising bureaucratic elite with its paci­fist and neutralist attitudes was now brought to a new pitch.

Both pro-war and anti-war parties agreed to accept Charles XII and Mazepa within Ottoman borders, but their reasons for this were diametrically opposed. The Grand Vizir, CorluluAli, wanted peace with the Tsar but he wanted it on the best terms possible. By allowing the Swedish and Ukrainian refugees to stay briefly within the borders of the empire, he hoped that their presence could be used to apply pressure on the Russians in the very near future when the Treaty of Constantinople would be renegotiated. Corlulu Ali demonstrated his desire for peace by confirming the existing peace treaty with the Tsar in December of 1709, even with Charles XII still on Ottoman territory.

The war party at the Porte was led by the Crimean Khan, Devlet Girei. For more than a decade, he had been warning his suzerain in Constantinople about the ambitions and aggressiveness of the Tsars.² When the Porte ignored his warnings, he organized an anti­Ottoman revolt in 1702-3. The Ottomans put down the rebellion and exiled Devlet Girei to the Isle of Rhodes. But, in 1708, he managed to regain the throne, whereupon he resumed his anti­Russian activities. Immediately after Poltava, the Khan offered Charles XII and Mazepa his hospitality and accepted many fleeing Zaporozhians in his realm. Once Charles XII became ensconced in Bender, Devlet Girei established contact with him and offered to continue the war against the Tsar even if the Porte would not do so. Cooperation between Charles XII and Devlet Girei was quickly set in motion and its primary goal became to push the Porte to a declaration of war against the Tsar.³

In order to achieve this, it was obvious that the incumbent Grand Vizir, Corlulu Ali, would have to be removed. With the aid of Devlet Girei and the skill of Charles’s diplomats, such as the ever commodious Stanislaw Poniatowski and Martin Neugebauer, this was accomplished on 5 June 1710. Numan Pasha, a friend of the Swedes, was chosen as his successor, but was unable to maintain himself in office. After two months, Baltaci Mehmet became the Grand Vizir and it appeared that the anti-Russian party had re­gained control. With the help of European, especially French diplomats, whose governments were worried by Russian expan­sion, tensions between the Porte and Moscow were pushed to the point where, on 19 November 1710, the Divan declared war on the Tsar. A second chance had been offered the Bender refugees to strike at the Tsar and, in the final months of 1710, they feverishly prepared to take advantage of it. A crucial aspect of these prepara­tions was the coordination of the efforts of the two most intensely anti-Russian forces—Orlyk’s Cossacks and Devlet Girei’s Tatars.