While the War of the Spanish Succession raged along the Rhine, in Bavaria and the Netherlands, the North of Germany was convulsed by another and very different struggle. The ambitious designs of Charles XII. of Sweden, who succeeded to the throne in 1697, aroused the jealousy and renewed the old hostility, of Denmark, Russia and Poland, and in 1700 they formed an alliance against Sweden. Denmark began the war, the same year, by invading Holstein-Gottorp, the Duke of which was the brother-in-law of Charles XII. The latter immediately attacked Copenhagen, and conquered a peace. A few months afterwards he crushed the power of Peter the Great, in the battle of Narva, and was then free to march against Poland. Augustus the Strong was no match for the young Northern hero, who compelled the Polish nobles to depose him and elect Stanislas Lesczinsky in his stead, then marched through Silesia into Saxony, in the year 1706, and from his camp near Leipzig dictated his own terms to Augustus. A year later, having exhausted what resources were left to the people after the outrageous exactions of their own Electors, Charles XII. evacuated Saxony with an army of 40,000 men, many of them German recruits, and marched through Poland on his way to the fatal field of Pultowa. The immediate consequences of his terrible defeat there, in 1709, were that Peter the Great took possession of the Baltic provinces, and prepared to found his new capital of St. Petersburg on the Neva. Then Denmark and Saxony entered into an alliance with Russia, Augustus the Strong was again placed on the throne of Poland, and the Swedish-German provinces on the Baltic and the North Sea were overrun and ravaged by the Danish and Russian armies. Towards the end of the year 1714, after peace had been concluded with France, Charles XII. suddenly appeared in Stralsund, having escaped from his long exile in Turkey and travelled day and night on horseback across Europe, from the shores of the Black Sea. Then Prussia and Hannover, both eager to enlarge their dominions at the expense of Sweden, united against him. He had not sufficient military strength to resist them, and after his death at Frederickshall, in 1718, Sweden was compelled to make peace on conditions which forever destroyed her supremacy among the northern powers. [Sidenote: 1714. THE PRAGMATIC SANCTION.] By the Treaties of Stockholm, made in 1719 and 1720, Prussia acquired Stettin and all of Pomerania except a strip of the coast with Wismar, Stralsund and the island of Rügen, paying 2,000,000 thalers to Sweden: Hannover acquired the territories of Bremen and Verden, paying 1,000,000 thalers: Denmark received Schleswig, and Russia all of her conquests except Finland. The power of Poland, already weakened by the corruptions and dissensions of her nobles, began steadily to decline after this long and exhausting war.