After his great victories Charles remained in Saxony, entertaining the throng of princes that sought his friendship and alliance and the crowd of flatterers who came to shine in his reflected glory. For six years in all he remained in Poland and Saxony, fighting and entertaining, while Peter the Great was actively engaged in carrying out the important purpose he had in mind, that of extending the dominion of Russia to the shores of the Baltic and gaining an outlet on the northern seas. As an essential part of his purpose he began to build a new city on the banks of the Neva, to serve as a great port and centre of commerce. It was long before Charles awakened to the fact that Peter was coming threateningly near to the Swedish territories, and when he finally realized the purpose of his great enemy and set out to circumvent it, he did so without any definite plan. He decided, as Napoleon did a century later, to plunge into the heart of the country and attack its capital city, Moscow, trusting by doing so to bring his enemy to terms. In this he failed as signally as Napoleon did in his later invasion. In June, 1708, with an army of forty-three thousand men, Charles crossed the Beresina and soon after met and defeated the Russian army near Smolensko. He considered this his most brilliant victory, and, as we are told by Voltaire, Peter now made overtures for peace, to which Charles, with the arrogance of a victor, replied, "I will treat with the Czar at Moscow." He never reached Moscow, but was constrained to turn southward to the Ukraine, where he hoped to gain the aid of the Cossacks, under their chief, Mazeppa, a bitter enemy of the czar. In this march his men suffered terribly, more than half of them dying from hunger and cold. He had met that same enemy which Napoleon afterwards met in Russia, a winter of bitter severity. In the spring he had only about eighteen thousand Swedes and about as many Cossacks under his command, but he persisted in his designs. During the wintry cold he had shared in the privations of his men, eating the same coarse food, while his only means of warming his tent was to have heated cannon balls rolled along the floor. The crisis came in the summer of 1709. Peter, who was keenly on the alert, had succeeded in winning to his side the Cossack chiefs, leaving Mazeppa without any followers. Then he intercepted the Swedish general Levenhaupt, who was marching with a new army to the aid of his king, and overwhelmed him with an immense force of Russians. Losing all his baggage and stores and more than half his men, Levenhaupt succeeded in reaching the king's camp with only six thousand battered and worn soldiers.