Toward the close of this age the balance of power in Northern Europe shifted quite as markedly as it had farther south. Three of the German electoral princes became kings. The Elector of Saxony was chosen King of Poland, thereby adding greatly to his power. George, Elector of Hanover, became King of England on the death of Queen Anne. And the Elector of Brandenburg, son of the Great Elector, when the war of 1701 against France and Spain broke out, only lent his aid to the European coalition on condition that the German Emperor should authorize him also to assume the title of king, not of Brandenburg but of his other and smaller domain of Prussia, which lay outside the empire. Most of the European sovereigns smiled at this empty change of title without a change of dominions; but Brandenburg or Prussia was thus made more united, more consolidated, and it soon rose to be the leader of Northern Germany. A new family, the Hohenzollerns, contested European supremacy with the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons.[1] [Footnote 1: See _Prussia Proclaimed a Kingdom_, page 310.] More important still was the strife between Sweden and Russia. Sweden had been raised by Gustavus Adolphus to be the chief power of the North, the chosen ally of Richelieu and Mazarin. Her soldiers were esteemed the best of the time. The prestige of the Swedes had, to be sure, suffered somewhat in the days when the Great Elector defeated them so completely at Fehrbellin and elsewhere. But Louis XIV had stood by them as his allies, and saved them from any loss of territory, so that in 1700 Sweden still held not only the Scandinavian peninsula but all the lands east of the Baltic as far as where St. Petersburg now stands, and much of the German coast to southward. The Baltic was thus almost a Swedish lake, when in 1697 a new warrior king, Charles XII, rose to reassert the warlike supremacy of his race. He was but fifteen when he reached the throne; and Denmark, Poland, and Russia all sought to snatch away his territories. He fought the Danes and defeated them. He fought the Saxon Elector who had become king of Poland. Soon both Poland and Saxony lay crushed at the feet of the "Lion of the North," as they called him then--"Madman of the North," after his great designs had failed. Only Russia remained to oppose him--Russia, as yet almost unknown to Europe, a semi-barbaric frontier land, supposedly helpless against the strength and resources of civilization.