The young King of Sweden first met and defeated the Danes, next the Russians, and then marched his victorious troops into Poland, which he conquered and overran. As a result of his victories he seems to have gained little, however, beyond the maintenance of his own throne in Sweden, and, after remaining two years or more in Poland, he set a king of his own nomination, Leszynska, on its throne, made peace with his enemies and went back to his own country. Three years later, however, he was again fighting in Russia, and it was during this campaign, that his armies pushed into Germany also. In Russia he finally suffered an overwhelming defeat at Pultowa: this was in 1709, and one result of that disaster was that his nominee lost the crown of Poland. After Pultowa, Charles fled to the Turks, engaged them as his allies and persuaded them to send an army of invasion into Russia; but after a short campaign peace was made between Russia and Turkey, and in 1714 Charles returned to his own country. He died four years later; and thereafter Sweden was no more a great actor in our story. The power of Russia, on the other hand, continually increased, and within a few years Russian armies were victoriously overrunning Sweden itself. The Swedes, nevertheless, preserved their independence, but were no longer dangerously aggressive to the nations south of the Baltic. {114} CHAPTER VIII FROM THE PEACE OF UTRECHT TO THE PEACE OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE In the last, short, chapter I tried to tell the story of the early years of the eighteenth century up to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. Principally it is the story of the humbling of France, and of the checking of the ambition of Louis XIV. to unite in his descendants, together with the Crown of France, all that was included in the monarchy of Spain. That ambitious design was checked, and from now onward we shall see that a great motive in the story is the preservation of what became known as "the balance of power in Europe"; so that no one nation should have too preponderant a superiority over the rest. The purpose of the present chapter is to carry forward the story to the middle of the century, or, more precisely, to another very important peace treaty, that between England and France, signed at Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748.