The coronation was solemnized quietly and magnificently in Warsaw in spite of the Polish custom of crowning kings in Cracow. Stanislas Leczinski and his wife Charlotte were consecrated King and Queen of Poland at the hands of the Archbishop of Leopold assisted by several other bishops. The only reward Charles reaped from his conquest was to be present at the ceremony incognito. While he was thus providing Poland with a king, and the King of Denmark dare not harrass him, while the King of Prussia was courting his friendship and Augustus was withdrawing to his hereditary dominions, the Czar became daily more formidable. His assistance of Augustus in Poland had been feeble, but he had made powerful diversions in Ingria. As for him, he not only began to be a great soldier himself, but also to teach his soldiers the art of war: discipline was established among his forces; he had good engineers, experienced artillery and many good officers; he had also learned the great art of supporting his armies. Some of his generals had learned both to fight well and, if necessary, to abstain from fighting; more than all, he had built up a fleet capable of making head against the Swedes in the Baltic. Confident in all these advantages, due both to his genius and to the absence of the King of Sweden, he took Narva by assault after a regular siege and a blockade by land and sea. When the soldiers had taken the town they plundered it, and gave themselves to horrible barbarities: the Czar hastened from one place to another to stop the disorder and massacre. He rescued by force from the hands of the soldiers women whose throats they were going to cut after having outraged them; he was obliged to kill with his own hands some Russians who would not listen to his commands. In the town hall at Narva they still show the table where he laid his sword, as he said to the citizens who flocked after him, “This sword is not wet with the blood of the citizens I have slain, but with that of the Russians whom I have killed to save your lives.”