In furtherance of this scheme, the diplomats of the Porte and the Grand Vizir of the Khan of Tartary pretended to treat the Zaporogians as an independent power. In a manifesto widely distributed among the villages of the old Ukraine the
Cossacks were called upon to return to their Polish allegiance. The Turks not only promised to reestablish the rights of the Zaporogians, but also offered to assist the Cossack settlements along the upper Dnieper to regain their former freedom, if they would openly resist the oppressions and exactions of the Russians.
An expedition was next set on foot by the Porte wherein thirty thousand picked Tartar and Turkish troops were to join with Orlick and his Zaporogians in an invasion of the Russian and Polish Ukraine. In the same army was included a contingent of Poles disaffected by the Tsar's treatment of their country, under the leadership of a powerful noble of the ancient house of Pototski.
During this skilfully planned political-military campaign — wherein the diplomacy of Charles is plainly visible — orders were given to spare the Poles and Cossacks of the invaded districts while punishing without mercy the Russian troops and their adherents. This scheme, however, did not coincide with the time-honoured methods employed by the Tartars in their warfare. The subjects of the Khan and the even less disciplined Zaporogians soon began to indulge their talents for ruthless pillage, and following a few slight military successes in the beginning of the campaign, the allied armies dispersed in search of plunder. This enabled these scattered bands to be easily defeated by regular Russian troops imder Prince Galitzine near Kiev. Their losses in battles and skirmishes are placed as high as five thousand.
While the Zaporogians and their Cossack alHes were thus wasting a last opportunity to recover the freedom of the Ukraine, a body of picked Tartar troops, under the command of the Khan in person, succeeded in penetrating in a compact mass to the heart of Russian territory as far as Vorentz. The horrors of this invasion, recalhng the excesses of the Tartar hordes under Batu Khan, ralhed many districts wavering in their loyalty to Peter's standard. The principal militarj^ result of the expedition was obtained at Samara, where the Khan succeeded in destroying the Russian shipyards and a half -built flotilla, by means of which the Tsar had planned to descend the river Dnieper in an attempt to transfer the seat of war to the frontier of the Ottoman dominions. This feat of arms was probably responsible in part for the disastrous results of the famous Pruth campaign, upon which Peter now embarked at the instance of the Hospodars of the Christian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia.
The events of this strange crusade, the most critical incident in Peter's career, do not belong to the subject in hand. It is sufficient to remark that his ill-prepared expedition cost Peter in the course of a few weeks, not only the prestige won through his defeat of the invincible armies of Charles of Sweden, but also placed him for a time at the entire mercv of his Turkish enemies. Had it not been for the fascinations and diplomacy of his new wife, the Empress Catherine, and the wholly unexpected clemency of the Turkish vizir, Tsar Peter — no longer "the Great" — would probably have ended his career a prisoner in Constantinople.
At the cost of nearly all the ready money in his treasury, a dearly won military reputation and a disastrous treaty, the emperor of all the Russias was at last enabled to return to his dominions — in spite of the frenzied protests of the Swedish king.