Image: Victory at Narva, 1905, by Gustaf Cederström, National Museum of Sweden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
This image, painted two hundred years after the battle, depicts what the surrender of Russian forces to Sweden might have looked like after one of the opening conflicts of the Great Northern War at Narva in 1700. Sweden, under King Charles XII, defeated a Russian force that was three times its size. Charles was a young king, gaining the throne at age 15 in 1697, who often accompanied his troops into battle.
Sweden maintained its status as the superpower of the northern ports of the Baltic Sea and North Sea through the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth century. It seems unlikely in our modern era that Sweden could maintain superiority over its neighbors. A military historian I know said that the Swedes, beginning with Gustavus Adolphus and continuing with Charles XII, maintained their position because they mastered logistics before anyone else. Adequate food for humans and horses, adequate ammunition and clothing, and moving it all—the mundane was critical in early land warfare.
Brian Davies of UT San Antonio published an interesting paper asserting that one of the reasons Russia lost so decisively in the Battle of Narva was simply because up to thirty percent of their cannonballs didn’t fit their cannons. Russia had yet to employ formal logistics and enlisted James Bruce early in the war to develop uniformity in Russian artillery. Replacing the cannons lost at Narva, all but fourteen of them, meant melting down a quarter of all the church bells across Russia in order to obtain enough bronze. (Davies, 28-29).
The high level of discipline of Swedish troops is legend. I wonder if the stamina of Swedish troops in the harsh conditions is partly related to the Norse mindset of early Scandinavia. In Norse myth, warriors who died in battle joined the gods in their eternal resting place at Valhalla or Valhöll, while everyone else went to Hel. The Norse also believed that the Norns had already decided how long they would live, with their days somehow marked on sticks, so they could be as reckless as they wanted in battle. (As always, my source for Norse mythology is Dr. Jackson Crawford on YouTube.)
Narva is slightly inland from the Gulf of Finland, in modern-day Estonia. In 1700, Narva sat on the border of Russia in the Polish Lithuania kingdom. The battle was fought between Russia and Sweden with cavalry and cannons.
The Great Northern War is vastly confusing, with many nations involved and shifting alliances. I found a YouTube channel by Kings and Generals with video reenactments of the war that help make sense of it. Colored maps change like mood rings and simulated cavalry march across the ever-changing landscape of Europe. I don’t know how accurate the military information is, but it is certainly a helpful visual. The link is as follows: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=1DvbGhQcCJw&list=PLaBYW76inbX7MvJ4pMlOPVS4KTSTFHqQ_
Source: Brian Davies, “James Bruce and the Emergence of Russian Military Technicalism During the Great Northern War, in The Great Northern War: New Perspectives (2018, Authors and University Press of Southern Denmark, edited by Michael Hesselholt Clemmesen, Niels Bo Poulsen and Anna Sofie Schøning).