Today in European history: the Skirmish at Bendery (1713)

The “Skirmish at Bendery” (known in Swedish as the Kalabaliken i Bender, from the Turkish word kalabalık or “crowd”) is a relatively silly affair, but it shows that, even in 1713 when they were supposedly in “decline,” the Ottomans were still capable of the occasional muscle flexing in Europe. It’s the climax of a chapter in the 1700-1721 Great Northern War, which otherwise didn’t involve the Ottomans at all and was fought between Charles XII’s (d. 1718) Swedish Empire and a coalition of opponents, led by Tsar Peter (the Great) of Russia (d. 1725). Sweden had spent most of the 17th century amassing a sizable empire around the Baltic Sea, which left it holding, among other things, Russia’s former Baltic ports. Peter allied with Denmark-Norway and the German state of Saxony (whose elector also happened to be the king of Poland), both of which had also suffered from Sweden’s expansion.

This is just a placeholder. If you’d like to read the rest please check out my new home, Foreign Exchanges!

Advertisement

One thought on “Today in European history: the Skirmish at Bendery (1713)

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.