ABSTRACT
On 9 September 1700 one could have observed from the bastions of the fortress of Narva a mass of troops and strings of supply carts—Peter’s army of almost 40,000 was approaching the Swedish fortress on the river Narva that bordered on Russia. So began for Russia the Great Northern War, and nobody then could have surmised that it would last more than two decades (until 1721) and that it would end only when a new generation had been born, grown up, and even settled in on both sides of the Baltic—a generation for whom the memory of “ill-fated” Narva would be a legacy.
