Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
". . . a conflict in which a coalition led by the Tsardom of Russia successfully contested the supremacy of the Swedish Empire in Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. . . . The war began when an alliance of Denmark–Norway, Saxony, Poland and Russia, sensing an opportunity as Sweden was ruled by the young Charles XII, declared war on the Swedish Empire and launched a threefold attack on Swedish Holstein-Gottorp, Swedish Livonia, and Swedish Ingria. Sweden parried the Danish and Russian attacks at Travendal (August 1700) and Narva (November 1700) respectively, and in a counter-offensive pushed Augustus II's forces through the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to Saxony, dethroning Augustus on the way . . . Meanwhile, the forces of Peter I had recovered from defeat at Narva and gained ground in Sweden's Baltic provinces, where they cemented Russian access to the Baltic Sea by founding Saint Petersburg in 1703. Charles XII moved from Saxony into Russia to confront Peter, but the campaign ended in 1709 with the destruction of the main Swedish army at the decisive Battle of Poltava (in present-day Ukraine) and Charles' exile in the Ottoman town of Bender." [Wikipedia] "Although the dust had settled on the War of the Spanish Succession by the time Louis XIV died in 1715, the ‘Great Northern War’ continued to rage in the east. It was known as ‘great’ to distinguish it from an earlier conflict of the 1650s and 1660s involving the same combatants. At stake in both wars was the domination of the Baltic and the domination of Poland. . . . [The] Great Northern War sprawled across thousands of kilometres, from Norway to the Ukraine. . . . After enduring the terrible winter of 1708–9, Charles XII finally got the battle he had been looking for, at Poltava on 27 June 1709. . . . Charles XII escaped into Turkish territory, where he spent the next five years in exile. Poltava was a truly world-historical event, much more momentous than Blenheim, for example. Peter the Great’s (and his sobriquet was now merited) own comment was ‘now, with God’s help, the final stone has been laid in the foundation of St Petersburg.'" [Blanning: Pursuit of Glory, p. 557-8]