Peter the Great defeats the Swedes at the Battle of Lesnaya.

Peter I, better known as Peter the Great, was the Tsar of all Russia from 1682 and the first Emperor of all Russia from 1721 until his death in 1725. He reigned jointly with his half-brother Ivan V until 1696. From this year, Peter was an absolute monarch, an autocrat who remained the ultimate authority and organized a well-ordered police state.

The Battle of Lesnaya was one of the major battles of the Great Northern War. It took place on October 9 [O.S. September 28] 1708 between a Russian army of between 17,000 and 29,000 men commanded by Peter I of Russia, Mikhail Mikhailovich Golitsyn, Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov, Rudolph Felix Bauer and Nikolai Grigorovitj von Werden and a Swedish army between 12,500 and 16,000 men commanded by Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt and Berndt Otto Stackelberg, at the village of Lesnaya, located close to the border between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russian Empire. The Swedes were escorting a supply column of more than 4,500 wagons for their main army in Ukraine.