Mathias

Charles XII of Sweden wore no armor, no wig and no fancy uniform. People believed bullets couldn't touch him. He became king at 15 in 1697. Three years later, Denmark, Poland and Russia all attacked Sweden at once, thinking the teenage king would be easy prey. Instead he knocked Denmark out of the war in weeks, then crushed a Russian army four times his size at Narva in a snowstorm. For the next nine years he marched across Eastern Europe and nobody could stop him. He lived like a common soldier. He wore a plain blue coat, big leather boots and his own hair. He slept on straw and drank no alcohol. He was always at the front, and he kept coming out alive, so a legend spread through the army that he couldn't be hit by an ordinary bullet. Then he invaded Russia. At Poltava in 1709, a few days before the battle, he was shot in the foot while scouting and had to direct the fight from a stretcher. His army was destroyed. He escaped to the Ottoman Empire and stayed there for five years as an awkward guest. When the Turks finally tried to throw him out in 1713, he barricaded himself in a house with a few dozen men and fought off Ottoman soldiers with a sword until they set the roof on fire. In 1718 he was back fighting, besieging the fortress of Fredriksten in Norway. On a dark night in late November, he leaned over the edge of a trench to watch the work. A bullet went through his head, entering one side and leaving the other. He died instantly at 36. Nobody has ever agreed on who fired it. Some say a Norwegian soldier on the walls. Others say it was one of his own men, sick of the war. His body was dug up and examined in 1746, 1799, 1859 and 1917, and nobody could settle it. Swedish folklore had its own answer: since he was bulletproof, he must have been killed by a coat button fired from a musket. The plain blue uniform, boots and gloves he wore that night are still in the Royal Armoury in Stockholm. So is the hat, with the hole in it.