What's going on in this painting by Nikolai Sauerweid?

With his face contorted with rage and a sword in his hand, Peter I bursts into a crowd of Russian soldiers who are plundering and looting a newly captured enemy city and mercilessly slaughtering its population. They fall under the hooves of his horse, but the tsar pays them no attention. The terrified townspeople look hopefully at their savior, while the officers who arrived with Peter try their best to calm them.

This scene is depicted in Nikolai Sauerweid's painting ‘Peter I Subdues His Fierce Soldiers at the Capture of Narva in 1704’. This hereditary Russian battle painter and academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts painted it in 1859.

For the Russians during the Northern War against Sweden, Narva became a symbol of both tragedy and triumph. In 1700, they suffered a terrible defeat there, which nearly resulted in their defeat in the entire conflict. Four years later, Peter I's troops once again found themselves at the city’s walls.

The siege began on July 8, 1704. The tsar's troops blockaded the fortress, repelled an enemy detachment coming to its aid and began systematically destroying its fortifications with artillery fire. Despite the grave situation, General Rudolf Horn, who commanded the garrison, rejected all offers of surrender, arrogantly reminding Peter of the events that had taken place four years earlier.

On August 20, Russian troops launched an assault. With a swift onslaught, they drove the garrison forces from the walls, breached the gates and stormed into the fortress. Only then did Horn give the signal to surrender, but no one heard him amid the din of battle. Consumed by anger and fury, the Russian soldiers killed everyone in their path, sparing not even the civilians. Peter had to intervene urgently to stop the bloodshed.

According to a legend, when a captured Swedish commander appeared before the tsar, the tsar held up a bloodstained sword and shouted in anger: "Look, this is not Swedish blood, but Russian! I killed my own to quell the fury to which you drove my soldiers with your stubbornness!"

Sauerweid was awarded a second-class gold medal for his painting. Critics were particularly impressed by the figure of a little girl wearing only a chemise on the left side of the painting: "Her pose is completely natural and simple; her face is not visible, but her entire figure expresses to most profound despair and, at the same time, is so childlike that it evokes compassion, as if for a living being."