Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  The ambassador's report was intended as a last-minute briefing for the Emperor, as Peter was expected to depart any day for Holland, and the next stop on his tour was Vienna. But the Tsar's departure was repeatedly postponed. He had come for only a short visit, but had found so much to see and do, not only at the Deptford shipyard but also at Woolwich and the mint, that he constantly delayed. This stirred anxiety in those members of the Embassy left behind in Amsterdam. They not only worried about the Tsar's whereabouts and intentions, but they had received news from Vienna that the Emperor was about to make a separate peace with their common enemy, the Turks. The ostensible purpose of the Great Embassy being to strengthen the alliance, news of its impending disintegration did not make the Russians happy. As these messages arrived and the pressures on him grew, Peter reluctantly decided that he must leave.

  On April 18, Peter paid his farewell visit to the King. Relations between the two had chilled somewhat when Peter learned that William had had a hand in the forthcoming peace between the Emperor and the Sultan. For William, of course, it was essential to help disengage the Hapsburg empire from its war in the Balkans and turn it around to prepare against the only enemy William cared about: France. Nevertheless, the final meeting at Kensington Palace was amicable. The Tsar distributed 120 guineas among the

  King's servants who had waited on him, which, according to one observer, "was more than they deserved, they being very rude to him." To Admiral Mitchell, his escort and translator, he gave forty sables and six pieces of damask, a handsome gift. It was on this occasion, too, that Peter supposedly took from his pocket a small object wrapped in brown paper which he gave to the King as a token of friendship and appreciation. William unwrapped it, the story goes, and found a magnificent uncut diamond. Another account says that it was a huge, rough ruby fit to be "set upon the top of the Imperial Crown of England."

  On May 2, Peter reluctantly left London. He paid a final visit to the Tower and the mint on the day of his departure while his companions were waiting for him aboard the Royal Transport, and when the yacht moved down the river, Peter stopped and anchored at Woolwich so that he could go ashore and say goodbye to Romney at the arsenal. Under way once again, the Royal Transport reached Gravesend at dusk, where the Tsar anchored again. In the morning, accompanied by Carmarthen sailing in his own yacht, Peregrine, Peter made for Chatham, the naval harbor. There he transferred to the Peregrine and cruised through the port, admiring the giant, three-decked ships-of-the-line lying at anchor. With Carmarthen, he boarded three men-of-war, the Britannia, the Triumph, and the Association, and then was rowed ashore to visit the naval-stores depot.

  The following morning, the Royal Transport weighed anchor and made for Margate, where the Thames estuary meets the sea. There, he found an English naval squadron, again commanded by Admiral Mitchell, waiting to escort him back to Holland. The crossing was stormy and exciting, more so than most of the Russians on board could have wished, but Peter relished the waves seething over the decks.*

  Although he never returned to England, Peter had enjoyed his taste of English life. He found there much that he liked: informality, a practical, efficient monarch and government, good

  *Sadly, Peter never sailed again on his splendid English yacht. She was loaded at Amsterdam with Peter's own collection of instruments and curiosities bought during his tour, and sent back to Archangel. There, on Peter's orders, she was met by Franz Timmerman, who was commanded to bring her through the network of rivers and lakes in northern Russia to Yaroslavl and thence down the Volga. One day, when his Volga-Don canal was finished, Peter hoped to bring her down the Don to Azov and sail her on the Black Sea. But the Royal Transport drew eight feet and Timmerman could not bring her even as far as the Volga. She returned to Archangel, where she remained for fifteen years. In 1715, when Russia had become a Baltic naval power, Peter ordered her refitted and sailed around the North Cape to join him in the Baltic. She entered the Baltic and was lost in a storm off the coast of Sweden.

  drinking and good talk about ships, gunnery and fireworks. Although he was not intimate with William, the King had opened every door, he had given Peter access to his shipyards, mint and gun foundries, he had displayed his fleet, he had allowed the Russians to talk with everyone and make notes. Peter was grateful and carried away the highest respect not only for English ship design and workmanship, but for the island as a whole. In Russia, he once said to Perry that "if he had not come to England he had certainly been a bungler." Further, continued Perry, "His Majesty has often declared to his lords, when he has been a little merry, that he thinks it a much happier life to be an admiral in England than a tsar in Russia." "The English island," Peter said, "is the best and most beautiful in the world."

  17

  LEOPOLD AND AUGUSTUS

  In Amsterdam, the Embassy was overjoyed to see the Tsar again; they had felt themselves abandoned as Peter's visit of weeks in England extended over four months. They had spent the winter traveling around the small country, gaining everywhere a formidable reputation as drinkers. They tried on ice skates, unknown in Russia—but, not realizing that the ice in Holland was thinner than the winter ice of Russia, they frequently fell through. When this happened, the Dutch were amazed that, rather than change out of their icy, dripping clothes, the Russians were content with another drink. But, despite their revels, the winter had not been wasted. Peter returned to find large piles of material, weapons, special instruments and naval stores waiting. More important, the Embassy had recruited 640 Dutchmen, among them Rear Admiral Cruys and other naval officers (eventually, Cruys persuaded 200 Dutch naval officers to come to Russia), seamen, engineers, technicians, shipwrights, physicians and other specialists. To carry them and the equipment purchased back to Russia, ten ships had been chartered.

  On May 15, 1698, Peter and the Great Embassy left Amsterdam for Vienna, their route lying through Leipzig, Dresden and Prague. In Dresden, capital of the electoral state of Saxony and a city so rich in architecture and art treasures that it was called "the

  Florence on the Elbe," Peter was received especially warmly. The Elector Augustus was now also King Augustus II of Poland, and, on Peter's arrival, he was away in his new kingdom, but he had left instructions that the Tsar, to whom in part he owed his new throne, be handsomely welcomed as a royal guest.

  Peter's initial reaction to Dresden hospitality was hostile. As he entered the city, he saw people staring at him, not only because of his rank but also because of his unusual height. His sensitivity to these stares had grown, not diminished, during his months in the West, and he threatened to leave Dresden immediately unless they could be stopped. Prince Furstenberg, the Elector's representative and Peter's host, attempted to calm the Tsar. When, on the night of his arrival and despite the hour, Peter asked to visit the famous Dresden Kunstkammer Museum and the special private treasury known as the Green Vault, Furstenberg quickly agreed. After midnight, the Tsar, the Prince and the museum's curator entered the Elector's palace, where the museum was housed in seven rooms on the top floor. The Kunstkammer, or "cabinet of curiosities," had been founded more than a century before to gather and display both natural wonders and man-made objects of special interest. Its collection of elaborate clocks and mechanical instruments, mining and manufacturing tools, along with rare books, parade armor and portraits of notables, was open to all scholars and persons of good birth and was exactly the kind of thing to fascinate Peter. He resolved, one day, to create a similar Kunstkammer in Russia. The Green Vault, so named because its walls were painted the national color of Saxony, was a secret storehouse, accessible through a single door in the Elector's living quarters. Here the rulers of Saxony kept a collection of jewels and precious objects which were among the richest in Europe. Peter was absorbed by both collections and remained, examining one instrument or object after another, until dawn.

  The following evening, Furstenberg gave a small private dinner that expanded into the kind of noisy, boisterous party the Russians l
oved. Trumpeters, oboists and drummers were called in to provide music. At Peter's request, five ladies were also invited, including the beautiful Countess Aurora von Konigsmark, mistress of the Elector and mother of the future great marshal of France, Maurice de Saxe. The party went on until three a.m. with Peter exuberantly taking the drumsticks and playing "with a perfection that far surpassed the drummers." After this night of drinking, music and dancing, Peter set off in a light-hearted mood for Prague and Vienna, and as soon as the Tsar was out of town, the relieved and weary Prince Furstenberg wrote to the Elector: "I thank God that all has gone off so well, for I feared that I could not fully please this fastidious gentleman."

  Four miles north of the old city of Vienna rise the twin hills of the Kahlenberg and the Leopoldsberg; east of the city, the Danube flows southward toward Budapest; to the west lie the rolling meadows and forests of the Vienna Woods. Yet, for all its magnificent setting, Vienna did not compare in size with London, Amsterdam, Paris or even with Moscow. Primarily, this was because Vienna, unlike the other great cities of Europe, was not a great port or commercial trading center. Its sole function was to be the seat of the imperial House of Hapsburg, the crossroads and administrative center of the vast sweep of territory from the Baltic to Sicily which owed allegiance to the Emperor Leopold I. In fact, in Peter's time, the Emperor ruled two empires. The first was the old Holy Roman Empire, a loosely bound union of almost independent states in Germany and Italy, whose ties and ancient traditions went back through a thousand years to the empire of Charlemagne. The other empire, quite separate and distinct, was the collection of traditional Hapsburg lands in Central Europe— the Archduchy of Austria, the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Kingdom of Hungary and other territories in the Balkans recently conquered from the Turks.

  It was the first empire, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which gave the Emperor his title and immense prestige and justified the enormous size and magnificence of his court. In fact, however, the title was hollow and the empire itself was almost wholly facade. The rulers of this congerie of disparate states, the hereditary electors,* margraves, landgraves, princes and dukes, determined for themselves the religion of their subjects, the size of their armies and whether, when war came, they would fight beside the Emperor, against him, or remain neutral. None of these great lords gave more than a passing thought to their ties to their imperial master when it came to matters of serious policy. They, or their representatives, sat in the Imperial Diet at Regensburg, originally the empire's legislative organ, now purely consultative and decorative. The Emperor could make no law without the Diet's consent, and the discussions never reached consent, as the envoys argued endlessly over precedence. When an emperor died, the Diet met and automatically elected the next head of the House of Hapsburg. This was traditional, and tradition was the single feature of the ancient empire which had not been allowed to die.

  Despite the hollowness of his imperial title, the Emperor was

  *The title "elector" was given to the seven Germanic princes who held the privilege of electing the Holy Roman Emperor.

  not unimportant. The strength of the House of Hapsburg, its revenues, its army and its power, stemmed from the states and territories it really ruled: Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Hungary and new claims and conquests which stretched across the Carpathians into Translyvania and across the Alps to the Adriatic. There were also Hapsburg claims to the throne of Spain with all of Spain's possessions in Europe, including Spain itself, the Spanish Netherlands, and Naples, Sicily and Sardinia. This second empire looked to the south and east for dangers and opportunities. Lying as a barrier between Western Europe and the Balkans, it believed in its holy mission to defend Christianity against the advance of the Ottoman Empire. The Protestant princes to the north had no interest in the Emperor's fears or ambitions in the Balkans; they saw these matters as private enterprises of the House of Hapsburg, and if the Emperor wanted their support in any of them, he usually had to buy it.

  Austria was the center and Vienna the heart of the Hapsburg world. It was a Catholic world, heavy with tradition and elaborate ceremony, actively guided by the Jesuits who were never far from the deliberations of the councils of state. Or from the elbow of the imperial personage in whom God, they assured him, had placed a special trust.

  His Most Catholic Majesty Leopold I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Archduke of Austria, King of Bohemia and King of Hungary, admitted no mortal man to be his equal except the Pope. In the eyes of the Hapsburg Emperor, His Most Christian Majesty the King of France was no more than an arriviste, an upstart of mediocre genealogy and odious pretensions. The Tsar of Muscovy was scarcely more notable than other Eastern princes who lived in tents.

  Leopold was unshakably certain of his position. The House of Hapsburg was the oldest reigning dynasty in Europe. For 300 years, in unbroken succession, the family had worn the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, whose history and prerogatives traced back to Charlemagne. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War had diminished the Imperial power, but in name, the Emperor was still the preeminent secular ruler of Christendom. His actual power might have faded in comparison to that of the King of France, but a sense of superiority—shadowy, medieval, semi-ecclesiastical—still prevailed. To preserve that sense of rank was one of Leopold's principal concerns. He maintained a staff of industrious historians and librarians who had managed by their research to link the Emperor's genealogy back through innumerable heroes and saints to Noah.

  The man who bore this heavy weight of genealogical responsibility was swarthy, of middling height, with the projecting lower jaw and protruding lower lip which traditionally marked (if not disfigured) the Hapsburgs. Although in 1698 he had already occupied the imperial throne for forty years and would sit on it seven years more, he had not been born to the crown. Instead, Leopold was a younger brother, bred for the church, who had been snatched from his theological studies only by the death of his older brother, Ferdinand. Elected emperor at eighteen, Leopold throughout his long reign preferred the quieter things: theology, the arts, court ceremony and the study of genealogy; he especially loved music and himself composed operas. He was not a warrior, although under him the empire was almost continually at war. When the Ottoman armies surrounded and besieged Vienna in 1683, the Emperor quietly departed, returning only after the Turks had been repelled and driven down the Danube. His character was melancholy, apathetic and obstinate. Yet, in his lethargy he somehow projected an austere dignity which was not without grandeur, part of which lay in his attitude toward himself. To be the emperor, he knew, was to stand at the summit of mankind.

  Every detail of daily life at the imperial court was designed to proclaim that sublime rank. In the chambers and corridors of his ancient Viennese palace, the Hofburg, the Emperor was the object of a rigid protocol more akin to Byzantium than to Versailles. Normally, the Emperor wore Spanish court dress: black velvet with white point lace, a short cloak, his brimmed hat turned up at one side, the red stockings worn only by Hapsburg emperors, and red shoes. On ceremonial days—which were frequent—he appeared in almost Eastern splendor, covered with scarlet-and-gold brocade embroidered with diamonds, surrounded by his Knights of the Golden Fleece, each wearing a long cloak of crimson velvet embroidered with gold. Thus attired, on religious feast days the Emperor went on foot to mass, marching at the head of a long procession. Whenever the Emperor and his family passed, courtiers bowed low and dropped to one knee. If his name was mentioned, even when he was in another room, all who heard it performed a similar genuflection. When Their Majesties dined alone, their dishes passed through twenty-four hands before reaching the imperial table. Wine was poured by a steward who filled the imperial glass while on one knee.

  The center of this stultifying ceremony was the Hofburg Palace, a confusing maze of buildings constructed over centuries, linked by corridors and dark staircases, tiny courtyards and grand hallways. Into this jumble of stone and masonry, which h
ad none of the symmetry and elegance of Versailles, the Emperor, his court of 2,000 noblemen and 30,000 servants were crammed alongside numerous government offices, a museum and even a hospital. Except when on occasional visits to the Favorits Palace just outside the city, where he hunted stags, or the Laxenburg Palace twenty miles away, where he set his falcons on the herons, Leopold ruled his empire from the Hofburg.

  In fact, the chaos of the Hofburg was symbolic of the chaos of the empire. The administration of the Hapsburg emperors was not effective. They could never weld together all the chanceries, councils, treasuries and other diverse organs of the Holy Roman Empire and the Hapsburg domains into a single cohesive structure of central government. Leopold himself, trained for theology, was an indecisive autocrat. Timid, apathetic, uncertain which course to take, he preferred to listen to advice, to mull endlessly over the contradictory recommendations of his advisors. A French diplomat described him as "a clock which always required rewinding." By the 1690's he was enveloped in a many-layered cocoon of committees, all quietly and vigorously warring with one another behind his back. Policy was made by default.

  At heart, Leopold and after him his two sons, the Emperors Joseph I and Charles VI, did not believe that a chaotic administration was a fundamental defect. The three of them, over almost a century, shared the view that the administration of government was a minor matter, infinitely less important not only for their own souls but for the future of the Hapsburg House than belief in God and support of the Catholic Church. If God was satisfied with them, He would ensure that the House continued and prospered. This, then, was the basis of their political theory and their practice of government: that the throne and empire had been fixed on them by God, and that "Our House, its interests and its destiny, were being watched over and would be upheld by a power grander than any on earth."