Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  During Leopold's long reign, despite the apathy of the Emperor and the stifling quality of his bureaucracy, the fortunes of the empire actually rose. This may have been due to the influence of God, as Leopold believed, but more immediately, in the last decades of his reign, Leopold's prospects and power rested on the shining sword of Prince Eugene Savoy. The slight, stooping Prince was a Field Marshal of the Holy Roman Empire, commander of the Imperial armies, and—with the Duke of Marlborough and King Charles XII of Sweden—one of the most famous and successful military commanders of his age.

  Eugene was Italian and French by birth, his title stemming from a grandfather who was Duke of Savoy. He was born in Paris in 1663, the son of Olympia Mancini, one of the famous beauties of Louis XIV's court, and the Comte de Soissons. Because his face and frail body were so nondescript, his application to serve in the French army was rejected and he was designated for an ecclesiastical career; indeed, Louis XIV took to calling Eugene in public "Le Petit Abbe." The Sun King's gibes were to cost France dearly. At twenty Eugene made his way to the Emperor to ask for a command in the Imperial army. Leopold's somber court appealed to Eugene and his own personal intensity and lack of frivolity— qualities that had earned him mockery at Versailles—gained him favor in Vienna. Eugene's arrival coincided with the Turkish siege and, still only twenty, he took command of a dragoon regiment. In the years that followed, he gave up his desire for a principality in Italy and dedicated his life to the army. At twenty-six, he was a general of cavalry; at thirty-four, he was commander of the Imperial army in Hungary. There, on September 11, 1697, while Peter was at work in an Amsterdam shipyard, Eugene crushed the Sultan's main army, three times larger than his own, in a desperate battle at Zenta. The peace was brief. Soon he ws fighting the Emperor's enemies in the Low Countries, on the Rhine, in Italy and on the Danube. He participated in two of the Duke of Marlborough's greatest victories, at Blenheim and at Oudenard, modestly accepting the role of vice-commander. His military genius has been shaded by Marlborough's, but while Marlborough's reputation rests on ten years of command during the War of the Spanish Succession, Eugene was a soldier for fifty years, a commander-in-chief for thirty.

  On behalf of their august potentate, the Emperor's counselors and advisors, historians and genealogists, fought tenaciously over matters of protocol. The Tsar of Muscovy, however vast the size of his domains, could not conceivably be received as the equal of God's personal steward, the Emperor. The matter was further complicated by the fact that, officially, the Tsar would not be present. Yet somehow some notice had to be taken of the tall young man whose incognito was Peter Mikhailov. Such weighty problems took time to resolve; it required four days to work out the details of the Embassy's entry into Vienna, and an entire month of negotiations to agree to the manner in which the Emperor would receive the ambassadors. Meanwhile, Peter was anxious to meet the Emperor personally. The Austrian court officials were adamant that a Tsar incognito could not be publicly received by His Imperial Majesty, but Lefort's persistence bore fruit in a private meeting.

  The informal interview was held in the Favorits Palace,

  Leopold's summer villa on the outskirts of the city. Peter, in keeping with his incognito, was taken through a small door in the garden and up a back spiral staircase into the audience chamber. He had been carefully briefed by Lefort as to the agreed-on protocol for the meeting: the two monarchs were to enter the long audience hall simultaneously from doors at opposite ends; walking slowly, they were to meet exactly halfway, at the fifth window. Unfortunately, Peter, on opening the door and seeing Leopold, forgot what he had been told and, bounding toward the Emperor in long, quick strides, reached Leopold by the third window. The Austrian courtiers gasped. Protocol had been upset! What would happen to Peter? What would happen to them? But as the two sovereigns drew apart into a window recess to talk, with only Lefort as their interpreter, the courtiers were relieved to see that the Tsar was treating their master with great respect and deference. The two made quite a contrast: the short, pale, fifty-eight-year-old Emperor with his narrow, gloomy face framed by a large wig and a thick mustache hanging over his pendulous lower lip; and the abnormally tall, twenty-six-year-old Tsar with his vigorous, imperious, sometimes jerky gestures. The meeting was actually only an exchange of compliments and lasted fifteen minutes. Afterward, Peter descended into the palace garden and cheerfully rowed himself around a lake in a little rowboat.

  This first meeting set the tone for Peter's two-week stay in Vienna, his only visit to the imperial capital. Despite the annoying cluckings of the Austrian protocol officers, Peter remained in a good-natured and deferential mood. He called on the Empress and the imperial princesses and tried to be pleasant. He genially refused the allotment by the imperial court of 3,000 gulden a week for the Russian Embassy's expenses in Vienna. This sum, Peter protested, was far too much for his "dear brother" to pay, having just borne the burden of long wars; Peter reduced the sum by half. The Austrians, who had been fully informed as to Peter's character both in Moscow and throughout the tour, could scarcely believe that the subdued, modest figure before them was the man they had heard about. Foreign ambassadors spoke of his "delicate and polished manners." The Spanish ambassador wrote to Madrid, "Here he appears quite unlike the description of other courts and far more civilized, intelligent, with excellent manners and modest."

  In one important quarter in Vienna, Peter's surprising amiability and curiosity raised high hopes. The Catholic Church, especially the Jesuit College of Vienna, was aware from the reports of the imperial ambassador in London of Peter's lack of attachment to doctrinaire Orthodoxy and his interest in other religions. As the Archbishop of Canterbury and other Protestants had begun to think of converting the Tsar to Protestantism, so the Catholics began to hope that the monarch and, after him, his realm might be brought home to the Mother Church. These hopes were embodied in the Emperor's personal advisor, Father Woolf, a Jesuit priest who spoke some Russian. On St. Peter's Day, after attending an Orthodox service conducted by his own Russian priest traveling with the Embassy, Peter attended mass at the Jesuit College. There he heard Father Woolf preach "that the keys would be bestowed a second time, upon a new Peter, that he might open another door." Soon after, Peter attended a second mass, celebrated this time by Cardinal Kollonitz, the Primate of Hungary, and then joined the Cardinal for a lunch in the college refectory. From their conversation, it became clear that Peter was not thinking of conversion and the rumors that he was planning to go to Rome to be accepted into the church by the Pope himself were false. He was going to Venice to study galley building; if he went to Rome at all, it would be as a tourist, not as an applicant. After their meeting, the Cardinal described his visitor.

  The Tsar is a tall young man from twenty-eight to thirty years of age, with a dark complexion, proud and grave, and with an expressive countenance. His left eye, his left arm and left leg were injured by the poison given him during the life of his brother; but there remains of this now only a fixed look in his eye and a constant movement of his arm and leg. To hide this, he accompanies this involuntary motion with continual movements of his entire body, which by many people, in the countries which he has visited, have been attributed to natural causes, but really they are artificial. His wit is alert and quick; his manners, closer to civil than savage. The journey he has made has improved him greatly, and the difference from the beginning of his present travels and the present time is obvious, although his native coarseness still appears; chiefly in his relations with his followers, whom he holds in check with great severity. He has a knowledge of history and geography and he desires to know more about these subjects; but his strongest interest is in the sea and ships, on which he himself works manually.

  In the course of Peter's visit, Leopold staged one of his famous masked balls of the Viennese court. The setting was a supposed country inn, with the Emperor and Empress as innkeepers, and the court and foreign ambassadors all dressed as peasants in native costume. Prin
ce Eugene of Savoy was there. Peter was dressed for the evening as a Frisian peasant, and his partner drawn by lot, Fraulein Johanna von Thurn, was dressed as his Frisian mate. At dinner, all precedence was discarded and the Emperor and Empress sat where they liked at the table. During the toasts,

  Leopold found a happy formula for toasting his distinguished guest who was not officially there. Rising to face the masked young visitor, the Emperor said, "I believe you know the Tsar of Russia. Let us drink to his health." The following morning, the cup that the Emperor had used for the toast arrived at Peter's door as a gift. It was inlaid with rock crystal and worth 2,000 florins. The Tsar's pleasure in the company of his supper partner was measured the following day when she received a gift of four pairs of sables and 250 ducats.

  Returning this hospitality, on St. Peter's Day the Russian Embassy entertained its hosts by giving an all-night ball for one thousand guests. Fireworks lit by the Tsar's own hand, dancing, drinking and chases through the summer gardens brought a touch of the German Suburb to Vienna. At a state dinner given after the Emperor's reception of the Embassy, the health of the two consorts, the Empress and the Tsaritsa, was not drunk. This omission, arranged at the request of the Russians, was a sign of what was in store for Eudoxia when Peter returned to Moscow. During the dinner, when the talk turned to wine, Baron Konigsacker insisted that Lefort immediately taste six specimens he recommended. When the wine arrived and Lefort had tasted it, he asked that his tall friend standing as a servant behind his chair might taste it, too.

  Despite all the public amiability, Peter's mission to Vienna was a diplomatic failure. The Great Embassy had come to engage Austria's interest in resuming a more vigorous war against the Turks. Instead, they found themselves struggling to prevent an Austrian acceptance of a Turkish offer of peace which was highly favorable to Austria but not to Russia—a peace with all combatants agreeing to establishing the current status quo, each one keeping the territory he had won. For the Hapsburg monarch, this was a favorable settlement: Hungary and parts of Transylvania would remain under Hapsburg control. The idea of peace was enormously tempting. Besides, the shadow of Louis loomed once again in the West. It was time to disengage in the East, accept the fruits of victory, regroup and turn to face the Sun King.

  The only party not happy about the prospect of peace was Peter. Having renewed the war against Turkey himself in 1695 and 1696 with his campaigns against Azov, having captured that fortress and tasted the ambition to sail on the Black Sea, having moved mountains to build a fleet at Voronezh and come himself to Europe to learn shipbuilding and hire shipwrights, naval captains and seamen to build and man his Black Sea fleet, he could not permit

  the war to end until he had at least acquired Kerch and Turkish acceptance of his right to sail on the Black Sea.

  Peter expressed this demand personally to the imperial Foreign Minister, Count Kinsky, and through Kinsky to the Emperor. Understanding that the Austrians were determined to make peace, Peter concentrated on the terms of that peace. Primarily, he wanted to make certain the Emperor would insist that Turkey cede to Russia the fortress of Kerch, which commanded the junction of the Black Sea with the Sea of Azov. Without Kerch, Peter's new fleet could not gain entry into the Black Sea, but would be confined on the vast but essentially useless Sea of Azov. Kinsky replied that the peace congress, to which Russia would naturally be invited, had not yet begun. If Peter wanted Kerch, he had best seize it quickly before the treaty was signed; he doubted that the Turks could be forced to hand it over merely by diplomatic pressures at a conference table, "for the Turks are not accustomed to give up their fortresses without a fight." The Emperor promised at least that he would sign no treaty without the Tsar's full knowledge of its terms.

  This was the best that could be done, and Peter was impatient to leave: Vienna was an inland city with no docks or ships, and his next stop was to be Venice, where he hoped to learn the secrets of the marvelously efficient Venetian war galleys. By July 15, everything was arranged, the Embassy's passports were ready and some members of the suite were already on the road to Venice. Peter himself had just come away from his farewell audience with the Emperor when, at the moment of departure, the latest post from Moscow arrived, bringing an urgent letter with disturbing news from Romodanovsky. Four regiments of Streltsy, upon being ordered to march from Azov to the Polish frontier, had revolted and were instead marching on Moscow. As Romodanovsky was writing, they were only sixty miles from the capital, and loyal troops under Shein and Patrick Gordon had gone out to block their path. Nothing was said of the cause or extent of the revolt, and there was no further news as to what had happened. The letter had been a month on the way. Peter realized that while he had been dancing in peasant costume at a masked ball, the Streltsy might have occupied the Kremlin, his sister Sophia seized the Russian throne and he himself been branded a traitor.

  At once, he decided to abandon the rest of the tour, cancel the visit to Venice and return directly to Moscow to face whatever awaited him there. Hoping and trusting that his regents were still in power, he wrote to Romodanovsky:

  I have received your letter in which your grace writes that the seed of Ivan Mikhailovich [Miloslavsky] is sprouting. I beg you to be severe; in no other way is it possible to put out the flame. Although we are sorry to give up our present profitable business, yet, for the sake of this, we shall be with you sooner than you think.

  In terminating the Embassy, Peter decided to take with him the first two ambassdadors, Lefort and Golovin, to help in dealing with the situation in Moscow and leave the third, Voznitsyn, in Vienna to act as Russian representative at the coming peace negotiations with the Turks.

  On July 19, Peter left Vienna on the road to Poland, astonishing the Austrians, who knew nothing of his news and expected to see him depart in the direction of Venice. He traveled day and night, stopping only to eat and change horses. He had reached Cracow when a messenger, forwarded along to him at a gallop by Voznitsyn, brought fresh and brighter news. Shein had met and subdued the rebels; 130 had been executed and 1,860 were prisoners. Peter was relieved, and considered turning around for his intended visit to Venice. But he was halfway home, he had been away for a year and a half and there was much he wanted to do in Moscow. He continued eastward, slowing his pace, proceeding in a leisurely fashion toward the town of Rawa in Galicia. Here, for the first time, the Tsar met an extraordinary figure in whose diplomatic and military machinations Peter and Russia were to become deeply involved. This was Augustus, Elector of Saxony and now also, thanks to the support of both the Emperor and the Tsar, King of Poland.

  Poland, through whose territory the Tsar was journeying homeward, was the weakest and most vulnerable of all the great European states in Peter's day. In physical size and in population, it was a giant: Its frontiers sprawled from Silesia to the Ukraine, from the Baltic to the Carpathians; its population was eight million, one of the largest in Europe, yet, politically and militarily, Poland was insignificant. Indeed, the vast state remained intact only because its neighbors were too busy or too weak themselves to bother pulling it apart. For the full twenty years of the Great Northern War which was about to begin, Poland lay prostrate, its unhappy function being to provide a battleground for invading foreign armies. Before the military power of aggressive Sweden, whose entire empire counted only two and a half million subjects, giant Poland lay helpless.

  A number of factors were responsible for Poland's impotence. The first was an absence of any real racial or religious cohesion. Only half of Poland's people were actually Polish, and this half tended to be Catholic. The other half—Lithuanians, Russians, Jews and Germans—were a mixture of Protestant, Russian Orthodox and Jewish faiths. Among these richly varied strains, political and religious antagonism flourished. The Lithuanians fought among themselves and united only in common hatred of the Poles. The Jews, who made up a large percentage of the town populations, tended to dominate trade and finance, thus incurring the fear and envy of the Poles. The
Cossacks, whose nominal allegiance was to the Ukrainian Hetman, himself now a nominal subject of the Tsar, refused all orders from a Polish king.

  If the racial and religious situation was confused, the political situation was chaotic. Poland was a republic which had a king. The king was an elective, not a hereditary, monarch, exercising only such power as the nobility chose to grant to him—which usually was none. The monarch therefore became little more than a state ornament. Thus, at a time when France was leading most European nations toward centralization of power and royal absolutism, Poland was headed in the opposite direction, toward political disintegration and anarchy. The true rulers of Poland were the great Polish and Lithuanian lords who ruled over immense territories where no central authority was permitted to penetrate. In Lithuania, the mighty Sapieha family, dreaming of the throne themselves, categorically defied all kings of Poland.

  It was the polish and Lithuanian land-owning aristocrats who, in 1572, had insisted that the crown be made an elective office. It was they who at the end of the seventeenth century owned all the nation's wealth and exported flax, grain and timber from their vast estates down the Vistula to the Baltic. They kept all political power, not only electing their sovereign but imposing on him a formal pact, to be signed by the elected candidate before his coronation, setting forth the terms on which he could rule. The embodiment of their ideal was reached when the Diet, or Polish parliament, finally agreed that no bill could pass if a single member objected. Nor did king or Diet have any machinery for authorizing or collecting taxes. There was no systematic Polish foreign policy. "This unsettled nation [is] like the sea," complained an English diplomat. "It foams and roars . . . [but it] only moves when it is agitated by some superior power."