Under the name Kindler and hidden in a group of twelve Saxon engineers hired by the Tsar, Patkul accompanied Augustus' personal representative, General George von Carlowitz, from Warsaw to Moscow to attempt to persuade Peter.* But in Moscow, the two conspirators found themselves in a peculiar situation. The Swedes, sensing that alliances were being formed against them, hoped to mollify Peter by sending to Moscow in the summer of 1699 a splendid embassy which would announce the accession of King Charles XII and ask for confirmation and renewal of all existing treaties, as was customary on the accession of a new monarch. The splendor of the Swedish embassy was meant to atone for the slight which the Tsar complained of having suffered when he passed through Riga in 1697. When the embassy arrived at the Russian frontier in mid-June, Peter's uncle Lev Naryshkin received them politely, but explained that they would have to await the return of the Tsar, who was with his fleet at Azov.
Peter's return to Moscow in early October was a dramatic moment. He found two embassies waiting for him: the formal Swedish embassy asking him to confirm the existing treaties of peace, and the secret Polish embassy of Carlowitz and Patkul asking him to make war on Sweden. Thereafter, for weeks, the
*The agreement at Rawa between Peter and Augustus had been only an exuberant burst of camaraderie. So far, there was no actual plan, either of alliance or of campaign.
two sets of negotiations continued side by side, the formal and unwelcome negotiations with Sweden being conducted openly at the Foreign Office, while the serious secret negotiations with Carlowitz were conducted personally by Peter at Preobrazhenskoe, with only Fedor Golovin and an interpreter, Peter Shafirov, present at the Tsar's side.
The Swedes were aware of Carlowitz' presence and knew that some kind of treaty was being discussed, but thought it was a peaceful treaty and suspected nothing of the truth. To avoid arousing suspicions, the Swedes were received with honor by Peter, to whom they presented a full-length picture of their new young King on horseback. And to bolster the deception, Peter went through the formality of confirming the previous treaties with Sweden, but, as a slight salve to his conscience, he avoided kissing the cross at the ceremony of signature. When the Swedish ambassadors noticed the omission and complained, Peter said that he had already taken an oath to observe all treaties when he came to the throne and that it was the Russian custom not to repeat it. On November 24, the Swedish ambassadors had a final audience with the Tsar. Peter was genial and gave them a formal letter from himself to King Charles XII confirming the treaties of peace between Sweden and Russia.
Meanwhile, the mission of Carlowitz and Patkul was proceeding successfully. Peter received Carlowitz (Patkul remained in disguise) and read the letter presented by Carlowitz but probably written by Patkul. In return for the Tsar's alliance, it offered Augustus' promise to support Russia's claims to Ingria and Karelia. Peter then called in Heins, the Danish ambassador, who was privy to the secret negotiations as Denmark had already signed its treaty of alliance with Poland. Heins endorsed the promise of the letter. Thus it was that, only three days after the Swedish embassy left Moscow, Peter signed a treaty agreeing that Russia would attack Sweden, if possible in April 1700. The Tsar carefully refused to name a specific date, and a clause stated that the Russian attack would come only after the signing of a peace or armistice between Russia and Turkey. Once the agreement was signed, Patkul, who until now had remained in the background, was presented to the Tsar. Two weeks later, Carlowitz left Moscow for Saxony, planning to take the road through Riga and use the opportunity to examine the city's fortifications.
Peter, having promised to attack a major Western military power within a few months, now turned to the enormous work of preparing for war. Since his return from the West, he had been primarily interested in the fleet. Overnight, he had to shift his attention from the building of ships to the accumulation of guns, powder, wagons, horses, uniforms and soldiers. With the Streltsy demoralized and only a few regiments still actually in existence, Peter's professional army consisted primarily of the four regiments of Guards, the Preobrazhensky, Semyonovsky, Lefort and Butursky. Thus, if the Tsar was to keep his promise to Augustus, an entire new army had to be raised, trained, equipped and placed on the march within three months.
Peter acted quickly. A decree was addressed to all civil and clerical landowners. Civil landowners were required to send the Tsar one serf recruit for every fifty serf households in their possession. Monasteries and other ecclesiastical landlords were more severely taxed at the rate of one recruit for every twenty-five households. Peter also asked for volunteers from among the freemen of the population of Moscow, promising good pay: eleven roubles a year plus an allowance for drink. All these men were ordered to muster at Preobrazhenskoe in December and January, and through the wintry days a stream of recruits poured into Peter's camp. Twenty-seven new infantry regiments were to be formed on the model of the four Guards regiments, with two to four battalions apiece. Now, Peter professionally felt the loss of Patrick Gordon. Lacking the Scotsman's experienced hand, Peter supervised the training himself, assisted by General Avtemon Golovin, the commander of the Guard, and Brigadier Adam Weide. Meanwhile, Prince Nikita Repnin was sent to enlist and train men from the towns along the lower Volga.
Although the commanders of the three new army divisions, Golovin, Weide and Repnin, were Russian, all of the regimental commanders were foreigners, some of whom had seen action in the Crimean and Azov campaigns, others newly hired from the West. Peter's greatest difficulty was with the older Russian officers, many of whom had no taste whatever for going to war. To replace those who were cashiered, many courtiers were enrolled as officers. They seemed to pick up soldiering so quickly that Peter exclaimed prematurely, "Why should I spend money on foreigners when my own subjects can do as well as they?" Subsequently, nearly all the court chamberlains and other palace officials entered the army.
The new soldiers were uniformed on the German model with coats of dark-green cloth, breeches, boots and three-cornered hats. They were armed with muskets and bayonets, and a beginning was made in teaching them to march in columns, deploy into line and stand firmly side by side and fire on command. The artillery, which was numerous—thanks to 300 guns sent as a present from King Charles XII to help the Tsar fight the Turks—was under the command of Prince Alexander of
Imeritia. The Prince had been Peter's companion in Holland and had devoted himself to the study of artillery at The Hague. Brigadier Weide, who had served in the Austrian army under Prince Eugene of Savoy, drew up the articles of war under which infractions of army discipline were to be severely punished.
Through the spring of 1700, Peter was caught suspended between the war he wanted to end and the war he wanted to begin. During the negotiations in February 1700, the rumors from Constantinople grew so ominous that he decided he must prepare for renewal of the war with the Sultan. He left his new regiments drilling at Preobrazhenskoe and went to Voronezh, where he worked furiously to help make his ships ready for war. Near the end of April, in the presence of his son, his sister and many boyars, he launched the sixty-four-gun ship Predestination, on which he himself had worked.
While Peter was at Voronezh, both of his Baltic allies struck their planned blows at Sweden. In February, without any declaration of war, 14,000 Saxon troops suddenly invaded Livonia and laid siege to the great fortress city of Riga. The Swedes counterattacked and drove them back, killing General Carlowitz in the process. Peter was disgusted, especially with Augustus; the King, he said, should have been in Livonia leading his troops himself instead of "diverting himself with women" in Saxony.
In March, the second of Peter's new allies, Federick IV, invaded the territories of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, south of Denmark, with 16,000 men and laid siege to the town of Tonning. Now, if ever, was the time for Peter to add his weight by striking at Ingria. But the Tsar's hands were tied. "It is a pity," he replied to Golovin, "but there is nothing to be done. I have not heard from Constantinople."
"You cannot think that I would begin an unjust war against the King of Sweden and break an eternal peace which I have just promised to preserve." Knipercrona begged the Tsar to forgive his wife. Peter embraced the Ambassador affectionately and swore that if the King of Poland captured Riga from Sweden, "I will tear it from his hands." Thoroughly convinced, Knipercrona reported in his dispatch to Stockholm that the Tsar had no thought of aggression against Sweden.*
The spring passed, then June, then July, and still no word came from Constantinople. On July 15, Peter received a Saxon envoy, Major General Baron Langen. Augustus, who finally had joined his army before Riga, begged the Tsar to begin military operations. Reported Langen: "The Tsar sent his ministers out of the room, and, with tears in his eyes, said to me in broken Dutch how grieved he was at the delay in concluding a peace with Turkey. . . . [He said that] he had ordered his ambassador to conclude a peace or truce in the quickest possible time even to his own loss, in order to have his hands free to aid his allies with all his forces." Finally, on August 8, news from Constantinople arrived. The thirty-year armistice had been signed on July 3, and Ukraintsev's messenger, traveling by the fastest means, reached Moscow with the news thirty-six days later.
Free at last to act, Peter moved with great speed. On the evening of the day Ukraintsev's dispatch arrived, the temporary peace with Turkey was celebrated in Moscow with an extraordinary display of fireworks. The following morning, war with Sweden was declared in the manner of the old Muscovite tsars, from the Bedchamber Porch in the Kremlin. "The Great Tsar has directed," the proclamation went, "that for the many wrongs of the Swedish king, and especially because during the Tsar's journey through Riga he suffered obstacles and unpleasantness at the hands of the people of Riga, his soldiers shall march in war on the Swedish towns." The proclaimed objectives of the war were the provinces of Ingria and Karelia, "which by the Grace of God and according to law have always belonged to Russia and were lost during the Time of Troubles." That same day, Peter dispatched a handwritten letter to Augustus informing him of what had happened and saying, "We hope, by the help of God, that Your Majesty will not see other than profit."
*Then, as now, morality played a peripheral role in war and diplomacy. Most states seized whatever territories or colonies they could. In Peter's view, these coastal regions were ancient Russian lands; now was simply the best time to reclaim them. Similarly, Peter's simultaneous negotiations with the Swedes and the Saxons were nothing to be ashamed of in that day. Similar characters were acted out routinely in London, Paris. Vienna and Constantinople.
* * *
Thus began the Great Northern War, or, as Voltaire called it, "The Famous War of the North." For twenty years, two youthful sovereigns, Peter and Charles, would wrestle for supremacy in a conflict that would settle the fate of both their empires. In the early years, 1700 to 1709, Peter would be on the defensive, preparing himself, his army and his state for the hour when the Swedish battering ram would be pointed toward his backward kingdom. In these years, amidst the storms of war, Russia would continue her transformation. Reforms would be made not as a result of careful planning and methodical execution, but rather as desperate, hurried measures dictated by the need to stave off a relentless enemy. Later, after Poltava, the tide would turn, but both sovereigns would fight on, the one enmeshed and distracted by largely useless alliances, the other burning to avenge his defeat and restore his crumbling empire.
23
LET THE CANNON DECIDE
Peter of Russia and Charles of Sweden, Frederick of Denmark, Augustus of Poland, Louis of France, William of England, Leopold of Austria and most of the other kings and princes of the era eventually submitted their differences to the decision of war. War was the final arbiter between nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as, indeed, it has been in the twentieth. Dynastic rivalries, the drawing of frontiers, possession of cities, fortresses, trade routes and colonies, and ultimately the destinies of kingdoms and empires all were decided by war. The axion was succinctly put by one of Louis XIV's young officers: "There is no judge more equitable than cannon. They go directly to the goal and they are not corruptible."
For fifty years, through the second half of the seventeenth century, the armies of France were the most powerful and most admired in Europe. Its forces were overwhelmingly the largest on the continent. In peacetime, it kept a standing army of 150,000, and expanded this to 400,000 in time of war. During the War of the Spanish Succession, eight large French armies, each commanded by a marshal of France, campaigned simultaneously in the Low Countries, on the Rhine, in Italy and in Spain. Thanks to the King and Louvois, France's soldiers were the best trained, the best equipped and the best supplied in Europe. Thanks to generals such as Turenne, Cond6 and Vendome, they were overall also the most successful. The Duke of Marlborough's shattering defeat of Marshal Tallard at Blenheim (the Duke was aided by his companion-in-arms, Prince Eugene of Savoy) was the first great defeat of the French army since the Middle Ages.
Throughout this period, the size, firepower and destructiveness of all armies was growing rapidly. As energetic finance ministers enlarged the tax base for the support of armies, increasing numbers of troops could be put into the field. In the first half of the seventeenth century, a European battle might see as few as 25,000 troops involved on both sides. In 1644, at Marston Moor, the decisive battle of the English Civil War, Cromwell pitted 8,000 men against an equal number under King Charles I. Sixty-five years later, at Malplaquet, Marlborough led 110,000 allied troops against 80,000 Frenchmen. At the peak of its strength, Sweden, with a home population of a million and a half, supported an army of 110,000. Peter, even after dismissing the disorganized, irregular mass of feudal soldiery he inherited from Sophia and Golitsyn, eventually raised and trained a completely new army of 220,000.
Although, as wars dragged on, conscription became necessary to fill the ranks, most armies in this period were made up of professional soldiers. Many of these, both officers and men, were foreign mercenaries—in that time, a soldier could join any army he liked as long as he did not fight against his own king. Frequently, kings and princes who were at peace rented out whole regiments to warring neighbors. Thus, Swiss, Scots and Irish regiments served in the French army; Danish and Prussian regiments in the Dutch army; and the Hapsburg Imperial army contained men from all the German states. Individual officers changed sides as often as modern executives change jobs, nor did their past or future employers bear them ill-will for their actions. As a twenty-four-year-old colonel, Marlborough served under Marshal Turenne against the Dutch and was personally praised at a great parade by Louis XIV himself. Later, in command of a predominantly Dutch army, Marlborough almost toppled the Sun King from his throne. For a while, both before and after Peter came to the throne, most of the senior officers in the Russian army were foreigners; without them, the Tsar could have fielded little more than a mob.
Customarily, these professional soldiers conducted warfare by accepted rules. There was a seasonal rhythm to war which was rarely broken: summer and autumn were for ca
mpaigning and battles; winter and spring were for rest, recruiting and replenishment. In the main, these rules were dictated by the weather, the crops and the state of the roads. Every year, the armies waited until the spring thaw had melted the snows and enough fresh green grass had sprouted to nourish the horses of the cavalry and baggage trains. In May and June, once the mud had dried to dust, long columns of men and wagons began to move. The generals had until October to maneuver, besiege and offer battle; by November, when the first frost appeared, the armies began going into winter quarters. These rules were almost religiously observed in Western Europe. Through ten consecutive years of campaigning on the continent, Marlborough regularly left the army in November and returned to London until spring. In the same months, senior French officers returned to Paris or Versailles. A long-vanished aspect of those civilized wars was the issuance of passports to prominent officers to travel through hostile territory on the shortest routes for winter leave. Common soldiers, of course, did not enjoy these priviliges. There was no question of home leave for them until the war was over. If they were fortunate, they were confined to billets in town through the coldest months. All too often, however, they were crowded into winter encampments of huts and hovels, prey to frostbite, disease and hunger. In the spring, the gaps chewed through their ranks by pestilence would be filled by fresh consignments of recruits.
On the march, an army of .this period moved slowly, even when its passage was unopposed; few armies could move faster than ten miles a day, while the average daily march was five. Marlborough's historic march from the Low Countries up the Rhine to Bavaria before the Battle of Blenheim was considered a "lightning stroke" at the time—250 miles in five weeks. The limiting factor usually was the artillery. The horses struggling to pull the cumbersome, heavy cannon, whose wheels fearsomely rutted the roads for those that followed, simply could not move faster.
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