Peter The Great: Autocrat And Reformer

by W. Simmons, Michael

  At the time of Ivan’s death, Peter was busy constructing a fleet of Russian ships to launch an attack against the Ottoman empire at the fortress of Azov on the Black Sea. His sister Sophia, and her foreign minister Vasily Golitsyn, had prosecuted an unsuccessful war against the Ottomans by sending a land force over the steppes. Peter, however, fueled by ambition to make Russia a maritime power, divided his forces between land and river. The first siege of Azov, in 1695, was unsuccessful because Russian boats could not maintain control of the waterways to prevent the Turkish garrison from being resupplied. In preparation for the second siege, Peter converted the town of Voronezh on the Don River into a shipyard, where he ordered the construction of the Azov Flotilla: twenty-three galley ships, along with two ships of the line and four fire ships.

  Still in his early twenties, Peter was famous not only for his enormous height and strength but for his incredible physical energy; these qualities were useful to him as he personally directed construction and building of the ships under the tutelage of master carpenters. The second siege began on May 28. By July 19, the garrison at Azov had surrendered. This was the first significant military victory by Russian forces since the reign of Peter’s father, Alexis. Peter immediately set to work converting Azov into an Orthodox city, replacing mosques with churches; even more significantly, he ordered the construction of a Russian warm water port on the north shore of the Sea of Azov. But in order to have access to the wider world, Russia would have to control the strait of Kerch, between Azov and the Black Sea, which was still in Turkish hands.

  In order to achieve such a victory, Peter would need a proper fleet of sea-going vessels, not just galleys and barges. In other words, Russia would need a navy. Peter outsourced the cost of this endeavor to the wealthiest of his subjects. Every great monastery, each of the greatest landowners, all would be responsible for constructing one ship apiece. And in order that the Russian navy would not have to be solely dependent on the drafted expertise of foreigners, Peter ordered fifty men from the most powerful families in Russia to travel west at their own expense in order to learn from experts how to build and navigate these ships. This decree horrified the families of the men he had selected; hardly any Russians traveled to Europe, and it was well known that the west was full of corrupting influences. But Peter had even more shocking news to relate: he was sending high-ranking Russian ministers as ambassadors on a diplomatic mission to the courts of the kings of Europe. Furthermore, he would be traveling with them—not in state, with the royal trappings that befit a monarch in a foreign country, but incognito, under the name Peter Mikhailov. Peter had been the first Russian tsar ever to make a saltwater voyage; now he would be the first tsar ever to leave Russia in peacetime.

  The Great Embassy

  “He turned his whole mind to the construction of a fleet… A suitable place for ship-building was found on the River Voronezh, close to the town of that name, skillful shipwrights were called from England and Holland, and in 1696 there began a new work in Russia—the construction of great warships, galleys and other vessels. And so that this might be forever secured in Russia, and that he might introduce among his people the art of this business, he sent many people of noble families to Holland and other states to learn the building and management of ships; and that the monarch might not be shamefully behind his subjects in that trade, he himself undertook a journey to Holland; and in Amsterdam at the East India wharf, giving himself up, with other volunteers, to the learning of naval architecture, he got what was necessary for a good carpenter to know, and, by his own work and skill, constructed and launched a new ship.”

  Peter the Great, Maritime Regulations

  Speculation abounded, both in Russia and abroad, regarding Peter’s decision to visit Europe unencumbered by the trappings of his rank. To his horrified Russian ministers, Peter explained that he had made a vow to visit the tomb of St. Peter in Rome, to give thanks for having been safely delivered from the storm that nearly killed him during his first sea voyage. Some thought he was probably motivated by nothing more than the desire to amuse himself; Peter Mikhailovich, no doubt, would have more fun knocking about Europe than would Tsar Peter I, Autocrat of All Russia. The simplest explanation for his decision to travel incognito is probably that Peter had never been comfortable with the pomp and ceremony that came with being tsar. He had avoided ceremonial functions whenever possible, leaving them to his brother when Ivan was alive, ignoring them entirely afterwards. In his play regiments as a boy, and in the All-Drunken Synod afterwards, it had suited Peter to elevate his companions to mock-ranks of the most exalted stations, and to address them the way his boyars addressed him, as a groveling slave pathetically grateful for their notice. By pretending to be something other than he was, Peter gained a perspective on the world that is rarely granted to royalty. And it kept people guessing. It is easy to hide one’s true feelings behind customary obsequiousness; no doubt Peter found it useful to take the measure of a man when he had upset their preconceived notions of how to behave around royalty.

  His incognito aside, the purpose of Peter’s Great Embassy, as it was called, was primarily to solidify his alliance with other Christian kings against the Ottoman empire. He would need their support when his navy was at last finished and he went to war against the Turks for the Strait of Kerch. Peter would travel first to Poland, Russia’s historic enemy, which had become their first and principle ally against the Turks. He would travel next to Austria, and then to Venice, which had supplied Russia with master shipbuilders to assist in building the Azov Flotilla. Along the way, he would visit Holland and England, to further his knowledge of shipbuilding. The great Protestant nations were also the greatest shipwrights in the western world. Having spent so much of his childhood in the German Quarter of Moscow, Peter felt far more comfortable amongst Protestants than most Orthodox Russians did. He also intended to recruit as many experienced shipbuilders and sailors as could be enticed to resettle in Russia, and to purchase instruments and materials necessary in constructing Russian ships. Peter’s sojourn to western Europe was to last eighteen months; it was the last great educational experience in his self-administered curriculum as a student of European society and technology.

  Historian Robert Massie describes the company that set off on the Great Embassy thus:

  “Chosen to escort the ambassadors [Francis Lefort, Fedor Golovin, and Prokofy Voznitsyn] were twenty noblemen and thirty-five young Russian ‘volunteers’ who, like those dispatched in previous months, were going to England, Holland and Venice to learn shipbuilding, navigation and other nautical sciences… To complete the Embassy, there were chamberlains, priests, secretaries, interpreters, musicians… singers, cooks, coachmen, seventy soldiers and four dwarfs, bringing the total above 250. And somewhere in the ranks was a tall young man, brown-haired, dark-eyed, with a wart on the right side of his face, whom the others addressed simply as Peter Mikhailov. For members of the Embassy to address him as anything else, to reveal that he was the Tsar, or even to mention that the Tsar was present with the Embassy, was punishable by death.”

  (In fact, all of Europe knew that Peter was six feet, eight inches tall, in an era where the average man stood significantly less than six feet. He was easy to pick out. But pretenses had to be maintained.)

  Riga, Courland, and Brandenburg

  On his way to Europe, Peter passed through Riga, in Swedish Livonia, in the Baltic. Since Riga’s defenses existed for the exact purpose of keeping Russia at bay, the presence of the Russian tsar, who took a more or less scholarly interest in sketching the city’s fortifications, made the Swedes fairly nervous. At one point, a Swedish soldier threatened to fire his musket at the tsar if he did not cease drawing sketches and taking measurements. Obviously, the soldier knew only that the person he was threatening was a foreigner, not that he was the Russian tsar. Peter escaped unharmed and the soldier, who had only been doing his duty, was not punished, but Peter left Riga with a bad taste in his mouth. Three ye
ars later, he would attack the city in the opening move of the Great Northern War, using the rude treatment he had received there as an excuse.

  Peter’s journey took him next to the Duchy of Courland, a semi-independent possession of Poland, and then to Königsberg, in Brandenburg. The Embassy had learned its lesson in Riga; Peter technically maintained his incognito, but his identity was discreetly related to pertinent officials, so that no more diplomatic mishaps would occur. Peter negotiated a loose treaty of mutual assistance with Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, and took lessons from a captain of artillery, learning to fire cannon with precision. The Embassy’s next destination was Holland, but by this time word had spread throughout Europe that Peter was coming, and it was difficult to make rapid progress; all the ceremony he had hoped to avoid by traveling under a pseudonym was making its way to him regardless. He was waylaid by the Electresses of Hanover, Sophia and her daughter Sophia Charlotte, both of them well-educated, sophisticated, and intellectual, even by European standards. Peter had never met women of their kind before, and when they invited him to dinner, he found himself so bashful that he covered his face with his hands and murmured, “I don’t know what to say.” But they soon put him at his ease and enticed him into drinking and dancing. In the words of Electress Sophia:

  “The Tsar is very tall, his features are fine, and his figure very noble. He has great vivacity of mind, and a ready and just repartee. But, with all the advantages with which nature has endowed him, it could be wished that his manners were a little less rustic…. He was very gay, very talkative, and we established a great friendship for each other, and he exchanged snuff-boxes with my daughter… We regretted that we could not stay much longer, so that we could see him again, for his society gave us much pleasure. He is a very extraordinary man. It is impossible to describe him, or even to give an idea of him, unless you have seen him. He has a very good heart, and remarkably noble sentiments. I must tell you also that he did not get drunk in our presence, but we had hardly left when the people of his suite began to make ample amends. He is a prince at once very good and very bad; his character is exactly that of his country. If he had received a better education, he would be an exceptional man, for he has great qualities and unlimited natural intelligence.”

  Holland

  At the time of Peter’s visit in 1697, Holland was, despite its diminutive size, the wealthiest, most technologically advanced, and socially sophisticated nation in Europe, and it was one of the chief destinations on his trip west. All commercial sea traffic originating in Europe and traveling to points west and north was routed through the port cities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. For Peter, whose imagination was wholly preoccupied with ships and sea travel, his journey to Holland had something of the nature of a pilgrimage. In Courland and Brandenburg, Peter had been little more than a diplomatic tourist, but in Holland, in the small city of Zaandam, he proposed to make his home for many months as a student of Dutch shipbuilders. He traveled ahead of the rest of the Great Embassy, arriving in Zaandam with only a handful of chosen companions out of the retinue of two hundred. There, he encountered, by chance, a blacksmith named Gerrit Kist, who had helped teach Peter in Moscow when he was a boy. Overjoyed to meet an old friend in a foreign country, Peter took up lodgings in a tiny wooden house next to Kist’s, and got himself hired as a common workman at a nearby shipyard. When he had spare time, he visited the families of other Dutchmen he had known in Moscow, rewarding them and dining with them and giving them news of their scattered relations.

  Unfortunately for Peter, word of his arrival spread quickly, and once again, his remarkable physical characteristics—his immense height, the small wart on his cheek, and the involuntary twitching of his features under stress which sometimes extended to contractions of the limbs—made him all too easy for the average person to recognize. He was only able to spend about a week in Zaandam before it became impossible for him to work or observe work being done, due to the massive crowds of people thronging along the docks to get a glimpse of the Tsar of Muscovy. He was forced to quit the city entirely and retreat to Amsterdam, where the rest of the Embassy was soon due to arrive. It was in Amsterdam, rather than Zaandam, that Peter would linger for months as an apprentice ship builder.

  In order to spare Peter the crowds of curious spectators, the burgomaster of Amsterdam arranged for him to live and work in the private shipyards of the East India Company, where the public could not go and which were screened from view. There, he worked daily, helping to build a frigate which was christened The Apostles Peter and Paul. In the evenings, he read and replied to correspondence from Moscow. Before, he had taken little interest in the operations of his own government. But just prior to his departure, a few members of the Streltsy had been arrested and executed on a treason charge. Any hint of treachery from the Streltsy ignited Peter’s fury; he had never forgotten how they had terrorized him and murdered his family when he was a boy. Now that he was far from home, he took new interest in what was befalling Russia in his absence, especially where the Streltsy were concerned.

  Peter sometimes took breaks from the shipyards to study with leading Dutch experts in other fields: architecture, drawing and engraving, engineering, book printing, anatomy, medicine, and surgery. He learned how to perform a number of simple surgical procedures himself, such as tooth extractions, and was so eager to ply his skills that his companions on the Embassy learned not to complain of toothache within the tsar’s hearing—otherwise, they risked Peter ordering them to submit themselves to his learning and his bag of sharp surgical instruments.

  In 1698, after four months of working in a shipyard, Peter found himself better at handling an axe and saw than he had been before, but he still had not learned what he had come to Europe to learn. His goal was to discover simple, consistent principles of shipbuilding that could be reduced to blueprints and mathematical formulas that could be passed on to inexperienced carpenters in Russia who had never seen a frigate or a saltwater vessel larger than a yacht. But Dutch shipbuilding, though accomplished, was not yet consistent or scientific, and Peter was left dissatisfied. He decided to travel next to London, and wrote to William of Orange for permission to make the visit while maintaining his incognito. William and Peter had met several times in Amsterdam, and William responded to his request by gifting him with the fastest yacht ever produced by a European shipyard. Delighted, Peter once again left his Embassy behind, and set sail for England.

  England

  Peter had learned to idolize the fierce William of Orange as a boy, hearing tales from Dutch carpenters in the German Quarter of how the Dutch prince had repelled the French invasion of Holland by destroying the dikes and flooding the lowlands to keep the French armies out of Amsterdam. Some twenty years later, William and his wife Mary had become joint monarchs of England during the Glorious Revolution, making William de facto head of a European coalition whose goal was to check the expansionist ambitions of Louis XIV.

  William was considerably older than Peter, and very unlike him in temperament, but he was flattered by Peter’s admiration, and he was curious about the young tsar who was so keen to acquire first-hand knowledge of European technologies and crafts. More importantly, Peter cherished a vivid animosity against William’s bitter enemy, Louis XIV, and though Peter had been unsuccessful in persuading the Dutch heads of state to support his war against the Turks, having a common enemy provided firm diplomatic footing for Peter’s visit to the island nation. London was next in importance to Amsterdam among European port cities, the Thames providing access to a steady stream of merchant ships from all over the world. When Peter came to visit London, he was, in accordance with his own wishes, given a modest house along the river with doors that opened directly onto the water.

  While Peter was in England, rumors began to spread that the young Russian tsar was not a firm believer in the Orthodox faith, meaning that he (and through him, all of Russia) might be a prospect for conversion to Protestantism. The Bishop of Sali
sbury and the Archbishop of Canterbury had a long conversation with him at the request of William of Orange. The Bishop wrote the following description of Peter long after the tsar had departed England:

  “I waited often on him, and was ordered both by the King and the archbishop and bishops to attend upon him. I had good interpreters, so I had much free discourse with him. He is a man of very hot temper, soon inflamed, and very brutal in his passion; he raises his natural heat by drinking much brandy, which he rectified himself with great application. He is subject to convulsive motions all over his body, and his head seems to be affected with these. He wants not capacity, and has a larger measure of knowledge than might be expected from his education, which was very indifferent; a want of judgment with an instability of temper, appear in him too often and too evidently. He is mechanically turned, and seems designed by nature to be a ship-carpenter rather than a great prince. This was his chief study and exercise while he stayed here. He wrought much with his own hands, and made all about him work at the models of ships. He told me how he designed a great fleet at Azov, and with it to attack the Turkish empire; but he did not seem capable of conducting so great a design, though his conduct in his wars since this time has discovered a greater genius than appeared at that time. He was desirous to understand our doctrine, but he did not seem disposed to mend matters in Muscovy [by converting to Anglicanism]; he was, indeed, resolved to encourage learning, and to polish his people by sending some of them to travel in other countries, and to draw strangers to come and live among them. He seemed apprehensive still of his sister’s intrigues. There is a mixture of both of passion and severity in his temper. He is resolute but understands little of war, and seems not at all inquisitive that way. After I had seen him often, and had conversed much with him, I could not but adore the depth of the providence of God, that had raised up such a furious man to so absolute authority over so great a part of the world.”