Massie Robert K. - Peter the Great : his life and world

PETER THE GREAT

His Life and World

Robert K. Massie

BALLANTINE BOOKS NEW YORK

Copyright 1980 by Robert K. Massie

Cover art property of NBC. 1985 National Broadcasting

Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number. 80-7635 ISBN 0-345-33619-4

This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Ballantine Books Trade Edition: October 1981

First Ballantine Books Mass Market Edition: February 1986

For

Mary Kimball Todd and James Madison Todd and in memory of Robert Kinloch Mass i e

CONTENTS

Part One: Old Muscovy

Old Muscovy

Peter's Childhood

"A Maiden of Great Intelligence"

The Revolt of the Streltsy

The Great Schism

Peter's Games

The Regency of Sophia

Sophia Overthrown

Gordon, Lefort and the Jolly Company

Archangel

Azov

Part Two: The Great Embassy

The Great Embassy to Western Europe

"It Is Impossible to Describe Him"

Peter in Holland

The Prince of Orange

Peter in England

Leopold and Augustus

"These Things Are in Your Way"

Fire and Knout

Among Friends

Voronezh and the Southern Fleet

Part Three: The Great Northern War

Mistress of the North

Let the Cannon Decide

Charles XII

Narva

"We Must Not Lose Our Heads"

The Founding of St. Petersburg

Menshikov and Catherine

The Hand of the Autocrat

Polish Quagmire

Charles in Saxony

The Great Road to Moscow

Golovchin and Lesnaya

Mazeppa

The Worst Winter Within Memory

The Gathering of Forces

Poltava

Surrender by the River

The Fruits of Poltava

Part Four: On the European Stage

The Sultan's World

Liberator of the Balkan Christians

Fifty Blows on the Pruth

The German Campaign and Frederick William

The Coast of Finland

The Kalabalik

Venice of the North

An Ambassador Reports

The Second Journey West

"The King Is a Mighty Man..."

A Visitor in Paris

The Education of an Heir

A Paternal Ultimatum

Flight of the Tsarevich

The Future on Trial

Charles' Last Offensive

King George Enters the Baltic

Victory

Part Five: The New Russia

In the Service of the State

Commerce by Decree

Supreme Under God

The Emperor in St. Petersburg

Along the Caspian

Twilight

851 Epilogue

MAPS

Russia during the youth of Peter the Great, 1672-1696

Moscow

The Swedish Empire at the beginning of the

Great Northern War

The Battle of Narva I

The Battle of Narva II

The Swedish invasion of Russia, 1708-1709

Poltava I

Poltava II

Poltava III

Poltava IV

The Pnith campaign

Europe in the time of Peter the Great 936-937

PETER THE GREAT

His Life an d World

OLD MUSCOVY

Around Moscow, the country rolls gently up from the rivers winding in silvery loops across the pleasant landscape. Small lakes and patches of woods are sprinkled among the meadow-lands. Here and there, a village appears, topped by the onion dome of its church. People are walking through the fields on dirt paths lined with weeds. Along the riverbanks, they are fishing, swimming and lying in the sun. It is a familiar Russian scene, rooted in centuries.

In the third quarter of the seventeenth century, the traveler coming from Western Europe passed through this countryside to arrive at a vantage point known as the Sparrow Hills. Looking down on Moscow from this high ridge, he saw at his feet "the most rich and beautiful city in the world." Hundreds of golden domes topped by a forest of golden crosses rose above the treetops; if the traveler was present at a moment when the sun touched all this gold, the blaze of light forced his eyes to close. The white-walled churches beneath these domes were scattered through a city as large as London. At the center, on a modest hill, stood the citadel of the Kremlin, the glory of Moscow, with its three magnificent cathedrals, its mighty bell tower, its gorgeous palaces, chapels and hundreds of houses. Enclosed by great white walls, it was a city in itself.

In summer, immersed in greenery, the city seemed like an enormous garden. Many of the larger mansions were surrounded by orchards and parks, while swaths of open space left as firebreaks burst out with grasses, bushes and trees. Overflowing its own walls, the city expanded into numerous flourishing suburbs, each with its own orchards, gardens and copses of trees. Beyond, in a wide circle around the city, the manors and estates of great nobles and the white walls and gilded cupolas of monasteries were scattered among meadows and tilled fields to stretch the landscape out to the horizon.

Entering Moscow through its walls of earth and brick, the traveler plunged immediately into the bustling life of a busy commercial city. The streets were crowded with jostling humanity.

Tradespeople, artisans, idlers and ragged holy men walked beside laborers, peasants, black-robed priests and soldiers in bright-colored caftans and yellow boots. Carts and wagons struggled to make headway through this river of people, but the crowds parted for a fat-bellied, bearded boyar, or nobleman, on horseback, his head covered with a fine fur cap and his girth with a rich fur-lined coat of velvet or stiff brocade. At street corners, musicians, jugglers, acrobats and animal handlers with bears and dogs performed their tricks. Outside every church, beggars clustered and wailed for alms. In front of taverns, travelers were sometimes astonished to see naked men who had sold every stitch of clothing for a drink; on feast days, other men, naked and clothed alike, lay in rows in the mud, drunk.

The densest crowds gathered in the commercial districts centered on Red Square. The Red Square of the seventeenth century was very different from the silent, cobbled desert we know today beneath the fantastic, clustered steeples and cupolas of St. Basil's Cathedral and the high Kremlin walls. Then it was a brawling, open-air marketplace, with logs laid down to cover the mud, with lines of log houses and small chapels built against the Kremlin wall where Lenin's tomb now stands, and with rows and rows of shops and stalls, some wood, some covered by tent-like canvas, crammed into every corner of the vast arena. Three hundred years ago. Red Square teemed, swirled and reverberated with life. Merchants standing in front of stalls shouted to customers to step up and inspect their wares. They offered velvet and brocade, Persian and Armenian silk, bronze, brass and copper goods, iron wares, tooled leather, pottery, innumerable objects made of wood, and rows of melons, apples, pears, cherries, plums, carrots, cucumbers, onions, garlic and asparagus as thick as a thumb, laid out in trays and baskets. Peddlers and pushcart men forced their way through the crowds with a combination of threats and pleas. Vendors sold pirozhki (small meat pies) from trays suspended by cords from their shoulders. Tailors and street jewelers, oblivious to all around them, worked at their trades. Barbers clipped hair, which fell to the ground unswept, adding a new layer to a matted carpet decades in the forming. Flea markets offered old clothes, rags, used furniture and junk. Down the hill, nearer the Moscow River, animals were sold, and live fish from tanks. On the riverbank itself, near the new stone bridge, rows of women bent over the water washing clothes. One seventeenth-century German traveler noted that some of the women selling goods in the square might also sell "another commodity."