Peter the Great
Page 1
Peter the Great
Book Jacket
Tags: Non Fiction, History
SUMMARY:
"Enthralling...As fascinating as any novel and more so than most!"THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWAgainst the monumental canvas of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and Russia, unfolds the magnificent story of Peter the Great. He brought Russia from the darkness of its own Middle Ages into the Enlightenment and transformed it into the power that has its legacy in the Russia of our own century.
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 MASSIE
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 323
Narva 335
"We Must Not Lose Our Heads" 351
The Founding of St. Petersburg 367
Menshikov and Catherine 380
The Hand of the Autocrat 395
Polish Quagmire 411
Charles in Saxony 428
The Great Road to Moscow · 443
Golovchin and Lesnaya 455
Mazeppa 472
The Worst Winter Within Memory 484
The Gathering of Forces 496
Poltava 508
Surrender by the River 525
The Fruits of Poltava 534
Part Four: On the European Stage
The Sultan's World 549
Liberator of the Balkan Christians 559
Fifty Blows on the Pruth 572
The German Campaign and Frederick William 587
The Coast of Finland 601
The Kalabalik 611
Venice of the North 622
An Ambassador Reports 633
The Second Journey West 643
"The King Is a Mighty Man . . ." 655
A Visitor in Paris 664
The Education of an Heir 677
A Paternal Ultimatum 688
Flight of the Tsarevich 700
The Future on Trial 711
Charles' Last Offensive 730
King George Enters the Baltic 743
Victory 754
Part Five: The New Russia
In the Service of the State 765
Commerce by Decree 790
Supreme Under God 803
The Emperor in St. Petersburg 816
Along the Caspian 840
Twilight
851 Epilogue 870
MAPS
Russia during the youth of Peter the Great, 1672-1696 15
Moscow 41
The Swedish Empire at the beginning of the
Great Northern War 304
The Battle of Narva I 344
The Battle of Narva II 348
The Swedish invasion of Russia, 1708-1709 457
Poltava I 506
Poltava II 515
Poltava III 518
Poltava IV 523
The Pnith campaign 576
Europe in the time of Peter the Great 936-937
PETER THE GREAT
His Life and 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 hi
gh 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."
At noon, all activity came to a halt. The markets would close and the streets empty as people ate dinner, the largest meal of the day. Afterward, everyone napped and shopkeepers and vendors stretched out to sleep in front of their stalls.
With the coming of dusk, swallows began to soar over the Kremlin battlements and the city locked itself up for the night. Shops closed behind heavy shutters, watchmen looked down from the rooftops and bad-tempered dogs paced at the end of long chains. Few honest citizens ventured into the dark streets, which became the habitat of thieves and armed beggars bent on extracting by force in the dark what they had failed to get by pleading during the daylight hours. "These villains," wrote an Austrian visitor, "place themselves at the comers of streets and throw swinging cudgels at the heads of those that pass by, in which practice they are so expert that these mortal blows seldom miss." Several murders a night were common in Moscow, and although the motive for these crimes was seldom more than simple theft, so vicious were the thieves that no one dared respond to cries for help. Often, terrorized citizens were afraid to even look out their own doors or windows to see what was happening. In the morning, the police routinely carried the bodies found lying in the streets to a central field where relatives could come to check for missing persons; eventually, all unidentified corpses were tumbled into a common grave.
Moscow in the 1670's was a city of wood. The houses, mansions and hovels alike, were built of logs, but their unique architecture and the superb carved and painted decoration of their windows, porches and gables gave them a strange beauty unknown to the stolid masonry of European cities. Even the streets were made of wood. Lined with rough timbers and wooden planks, thick with dust in summer or sinking into the mud during spring thaws and September rains, the wood-paved streets of Moscow attempted to provide footing for passage. Often, they failed. "The autumnal rains made the streets impassable for wagons and horses," complained an Orthodox churchman visiting from the Holy Land. "We could not go out of the house to market, the mud and clay being deep enough to sink in overhead. The price of food rose very high, as none could be brought in from the country. All the people, and most of all ourselves, prayed to God that He would cause the earth to freeze."
Not unnaturally in a city built of wood, fire was the scourge of Moscow. In winter when primitive stoves were blazing in every house, and in summer when the heat made wood tinder-dry, a spark could create a holocaust. Caught by the wind, flames leaped from one roof to the next, reducing entire streets to ashes. In 1571, 1611, 1626 and 1671, great fires destroyed whole quarters of Moscow, leaving vast empty spaces in the middle of the city.
These disasters were exceptional, but to Muscovites the sight of a burning house with firemen struggling to localize the, fire by hastily tearing down other buildings in its path was part of daily life.
As Moscow was built of logs, Muscovites always kept spares on hand for repairs or new construction. Logs by the thousand were piled up between houses or sometimes hidden behind them or surrounded by fences as protection from thieves. In one section, a large wood market kept thousands of prefabricated log houses of various sizes ready for sale; a buyer had only to specify the size and number of rooms desired. Almost overnight, the timbers, all clearly numbered and marked, would be carried to his site, assembled, the logs chinked with moss, a roof of thin planks laid on top and the new owner could move in. The largest logs, however, were saved and sold for a different purpose. Cut into six-foot sections, hollowed out with an axe and covered with lids, they became the coffins in which Russians were buried.
Rising from a hill 125 feet above the Moscow River, the towers, cupolas and battlements of the Kremlin dominated the city. In Russian, the word "kreml" means "fortress" and the Moscow Kremlin was a mighty citadel. Two rivers and a deep moat rippled beneath its powerful walls. These walls, twelve to sixteen feet thick and rising sixty-five feet above the water, formed a triangle around the crest of the hill, with a perimeter of a mile and a half and a protected enclosure of sixty-nine acres. Twenty massive towers studded the wall at intervals, each a self-contained fortress, each designed to be impregnable. The Kremlin was not impregnable; archers and pikemen and later musketeers and artillerymen could be made to surrender to hunger if not to assault, but the most recent siege, early in the seventeenth century, had lasted two years. Ironically, the besiegers were Russian and the defenders Poles, supporters of a Polish claimant, the False Dmitry, who temporarily occupied the throne. When the Kremlin finally fell, the Russians executed Dmitry, burned his body, primed a cannon on the Kremlin wall and fired his ashes back toward Poland.
In normal times, the Kremlin had two masters, one temporal, the other spiritual: the tsar and the patriarch. Each lived within the fortress and governed his respective realm from there. Crowding around the Kremlin squares were government offices, lawcourts, barracks, bakeries, laundries and stables; nearby stood other palaces and offices and more than forty churches and chapels of the patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. At the center of the Kremlin,! on the crest of the hill around the edges of a wide square, stood four magnificent buildings—three superb cathedrals and a majestic, soaring bell tower—which, then and now, may be considered the physical heart of Russia. Two of these cathedrals, along with the Kremlin wall and many of its towers, had been designed by Italian architects.
The largest and most historic of these cathedrals was the Assumption Cathedral (Uspensky Sobor), in which every Russian tsar or empress from the fifteenth century to the twentieth was crowned. It had been built in 1479 by Ridolfo Fioravanti of Bologna but reflected many essential Russian features of church design. Before beginning its construction, Fioravanti had visited the old Russian cities of Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Rostov and Novgorod to study their beautiful cathedrals, and then produced a Russian church with far more space inside than any Russian had ever seen. Four huge circular columns supported the onion-shaped central dome and its four smaller satellite domes without the complicated webbing of walls and buttressing previously thought necessary. This gave an airiness to the ceiling and a spaciousness to the nave entirely unique in Russia, where the power as well as the beauty of the Gothic arch were unknown.
Across the square from the Assumption Cathedral stood the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, where the tsars were entombed. Built by Alvesio Novy of Milan, it was considerably more Italianate than either of its two sisters. Inside, amidst its several chapels, the deceased rulers were clustered in groups. In the middle of one small room, three carved stone coffins held Ivan the Terrible and his two sons. Othe
r tsars lay in rows along the walls, their coffins of brass and stone covered with embroidered velvet cloths with inscriptions sewn in pearls around the hems. Tsar Alexis, father of Peter the Great, and two of his sons, Fedor and Ivan VI, also both tsars, would lie in this small room, but they would be the last. Alexis third son, Peter, would build a new cathedral in a new city on the Baltic where he and all the Romanovs who followed would be entombed.*
The smallest of the three cathedrals, the Cathedral of the Annunciation, had nine towers and three porches, and was the only one designed by Russian architects. Its builders came from Pskov, which was famous for its carved stone churches. Used extensively as a private chapel by the tsars and their families, its iconostasis was set with icons by the two most famous painters of this form of religious art in Russia, Theophanes the Greek, who came from Byzantium, and his Russian pupil Andrei Rublev.
On the eastern side of the square, towering above the three
·Except Peter II, whose body is in the Kremlin, and Nicholas II, the last tsar, whose body was destroyed in a pit outside Ekaterinburg in the Urals.
cathedrals, stood the whitewashed brick bell towers of Ivan the Great, the Bono Tower and the Tower of the Patriarch Philaret, now joined into a single structure. Beneath its highest cupola, 270 feet in the air, rows of bells hung in laddered niches. Cast in silver, copper, bronze and iron, in many sizes and timbres (the largest weighed thirty-one tons), they rang with a hundred messages: summoning Muscovites to early mass or vespers, reminding them of fasts and festivals, tolling the sadness of death, chiming the happiness of marriage, jangling warnings of fire or booming the celebration of victory. At times, they rang all night, driving foreigners to consternation. But Russians loved their bells. On holidays, the common people crowded to the belfries to take turns pulling the ropes. The first bells usually sounded from the Kremlin, then the sound was taken up by all the bells of Moscow's "forty times forty" churches. Before long, waves of sound passed over the city and "the earth shook with their vibrations like thunder" according to one awed visitor.
From building cathedrals, the Italian architects turned to building palaces. In 1487, Ivan the Great commissioned the first stone palace of the Kremlin, the Palace of Facets (Granovitaya Palata), so named because its gray stone exterior walls were cut prismatically to resemble the surface of facet-cut jewels. Its most notable architectural feature was a throne room seventy-seven feet on each side, whose roof was supported by a single, massively arched column in the middle. When foreign ambassadors were being received, and on other state occasions, a small curtained window near the ceiling permitted the cloistered women of the tsar's family to peak down and watch.