Peter the Great
Autocrat and Reformer
By Michael W. Simmons
Copyright 2016 by Make Profits Easy LLC
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Table of Contents
Chapter One: The Heir, the Regent, and the Tsars
Chapter Two: The Tsar in Europe
Chapter Three: The Great Northern War
Chapter Four: Poltava and Alexei
Chapter Five: The Legacy of Peter the Great
Further Reading
Chapter One: The Heir, the Regent, and the Tsars
The Russia of Alexei I
“I shall now give you a further description of the Czar. He is a goodly person, about six foot high, well set, inclined to fat, of a clear complexion, light hair, somewhat a low forehead, of a stern countenance, severe in his chastisements, but very careful of his Subjects love. Being urged by a Stranger to make it death for any man to desert his colors, he answered, it was a hard case to do that, for God has not given courage to all men alike. He never appears to the people but in magnificence, and on festivals with wonderful splendor of jewels and attendants. He never went to any subject’s house but his governor’s when he was thought past all recovery. His sentinels and guards, placed round about his court, stand like silent and immoveable statues. No noise is heard in his palace, no more than if uninhabited. None but his domestics are suffered to approach the inward Court, except the lords that are in office. He never dines publicly but on festivals, and then his nobility dine in his presence. At Easter all the nobility and gentry, and Courtiers kiss the emperor’s hand, and receive eggs. Every meal he sends dishes of meat to his favorites from his own table. His stores of corn, and dried flesh are very considerable, with these he pays his Streltsy or Janissaries, giving them some cloth, but very little money; for they have all trades, and great privileges…
'Tis death for anyone to reveal what is spoken in the palace. I being curious to see the fine buildings for the flax and hemp, asked to what end they were built, but not a workman durst tell me, though they know it well enough; but they replied, God and the Emperor know best, this was all I could get from them. The Czars’ children are attended with children of their own bred up with them, and there is none of them but know their distance, and their degrees of bowing to all sorts of persons. None dare speak a word what passes in their Court.”
Samuel Collins, personal physician to Tsar Alexei I, 1660-1670
The Romanov dynasty had existed for less than sixty years when Peter the Great was born on June 9, 1672. In 1613, his grandfather, the sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov, had been offered the bankrupt, moth-eaten throne of the tsars after over a decade of chaos and civil war, known as the Time of Troubles, during which there had been no supreme ruler in Russia. Sickly, unprepared, lacking in allies, Michael had nonetheless managed to prepare his son Alexei superbly for the position he would inherit. Alexei I was well-educated for a Russian of his era, reform-minded, strictly religious, and beloved by his subjects. To peasant and noble alike, the tsar was father of his people, “batushka”, and his authority over them was supreme, as the authority of a father over his children was supreme. Alexei had a reputation for piety besides; he was called “the Young Monk” during the early years of his reign, and even priests of the Russian Orthodox church who visited the tsar’s court found it a challenge to keep up with his daily schedule of prayers and masses, which began before dawn and continued throughout the day.
Alexei’s first wife was Maria Miloslavsky, a girl four years his senior whom the tsar had selected out of a final group of six contestants in a traditional brideshow, a sort of beauty contestant for the daughters of the minor nobility. The winner of the brideshow became tsarina and her family were elevated to a place of honor and influence in the tsar’s court. Alexei’s union with Miloslavsky produced thirteen children. She died in 1669, after twenty-one years of marriage, due to complications from her fourteenth pregnancy. Despite the birth of so many children, only a few of them had survived infancy, and only two of them were boys. Of these two potential heirs, the elder, Fyodor, was sickly, and the younger, Ivan, was partially blind and considered to be “slow”—what sort of disability or impairment he had is uncertain, but it was plain that he could never rule Russia alone. Alexei decided to marry again, in the hopes of producing more sons.
The girl of nineteen whom Alexei chose as his next tsarina was remarkable, even unique, amongst the young Russian women of her day. Her name was Natalya Naryshkina, and she was the ward of Arteem Matveev and his wife Mary Hamilton, a Scottish refugee from Cromwell’s anti-royalist regime. Matveev and Hamilton lived in the German Quarter, the only area of Moscow where foreigners were permitted to reside, and they hosted regular salons where the science, art, literature, and technology of the west were celebrated. Alexei was a regular visitor to their home; unlike most Russians, he had studied western languages as a boy, and he took an interest in the lives of the foreigners dwelling in his city.
In the late 17th century, people at even the highest levels of Russian society were unaware and uncaring of the amusements or advancements that enlivened the existence of their European counterparts. Russia, though massive, was landlocked for most of the year when its sole port city, Archangel, was frozen over. The nations that bordered Russia, particularly Sweden and Austria, took care to keep their neighbor isolated, by checking any attempt to gain control of southern waterways in the Baltic. But Russia’s isolation was cultural and religious as well as geographical. The Orthodox church held no communion with Roman Catholicism; Russians looked east to Kiev, to Constantinople, for its religious and cultural near neighbors. Russian men wore long beards as a sign of their devotion to God, not unlike Muslim men; noble Russian women lived in the terem, on the upper floors of their family home, entirely segregated from the lives of the men. In public they veiled their faces and at church or at court functions they remained behind grilled partitions. As historian Robert Massie puts it,
“The higher a lady’s rank and the more gorgeous her wardrobe, the less likely she was to be seen. The Muscovite idea of women, derived from Byzantium, had nothing of those romantic medieval Western conceptions of gallantry, chivalry, and the Court of Love. Instead, a woman was regarded as a silly, helpless child, intellectually void, morally irresponsible, and, given the slightest chance, enthusiastically promiscuous. This puritanical idea that an element of evil lurked in all little girls affected their earliest childhood. In good families, children of opposite sexes were never allowed to play together—to preserve the boys from contamination. As they grew older, girls, too, were subject to contamination, and even the most innocent contact between youths and maidens were forbidden. Instead, to preserve their purity while teaching them prayer, obedience and a few useful skills such as embroidery, daughters were kept under lock and key. A song described them as ‘sitting behind thirty locked doors, so that the wind may not ruffle their hair, nor the sun burn their cheeks, nor the handsome young men entice them.’ Thus they waited, ignorant and undefiled, until the day came to thrust them into the hands of a husband.”
In stark contrast to such traditions, Mary Hamilton played hostess to her husband’s male visitors in the European style, guiding conversations, serving refreshments, arranging for entertainment—in short, being anything other than cloistered and invisible. At her side sat Natalya Naryshkina, learning social graces she could scarcely have learned anywhere else in Russia. Alexei met Naryshkina during a visit to Matveev’s house; she served him vodka, he engaged her in conversation, and was reportedly impressed by the modesty and cleverness blended in her responses. It was the first time he
had ever encountered a young Russian woman outside his own family in a social setting, so it is scarcely to be wondered that she made a significant impression on him. Alexei asked Matveev what arrangements had been made for the young woman’s future. Matveev explained that she was very popular with the men who visited his home, but no one had offered to marry her, due to the fact that neither he nor her father could offer much in the way of a dowry. Alexei told Matveev that he knew of a man who loved her, and had no need of a dowry, and that he, Alexei, could arrange the match if Naryshkina was willing. Matveev replied that, though Naryshkina would undoubtedly be delighted to consent to a match arranged for her by the tsar himself, she would probably wish to know the man’s name before she gave her consent. Alexei agreed that this was reasonable, and told Matveev that it was he who wished to marry her.
Alexei’s declaration was nothing less than earthshaking, both to the Matveev household and the entire Russian court. In Europe, intermarriage between the royal houses of different countries were arranged to secure alliances. In isolated Russia, however, the tsar could only marry an Orthodox bride, partly for religious reasons, partly because European families were unwilling to send their daughters on a long, dangerous journey to a country that was considered primitive, even savage. The tsar’s marriage, therefore, defined the balance of power in the Russian court. For as long as the tsar lived and the marriage prospered, the tsarina’s family enjoyed a position of power and influence second only to the Romanovs themselves. But a Russian royal marriage could be ended with considerably less trouble than a European one. Henry VIII had to defy a pope and establish a new religion with himself as its head in order to divorce his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. The Russian tsar had only to send his tsarina to a convent to become a nun, and the marriage became void, his remarriage cleared of legal obstacles. If the tsarina fell out of favor, by failing to produce a son or for any other reason, not only she, but her entire family, stood to lose everything, even their lives.
There was neither check nor balance against the tsar’s power. He was the supreme autocrat, and his word was law. By choosing Matveev’s ward as his bride, Alexei was elevating Matveev, who was not from a high ranking noble family, to dizzying heights; but if Naryshkina should prove a disappointment, Matveev might just as easily find himself executed or exiled. And it was not only the tsar’s displeasure that Matveev and Naryshkina had to fear. The family of the widowed Alexei’s first tsarina, the Miloslavskys, would jealously guard their power in the court against the faction that would form around the new tsarina. The Miloslavskys could not prevent Matveev and the Naryshkins from gaining pre-eminence, but as family to the young princes Fyodor and Ivan, they could not be set aside either. The rivalry between the families of the two tsarinas would define Russian politics for the next twenty years.
At Matveev’s insistence, Natalya Naryshkina went through the formality of participating in a brideshow, during which the Miloslavskys accused Matveev of using witchcraft to ensnare the tsar’s affections. Nonetheless, the marriage took place on February 1, 1671. The western influences in Naryshkina’s upbringing marked the beginning of the end of Russia’s strict adherence to old Muscovite traditions and complete isolation from Europe. When her son Peter became tsar, he would order his courtiers to cut their long Orthodox beards; in 1671, Natalya upset the court nearly as much by going out in public in a carriage without heavy curtains to screen her from view. She sat next to the tsar at state functions, instead of keeping behind the women’s partition. Music and dancing had long been forbidden by the strictly pious Alexei, but because Natalya had learned to love music under Mary Hamilton’s tutelage, music and dancing were introduced at court. To most Russians, these changes were very welcome. But Natalya was already making enemies, among them Alexei’s daughters by Maria Miloslavsky, some of whom were older than their nineteen-year-old stepmother. The most intelligent of the sisters, Sophia Alekseyevna, thirteen at the time of the marriage, hated Natalya most of all.
Natalya and Alexei’s son Peter was born in June of 1672 (May 30 in the Gregorian calendar.) By the age of two he had his own apartments in the Kremlin, overflowing with toys. His favorite plaything was a model ship given to him by Matveev; Peter’s interest in shipbuilding would last throughout his life, and eventually lead to the establishment of a Russian navy. Tsar Alexei doted on his wife and young son, taking the intelligent, energetic toddler with him to greet the public and meet foreign ministers. But five years after Alexei and Natalya were married, when Peter was a little more than three years old, Alexei died of a sudden illness. With his father’s passing came a complete change in Peter’s status. He was no longer the son of the living tsar but the half-brother of the sickly new tsar Fyodor III. Though Alexei had recently declared the fifteen-year-old Fyodor to be of age and officially recognized him as his heir, it was taken as little more than a gesture of paternal affection; Fyodor, it was thought, would undoubtedly predecease his robust father, who would then recognize his youngest son Peter as his successor. With Alexei gone, however, and the son of Maria Miloslavsky on the Russian throne, the Naryshkins were out of favor. Fyodor was fond of his youngest brother and of his stepmother, but he could not prevent his relatives from confining Natalya and Peter to a country estate, far away from the seat of political power.
The death of Tsar Fyodor
Educational standards in Russia during Peter’s childhood were less than rigorous, compared to the sort of education that a young European prince was expected to attain. It was not uncommon for nobles to be as illiterate as peasants. Tsar Fyodor and his sister Sophia were exceptions; both had received classical educations at the hands of theological tutors and could speak Latin and Polish, Polish having the same utility to a Russian noble that French had to a European one. The tutor assigned to oversee Peter’s education had none of these qualifications; he was chosen chiefly because of his profound knowledge of Scripture. Natalya Naryshkina was only concerned that Peter learn to read and write, but though Peter was a restless student, he was eager to expand his knowledge of geography and Russian history. Knowledge of these fields stood him in excellent stead when he became the first tsar of Russia to travel outside of his homeland.
Fyodor lived and reigned for six years after Alexei’s death. He married twice, but neither marriage produced sons. When he died in 1682, the succession was unclear for the first time in the history of the Romanov dynasty, which had transferred power seamlessly from father to son for three generations.
Fyodor’s brother Ivan would be his natural successor, except that everyone knew Ivan was mentally unfit to rule. His Miloslavsky relatives, eager to seize power through a regency on Ivan’s behalf, pressed his claim. Fyodor and Ivan’s half-brother, Peter, was already tall and strong, active and intelligent, but he was only ten years old and the Miloslavskys were unwilling to accept a Naryshkin regent. Both the Miloslavskys and Naryshkins would have to be satisfied before a decision could be made, but they were incapable of coming to an agreement. During an assembly of boyars, the cry went up that “the people” should decide which boy would be tsar, so Patriarch Joachim of the Orthodox church guided both Peter and Ivan onto a balcony and presented them to the crowds gathered below the palace, asking them to choose their tsar. The sound of Peter’s name being shouted quickly drowned out the sound of Ivan’s.
The Streltsy Revolt
The Miloslavskys were predictably disheartened by Peter’s acclamation and the return of the Naryshkin faction to power, none more so than the twenty-five-year-old tsarevna Sophia. As the daughter and sister of tsars, Sophia ought to have lived her entire life in the terem apartments in the uppermost floors of the Kremlin, leaving home only to attend church and go on pilgrimage, when she would be hidden from the world by the veils she wore and the curtains on the windows. But somehow she defied this destiny. We do not know why tsar Alexei chose to permit Sophia, out of all his daughters, to attend lessons with her brother, the future tsar Fyodor, but he did, and her educatio
n was accordingly excellent. She was the third oldest of Alexei’s eight daughters, one of twelve female inmates of the terem. Nothing distinguished her except her own exceptional qualities. She was a capable student, praised by her tutors as “a maiden of great intelligence” and superior understanding. During Fyodor’s reign, while her Miloslavsky relatives held power in the court, Sophia began to expand the boundaries of her world even further, attending council sessions, conversing with male politicians, comparing her intellectual powers with those of the men who ran the Russian court.
By the time tsar Fyodor died, Sophia had matured in confidence and had amassed more influence than anyone realized. She was accustomed to the freedom of life outside the terem. When her half-brother Peter was elected tsar by public acclamation, Sophia was savvy enough to understand that she would probably be sent back in the terem, not only because her Miloslavsky relatives would be replaced at court by the Naryshkins, but because Natalya Naryshkina would be regent, and she and Sophia had always been at odds with one another. Demonstrating just how politically astute she had become, Sophia began her campaign to alter the balance of power in her favor at her brother’s funeral. During Fyodor’s funeral procession, she stepped out of her veiled canopy—another shocking departure from custom—and displayed her wailing and weeping to the public, underscoring the fact that the dead tsar was her dearly beloved brother. Natalya Naryshkina retaliated by taking the ten-year-old Peter home from the funeral service early, claiming that he was too tired and hungry to endure the whole service. This proved to be a severe miscalculation; in the absence of the new tsar and the regent, all eyes were on the bereaved tsarevna, who loudly, theatrically, bemoaned her orphaned state, proclaimed that her brother Fyodor had been poisoned by the Naryshkins, and insinuated that a similar fate awaited her young brother Ivan.
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