I
Childhood games brought mature triumphs. (Inscription on an engraving (1722) of Peter's little boat)
A tsar is born
The future Peter the Great was born in Moscow at around one in the morning of Thursday, 30 May 1672, on the feast of St Isaac of Dalmatia. The children of the tsars of Muscovy were usually born in the Kremlin, which is almost certainly where Peter first entered the world, but legends persist that his mother, Tsaritsa Natalia, the second wife of Tsar Alexis of Russia, gave birth to her first child either in the royal palace at Kolomenskoe to the south of Moscow (which a Russian poet later dubbed the ‘Russian Bethlehem’) or at the significantly named village of Preobrazhenskoe (Transfiguration.) The life and deeds of the tsar, who was later credited with transforming Russia from ‘non-existence’ into ‘being’, gave rise to many myths and legends. Later writers, for example, recorded the court poet Simeon Polotsky's prediction of Peter's future greatness, made on the basis of astrological calculations for 11 August 1671, the supposed day of his conception, and quoted his ode to celebrate the birth, which portrayed Peter as the future conqueror of Constantinople and a ‘new Constantine’, a literary commonplace for praising Muscovite princes.1 As it turned out, Peter did not fulfil his destiny in quite the way in which Polotsky envisaged. He was to be Russia's first emperor and to found a new capital in emulation of his imperial Roman forerunner, it is true, but his notion of his country's role in world history was to be oriented towards Western Europe rather than the Orthodox East, with immense consequences for Russia.
Opponents of this reorientation towards Western culture and values saw grim portents in the circumstances of Peter's birth. Later in his reign, rumours circulated that Natalia had given birth to a daughter, who was secretly exchanged for a German boy baby from Moscow's foreign community. Others identified the Swiss mercenary Franz Lefort, Patriarch Nikon or other unlikely candidates as Peter's father, on the grounds that a man who destroyed Russian traditions could not have been the son of the pious tsar Alexis. Even what most people accept as the true facts of his ancestry were interpreted negatively by conservative critics, who argued that as the child of a second wife he was born in sin and as the product of the blood of tsars, ‘slaves’ (his mother's family, the Naryshkins), and priests (his great-grandfather Filaret was patriarch of Moscow) he was doomed to bring ill fortune to Russia.
All this was in the future, when disillusioned subjects sought explanations for Peter's often bizarre, ‘alien’ behaviour and unpopular policies. In 1672 the birth of a prince was a reason for rejoicing. The boy was large and healthy, 19¼ inches long according to the measuring icon of his patron saint the apostle Peter, made shortly after the birth in the tsar's workshop to record the infant's length. (Had he measured the 33 inches which some historians erroneously recorded, he would have qualified as one of the ‘monsters’ which he himself later collected and his mother would hardly have survived to see him grow to maturity.) The healthy male infant was an insurance for the dynasty's future, but he was not the heir to the throne. Peter's twenty-one-year-old mother, Natalia Kirillovna Naryshkina, daughter of a fairly minor military servitor, was married on 22 January 1671 to Tsar Alexis (Aleksei) Mikhailovich, whose first wife Maria Miloslavskaia had died in 1669 at the age of forth-three after giving birth to her thirteenth child. Alexis's first marriage produced five sons, of whom two were still alive in 1672. The heir, Fedor, born in 1661, was intelligent but delicate, while Ivan, born in 1666, was mentally and physically handicapped. In 1672 Tsar Alexis's three sisters – Irina, Anna and Tat'iana – were still alive and six of his eight daughters: Evdokia (the eldest, at twenty-two), Martha, Sophia, Ekaterina, Maria and Feodosia. In 1673 and 1674 Tsaritsa Natalia gave birth to girls, Natalia and Fedora, bringing the tally of princesses to eleven. Fedora died in 1678, Irina in 1679 and Anna in 1692, but all the others survived into the eighteenth century and witnessed at least some of Peter's reforms. The tsarevny (daughters of the tsar) were not regarded as candidates for the succession, nor did they or would they have husbands who could engage in palace politics and children to augment the royal line, for in the seventeenth century a policy emerged of keeping them unmarried; but all enjoyed the sanctity and power which came with royal blood or marriage. Peter could expect to grow up in an extended family dominated by women in which he, as a boy, enjoyed a superior status, but without any immediate prospect of becoming tsar. Given the high rates of infant mortality, even in the royal palace, it is unlikely that anyone formulated an individualised, long-term plan for Peter's future, except within the conventions of raising princes to be good Orthodox Christians.
Russia in 1672
Peter was born in a country which was poised to play an increasingly active role in world affairs but was hampered in many ways from pulling its full weight. In the so-called Thirteen Years or First Northern War (1654–67), Russia had clashed with its old neighbour-enemies Poland-Lithuania and Sweden. War with Poland ended in 1667 to Russia's advantage, with Left Bank Ukraine (to the east of the River Dnieper) and Kiev brought provisionally under the tsar's rule or, in the Muscovite view, restored to it, for the tsars of Muscovy regarded ‘Little Russia’ as their patrimony and its Cossacks as their subjects, as they did all the lands inhabited by Orthodox Slavs who lived under Catholic rule in the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Russia gained nothing during the shorter conflict of 1656–61 with Sweden, which had blocked its way to the Baltic since the 1617 Treaty of Stolbovo removed Russia's narrow foothold on that sea. In the south, Russia and Poland vied for possession and domination of the steppes with the Ottoman Turks and Crimean Tatars, who blocked Russia's access to fertile agricultural lands and its advance to the Black Sea. Tatar raids across the Russian and Ukrainian borders exacted a heavy toll in annual tribute, prisoners and livestock, forcing Russia to maintain expensive garrisons. In 1672 Turks and Tatars seized parts of Polish (Right Bank) Ukraine and threatened incursions across the Dnieper into Muscovite territory. It was this crisis which prompted Tsar Alexis in the same year to send envoys to courts all over Europe to seek aid for an anti-Turkish league. In 1676 his successor Fedor found himself at war with the Turks and Tatars. After losing its fort at Chigirin on the Dnieper, Moscow made an uneasy twenty-year truce at Bakhchisarai (January 1681). Thus all three major issues of Muscovite foreign policy – the Polish, Swedish and Turkish questions – remained unresolved during Peter's childhood, with the potential for conflict to flare up along any of the borders. In addition, Muscovy was increasingly involved in Europe-wide diplomatic relations, even though it still did not maintain accredited ambassadors abroad. For their part, many Western countries regarded Russia in terms of commercial opportunities rather than alliances, although this was soon to change.
The population of late seventeenth-century Muscovy has been estimated at about ten million. It was by far the biggest country in Europe, but one of the least densely populated. It is possible to divide the great majority of Muscovy's inhabitants into two very broad categories in terms of their relationship to the state: those who performed military and other forms of service (including churchmen) and – the overwhelming majority – those who paid taxes. There were many variations, for example, non-Russian tribes people, who rendered taxes in the form of tribute (often in furs) or did irregular military service, and foreigners in temporary employment. Some of the tsar's subjects were difficult to pin down, such as the so-called ‘men of other ranks’ and ‘wandering’ people unattached to any fixed locality, who were incapable either of performing service or of paying taxes – for example, cripples and ‘fools in Christ’ – or those who wilfully escaped obligations – runaway serfs, army deserters and religious dissidents. Cossack military communities, originating as refuges from the long arm of government on the periphery of Muscovy, maintained a variety of links with the centre, either bound in service, like the registered Cossacks of Ukraine, intermittently loyal, like the Cossacks of the Don, or persistently hostile, like the Zaporozhian Cossack Host on the River Dnieper.
Peasants accounted for about 90 per cent of the population. Roughly half – the serfs or seigniorial peasants – were the property of the land-owning state servitors; the rest belonged to the church or the royal family or to the state. Serfs fulfilled their obligations by doing agricultural work (corvée) on their owners' land, working as domestics in their houses or paying in money or kind (quitrent). All peasants were obliged to pay taxes to the state and were liable to be conscripted for military service, which, if they were serfs, freed them from their obligations to their former owners. Tsar Alexis's 1649 Law Code abolished the time limit on owners recovering fugitive serfs, thereby fixing serfdom as a hereditary status in perpetuity. Making peasants stay in one place in perpetuity, however, was another matter, as Peter was constantly to be reminded. Despite their propensity to run away, Russian peasants should not be regarded primarily as ‘victims’. Given that the climate and soils of most of seventeenth-century Russia were on the margins of viability for agriculture, the peasant economy was fairly successful in providing subsistence for peasants and a surplus for a state whose policies were determined by the requirements of the growth and maintenance of empire. It was not serfdom as such but the difficult climatic and geographical conditions which brought about generally low productivity, which is not to say that serfdom was good per se, that peasants enthusiastically embraced it or that peasant life was easy.
Towns accounted for no more than four per cent of the Muscovite population. The total male registered urban population in the 1670s has been estimated at just 185,000, which comprised merchants, artisans and traders, all of whom had communal tax liabilities to the state. The rest of the town population was variously made up of military servitors, priests and their families, strel'tsy (musketeers), artillerymen and postal drivers, secretaries and clerks working in government offices, household slaves on temporary contracts of bondage and many peasants residing temporarily, while continuing to be registered and pay taxes to their rural communities. In all cases we should add ‘and their wives and other female relatives’. Women were not counted in censuses and, with the exception of nuns and some women traders, had no status independent of their male relatives. Russian towns, even Moscow – by far the biggest – lacked indigenous professional people such as bankers, scholars, doctors, teachers, lawyers and actors whom one might have encountered in any sizeable Western European town.
Muscovy was administered by the top layer of the Moscow-based service class, roughly the equivalent of the Western aristocracy, the core of whom enjoyed the privilege of attending and advising the tsar and a few of whom owned tens of thousands of serfs on hereditary estates dotted about the country. The so-called boyar duma or council (never a formally constituted body) in the seventeenth century varied in number from 28 to 153 members and had its own fourfold hierarchy: the boyars proper, sub-boyars or okol'nichie, gentlemen and clerks of the council. Membership of the two top groups was determined chiefly by hereditary right. Men from leading families generally became boyars and okol'nichie in the course of time according to seniority within their clan. The pecking order also accommodated royal in-laws (marrying a daughter to the tsar or his son considerably boosted a family's fortunes) and a handful of men of lower status who were raised by royal favour. Servitors immediately below the élite advisory council, mostly younger relatives and aspirants to membership, bore the hard-to-translate titles (in descending order) of stol'nik, striapchii, dvorianin moskovskii and zhilets. In peacetime these Moscow-based servitors in junior ranks performed a variety of duties, perhaps the most important of which was providing ‘extras’ for the elaborate rituals of the tsars’ court. In wartime they went on campaign as cavalry officers.
In 1672 commissions, appointments and other placings, such as seating at state banquets, were still in theory governed by the code of precedence or ‘place’ system (mestnichestvo), which determined an individual's position by calculations based on his own and his clan's service record and his seniority within his clan. It was considered a great dishonour to be appointed or seated below someone who officially merited a lower place. Such insults gave grounds for an appeal to the tsar, who, however, for some campaigns ordered military rolls to be drawn up ‘without places’. Defending the honour of one's clan and maintaining its position within the hierarchy of service was regarded as vital, for service to the state was compulsory even for the highest in the land and there were no alternative careers for the élite. The Russian nobility (some historians question the validity of this term in the Russian context) lacked a corporte identity and, apparently, any aspiration towards constitutional power-sharing. Russia had no parliament. There was no legal profession, although state servitors were called upon to administer the law within the government chancelleries. With very few exceptions, even younger sons of noblemen did not enter the Orthodox priesthood, which had developed as a more or less closed caste, although retiring to a monastery in old age was an option. Local politics barely figured as a career path for the upper service class, apart from the handful of men whom the tsar appointed as military governor (voevoda). In the countryside the state's business was carried out by the middle service class or gentry, who were privileged in being exempt from tax and labour burdens and holding lands which were granted and held on condition of military service but increasingly were passed on to heirs from generation to generation. These lands were worked by serfs, although many of the lesser provincial gentry owned only one or two peasant households and in some cases cultivated their own plots. Making a full-time career of administering one's estate in person was not possible until after 1762, when the Russian nobility was freed from compulsory service. Landed estates, manned by serfs and slaves (bondsmen), provided the income and the servants which allowed top men to reside close to the tsar in Moscow in order to do their duty, and lesser nobles to feed themselves and their families.
The absence of professions was reflected in the absence of training for professions. There were no universities in Muscovite Russia and no schools, apart from some in-house establishments for lower-ranking chancellery staff in the Kremlin. The gentleman-poet, playwright, astronomer or architect (still less the female of the species) had no place in Muscovite society and in modern histories of science based on great names (Newton, Descartes and their like) seventeenth-century Russia simply does not feature. Of course, we should not exaggerate literacy levels in the rest of Europe or overestimate the number of Westerners who had even heard of Copernican theory or calculus. Then, as now, advanced scientific knowledge was in the hands of a tiny minority and native folk wisdom and skills, passed from father to son or mother to daughter, satisfied most needs. But folk wisdom and peasant crafts did not produce the latest military technology, build seagoing ships or command respect at foreign courts, areas to which Peter was to devote considerable attention.
Awareness of Russia's need to ‘catch up’ in certain areas did not begin with Peter. The inflated claim which gained momentum after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 that Moscow was the guardian of true Christianity and the culminating point of Christian history was, even in the fifteenth century, tempered by the uncomfortable knowledge that Muscovite armies could prevail (sometimes) against Tatar ‘infidels’ but rarely against heretical ‘Latins and Lutherans’. In the sixteenth century the empire spread inexorably eastwards, but acquisitions in the west, especially on the sought-after Baltic, were generally not held for long. The danger was that technical inferiority coupled with internal instability could lead to foreign subjugation, as underlined by the Time of Troubles (1598–1613), when famine and a dynastic crisis precipitated the collapse of central authority and Russian territory was overrun by Poles and Swedes. Foreign merchants and military advisers first began to arrive in Muscovy in significant numbers for more peaceful purposes during the reign of Ivan IV (1533–84). More came when Peter's grandfather Michael (1613–45), the first Romanov tsar, reorganised certain infantry regiments along foreign lines in the 1630s. To accommodate the growing numbers of military, commercial and diplomatic personnel from Western European countries, in 1652 Tsar Alexis set aside a separate area of Moscow called the Foreign or ‘German’ Quarter, which also housed a handful of foreign craftsmen and artists. In October 1672 it supplied a director and amateur actors to stage Russia's first theatrical performance, given at Tsar Alexis's command.
With its taverns, shops and Protestant churches (Catholics were allowed to worship only at home) the Foreign Quarter was a small corner of Western Europe which could not fail to excite Russians' curiosity, made even more irresistible because it was out of bounds. Far from being a symbol of Russia's increasing openness to the West, it was actually an attempt to restrict non-Orthodox foreigners and their churches to their own ghetto, away from the city centre where they had lived previously, as well as to stop them getting their hands on prime properties and business premises in unfair competition with local merchants. The Orthodox church warned its flock to regard such foreigners as dangerous heretics and to keep foreign ‘novelties’ and fashions at arm's length. Joachim, patriarch of Moscow from 1674 to 1690, urged the tsars to expel even mercenaries and to demolish non-Orthodox churches. The church also insisted that Russians be differentiated from Western Europeans, from whom ethnically they are indistinguishable, by their dress and hairstyle. In 1675 the growing practice among some Russian magnates of wearing Western fashions in private prompted the tsar to issue an order that courtiers were ‘forbidden to adopt foreign, German and other customs, to cut the hair on their heads and to wear robes, tunics and hats of foreign design, and they are to forbid their servants to do so’.2
Shaving the beard, which increasingly became the fashion in the West among urban dwellers during the later seventeenth century, attracted particular disapproval. In this respect Orthodox Russians were guided by the pronouncement of a church council of 1551: ‘The sacred rules to all Orthodox Christians warn them not to shave their beards or moustaches or to cut their hair. Such is not an Orthodox practice but a Latin and heretical bequest …’3 That such warnings had to be issued at all indicates that adherence to tradition was by no means universal.
The Muscovite church found itself fighting a war on several fronts, not least with internal religious dissent, the best known example of which – the so-called Old Believer movement – was a reaction to the programme of reform carried out by Patriarch Nikon in 1652–58 to correct Russian service books on the basis of Greek and Ukrainian texts. At the same time he imposed the sign of the cross made with three fingers (the Greek practice) instead of two (Old Russian) and changed spellings and liturgical practices. Many Christians believed that to worship using the new books and rituals posed a mortal danger to the soul and it was better to die than to submit. These protesters and other schismatics who rejected the authority of the church for all sorts of reasons added to the strong undertow of dissent and flight from obligations which characterised Muscovite Russia.
Religion also dictated strict rules of decorum for women. Married women concealed their hair at all times in public and women of all ages and classes wore loose, layered garments which revealed only their faces and hands. Elite women, both married and unmarried, lived in semi-seclusion in what some later sources refer to as the terem, which served both to protect them from illicit sexual encounters and to emphasise their exclusiveness, as well as allowing them access to their own finances and to have their own household administrators and servants. One of the most intriguing features of the Foreign Quarter for Russians was that the inhabitants followed Western conventions regarding fashion, mixed-sex gatherings and courtship, which, as we shall see, was to hold a particular attraction for Peter.
Russians were protected from foreign influences by other controls, too. For example, publishing and printing remained firmly in the hands of the church. In the whole of the seventeenth century fewer than ten non-religious titles were isued by Muscovite presses, which were devoted chiefly to producing liturgical and devotional texts. Even publications from Slavonic presses in Kiev, Chernigov, Vilna and other centres of Orthodoxy were intermittently banned for fear of spreading heresy. Books in foreign languages reached the libraries of a few leading nobles and clerics, but were not freely on sale. The absence of Muscovite printed news sheets, journals, almanacs, histories, plays, poetry and philosophy – the sort of works found in bookshops in London, Paris and other cities – was partly compensated by popular literature in manuscript and a flourishing oral tradition. Private reading of printed books (as opposed to listening to books being read out in church or to stories told by a storyteller) was a minority occupation in Muscovy, and scholarship even at an amateur level was more or less confined to members of monastic orders. The exceptions were some of the government chancelleries in Moscow, which had to cater for state needs in such areas as map-making, building, medicine and gathering foreign news, but their activities hardly reached a wider public.
The Russia into which Peter was born, then, was a country in many ways very distinct from its neighbours in Protestant and Catholic Europe, where Russia was still regarded as a ‘rude and barbarous’ kingdom, with rulers more akin to the emperors of China or the sultans of Turkey than to European kings. In the year 1672 the birth of a Russian prince went more or less unobserved in the West. There would not even have been much speculation about the new prince's eligibility as a marriage partner, as the Muscovite royal family was known to remain aloof from such contacts. Tapping foreigners' knowledge, marrying his children to them and gaining their respect were to be among Peter's major goals and not the least of the areas in which he tried to ‘catch up’ was that of chronology and time-keeping. Most sources agree that 30 May was Peter's birthday, as did Peter himself by honouring St Isaac of Dalmatia, later founding a church to the rather obscure saint. But at least one record gives 29 May, following the old Russian practice of starting the new day not at midnight but at first light, according to which calculation 30 May (the nights are short in Russia at that time of year) began an hour or so after Peter was born. For those European countries, mostly Catholic, which had adopted the more accurate Gregorian calendar and so were ten days ahead of those which, like Russia, followed the older Julian calendar, Peter was born on 9 June. Contemporary Russian chroniclers, in the meantime, used not Arabic numerals but Cyrillic letters with numerical equivalents to record the year of Peter's birth as 7180, following the Byzantine practice of numbering years from the notional creation of the world in 5509 BC. The year 7181 was due to begin not on 1 January 1673 but on 1 September 1672, again following the Byzantine practice.
It is appropriate that questions of time and chronology should arise at the very outset of Peter's biography, for he was to be obsessed with time and its passing, believing that ‘wasted time, like death, cannot be reversed’.4 On the eve of the new eighteenth century, which most people agreed started in 1700 rather than 1701, Peter decreed that official records would henceforth keep calendar years from the birth of Christ, as other Christian nations did, whereupon traditionalists denounced him for tampering with ‘God's time’. When he died on 28 January 1725, as it was now entered in official records, he had changed much more than the calendar.
Childhood
For the first decade of his life Peter was a junior member of an extended royal household, with his own nursery and servants in the Kremlin palace, which was a warren of chambers and chapels. Materially, he wanted for nothing. His birth was celebrated with a banquet featuring confections fit for a prince: a spice cake in the shape of the Muscovite coat of arms, a sugar duck, parrot, dove and eagles, a whole spun sugar Kremlin with infantry, cavalry and two towers with an eagle soaring above them, and great platters heaped with marzipan, frosted fruits, candied peel, and other sweets, some of which were presented to guests to take home.
Given that the major ingredients had to be imported, this represented conspicuous consumption on a grand scale, even if such festive fare was not served every day. Late Muscovite taste was for colourful ornateness and everything in the royal household was richly decorated: robes embroidered with gold and silver thread and pearls, household utensils and cult objects enamelled in glowing colours, embossed saddles and harnesses, carved and gilded velvet-lined carriages, religious frescos in bright paints with lashings of gold leaf, icons with jewelled casings. The desired effects were achieved by Russian craftsmen in the royal workshops and with imported goods, especially textiles, brought from all over the world.
The royal children were protected from the public gaze, only occasionally making an appearance in written records, often when they were glimpsed by curious foreigners: for example, sightings of three-year-old Peter leaving the Kremlin in a tiny gilded carriage, accompanied by dwarfs, or escaping his mother's grasp to run out from behind a curtain. His early upbringing followed the traditional Orthodox model, based on learning to read from a primer, graduating to the Psalter and Acts of the Apostles, then learning to write and count. Peter received indifferent tuition from Russians seconded from government chancelleries, who apparently failed to inculcate even basic disciplines into their pupil: his handwriting and spelling remained atrocious for the rest of his life and his original autographs are barely decipherable even by specialists. In this respect Peter's education lagged behind that of several of his half-siblings. His brothers Fedor and Alexis (died 1670) were taught by Simeon Polotsky, who gave instruction in Latin, Polish, versification and other elements of the classical syllabus. Polotsky died in 1680 before he had the chance, had it been offered, to tutor Peter, who only ever mastered a few token names and terms from classical languages and had little interest in poetry. His daughter Elizabeth later recounted how Peter often visited her and her sisters at their lessons and told them to be grateful that they were receiving a good education. ‘I was deprived of all that in my youth.’5 Was this a myth of Peter's own making, one wonders, intended to blacken the reputation of relatives who allegedly ‘oppressed’ him in his youth and to cover up his own difficulties with intellectually challenging subjects? Throughout his life Peter was to be more comfortable with practical skills, such as carpentry and wood-turning, than with theory or academic disciplines. Foreign mentors were certainly to hand but not one was a scholar. The Scottish General Paul Menzies from Aberdeen (1637–94), who went on diplomatic missions for Russia in the 1670s, had connections to Peter's circle through Peter's maternal relatives the Naryshkins and the family of one of their sponsors, Artamon Matveev, the head of the Foreign Office, who were related to the Scottish Hamiltons. References survive to Menzies as Peter's ‘tutor’, although as a Catholic he would not have been entrusted with traditional literacy teaching through the Psalter and primer. He, like the Dutchman Franz Timmermann who later taught Peter to sail and perhaps gave him lessons in Dutch, was probably most valued as an adviser on military affairs, which soon became one of Peter's major preoccupations.
Later writers credited the infant Peter with extraordinary military prowess, comparing him with the young Hercules who strangled a serpent in his cradle, but these precocious talents were extrapolated from his mature military victories. Even so, military affairs were regarded as the right and proper concern of a tsarevich and like his father and elder brothers before him, Peter played with toy soldiers, miniature forts, cannon, bows and arrows and drums. He learned to ride, to shoot a bow and handle a sword. Toy weapons were supplemented with spades, hammers and mason's tools, which no doubt fostered Peter's love of mechanical crafts. The fiercest of Peter's boyhood passions – his love of ships and the sea – is harder to explain in a country without a seagoing tradition, especially as the young Peter is said to have had a dread of water, the overcoming of which features in a number of anecdotes illustrating his courage and determination. Russia's naval inexperience should not be exaggerated. English vessels had been docking on the White Sea since the 1550s and Tsar Alexis commissioned Dutch shipwrights to build a small fleet on the Caspian in the 1660s. Russians may not have been expert sailors on the high seas, but they knew how to navigate inland waters and the northern coastlines. Peter found no lack of stimulants to the imagination close to hand: toy boats, maps, charts and engravings and what he himself identified as the spark which lit the flame, the old English sailing boat, the ‘grandfather of the Russian fleet’, which he discovered in the early 1680s in the outhouse of a country estate and which will make several appearances in our narrative.
In January 1676 Tsar Alexis died at the age of forty-seven, apparently from a cocktail of ailments leading to kidney and heart failure. Probably Peter had few personal memories of his father, although later in life he expressed admiration for his achievements. In contemporary documents Alexis was described as ‘most quiet’ and ‘most pious’. Nineteenth-century Slavophile (nationalist) historians regarded him as the ideal ruler, contrasting his cautious approach to government, inspired by piety and respect for tradition, with Peter's obsessive urge to turn everything upside down. The most often reproduced portraits of Alexis tend to confirm the image of a passive man, a static figure in heavy robes, carrying symbols of office, as though about to set forth to attend a church service. But contemporary sources reveal that the ‘most quiet’, who, in the words of his biographer, ‘perceived good order to be the necessary condition of the good life and for success in everything’, also had a violent temper, which his son evidently inherited.6
If Alexis's mildness has been exaggerated, so too has his reputation as a consistent guardian of national traditions which Peter wantonly destroyed. In fact, in his own way Alexis was a moderniser and Peter himself acknowledged his debt to the father he scarcely knew in two key areas: military reform and the creation of a fleet. Many things which Peter's own publicists and later historians included among the achievements of the Petrine ‘revolution’ had their roots in his father's and even his grandfather's reign, including a professional army based on infantry, subjugation of the church, use of foreign specialists and imported technology and culture. Even some of the more bizarre aspects of Peter's behaviour as an adult seem to emulate his father. Alexis instituted a method of fines and punishments for courtiers who failed to attend morning prayers or name-day services. He had them ducked in water, like a baptism, then forced to drink three draughts of vodka. Peter was to devise even more inventive penalties. By and large, modern historians regard Alexis as Peter's precursor rather than his antithesis.
Fourteen-year-old Fedor succeeded his father. Unsubstantiated rumours of attempts to crown three-year-old Peter instead of him underline the potential difficulties of Peter and his mother. The Miloslavskys had been pushed into the background when their kinswoman Tsaritsa Maria died and Alexis married Natalia Naryshkina in 1671. The new tsaritsa's father Kirill attained full boyar status and younger clan members received prestigious appointments as chamberlains, while even some lesser relatives found themselves installed in provincial governorships. The Naryshkins' clients benefited accordingly. In 1676 it was the Miloslavskys' turn again. With Fedor's accession, their fortunes rose and the Naryshkins' declined; leading members of Natalia's clan were exiled, including Artamon Matveev. These gains were temporary, however. Fedor chose his own favourites, showing no preference for his maternal relatives, and there is no reason to believe that he entertained any personal animosity towards his young half-brother. Even so, twice in the six years following his father's death Peter narrowly escaped being pushed further down the ladder of succession. Fedor's first wife, Agafia Grushetskaia, and her newborn son Ilia died in July 1681. Early in 1682 he took a second wife, the noblewoman Martha Matveevna Apraksina. As long as Fedor remained childless, custom dictated that his younger brother Ivan was his heir, but custom was soon to be flouted.
The strel'tsy revolt of 1682
On 27 April 1682 Fedor, who had always been sickly, died and Peter, a month short of his tenth birthday, was declared tsar on the grounds that his mother was alive to act as regent and his elder half-brother Ivan was ‘weak-minded’, a decision which did not long remain unchallenged. To be sure, Ivan's afflictions precluded his taking the initiative in either civil or military affairs. Russia had no written law of succession to exclude the accession of a younger brother under these circumstances – observance of primogeniture was a matter of custom rather than constitution – and Peter had the support of Patriarch Joachim, who carried great authority. But the politics of kinship and popular notions of justice proved stronger than pragmatism.
With Peter proclaimed tsar, the Naryshkins and their clients could expect to wield some real power in his minority and to retain key posts when he came of age. One of the very first actions of the new regime, which had Tsaritsa Natalia as its figurehead, was to recall Artamon Matveev from exile. But the Naryshkins apparently had not reckoned on a lethal combination of unrest among Moscow's armed guard, the strel'tsy, and the fury of the affronted Miloslavskys, who found a spokeswoman in the spurned Tsarevich Ivan's sister, twenty-five-year-old Sophia, that ‘ambitious and power-hungry princess’, as a contemporary described her.7 By and large women's role in Muscovite power networks, as elsewhere, was confined to their usefulness as marriage partners and mothers (a clan could boost its fortunes by making good marriages) and in some cases, especially if they gained appointments as ladies-in-waiting in the royal household, to behind-the-scenes lobbying on behalf of male relatives. Widows with under-age sons and dependent male relatives, like Tsaritsa Natalia, could become even more powerful; but open political manoeuvring was hampered by the Muscovite custom of keeping élite women in semi-seclusion, with special conventions limiting contact with male non-relatives. Even so, these women still enjoyed considerable authority derived not simply from their royal blood, but from a religious view of political power which stressed the role of royal wives and daughters as champions of Orthodoxy and intercessors on behalf of their men folk and the realm. This view was underpinned by the use of analogies with female saints and strong women from the Bible and Byzantine history who in case of need acted independently. In Muscovy both male and female power, although wielded in separate spheres, were conceptualised and expressed in terms which interpreted piety not as restrictive and passive but empowering. Royal power was seen as collective, as evidenced, for example, by the inclusion of royal women in oaths of allegiance. Visible authority may usually have been exercised by men, but when Sophia found herself in a position to take over in the absence of mature male relatives, she had the sanction of a long-standing tradition. Any one of Tsarevich Ivan's other five sisters could have taken on the role, but evidently Sophia was the boldest and most outspoken.
It is possible that by this stage she had already taken as her lover or at least formed a strong attachment to one of the leading men in the boyar council, Prince Vasily Vasil'evich Golitsyn (1643–1714). Their relationship is said to have begun when Sophia was caring for the ailing Tsar Fedor, to whose bedchamber Golitsyn often reported. In 1681–82 he was a prime mover in the abolition of the code of precedence and in devising a new scheme for making military appointments. Much of the evidence of the couple's intimacy rests on hearsay and rumour, plus some coded letters dating from the later 1680s. What is beyond doubt is that once in power Sophia relied on Golitsyn to spearhead both her foreign and her domestic policy and showered him with rewards and honours. Over-reliance upon his skills as a military commander was to hasten the downfall of both of them.
Sophia's main aim was to get Ivan on the throne, but to achieve this she needed to find support beyond the circles of the boyar council, where few men, if any, were active supporters of Tsarevich Ivan. Luckily for her, at the time of Fedor's death the strel'tsy were ultra-sensitive to rumours of abuses and injustice in high places as a result of continual disputes over management, pay and conditions. After two weeks of negotiations, during which the new Naryshkin government handed over unpopular officers to strel'tsy mobs, a rumour that Tsarevich Ivan had been strangled by his ‘ill-wishers’ and that the same evil men were preparing to assault the strel'tsy brought mutinous regiments to the Kremlin. Here on 15–17 May the strel'tsy settled personal grudges by butchering some of their own commanding officers and unpopular government officials and also singled out members of the Naryshkin clan and their associates as ‘traitors’ to Ivan, possibly with the help of a list drawn up by Sophia. About forty persons fell victim to axe and pike, including Peter's uncle Ivan Naryshkin (who was accused of trying on the crown) and Artamon Matveev, who was hacked to pieces. Peter witnessed several of these brutal murders when he and Ivan were brought out onto a balcony in front of the palace to reassure the mutineers that they were both unharmed.
The mob's fury was not directed at Peter himself, who was sanctified by his royal descent, but at ‘wicked advisers’ whom they suspected of manipulating both boys for their own ends, but it is unlikely that the nine-year-old realised this. His experience – terror for his personal safety as he witnessed people close to him slaughtered (Matveev had been standing next to Peter and his mother seconds before he was thrown on to the soldiers' pikes in the square below) – must have been psychologically damaging. Later he recalled these violent incidents as a sort of metaphor for what he had to overcome: the wild beast face of Russia, which acted with brute force on the basis of rumour, superstition and prejudice rather than by exercising reason and brain power. It has been argued that this strel'tsy revolt and subsequent ones inculcated in Peter a basically pessimistic notion of human nature and ultimately the realisation that barbarism can only be overcome by its own methods in order to allow the rule of reason to flourish.
Sophia and the ‘Khovanshchina’
The role of Tsarevna Sophia Alekseevna in these violent events has been widely debated. Although there is no direct evidence that she had the ‘Machiavellian’ tendencies attributed to her by some contemporaries (she left no personal writings which throw light on her motives), still less that she plotted to kill Peter and his mother, who remained unharmed throughout her regency, she vigorously championed the claim of her brother Ivan to be tsar. Once the strel'tsy had retreated from the Kremlin, reassured that Ivan was alive and well, in late May 1682 a compromise was found in the form of a joint tsardom, with Ivan as senior tsar and Peter as junior, with reference to Byzantine precedents and the rhetorical formula that Ivan would rule at home while Peter went to war against Russia's enemies. An oath of allegiance to Tsars Ivan and Peter was sworn on 26 May but there is no contemporary record of the formal establishment of a regency. The monk Silvester Medvedev, a fervent supporter of Sophia, relates that the strel'tsy presented a petition that same day asking ‘that the government of the Russian realm be administered by the pious wise Sovereign Lady, the tsarevna and great princess Sophia Alekseevna’, and that she finally ‘agreed to take upon herself that great labour’,8 but Medvedev may have doctored his account towards the end of the 1680s when he and others were trying to prepare the ground for Sophia to be crowned and were anxious to show that popular acclaim was the legal basis for her rule. Whatever the nature of the arrangement made in May 1682, in the course of the 1680s Sophia became ruler and from about 1686 began not only to add her name to those of her brothers in royal edicts but also to include samoderzhitsa, the feminine form of samoderzhets (autocrat) among her titles. But titles could not disguise the dilemma: was she to remain in power until Ivan's death, since his need for a regent was permanent, or would she step down when Peter came of age? It is significant that she never demanded that Peter, the fatal flaw in any scheme for the perpetration of her power, be removed from the throne. Whether this demonstrates a lack of political acumen or a wise acknowledgement of real politics is difficult to say.
On Sunday, 25 June 1682 the Kremlin bells rang out for the coronation of Tsars Ivan and Peter in the fifteenth-century Cathedral of the Dormition in a double version of the modified Byzantine ritual first used for the coronation of Ivan IV in 1547. An additional set of regalia – the special fur-trimmed crown known as the Cap of Monomach, orb and sceptre, pectoral cross and shoulder mantle – had to be prepared for Peter and a two-seater throne was constructed. Peter's coronation robe of heavy Italian gold damask, incorporating flower and crown motifs and trimmed with gold lacework, survives to this day. Sophia did not attend the coronation in person for Muscovite tradition generally barred women from such occasions, but Prince Vasily Golitsyn was there as her substitute, summoning the tsars to the service, standing on the raised platform beside them and holding Tsar Ivan's sceptre. Ceremonial duties performed by other magnates – for example, Prince Boris Alekseevich Golitsyn, a Naryshkin supporter, acted as Peter's sceptre bearer – indicate that the Miloslavskys were by no means clearly in the ascendant. This was underlined by the list of promotions made a few days later on Peter's name day, 29 June, where men more allied to the Naryshkins than to the Miloslavskys received boyar ranks. From Sophia's point of view, what had been achieved was not the elimination or total humiliation of the Naryshkin network, an impossibility as long as Peter was tsar, but a restoration of the fortunes of the Miloslavsky clan and their clients with, no doubt she hoped, an edge over the Naryshkins now that Ivan was nominally ‘senior’ monarch. A compromise had to be reached in order not to disrupt the expectations of promotion of members of leading clans. Once the tsars were crowned the aim was harmony and consensus up above, in order better to deal with the discord which still threatened to get out of hand down below.
The withdrawal of the strel'tsy from the Kremlin on 17 May marked not the end but a new stage in the troubles. Anxious not to be branded as traitors, the strel'tsy demanded that Sophia's government, equally anxious to avoid further bloodshed, absolve them of all guilt and erect a column on Red Square to commemorate the services which they had rendered by eliminating ‘wicked men’ who had ‘plotted all manner of evil’ against the crown. The Sophia–Golitsyn government duly erected the column, issued a charter, exiled disgraced officers and redistributed their property. But these measures failed to prevent a new wave of unrest, this time initiated by religious dissidents among the strel'tsy who demanded to know ‘why they [the government] hated the old service books and loved the new Latin-Roman faith’.9 Their appeal for the restoration of the ‘old belief’ was encouraged by Prince Ivan Andreevich Khovansky, the man who had replaced the murdered Prince Iury Dolgoruky as head of the strel'tsy chancellery. Acting as the troops' self-styled ‘father’, Khovansky, a veteran of campaigns against Poland and Turkey with a long record of service as military governor, made a show of mediating between the strel'tsy and the Kremlin and organised a meeting between the patriarch and dissident priests to debate the issue of the faith on 5 July, an event which Sophia, two of her sisters, one of her aunts and Tsaritsa Natalia attended. When the dissidents' spokesman, the defrocked priest Nikita, assaulted an archbishop, Sophia threatened to leave Moscow ‘in order to tell all the people about this insubordination and chaos’, a threat which she later carried out to considerable effect.
Nikita was arrested and executed, but Khovansky remained too popular with the strel'tsy for the government to touch him. Instead they began to reduce the power of the Khovansky clan by reshuffling chancellery personnel, relying on the fact that Khovansky had few supporters among the boyars. The royal party then set off on tours of estates and monasteries, leaving Khovansky precariously in charge in Moscow and increasingly isolated. Sophia announced that the tsars had been forced to leave Moscow ‘because we could not tolerate the many offences, unlawful and gross actions and violations committed by criminals and traitors’.10 Khovansky's failure to obey several orders, for example to send the royal bodyguard of mounted strel'tsy to attend Tsar Ivan's name-day celebrations on 29 August, allowed Sophia to isolate him further. His fate was sealed by the discovery of an anonymous (probably fabricated) letter of denunciation. On 17 September, her own name day, Sophia succeeded in luring Ivan Khovansky and his son Ivan to the royal summer residence at Vozdvizhenskoe outside Moscow. The charges against them centred on their ‘evil designs upon the health and authority of the great sovereigns’ which involved no less than plotting to use the strel'tsy to kill the tsars, Tsaritsa Natalia, Sophia and the patriarch, then to raise rebellion all over Moscow and snatch the throne. The lesser charges included association with ‘accursed schismatics’, embezzlement, dereliction of military duty, and insulting the boyars. The charges were full of inconsistencies and illogicalities, but their sheer weight sealed the Khovanskys' fate and Prince Ivan and his son were beheaded on the spot. Despite reassurances that the quarrel was not with them, the strel'tsy looked set to barricade themselves into Moscow, but eventually they were reduced to begging Sophia and the tsars, now ensconced in the Trinity Monastery to the north of Moscow, to return. The strel'tsy were forced to swear an oath of loyalty based on a set of conditions, the final clause of which threatened death to anyone who ‘speaks approvingly of the deeds of late, or boasts of committing murder or makes up phrases inciting rebellion as before, or stirs up people to commit criminal acts’.11 The royal party returned to Moscow in early November 1682.
A portrait of Ivan and Peter
The names of the great sovereign tsars and great princes Ivan Alekseevich and Peter Alekseevich, autocrats of all Great and Little and White Russia, may have appeared on the numerous orders and edicts issued during the ‘Khovanshchina’, as the period of unrest came to be known, but it was the ‘great sovereign lady, pious tsarevna and great princess’ Sophia Alekseevna and her supporters who took the decisions. The tsars were closely supervised figureheads, alternately kept out of sight or shown to selected audiences as a token of the withdrawal or conferral of favour. Being in charge of the tsars was Sophia's greatest asset and she cleverly exploited the special significance attached to the royal presence, especially among the strel'tsy, whose muddled quarrel had always been with the ‘wicked boyars’. Later in life Peter never gave Sophia and her supporters any credit for their shrewd handling of the Khovansky affair. Perhaps he was scarcely aware of the intricate manoeuvres which took place during the summer and autumn of 1682, except for the fact that he and his brother were moved back and forth between various royal residences, as though they were on the run. In the absence of personal reminiscences about that fateful year we can only deduce its disturbing impact from Peter's treatment of the strel'tsy in 1698 and his determination to eradicate the corps.
Despite their senior–junior designation, the few depictions of the two tsars together show them as equals and more or less interchangeable, for example in the illustrations by unknown Russian artists of Peter and Ivan in their coronation robes for the large bound collection of manuscript portraits of Russian and foreign princes known as the Book of Titled Heads (Tituliarnik), a sort of heraldic and dynastic reference work compiled in the Kremlin Armoury workshops over several decades. Supplements contained pictures of all Tsar Alexis's sons, including a drawing of Peter dating from 1678. All the Russian images in the book were stereotypical, with the twelfth-century Kievan prince Vladimir Monomach scarcely distinguishable from Tsar Alexis. The attributes of power and icon-like features suggest a fixed quality that looked to past traditions rather than the future. This manuscript portrait of Peter may have been the model for an anonymous and undated oil painting, which bears little resemblance to later authenticated portraits of him as a young man. The two tsars also featured in allegorical prints, embellished with a characteristic baroque mix of Christian and classical imagery. The earliest, an engraving by the Ukrainian artist Ivan Shchirsky for a theological work published in 1683, illustrates the text: ‘It is good and seemly when two brothers rule jointly.’ The two tsars in full regalia hover above a canopy containing a double eagle. Christ floats between them and above him is a winged maiden, the Divine Wisdom (Sophia), who influences and protects the two tsars in the heavenly sphere, just as their sister does on earth.12 A somewhat later print by Shchirsky, illustrating the programme for a debate in the Kiev Academy, shows the tsars enthroned and immobile beneath a huge double eagle. In such compositions the tsars are mere effigies, inhabiting an invented sacred landscape, always dressed as though for a coronation, without any distinguishing features.
Foreign artists devised exotic images of their own, for example engraved half-length portraits of Ivan and Peter by L'Armessin of Paris and F. Jollain's study of Les Frères Czars in fur hats and stoles and holding sabres, produced to mark a Russian embassy (a disastrous one as it turned out) to France in 1686–87. The artists seem to be saying: the tsars of Muscovy are exotic, the ‘other’ and cannot be depicted using the same conventions as those used for Western rulers. Their sphere of activity was in the East. Similar imagery was used in the West for the Turkish sultan or the emperor of China. Muscovy was barely included among the Christian ‘political’ nations.
None of these early images or, indeed, anything from Russian official written sources, gives much hint of what Peter was really like. For a glimpse of his personality we must turn (with all due caution) to foreigners' accounts. The German scientist and traveller Englebert Kämpfer saw both tsars at a diplomatic reception in July 1683. Ivan sat ‘motionless with downcast eyes’ and had to be helped by an attendant to acknowledge the ambassadors, whom he greeted with a sort of ‘babbling noise’. Peter, in contrast, ‘his face held upright and open, made such an impression with his wonderful beauty and pleasant gestures … that if the bystanders had beheld a young maid and not a royal personage before them, they would certainly have fallen in love with him’. Unlike the passive Ivan, Peter was so eager to ask questions that he had to be restrained. This restless curiosity never left him and often proved annoying to his companions and hosts. Kämpfer took him to be sixteen, rather than eleven.13 Dr Laurent Rinhuber formed a similar impression during an audience in June 1684. Sophia's kinsman Ivan Miloslavsky assisted Tsar Ivan, explaining that he had poor eyesight. Peter, on the other hand, ‘with his mouth half formed into a laugh gave us a friendly and gracious glance and scarcely had he seen me than he held out his hand of his own accord. An exceedingly handsome gentleman on whom nature has amply bestowed her powers.’14
It seems almost indecent to rub in any further the striking contrast between dull Ivan, who had severe visual impairment and perhaps mental handicaps (opinion differs as to the nature and extent of his disabilities), and bright Peter. As the Austrian envoy Johann Eberhardt Hövel remarked, ‘such a feeble-minded and sickly man [as Ivan] was by nature unfit to rule’.15 The only surviving image, much reproduced, of the mature Ivan painted in the Western manner shows no obvious signs of the ‘imbecility’ which less tactful observers mentioned, but there is no evidence that it is a true likeness. From today's viewpoint, Peter was clearly the better candidate for the job, especially if, with the wisdom of hindsight, one approves of his later reforms. Yet from the political-religious perspective of Russia in the 1680s Ivan remained the senior tsar by God's will, perfectly capable of fulfilling the symbolic functions of rulership as the motionless centre around which court ceremonial revolved. Piety, dignity and restraint in public, the ability to sit through receptions or stand through interminable church services, were important elements in the Muscovite idealised image of a good tsar. Peter's quick intelligence and impatience, on the other hand, which the educated foreigners Kämpfer and Rinhuber observed with approval, and his inability to sit or stand still, may actually have appeared unseemly and inappropriate to Russian contemporaries. And perhaps not only to Russians. As described by the Frenchman Foy de la Neuville, who visited Russia in 1689, Peter's liveliness verges on menacing hyperactivity:
Tsar Peter is very tall and quite well proportioned, with a handsome face. His eyes are big but so wild that he is pitiful to look at. His head shakes continually. He is twenty years of age. He amuses himself by making his favourites play tug o' war with each other, and often they knock each other out in their efforts to pay court. In the winter he has large holes cut in the ice and makes the fattest lords pass over them in sleds. The weakness of the new ice often causes them to fall in and drown. He also likes having the great bell rung, but his dominant passion is to see houses burn, which is a very common occurrence in Moscow since no one bothers to put one out unless there are 400 or 500 alight.16
Even if, as seems likely, Neuville never actually saw Peter, this assessment is still valuable for we know that the Frenchman had a number of influential informants among Peter's circle, including Andrei Matveev (the murdered Artamon's son) and Prince Boris Golitsyn, the cousin of Sophia's favourite, Prince Vasily. The shaking head and other alarming twitches have been attributed to the horrors Peter endured in 1682. A Swiss traveller, who saw Peter in Holland in 1698, reported that he suffered from convulsions in his eyes, hands and whole body. ‘Sometimes his eyes roll right back until only the whites are visible. … He even has a twitch of the legs and can't stand in the same place for long.’17 The dominant motifs in accounts of the 1680s are Peter's impetuousness and restlessness and his need for constant physical diversions, often trivial, sometimes cruel. The account by Prince Boris Kurakin (later ambassador in Holland) of how young Peter and his friends played at sviatki, a sort of Yuletide charade, is instructive, even if it was written long after the events described. Kurakin tells disapprovingly of how fat men were dragged through chairs, people's clothes were torn off and they were made to sit on ice with bare bottoms; they had to suffer candles being shoved up their backsides and air blown up them with bellows, resulting in at least one death.18 Even when he was a grown man, Peter continued to enjoy inflicting similarly humiliating physical violence on his friends as a joke and they had little choice but to grin and bear it.
The regency
Once the dangers were past, the peculiar circumstances of the dual monarchy allowed Peter to indulge himself. On occasion he was still required to put in an appearance at ambassadorial receptions or important family anniversaries, but by and large he was relieved of ceremonial duties, which Sophia was happy to see performed by Ivan alone, who thus assumed a prominent and active role in the public eye as the Orthodox figurehead. She herself also took part in rituals, which emphasised her own role as pious protector of the realm. It was said that Sophia ‘stifled Peter's natural light’,19 but the opposite was true. There was no question of Peter being either banished or persecuted; living away from the Kremlin suited him as much as it did Sophia. This ‘sabbatical’ from the routine burdens of rulership allowed him to pursue his own interests, which increasingly focused on military games and sailing, and to build up a circle of friends and assistants at a distance from traditional clan networks. Men from the boyar élite still predominated in Peter's entourage, but they were joined by foreigners and commoners. The company he kept in the 1680s–90s set the tone for Peter's personal circle for the rest of his reign, when he could variously be found in the company of army orderlies, foreign soldiers, doctors and shipwrights, dwarfs, giants, ‘blackamoors’, his personal choirmaster and chaplain, and fools and jesters of various types.
Peter played no direct role in either the domestic or foreign policy of Sophia's regency, even though his name appeared with Ivan's on all edicts and treaties. No doubt he would have endorsed the nineteenth-century historian Nikolai Ustrialov's dismissal of the Sophia–Golitsyn regime as one which produced ‘nothing of any significance either for the benefit of the state or for the growth of the nation's industrial sources or for its education’ and rejected Prince Kurakin's accolade that ‘never was there such a wise regime in the Russian realm’, which reached ‘a pinnacle of prosperity’.20 The truth lay somewhere in between. In many areas, Sophia's regime continued the policies of Alexis and Fedor to maximise the fulfilment of service requirements and the payment of tax liabilities (which involved updating land surveys and pursuing and returning fugitives), speeding up trials and maintaining law and order, especially with respect to the safety of the sovereigns, their treasury and the church. Rumours, recorded only in Neuville's memoir, that Prince Vasily Golitsyn wished to liberate the serfs, find no confirmation in the published legislation of the period, but may well reflect Golitsyn's concern with the linked issues of the peasant question and gentry service and with balancing a prosperous peasantry against the needs of national defence.
The regime's mildness in some areas, for example banning the cruel practice of burying alive women who murdered their husbands, was offset by its savage penalties for religious dissidents, who were pursued mercilessly by the state as well as the church. In 1685 a decree prescribed the use of the knout, torture and execution: those who ‘incite the common people, their wives and children to burn themselves to death [as religious protest] will themselves be burned’. At the same time, developments in foreign policy forced the regime to relax restrictions on non-Orthodox residents; for this Golitsyn, who was unusual for a Russian in knowing Latin and Polish, became known as the ‘friend of foreigners’. Catholic priests were granted entry to cater for Moscow's small community of foreign Catholics. With Prussian backing, Russia offered sanctuary to French Protestants fleeing from the ‘sundry cruelties’ of the king of France and made concessions to foreign merchants and industrialists to encourage them to set up businesses. In 1689 Russia signed commercial treaties with Prussia, laying the foundations for future Russo-Prussian co-operation during the 1710s. Russia's first institute of higher education, the Slavonic-Greek-Latin academy, founded in 1687 on the model of the Kiev academy, also relied on foreign teachers. Its first directors were the Greek monks Ioanniky and Sofrony Likhud (Lichoedes).
In its own eyes, the Sophia–Golitsyn regime's crowning achievement was the 1686 treaty with Poland, which ratified Russia's possession of Kiev and its immediate hinterland in return for Russia's agreement to sever relations with Turkey and Crimea ‘on account of the many wrongs committed by the Muslims, in the name of Christianity and to save many Christians held in servitude’ and wage war on Crimea.21 This treaty of ‘eternal peace’, which drew Russia into the Holy League, was a landmark in Russia's relations with the Polish Commonwealth, a stepping stone towards the ascendancy achieved later in Peter's reign. In the shorter term, however, problems in fulfilling its clauses were to supply the pretext for Sophia and Golitsyn's opponents to overthrow them.
War and naval games. Preobrazhenskoe
While serious international business was going on, Peter, it seems, was amusing himself. The story goes that he discovered about 300 men idle at a former royal hunting lodge (he himself never much enjoyed hunting) and signed them up to play military games, then requisitioned others from regular units. Young nobles who would normally serve in junior court posts were recruited alongside local lads from a variety of backgrounds. The resulting ‘play’ (poteshnye) troops were formed into two regiments which took their names from the adjacent royal villages at Preobrazhenskoe and Semenovskoe to the north of Moscow. The troops' organisation – foreign ranks, training methods and uniforms – was modelled on the new formation infantry regiments first introduced in the 1630s. By 1684–85 the embryonic guards had their own barracks and a scaled-down wooden fortress which Peter named Presburg. A moat was dug and towers and gates erected, along with a church and an administrative block, all built of wood. Peter had his own modest billet, which he used for years to come. ‘When at Mosco,’ observed the future English ambassador Charles Whitworth, ‘he never lodges in the palace, but in a little wooden house built for him in the suburbs [at Preobrazhenskoe] as Colonel of his guards.’22 The fact that Peter did not have a regular palace is significant, for he lived and served at Preobrazhenskoe not as tsar but as a trainee. In deference to foreign expertise, all Russians, including the tsar himself, served in the ranks or as non-commissioned officers. Royal ceremonial functions were performed by a ‘mock’ tsar known as Prince-Caesar and there was also a mock patriarch. In the 1680s–90s Peter came to regard Preobrazhenskoe rather than Moscow as his capital. In other words, Moscow was symbolically deprived of its capital status some time before St Petersburg took over the function, evidence that psychologically Peter had broken with the Kremlin at quite an early stage in his career and had begun to replicate the established hierarchy with a weird version of his own.
The official history of the Russian fleet also begins in the 1680s with the discovery at another royal village, Izmailovo, of a sailing boat, which Peter himself later elevated to the symbolic status of ‘grandfather’ of his navy. Built in the 1640s, almost certainly of English-type construction, it is preserved in the Maritime Museum in St Petersburg. For Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich, who edited Peter's preface to the 1720 Naval Statute, where its story was first told in print, the little boat provided a striking emblem to illustrate the aphorism that ‘great oaks from little acorns grow’, for ‘this Monarch was so particularly remarkable in all he did, that the very Pastimes of his Childhood are esteem'd, as Transactions momentous and weighty, and appear worthy to be recorded in History’.23 The little boat was not, in fact, the first Russian royal ship. As Peter acknowledged in the Naval Statute, his father commissioned Dutchmen to build the three-masted Eagle in 1667–68, but it was burned by Stenka Razin's rebels at Astrakhan in 1670 before it could put to sea. One of the ship's gunners, Carsten Brandt, was still in Russia when Peter advertised for a shipwright to repair the Izmailovo boat, thus providing a direct link with Tsar Alexis's initiative. The Dutchman Franz Timmermann taught him to sail. As far as we know, Tsar Alexis had little personal attachment to ships and the sea, but for Peter, they were to become a dominating passion.
Marriage
Peter did his best to avoid official engagements in the Kremlin, but there was at least one which he failed to escape. On 27 January 1689 he was married off to twenty-year-old Evdokia Lopukhina, daughter of a state servitor of middling rank. Like all Muscovite royal marriages, Peter's was determined primarily by dynastic calculations, in this case additionally to emphasise the fact that he was now a man who did not need a regent and in the hope of getting a male heir before Ivan did. Ivan had been married to Praskovia Saltykova (1664–1723) in 1684, but the marriage remained without issue until 1689, and then produced five daughters in quick succession: Maria (1689–92), Feodosia (1690–91), Ekaterina (1692–1733), Anna (1693–1740, empress 1730–40) and Praskovia (1694–1731). (There were rumours that this rich crop of girls was not Ivan's.) As was the custom, the tsars' brides were selected from clans well down the pecking order of the boyar élite, thereby (it was hoped) minimising rivalries among more prominent families. The new tsaritsas' male relatives and their clientele would add weight to the Miloslavsky and Naryshkin camps respectively without expecting rewards above their station.
In Peter's case, we know little about the preliminaries of the choice, just the bare fact that the couple were married in one of the palace chapels in a simple ceremony. The event was marked by the production of a manuscript book in a single copy entitled The Token of Love in Holy Matrimony, the frontispiece to which is a religious allegory featuring a notional likeness of the tsar and his bride in traditional brocade robes and crowns. Floating above them on a cloud, Christ and the Mother of God and Saints Peter and Evdokia bless the union, while scrolls with appropriate biblical texts (‘There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee …’, ‘And God created man in his image, male and female created he them’, and so on) link the earthly and heavenly planes. The book contains verses by the court poet Karion Istomin in fashionable Polish syllabic metre, reflecting on the nature of royal marriage and the role of the body and the senses in human life and divine worship. This was a traditional marriage with traditional expectations, as emphasised by Evdokia's pose. The only known portrait of Peter's first wife in later life painted in the Western manner, of which numerous copies exist, is distinctly unflattering, showing her as a nun, a flabby-faced woman in a voluminous fur-trimmed robe of dark fabric, her hair concealed from view in a dark head-dress which blends into an even murkier background. In her youth, however, Evdokia was regarded as a beauty. Prince Boris Kurakin, who was married to her sister, wrote that the new tsaritsa was ‘fair of face, but of mediocre intellect and no match for her husband in character’.24 Her conventional upbringing is reflected in a handful of surviving letters which she wrote to Peter in her own hand in the early years of their marriage, formulaic texts dotted with standard terms of endearment and expressed in the submissive tone required of a royal bride: ‘Your wretched little wife Dunka greets you. … Be so good as to write to me, my light, about your health, so that wretched me may be happy in my sadness. … You have not written a single line about your royal health.’25 We do not know whether Peter, preoccupied with drilling troops and sailing, was ever ‘so good’ as to write to her: no letters survive from him to Evdokia. But Peter performed his marital duty in one respect at least: a few months after the wedding Evdokia was already pregnant.
The Crimean campaigns. Sophia and Golitsyn overthrown
The year of Peter's marriage, 1689, was to prove crucial in more ways than one. As part of Russia's commitments to the Holy League against the Turks, in spring 1687 Prince Vasily Golitsyn led a vast army south towards the Crimea. Weighed down with heavy supply wagons, for there was little chance of forage in the unpopulated steppes, the troops made painfully slow progress over difficult terrain, only to discover when they were still almost 200 miles away from the Crimea that the grasslands on which they were relying for horse fodder had been burned. Official reports variously blamed the Cossacks and the Tatars for starting the blaze. As men fell ill from drinking contaminated water, Golitsyn took the decision to turn back. Official reports later claimed that the khan and his Tatars ‘were seized with fear and terror … and plunged into the depths of despair’26 by the approach of the Russian army, but in fact the outcome was decided by logistics rather than battles. A campaign in which the enemy's non-appearance allowed little scope for military exploits thus acquired an exaggeratedly heroic colouring.
In February 1689 Golitsyn, reluctantly by all accounts, again set off for the Crimea. On this second campaign, he reached the fort of Perekop at the entrance to the Crimean isthmus. There were several engagements with the Tatars at which ‘their majesties’ men-at-arms courageously and boldly repelled the infidel in a bloody battle and drove them from the battlefield’, as Golitsyn wrote in a dispatch.27 But yet again, logistical problems, particularly an absence of fresh water, forced the Russian armies to withdraw after suing for peace, this time with even greater losses than previously as men and horses perished from thirst and sickness. Prominent among the charges later made against Golitsyn was the one that at Perekop he ‘failed to carry out military operations and withdrew from that place and by [his] lack of enterprise great losses were inflicted on the royal treasury, ruin on the state and oppression on the people’.28 There were no grounds for the accusations of dereliction of duty, still less that Golitsyn was bought off with Tatar gold, but the growing influence of Peter's supporters at court left Golitsyn more vulnerable than ever to rumour and innuendo.
Although Golitsyn was once again fêted as a hero on Sophia's instructions when he returned to Moscow in July 1689, this second failure gave his opponents the opportunity to undermine both him and Sophia, whose ‘unseemly’ appearances in public, especially in church parades, Peter had begun to criticise. Peter made a point of absenting himself from the welcoming party for the ‘victorious’ Golitsyn on 19 July and initially refused to give his consent to rewards for the other campaign commanders, which led, in the words of the Scottish general Patrick Gordon, to ‘an open eruption or breach which was like to turn to animosityes’ and caused ‘passions and humors increasing lyke to breake out with a Poroxismus’.29 Gordon (1635–99), a veteran of the Crimean campaigns who had entered Russian service in 1661, was soon to become a member of Peter's inner circle.
By the summer of 1689 Peter had good reason to assert himself: he was well into his majority (Fedor Alekseevich, it will be recalled, became tsar without a regent at the age of fourteen); his wife was pregnant; he had his ‘play’ regiments and foreign officers at his disposal and the support of the patriarch. Meanwhile, Sophia's side, led by Fedor Shaklovity, the so-called ‘second favourite’, a clever man of humble origins who had made his career in the chancellery administration, spread rumours about Peter's ‘impious’ behaviour and lack of respect for his ancestors, hinting that his ambitious uncle, Lev Naryshkin, was planning to flog the strel'tsy. The ‘open eruption’ predicted by Gordon came on 7 August 1689, when Peter was woken up in the night at Preobrazhenskoe with news that the strel'tsy were coming to kill him. A suspiciously large unit of strel'tsy had indeed gathered near the Kremlin, although later Shaklovity claimed that this was just a bodyguard to accompany Sophia to the Donskoy convent, where she went every year for the feast of the icon of Our Lady of the Don. This crisis may have been engineered by Peter's own supporters in order to force a confrontation between Peter and Sophia, which they knew she was unlikely to win given public dissatisfaction with the Crimean campaigns. Peter fled north to the Trinity-St Sergius monastery, where, in Gordon's words, ‘he immediately threw himself upon a bed and fell a weeping bitterly’. Thus began a stand-off between Sophia's fast-dwindling forces in the Kremlin and Peter's supporters massed at Trinity. In mid-August Peter ordered the strel'tsy and infantry regiments to attend him there, but Sophia in an ‘eloquent oration’ (observed by Gordon, who was still in two minds whether to join Peter) managed to persuade them to remain. A few days later the patriarch left for Trinity and Sophia attempted to go in person to speak with her brother, but Peter turned her away, demanding instead that she hand over the ‘blatant criminal’ Shaklovity, now named as the author of a plot to kill Peter and his family. On 5 September the departure of foreign officers for Trinity, among them Gordon, proved a turning point. Shaklovity was arrested and subsequently executed along with other conspirators for plotting regicide, while Vasily Golitsyn, probably with the help of his cousin Boris, got off with the lesser charges of condoning Sophia's attempts to assume sovereign powers and of negligence during the Crimean campaigns. He was exiled in the north of Russia, where he died in 1714, a waste of a remarkable talent which, in different circumstances, Peter would have been glad to use.
As for Sophia, for the rest of his life Peter associated her with the dark forces of opposition, even if he blamed most of the active wickedness on her male supporters. The perpetrators of the so-called Tsykler plot against Peter in 1696–97 were executed over the exhumed coffin of Ivan Miloslavsky, a relative of Sophia who was identified by several contemporaries as the mastermind behind the 1682 rebellion. ‘The seed of Ivan Miloslavsky is sprouting,’ wrote Peter when he came back to Russia to deal with another strel'tsy revolt in 1698.30 He recognised Sophia's ‘great intelligence’ but thought it was out-weighed by her malice and cunning.31 In a letter to Tsar Ivan, probably ghost-written by a Naryshkin adviser between 8 and 12 September 1689, Peter declared: ‘And now, brother sovereign, the time has come for us to rule the realm entrusted to us by God, since we are of age and we must not allow that third shameful personage, our sister the Tsarevna S. A., to share the titles and government with us two male persons.’32 Sophia was locked up without any charge in the Moscow Novodevichy convent, many of the modern buildings of which she had commissioned, under the supervision of a unit of the Preobrazhensky guards. From 7 September all references to her disappeared from official documents, as if the regency had never been.