II
In the autumn we were engaged in martial games at Kozhukhovo. They weren't intended to be anything more than games. But that play was the herald of the real business. (Peter to Fedor Apraksin, April 1695)1
The Naryshkins
The departure of Sophia and Golitsyn was not a signal for the start of Peter's personal rule, either constitutionally (he was crowned in 1682) or in practical terms. The regent and some of her clients were removed and the hierarchy at court adjusted itself accordingly, but the relationship between Tsar Ivan, making stately progress in his heavy brocade robes, and Tsar Peter, now clad in German dress, dashing from sailing expedition to military parade, remained the same, despite efforts by Peter's relatives to push him into performing more ceremonial duties. Peter showed little inclination to ‘rule the realm’, still less to reform it.
Members of the Naryshkin clan, who towards the end of Sophia's regency had recovered some of the ground lost in May 1682, came bouncing back into executive positions. A host of them were awarded boyar rank. The most prominent was Peter's uncle Lev Kirillovich (1664–1705), whom Boris Kurakin dismissed as ‘a man of very mediocre brain and an inveterate drunkard’.2 The clan's most enduring legacy consisted of the many sumptuous churches they commissioned from 1689 onwards in an ornate style which later became known as ‘Naryshkin baroque’. One of the finest examples, the Church of the Intercession at Fili, built for Lev Naryshkin in 1690–93, with its soaring tower of receding octagons, gold cupolas and intricately carved limestone decoration based on the classical orders, bears witness to both the Naryshkins' wealth and their Westernised tastes. Inside, the choice of icons followed the fashion for reflecting family history, in this case with references to the clan's royal connections in images of SS Peter and Paul, John the Baptist (Tsar Ivan's patron saint) and Alexis Man of God. The icon of St Stephen bears a striking resemblance to the young Peter, who often visited the church. All the icons were painted in an ‘Italianate’ style.
Notwithstanding their taste for the latest fashions in art and architecture, the Naryshkins were easily persuaded to take a conservative line on ‘Latins and Lutherans’. The new regime cancelled several concessions made to foreigners during Sophia's regency and adopted closer supervision of aliens in general in order to stem the infiltration of heresy. On 2 October 1689 the Jesuit fathers Georgius David and Tobias Tichavsky were expelled from Moscow. Two priests were still allowed to serve the foreign Catholic community, but precautions were taken to ensure that they did not try to convert Russians or visit them in their homes. In October 1689 the Protestant mystic Quirinus Kuhlman was burned on Red Square together with his works. The governor of Novgorod was warned to take care that ‘no more such criminals enter the country and that foreigners who in future arrive from abroad from various countries … and claim that they have come to enter service or to visit relatives or for some other business in Moscow, should be questioned at the border and in Novgorod and detained and not allowed to proceed to Moscow until you receive our royal instructions’.3 The atmosphere for a few months after Sophia's overthrow was so oppressive that Patrick Gordon, by now Peter's friend and adviser, contemplated leaving Russia, especially after the patriarch barred foreign guests from attending a royal banquet in February 1690.
Patriarch Joachim's Testament (he died in March 1690) sought to consolidate this anti-foreign policy. ‘May our sovereigns never allow any Orthodox Christians in their realm to entertain any close friendly relations with heretics and dissenters,’ he wrote, ‘with the Latins, Lutherans, Calvinists and godless Tatars (whom our Lord abominates and the church of God damns for their God-abhorred guile); but let them be avoided as enemies of God and defamers of the church.’4 Joachim's successor Adrian, consecrated in August 1690, held similar views. The religious life at court, with Tsar Ivan at its centre, continued unabated, the court records meticulously detailing the order of ceremonies and the colour and cloth of the participants' costumes. For a time, Peter also found himself forced to put in regular appearances to underline the ascendancy of his mother's party. On Easter Sunday in April 1690 we find the two tsars processing into the Dormition cathedral for matins past ranks of servitors clad in robes of gold thread (anyone not clad in gold was barred from entry by armed strel'tsy), walking round the church behind the icons and crosses, then proceeding to pray first at the tombs of their ancestors in the cathedral of the Archangel Michael, then in the cathedral of the Annunciation, after which they attended mass in a private chapel.
Two months earlier the Kremlin had witnessed celebrations which even Peter could not wriggle out of. On the morning of 19 February 1690 Peter and Ivan went to the Dormition cathedral ‘to join in prayers and give thankful praise to the Lord God, our blessed protectress the Mother of God and the Moscow miracle workers and all saints, asking them to grant the sovereigns many years of health and to grant many years of health also to the newborn, pious Sovereign Tsarevich and Great Prince Alexis Petrovich of all Great and Little and White Russia.’5 After the service the tsars treated members of the boyar council to goblets of wine and lesser ranks to vodka. At the same time a number of promotions were announced, including Peter's uncle Martem'ian Kirillovich Naryshkin and his wife's uncle Peter Abramovich Lopukhin the Younger to the rank of boyar.
Peter put his own mark on the occasion: the birth of his first child was celebrated not just with the customary church services and peals of bells but with cannon fire and drumbeats. Foreign-led infantry regiments were drawn up in the Kremlin, where their colonels delivered congratulatory speeches and in turn were presented with gifts and vodka and ordered to fire off rounds of shot. Alexis was baptised by the patriarch on 23 February in the Kremlin Monastery of Miracles, where Peter and his mother also attended mass. Over the next few days there were firework displays and banquets, where more promotions were announced. The Naryshkins and Lopukhins had good reason to celebrate, for nothing was more important to a clan than male heirs. Despite Peter's apparent indifference to Evdokia, in October 1691 another son, Alexander, was born. Sadly, Alexander died the following May, and was laid to rest beside Tsarevich Ilia, the infant son of Tsar Fedor. Peter did not attend the funeral as he was otherwise engaged. Some authors mention a third son, Paul, said to have died in 1693, but neither his birth nor his death is recorded in the admittedly incomplete palace records and there is no marked tomb. By the middle of the 1690s Peter was estranged from Evdokia and the son whose birth they celebrated so enthusiastically in 1690 was to provide one of the most harrowing chapters in his life.
Foreign friends
Peter, meantime, deaf to the church's dire warnings about the dangers of defilement, was spending more time than ever in the company of ‘heretics’, often as a guest in their homes in the Foreign Quarter. The first foreign home which Peter is said to have visited – on 30 April 1690 – was that of Patrick Gordon, who had become his adviser not only on military matters, but also on politics and fireworks, the latter another of Peter's lifelong enthusiasms. Gordon was one of the Foreign Quarter's leading Catholics, but this did not deter Peter. Peter became even closer to the Swiss mercenary Franz Lefort (born 1655/6), who came to Moscow in 1676 and fought in the Crimean campaigns. Assessments of his talents vary. Boris Kurakin, who took a dim view of most of the younger Peter's friends, complained that Lefort ‘spent day and night in pleasure, dinners, balls and banquets’, encouraging Peter to indulge in debauchery and excessive drinking.6 He was also knowledgeable about trade and diplomacy, but the key thing is that Peter admired and trusted the older man. On receiving news of his friend's death at the age of forty-two in 1699 (from drink, according to Kurakin) Peter allegedly complained that he was now left ‘without one trustworthy man’.7
Peter got to know other foreign soldiers and merchants, attending their banquets, weddings, baptisms and funerals. Lefort's palace in the Foreign Quarter, with a splendidly appointed ballroom added, was turned into a semi-official residence for holding receptions, which according to Kurakin featured ‘debauchery and drunkenness so great that it is impossible to describe it’.8 In October 1691 Peter attended a party in the Foreign Quarter at the home of the tavern keeper Johann Georg Mons, which is probably when he first met his future mistress Anna, Johann's daughter. Peter picked up other skills from his foreign friends, starting to learn Dutch (from Andrei Vinius, a government official of Dutch descent), as well as taking lessons in dancing, fencing and riding. There is little evidence that he undertook any formal education or serious reading, however.
Nowhere is the spirit of Peter's activities, poised between the old and the new, better illustrated than in an entry in the palace record for 27 April 1690 (April was traditionally the start of the royal pilgrimage season), when ‘the Great Sovereign Peter Alekseevich deigned to visit Kolomenskoe’. For this trip a rowing boat was got up to look like a sailing ship; boyars followed in two boats and strel'tsy went in front in seven, and ‘as they sailed along the water there was firing from cannon and hand guns’. The play regiments sailed in smaller craft. Tsar Ivan travelled by land.9 Thus we see two tsars, one firmly rooted in old Russia, the other encouraging novelty. Peter did not neglect his religious duties entirely – in May 1690, for example, he made a tour of monasteries, as his father and brother had done before him – but more often than not Ivan carried out such duties alone. Contemporaries noticed this turn of events. Boris Kurakin records: ‘First the ceremonial processions to the cathedral were abandoned and Tsar Ivan Alekseevich started to go alone; also the royal robes were abandoned and Peter wore simple dress. Public audiences were mostly abandoned (such as were given to visiting prelates and envoys from the hetman [the Cossack commander], for which there were public processions); now there were simple receptions.’10 This apparent simplification of court ritual in fact involved both the elaboration of a new court calendar, from which old feasts were dropped and to which new ones were added, and the introduction of ‘mock’ rituals alongside real ones.
Many of Peter's unofficial activities are recorded in Patrick Gordon's diary. In 1690 he spent his birthday at Preobrazhenskoe enjoying gun salutes and target practice. On 19 January 1691 he visited the boyar P. V. Sheremetev and the next day Gordon had such a dreadful hangover that he could not get out of bed until the evening, a condition which he experienced on many occasions. A dinner at Boris Golitsyn's on 16 May led to similar consequences. And so on. Royal account books for 1690–91 show numerous entries for orders for ‘German dress’ for Peter and members of his play regiments, for example a purchase of ‘good English cloth, dark grey’, for which the chamberlain Gavrila Ivanovich Golovkin (1660–1734), Peter's future chancellor, passed a payment of 75 roubles.11 Among foreign goods shipped to Archangel in 1692 for Peter's use were mathematical instruments, two globes, a large organ, four large clocks, five barrels of Rhine wine and a barrel of olive oil.12 Arguably, in making such purchases Peter was merely continuing trends encouraged by his father and brother, but the cumulative effect of the things he bought and the company he kept created a more Westernised environment than they had known.
Prince-Pope and Prince-Caesar
Throughout his life Peter remained as much attached to objects as to ideas, more at ease with the concrete than the abstract, although he was capable of appreciating the symbolic and the emblematic. He also had a crude sense of humour. This is worth bearing in mind when examining the origins of one of Peter's most controversial creations, the All-Drunken, All-Jesting Assembly, a group of people close to the tsar who engaged in parodic religious ceremonies, presided over by a ‘Prince-Pope’ (kniaz'-papa) and other mock churchmen. Peter may well have gleaned inspiration from the real election and installation of Adrian as patriarch in August 1690. Not only was Peter obliged to attend, wearing the heavy robes and regalia which he so disliked, but he had to sit through a speech in which the new patriarch appealed to God for deliverance ‘from Latinism, Lutheranism and Calvinism and all other heresies’.13 It is probably no coincidence that Peter and his friends elected their own mock ‘arch-pastor’ not long after this ceremony. According to tradition, the first mock prelate was Matvei F. Naryshkin (whom Kurakin, scathing as ever, described as ‘stupid, old and drunk’),14 but the best-known incumbent was Peter's former tutor Nikita Zotov, referred to in some sources as ‘Patriarch Bacchus’, one of the attendants of the real patriarch at the enthronement in 1690 and holder of the post of Prince-Pope until his death in 1717.
One formulation of the Prince-Pope's titles was ‘patriarch of all Iauza and Kukui’, the latter a vulgar name for the Foreign Quarter, which underlined the undoubted influence of Peter's foreign friends, in whose homes and taverns he joined in drunken rituals and bawdy drinking songs addressed to Bacchus. The British specialised in this brand of humour; later the ‘British Monastery’ or Bung-College in St Petersburg, had its own Father Superior and included among its activities punishments supervised by ‘the staff surgeon and pinkle smith or prick farrier’. At about the same time Peter began to construct a mock court, presided over by His Majesty Prince-Caesar (kniaz'-kezar'), who often appeared with the Prince-Pope on festive occasions in a parody of the Byzantine symphony of tsardom and priesthood. For more than twenty years the mock throne was occupied by Prince Fedor Romodanovsky (1640–1717), who was succeeded by his son Tsarevich Ivan. As Prince-Caesar, Romodanovsky had his own residence and church at Preobrazhenskoe, all built of wood, and as director of the chancellery of the Preobrazhensky regiment and the tribunal attached to it he also held real power. An early recorded example of the combined antics of the mock court and church assembly was the wedding in January 1695 of Iakov Turgenev, a secretary in the Preobrazhensky regimental office, in which the bride and groom rode in the tsar's ‘best carriage’ with a retinue of boyars and courtiers in fancy dress decorated with animals' tails and pulled by bullocks, goats, pigs and dogs.15 A new cultural topography was being constructed which paralleled the traditional ‘sacred landscape’ in which Tsar Ivan and Patriarch Adrian continued to function. Peter's part in his new invented world was variously as the humble subject (trainee bombardier or trainee shipbuilder) of Prince-Caesar and deacon in attendance on Prince-Pope. It demonstrated his ability to set the rules and choose his own roles.
The death of Natalia Naryshkina
Change was in the air, much to the consternation of traditionally minded courtiers. Then in November 1692 Peter fell ill and for ten days was at death's door. There were rumours that many of his supporters were preparing to flee for fear of reprisals from Tsar Ivan's camp if Peter died. In fact he recovered, with more zest for life than ever, and in July 1693 set off for Archangel to see the sea, an important landmark in his life. This historic journey had much in common with royal outings of old to country estates and monasteries – the accompanying retinue was listed according to rank, from boyars to secretaries, and Peter travelled with a priest, eight choristers, two dwarfs and forty strel'tsy – but more and more the lifestyle of the two courts diverged. Peter celebrated the Russian New Year on 1 September 1693 in Archangel to the sound of gun salutes from both foreign and Russian ships in the harbour, while back in Moscow Tsar Ivan, clad in robes of red velvet, ‘deigned to go from his royal chambers to the cathedral’ to hear the patriarch celebrate the liturgy ‘according to the usual rites’.16
Peter did not entirely neglect his religious duties. Just before departing for Archangel he visited his father's favourite place of pilgrimage, the St Sabbas monastery at Zvenigorod, but this was not enough to allay his mother's fears that her son was falling into bad ways and would face mortal danger at Archangel. In letters she urged him to return and Peter found excuses to stay. Natalia's final letter reads:
As a favour to me, my light, come home without delay. I'm so very sad that I can't see you, my light and joy. You wrote that you intend to await the arrival of all the ships, but you have seen the ones that have arrived already, so why do you have to wait for the rest to come in? Don't scorn my request. You write in your letter that you have been to sea even though you promised me that you wouldn't.17
Peter returned to Moscow and resumed some of his ceremonial duties, perhaps to make amends for ignoring his mother's wishes. (There were no ships to see in Archangel once the sea froze over, anyway.) On 5 January 1694, the eve of Epiphany, he attended mass in the palace chapel of SS Peter and Paul, while Ivan alone, dressed in a white robe, attended a ceremony of blessing the water and prayers for the royal family in the cathedral. The next morning both tsars appeared in full ceremonial regalia and crowns to participate in a lavish procession of icons and crosses from the cathedral to ‘Jordan’, a place marked in the ice on the Moscow river just below the Kremlin, where the patriarch dipped a cross into the water and sprinkled the tsars, then the crowds, with consecrated water. This ceremony had long been a major event in the court calendar and was one of the few Muscovite customs to survive into the eighteenth century, perhaps because it could be adapted to include a strong military presence, in this case both strel'tsy and guards, carrying standards and weapons. It is significant that Peter failed to put in an appearance in the cathedral for services for the feast of Metropolitan Philip of Moscow on 8 and 9 January, one of several feasts of leading Moscow churchmen which Patriarchs Joachim and Adrian promoted. The scribes specifically noted his absence, as they did on 12 January, the feast of St Tat'iana, when only Ivan attended the celebrations of his aunt Tat'iana's name day.18
The official ceremonies for women's name days continued to be all-male affairs. In general, royal women were mentioned in the court circulars only with reference to births, deaths, weddings and prayers for their long life, so the records for the first half of January 1694 gave no hint that Tsaritsa Natalia was ill. Then on Thursday the 25th, the feast of St Gregory the Theologian, they note her death. The following day her open coffin was placed on a sledge draped in black velvet and taken the short distance from the palace to the Kremlin Ascension convent, to the sound of a funeral knell tolled in the bell tower of St John ‘in the ancient manner, with a muffled peal’. Patriarch Adrian walked beside the coffin and behind him Tsar Ivan, preceded by members of the boyar council, courtiers, officials and chief merchants. In the convent chapel Natalia was laid to rest next to her predecessor Maria Miloslavskaia. Peter had been with his mother on the day before she died, but, as the scribes noted, ‘the great sovereign tsar and great prince Peter Alekseevich, autocrat of all Great and Little and White Russia, did not process behind the body of the pious sovereign tsaritsa and did not attend the burial’.19 He visited her tomb on the day after the funeral and again on 1 and 13 February, but mainly it was left to Ivan alone to attend the requiem masses for Natalia's soul.
Peter revealed his true feelings in a letter to the future admiral Fedor Apraksin (1661–1728), brother-in-law of the late Tsar Fedor and one of Peter's most loyal friends: ‘It is hard for me to tell you how bereft and sad I feel; my hand is incapable of describing it fully or my heart of expressing it. So, like Noah, a little rested from my misfortune and leaving behind what cannot be restored, I write of what is alive.’20 In 1706, consoling Gavrila Golovkin on the death of his mother, Peter wrote that if his own mother had lived to such a great old age as Golovkin's he would have been grateful to God.21 There was real affection between mother and son, who had weathered many crises together, but Peter's restless nature apparently prevented him from waiting at his mother's deathbed or wasting too much time grieving when he had so much to do. The only surviving portraits of Natalia show her as a widow, her hair hidden and her face framed by a severe black head-dress in old Muscovite style, with little hint remaining of the young woman who allegedly relaxed the rules of the female seclusion in the 1670s and enjoyed attending her husband's theatre. She was the person who had provided what security and continuity Peter had known. With her death, many links with the past were broken and lip-service to the old ways could be abandoned more easily.
The Kozhukhovo manoeuvres
In the months following his mother's death, Peter returned to his favourite pursuits. In the summer of 1694 he abandoned Moscow and the court during the pilgrimage season to return to Archangel and pursue his passion for shipbuilding and seafaring. Yet he did not omit to visit the relics of saints on the Solovki islands, where he founded a chapel and erected a cross to commemorate his visit. Much of his attention was focused on preparing for what became known as the ‘Kozhukhovo manoeuvres’, a mock campaign staged in September 1694 with a force of 30,000 guardsmen and strel'tsy. Tsaritsa Natalia's death deprived those leading men of the Naryshkin camp who lacked close ties with Peter himself of a useful figurehead and threatened a new configuration of forces which might have worked to Peter's disadvantage. Now for the first time Muscovites were presented with a demonstration of the real strength of Peter's ‘play’ troops, as armies commanded by Prince-Caesar Fedor Romodanovsky, the ‘King of Presburg’ and Ivan Buturlin, as the ‘King of Poland’ (in some sources also described as the ‘tsars’ of Preobrazhenskoe and Semenovskoe), paraded through the city. The staged battle, which featured an assault with explosives on a specially constructed fortress, left twenty-four dead and fifteen injured. Peter placed members of both the Lopukhin and Naryshkin clans on the losing side, perhaps to make the point that he did not intend to be beholden to any of his relatives unless they proved their personal worth. He himself posed as ‘King’ Fedor's loyal subject, participating in the action as an ordinary bombardier. This was among the first of many such demonstrations of royal authority operating in the guise of assumed humility. No wonder people were confused.
Menshikov
Peter's neglect of the old hierarchies and proprieties was also demonstrated in his choice of companions, not just foreigners but also Russians, of whom the closest was Alexander Danilovich Menshikov (1673–1729). Menshikov's origins were obscure. Later he deliberately kicked over his own traces, acquiring a genealogy which traced his ancestors back to the ninth-century warrior band of Prince Riurik the Viking and a whole portfolio of titles and orders. Some early sources refer to him as ‘gentleman’ (dvorianin), but it was widely believed at the time that Aleksasha or Aleksashenka, as Peter called him, was ‘of low birth, lower than the gentry’.22 Certainly, he had no close links with any of the families of the Muscovite élite. His was a ‘rags to riches’ tale, a poor boy raised above boyars and princes of ancient lineage eventually to become the most titled man in the realm after the tsar himself.
The circumstances of Menshikov's first meeting with Peter are a matter of conjecture. Thomas Consett, later British chaplain in St Petersburg, tells a story about Alexander being arrested in 1691 for challenging the tsar while on sentry duty, then being rewarded for his vigilance.23 A favourite version was that his father was a stable lad turned pastry cook and that young Alexander met the tsar while peddling his wares. This story features in anecdotes in which Peter reminds Menshikov many years later that he has the power to return him to his pie-selling origins whenever he wishes (‘Alexander! ‘Don't you forget who you were and how I made you what you are now’) and Menshikov appears with a tray of pies as a joke.24 In fact, Menshikov's father served as a non-commissioned officer in the Semenovsky guards regiment and may have been brought to Russia as a prisoner of war from Lithuania and converted to Orthodoxy. In 1693 Alexander's name appears in the second rank of bombardiers of the Preobrazhensky regiment, an indication that he was already close to ‘bombardier Piter’. (By this time Peter had taken to writing his name Dutch-style in Latin letters.) They were together at Azov in 1695–96, sharing a tent. By the time of the Grand Embassy in 1697 Peter and Alexander were inseparable.
Menshikov was in some ways on odd choice of companion. Boris Kurakin, who knew French as well as Russian, accused him of being illiterate. His biographer N. I. Pavlenko confirms that, in contrast to the volumes of paper which survive covered with Peter's scrawl, not one letter, or even a corrected draft, has ever been found in Menshikov's hand, although he did learn to form a clear signature. Recent investigations suggest that he could read, but not write. Why was Peter, who valued learning, so lenient with Menshikov in this respect? Charles Whitworth may have come close to the truth when he wrote ‘[Menshikov's] parts are not extraordinary, his education low, for the Czar would never let him learn to read and write, and his advancement too quick to give him time for observation or experience.’25 Peter laid so many responsibilities on Menshikov's shoulders that he had no time for systematic study. It is not inconceivable, either, that it suited Peter to have a semi-literate favourite, just as later it pleased him to crown an illiterate foreign peasant woman as his empress and to surround himself with jesters and fools. The key to advancement within the inner circle lay more in ‘personal chemistry’ than in formal qualifications. Menshikov had a number of qualities which recommended him to Peter. He was versatile, energetic, loyal, but capable of acting on his own initiative. He shared the tsar's sense of humour and capacity for alcohol. Not that Peter was blind to Menshikov's shortcomings, of which ambition was one; throughout the ‘honeymoon’ of their friendship in the 1690s, Peter stopped short of awarding his friend officer's rank, which he earned only after the battle of Narva in November 1700, and then only the lowest rank of ensign.
It has been hinted, in both foreign memoirs and Russian sources, that there was an additional element to the friendship. Rumours survive in the records of the Preobrazhensky chancellery (where the perpetrators were tortured) that Peter and Menshikov ‘lived in sin’. More specifically, a merchant Gavrila Nikitin was arrested in August 1698 for blurting out while drunk that Peter took Menshikov to his bed ‘like a whore’.26 It has also been pointed out (with no evidence) that in the seventeenth century Russian homosexuals shaved, in an attempt to give a new slant to Peter's preference for being clean-shaven, which was later enshrined in a ban on beards. The correspondence between the two men in their youth certainly demonstrated warm feelings. The first extant letter from Peter to Menshikov, dated February 1700, begins ‘Mein gertsenkin’ (from German: ‘child of my heart’). Variations in other letters include ‘child of my soul’, and ‘my heart’, as well as the more neutral ‘my dearest comrade’ and ‘my best friend’, always expressed in misspelt German-Dutch.27 Menshikov usually addressed Peter more formally, but occasionally a ‘dear heart’ crept into the letters which he dictated, too, as in one dated October 1704 addressed to ‘mein gerts kaptein’.28 A letter from Peter in 1703 captures the tone of their friendship more than a decade after they met: ‘Be here tomorrow by midday; I really need to see you, and I need to see you here, and tomorrow is a day off [Sunday]. So I ask you to be here tomorrow without fail. I write again, for God's sake, don't put off coming because you think it's unhealthy here. It's really healthy, and I only want to see you.’29 Life without Aleksasha was ‘like food without salt’.30
We should beware of reading modern nuances into letters written in Russian three hundred years ago or accepting rumours at face value. Peter's relationship with Menshikov was a complex one, which changed with the years, through both men's subsequent marriages and shared successes and disappointments. It also had its violent side. The Austrian envoy Johannes Korb, in Russia in 1698–99, witnessed several occasions on which Menshikov felt the tsar's fists, including one when Peter knocked him out, ‘so that he lay stretched at full length, quite like a dying man at the feet of irate Majesty’.31 Menshikov may have become rich and powerful, building up his own clientele networks over the years, but he was ultimately Peter's creation. They could never be equals.
The Azov campaigns
Soon the two young men were to have the opportunity to see real military action. In the wake of the disastrous Crimean campaigns of 1687 and 1689, which attracted little allied support, Russia began to lose confidence in the Holy League, fearing to be excluded from any future peace negotiations with the Turks. In an attempt to recover Russia's prestige, gain a stronger bargaining position with the allies and ward off Turkish attacks on Ukraine, in 1695 Peter reopened hostilities in a campaign against the Turkish coastal fort of Azov at the mouth of the River Don. He dispatched two armies, the joint force of Boris Petrovich Sheremetev and the Ukrainian hetman Ivan Mazepa to the Dnieper to deflect the Tatars from the mouth of the Don and a smaller unit consisting of the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky guards and strel'tsy on river craft down the Don to Azov itself.
In this, as in some subsequent campaigns, Peter ceded nominal authority to others. The commander-in-chief was Aleksei Semenovich Shein while the tsar marched as a bombardier in the Preobrazhensky regiment. The first Azov campaign was a failure, which Peter blamed on multiple command, tactical errors and technical deficiencies. In particular, the Turks were able to replenish supplies from the sea with no Russian ships to hinder them. He hired foreign engineering specialists for the next campaign in an effort to avoid such fiascos as an incident in which mines planted on ramparts far away from the enemy blew up 130 Russians without doing any damage to the Turks.
On 29 January 1696 Tsar Ivan died and on the following day was buried. The funeral ceremony observed a time-honoured pattern: the coffin was borne out of the palace and into the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael to the solemn toll of a funeral bell. The patriarch officiated, walking in front of the coffin at the rear of a long procession of priests; behind came secular persons, headed by Peter and prominent boyars, followed by Ivan's widow Praskovia and various female members of her household (but not, according to official records, Ivan's sisters). In the cathedral, mass was celebrated, then the funeral service was sung over the open coffin, after which Peter took leave of his brother, followed by courtiers, who went up to kiss the dead man's hand ‘with floods of tears and wailing’.32 Finally Ivan was laid to rest in the cathedral next to his brother Tsar Fedor. Throughout the following forty-day period courtiers kept a twenty-four-hour vigil in groups of ten. This ceremony, so fitting in its simple dignity for a tsar whose role had been almost purely ceremonial, was the last of the old-style royal funerals. Peter's departure from this world almost exactly twenty-nine years later was to be marked in a different place and a different manner. Ivan's death robbed him of a brother whom he had always held in affection, and of a figurehead. From now on Peter was free to elaborate his alternative scenarios and the traditionalist camp found themselves without a tsar.
Both the failure at Azov and the death of Ivan forced Peter to take stock. Early in 1696 he implemented a number of measures, characterised by what was to become the typically ‘Petrine’ use of speed, technology, mass recruitment and command from above. The prime example was the preparation of galleys at Voronezh on the Don for a renewed campaign in 1696, a huge effort in which thousands of the tsar's subjects were expected to do their bit, from the leading churchmen and merchants who reluctantly supplied the cash to the hapless labourers drafted in to hack ships out of green wood. At the end of May 1696 Peter's land and water-borne forces – 46,000 Russian troops, 15,000 Ukrainian Cossacks, 5,000 Don Cossacks and 3,000 Kalmyks – laid siege to Azov. By early June a Russian flotilla was able to take to the sea and cut off the Turks' access to reinforcements. Russia's success was also aided by General Gordon's plan of a ‘rolling rampart’ and the services of Austrian engineers. On 18 July the fortress surrendered.
Peter's first military victory prompted some striking cultural manifestations. There were services of thanksgiving, to be sure – in Russia as in every other European country victory and defeat were inextricably linked with God's will – and prayers for the souls of the dead, but from now on religious processions were supplemented by secular parades bristling with ‘pagan’ symbols, imperial Roman references and imagery. Triumphal gates of classical design were erected, bearing Julius Caesar's words: ‘I came. I saw. I conquered.’ There were references to Christian Rome, too, and stock comparisons of Peter with the Emperor Constantine the Great. Peter marched in the parade wearing Western dress behind the official heroes Admiral Lefort and General Shein, while the religious authority was parodied by Prince-Pope Nikita Zotov in a carriage. This was the first major public display of the new manners, which until now had by and large been confined to semi-private indulgence at Preobrazhenskoe or in the Foreign Quarter.
Ivan's death removed the main raison-d'être of the old-style Muscovite court, for which Peter had no use, except sometimes to mock it. Many formal rituals now had to be enacted without any tsar at the centre, while Peter's own circle was presided over by Prince-Caesar Fedor Romodanovsky. Such developments did not go unremarked. At some time in 1696–97 Father Avraamy of St Andrew's monastery in Moscow handed Peter a missive. Avraamy had heard rumours about Peter's bad behaviour and decided to give the young tsar some good advice before it was too late, beginning his tract with the story of the Creation and the warning that ‘good tsars give right judgement, bad ones forget the fear of God’. He appealed to Peter to resume the straight and narrow path, to heed the advice of churchmen rather than laymen. Good men had hoped that after Peter's marriage he would abandon childish games, but Peter still indulged in ‘jests and japes’ and activities unpleasant to God. War games and sailing were distracting him from his duties, which he had left in the hands of intriguers and embezzlers, ‘wicked’ power-seeking boyars. Avraamy ended up in a monastery in Kolomna (a mild punishment), where he continued to write to the tsar.33 Other critics wrote anonymous letters, a time-honoured way of getting a message to the tsar. A typical example, left in a church in Moscow, warned that Peter had been ‘seduced by Germans and German women into the Latin faith’ and was even being poisoned by them. The author lamented the lowering of moral standards and the prevalence of smoking and advised the tsar to attend church services to avert a Turkish attack. Another letter described Peter's entourage as ‘a swarm of demons’.34
Peter paid little attention to such protests by ‘fanatics’, but he was disturbed by the so-called Ivan Tsykler affair, an alleged plot against him masterminded by a group of state servitors from leading families. The participants, who included Fedor Pushkin and Aleksei Sokovnin, voiced dark fears about Peter's decision to take a trip abroad, due to begin in spring 1697. Sokovnin was horrified by the inclusion of two of his own sons in the list of young nobles to be sent abroad to study. According to Patrick Gordon, ‘they all confessed that they had an intention to have murdered his Majesty and to that purpose had tryed to draw the streltsees to their party’.35 Mention of the strel'tsy and of bringing back Golitsyn and Sophia led Peter to order the exhumation of the corpse of Ivan Miloslavsky, who had died in his bed in 1685 and whom Peter had always regarded as one of Sophia's major associates. The open coffin was brought to the executioner's block on a sledge drawn by pigs, and the blood of the executed Tsykler and his accomplices was ‘sprinkled on the dead carkass which in some places was rotten & consumed’.36 All the corpses were then left on view on Red Square until the summer. This gruesome spectacle (similar displays were common in Western countries) occurred just a few days before Peter set off for the West, a grim confirmation that he had no intention of being diverted from his plans to travel abroad.