III
I am a student and I seek teachers. (Inscription on Peter's seal)
Peter Mikhailov
In March 1697 Peter left Russia for the first time, bound for Western Europe. One of the stated aims of this so-called Grand or Great Embassy was to publicise Russia's recent success at Azov in the hope of obtaining further aid for the alliance against the Turks, while paying courtesy calls on friendly European rulers ‘for the confirmation of ancient friendship and love, and the weakening of the Turkish sultan, the Crimean khan and all their Muslim hordes, the enemies of the Cross of Our Lord’.1 For Peter this also was to be a personal voyage of discovery in his quest for practical knowledge, ideas and inspiration; he carried a seal with the inscription: ‘I am a student and I seek teachers.’ He was to see with his own eyes the extent to which Russia differed from the countries which he visited in its social, economic, technological and cultural development and to find confirmation of what he already must have sensed in Moscow's Foreign Quarter, which offered an intriguing glimpse of many aspects of Western urban life, but without the historical setting and cultural and social diversity of the real towns – Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Dresden, Vienna – that Peter saw during his travels. Not the least of the problems he had to confront was Europe's negative image of Russia, and indeed of himself as the exotic ruler of a ‘rude and barbarous kingdom’ who attracted more curiosity than respect.
The irony is that Peter tantalised the curious public even more by attempting to conceal his true identity under a commoner's disguise. The 250-strong contingent which left Moscow in March 1697 with a thousand sledges was headed not by the tsar but by a trio of plenipotentiaries: Franz Lefort, Fedor Golovin and the Foreign Office official Prokopy Voznitsyn. ‘Never has there been such a big embassy,’ Lefort wrote to his brother Jacob. ‘I have six pages, four dwarfs, about twenty liveried servants, who will all be splendidly dressed, five trumpeters, musicians, a pastor, surgeons, physicians and a company of well-equipped soldiers.’2 Although grand in scale, the delegation was traditional in its composition and in the exhaustive instructions (running to thirty-three volumes) issued to it by the Foreign Office in the tsar's name. But it was augmented by a decidedly non-standard component: thirty-five Russian ‘volunteers’ bound for the Dutch Republic to study shipbuilding and navigation, among them Peter Mikhailov, a decurion (desiatnik) or officer in charge of a unit of ten men, and his best friend, Alexander Menshikov.
Peter's decision to travel incognito has usually been attributed to his loathing of diplomatic protocol and his desire to retain the freedom to work and observe without getting bogged down in official duties. It was a signal to his hosts that the usual formalities should be suspended, rather than a sustained attempt to conceal his identity, which would have been doomed to failure. As an excited correspondent of the London Post Boy informed its readers in August 1697, ‘The Prince is said to be 7 foot high!’3 (By now he had in fact reached the height of 6 feet 7 inches.) Peter dropped his disguise when it seemed important, notably in Vienna in June–July 1698 when he took part in key negotiations about the future of the anti-Turkish alliance. The sub-terfuge may also have been an attempt to hide for as long as possible the fact that the tsar had left Russia (an unprecedented event in peacetime), to dupe not only the Turks, who might stage an attack in his absence, but also the tsar's subjects, who were not accustomed to their sovereigns subjecting themselves to the hazards of the heretical West. Muscovite politics was an intensely personal affair, revolving around the ruler's physical presence, and an absent tsar left an uncomfortable vacuum in the seat of power. Edicts issued in Moscow during the Embassy maintained such familiar formulae as ‘the great sovereign decreed’, giving no hint that Peter was missing. There is also a less easily definable aspect to Peter's incognito, which we shall encounter again and again: a love of play-acting and ‘pretendership’ which verged on a desire actually to be someone else. The Embassy charade was a natural extension of the play regiments and the mock court, a provocative challenge to Peter's companions, who were forced to collude and even assume different identities themselves. Probably only a crowned autocrat with Peter's forceful personality could get away with it.
Peter's disguise attracted rather than deflected attention. Peter Lefort, Franz's nephew, writing to relatives in Switzerland in the middle of August 1697, found it impossible to keep the secret: ‘I want to tell you, without subjecting myself to the risk of actually writing it, that the person whom you mentioned is with us. And everyone knows. We did all we could to hide the fact but it was impossible. … The rumour is so wide-spread that people run after every Muscovite thinking that it's His Majesty.’ In early September he wrote: ‘We are no longer hiding the fact of the tsar's presence as it would be pointless.’4 Peter's semi-incognito was to produce some awkward incidents, one of which had very serious repercussions.
The insult at Riga. Prussia
In Riga in Swedish Livonia, which the Embassy reached on 31 March 1697, Peter tried to inspect ships in the harbour and to sketch a plan of the fortifications, which understandably aroused the suspicions of the Swedish governor, who at the same time made no special arrangement to receive or honour Mr Mikhailov. Peter was asked to move along by armed guards. Apparently insulted that he had not been treated like a tsar and outraged by the high price of accommodation and transport (the onset of spring forced the Embassy to exchange their sleds for wheeled vehicles), he left Riga on 8 April, three days before the main party. Bad memories of the city were stored up for future reference. Turning the East–West rhetoric of ‘them and us' on its head, he later referred to his reception as ‘barbaric and Tatar-like’.5 The Swedes claimed, on the contrary, that they had treated Peter's delegation with all possible civility, greeted them with ceremonial gun salutes and given them the best lodgings. They pointed out that it was not usual for diplomatic personnel to look around forts with telescopes and make sketches of fortifications. For the time being, though, relations with Sweden remained officially cordial. In December 1697 Peter congratulated the sixteen-year-old King Charles XII on his accession and promised to keep the established treaties in perpetuity.
Peter had a better time in Mitau at the court of the duke of Courland, who arranged a programme of feasts and entertainments, at which Peter behaved like a ‘second Bacchus’. On 20 April he set off for Libau, where on 2 May he embarked on the ship Saint George, docking three days later at Pilau in Brandenburg. On 9 May, well ahead of the main Embassy, which was welcomed with splendid parades on 18 May, he had his first meeting with Frederick, the elector of Brandenburg, who respected the ‘high personage's’ disguise by putting on a splendid firework display which included an illuminated screen with the words ‘Vivat Tsar and Great Prince Peter Alekseevich’, allegedly addressed to the tsar back in Moscow. In Königsberg Peter Mikhailov took lessons in the ‘bombardier's art’ from Peter von Sternfeld, who awarded him a proficiency certificate. In June Lefort signed treaties with the Prussians on friendship, trade and training opportunities for Russians, although assurances of mutual aid in the case of enemy attack were only expressed orally. Peter spent several weeks in Pilau awaiting the latest news from Poland, where a contest for the throne was in progress, and was pleased to hear of the victory of Frederick Augustus, elector of Saxony, the candidate favoured by Russia and Denmark, over the French-backed Prince de Conti. On 30 June he set off for the Dutch Republic.
In Koppenbrügge near Hanover Peter met Sophia-Charlotte, the wife of the elector of Brandenburg, and her mother, Sophia, electress of Hanover, who invited him to dinner and dancing. In letters the two women later remarked on the tsar's ‘rustic’ table manners, his shyness and lack of gallantry. He seemed more at ease with the dwarfs in his party, whom every now and then he kissed, than dancing with the German ladies; their whalebone corsets puzzled the ‘Muscovites’, who had little experience of socialising in mixed company. Even so, the electresses were charmed by Peter's ‘natural manner and informality’. If he had a better education, they thought, he would be a splendid person, because he had ‘much merit and much native wit’.6 Such social encounters were an essential part of Peter's Western education and contributed to his vision of civilising Russia, which included ending the traditional segregation of men and women.
The little house at Zaandam
When Peter met the electresses he was dressed like a Dutch sailor, in anticipation of his arrival on 8 August in the Amsterdam suburb of Zaandam, where he rented a room at the back of a blacksmith's house. The house was tiny, with a box-like guest room only slightly longer than the height of an average person, but it suited Peter, who preferred confined spaces to grand palaces. In fact, he spent only about a week in his cramped lodgings. On 15 August, uttering the words ‘Too many people!’, he was forced to quit by curious crowds, who even clambered on to neighbouring roofs to catch a glimpse of the tsar of Muscovy. Zaandam residents handed down many tales about Peter, for example how he was partial to a glass (or two) of gin and liked to converse in Dutch. Several anecdotes centre on the themes of modesty and mistaken identity, such as the story of Peter's conversation with a shipwright's wife: ‘Your husband's a skilled worker,’ says Peter. ‘I know him well because I built a ship with him.’ She asks: ‘Are you a carpenter too, then?’ and Peter replies: ‘Yes, I'm a carpenter too.’7 In reality, few people were taken in by Peter's disguise, although many deemed it sensible to play along with it.
Peter chose the Zaandam cottage for practical reasons – it was on a canal about five minutes from the quay where he was planning to work – but the little house also formed part of the stage set for his play-acting, in this case in the role of ship's carpenter Peter Mikhailov. It also provided material for subsequent myth-making about the Carpenter Tsar, both in the later imperial and in the Soviet eras. Not everyone approved of such ‘affectations’ of modesty. When Napoleon visited Zaandam in 1811 he expressed disapproval of Peter's inappropriate sailor habits and the ‘absurdity’ of the by then half-ruined little house. But Napoleon, we recall, rose to be emperor and to rule half of Europe from humble beginnings, unlike the hereditary tsar Peter, who chose to simulate humility. In 1865 Prince Henry of the Netherlands commissioned a wooden structure to protect Peter's cottage and in 1886 William III gave it as a gift to Alexander III, who sponsored a major rescue operation, during which the whole building was lifted on to a stone foundation and wooden and iron supports were built. In 1895 a stone casing was added, which survives to the present, as does an inscription by Alexander I: ‘Nothing is too small for a great man.’
The Dutch Republic
Peter transferred to the centre of Amsterdam where he was looked after by the burgomaster Nicolaes Witsen, who had visited Russia and shared Peter's interest in ships and collecting curiosities. On 17 August he toured the city and on subsequent days enjoyed firework displays, one of which featured four columns supporting a globe with ‘nautical wonders’ at the corners, and inside a double eagle with the Latin inscription VIVAT TSAR PETER ALEKSEEVICH, flanked by figures of Mars and Hercules. The Dutch East India Company agreed to admit ‘the distinguished personage living incognito’ together with ten of his companions to work in their yards under instruction from the master shipwright Claas Paul. (The Russian team saw the launch of their first frigate, the Peter and Paul, on 9 November.) On 1 September in Utrecht Peter had his first (secret) meeting with the Dutch stadtholder William of Orange, since 1688 also king of England. The details of their conversation were not officially recorded, although various texts survive which emphasise Peter's admiration for William (‘the most brave and most generous Hero of the Age’), his distrust of France and his desire to promote trade.8 A week later the king staged a sumptuous dinner for his guest. On 22 September the whole Embassy was received by the Estates General in the Hague, a reception which took some time to organise as a result of different opinions of protocol. Their hosts explained to the Russians that the deputies were not the servants of a monarch but held high office in their own right and merited appropriate respect. This proved an inopportune moment to request money from the Dutch, who pleaded poverty as a result of the Nine Years' War with France, just ended by the peace of Ryswick (autumn 1697), not to mention the fact that France, with whom they had just concluded peace, was the Turkish sultan's protector.
Peter spent four and a half months in the Dutch Republic, much of it devoted to studying shipbuilding, punctuated by sailing and naval displays and visits to windmills, engravers' workshops, hospitals, botanical gardens and other sights. He was particularly fascinated by the curiosities and rarities, assembled from all corners of the globe, in which the Republic abounded. He visited Jacob de Wilde's gemstone collection and the museums of Levinus Vincent and Frederick Ruysch, highlights of which were about ‘50 small bodies, undecayed, preserved in alcohol’, some of which later ended up in Peter's own chamber of curiosities in St Petersburg, where they can be seen to this day. Peter also attended some of Professor Ruysch's gruesomely illustrated public lectures at the Amsterdam Anatomical Theatre, one of the places where he acquired a taste for performing dissections and autopsies. What may seem a macabre interest to modern readers was not so unusual in Peter's time; Samuel Pepys, for example, describes a similar theatre in seventeenth-century London where audiences regularly watched dissections while eating their lunch. Peter took away from this part of northern Europe the impression of a well-ordered state, well-planned towns with clean streets and solid houses, thriving commerce and crafts, and a people in control of their environment. Many years later he advised the trainee architect Ivan Korobov to ‘learn the manner of Dutch architecture, especially foundations which are needed here for we have the same conditions with regard to the lowness of the land and also the thinness of the walls; also learn how to measure the proportions of gardens and to decorate them with trees and figures, which nowhere in the world are so fine as in Holland.’9 No major Dutch architects are known to have worked in St Petersburg, but the Dutch principles which Peter admired – the intersection of the city by canals, the construction of embankments, the formal layout of gardens, and the use of brick and tiles, including blue and white Delft tiles for interiors – were later reflected in his new city of Sankt-Piter-Burkh, which came to be known, among other things as ‘New Amsterdam’.
England
On 9 January 1698 Peter left the Embassy proper in the Dutch Republic and sailed across the Channel with his team of trainees to England in Vice-Admiral Sir David Mitchell's ship, the Yorke. As it was later recounted in the preface to the Naval Statute (1720), having acquired practical experience in Holland, Peter turned to England (not on his original itinerary) to acquire theoretical knowledge ‘in the Mathematical way’.10 In fact, most of Peter's time in England, too, was devoted to practical activity and visiting the sights rather than to theoretical studies, for which he had little patience. There were ample opportunities for acquiring a range of naval expertise, from a better understanding of the role of a navy in a modern state to getting hands-on experience of building ships in the Royal Naval Dockyards at Deptford.
English motives for welcoming this strange guest were chiefly commercial. The Russia Company, the descendant of the trading company formed by the first English merchants in Moscow in the 1550s, was pursuing a long-term policy of recovering commercial privileges lost in 1649, when Tsar Alexis's government had protested about the execution of Charles I. In the end, the winner of a contract to sell tobacco to Russia, signed in April 1698, was not the Company but Peregrine Osborne, marquis of Carmarthen, who was able to tempt the tsar to visit England in the first place with the gift of the frigate Royal Transport, the most modern vessel of its kind afloat. As far as political alliances were concerned, the English still regarded Russia's role in the world as marginal. Russia was not in competition for colonies overseas. It had no navy to speak of. They acknowledged Russia's success at Azov, but the port's location further encouraged the view that Russian foreign policy was distinctly eastern-oriented. A contemporary poem portrayed Peter and William as ‘the Twins of Fate’, each illustrious in his own sphere:
[Peter's] Glist'ning Sabre on proud Asia Gleams,
Dazling the Frighted Tarters by its Beams;
Its Conquering Steel shall to the East give Law,
Whilst NASSAW's Scepter keeps the West in Awe.11
Over the next two decades Britain was to watch the growth of Russian sea power in the Baltic with growing anxiety, but for the time being relations were cordial and no restrictions were imposed on Peter's own shipbuilding studies or on his hiring British naval experts for use in his ‘eastern’ campaigns.
Kneller
We have no clear idea of what Peter looked like before he embarked on the Grand Embassy. The few surviving early ‘portraits’, as we saw earlier, are either stylised effigies or imaginative reconstructions by foreigners. In 1698 the twenty-five-year-old tsar finally comes to life in the famous full-length portrait painted in London by Sir Godfrey Kneller and now hanging in Kensington Palace in London. Even if Kneller's was not the first true likeness of Peter painted from life (there is a reference to a sitting in Königsberg in 1697, for example) it was certainly the most successful of the early images. Sir Godfrey (1646–1723), court painter to a series of English monarchs, was a busy man. He probably painted only the face (the Austrian resident minister Hofmann recorded a sitting in early February), which meant that Peter did not pose in the setting of the completed painting, which would have been added by Kneller's assistants. The master repeated the same set formulae – column and crown to our left, warship in the background to the right, the tsar in royal ermine and armour – as he used in his portrait of James II (1683–84, National Portrait Gallery, London), which itself was a variation on a fairly hackneyed theme. It was lucky that the warship motif from James's portrait (James was high admiral of the fleet) was so appropriate for the sealoving tsar, while the emblematic armour, of a kind which was no longer worn in battle, and a marshal's baton, honoured Peter as a military leader. But the very fact that in West European terms Kneller's portrait is conventional and unremarkable, albeit apparently a good likeness, immediately recognised by contemporaries who saw it, makes it something of a landmark in the history of Western perceptions of Russian rulers. All traces of Russian exoticism and barbarism were expunged, to produce an unambiguously Western royal image in the grand register. For perhaps the first time a Russian ruler was depicted as ‘one of us’ as opposed to ‘one of them’.
To the wider British public in 1698, of course, Russia was still ‘as remote as China … the land of ice, of barbarism and of ignorance’.12 That a Muscovite monarch should come to the West to receive education and culture and take them back home with him instead of waiting passively for them to arrive or (more likely) resisting them was regarded as remarkable. Peter's aim, British observers agreed, was ‘to see countries more civilised than his own, and especially nations who have developed a Navy, which is his master passion’ and ‘to take patterns for civilising his own rude people’.13 It seemed natural, then, to honour Peter as a token European ruler in the making, as Kneller did in his portrait, the features of which soon reached a wider public through the medium of prints (notably by the famous engraver John Smith) and miniatures on enamel, and also spawned numerous copies on canvas.
There are other portraits of Peter from this period, however, which remind us that the break with Old Russia was far from complete and that artists abroad still catered for a public which expected its Muscovite monarchs to look exotic. A painting by the Dutch artist Pieter van de Werff (1665–1718) shows Peter dressed in a more native style, which at least one commentator thought was more like Peter than the ‘idealised’ portrait by Kneller, who was too used to ‘flattering lords and ladies’.14 A print by the British engraver William Faithorne, based on Kneller's likeness, also presents a more Muscovite Peter in a fur hat, while a medal made by the Saxon engraver Christian Wermuth to commemorate the Grand Embassy presents a sort of composite Western–Eastern Peter in laurels and armour but wearing a furtrimmed robe, inscribed CZAR ET AUTOCRATOR … CULTIORES EVROPAE REGIONES INVISIT (he visited the most educated regions of Europe). Similar contrasts may be observed in two experimental half-roubles minted in Moscow in 1699, the first showing Peter full face as in icons, wearing the Cap of Monomach, the second as a Roman emperor in profile, with laurel wreath and mantle. After 1700 the Muscovite Peter was more or less to disappear from view.
Impressions of foggy Albion
Peter made the most of his three months in England. In London he visited the Royal Observatory, the Mint (in the Tower), the Arsenal, and the Royal Society. He went to Portsmouth and on the way back visited Windsor Castle, where an Order of the Garter ceremony may have given him some ideas for his own Order of St Andrew, which he instituted in 1699, and also spent a night in Christ Church College, Oxford. Sometimes he just wandered round the streets. On 9 March, writes the compiler of his journal, ‘a female giant came to see us for lunch. She stretched out her arm and without bending the decurion walked under the arm.’15 He enjoyed ‘the choicest Secrets and Experiments’ conducted for him by the physician Moses Stringer, which included dissolving and separating metals.16 and some trips to the theatre, where he saw, among other things, The Rival Queens, or the Death of Alexander the Great by Nathanial Lee. He also had a fling with the famous actress Laetitia Cross.
Peter appreciated the British first and foremost as seafarers, as encapsulated in a statement, recorded by the British engineer John Perry and in other sources, ‘that he thinks it a much happier Life to be an Admiral in England, than Czar in Russia’.17 If he really did say that he found the British Isles ‘the best, most beautiful and happiest place on earth’, he surely had the seas, rivers and ships of ‘foggy Albion’ in mind.18 For Peter the highlights of his visit included sailing on the Thames, inspecting ships and attending a naval review at Portsmouth. But notwithstanding William III's view that Peter was ‘interested only in ships and navigation and is quite indifferent to the beauties of nature, to splendid buildings and parks’,19 he did take an interest in non-naval matters. Some architectural historians may have found William III's architecture over-plain and lacking in grandeur, but this was probably a positive virtue to a young monarch with modest resources and a taste for small buildings. Peter visited Kensington Palace, which William bought in 1689 and had restored and altered by Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723), and Wren's new wing at Hampton Court. Wren's majestic Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich, with splendid views across the Thames, was begun in 1694, but was still mostly a building site when Peter saw it. Just behind it he would have seen Inigo Jones's Queen's House (1616), the first classical building in England and beyond it Greenwich Park, recently laid out in formal style by the French garden designer André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), creator of the gardens at Versailles, who also designed the formal gardens at Hampton Court. Later albums of prints of British mansions and parks were to provide Peter with ideas for his own projects.
In walks around the City of London where, the journal of his visit records, ‘he climbed the column commemorating the Great Fire of London called the Monument’ Peter saw Wren's numerous parish churches, some with spires and towers reminiscent of his own later Peter-Paul Cathedral. St Paul's Cathedral, founded in 1675, did not get its dome until 1702 and was declared complete only in 1711, but its imposing scale may have reminded Peter that even in a country like Britain, where the church was firmly subordinated to the crown, grand ecclesiastical architecture remained a prominent feature in the capital city and glorified the monarch as well as God. The Anglican church interested Peter greatly. He visited the archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace, where he saw an ordination and a service. One of the churchmen whom Peter met was Bishop Gilbert Burnet (1679–1715), who wrote that Peter was most attentive when he explained the authority that Christian emperors assumed in matters of religion, and the supremacy of the English kings. They discussed icons, the saints and the formulation of the Trinity. At the same time, Burnet found Peter ‘a man of very hot temper, soon inflamed and very brutal in his passion’.20
Peter was curious about the British system of government and several stories survive on this theme. In order to see the king in parliament, for example, he was ‘placed in a gutter upon the house-top, to peep in at a window, where he made so ridiculous a figure that neither king nor people could forbear laughing, which obliged him to retire sooner than he intended’. This gave the Austrian ambassador occasion to report ‘the rarest of things: a king on the throne and an emperor on the roof’.21 The official journal fixes the date of this visit as 2 April, when Peter attended a joint session of the Lords and Commons. The entry for this day describes how he heard ‘various orators and the reading of law suits, bills and addresses’, which, according to an anecdote, prompted the response: ‘It's fun to listen to the sons of the fatherland telling the king the blunt truth. We ought to learn from the English in this respect.’22 This remark should not be interpreted as a statement in favour of parliamentary government, however. It was the Lords whom Peter observed speaking ‘truthfully’, who in their capacity as advisers physically surrounding the king may have struck him as not much different from his own boyar council, even though the lords did not prostrate themselves before the king or refer to themselves as his ‘slaves’, practices which Peter was trying to eliminate at home. He probably regarded the king as an absolute monarch much like himself.
In fact, although on paper Britain was a strong monarchy – the king could declare war and make peace, call and dissolve parliament, issue pardons, appoint cabinet ministers and officers – the royal finances were limited (money was granted by parliament) and the monarchy was not protected from public opinion. Not surprisingly, Peter was struck by the contradictory messages about British royal power which the Tower of London provided. On the one hand, he learned that the Tower housed state prisoners, sent there by rulers with powers much like his own; on the other hand, the axes which cut off the heads of Mary Stuart and Charles I were displayed, but hidden from Peter in case he threw them into the Thames to express his disapproval.23 Peter rejected the accusations made by foreigners that he ruled his subjects like ‘slaves’. He was adamant that ‘English freedom is not appropriate here [in Russia]. … You have to know your people to know how to govern them. I am happy to hear anything useful from the lowest of my subjects; their hands, legs and tongues aren't fettered.’24 This anecdote represents the relationship between tsar and subjects in traditional, patrimonial terms. In Russia people were free to appeal or speak to the tsar (although in law direct petitions were discouraged), but not to channel their appeals through institutionalised bodies. The independent judiciary, parliament and corporate bodies, which in Britain regulated relations between ruler and ruled, were absent.
In London Peter and his companions were confronted with a bewildering choice of products – trade and commerce were the foundation of Britain's wealth – and what he bought, both for personal and public use, tells us much about his priorities. His largest purchase was tobacco, a commodity which Peter regarded not only as a source of profit but also as a signifier of cultural reform. (Russian conservatives denounced the evils of smoking for religious, not health reasons.) He bought mathematical and navigational instruments, watches and clocks, clothes, wigs, books, boxes, swords, and a coffin as a model for Russian coffin-makers. An intriguing purchase were some lawyers' gowns in black cloth. Their fate is unknown, but it is possible that they were intended for the use of the Drunken Assembly. He also bought several black slaves, at £30 for a female, £20 for a boy.25 Although serfdom had died out in Britain long ago, slavery was still a flourishing business in the empire, even though comparatively few black slaves went to owners in England. These live purchases remind us that Peter shared the taste of many contemporary European rulers for human ‘exotica’, as ‘blackamoors’ were regarded, and for freaks of nature (‘monsters’) such as dwarfs and giants, which were collected with the same enthusiasm as rare shells, plants and animals.
Peter left vivid impressions in England, where from the start he confounded expectations of how a monarch should behave. When he first arrived in London, repeating his Dutch experience he rented a small house near the Strand with just two rooms on each storey, which gave him easy access to the Thames. When the prince of Denmark (husband of the future Queen Anne) paid a visit he was surprised to find the tsar still in bed and three or four other persons crammed into the tiny room. They had to open all the windows to clear the terrible stench.26 Even more notorious is the story of the damage which Peter and his friends inflicted on the famous diarist John Evelyn's house and garden (regarded as a horticultural marvel) at Sayes Court, their lodgings in Deptford, which resulted in a bill for £350 9s. 6d. damages.27 The story about Peter pushing his companions in wheelbarrows through the famous holly hedge (described by Evelyn as ‘impregnable’) is anecdotal, but there are records of paving being ripped up and trees and plants destroyed. Evelyn himself was away at the time, but his servant referred to the Russian guests as ‘right nasty’. Despite such bad behaviour, however, Peter generally aroused admiration rather than condemnation. The uncouth and untutored nosiness of a ‘giant-genius’ determined to reform both himself and his people, to overcome prejudice, superstition and ignorance by learning from others, formed part of a potent image which allowed Russia to be viewed simultaneously as ‘Oriental’ and alien, but also potentially ‘one of us’, albeit a junior, trainee version. If imitation is the best form of flattery, the British had every reason to approve Peter's good sense and forgive his naughty behaviour.
The strel'tsy revolt of 1698
In April 1698 Peter returned briefly to the Dutch Republic before heading south-east towards Vienna for his next major engagement. A correspondent in London sent Emperor Leopold of Austria, a stickler for etiquette who had ruled his country since 1658, a sneak preview:
While he was here he went around all the time dressed as a shipwright, so who knows what sort of dress he will assume when he is in Your Imperial Majesty's court. He did not see much of the king as he refused to change his life style and had his lunch at 11 a.m. and his supper at 7 p.m., then went straight to bed and got up at four in the morning, which was very trying for the Englishmen who had to attend him.28
In early May Peter had news from Prince-Caesar in Moscow about a mutiny of the strel'tsy, which apparently had been successfully quelled, although Peter was not convinced that the culprits had been treated with suitable severity. Later in May he spent two weeks in Dresden, where he visited the chamber of curiosities, the arsenal and foundry and the castle at Fürstenberg, where he was treated to a shooting display and a tasting in some famous wine cellars. (For the rest of his life Peter did not stint himself when it came to good wines, which he purchased abroad in large consignments.) On 16 June the Embassy arrived in Vienna, where it enjoyed a lavish welcome. Peter was on his best behaviour at his first meeting with Emperor Leopold, unusually attentive to the emperor and his family, despite initially committing a faux pas by galloping into the audience chamber and overstepping the spot in the centre of the room where the two were supposed to meet. Highlights of Peter's stay in Vienna were two costumed balls, one given for his name day on 29 June (9 July) and another on 11 (21) July, which Peter attended dressed as a Friesian peasant, whom Emperor Leopold, getting into the spirit of things, toasted with the words: ‘I know that you are acquainted with the great Russian monarch, so let us drink to his health.’29 There was more show than substance to the formal negotiations, for the Austrians were on the point of making a separate peace. Their decisive victory over the Turks at Zenta (11 September 1697 NS) allowed them to press for peace on the basis of uti possidetis and to sign the Treaty of Carlowitz late in 1698.
Peter had already said his farewells to the emperor and was on the point of leaving for Venice, a watery paradise where a grand reception awaited him, when another letter arrived from Prince-Caesar reporting that the strel'tsy had mutinied again. Alarmed, he decided to cancel the next stage of his journey and return to Moscow without seeing Italy. (This is the official story. A Russian historian has argued that Peter did in fact visit Venice incognito on 19–20 July, the only gap in the verifiable schedule. If the visit did take place, there would have been little time for more than a fleeting impression.30) Leaving Voznitsyn in Vienna to continue talks, which had reached a dead end, and accompanied by Lefort, Golovin and Menshikov, Peter made rapid progress. News that the revolt had been suppressed did not persuade him to resume his planned itinerary. No doubt he had little confidence, given their assurances about the first outbreak, in the ability of his associates in Moscow to act firmly.
On his homeward journey, passing through Rawa in Galicia, Peter met Augustus, the new king of Poland, one of the most colourful characters of his era, who pursued titles, wealth and women with equal energy, even if the number of his illegitimate offspring has been exaggerated. The tsar and the king discussed their common interests and Peter expressed his wish to avenge the ‘insult’ suffered in Riga. Peter learned that Augustus had designs on Swedish Livonia, which offered his new Polish kingdom outlets to the sea. He also knew that Denmark was eager to reduce Sweden's possessions in north Germany and to discourage the ties of their neighbours the dukes of Holstein-Gottorp with the Swedish crown. Thus the outline of an alliance against Sweden was taking shape. Peter was captivated by the self-confident Augustus, an enthusiastic drinker and sportsman ten years his senior, and when he returned to Moscow he swaggered around in a tunic and sword presented to him by his new friend. A decade later, as we shall see, the senior–junior roles were to be reversed.
In terms of its stated diplomatic aims, the Grand Embassy was a failure, indeed was rendered redundant while it was still in progress, but it produced many practical results, notably the hiring of shipwrights, sailors, apothecaries, architects and other experts, as well as arrangements for training Russians abroad. In Britain Peter hired the engineer John Perry, the shipwrights Joseph Noye and Richard Cozens, and the mathematician Henry Farquarson, among others, while over the next few decades young Russians undertook apprenticeships in England as boat builders, anchorsmiths, joiners, locksmiths, furniture makers, metal workers and in other trades. Perhaps the main lesson that Peter learned in diplomacy was the importance of ‘lateral thinking’ on the question of coalitions for the pursuit of Russia's goals. The bad experience at Riga, cordial relations with Sweden's rival Prussia, personal friendship with King Augustus of Poland, the realisation that immediate further gains in the south were unlikely in view of the collapse of the Holy League, all pointed to a new phase in Russia's foreign programme. As far as Peter's personal development was concerned, the influence of the Embassy is incalculable. He came back not just a changed man but also a man more convinced than ever that Russia must change.
Wielding the razor
The Embassy crystallised Peter's image of Europeans, not in any profound historical or philosophical context (there is little evidence that he did much in the way of serious reading either before or during his travels) but in the immediate, concrete sense of what they looked like and how they behaved in their surroundings. And what in the first instance divided Russians and Western Europeans (of both sexes) into ‘us’ and ‘them’ were clothes and hairstyles. Peter made his initial onslaught on his subjects' appearance on 26 August 1698, the day after he returned to Moscow, when the Austrian envoy Johannes Korb was on the spot to record the scene:
The report of the Czar's arrival had spread through the city. The Boyars and principal Muscovites flocked in numbers at an early hour to the place where it had become known he had spent the night, to pay their court. … Those who, according to the fashion of that country, would cast themselves upon the ground to worship majesty, he lifted up graciously from their grovelling posture, and embraced with a kiss, such as is only due among private friends. If the razor, that plied promiscuously among the beards of those present can be forgiven the injury it did, the Muscovites may truly reckon that day among the happiest of their lives.31
As the tsar hacked away at the long beards, the first to be shorn was General Aleksei Shein; next came Prince-Caesar Fedor Romodanovsky, then ‘all the rest had to conform to the guise of foreign nations, and the razor eliminated the ancient fashion’.32 Apart from the patriarch (exempted by ‘superstitious awe for his office’), only a couple of boyars were let off on account of extreme old age or special links with the royal family. The campaign continued on 1 September, Muscovite New Year, when a court jester circulated among the guests at a banquet shaving anyone who still had a beard. ‘It was of evil omen to make show of reluctance as the razor approached the chin,’ writes Korb, ‘and was to be forthwith punished with a boxing on the ears. In this way, between mirth and the wine cup, many were admonished by this insane ridicule to abandon the olden guise.’33 Forced shaving was combined with another offence to tradition, when Peter failed to observe the usual New Year ceremonies over which tsar and patriarch usually presided jointly. Instead, ‘common sailors’ were allowed to mix with guests and gun salvoes accompanied the toasts. The attack on beards was thus part of a wider package of cultural reform, which, as Korb detected, Peter pursued by using ridicule to attack people's dignity, with an underlying hint of menace in the shape of razors held to throats.
Members of Peter's immediate entourage had already adopted a Westernised appearance – participants in the Grand Embassy swapped their Muscovite clothes for European in Holland in 1697, although on occasions they still wore high fur hats and brocade robes at grand receptions – while the wider court circle at home had little choice but to comply. Further afield, however, the measures aroused bitter protests. The British engineer John Perry attributed the opposition to the fact that ‘the holy Men of old had worn their Beards according to the Model of the Picture of their Saints’, and recounts the tale of an old Russian carpenter at Voronezh who hid his shavedoff beard under his shirt with the intention of taking it with him to the grave,34 while Charles Whitworth spoke of the difficulty with which the nation ‘submitted to the Razor … their fore fathers lived unshaven, their priests saints and martyrs were venerable for their beards, then they were bid to imitate’.35
Dress reform followed. In February 1699, as Korb recorded, Peter demonstrated his dislike of traditional fashion by cutting off the long sleeves of some of his officers and ordering returning envoys to wear ‘German dress’.36 Peter's own sartorial habits were influenced early on by his friends in the Foreign Quarter, although in the 1690s Russian dress was still de rigueur for ceremonial occasions. Items of Russian clothing from this period survive in Peter's wardrobe in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, but there is no evidence that he wore Russian garments after 1698. Peter's own clean-shaven visage and ‘German’ attire and his imposition of the same on others were frequently cited as evidence of his ungodliness. An artisan interrogated in 1704 protested that Peter was destroying the Christian faith by forcing people to shave their beards, wear German dress and smoke tobacco.37 This view was shared by the church. In the words of Patriarch Adrian, ‘Latin Jesuits, Dominicans, Bernadines and others not only shave their beards but also their moustaches and look like apes or monkeys.’38 One treatise warned: ‘Look often at the icon of the Second Coming of Christ, and observe the righteous standing at the right side of Christ, all with beards. At the left stand the Muselmen and heretics, Lutherans and Poles and other shavers of their ilk, with just whiskers, such as cats and dogs have. Take heed whom to imitate and which side you will be on.’39 In fact, the rule that laymen must be bearded has no basis in scripture and it was not long before pro-reform churchmen composed their own treatises to explain why the wearing of a beard was not essential for salvation.
Punishing the strel'tsy
It was no accident that Peter's assault on beards and traditional dress occurred soon after his premature recall to Russia to do battle with a group of men whom he had come to regard as symbols of Old Russian ‘barbarism’. The strel'tsy had plenty to complain about. After the banishment of Sophia and Golitsyn, they were relegated to the losing side in Peter's mock battles, then subjected to hardships during the two Azov campaigns, which were followed not by rewards or even respite but by new postings away from their base in Moscow to the Polish border, with little hope of returning permanently to the capital. In June 1698 four regiments mutinied, as Peter learned in Vienna, but their revolt was quashed not far from the New Jerusalem monastery at Istra by troops under the command of Patrick Gordon. The rebels' petitions to the authorities confirmed Peter's worst fears: vows to kill the ‘Germans’ who were ‘destroying Orthodoxy’ mingled with threats to wipe out the new infantry regiments, their perceived rivals. During interrogations it became clear that the strel'tsy harboured vague notions of driving out ‘traitors’ and foreigners, establishing leaders sympathetic to them and restoring the ‘old order’ under which they, the strel'tsy, had enjoyed a privileged position.
Peter was dissatisfied by the investigation and the penalties imposed on the rebels before his return. A new round of trials, which began on 17 September 1698 and ended only in February 1700, aimed not to establish their guilt (which was regarded as proven), but to elicit information on ‘accomplices’ and motives. In particular, Peter suspected the involvement of Sophia, who since 1689 had been residing in a fair degree of comfort in the Novodevichy convent just a few miles from the Kremlin. Several testimonies mentioned a plan to restore her to power (‘their hopes were pinned upon Tsarevna Sophia Alekseevna, for she had ruled the government previously’) and evidence emerged of secret letters passing between the convent and the strel'tsy through the mediation of Sophia's sisters and some mysterious beggar women and strel'tsy wives. Johannes Korb recorded the rumour that ‘she promised to put herself at the head of a new conspiracy of the Streliz [strel'tsy], and communicated her advice to them, suggesting the manner and the frauds by which the Strelitz might bring their dark and malignant designs into effect’.
On 27 September Peter went in person to the convent to question Sophia, the first recorded meeting between them for nine years. In Korb's view, Peter had in mind that ‘Mary of Scotland was led forth from prison to the block by command of her sister Elizabeth, Queen of England’, but there was to be no execution for Sophia, who denied any knowledge of letters or any attempt to communicate with the strel'tsy. In the end Peter made do with inflicting a symbolic death on his troublesome half-sister, who was forced to take the veil under the name Suzanna and to live under a stricter regime. To rub it in, a few corpses of executed strel'tsy were strung up just outside the windows of her living quarters and left there to rot. As Korb wrote, one held a petition in his hand, ‘perhaps in order that remorse for the past may gnaw Sophia with perpetual grief’.40 For the rest of his life Peter retained a deep suspicion of convents and monasteries as refuges for subversives and dissidents.
As for the strel'tsy, their past record was enough to ensure harsh sentences as a warning to others: 1,182 strel'tsy were executed and 601 flogged and banished. Men were broken on the wheel, heads were displayed on poles, corpses strung up. The execution of the strel'tsy, some beheaded by Peter himself, became one of the symbols of the tsar's ruthless determination to root out opposition. It is no coincidence that he prepared to deal with the strel'tsy by cutting off the boyars' long beards, the symbol of antiquity. The Russian artist Vasily Surikov's famous painting The Morning of the Strel'tsy Execution (1881) makes the point graphically, contrasting the traditional clothing of the bearded strel'tsy and their families, clutching candles and icons, with the Western uniforms of the clean-shaven guardsmen and the tsar himself in the plain green tunic of the Preobrazhensky guards. The largely symbolic, although still painful, cut of the razor about the faces of the elite was soon followed by the lethal stroke of the axe on the necks of the strel'tsy. Peter in person wielded both razors and axes, if only as a token gesture. The bulk of the cutting work was done by his associates. The message was not lost on the élite, who remained by and large obedient and subservient, but cruel retribution was not enough to suppress strel'tsy disaffection. If anything it made it worse, especially when after 1698 many were exiled from Moscow only to form pockets of discontent in other part of the empire.
In what was left of the seventeenth century Peter had one more symbol of the past to deal with. In 1697 he had written from abroad to close associates proposing that his unloved wife Evdokia take the veil, a wish which no doubt became even stronger as a result of his encounters with Western women during his travels. The Danish commercial agent Georg Grund recounts an interesting tale, not found in any other source, about a blazing row which erupted after Peter tried to appease his wife with gifts of trinkets bought from merchants in the Foreign Quarter, after he had just spent the night there with his mistress Anna Mons. Evdokia flung them to the floor and trampled on them, cursing ‘that German whore’. Peter thereupon vowed to have nothing more to do with his wife.41 After his return to Moscow in August 1698 (when he immediately visited Anna) Peter tried to persuade Evdokia to retire voluntarily, but the ‘pious tsaritsa’ turned out to have a will of her own. She refused and so was unceremoniously dispatched to the Intercession convent in Suzdal', where she lived under armed guard. In May 1699 Peter sent an agent to Suzdal' to oversee a ceremony in which Evdokia was forced to take the veil under the name Elena. So secret and irregular was this ritual that not long afterwards Evdokia abandoned her nun's habit and resumed a secular life, entertaining visitors, travelling around the district in some style and taking a young army officer as a lover. There was more than a hint of irony when some years later Peter informed the Danish commercial agent Just Juel that he had divorced Evdokia in order to allow her ‘to live a life of piety’.42 His real motive was to obtain a divorce, but the failure to put the case through a church court and Evdokia's refusal to comply undermined the legality of the separation. When members of Evdokia's circle were interrogated many years later, much hinged on the question of whether or not she had been ‘shorn’ (i.e. taken the veil) in 1698–99. We shall return to this later when we consider the fate of her only surviving son, Alexis.