V
Now with God's help the final stone has been laid in the foundation of St Petersburg. (Peter to Fedor Apraksin after the battle of Poltava, 27 June 1709)
Poltava
Peter remained far from confident of victory. In December 1708 he wrote to Apraksin: ‘I don't expect this winter to pass without a pitched battle (since to wait until spring is not without danger), but this game is in God's hands, and who knows who fortune will smile on?’1 There was no battle that winter, one of the severest in living memory. In early January 1709 hundreds of Swedes froze to death outside the Ukrainian town of Hadyach, where Charles made his winter quarters. The Lutheran pastor Daniel Krman, travelling with the Swedish army, describes how surgeons cut off frost-bitten fingers and toes. ‘We experienced such cold as I shall never forget. The spittle from people's mouths turned to ice before hitting the ground, sparrows fell frozen from the roofs to the ground. You could see men without hands, others without hands and feet, some who had lost their fingers, faces, ears and noses, others crawling about on all fours.’2
Peter himself spent the first half of 1709 well away from the battle zone. In February he was in Voronezh and April and May found him in Azov and Taganrog for the first time in ten years, taking a course of strong medicine which left him feeling once again ‘as weak as a child’.3 He remained proud of his southern conquests, writing to Menshikov from Trinity fortress at Taganrog in May: ‘In this place, where ten years ago we saw just open country, with God's help now we find a fine town with a harbour, and although when the master has been away for a long time not everything is in order, still there is something worth looking at.’4 Charles, meanwhile, saw potential reinforcements falling away. On 14 May 1709 Russian troops stormed the camp of the Zaporozhian Cossacks on the Dnieper (a ‘nest of traitors’, in Peter's view) with the aim of averting an alliance between the Zaporozhians and the Tatars, both of whose support Charles was counting on. Swedish auxiliaries and supplies from the north also failed to materialise. To gain time, in May the Swedes began to besiege the small Ukrainian town of Poltava on the River Vorskla. Peter moved north into Ukraine. On 31 May he wrote to Menshikov from Kharkov: ‘I have just arrived here and shall try to get to you as quickly as I can. But we cannot afford to lose even an hour in this vital business, so if something has to be done, don't wait for me but, with God's help, do it.’5 A few days later he joined up with the army and on 27 June went into battle with the Swedes outside Poltava, beforehand, according to legend, encouraging his troops with a famous speech:
Let the Russian troops know that the hour has come which has placed the fate of all the fatherland in their hands, to decide whether Russia will be lost or will be reborn and improve its situation. Do not think of yourselves as armed and drawn up to fight for Peter but for the state which has been entrusted to Peter, for your kin and for the people of all Russia, which has until now been your defence and now awaits the final decision of fortune. Do not be confused by the enemy's reputation for invincibility which they have shown to be unfounded on many occasions. Keep before your eyes in this action that God and truth are fighting with us, which the Lord strong in battle has already demonstrated by his aid in many military actions; think of this alone. Of Peter know only that he sets no value on his own life if only Russia and Russian piety, glory and well-being may live.6
No original text or eyewitness testimonies survive, but the speech, first published in 1773, has often been quoted as a morale-booster for both the Imperial and Soviet armies.
By the time Peter met Charles in pitched battle for the first and last time, the odds were in his favour. The legendary resilience of the Swedish troops had been severely tested by two years on the move in alien terrain, by the bitter cold of winter and intense summer heat, skirmishes and shortages of food and fodder. Their numbers were depleted: Charles was left with an estimated 22,000 men to Peter's 40,000 and 5,000 irregulars. Still, in the past the Swedes had won battles when the odds were more stacked against them and the Russian troops feared them. This time, though, weakness in numbers was exacerbated by bad luck and miscalculations. They decided not to deploy their artillery, anticipating a quick breakthrough with cavalry, then had to face fire from seventy guns from the Russian camp, which cut through the already thinned Swedish ranks ‘as grass before a scythe’, as an eyewitness expressed it.7 Even when the Swedes managed to fire a volley, the poor quality of their powder made most bullets fall short. Charles himself had a wounded foot and his already overburdened staff feared for his safety. His experienced bodyguards were among the first to be killed. The two Swedish generals Rehnsköld and Löwenhaupt were at loggerheads, with the result that the former failed to communicate the battle plan to the latter, who made a fatal error in detaching his troops from the main army. General Roos sacrificed men by a prolonged attack on a useless redoubt in the initial stages of battle. Calculations that the Russians would remain passive or could be cut off from a difficult escape route (on the assumption that they would flee) proved unfounded. Swedish losses on the battlefield were 6,901 dead/ wounded and 2,760 taken prisoner. Official figures put Russian losses at 1,345 killed and 3,290 wounded.
To Catherine, who was in the baggage train at the village of Vladimirovka, Peter wrote: ‘Greetings, Matushka! I report that this day the All-Merciful God has granted us an unprecedented victory over the enemy. In short, the whole enemy army has been knocked out, about which you will hear later. PS. Come and join us to congratulate me in person.’8 On 30 June the exhausted remnant of the Swedish army, 14,299 men with 34 cannon, surrendered at Perevolochna on the Dnieper to Menshikov's contingent of 9,000 troops. Charles made his escape across the Dnieper into Turkish territory with his aides, a handful of Cossacks and a few hundred cavalrymen.
The battle of Poltava generated some powerful legends, nearly all centred on Peter himself. As an official report put it:
And so by the grace of the All-Highest this perfect victory (few precedents of which have ever been heard of) was won with little effort and little bloodshed against a proud foe by His Majesty the Tsar's glorious weaponry and personal brave and wise command and the valour of the officers and men. For His Majesty showed his own courage, greatness of spirit and martial skill in the highest degree, ignoring all danger to his own person.9
The ‘Tale of the Three Bullets’ recounts how Peter narrowly escaped death at several points in the battle. One bullet pierced his three-cornered hat, leaving a hole the size of a walnut, allegedly the same hat now kept in the Hermitage's ‘Peter the Great's Wardrobe’ collection, along with Peter's Preobrazhensky guards uniform, the latter now a faded dark blue, although the original green can still be seen below the cuffs. No bullet hole is detectable in the hat (as a result of shrinkage caused by age, according to the curator), but Peter's bronze breastplate, also preserved, appears to bear traces of a missile. Among the treasures on show in the Kremlin Dormition Cathedral in the nineteenth century was a cross, allegedly once the property of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine, which, legend has it, stopped another bullet from piercing Peter's chest.
Painters did not have to witness the battle in order to capture the required poses: the equestrian image of the victorious ruler or general against the background of a battle was an artistic cliché, which could be customised with local details. In one of the best-known versions, J. G. Dannhauer's Peter I crowned by Victory at Poltava (1710s or 1720s), the rider on the rearing bay horse holding the emblematic commander's baton in his right hand, looking over his left shoulder at the viewer, is recognisably Peter, wearing the uniform of the Preobrazhensky guards and the Order of St Andrew. An allegorical winged female figure representing Victory hands down a laurel wreath for his head. In the background Russians (to our left) pursue fleeing Swedes (to our right) amidst smoky confusion. The grandest of the painted canvases on this theme produced during Peter's lifetime was Louis Caravaque's Poltava panorama, 281 × 487 cm (State Hermitage, 1718), in which Peter, on a horse rearing up on a slight promontory, gestures with his sword towards the battle scene below (where Swedes can be seen fleeing pursued by Russians) as he looks over his left shoulder towards a group of mounted generals. The scene was captured in other media – in prints, enamels, medals and tapestries – and continued to be reproduced long after the battle in order to keep alive a defining moment in Peter's personal career. By the time an equestrian image was used on engravings celebrating the peace of Nystad and the new imperial titles in 1721, Peter had not fought the Swedes on horseback for a good many years, but the conventional motif served to remind viewers of the crucial victories which had brought about Russia's new international status. Later, under the chisel of Etienne Falconet and the pen of Alexander Pushkin, the horseman remained the most enduring of all Petrine images.
After Poltava Peter made his way to Kiev (where on 24 July he had a meeting with Feofan Prokopovich, rector of the Kiev Academy and soon to become his chief publicist) and from there to Poland, in late September reaching Warsaw, from where he wrote to Catherine that he soon hoped to join her and told her not to make jokes about him ‘amusing himself’ as he was ‘too old’ for such things. He recounted how one of his companions had got drunk (‘consorted too much with John Barleycorn’) and injured himself falling off a roof. The letter was accompanied by a gift of fresh lemons.10 Stopping off for various diplomatic meetings, Peter slowly made his way back to St Petersburg via Mitau and Riga. He spent a couple of weeks in St Petersburg before setting off for Moscow to celebrate his victory. On 18 December a triumphal parade set out from Kolomenskoe for the centre of Moscow. (On the same day Peter's daughter Elizabeth was born, a happy coincidence much exploited by publicists during her own reign as empress in 1741–61.) The parade, commemorated in a print by Aleksei Zubov, was described by an eyewitness as ‘undoubtedly the grandest and most magnificent triumphal procession in Europe since the time of the ancient Romans’,11 but it also featured Peter's own peculiar brand of disguise. Even after this key victory, Peter did not claim the ceremonial laurels, either as commander-in-chief or as sovereign. In the formal march-past on 21 December his role was, as on previous occasions, that of colonel of his regiment, the Preobrazhenskys, which was followed by a battalion of the Semenovsky guards escorting trophies and prisoners from the battle of Lesnaia. Between the two regiments drove a carriage drawn by reindeer bearing the fool Vimeni, one of several jesters in Peter's entourage. The next day Peter and fellow officers Boris Sheremetev and Alexander Menshikov submitted formal reports on the victories at Lesnaia and Poltava to His Imperial Majesty Fedor Romodanovsky, who was enthroned in state to receive the captured Swedes. A portrait set up outside Romodanovsky's Moscow residence was captioned ‘The unconquerable and most fortunate Emperor’, ostensibly a reference to Prince-Caesar rather than to Tsar Peter, although the true identity of the victor was hardly a secret. The celebrations continued until 1 January, when the new year was marked by a huge firework display, the centrepiece of which was a fiery Russian eagle shooting an arrow into the Swedish lion. The Danish agent Just Juel described ‘beautiful blue and green lights, invented by the tsar himself, and also numerous fiery globes and rains, which turned night into daylight’.12 After Poltava the discourse that Peter himself could turn darkness into light and non-existence into being gained currency.
Turk of the North
The Poltava victory was, as Peter wrote many years later, ‘a divine miracle; for it reveals that all human minds are as nothing against the will of God’.13 Foreign observers viewed the ‘miracle’ with some foreboding. Leibniz wrote to the Russian envoy in Vienna in August 1709: ‘You can imagine how the great revolution in the north has astounded people. It is being said that the tsar will be formidable to the whole of Europe, that he will be a sort of Turk of the North.’14
Victory allowed Peter to renew and extend the northern alliance. Poland was freed from Swedish occupation and Augustus was restored to the Polish throne. A meeting between him and Peter in Torun produced a new treaty of alliance signed on 9 October 1709, allowing Russia to station troops in Poland. A secret clause recognised Augustus's claim to Livonia. Augustus for his part realised that he owed his crown to Russia. The Poltava victory determined Russia's programme of maintaining the Polish Commonwealth's territorial integrity and ‘golden liberties’ (which more or less guaranteed opportunities for foreign intervention as a result of the Poles' inability to agree among themselves) right up to the first partition of Poland in 1772. On 10 and 11 October Russia signed treaties with Prussia and Denmark. Britain expressed willingness to act as mediator between Russia and Sweden, while the French were prepared for Russia to mediate, together with Denmark and Poland, in the War of the Spanish Succession, which was going badly. Diplomatically, Russia had never been in a stronger position.
The maritime powers were anxious lest Russia become too powerful. Britain in particular insisted that Sweden must not be allowed to collapse completely and that a balance must be maintained in the north. Nor was Russia totally secure in the south. At the beginning of February 1710 the Danish envoy Just Juel received a negative response to his king's request for aid for his fleet:
Now on account of the state of war and many expenses, also for fear of a sudden attack by the Turks, for which emergency preparations are being made, His Majesty [the tsar] cannot help, but will do what can be done in the future. … In the meantime His Majesty the king should himself act for the common good and arm his fleet at his own expense and go into action, which he is capable of doing as they have been at peace for a long time while we have been at war.15
On 6 February 1710, however, news reached Russia that the 1700 peace treaty with Turkey had been renewed. Peter was relieved: ‘For this fine deed, praise be to the all-powerful Lord: now we can turn our eyes and thoughts in one direction.’16 Sweden's Baltic ports were ready for the taking. In early February Elbing was captured. On 14 June 1710 Peter entered the fortress of Viborg, subdued with naval support, which he declared to be a ‘firm bulwark’ for the city of St Petersburg. The conquest was duly celebrated in the company of the Drunken Assembly and proclamations were sent to allies and to the mock sovereigns Romodanovsky and Buturlin. On 4 July the ‘famed and strong town of Riga was taken from the enemy with little loss with God's help’ after a long siege.17 This victory gave particular satisfaction to Peter, who had never forgotten the ‘insult’ of 1697. (In November 1709 he had reported to Menshikov from outside the walls of the besieged city that he had thrown the first three grenades into the town with his own hands, ‘for which I thank God for allowing me personally the honour of starting the vengeance against this accursed place’.18) Several Swedish garrisons, many laid low by the plague which was raging round the Baltic, now fell to the Russians in quick succession: in August Dünamünde and Pernau, and in September Kexholm (Korela), the island of Oesel, the fortress at Arensburg and the Estonian port of Reval (Tallinn). Peter wrote to Romodanovsky on 10 October:
I beg to inform your majesty that the All-Highest has granted us success in this campaign almost comparable with the last, for the last town, Reval, has surrendered to Lieutenant-General Bauer. And so Livonia and Estonia are cleansed of the enemy. In a word, the enemy on the left side of this eastern sea not only has no towns but also no territory left. Now it only remains to ask the Lord God for a good peace.19
Peter first visited Reval in December 1711 to view the fortifications and in 1714 he bought a plot of land nearby where he ordered a small house in the Dutch style to be built with a view of the sea. Orchards and trees were planted, some of which were still there in the late eighteenth century. At the same time he commissioned a grander palace called Ekaterinental with cascades and foundations from the architect Michetti, replicating the pattern of a grand residence for formal receptions and a modest house for private use which can be found at Peterhof, Strel'na and other estates.
There was no more talk of handing over Livonia to Augustus. A medal issued to mark Russian victories has Peter wearing a laurel wreath, armour and mantle, and on the reverse Hercules bearing a globe with the towns Narva, Reval, Dorpat, Pernau, Arensburg and Riga marked and the legend in Latin I HAVE THE STRENGTH TO BEAR SUCH A BURDEN.20 Russia's occupation of the Baltic ports was consolidated by maintaining and in some cases restoring local privileges and laws, extending to inhabitants ‘the full protection of His Majesty the Tsar’. Peter later ratified Baltic privileges in his General Regulation of 1720 and in the 1721 Treaty of Nystad. Estonian and Livonian laws were used as models for new Russian legislation, for example statutes on landed estates and laws on provision for orphans. But privileges were accompanied by watchfulness. Peter wrote to the governor of Riga in 1716 warning him that Sweden still had many supporters in the Baltic towns and that he should act with caution, taking regular censuses of the population. All new arrivals must be questioned and arrested on the least suspicion, curfews were imposed and a maximum of 300 people were allowed into the town each day. Carts and cargoes were to be searched for weapons, and ships docking in summer searched below decks.21 Religious freedom was guaranteed in the conquered provinces, but facilities for Orthodox worship were extended. In Riga a wooden Lutheran church and a chapel in the citadel were turned into Orthodox churches (one in the name of SS Peter and Paul) and a destroyed Catholic church in the town was restored and reconsecrated as Orthodox in the name of Alexis Man of God, in honour of Peter's father, who had narrowly failed to take Riga in the 1650s.
For the German-speaking merchants and gentry, swapping Swedish rule for Russian was not such a bad deal if it meant peace and the return of landed estates confiscated by the Swedish crown, while the mass of the population probably hardly noticed the difference. For them the main effect of war was general devastation. Friedrich Christian Weber from Hanover, in Riga in 1714, recorded that the land was ‘so dispeopled, that not the fourth Part of it is inhabited, and the vast Number of Ruins of Gentlemens Seats, and other Houses, shew what Ravage the War has made there’.22 It was to be many years before the prosperity of the region was restored.
Paradise regained. The growth of St Petersburg
In 1709 Peter was able to spend only a couple of weeks in St Petersburg, but with military operations again focused on the Baltic he was there for much of 1710, when, in the words of an official history, ‘he ordered houses of amusement to be built of stone of fine architectural design, to embellish gardens and speed the erection of fortifications, and also gave orders for more houses to be built for naval servitors and merchants, and the gentlemen ministers, generals and distinguished nobles were ordered to build stone mansions’.23 In February 1710 he wrote to Menshikov: ‘I only hope that the Lord God may settle your affairs as quickly as possible and that we will see you here, so that you too may see the beauty of this Paradise as a reward for the labours in which you participated together with us, which I wish with all my heart, for this place really is thriving like a fine infant.’24
The Summer and Winter Palaces (the latter replaced by another in 1725, which in turn made way for the existing building, completed in 1762) were begun in 1710, as were the mansions of Menshikov, Gavrila Golovkin and other magnates, the Alexander Nevsky monastery and the wooden church of St Isaac of Dalmatia, the saint whose feast fell on Peter's birthday. In 1711 a perspektiva or avenue (today's Nevsky Prospekt) was laid, leading from the Admiralty, one of the first sites to be constructed, to the monastery. In 1712 the construction of the stone cathedral of SS Peter and Paul in the fortress began, although not until after Peter's death did it eclipse the nearby Trinity Cathedral (demolished in 1927) as the city's main church. The chief architect of several of these projects was the Swiss-Italian Domenico Trezzini, who came to Russia in 1703 and died there in 1734. He was also in charge of a team of Russian trainee architects. All the major architects of Petrine St Petersburg were foreigners. They included the Germans Johann Friedrich Braunstein, Georg Johann Mattarnovi and Andreas Schlüter, the Austrian Nicholas Friedrich Härbel, the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Le Blond and Italians Gaetano Chiaveri and Niccolo Michetti. Peter's own contribution to the planning of St Petersburg was substantial, not one important building being built without his participation at some stage of construction. The resulting ‘Paradise’ was a sort of ribbon development of buildings immediately adjacent to the River Neva and its branches, with a few focal points, such as the Peter-Paul fortress, Trinity Square (with government offices and the main cathedral) and Admiralty Square. Buildings were mostly constructed of brick, stuccoed in bright colours and decorated with bands of flat white pilasters and window surrounds and the horizon was punctuated by bold spires and the masts of ships. Everywhere there were patches of greenery, most of it artificially cultivated. From 1710 a bureau, headed by Boris Neronov, ran the tsar's gardens. Apprentice gardeners were summoned from Moscow, together with plants and seeds, exotic flowering, medicinal and fruit-bearing species as well as native varieties. For Peter, the city's poor soils, short summers and long, dark winters were no deterrent to transforming it into heaven on earth.
Two weddings
After Poltava St Petersburg came to be regarded as the capital, although no decree was issued and the transfer of the court and government offices from Moscow was effected in stages. The autumn of 1710 marked St Petersburg's inauguration as Russia's ceremonial capital, when it witnessed a three-day victory celebration on 8–10 October, followed by the wedding of Peter's niece, seventeen-year-old Anna Ivanovna, to Frederick William, duke of Courland, also aged seventeen, described as ‘handsome, well-brought up and charming’.25 The marriage had the blessing of Peter's ally the king of Prussia, the duke's uncle. For his part, Peter gained a useful channel of influence in Courland, which was a nominal vassal of Poland-Lithuania. This was, needless to say, not a love match. At the outset of negotiations the envoys from Courland asked for portraits of all three of Tsar Ivan's surviving daughters, any one of whom would have been considered a suitable bride. The marriage contract, signed on 10 June 1710 in St Petersburg, fixed the dowry at 200,000 roubles, which would allow the duke to pay off his debts and redeem mortgaged estates. Anna was to retain her Orthodox faith.26 Peter instructed his niece on her priorities: ‘Preserve the faith and law in which you were born, to the end of your days unswervingly. Don't forget your own people, but love and respect them above all others. Love and respect your husband as the head [of the family] and obey him in all things except the aforementioned.’27
The wedding, which took place on 31 October 1710 in the chapel of Menshikov's newly built palace, was the first important royal rite of passage to be held in St Petersburg and set the tone for others to come, with a public procession headed by musicians, which travelled to the church by boat. Near the quay groups of workers in funny costumes waved rockets. During the ceremony Peter held the crown traditionally used at Orthodox weddings over the head of the groom and Menshikov over the bride, but Peter got bored and ordered the priest to get it over with quickly. Parts of the service were therefore omitted. Two days of feasting followed. Fireworks on rafts on the Neva illuminated crowns over the letters A and F and two palm trees with entwined tops with the inscription: LOVE UNITES. On another screen Cupid with his hammer and anvil welded together two hearts under the inscription: TWO JOINED TOGETHER AS ONE. Peter himself explained the meaning of each allegorical picture as it burned.
The entertainments did not end there. On 14 November St Petersburg witnessed the wedding of the royal dwarf Iakim Volkov and his dwarf bride, a striking example of how ‘real’ and ‘mock’ court life intermingled. The tsar in person held the wedding crown over the bride's head and hurried proceedings along, just as he had at Anna's wedding. Anna and Frederick were now guests at the dwarfs' wedding feast, which was held in the same room in Menshikov's palace as their own. In fact, Peter had planned both weddings simultaneously, evidently seeing the second as a sequel to the first. In August 1710, a day after he ordered a pair of diamond earrings as a gift for his niece, he had instructed Prince-Caesar Romodanovsky to round up all the dwarfs in Moscow and send them to St Petersburg. Their owners were told to provide smart outfits for the dwarfs in the latest Western fashion, with plenty of gold braid and periwigs. In St Petersburg they were allocated to the lords and ladies who were to dress them up and transport them to the nuptials. On the day about seventy dwarfs formed the retinue for the wedding ceremony, which was accompanied by the stifled giggles of the full-sized congregation and even the priest, a spectacle made all the funnier by the fact that most of the dwarfs were of peasant extraction with coarse manners. At the feast in the grand hall of Menshikov's palace the dwarfs sat at miniature tables in the centre of the room, while full-sized guests watched them from tables at the sides. They roared with laughter as dwarfs, especially the older, uglier ones whose hunchbacks, huge bellies and short crooked legs made it difficult for them to dance, fell down drunk or engaged in brawls. Miniature cannons were standing at the ready and the groom had made his own fireworks, but they were not set off as Menshikov's only son, Luke-Peter (born February 1709), was seriously ill, and, indeed, died the same evening. The occasion was immortalised in an engraving made by Aleksei Zubov in 1711, entitled The wedding and merriment of His Majesty the Tsar's dwarfs in St Petersburg at which were gathered a great many dwarfs in the house of His Excellency Prince Alexander Danilovich Menshikov. November 14, 1710.
On one level, the dwarf wedding was just an entertainment. Being amused by the vertically challenged may offend modern sensibilities, but dwarfs were a standard feature of early modern European courts and noble households. (The famous painting of Henrietta Maria, queen of Charles I of England, with her dwarf John Hudson is one of several on the theme.) The 6 foot 7 inch tsar loved his contingent of resident dwarfs, who were liable to surprise guests by leaping from pies (sometimes naked), dancing on tables or trotting in on miniature ponies, as well as performing domestic duties and running errands. Iakim, the bridegroom, was with Peter at Poltava and later accompanied him abroad as a miniature servant. But like all Peter's mock spectacles, the dwarf wedding also operated on a more symbolic level. Its juxtaposition with the wedding of Anna and the duke and its imitation of certain elements suggested that the full-sized guests were watching caricatures of themselves, miniature ‘lords and ladies’ clad, like them, in unfamiliar Western dress. Peter's courtiers, like his new city, still had a long way to go before they were fully fledged, ‘grown-up’ Europeans. The coarse ‘peasant’ behaviour and drunkenness which so amused them in the dwarfs actually bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the well-attested gross manners of fully grown Russian courtiers, one aspect of which was only too tragically illustrated not long after. At the beginning of 1711 the newly-wed duke and duchess set off for Courland, but when they were less than 50 miles from St Petersburg, Frederick died. Just Juel reported that the duke was already ill when he left St Petersburg from the effects of excessive drinking and ‘unpleasantness’ suffered at the hands of Menshikov.28
Anna returned to St Petersburg forthwith, collected her widow's pension and embarked upon the nomadic existence which was to last until she became empress of Russia in 1730. No doubt she would have preferred to remain at home, but the presence of a Russian retinue in Courland was too valuable to Peter for him to allow her to return permanently. Over the years she received proposals from various suitors, but nothing came of them. Anna's life alternated between Russia and Courland, where her household expenses were regulated by Peter down to the last detail. When she became empress herself she proved a good student of Peter's peculiar brand of humour. Her own court featured a nobleman ‘fool’ whose main duty was to pretend to be a chicken and whom she married off to a Kalmyk woman in a palace of ice, perhaps recalling her own brief marriage.
War with Turkey
Frederick's sudden death contributed to the gloom which now descended on St Petersburg. On 23 December 1710 Peter had received the news that the Ottoman Empire had declared war on Russia and that his ambassador Peter Tolstoy had been thrown into the Seven Towers in Constantinople. Just Juel wrote that the Russians were so depressed by the news that they wandered around listlessly, although he attributed at least some of their limpness to the fast which preceded Christmas.29 Turkish and Crimean affairs were an important element in Peter's calculations throughout the Northern War, particularly when the theatre of operations shifted to Ukraine in 1708–9. The Ottoman Turks had stopped short of intervention at the time of Poltava, but now Charles XII's escape to Turkish territory and his efforts to persuade the Turks to declare war on Russia tipped the scales. The rabidly anti-Russian Crimean khan Devlet-Girei offered troops to escort Charles back north and succeeded in winning the sultan's ear. French diplomacy, British bankers' loans to Charles and the intervention of the sultan's doctor and mother, all influenced the Ottoman decision to go to war.
Initially Peter himself was not averse to the prospect of a short, victorious war in the south. Russian success would deprive Sweden of a potential ally. He might even expand into Ottoman lands under the pretext of liberating Balkan Christians. He issued orders for a large-scale mobilisation but preparations went slowly. Peter wrote to Menshikov: ‘Don't be upset because I don't write often; really there's indescribable confusion and depression on account of the mess things are in here.’30 Routine peace proposals were made to the Swedes, in the hope of avoiding war on two fronts, but Charles refused to relinquish even one province to buy what he regarded as a shameful peace. On 22 February 1711 Peter declared war, denouncing the ‘oath-breaking’ sultan as the ally of Sweden and Leszczynski and accusing him of using followers of Mazepa and Bulavin against Augustus and all Christendom. The document set out the history of Russo-Turkish relations for the past thirty years or so, itemising offences committed by Turkish subjects against Russia during truces.
The Senate
A handwritten edict dated the same day listed the names of ten men ‘to govern in our absence’ under the title of the ‘ruling Senate’. The senators' duties, specified in another laconic edict dated 2 March, were to act as judges, supervise state expenses and eliminate unnecessary ones; increase revenues (‘since money is the artery of war’); replenish the officer corps and track down shirkers; regulate receipts for money and goods in government offices; inspect and certify goods held in franchises or chancelleries and provincial offices; sort out salt franchises, increase trade with China and Persia and attract more Armenian traders. A footnote mentioned the appointment of officials called fiscals, who were supposed to unmask embezzlement, bribe-taking and serious infringements of the law by other state officials.31 Peter clearly intended the new Senate to wield real authority: everyone, churchmen and laymen, must obey it as they did the tsar himself, under threat of cruel punishment or death, depending on the crime. It could even issue its own edicts independently of the sovereign. As Peter wrote to Menshikov on 11 March: ‘… we have given [the ruling Senate] full powers. Therefore write to them with all your requests, and write to us only to keep us informed in order not to waste time.’32 The senators, for their part, had to swear to serve the sovereign's and state's interests ‘to the last drop of their strength’. All senators had an equal voice and their decisions had to be unanimous.
Peter created the Senate in response to the impending conflict with Turkey. There was no detailed consideration of foreign models or lengthy discussions and redrafting, as was to be the case with some later reforms. Peter had a limited pool of talent to draw on. His closest colleagues were already occupied with the Northern War, including its diplomatic ramifications, or would be needed for the Turkish campaign (military and foreign policy tasks were omitted from the Senate's brief) and there was no single individual to whom he could entrust the country's domestic affairs in his absence. So he revived the Muscovite practice of leaving the capital in charge of a group of boyars when the ruler was away, but gave it a name suggestive of the spirit if not the substance of ancient imperial institutions. The Senate was thus one of many pieces of Roman ‘window-dressing’ with which the new empire was embellished.
The senators faced an unenviable task, for which their talents and experience ill equipped them. One of the original ten, M. I. Dolgoruky, was probably illiterate. His fellow senator G. A. Plemiannikov (died in 1713) signed on his behalf. Prince P. A. Golitsyn (1682–1722), the youngest of the original senators by more than a decade, was a junior member of his clan. Prince G. I. Volkonsky and V. A. Apukhtin were arrested in 1714 and had their tongues burned for ‘taking out contracts for provisioning under false names, taking a high price and thereby burdening the people’.33 The oldest and the most obscure of the first senators was N. P. Mel'nitsky (born 1645), who survived to serve only a year. Only two had close personal ties with the tsar: the boyars Tikhon Nikitich Streshnev, who at sixty-two was too old to serve in the army, and Ivan Musin-Pushkin, who had done useful work in the Monastery department. The rest probably owed their promotion to influential connections.
At first Peter was greatly disappointed by this hastily created body. His letters bristle with frustration. ‘We are amazed that since our departure [for the war] from Moscow we have had no word from you about what is happening there,’ he wrote on 4 May 1711.34 Two weeks later he reprimanded them for writing with excuses ‘just like the old judges … or has the oath which you swore not long ago already escaped your memory?’35 Peter's closer associates were reluctant to channel business through persons they regarded as their inferiors. Peter reprimanded Menshikov: ‘Please write to them (the senators) on all matters, because in writing to us here and from here to the Senate in Moscow more time is wasted in writing than if you write direct to them.’36 Things hardly improved over the next few years. Senators were behaving ‘in the old stupid manner’.37 They misunderstood Peter's instructions: ‘You should have been able to work out from our letters to you in which we kept repeating that this is vital to the interests of our state,’ he wrote, ‘that you were supposed to increase and strengthen the corps in St Petersburg, not to diminish it.’38 They were inefficient and procrastinating: ‘We have been informed … that you have not resolved one major case but just keep putting everything off from one date to the next, forgetting God and your souls. Therefore I am writing for the last time to say that if at least five or six major cases are not resolved by 1 November and if you do not put criminals who damage state interests for their own benefit to death, showing mercy to no one … it will be the worse for you.’39 This ongoing correspondence provides revealing illustrations of the frustration and impatience which Peter constantly felt and expressed when other people's failings undermined or delayed his schemes.
‘The true and lawful sovereign lady’
Peter had good reason to be apprehensive about the coming war. On 24 February he chided the official Aleksei Kurbatov for complaining about his posting as vice-governor of Archangel, ‘like some faint-hearted Jonah, without regard for the troubles and grief in which your leader finds himself.’40 He also felt the need to put his personal affairs in order. On 6 March 1711, the day of his departure for the Turkish front, ‘it was publicly announced that the sovereign lady Tsaritsa Ekaterina Alekseevna is the true and lawful sovereign lady’.41 Peter later explained to Menshikov that he had taken this step ‘on account of the hazardous journey’. Were his daughters to be left orphans, their position would be more secure, ‘but if God brings this business [i.e. the war] to a happy conclusion,’ he added, ‘we shall complete the formalities in St Petersburg’.42 Peter knew from experience how quickly alliances at court could change and had every reason to fear the reaction of friends and relatives of Tsarevich Alexis and his mother Tsaritsa Evdokia if Catherine were to be left alone. If the couple were married secretly in November 1707, as some sources suggest, Peter clearly did not regard the ceremony as sufficiently legal and binding to protect Catherine from being banished and his daughters declared illegitimate in the event of his death. Just Juel's diary provides further clarification. During a visit to Tsaritsa Praskovia's residence in Moscow on 10 March 1711 Juel learned from Peter's nieces that just before his departure Peter had summoned them and his sister Natalia to Preobrazhenskoe and told them that in the future they were to regard Catherine as his legal spouse and as tsaritsa. If he were to die in the forthcoming campaign before he managed to marry her, they were still to regard her as his wife.43
Peter was aware of public disapproval of his alliance with a foreign commoner. Traditionalists continued to regard Evdokia as Peter's real wife. According to strict Orthodox rules on consanguinity, Peter was even accused of marrying his own granddaughter and niece, on the grounds that his son Alexis and his sister Natalia were Catherine's godparents at her conversion to Orthodoxy. In 1720 the monk Aleksei was accused of making similar allegations. Catherine ‘consorted with foreigners and there would be harm done to Christians because she was not of local origins’. He added that Peter and his assistants failed to keep the fasts, under the influence of the ‘fallen Western church of Rome’, that Menshikov had been seen smoking in church and Aleksei Petrovich Saltykov had taken out his tobacco pouch and lit up right in front of the altar during mass.44 Peter was not amused by allegations that his relationship with Catherine was a sign of his ungodliness. He had the monk broken on the wheel.
Battle on the Pruth
In mid-March Peter crossed the Polish–Lithuanian border on his way to meet the Turks. Catherine travelled with him. One of his hopes was that Russian action would spark uprisings in the Ottoman empire to sap Turkish morale. In a message to ‘Christian peoples subjugated to Turkey’ Peter wrote: ‘I am taking upon myself a heavy burden for the sake of the love of God, for which reason I have entered into war with the Turkish realm … because the Turks have trampled on our faith, taken our churches and lands by cunning, pillaged and destroyed many of our churches and monasteries.’45 An appeal was also issued further afield to Christians in Serbia, Macedonia and Herzegovina. Standards carried in the campaign bore the image of the cross and declaration of Constantine the Great: UNDER THIS SIGN WE CONQUER. In mid-April Peter reached Slutsk in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where a council of war outlined a plan for a forced march to the Danube to head off the Turks before they reached Moldavia and Poland. Boris Sheremetev protested that he could not cover the ground in the time required; he was short of supplies, weapons and men, but Peter insisted upon speed. It was vital to reach the Danube before the Turks and join forces with local Orthodox rulers. A treaty was signed with Hospodar Dmitry Cantemir of Moldavia in April 1711: in return for military support, Moldavia was to become an autonomous Russian protectorate. But Brancovan, the hospodar of Wallachia, was less willing to cooperate. Wallachian nobles were of the opinion that ‘it is dangerous to declare for Russia until the tsar's army crosses the Danube. Who knows whether Wallachia in the power of the Russians will be happier than under the domination of the Turks?’46 The Russian army was very much in need of local support. Poor harvests had created food shortages along the way. Clean water was scarce and intense heat burned the grass, causing fodder shortages reminiscent of those during Vasily Golitsyn's Crimean campaigns.
In the event, the Turks did get there first. Cantemir supplied only about 5,000 men, while any lingering hope of aid from the reluctant Brancovan was dashed when he turned over his supplies to the Turks. On 23 June Peter arrived on the River Pruth in Moldavia and on 30 June wrote to Menshikov:
Our march was indescribably hard on account of the heat and thirst … I expect things to be resolved by the middle of July as to whether there will be a battle or not. May God bestow his grace on the righteous in this affair. People are saying that the Turks are not very enthusiastic about this war, but God alone knows if this is so. They have strong artillery, five hundred cannons.47
In the battle which took place on 9 July 38,000 Russian troops found themselves facing a combined Turkish and Tatar force of 130,000. Despite their superior numbers, the Turks suffered heavy losses in their first encounter with Russian artillery, but the Russians remained unaware of the extent of the damage inflicted and Peter refused to counter-attack before he had dug in his supply train. The battle was thus inconclusive, but the Russians could not afford to wait for an outcome because of shortages of food and ammunition. Peter's dilemma was summed up in a letter to the Senate dated 10 July: they were surrounded and he himself was likely either to die or be taken prisoner. In the latter event the senators were instructed to cease to regard Peter as their sovereign until he returned in person. In the event of his death they were to choose ‘the most worthy’ of his successors.48 The text may not be authentic, but gives a fair estimate of the danger in which Peter found himself. In the end, disaster was averted by the moderateness of Turkish demands, which were probably tempered by news of the Russian General Rönne's successful raid on the Danube at Brailov on 7 July. There were also rumours that a huge bribe, including Catherine's jewels, persuaded the grand vizier to allow the Russians to retreat, but these stories almost certainly originated in Ukraine and Sweden after the event. Anxious to concentrate on conquests in the Mediterranean, Turkey contented itself with formal tokens of Russian withdrawal from Poland and, much to Charles XII's disgust, refused to give any further guarantees to Sweden.
By the peace treaty of 12 July 1711 Russia agreed to surrender Azov and its district to Turkey and to destroy its southern fleet. The forts at Taganrog and Kamenny Zaton (on the Dnieper above the Zaporozhian Cossack camp) were to be razed. There were clauses on Polish affairs (Poland was to be a free state), trade and safe passage home for Charles. Peter tried to put a brave face on it. In a letter to Fedor Apraksin dated 15 July he wrote: ‘It is a sad thing to lose those places in which so much effort and expense have been invested, but this loss means a strengthening for the other business [i.e. war with Sweden], which is an incomparable gain for us.’49 He wrote in a similar vein to G. F. Dolgoruky: ‘On the one hand, this peace represents a loss; on the other by this event we have entirely disengaged ourselves from the Turkish affair and are [better] able with all our strength and with God's help to fight the Swedes.’50 Writing to Apraksin in September he continued to look on the bright side: ‘Of course, it's very painful, but it's best to choose the lesser of two evils, for you yourself can judge which war is the more difficult to conclude.’51
Still, Peter was devastated at the prospect of losing Azov, which he could not bring himself to mention by name in his hand-corrected draft of the July treaty. ‘The Lord God drove me out of this place, like Adam out of Paradise,’ he is alleged to have said, using an image more often associated with St Petersburg.52 He attempted to delay the handover and the destruction of Taganrog fort until he received confirmation that Charles had left Turkey, specifying that the foundations of the forts should be retained, ‘as in time God might make things turn out differently’.53 Early in 1712 the Turks responded to these prevarications by declaring war on Russia again. Conflict was averted and a second peace treaty (the Iusuf-Pasha pact) was signed on 5 April. Further delays by the Russians in withdrawing troops from Poland prompted yet another declaration of war by Turkey in October, this time with Swedish and French backing. On 13 June 1713 a more lasting peace was finally signed at Adrianople, the first clause of which obliged Russia to withdraw its troops from Poland within two months. In fact, few of the clauses of the Treaty of Adrianople had any lasting effect. Peter did not ‘keep his hands off’ Poland. In April 1714 the sultan recognised Augustus II's possession of Polish Ukraine, which in effect ratified Russian influence; the Russo-Turkish border remained fluid; Cossacks and Tatars took little notice of agreements between Moscow and Constantinople; Charles XII returned to Sweden in November 1714, avoiding Russian territory; and Russia regained Azov in 1739. But peace allowed Peter once again to concentrate his efforts in the north.
Alexis and Charlotte
After the initial truce with the Turks in July 1711 Peter did not return to Russia but travelled to Poland, reaching Warsaw in late August, and then on to Saxony, where he visited Dresden (9–11 September) and Carlsbad (13 September to 3 October); here he took the waters, which he found a tedious experience. He wrote to Catherine on 19 September: ‘You write that I shouldn't hurry back to join you on account of my cure, but I think it's because you have found someone taller than me. Please write and let me know if he is one of us or from Torun? I rather think it must be a man from Torun as you want to get your revenge for what I did two years ago. That's just the sort of thing you daughters of Eve do to us old men!’54 On 13 October he himself arrived in Torun to attend the wedding of his son Alexis to Princess Charlotte-Christina-Sophia of Wolfenbüttel in the palace of the queen of Poland the following day. It was a foregone conclusion that Alexis would marry a foreign princess and Charlotte was a good catch. The Brunswick-Wolfenbüttels were related by marriage to many of the royal and princely families of Europe. Charlotte's grandfather was Duke Anton Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp and her sister was married to the Habsburg Emperor Charles VI. In theory, Alexis could have refused the match. ‘Why haven't you written to tell me what you thought of her and whether you are inclined to marry her?’ wrote Peter in August 1710 after the couple first met.55 In 1718 in his manifesto depriving Alexis of the throne, Peter insisted that Alexis had been allowed to choose his own bride (as long as she was a foreigner) and had even asked his father to arrange the marriage. In reality, the idea seems to have been Peter's. Under the terms of the contract signed in April 1711, Charlotte was allowed to retain her Protestant faith, but any children were to be raised in the Orthodox faith. Peter promised gifts of cash, tableware and carriages. When his new in-laws enquired about the whereabouts of these gifts in September 1711 Peter replied sarcastically that, having arrived in Germany straight from the war, he could hardly have tableware and carriages about his person.56
Menshikov sent a water-melon as a gift. It is not clear whether this was intended as a rare delicacy, a fertility symbol or a joke. One is inclined to think the latter, given Peter's half-mocking attitude to the proceedings. He wrote to Catherine on 14 October: ‘On this day the wedding of my son took place, at which many distinguished persons were present … I beg you to notify the all-jesting Prince-Pope and the others of this and ask him to bless the newly-weds dressed in all his robes together with all those who are there with you.’57 A few days after the wedding Peter informed Alexis that he must continue his studies and war work. His new duties included organising food supply depots and river transport for the troops going to Pomerania in Menshikov's regiment.
Thus began an unhappy and ill-fated union. Rumour has it that Alexis found his bride too thin and pockmarked and was influenced by his friends' disapproval of a foreign Protestant bride, who was said to be cold and standoffish and always surrounded by her German entourage. Other sources suggest that Charlotte was the victim: being dragged off to Russia's half-built capital to live with a reluctant husband was hardly an attractive prospect. In the words of a Swedish observer Lars Erenmalm, in St Petersburg in the early 1710s, although the tsarevich had visited foreign countries and studied their languages ‘in everything apart from outer clothing, he keeps to the old Russian customs and it seems the prince only outwardly follows foreign manners and is polite to foreigners more out of fear of his father than by his own inclinations and wishes’.58 According to Weber, Alexis avoided Charlotte in public and they lived separate lives. In 1714 he formed a liaison with Afrosinia Fedorova, the serf of his tutor N. K. Viazemsky. Such an arrangement was barely enough to raise an eyebrow in other royal courts of the period and even followed a pattern already established by Peter himself. His marriage to Charlotte produced a daughter, Natalia, in 1714, and a son, Peter, in 1715. But, as we shall see, Peter had other reasons for being disappointed in his son.
The best-known portrait of Alexis dates from about this time. Painted by Johann Dannhauer, it shows a narrow-faced young man with a long nose and large brown eyes, a high forehead with a receding hairline, and long dark hair. Under a fashionable red collarless tunic with large buttons and a blue lining, he wears a breastplate, to denote a prince on active service. His features hint at ill health: by this time tuberculosis had been diagnosed, apparently exacerbated by ‘corrupt Habits’ and excessive drinking.59 Although other, more flattering portraits exist, in some of which Alexis looks like a replica of his father (perhaps wishful thinking on the artists' part), Dannhauer's is almost invariably the image chosen to represent him. Dannhauer probably painted a companion portrait of Charlotte at the same time, of which only a copy survives. It shows a pleasant, narrow-faced young woman fashionably dressed, with piled-up blonde curls, indistinguishable from hundreds of other female images of the period.
As for Peter, who was soon to celebrate his fortieth birthday, artists drew a veil over his disgrace on the Pruth. In Carlsbad and Torun the Czech artist Jan Kupetsky painted two portraits, one of which, much reproduced in engravings, has an overload of martial imagery, including a wild animal skin and a turbulent sky. Peter must have approved, for in a letter to his son in January 1712, Peter ordered him to send the portraits ‘immediately’.60 One was reproduced for the Book of Mars or Military Affairs, a compilation of accounts of Russian victories in the Swedish war. On 31 December 1711 Peter arrived back in St Petersburg to put Pruth behind him and get on with the Swedish war.