11
AZOV
Peter was now twenty-two, in the prime of his young manhood. To those who were seeing the Tsar for the first time, his most awesome physical characteristic was his height: at six feet seven inches, the monarch towered over everyone around him, the more so because in those days the average man was shorter than today. Tall as he was, however, Peter’s body was more angular than massive. His shoulders were unusually thin for a man of his height, his arms were long and his hands, which he was eager to display, were powerful, rough and permanently callused from his work in the shipyard. Peter’s face in these years was round, still youthful and almost handsome. He wore a small mustache and no wig; instead, he let his own straight, auburn-brown hair hang halfway between his ears and his shoulders.
His most extraordinary quality, even more remarkable than his height, was his titanic energy. He could not sit still or stay long in the same place. He walked so quickly with his long, loose-limbed stride that those in his company had to trot to keep up with him. When forced to do paperwork, he paced around a stand-up desk. Seated at a banquet, he would eat for a few minutes, then spring up to see what was happening in the next room or to take a walk outdoors. Needing movement, he liked to burn off his energy in dancing. When he had been in one place for a while, he wanted to leave, to move along, to see new people and new scenery, to form new impressions. The most accurate image of Peter the Great is of a man who throughout his life was perpetually curious, perpetually restless, perpetually in movement.
It was, however, during these same years that a worrisome, often mortifying physical disorder began to afflict the young Tsar. When he was emotionally agitated or under stress from the pressure of events, Peter’s face sometimes began to twitch uncontrollably. The disorder, usually troubling only the left side of his face, varied in degree of severity: Sometimes the tremor was no more than a facial tic lasting only a second or two; at other times, there would be a genuine convulsion, beginning with a contraction of the muscles on the left side of his neck, followed by a spasm involving the entire left side of his face and the rolling up of his eyes until only the whites could be seen. At its worst, when violent, disjointed motion of the left arm was also involved, the convulsion ended only when Peter had lost consciousness.
With only unprofessional descriptions of Peter’s symptoms available, neither the precise nature of his illness nor its cause will ever be known. Most likely, he suffered from focal epileptic seizures, among the milder of a range of neurological disorders whose most severe form is grand-mal epilepsy. There is no evidence that Peter suffered from this extreme condition; there are no reports that he collapsed totally unconscious on the floor, foamed at the mouth or lost control of his bodily functions. In Peter’s case, the disturbance began in a part of the brain affecting muscles of the left side of his neck and face. If the provocation continued without alleviation, the focus of the disturbance could spread to adjacent parts of the brain affecting the motion of the left shoulder and arm.
Not knowing the exact nature of the affliction, it is even more difficult to pinpoint the cause. At the time, and in subsequent historical writing, a wide range of opinions has been offered. Peter’s convulsions have been ascribed to the traumatic horror he suffered in 1682 when, as a ten-year-old boy, he stood by his mother and watched the massacre of Matveev and the Naryshkins by the rampaging Streltsy. By others, his condition has been traced to the shock of being awakened in the middle of the night at Preobrazhenskoe seven years later and told that the Streltsy were coming to kill him. Some have blamed it on the excessive drinking which the Tsar learned at Lefort’s elbow and practiced with the Jolly Company. There was even a rumor, passed to the West in correspondence from the German Suburb, that the Tsar’s affliction had been caused by poison administered by Sophia endeavoring to clear her path to the throne. The most likely cause of this kind of epilepsy, however, especially in the absence of a hard blow which could leave permanent scar tissue on the brain, is high fever over an extended period. Peter suffered such a fever during the weeks between November 1693 and January 1694 when he became so ill that many believed he would die. A fever of this kind in the nature of encephalitis can cause local scarring of the brain; subsequently, when specific psychological stimuli disturb this damaged area, a seizure of the kind which Peter suffered can be triggered.
The psychological impact of this illness upon Peter was profound; it accounts in large part for his unusual shyness, especially with strangers who were not familiar with his convulsions and therefore unprepared to witness them. For paroxysms of this kind, as disturbing to those around him as to Peter himself, there was no real treatment, although what was done then would still be considered eminently reasonable today. When the tremor was no more than a tic, Peter and those in his company tried to proceed as if nothing had happened. If the convulsion became more pronounced, his friends or orderlies quickly brought someone to him whose presence he found relaxing. Eventually, whenever she was nearby, this was his second wife, Catherine, but before Catherine appeared, or if she was not present, it was some young woman who could soothe the Tsar. “Peter Alexeevich, here is the person to whom you wished to speak,” his worried orderly would say and then withdraw. The Tsar would lie down and place his shaking head on the woman’s lap and she would stroke his forehead and temples, speaking to him softly and reassuringly. Peter would fall asleep, his loss of consciousness clearing the electrical disturbances in his brain, and when he awoke an hour or two later, he was always refreshed and in far better humor than he had been before.
In the winter of 1695, Peter sought some new outlet for his energy. His two summers in Archangel, his brief cruises on the White Sea, his long talks with English and Dutch sea captains had stimulated him. Now, he wanted to travel farther, to see more, to sail more ships. One recurring idea was an expedition to Persia and the East. This subject came up often during winter evenings in the German Suburb, where Dutch and English merchants talked grandly of the Europe-to-Persia and Europe-to-India trade which could be developed along the rivers to Russia. From Archangel, Lefort had written to his family in Geneva that “there was talk of a journey in about two years’ time to Kazan and Astrachan.” Later, the Swiss wrote, “Next summer we are going to construct five large ships and two galleys which, God willing, will go two years hence to Astrachan for the conclusion of important treaties with Persia.” “There is also an idea of constructing some galleys and going to the Baltic Sea,” wrote Lefort.
With talk of Persia and the Baltic in the air, Moscow was surprised in the winter of 1695 at the announcement that Russia would embark the following summer on a renewed war against the Tatars and their overlords, the Ottoman Empire. We do not know exactly why Peter decided that winter to attack the Turkish fortress of Azov. It has been suggested that this sudden plunge into active war stemmed entirely from Peter’s restlessness and that it served mainly as an outlet for his energy and curiosity. Thus, seen in retrospect, it becomes another step in the great maritime adventure of his life: first the Yauza, then Lake Pleschev, then Archangel—so the sequence runs. Now, he dreamed of creating a fleet. But Russia’s only seaport was frozen solid six months of the year. The nearest sea, the Baltic, was still firmly gripped by Sweden, the dominant military power in Northern Europe. Only one avenue to salt water remained: to the south and the Black Sea.
Or, if this new adventure was not a Game of Neptune, perhaps it was a Game of Mars. For twenty years, Peter had been playing with soldiers; first toys, then boys, then grown men. His games had grown from drills involving a few hundred idle stable boys and falconers to 30,000 men involved in the assault and defense of the river fort of Pressburg. Now, seeking the excitement of real combat, he looked for a fortress to besiege, and Azov, isolated at the bottom of the Ukrainian steppe, suited admirably.
Unquestionably, Peter’s compulsion to reach the sea and his desire to test his army both played a part in the Azov decision. But there were other reasons, too. Russia was still at war with the Ottoman Empire, and every summer the horsemen of the Tatar Khan rode north to raid the Ukraine. In 1692, an army of 12,000 Tatar cavalry appeared before the town of Neimerov, burned it to the ground and carried away 2,000 prisoners to be sold in the Ottoman slave marts. A year later, the number of Russian prisoners mounted to 15,000.
Since Sophia’s fall, Moscow had done little to defend these southern border regions, despite their appeals to the capital. Indeed, the Tsar’s indifference had led to a stinging jibe from Dositheus, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem. “The Crimean Tatars are but a handful,” he wrote to Peter, “and yet they boast that they receive tribute from you. The Tatars are Turkish subjects, so it follows that you are Turkish subjects. Many times you have boasted that you will do such and such, but all finished with words only and nothing in fact is done.”
In addition, there was a diplomatic reason for a resumption of hostilities with the Turks and Tatars. Moscow’s ally King Jan Sobieski of Poland, judging that Russia had contributed nothing of consequence in the common war against Turkey, had threatened to make a separate peace with the Ottoman Empire which would ignore Russia’s interests completely. Indeed, the King complained to the Russian resident in Warsaw, he could scarcely be blamed for abandoning Moscow’s interests since no one had troubled to explain to him exactly what Moscow’s interests were.
The Azov campaign, then, was more than an elaborate war game mounted for the Tsar’s private education and amusement. The desire to suppress the Tatar raids and the need to make a military effort to satisfy the Poles were serious pressures to which any Russian government would have had to respond. These two factors happened to dovetail perfectly with Peter’s private desires.
The decision remained as to where the campaign would take place. There were two objectives: to harry the Turk and to suppress the Tatar. Golitsyn’s two unhappy campaigns had left the Russians wary of still another direct attack across the steppe toward Perekop. Instead, this time the two prongs of the Russian attack would fall on either side of the peninsular stronghold. The dual objectives would be the mouths of the rivers Dnieper and Don, where Turkish forts blocked Ukrainian Cossack or Russian access to the Black Sea. This time, instead of marching across the dry steppe, trundling supplies in thousands of wagons, the Russian army would travel south by water, using barges as vehicles of supply.
Two very different Russian armies were formed to make the double offensive. The eastern army was to move down the Don to attack the powerful Turkish fortress of Azov and was composed of Peter’s play soldiers, the men who had attacked or defended Pressburg in the previous autumn games at Kozhukhovo. They included the new Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards Regiments, the Streltsy and the Western-trained artillery and cavalry—31,000 men in three divisions, commanded by Lefort, Golovin and Gordon. To avoid jealousy, none of the three was named supreme commander; each division was to operate independently, and the three generals were to make overall decisions in council in the presence of the twenty-three-year-old Bombardier Peter.
The second or western prong of the Russian offensive, which would move down the Dnieper to attack the major Turkish forts at Ochakov and Kazikerman and three smaller forts guarding the mouth of the river, was made up of a much larger, more traditional Russian army, commanded by the boyar Boris Sheremetev. This army was reminiscent of the huge forces which Golitsyn had led south: 120,000 men, most of them peasant levies called up in the old Russian style for a single summer of campaigning: In the overall plan, Sheremetev’s effort was to be subsidiary to Peter’s; its purpose was not simply to capture the Dnieper forts but also to distract the main army of Tatar horsemen from riding east to attack Peter’s troops before Azov. In addition, Peter hoped that the presence of this huge covering force would sever the communications between the Crimea and the European Ottoman provinces to the west, thus obstructing the customary annual movement of Tatar cavalry to join the Sultan’s army in the Balkans. This would be a direct contribution to Russia’s hard-pressed allies. Further, the mere presence of this vast Russian army in the Ukraine would strengthen the Tsar’s influence among the volatile, impressionable Cossacks.
Once the plan of campaign was decided, Peter plunged into preparations. Exuberantly, he wrote to Apraxin in Archangel, “At Kozhukhovo we jested. Now we are going to play the real game before Azov.”
Gordon’s division was ready first and left Moscow in March, moving south across the steppe “full of flowers and herbs, asparagus, wild thyme, marjoram, tulips, pinks, meliot and maiden gilly flowers,” according to the commander’s diary. The main body with Peter, Lefort and Golovin left in May, embarking directly onto barges in the Moscow River and moving downstream to join the Volga. It followed the great river as far as Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd), then dragged the cannon and supplies across to the lower Don, where it reembarked on other boats. Progress was slow because of the leaky barges and inexperienced boatmen and Peter angrily wrote to Vinius: “Most of all the delay was caused by stupid pilots and workmen who call themselves masters, but in reality are as far from being so as the earth is from heaven.” On June 29, the main body of 21,000 men reached Azov to find Gordon’s 10,000 soldiers entrenched before the city.
The fortress town of Azov stood on the left bank of the southernmost branch of the Don about fifteen miles upstream from the Sea of Azov. In 500 B.C., a Greek colony, one of a number of Greek settlements around the coast of the Black Sea, had occupied the site. Later, the town, commanding the entrance to the great river and its trade, had been a colony of the merchant state of Genoa. Taken by the Turks in 1475, it became the northeastern link in their absolute control of the Black Sea and served as a barrier to any Russian advance down the Don. They had fortified the town with towers and walls, and, as part of the barrier system, two Turkish watchtower forts were situated a mile upriver from the city, with iron chains stretched between them across the river to prevent the light Cossack galleys slipping past the town and out into the sea.
With Peter present before the town, the Russian cannon opened fire, and for fourteen weeks the bombardment continued. There were many problems. Experienced engineers were lacking, and in Peter’s day a siege was as much a matter for engineers as for artillerymen or foot soldiers. The Russian supply organization was unable to cope with the problem of feeding 30,000 men in the open air for so long a time, and the army quickly denuded the meager countryside around Azov. The Streltsy were unwilling to follow orders given by European officers and were often useless. Of the overall situation, Gordon said, “We sometimes acted as if we were not in earnest.”
At first, the two Turkish watchtower forts above the town prevented the passage of Russian barges down the river with supplies for the army. The supplies had to be unloaded above this point and carried in wagons overland to the troops, and the wagons were exposed to swooping attacks from the Tatar cavalry which hovered on the periphery of the Russian camp. Capture of the two forts became a primary objective, and the army was cheered when the Don Cossacks stormed one of the forts; soon after, under intense artillery fire, the Turks abandoned the other fort.
Peter’s happiness at this success was quickly spoiled by an episode of treachery in his own camp. A Dutch sailor named Jacob Jensen defected from the Russians to the Turks carrying important information. Originally a seaman on a Dutch ship in Archangel, Jensen had entered Russian service, accepted the Orthodox faith and served in the new Russian artillery. Peter, liking both Dutchmen and artillery, had kept Jensen near him and, during the days and nights before Azov, had confided in him. When Jensen deserted, he betrayed to the Pasha in Azov the numbers and disposition of the Russian troops, the strengths and weaknesses of the siege works and what he knew of Peter’s intentions. He also made a suggestion based on the immutable habit of all Russians, including soldiers, of taking a nap after the big midday meal. A few days later, at exactly this hour, a formidable Turkish sortie into the Russian trenches was launched. At first, the sleepy Russians ran, but Gordon managed to rally them, and after a desperate three-hour battle the Turks were driven back. The thrust was costly to the besiegers: 400 Russians were killed and 600 wounded, and many of the siege works were wrecked.
Even more damaging than Jensen’s treachery was the inability of the Russian army to cut off and isolate the fortress. Gordon, the most experienced soldier present, wanted a total investiture of the town, but, for lack of men, the Russian siege works did not even completely encircle the land side of Azov. Between the end of the Russian trenches and the river was an open gap through which Tatar cavalry maintained communication with the Azov garrison. And the siege was rendered even less effective by lack of ships to control the river. Peter could only watch helplessly when twenty Turkish galleys came upstream and anchored near the town to deliver supplies and reinforcements to the Turkish garrison.
Through the long weeks of the siege, Peter himself toiled indefatigably. He continued to play two roles. As a common artilleryman, the bombardier who called himself Peter Alexeev helped load and fire the siege mortars that hurled bombs and shells into the town. As Tsar, he presided over the senior war council and discussed and reviewed all plans and operations. In addition, he kept up a constant correspondence with his friends in Moscow. Endeavoring to raise his own drooping spirits, he maintained his jesting tone, addressing Romodanovsky in Moscow as “My Lord King” and signing himself with expressions of great respect as “Bombardier Peter.”
Increasingly, the problem of divided command hampered the Russian siege operation. Lefort and Golovin both resented General Gordon’s superior military experience and tended to side together in council to overrule the veteran Scot. Peter also grew impatient with the course of the siege and, together with Lefort and Golovin, forced a decision to launch a sudden major assault in an effort to take the town by storm. Gordon argued that to take a fortress of this strength they must advance the trenches closer to the walls so that the troops could be protected until the moment of attack and not be lengthily exposed on the open ground before the walls. His warnings were brushed aside, and on August 15 the attack was made and it failed, as predicted. “Such was the result of this ill-timed and rash undertaking,” wrote Gordon in his diary. “Of the four regiments, 1,500 men were killed, not including officers. About 9 o’clock, His Majesty sent for me and the other officers. There was nothing to be seen but angry looks and sad countenances.” The Russian adversity continued. Two huge land mines, intended to be placed under the Turkish walls, blew up while still inside the Russian trenches with further heavy casualties.
Autumn was beginning. Peter knew that he could not leave his men in the trenches throughout the winter; either he would have to take the town or retreat. But a final attack was no more successful than the first, and on October 12, with the soldiers’ morale very low and the weather growing colder, Peter raised the siege. That he planned to return the following year, however, was indicated by the fact that he left the two watchtower forts strongly garrisoned by 3,000 men.
The retreat northward was a disaster, more costly in lives and equipment than the entire summer siege. For seven weeks, through heavy rains, the Russians trudged and stumbled north across the steppe, hotly pursued and harried by Tatar horsemen. The rivers were swollen by the rains, the grass had been burned in the summer and now was sodden, there was nothing for the animals to eat, and the men had difficulty finding dry wood to start a fire. The Austrian diplomat Pleyer was accompanying the army, and his report to Vienna was a tale of calamity: “Great quantities of provisions, which could have kept a large army [were] either ruined by bad weather, or lost by the barges going to the bottom.… It was impossible to see without tears how through the whole steppe for five hundred miles men and horses lay half-eaten by the wolves, and many villages were full of sick, some of whom died.”
On December 2, the army reached Moscow. Peter, imitating the precedent of Sophia and Golitsyn which he himself had condemned, attempted to mask his defeat by staging a triumphal entry into the capital. He marched through the city with a single pathetic Turkish prisoner walking ahead of him. No one was fooled, and the grumbling against the Tsar’s foreign military advisors increased. How could an Orthodox army expect to conquer when it was commanded by foreigners and heretics?
This argument was given additional weight by the fact that Sheremetev’s army, an old-style Russian host entirely officered by Russians, had achieved considerable success on the lower Dnieper. Together with the horsemen of the Cossack Hetman Mazeppa, Sheremetev’s troops had stormed two of the Turkish fortresses along the river, after which the Turks had withdrawn from two others. This achievement gave the Russians control of the whole line of the Dnieper almost down to its estuary on the Black Sea.
But, despite Sheremetev’s successes, Peter’s own campaign against Azov had been a failure. His vaunted “Western-style” army had been held at bay and had suffered disastrously in retreat. Yet, if defeat was a shock for the exuberant twenty-three-year-old, it did not discourage him. Peter meant to return. Making no excuses, acknowledging failure, Peter threw himself into preparations for a second attempt. He had been thwarted by three mistakes: divided command, a lack of skilled engineers to construct efficient siege works and an absence of control of the sea at the river mouth to seal off the fortress from outside help.
The first defect was easiest to rectify: The following summer, a supreme military commander would be named. Peter attempted to remedy the second problem by writing to the Austrian Emperor and the Elector of Brandenburg for competent siege experts to aid in defeating the infidel Turk. Far more difficult was the third factor, a fleet to control the river. And yet Peter decided he had to provide one, and demanded that by May—in five short months—a war fleet of twenty-five armed galleys and 1,300 new river barges be built for transporting troops and supplies. The galleys were to be not merely shallow-draft river craft but respectable sea-going men of war fit to defeat Turkish warships on the estuary of the Don or even on the open waters of the Sea of Azov.
The effort appeared impossible. Not only was the time ridiculously short, but these particular five months were the worst time of the year. Rivers and roads were frozen by ice and snow, the days were short as winter night came early, men working in the open air would hammer and saw with fingers numbed by cold. And there was no seaport, no shipbuilding site. Peter would have to build his ships somewhere in the interior of Russia and float them downriver to bring them into position to fight the Turks. Moreover, in the Russian heartland there were no real shipwrights. Russians knew only how to make river boats, simple craft 100 feet long by 20 feet wide, fitted together without the use of a single nail, used for one voyage down the river and then broken up for timber or firewood. Peter’s plan, then, was to build the shipyards, assemble the workmen, teach them to mark, cut and hew the timber, lay the keels, build the hulls, step the masts, shape the oars, weave the ropes, sew the sails, train the crews and sail the whole massive fleet down the River Don to Azov. All within five winter months!*
He went to work. As a shipbuilding site, he chose the town of Voronezh on the upper Don, about 300 miles below Moscow and 500 miles above the sea. The town had several advantages. Sheer distance made it secure from the threat of Tatar raids. It was situated above the line of the treeless steppe and lay in a belt of thick virgin forest where timber was readily available. For these reasons, since the reign of Alexis and the adherence of the Ukraine to Russia, Voronezh had been a site for building the simple barges which carried goods to the Don Cossacks. On the low eastern bank of the river at Voronezh, Peter built new shipyards, expanded the old ones and summoned huge numbers of conscripted unskilled laborers. Belgorod province, where Voronezh lay, was commanded to send 27,828 men to work in the shipyards. Peter sent to Archangel for skilled carpenters and shipbuilders, routing foreign and Russian artisans out of their winter indolence, promising that they would finish by summer. He appealed to the Doge of Venice to send him experts in the construction of galleys. A galley ordered from Holland and newly arrived at Archangel was cut into sections and brought to Moscow, where it served as a model for others being built that winter at Preobrazhenskoe. These one- and two-masted vessels, constructed at Preobrazhenskoe or Lake Pleschev, were built in sections like modern prefabricated ships; then the sections were mounted on sledges and dragged over the snowy roads for final assembly at Voronezh.
In the middle of Peter’s Herculean effort, on February 8, 1696, Tsar Ivan suddenly died. Feeble, uncomprehending and harmless, gentle Ivan had passed most of his twenty-nine years as a living icon, presented at ceremonies or dragged forward in moments of crisis to calm an angry mob. The difference between restless, energetic Peter and his silent, passive half-brother and co-Tsar was so great that there remained great affection between them. By keeping the royal title, Ivan had lifted many wearisome burdens of state ceremony from the royal bombardier and skipper. During his travels, Peter had always written tender and respectful letters to his brother and co-monarch. Now that Ivan was gone, buried in state in the Kremlin’s Archangel Michael Cathedral, Peter took Ivan’s young widow, the Tsaritsa Praskovaya, and her three daughters under his care. Praskovaya, in gratitude, remained loyal to Peter for the rest of her life.
Ivan’s death had no active political significance, but it put a final, formal seal on Peter’s sovereignty. He was now sole Tsar, the single, supreme ruler of the Russian state.
When Peter returned to Voronezh, he found vast activity and confusion. Mountains of timber had been cut and dragged to the building yards, and dozens of barges had already taken shape. But there were endless problems: Many of the ship’s carpenters were slow in arriving from Archangel; many unskilled laborers, improperly housed and badly fed, deserted; the weather varied between thaws which turned the ground to mud and sudden new freezes which turned the river and the roads to ice.
Peter hurled himself into action. He slept in a small log house next to the shipyard and rose before dawn. Warming himself by a fire next to his carpenters, surrounded by the sound of blows of axe, hammer and mallet, Peter worked on a galley, the Principium, which he was building along Dutch lines. He reveled in the work. “According to the divine decree to our grandfather Adam, we are eating our bread in the sweat of our face,” he wrote.
In March, the weather improved, and in mid-April three galleys, including the Principium, were launched. Hundreds of new barges were already moored in the river, ready for loading. To crew this new armada, Peter sent for boatmen from even the most distant Russian rivers and lakes. To man the war galleys, he created a special marine force of 4,000 men culled from many regiments, with a heavy proportion coming from his own Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards.
The overall mobilization was smaller than it had been the previous summer—in this second campaign there would be no march on the Dnieper—but the force destined to make the second assault on Azov would be double the size of the previous summer. Forty-six thousand Russian soldiers would be bolstered by 15,000 Ukrainian Cossacks, 5,000 Don Cossacks and 3,000 Kalmucks—wiry, brown-skinned, semi-Asiatic horsemen who could ride with any Tatar. A single officer, the boyar Alexis Shein, had been appointed commander-in-chief of the expedition. Shein was not an experienced military commander, but he came from a distinguished family, his judgment was considered sound and his appointment silenced those conservative Muscovites who grumbled that a Russian army commanded by a foreigner could never succeed. Lefort, although no seaman, was made admiral of the new fleet, while Peter, shifting his interest from Mars to Neptune, took the title of naval captain rather than artillery bombardier.
On May 1, Shein, the generalissimo, boarded his commander’s galley and raised on its stern a great embroidered banner bearing the Tsar’s arms. Two days later, the first ships weighed anchor and the long procession of galleys and barges began the voyage down the Don. Peter, starting later with a battle squadron of eight fast galleys, overtook the main fleet on May 26. By the end of the month, the entire fleet of barges and galleys had reached the Russian-held watchtower forts above Azov.
Fighting began immediately. On May 28, the leader of the Don Cossacks, who had gone ahead with 250 men to reconnoiter the mouth of the river, sent back word that two large Turkish ships were anchored there. Peter decided to attack. Nine galleys were selected, and one of Gordon’s best regiments embarked in them. They were accompanied down the river by forty Cossack boats, each carrying twenty men. In unfamiliar waters and with unfavorable winds, the galleys began to go aground and were ordered to turn back. Peter transferred into one of the lighter Cossack boats and continued down the river, but at its mouth he found not two but thirty Turkish craft, including warships, barges and lighters. This force he judged too strong for his small boats, and he returned upstream to the Russian camp; the Cossacks, however, remained in the vicinity of the Turkish ships. The following night, while the Turks were still moving supplies from the sea-going ships to the shore, the Cossack raiders attacked and captured ten of the smaller Turkish boats. The remainder of the Turkish force fled back to the main anchorage, where the Turkish captains became so alarmed that, although their unloading was still incomplete, the entire Turkish fleet weighed anchor and sailed the open sea. This was the last succor the city of Azov was to receive.
A few days later, Peter returned to the mouth of the river, bringing his entire force of twenty-nine galleys safely past the fortress of Azov. The city was now isolated, and any help sent by the Sultan would have to fight its way upriver through Peter’s flotilla. To strengthen his grip, Peter landed troops at the mouth of the river and constructed two small forts containing artillery. When these were finished, he wrote to Romodanovsky, “We are now completely out of danger of the Turkish fleet.” On June 14, a number of ships appeared and attempted to land troops to attack the Russian forts, but the approach of Peter’s galleys quickly frightened them away. Two weeks later, the Turks tried again, but again the arrival of the Russian galleys forced them to withdraw.
Meanwhile, with the sea secure and the city isolated, Peter’s generals and engineers could proceed with the siege. Fortunately for them, the Turkish garrison of Azov, not expecting the Russians to return after their previous failure, had done little to improve its situation. The Turks had not bothered to level the Russian earth siege works or fill in the Russian trenches of the previous summer, and Peter’s returning soldiers reoccupied them quickly with a minimum of fresh digging. With twice its former numbers, the Russian army was now able to spread its siege lines completely around the land side of the city.
Once his artillery was in place, Peter called on the Turkish Pasha in Azov to surrender. On June 26, when the Tsar’s demand was refused, the Russian cannon opened fire. Through the days that followed, Peter lived primarily on his galley anchored at the mouth of the Don, coming upstream at times to watch the bombardment. When news of his activities reached Moscow, his sister Natalya, alarmed by reports that he was exposing himself to enemy fire, wrote and begged him not to go near enemy cannonballs and bullets. Lightheartedly, Peter replied, “It is not I who go near to cannonballs and bullets, but they come near to me. Send orders for them to stop it.”
As all hope of reinforcement from the sea was gone, Peter repeated his offer of good surrender terms to the garrison. A Russian archer fired an arrow over the walls bearing a written offer of honorable terms, granting the garrison the right to depart the fortress with all its arms and baggage if it surrendered before the coming assault. The answer was a billowing line of smoke from the walls as all the Turkish cannon fired back in unison.
Meanwhile, the siege works progressed. Under Gordon’s direction, 15,000 Russians toiled with shovels, filling baskets of earth and piling up dirt higher and higher, and nearer and nearer the Turkish walls, until at last a vast earth platform had been built from which it was possible to see and fire directly down into the streets of the town. By mid-July, the Austrian siege engineers sent by the Emperor Leopold arrived. They had been four months en route, having understood that the campaign would not begin until late summer. When Peter discovered that their ignorance was due to the unwillingness of Ukraintsev at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow to reveal the army’s plan to Austria for fear it would leak to the Turks, he wrote in fury to Vinius, the culprit’s brother-in-law: “Has he any healthy good sense? Entrusted with state matters, yet he conceals what everybody knows. Just tell him that what he does not write on paper I shall write on his back!”
The Austrian engineers were impressed by the magnitude of the Russian earth mound, but suggested a more scientific approach, using mines, trenches and well-placed siege cannon. Nevertheless, it was the earth mound that resulted in the taking of the town. A number of Cossacks, disgusted by the endless work with shovels and baskets and finding carrying earth a poor substitute for fighting, determined to attack the town on their own. On July 27, without orders from their generals, 2,000 Cossacks stormed down from the earth mound onto the walls and into the streets of the town. Had they been supported by regular soldiers or Streltsy, they would have been successful. As it was, a desperate Turkish counterattack forced them back, but they managed to keep control of one of the corner towers of the wall, where they were finally reinforced by soldiers sent by Golovin. The following day, to exploit the breakthrough, Shein ordered a general assault, but before it could begin, the Turks signaled by lowering and waving their banners that they were ready to surrender. The Pasha, seeing his wall breached, had decided to accept the Russian offer of surrender under honorable conditions.
The terms allowed the Turks to withdraw with all their arms and baggage, along with their wives and children, but Peter insisted that the Dutch traitor Jensen be delivered. The Pasha hesitated as Jensen screamed at him, “Cut off my head, but don’t give me up to Moscow!” But the Tsar insisted, and Jensen was brought, tied hand and foot, into the Russian camp.
The following day, with banners flying, the Turkish garrison marched out of Azov and through the Russian lines to board the Turkish ships which had been permitted to approach. Shein, the victorious commander, waited on horseback by the embarkation point. The Pasha thanked him for keeping his word, lowered his banner in respect, boarded his ship and sailed away. Ten Russian regiments marched into the empty city, which was found heavily damaged by the bombardment. The Cossacks could not be restrained and looted the empty houses while the Russian commanders sat down to a victory banquet which spared “neither drink nor powder.”
Azov was now a Russian town, and Peter ordered the immediate razing of all the siege works. Under the supervision of the Austrian engineers, he began reconstruction of the town’s own fortified walls and bastions. The streets were cleared of ruins and rubble, and the mosques were transformed into Christian churches. Peter heard mass in one new church before he left the city.
Now he needed a harbor for his new Don River fleet. Azov itself was too far upstream, and the mouths of the Don were treacherous: too shallow in some spots, too deep in others. For a week, Peter cruised along the nearby coasts of the Sea of Azov seeking an anchorage, sleeping on a bench of one of his new galleys. Finally, he decided to build a harbor on the north shore of the sea, thirty miles from the mouth of the Don. The site lay behind a point known to the Cossacks as Tagonrog, and here Peter ordered the construction of a fort and harbor which were to become the first real naval base in Russian history.
News of the Azov victory astonished Moscow. For the first time since the reign of Alexis, a Russian army had won a victory. “When your letter came,” Vinius reported to Peter, “there were many guests at the house of Lev Kyrilovich [Naryshkin, Peter’s uncle]. He immediately sent me with it to the Patriarch. His Holiness, on reading it, burst into tears, ordered the great bell to be rung and, in the presence of the Tsaritsa and the Tsarevich, gave thanks to the Almighty. All talked with astonishment of the humility of their lord, who, after such a great victory, has not lifted up his own heart, but has ascribed all to the Creator of Heaven and has praised only his assistants, although everyone knows that it was by your plan alone, and by the aid you got from the sea, that such a noted town has bowed down to your feet.”
Peter sent word to Vinius that if “the laborer is worthy of his hire” it would be appropriate to honor him and the commander-in-chief with a triumphal arch and a victory parade. Vinius immediately began to make preparations while, to allow him time, Peter delayed his homeward journey. He inspected the ironworks of Tula and worked with the famous blacksmith Nikita Demidov, whose later family fortune rested on the Tsar’s immense grants to him of mining territory in the Urals.
On October 10, the Tsar joined his troops at Kolomenskoe for the triumphal march into the capital. To the bewilderment of the Muscovites, it was staged not in the traditional Orthodox religious setting which had greeted Alexis’ triumphs with holy icons borne by church dignitaries butwith new pagan pageantry inspired by Greek and Roman mythology. The triumphal arch erected by Vinius near the Moscow River was classically Roman, with massive statues of Hercules and Mars supporting it and the Turkish Pasha depicted lying in chains beneath it.
The procession itself stretched several miles. At its head rode eighteen horsemen, followed by a six-horse carriage bearing Peter’s aged tutor, the Prince-Pope Nikita Zotov, dressed in armor and bearing sword and buckler. Then came fourteen more horsemen before the gilded carriage of Admiral Lefort, who was wearing a crimson coat trimmed with gold. Fedor Golovin and Lev Naryshkin were next, then thirty cavalrymen in silver cuirasses. Two companies of trumpeters preceded the royal standard of the Tsar, which was surrounded by guards with pikes. Behind the standard, in another gilded carriage, rolled the commander-in-chief, Alexis Shein, followed by sixteen captured Turkish standards, their shafts reversed and their banners trailing in the dirt. A grim warning followed: a simple peasant cart containing the trussed-up figure of the traitor Jensen. Around his neck he wore a sign proclaiming EVILDOER; by his side stood two executioners surrounded with axes, knives, whips and pincers, to give lurid display to the fate that awaited Jensen and other traitors.
And where, amidst all this gorgeous assemblage of flashing colors, of prancing horses and marching men, was the Tsar? To their amazement, Muscovites finally saw Peter not on a white horse or in a golden carriage at the head of his army, but walking with other galley captains behind the carriage of Admiral Francis Lefort. He was recognizable by his great height and by his German captain’s uniform, with foreign breeches, a black coat and a wide black hat in which, as a single sign of special rank, he had placed a white feather. On foot, in this fashion, the victorious Tsar walked through his capital the nine miles from Kolomenskoe south of the city to Preobrazhenskoe on the northeast.
News of the young Tsar’s triumph reverberated quickly through Europe, causing astonishment and admiration. Vinius wrote directly to Witsen, Burgomaster of Amsterdam, asking that he pass the news of the victory to Peter’s hero, King William III of England. In Constantinople, the news brought consternation. The weary Turkish soldiers returning home from the long siege were arrested, three officials were executed and the Pasha who had surrendered the town was forced to flee for his life.
Azov was only a beginning. Those Russians who hoped that now after a great victory, the first in three decades, Peter would quietly settle down to rule as his father, Alexis, and brother Fedor had done soon learned of the new projects and ideas bubbling in their master’s mind. The first wasconstruction of a sea-going fleet. What Peter wanted were real ships, not just the galleys he had built for the single purpose of supporting a land campaign and sealing off a fortress from the sea. By taking Azov, Peter had won access only to the Sea of Azov; entry into the Black Sea itself was still blocked by the powerful Turkish fortress at Kerch astride the strait between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, and to force this strait, Peter would need a fleet of sea-going ships.
Scarcely had the Moscow triumph been celebrated when Peter summoned his council of boyars to Preobrazhenskoe and announced his plans to colonize Azov and Tagonrog and begin the construction of a navy. A stream of edicts flowed from this historic meeting. Three thousand peasant families and 3,000 Streltsy with their wives and children were uprooted and dispatched to Azov as military colonizers. Twenty thousand Ukrainian laborers were drafted and sent to Tagonrog to build the naval harbor. The new ships themselves were to be built at Voronezh, where the present shipyards would be vastly expanded; from there, the finished vessels would be floated down the Don. Responsibility for building the ships was allocated. All who could afford to help—church, landowners, merchants—would join the state in paying the costs. The state itself would build ten large ships. Every great landowner would build one ship. Every large monastery would build one ship. All these ships were to be fully constructed, equipped and armed within eighteen months. The government would provide the timber, but the landowners or church officials were to provide everything else: ropes, sails, cannon, fittings.
The order was harshly enforced. Failure meant immediate confiscation of property. When the merchants of Moscow and other cities, feeling that their allocation of twelve ships was too much for them, petitioned the Tsar for a lighter burden, their share was increased to fourteen. Usually, the ships were built at Voronezh without the landowners or merchants actually taking personal charge of construction. They simply paid the necessary costs and hired foreign shipbuilders from the German Suburb to perform the skilled work.
Shipbuilders from Europe began to arrive; the thirteen galley experts requested of the Doge of Venice came and were set to work; fifty other Western shipwrights arrived in Moscow and were sent to Voronezh. But these foreigners were only a cadre. To construct the fleet that Peter envisaged would require many more shipbuilders and, once the ships were afloat, many naval officers to command them. At least some of these would have to be Russian. On November 22, 1696, a few weeks after the shipbuilding effort was announced, Peter declared that he was sending more than fifty Russians, most of them young and sons of the noblest families, to Western Europe to study seamanship, navigation and shipbuilding. Twenty-eight were sent to Venice to study the famed Venetian galleys; the rest were dispatched to Holland and England to study the larger ships of the two great maritime powers. Peter himself drew up the syllabus for study: The Russian students were to familiarize themselves with charts and compasses and other tools of seafaring, to learn the art of shipbuilding, to serve on foreign ships, starting at the bottom as common sailors, and, if possible, to participate in naval warfare. None was to return to Russia without a certificate signed by a foreign master attesting to the student’s proficiency.
Peter’s command fell on horrified ears. Some of those selected were already married—Peter Tolstoy, the oldest of the students, was fifty-two when sent abroad—and they would be uprooted from wives and children and sent into the temptations of the Western world. Their parents feared the corrupting effect of Western religion, and their wives feared the seductive arts of Western women. And all had to travel at their own expense. But there was no recourse; they had to go. None returned to Russia to become distinguished admirals, but their years abroad were not wasted. Tolstoy employed his knowledge of the West and his facility in the Italian language to effective use as ambassador to Constantinople. Boris Kurakin became Peter’s leading ambassador in Western Europe. Yury Trubetskoy and Dmitry Golitsyn became senators, Golitsyn being regarded as one of the most erudite men in Peter’s Russia. And these fifty were but the first wave. In the years that followed, scores of Russian youths, commoners as well as noblemen, were routinely sent abroad for naval training. The knowledge they brought home helped to change Russia.
The massive building program for the Azov fleet and the sending of dozens of young Russians abroad to learn seamanship were not the greatest shocks that awaited Russia in the wake of Peter’s victory over the Turks. Two weeks after the dispatch of the first naval apprentices, Councilor Ukraintsev of the Foreign Ministry made another, even more dramatic announcement:
The Sovereign has directed for his great affairs of state that to the neighboring nations, to the Emperor, to the Kings of England and Denmark, to the Pope of Rome, to the Dutch states, to the Elector of Brandenburg, and to Venice shall be sent his great Ambassadors and Plenipotentiaries: the General and Admiral Francis Lefort, General Fedor Golovin and Councilor Prokofy Voznitsyn.
The Great Embassy, as it came to be called, would number more than 250 people, and it would be absent from Russia for more than eighteen months. As well as giving its members an opportunity to study the West at first hand and to enlist officers, sailors, engineers and shipwrights to build and man a Russian fleet, it would enable Westerners to see and report their impressions of the leading Russians who made the trip. Soon after the announcement, two almost unbelievable rumors raced through Moscow: the Tsar himself meant to accompany the Great Embassy to the West, and he meant to go not as Great Lord and Tsar, autocrat and sovereign, but as a mere member of the ambassadors’ staff. Peter, who stood six feet seven inches, intended to travel incognito.
* Naval shipbuilding began in Russia and America at about the same time. In 1690, five years before Peter commenced his urgent shipbuilding program at Voronezh, a small man of war, the Falkland, was built for the British navy at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The vessel, constructed entirely by colonial shipwrights, was the first warship built in North America.