41

LIBERATOR OF THE BALKAN CHRISTIANS

In the second half of the seventeenth century, a new and quite unexpected danger appeared in the north to threaten the Ottoman Empire. Muscovite Russia waxed in power and portended menace for the throne of the Shadow of God. Traditionally, the Turks had regarded the Muscovites with disdain; it was not they, but their vassals the Crimean Tatars who dealt with the Muscovites. Indeed, such was the order of ascendancy that the Crimean Tatars, the sultan’s tributaries, themselves received tribute from the tsar. For the Crimean khans, Muscovy was a harvest ground for slaves and cattle taken in the great annual Tatar raids into the Ukraine and southern Russia.

That the Ottoman Empire had been able to display this indifference toward the Russian tsardom was due to Moscow’s involvement with its other enemies. The two most numerous Christian people of Eastern Europe, the Orthodox Russians and the Catholic Poles, had been fighting each other for generations. But in 1667 a change disagreeable to the sultan occurred: Russians and Poles resolved their differences at least temporarily to unite against the Turks. And it was in 1686 that King Jan Sobieski of Poland, anxious to fight the Ottoman Empire, surrendered temporarily (the transfer became permanent) the city of Kiev to the Regent Sophia in return for Russian adherence to a Polish-Austrian-Venetian alliance against Turkey.

Prodded by her allies, Russia finally initiated military action in this war. The offensives launched against the Crimean Tatars in 1677 and 1689, both commanded by Sophia’s favorite, Vasily Golitsyn, ended in failure. In Constantinople, the insignificance of Russian military power seemed further confirmed, while in Moscow, Golitsyn’s failures precipitated a shift in power. The revelation of Sophia’s weakness led to the Regent’s downfall and the assumption of power by the Naryshkin party in Peter’s name. Thereafter, while the youthful Tsar was drilling soldiers, building boats and visiting Archangel, relations between Russia and Turkey remained quiet. Technically, they were still at war but in fact there was no fighting.

As Peter came of age, he discovered in the anti-Turkish alliance and the never ended war the opportunity to realize a personal dream: to break through to the south and sail a fleet on the Black Sea. The two summer campaigns of 1695 and 1696 against Azov were the first Russian assaults not on Tatars but on a Turkish fortress manned by Turkish soldiers. Peter’s success in his second attempt alarmed the sultan’s government: Russian warships seemed more dangerous than Russian soldiers. Now, the Tsar had cleared the mouth of the Don and was massing a fleet at Tagonrog and Azov, but—fortunately, from the Turkish point of view—Ottoman fortresses still commanded the Strait of Kerch and prevented these ships from sailing on the Black Sea.

Officially, of course, it was to reignite the war, to invigorate his allies and perhaps to find new ones that Peter set out on his Great Embassy in 1697. As we have seen, he failed in this purpose, and once his allies signed a treaty of peace at Carlowitz, Russia, a minor combatant, was left to make the best peace it could with the Turks. Denied the fruits for which he hungered, the Tsar never forgave the Austrians for deserting him at Carlowitz. “They take no more notice of me than they do a dog,” he complained bitterly. “I shall never forget what they have done to me. I feel it and am come off with empty pockets.”

Despite the incompleteness of Peter’s gains, Azov was to have far-reaching consequences. The first Russian victory over the Turks, it demonstrated at least a local and temporary superiority over a power which the Muscovites had always before treated with circumspection. It was fortunate for Russia that no great sultan or grand vizier like those of the Ottoman past rose up in Peter’s day. The vast power to Russia’s south was somnolent, but it remained colossal in size, still possessed of immense resources, and, when provoked, could bring crushing weight to bear on its neighbors.

It was this lethargic but still formidable giant that Peter challenged in 1711 with his march into the Balkans.

By 1710, the thirty-year truce with Turkey, signed on the eve of the Great Northern War, had lasted for ten years; even when Peter had seemed most vulnerable, the truce had been maintained. For this good fortune, the man most responsible was Peter’s—and Russia’s—first permanent ambassador at Constantinople, Peter Tolstoy. A portrait of Tolstoy depicts a man with shrewd blue eyes, bushy black eyebrows, a high forehead and a gray Western wig. His clean-shaven face is serene. Everything about the man radiates vigor, tenacity, self-confidence and success.

Tolstoy had needed these qualities plus a great deal of luck to skirt the pitfalls already encountered in a long and remarkable career. Born in 1645 into a landed family of the lesser aristocracy, he had initially favored the Miloslavskys and ardently supported the Regent Sophia in her climactic confrontation with the young Tsar Peter in 1689, but had switched to the winning side just before the end. Peter, not fully trusting this new adherent, sent him to govern the distant northern province of Ustiug. There, as governor, it fell to Tolstoy to entertain the Tsar during the summers of 1693 and 1694 when he was traveling to and from Archangel. Tolstoy made a good impression, which he reinforced by serving capably in the second campaign against Azov. Finally, in 1696, he established himself in Peter’s favor when, although fifty-two and the father of a family, he volunteered to travel to Venice to study shipbuilding and navigation. He learned something of these trades and cruised the Mediterranean, but a more important consequence was that he learned to speak Italian and to understand something of Western life and culture, both useful in his subsequent career as diplomat. Shrewd, cool-headed, opportunistic, a man who by Russian standards was cultured and sophisticated, Tolstoy became immensely useful to the Tsar. Recognizing his qualities, Peter entrusted Tolstoy with two of the most difficult assignments of his reign: the long mission to Constantinople and, later, the luring back to Russia of the Tsarevich Alexis. Prizing this talented and useful servant, Peter gave Tolstoy the hereditary rank of count, but he never completely forgot the older man’s earlier opposition. Once, when this dark thought flitted across his mind, the Tsar took the older man’s head between his two powerful hands and said, “Oh, head, head! You would not be on your shoulders now if you were not so wise.”

Tolstoy’s character and experience suited him admirably for his assignment as Russia’s first resident ambassador at the sultan’s court. His instructions, when he arrived near the end of 1701, were those of diplomats since time immemorial: to preserve the truce between Turkey and Russia, to do what he could to stir up trouble between Turkey and Austria, to gather and forward to Moscow information on the foreign relations and internal politics of the Ottoman Empire, to pass along his judgments of the men in power and those likely to come to power, and to learn what he could about Turkish military and naval tactics and the strength of Turkish fortresses on the Black Sea. It was a challenging assignment, made all the more so because the Turks did not really want a Russian ambassador in Constantinople. Other foreign ambassadors were stationed in the Ottoman capital to facilitate commerce, but trade did not flow between Russia and Turkey, and the Turks, accordingly, were suspicious of Tolstoy’s presence.

At first, he was placed under something close to house arrest. As he wrote to Peter:

My residence is not pleasant to them because their domestic enemies, the Greeks, are our co-religionists. The Turks are of the opinion that, by living among them, I shall excite the Greeks to rise against the Mohammedans, and therefore the Greeks have been forbidden to have intercourse with me. The Christians have been so frightened that none of them dare even pass by the house in which I live.… Nothing terrifies them so much as your fleet. The rumor has circulated that seventy great ships have been built at Archangel and they think that when it is necessary these ships will come around from the Atlantic Ocean into the Mediterranean Sea and will sail up to Constantinople.

Despite these hardships, Tolstoy had considerable success. He managed to build up an intelligence network based partly on the organization of the Orthodox Church within the Ottoman Empire (Dositheus, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, was especially helpful) and partly with the assistance of the Dutch, who had much experience in the maze of Turkish court politics.

During Tolstoy’s years, this maze was particularly complex. Grand vizier followed grand vizier. Some were more tolerant of Tolstoy than others, but his position was never comfortable. In 1702, the Grand Vizier Daltaban Mustapha came to power, determined to back the Tatar Khan in his desire to renew the war with Russia. By generous bribery, Tolstoy managed to bring the Vizier’s scheme to the attention of the Sultan’s mother, and Daltaban was deposed and beheaded. The next vizier handled Tolstoy more carefully, but two Janissaries still guarded his door and watched his movements.

In 1703, when Sultan Mustapha II was replaced by his brother Ahmed III, Tolstoy at first was allowed to go where he pleased; then came a new grand vizier and again he was restricted. Despairingly, the ambassador wrote to Moscow: “The new Vizier is very ill-disposed to me, and my wretched situation, my troubles and fears are worse than before. Again no one dares to come to me and I can go nowhere. It is with great trouble that I can send this letter. This is the sixth Vizier in my time and he is the worst of all.” The sixth vizier was soon replaced by the seventh, but Tolstoy’s situation remained bleak.

In part, the ill-treatment of Tolstoy was due to the complaints of a Turkish envoy to Moscow about his treatment by the Russians. The Turkish ambassador sent to announce the accession of Ahmed III had been politely received, but had been made to wait a long time before seeing the Tsar. This delay was deliberate: Peter had wanted to gain time and impress on the envoy the power of the Russian Tsar. In addition, Peter fended the envoy away from what he most wanted to see: the Russian fleet base at Azov and its building site at Voronezh. Peter wrote to the governor of Azov, “Do not go near Voronezh. Be as slow on the road as possible, the longer, the better. Do not allow him to see Azov on any account.”

All of this rebounded on Tolstoy’s head when the envoy sent a letter home describing his treatment in Russia. “What he [his counterpart, the Turkish ambassador in Russia] has written, I do not know,” said Tolstoy, “but they ill-treat me in a frightful way, and they shut us all up in our house and allow no one either to go out or to come in. We have been some days almost without food because they let no one out to buy bread, and it was with difficulty that I succeeded by great presents in getting permission for one man to go out to buy victuals.”

Tolstoy also worried that one of his own staff would convert to Mohammedanism and then betray his intelligence service. Eventually, such a case did occur, and the Ambassador dealt with it summarily:

I am in great fear of my attendants [he wrote to Moscow]. As I have been living here for three years they have gotten acquainted with the Turks and have learned the Turkish language. Since we are now in great discomfort, I fear that they will become impatient on account of the imprisonment and will waver in their faith because the Mohammedan faith is very attractive to thoughtless people. If any Judas declare himself, he will do great harm because my people have seen with which of the Christians I have been intimate and who serves the Tsar … and if any one turns renegade and tells the Turks who has been working for the Tsar, not only will our friends suffer, but there will be harm to all Christians. I follow this with great attention and do not know how God will turn it. I have had one affair like this. A young secretary, Timothy, having got acquainted with the Turks, thought of turning Mohammedan. God helped me to learn about this. I called him quietly and began to talk to him and he declared to me frankly that he wished to become a Mohammedan. Then I shut him up in his bedroom till night, and at night he drank a glass of wine and quickly died. Thus God kept him from such wickedness.

As time went on, Tolstoy had other troubles. His salary failed to arrive, and in order to make ends meet, he was forced to sell some of the sable skins he had been given to use as gifts. He wrote to the Tsar begging for his pay and also for permission to resign and come home. Peter wrote back refusing, telling him that his services were essential. Tolstoy struggled along, bribing, intriguing, doing his best. In 1706, he reported that “two of the most prudent pashas have been strangled at the instigation of the Grand Vizier, who does not like capable people. God grant that all the rest may perish the same way.”

During Bulavin’s Cossack rebellion on the Don and the Swedish invasion of Russia, Peter feared that the Sultan might be tempted to try to retake Azov. His instinct was to appease, and he gave orders to be sure that no Turk or Tatar prisoners were still being held in Russian prisons. Tolstoy disagreed with this approach. He felt that the better policy was to be forceful, even threatening, with the Turks, in order to keep them quiet. Events seemed to bear him out. In 1709, the spring and summer of Poltava, the Turks not only failed to intervene on the side of Sweden, but talk of war with Russia and rumors of the appearance of a Russian fleet at the mouth of the Bosphorus caused panic in the streets of Constantinople.

Thus, for eight difficult years Tolstoy successfully upheld his master’s interests and preserved the peace between Russia and Turkey. Then, in 1709, Charles XII, fleeing Poltava, arrived within the Sultan’s dominions. Thereafter, four times within three years, the Sultan declared war on Russia.

When Charles XII crossed the Bug River and entered the territory of the Ottoman Empire, he became the Sultan’s guest. The King and the Cossack Hetman Mazeppa had sought asylum within the Sultan’s dominions; this, according to the religion of Islam, imposed on Ahmed III the duty to receive and protect them. So strongly was this obligation felt that when word reached Constantinople of the delaying tactics of the local pasha which had resulted in the massacre of the stranded Cossacks on the far side of the river, the Sultan contemplated sending the pasha a silken cord.

Once he knew that the King of Sweden was within his empire, the Sultan moved quickly to make amends. Within a few days, the Seraskier of Bender, Yusuf Pasha, arrived with a formal welcome and a wagon train of special provisions. Soon, the famished Swedish survivors were feasting on melons, mutton and excellent Turkish coffee. Yusuf Pasha also brought the Sultan’s suggestion, tinged with the weight of command, that his guests move to Bender on the Dniester River, 150 miles farther southwest. At this new site, Charles pitched camp in a row of handsome Turkish tents set in a meadow lined with fruit trees along the bank of the Dniester. In this pleasant country, now called Bessarabia, the restless King of Sweden was to spend three years.

At the time he moved there, Charles could have no inkling of this future. The King’s intention had been to return to Poland and take command of the armies of Krassow and Stanislaus as soon as his foot was healed. In Poland, he also hoped to rendezvous with the troops under Lewenhaupt which he had left behind at Perevoluchna. In addition, he had sent orders to the governing Council in Stockholm to raise new regiments and send them across the Baltic. Nature and politics conspired against him. The wound healed slowly, and it was another six weeks before the King was able to mount a horse. During this recuperation, he learned that his eldest sister, the widowed Duchess of Holstein, Hedwig Sophia, had died in Stockholm during an epidemic of measles. For days, the bachelor King could not stop weeping. Shutting himself in his tent, he refused to see even his closest comrades; for a while he even refused to believe the report, although the news had been transmitted in an official letter of condolence from the Swedish Council. To his younger sister, Ulrika, he wrote that he hoped that the “too terrible, quite unexpected rumor which totally numbed me” would be contradicted. Later, he wrote to Ulrika that he would have been happy if he had been the first of the three to die, and prayed now that at least he would be the second.

Another sorrow quickly followed. Mazeppa, the aging Hetman who had ruinously cast his lot with Charles before Poltava, had been carried from Charles’ camp to a house in the town of Bender, where during the hot summer days his condition worsened. Charles remained faithful: When an offer from Peter arrived, suggesting that the Tsar would free Count Piper if Charles would hand over Mazeppa, the King refused. On September 22, 1709, Mazeppa died, and Charles hobbled on crutches to attend the funeral.

Blow followed upon blow. In quick succession, Charles learned that Lewenhaupt had surrendered at Perevoluchna, that Russian troops under Menshikov were flooding Poland, that Stanislaus and Krassow had retreated, that Augustus had broken the Treaty of Altranstadt and invaded Poland to reclaim his crown, that Denmark had reentered the war against Sweden and that Sweden itself was invaded by a Danish army. Meanwhile, Peter’s Russian troops were marching through the Baltic provinces, occupying Riga, Pernau, Reval and Vyborg. Why did Charles not return to Sweden to take command? The journey would not have been easy. Bender was 1,200 miles south of Stockholm. The route through Poland was closed by the soldiers of Peter and Augustus. A recurrence of the plague had caused the Austrians to seal all their frontiers. Louis XIV repeatedly offered a ship to bring Charles home—the Sun King was eager to have the Swedish thunderbolt making mischief again in Eastern Europe behind the backs of his English, Dutch and Austrian opponents—but Charles worried about being seized by pirates. And if he accepted passage from the French—or even from the English or Dutch—what would be the price? Almost certainly, it would mean choosing sides in the War of the Spanish Succession.

In fact, once his disappointment at being unable to leave immediately for Poland had passed, Charles actually preferred to stay in Turkey. As he saw it, his presence inside the Ottoman Empire provided him with an impressive new opportunity. If he could arouse the Sultan to make war on the Tsar and join him in one successful southern offensive, Peter might still be beaten and all that Sweden had lost might be regained. Beginning in the autumn of 1709, Charles’ agents, Poniatowski and Neugebauer, plunged into the murky politics of Constantinople, toiling to undo Tolstoy’s work.

Their task was not easy. The Turks did not want to fight. This general feeling was reinforced by the news of Poltava, which had made an enormous impression in Constantinople: How long now would it be before the Tsar’s fleet appeared at the mouth of the Bosphorus? Faced with these dangers, many of the Sultan’s advisors would have been happy to do as Peter demanded and expel the Swedish troublemaker from their empire. “The King of Sweden,” reads a contemporary Turkish document, “has fallen like a heavy weight on the shoulders of the Sublime Porte.” On the other hand, there were parties inside the Ottoman Empire who were eager for war with Russia. The most prominent was the violent Russophobe Khan of the Crimea, Devlet Gerey, who had been stripped of his right to tribute from Russia by the treaty of 1700. He and his horsemen were thirsting for a chance to renew the great raids on the Ukraine which had been so lucrative in booty and prisoners. In addition, Neugebauer was so fortunate as to gain the ear of Sultan Ahmed’s mother. This lady’s imagination had already been captured by the hero legend of Charles XII; now Neugebauer made her see how her son could help her “lion [Charles] devour the Tsar.”

Another element was necessary to Charles’ plan. It was not enough simply to induce the Sultan to go to war; the campaign must be successfully fought and the right objectives achieved. Charles understood that in order to have a voice in these matters, he needed to command a fresh Swedish army on the continent. Even as the Ottoman army was mobilizing, Charles was writing urgently to Stockholm “to ensure the safe transport into Pomerania of the aforesaid regiments in good time, that our part in the forthcoming campaign may not fall to the ground.”

In Stockholm, the Council was astonished, even aghast, at this request. Already in November 1709, after Poltava, a newly emboldened Denmark had broken the Peace of Travendal and reentered the war against Sweden. Danish troops had invaded southern Sweden. To the Swedish Council, confronting immediate threats to the homeland along with the crushing burden of paying for a war which seemed already lost, the King’s command that another expeditionary force be sent to Poland seemed madness. A message was sent to Charles that no troops could be spared.

In the end, ironically, Neugebauer and Poniatowski were successful in Constantinople while Charles XII failed in Stockholm. The Ottoman Empire was persuaded to go to war, but none of the proud Swedish regiments which might have steeled the ranks of the Turkish army and given weight to the voice of the Swedish King were present. Although he was incontestably the greatest commander within the empire, and although the Turkish army in general and the Janissaries in particular idolized the warrior King, Charles was not a formal ally of the Turks and played no active part in the coming military campaign. Because of this, his last and perhaps his greatest opportunity to defeat Peter crumbled into dust.

It was not only the Turks who were concerned about the presence of Charles XII in the Ottoman Empire. Ever since the King’s arrival, Peter had pressed through Tolstoy for Charles’ surrender or expulsion. As the months passed, the tone of his messages became increasingly peremptory, and this played directly into the hands of the war party in Constantinople and Adrianople. The Tsar’s categorical demand that the Sultan reply by October 10, 1710, to his request that Charles be expelled from Turkey was considered insulting to the dignity of the Shadow of God. This, following the persuasions of the Khan, the Swedes, the French and the Sultan’s mother, tipped the balance. On November 21, in a solemn session of the Divan, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. Tolstoy was the first to suffer. Under Turkish law, ambassadors had no immunity in wartime, and Tolstoy was seized, stripped of half his clothes, set on an aged horse and paraded through the streets to confinement in the Seven Towers.

With the declaration of war came a new Grand Vizier, Mehemet Baltadji, appointed for the express purpose of making war on Russia. He was a curious choice, described by a contemporary as a dull-witted, blundering old pederast who had never been a serious soldier. Yet he decided on an offensive campaign. That winter, as soon as the Khan’s horsemen could make ready, a mobile Tatar army would strike north from the Crimea into the Ukraine to harry the Cossacks and reap the rewards in prisoners and cattle which ten years of peace had denied them. In the spring, the main body of the Ottoman army would march northeast from Adrianople. The artillery and supplies would go by sea to the Danube town of Isaccea to rendezvous with the army. There, the Tatar cavalry would join them to form a combined force of almost 200,000 men.

In January, the Tatars struck, ravaging the area between the middle Dnieper and the upper Don. They met heavy resistance from Peter’s new Cossack Hetman, Skoropadsky, and were forced to withdraw without having created the major diversion for which the Grand Vizier had hoped. At the end of February, the horsetails signifying war were raised in the Court of the Janissaries and the elite corps of 20,000, shouldering its polished muskets and ornamental bows, marched north. The main army moved slowly, reaching the Danube only at the beginning of June. Here, the cannon were unloaded from ships and placed in gun carriages, the supply trains organized, and the entire army transferred to the east bank of the river.

While the Turks were assembling on the Danube, the Grand Vizier sent Poniatowski, who had been representing Charles at the Sultan’s court, to Bender to invite the King to join the campaign, but only as a guest of the Grand Vizier. At first, the King was strongly tempted, but he decided against it. As a sovereign, he could not join an army he did not command, especially an army commanded by one lower in rank than himself. In retrospect, it appears a fatal mistake.

The war of 1711, which led to the campaign on the Pruth, was not of Peter’s asking; it was Charles who had instigated this fight between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, once war came, Peter, still flushed with his success at Poltava, accepted the challenge with confidence and took rapid steps to prepare. Ten regiments of Russian dragoons were dispatched from Poland to watch the Ottoman frontier. Sheremetev with twenty-two regiments of infantry was ordered to march from the Baltic to the Ukraine. A new, exceptionally heavy tax was levied to support the coming military operations.

On February 25, 1711, a great ceremony was held in the Kremlin. The Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards regiments stood in ranks in Cathedral Square before the Assumption Cathedral, their red banners bearing a cross inscribed with the ancient watchword of the Emperor Constantine: “By this sign you shall conquer.” Inside the cathedral, Peter solemnly proclaimed a holy war “against the enemies of Christ.” The Tsar meant to lead the Turkish campaign personally, and on March 6 left Moscow with Catherine at his side. But he became ill, and his letters carried a tone of resignation and despair. “We have before us this uncertain road which is known to God alone,” he wrote to Menshikov. To Apraxin, who had been given command of all the lower Don, including Azov and Tagonrog, and who had written asking for instructions as to where to place his headquarters, the Tsar replied, “Do as is most convenient to you, for all the country is entrusted to you. It is impossible for me to decide as I am so far off, and, if you will, in despair, being scarcely alive from illness, and affairs change from day to day.”

Peter’s illness was severe. To Menshikov, he wrote that he had suffered one seizure lasting a day and a half and had never been so sick in his life. After several weeks, he began to feel better and moved along to Yavorov. There, he was pleased that Catherine was received with dignity and addressed as “Your Majesty” by the local Polish noblemen. Catherine herself was delighted. “We here are often at banquets and soirees,” she wrote on May 9 to Menshikov, who had been left behind to defend St. Petersburg. “Three days ago we visited the Hetman Sieniawski and yesterday were at Prince Radziwill’s, where we danced a good bit.” Then, turning to some imagined slight, she soothed the worried Prince: “I beg your Highness not to be troubled by believing any stupid gossip coming from here, for the Rear Admiral [Peter] keeps you in his love and kindest remembrance as before.”

Peter had traveled to Yavorov to sign the marriage treaty which would link his son Alexis to Princess Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel. Schleinitz, the ambassador of the Duke of Wolfenbüttel, wrote to his master describing the Russian royal couple at this moment:

The next day about four o’clock the Tsar sent for me again. I knew that I should find him in the room of the Tsaritsa and that I should give him great pleasure if I congratulated the Tsaritsa on the publication of her marriage. After the declaration made on this subject by the King of Poland and the hereditary prince, I did not consider it out of place and besides I knew that the Polish minister gave the Tsaritsa the title of Majesty. When I went into the room I turned, notwithstanding the presence of the Tsar, and congratulated her in your name on the announcement of her marriage, and entrusted the Princess [Charlotte] to her friendship and protection.

Catherine was delighted and asked Schleinitz to thank the Duke for his good wishes. She said that she was eager to see and embrace the princess who was to become her stepdaughter-in-law and asked whether the Tsarevich seemed as much in love with Charlotte as people said. While Catherine was talking with the Ambassador, Peter was examining some mathematical instruments on the other side of the room. When he heard Catherine speak of Alexis, he laid these down on a table and walked over, but did not break into the conversation.

“I had been warned,” Schleinitz continued in his letter to the Duke,

that as the Tsar knows me very slightly, it was incumbent on me to address him first. I therefore told him that Her Majesty the Tsaritsa had asked me whether the Tsarevich was very much in love with the Princess. I declared that I was sure that the Tsarevich awaited with impatience the consent of his father in order to be fully happy. The Tsar replied through an interpreter: “I do not wish to put off the happiness of my son, but at the same time I do not wish entirely to deprive myself of my own happiness. He is my only son and I desire to have the pleasure at the end of the campaign of being personally present at his marriage. His marriage will be in Brunswick.” He explained that he was not entirely his own master, for he had to do with an enemy who was strong and rapid in his movements, but he would try and arrange it to take the waters at Carlsbad in the autumn and then go to Wolfenbüttel.

Three days later, the marriage contract arrived, signed without alteration by the Duke of Wolfenbüttel. Peter summoned Ambassador Schleinitz and greeted him in German with the statement, “I have some excellent news to give you.” He produced the contract, and when Schleinitz congratulated the Tsar and kissed his hand, Peter kissed him three times on the forehead and cheeks and ordered that a bottle of his favorite Hungarian wine be brought. They clinked glasses and Peter talked excitedly for two hours about his son, the army and the coming campaign against the Turks. Afterward, a pleased Schleinitz wrote to the Duke: “I cannot sufficiently express to Your Highness with what clearness of judgment and what modesty the Tsar spoke about everything.”

Peter’s confidence that the campaign against Turkey would be swiftly concluded so that he could take the waters at Carlsbad and then attend his son’s wedding was further reflected in an interview he had at this time with Augustus. The Elector of Saxony had once again entered Warsaw and claimed the crown of Poland, while his rival, Stanislaus, had fled with the retreating Swedes to Swedish Pomerania. Augustus intended to pursue these enemies and besiege the Swedish-held Baltic port of Stralsund. To support this effort, Peter pledged 100,000 roubles and placed 12,000 Russian soldiers under Augustus’ command.

Against the Turks, Peter’s plan, bold to the point of recklessness, was to march to the lower Danube, cross the river just above the place where it flows into the Black Sea and proceed southwest through Bulgaria to a point where he could threaten the Sultan’s second capital, Adrianople, and even the fabled city of Constantinople itself. The Russian army he would take with him would not be large—40,000 infantry and 14,000 cavalry—compared to the vast array which the Sultan could put in the field. But Peter expected that once he entered the Christian provinces of the Ottoman Empire bordering on Russia, he would be welcomed as a liberator and reinforced by 30,000 Walachians and 10,000 Moldavians. Then, his army would number 94,000.

The offensive plan had been conceived partly as a means of keeping war away from the Ukraine, devastated by the Swedish invasion and the defection of Mazeppa, and now quiet, at least for the moment. If an Ottoman army invaded the Ukrainian steppes, who knew which way the volatile Cossacks would go? By thrusting into the Ottoman Empire, Peter could at least lay these concerns to rest. Better for him to stir up trouble among the Sultan’s restless vassals than the other way around.

Peter’s expectation of help once his army arrived in the Christian provinces was not unfounded. Throughout his reign, he had received constant appeals from representatives of the Orthodox peoples of the Balkans: the Serbs, Montenegrins, Bulgars, Walachians and Moldavians. His partial defeat of the Sultan in 1698 and his capture of Azov had encouraged their dreams of liberation and exaggerated their promises. Once a Russian army appeared in their midst, they pledged, native troops would join it, supplies would be plentifully available and whole populations would rise. Between 1704 and 1710, four Serbian leaders arrived in Moscow to stir the Russians to action. “We have no other tsar than the Most Orthodox Tsar Peter,” they said.

Before Poltava, Peter, wary of any behavior which might cause the Sultan to break the truce of 1700, responded discreetly to these appeals. After Poltava, however, Tolstoy and other Russian agents inside the Ottoman Empire began to prepare the ground for an uprising. Now, in the spring of 1711, the hour had struck. In the Kremlin ceremony before he left Moscow, Peter issued a proclamation, openly presenting himself as the liberator of the Balkan Christians. He called on all of them, Catholic as well as Orthodox, to rise against their Ottoman masters and ensure that “the descendants of the heathen Mohammed were driven out into their old homeland, the sands and steppes of Arabia.”