Peter the Great (110 page)

It was this treaty which ultimately made it impossible for Charles XII to remain any longer in the Ottoman Empire. The Turks, who had harbored the King for four years, were now at peace with his enemies. Somehow, therefore, Charles must leave. With the continent at peace, the road across Europe lay open. Charles could not go through Poland, as he had originally planned, because his enemy Augustus was on the throne. But he could travel through Austria and the German states. Indeed, the new Emperor. Charles VI, was eager to see the King of Sweden return to North Germany. The kings and princes in that region were preparing to swallow up all of Sweden's territory in the Holy Roman Empire; the Emperor preferred to see the status quo maintained and a balance preserved. The Eihperor therefore not only agreed that Charles should pass through the empire, but urged the King to come to Vienna and be received officially. Charles refused the second request, insisting that he be allowed to pass without formalities or recognition of any kind. If this was denied, Charles declared that he would accept the invitation of Louis XIV to travel home in a French ship. The Emperor agreed.

Charles decided to travel incognito. Traveling as fast as horses could gallop, he might ride ahead of the news and arrive on the Baltic coast before Europe knew that he had left Turkey. At the end of the summer of 1714, Charles began to train for the ride, exercising himself and his horses, preparing for long days in the saddle. By September 20, he was ready to leave. The Sultan sent farewell gifts: splendid horses and tents, a jeweled saddle. Escorted by an honor guard of Turkish cavalry, the King and the 130 Swedes who had been with him since the Kalabalik rode north through Bulgaria, Walachia and the Carpathian passes. At Pitesti, on the frontier of the Ottoman and Austrian empires, Charles and his small group met the large number of Swedes who had remained behind at Bender after the Kalabalik. Riding along and planning to make the entire trip were dozens of creditors who had decided to accompany the Swedes across Europe in hopes that once the King reached Swedish soil, he would be able to pay them what he owed. While this group was assembling, Charles exercised his horses even harder, galloping them around posts, over crossbars, swinging down from the saddle at a gallop to pick up a glove on the ground.

When all the Swedish exiles had assembled, there were 1,200 men and almost 2,000 horses with dozens of wagons. Such a convoy would have to move slowly and would attract the eye of everyone for miles around. Charles was anxious to move quickly, not only to avoid capture by Saxon, Polish or Russian agents, but to avoid embarrassing demonstrations in his favor by Protestants in the empire who still looked on the King of Sweden as their champion. The King, therefore, decided to go alone.

Along with speed, Charles would rely on disguise. As his ascetic personal habits were known across Europe, one member of his party joked that the King could establish an impenetrable disguise if he wore a curled court wig, stayed in the most luxurious inns, drank heavily, flirted with every girl, wore slippers most of the day and slept until noon. Charles would not go this far, but he did grow a mustache, wear a dark wig, a brown uniform and a hat lined with gold braid, and carried a passport made out in the name of Captain Peter Frisk. He and his two companions were to ride ahead of the convoy, giving the impression that they were an advance party sent ahead to order horses and accommodations for the royal convoy following behind. Among those in the main body was an officer dressed in Charles' clothes and wearing his gloves and sword, whose role was to impersonate the King. Along the way, one of Charles' two escorts was left behind, so that the King of Sweden actually rode across Europe with a single companion.

The farther he went, the more impatient he became. He stopped briefly at staging posts—Debrecen in Hungary, Buda on the Danube—nowhere for more than an hour. He rarely slept in an inn, preferring to spend the night as a passenger in a fast postal coach, curling up to sleep on the straw on the floor of the bouncing carriage. At a gallop he passed from Regensburg to Nurnberg to Kassel and north. On the night of November 10, the guard of the city gate at Stralsund on the Baltic, in Swedish Pomerania, opened to an insistent knocking. Outside, he found a figure with a large hat curled over a dark wig. Progressively more senior officers were summoned until at four a.m. the Governor of Stralsund rose grumbling from his bed and went to confirm the astonishing report: After fifteen years, the King of Sweden stood once again on Swedish territory.

The ride made another astonishing story. In less than fourteen days, the King had traveled from Pitesti in Walachia to Stralsund on the Baltic, a distance of 1,296 miles. Of this, 531 miles had been traveled in post coaches, the rest on horseback. His average pace was more than 100 miles a day, and during the last six days and nights from Vienna to Stralsund, when the waxing moon aided him by lighting the roads, his speed was even greater Charles covered 756 miles in six days and nights. He traveled without once removing his clothes or boots; when he arrived in Stralsund, the boots had to be cut from his feet.

The famous ride seized the imagination of Europe. Once again, the King of Sweden had done the dramatic and unpredictable. In Sweden, the news was received with "indescribably joy." After fifteen years, a miracle had happened: The King was back. Perhaps, despite all the disasters that had struck in the five years since Poltava somehow the King would now turn everything around. In churches across Sweden, there were services of thanksgiving. But elsewhere Charles' ride to Stralsund created anxiety rather than thanksgiving. Now that the warrior King was back on Swedish soil, what new drama was about to begin? For those who had fought him so long—Peter of Russia, Augustus of Saxony, Frederick of Denmark—and for those who had joined to pluck the spoils—George Louis of Hanover and Frederick William of Prussia—this sudden event cast all in doubt. But a single dramatic exploit could not overturn the vast assembly of forces which, sensing the kill, mobilized against him.

Although after his ride everyone in Sweden and in Europe expected that Charles would immediately board a ship and return to his homeland, the King once again upset all expectations. He rested, summoned a tailor and had himself measured for a new uniform with a plain blue coat, white waistcoat, buckskin breeches and new boots, and then announced that he intended to remain in Stralsund, the last outpost of Swedish territory on the continent. There was logic in this. Stralsund, the strongest Swedish bastion in Pomerania, was sure to be attacked by the growing number of enemies closing in on Sweden. By conduction the defense himself, the King might distract his enemies from moving across the Baltic to attack Sweden. Besides, it would give him another chance to smell gunpowder.

Charles ordered fresh troops and artillery from Sweden. The Council, unable to resist his command now that he was on Swedish territory and so close to home, scraped up 14,000 men to garrison the town. Just as Charles expected, in the summer of 1715 a Prussian-Danish-Saxon army appeared before the town. It numbered 55,000.

The lifeline of the besieged town was the sea lane to Sweden. As long as the Swedish fleet could convoy supplies and ammunition, Charles had a chance to prevent its fall. Then, on July 28, 1715, the Danish fleet appeared and the two squadrons engaged in an intense six-hour cannonade. At the end, both fleets were badly damaged and had to limp home for repairs. But six weeks later the

Danish fleet, reinforced by eight large British warships, reappeared. The Swedish admiral, complaining of adverse winds, remained in port.

With the sea lane closed, the fall of Stralsund became inevitable. Danish troops first took the island of Riigen, which lay to seaward of Stralsund. Charles was present, and with a force of 2,800 men he attacked and tried to dislodge 14,000 entrenched Danes and Prussians. The attack was beaten off, the King hit in the chest by a spent musket ball but not badly hurt, and the Swedish troops gave up the island. The siege continued through the autumn, with Charles constantly exposing himself to harm both on land and at sea.* Finally, on December 22, 1715, the defences were breached and the city fell.

Just before'the garrison surrendered, the King left Stralsund in a small, open boat. For twelve hours, his sailors struggled in wintry seas amidst floating ice floes to reach a Swedish ship waiting offshore to carry the King to Sweden. He made it safely, and two days later, at four a.m. on December 24, 1715, fifteen years and three months after his departure, the King of Sweden stood in darkness and icy rain on the soil of his homeland.

46

VENICE OF THE NORTH

There
is a legend that the city of St. Petersburg was completely constructed in the airy blue heavens and then lowered in one piece onto marshes of the Neva. Only thus, the legend explains, can the presence of so beautiful a city on so bleak a site be accounted for.

*At one point, deciding to reconnoiter an enemy position by boat, Charles took a small rowing skiff whose helmsman w
as a master shipwright named Sch
midt. Once in range of the Prussians, the boat was enveloped in a cloud of musket balls. Schmidt crouched as low in the boat as possible; Charles, seeing him, stood up, exposing himself fully, and waved at the enemy with his right hand. He was not hit, and when he had seen enough, he ordered Schmidt to steer for safety. Not proud of his conduct, Schmidt apologized by saying, "Your Majesty, I am no helmsman but Your Majesty's shipwright, whose business is to build ships by day and beget children at night." Charles replied good-humoredly that his service at the helm that day had not disabled him for either occupation.

The truth is only slightly less miraculous: The iron will of a single man, the skills of hundreds of foreign architects and artisans, and the labor of hundreds of thousands of Russian workers created a city which admiring visitors later described as the "Venice of the North" and the "Babylon of the Snows."

The building of St. Petersburg began in earnest in the years after the 1709 victory at Poltava had, in the words of its founder, "laid the foundation stone" of the city. It was spurred the following year by Russia's capture of Riga and Vyborg, "the two cushions on which St. Petersburg now can rest in complete tranquillity." Thereafter, although Peter was absent from his "paradise" for months at a time (and sometimes a year or more), construction never ceased. Wherever he was, whatever else was demanding his attention, Peter's letters were filled with questions and orders relating to the building of embankments, palaces and other buildings, the digging of canals, the design and planting of gardens. In 1712, although no decree on the subject was ever issued, St. Petersburg became the capital of Russia. Autocratic government centered on the Tsar, and the Tsar preferred St. Petersburg. Accordingly, government offices transferred themselves from Moscow, new ministries sprang up there and very soon the simple fact of Peter's presence transformed the raw city on the Neva into the seat of government.

In the first decade of its existence, St. Petersburg grew rapidly. By April 1714, Weber reported, Peter had taken a census and counted 34,500 buildings in the city. This figure must have included every possible dwelling with four walls and a roof, and even then it was doubtless exaggerated. Nevertheless, not only the quantity but the quality of the new buildings in St. Petersburg was impressive. Architects from many countries had arrived and gone to work. Trezzini, the first Architect General, had been in Russia for almost ten years; he was succeeded in 1713 (although Trezzini remained and continu
ed to raise build
ings) by a German, Andreas Schliiter, who brought with him a number of his countrymen and fellow architects.

In 1714, the nucleus of the new city was still on Petrograd Island, a few yards east of the Peter and Paul Fortress. The center was Trinity Square, which faced the river embankment near Peter's original three-room log cabin. Around the square, a number of larger structures had been erected. One was the wooden Church of the Holy Trinity, built in 1710, in which Peter attended regular services, celebrated his triump
h
s and mourned his dead. The main building of the State Chancellery, the Government Printing Office (where Bibles and scientific and technical books were printed on type and presses imported from the West) and the city's first hospital were on the square, along with the new stone houses of Chancellor Golovkin, Vice Chancellor Shafirov, Prince Ivan Buturlin, Nikita Zotov (now created a count) and Prince Matthew Gagarin, Governor of Siberia. Nearby, the famous Four Frigates Tavern continued to offer a comfortable retreat where government officials including the Tsar himself, foreign ambassadors, merchants and decently dressed people from the street could stop in and refresh themselves with tobacco, beer, vodka, wine and brandy.

Not far from Trinity Square stood the city's single market, a large, two-storied wooden building enclosing three sides of a wide courtyard. Here, in hundreds of shops and stalls, merchants and traders of a dozen nations displayed their wares. All of them paid rent to the Tsar, who preserved his monopoly on trade by allowing no selling of goods in any other part of the city. Close by, in another large wooden building, was the market for food and housewares, where peas, lentils, cabbages, beans, oatmeal, flour, bacon, wooden utensils and earthen pots were sold. In the back streets, the Tatar flea market, a hodge-podge of tiny stalls, offered used shoes, pieces of old iron, old rope, old stools, used wooden saddles and hundreds of other items. In the congested mass of humanity, elbowing and pushing each other around these stalls, pickpockets found rick plucking. "The crowd is so dense that one has to take real care of one's purse, one's sword and one's handkerchief," wrote Weber. "It is wise to carry everything in one's hand. I once saw a German officer, a grenadier, return without his wig and a lady of quality without her bonnet." Tatar horsemen had galloped past, snatched off both wig and bonnet and then, to the laughter of the crowd, offered the stolen objects for sale still within sight of their bareheaded victims.