Peter the Great (29 page)

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 die 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 Trubestkoy 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 b
e 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.

Part Two

THE GREAT EMBASSY

I

- I

THE GREAT EMBASSY TO WESTERN EUROPE

The
Great Embassy was one of
the
two or three overwhelming events in Peter's life. The project amazed his fellow countrymen. Never before had a Russian tsar traveled peacefully abroad; a few had ventured across
the
border in wartime to besiege a city or pursue an enemy army, but not in time of peace. Why did he want to go?
Who would
rule
on his
behalf?
And why, if
he
must go, did
he
plan to travel incognito?

Many of the same questions were to be asked by Europeans, not in anguish but in sheer fascination. What was the reason for this mysterious journey by the reigning monarch of a vast, remote, semi-Oriental land
, a monarch traveling incognito, disdaining ceremony and refusing honors, curious to see everything and to understand how everything worked? As news of the journey spread, speculation as to its purpose was rife. Some believed with Pleyer, the Austrian agent in Moscow, that the Embassy was "merely a cloak to allow
...
the Tsar to get out of his own country and divert himself a little, and has no other serious purpose." Others (such as Voltaire, who wrote about it later) thought that Peter's purpose was to learn what ordinary life was like, so that when he remounted the throne he would be a better ruler. Still others believed Peter's claim that he was fulfilling the vow he had taken, at the time of his near-shipwreck, to visit the tomb of St. Peter in Rome.

In fact, there was a sound diplomatic reason for the Embassy. Peter was anxious to renew and if possible strengthen the alliance against the Turks. As he saw it, the capture of Azov was only a beginning. He hoped now to force the Strait of Kerch with his new fleet and attain mastery of the Black Sea, and to accomplish this he must not only acquire technology and trained manpower, he must have reliable allies; Russia could not fight the Ottoman Empire alone. Already, the solidarity of the alliance was threatened. King Jan Sobieski of Poland had died in June 1696, and with his death most of the anti-Turkish fervor had gone out of that nation. Louis XIV of France was maneuvering to place French
princes on the thrones of Spain and Poland, ambitions which were likely to provoke new wars with the Hapsburg empire; the Emperor, in consequence, was eager for peace in the East. To prevent any further crumbling of the alliance, the Russian Embassy intended to visit the capitals of its allies; Warsaw, Vienna and Venice. It would also visit the chief cities of the Protestant maritime powers, Amsterdam and London, in search of possible help. Only France, friend of the Turk and enemy of Austria, Holland and England, would be avoided. The ambassadors were to look for capable shipwrights and naval officers, men who had reached command by merit and not through influence; and they were to purchase ship's cannon, anchors, block and tackle, and instruments of navigation which could be copied and reproduced in Russia.

But even such serious objectiv
es could have been attained by Peter's ambassadors without the physical presence of the Tsar himself. Why, then, did he go? The simplest answer seems the best: He went because of his desire to learn. The visit to Western Europe was the final stage of Peter's education, the culmination of all he had learned from foreigners since boyhood. They had taught him all that they could in Russia, but there was more, and Lefort was constantly urging him to go. Peter's overriding interest was in ships for his embryo navy, and he was well aware that in Holland and England lived the greatest shipbuilders in the world. He wanted to go to those countries, where dockyards turned out the dominant navies and merchant fleets of the world, and to Venice, which was supreme in the building of multi-oared galleys for use in inland seas.

The best authority on his motive is Peter himself. Before his departure, he had a seal engraved for himself which bore the inscription, "I am a pupil and need to be taught." Later, in 1720, he wrote a preface to a set of newly issued
Maritime Regulations
for the new Russian navy, and in it described the sequence of events during this earlier part of his life:

He [Peter was describing himself in the third person] turned his whole mind to the construction of a fleet
...
A suitable place for shipbuilding was found on the River Voronezh, close to the town of that name, skillful shipwrights were called from England and Holland, and in 1696 there began a new work in Russia—the construction of great warships, galleys and other vessels. And so that this might be forever secured in Russia, and that he might introduce among his people the art of this business, he sent many people of noble families to Holland and other states to learn the building and management of ships; and that the monarch might not be shamefully behind his subjects in that trade, he himself undertook a journey to Holland; and in Amsterdam at the East India 162 wharf, giving himself up, with other volunteers, to the learning of naval architecture, he got what was necessary for a good carpenter to know, and, by his own work and skill, constructed and launched a new ship.

As for his decision to travel incognito—implemented by his command that all mail leaving Moscow be censored to prevent leakage of his plan—it
was intended as a buffer, a fac
ade, to protect him and give him freedom. Anxious to travel, yet hating the formality and ceremony that would inevitably inundate him should he journey as a reigning monarch, he chose to travel "invisibly" within the Embassy ranks. By giving the Embassy distinguished leadership, he could assure a reception consistent with persons of rank; by pretending that he himself was not present, he gave himself freedom to avoid wasted hours of numbing ceremony. In honoring his ambassadors, his hosts would be honoring the Tsar, and meanwhile Peter Mikhailov could come and go, and see whatever he liked.

If Peter's purpose seems narrow, the impact of this eighteen-month journey was to be immense. Peter returned to Russia determined to remold his country along Western lines. The old Muscovite state, isolated and introverted for centuries, would reach out to Europe and open itself to Europe. In a sense, the flow of effect was circular: the West affected Peter, the Tsar had a powerful impact upon Russia, and Russia, modernized and emergent, had a new and greater influence on Europe. For all three, therefore—Peter, Russia and Europe—the Great Embassy was a turning point.

The Europe which Peter was setting out to visit in the spring of 1697 was dominated by the power and glory of a single man, His Most Christian Majesty, Louis XIV of France. Called the Sun King, and represented in both pageantry and art as Apollo, his rays reached out to affect every corner of European politics, diplomacy and civilization.

When Peter was born, and through all but the last ten years of his life, Louis was the most influential man in Europe. It is impossible to understand the Europe which Russia was entering without first considering the French monarch. Few kings in any epoch have exceeded his majesty. His reign of seventy-two years was the longest in the history of France; his French contemporaries considered him a demi-god. "His slightest gesture, his walk, his bearing, his countenance; all was measured, appropriate, noble, majestic," wrote the court diarist, Saint-Simon. His presence was overwhelming. "I never trembled like this before

Your Majesty's enemies," confessed one of Louis' marshals on entering the royal presence.

Although Louis was born to the throne, the sweep of his majesty depended more on his character—his massive ego and absolute self-assurance—than on hi
s physical or political inher
itance. In physical stature, he was short even for that day—only five feet four inches. He had a robust figure and powerful, well-muscled legs which he loved to display in tight silk stockings. His eyes were brown, he had a long, thin, arched nose, a sensuous mouth and chestnut hair, which, as he grew older, was hidden in public beneath a wig of long black curls. The smallpox which had afflicted him when he was nine had left his cheeks and chin covered with pits.