Peter the Great

He was succeeded in 1713 by twenty-five-year-old King Frederick William I, who became the friend and ally of Peter of Russia. Even more single-mindedly than his father or grandfather, Frederick William I set as the unique purpose for the Prussian state the achievement of maximum military power. Everything was bent toward it: a sound economy which would support a larger army; an efficient bureaucracy which would make it easier to collect taxes to pay for more soldiers; an excellent system of public education which would create more intelligent soldiers. In contrast to France, where national wealth was poured into public architectural grandeur, Prussian buildings were constructed exclusively for military purpose: powder mills, cannon factories, arsenals, barracks. The King of Prussia's goal was a professional army of 80,000 men. Yet, despite this waxing military power, Prussian diplomatic policy was cautious. Like his father, Frederick William I coveted new territories and new seaports, but he did not rush to seize them. Prussian troops fought in Hapsburg imperial armies in Flanders and Italy, but always under contract; Prussa itself was never at war. In its dealings with the participants in the Great Northern War, which raged around its frontiers, Prussia was especially careful. During all the years that Charles XII was marching back and forth in Poland, Prussia remained neutral. Only after Poltava, when Sweden had dropped to its knees, did Prussia join Hanover to declare war and pick up the spoils.

In his personal life, Frederick William I was a curious and unfortunate man. Eccentric, homely, apoplectic, a martinet, he hated everything his father had loved, especially everything French. Frederick William despised the people, the language, the culture and even the food of France. When criminals were hanged, the King first had them dressed in French clothes. On the surface, Frederick William was a plain Protestant monarch, a faithful husband, a stodgy, bourgeois father. He stripped his court of frills, selling most of his father's furniture and jewels and dismissing most of his courtiers. He fell in love with and married his Hanoverian first cousin, Sophia Dorothea, the daughter of the future King George I of England. He referred to her as "my wife" instead of "the Queen" and his son as "Fritz" instead of "the Heir to the Throne." Every night, he ate dinner with his family.

What spoiled this pretty domestic scene were Frederick William's violent rages. Quite suddenly, he would flare out brutally at his children or anyone near him. Triggered by small, harmless remarks or even looks, he would begin to swing his wooden cane, hitting people in the face, sometimes breaking their noses or teeth. When he did this in a Berlin street, there was nothing the victim could do; to resist or strike back at the enraged monarch was punishable by death. The explanation, apparently, was porphyria, the disease supposedly descended from Mary Queen of Scots which later afflicted King George III. A derangement of the metabolism whose symptoms are gout, migraines, abscesses, boils, hemorrhoids, and terrible pains in the stomach, the disease plunged the King into agony and tinged him with insanity. He became very fat, his eyes bulged and his skin glistened like polished ivory. Seeking distraction from these miseries, Frederick William learned to paint and signed his canvases "FW in tormentis pinxit." Every evening after dinner, he convoked his ministers and generals to drink tankards of beer and smoke long pipes. At these crude, masculine gatherings, the leaders of the Prussian state delighted in teasing and tormenting a pedantic court historian, whom they once actually set on fire.

The King's most famous obsession was his collection of giants, for which he was renowned throughout Europe. Known as the Blue Prussians or the Giants of Potsdam, there were over 1,200 of the, organized into two battalions of 600 men each. None was under six feet tall, and some, in the special Red Unit of the First Battalion, was almost seven feet tall. The King dressed them in blue jackets with gold trim and scarlet lapels, scarlet trousers, white stockings, black shoes and tall red hats. He gave them muskets, white bandoleers and small daggers, and he played with them as a child would with enormous living toys. No expense was too great for this hobby, and Frederick William spent millions to recruit and equip his giant grenadiers. They were hired or bought all over Europe; especially desirable specimens, refusing the offer of the King's recruiting agents, were simply kidnapped. Eventually, recruiting in this way became too expensive—one seven-foot-two-inch Irishman cost over 6,000 pounds—and Frederick William tried to breed giants. Every tall man in his realm was forced to marry a tall woman. The drawback was that the King had to wait fifteen or twenty years for the products of these unions to mature, and often as not a boy or girl of normal height resulted. The easiest method of obtaining giants was to receive them as gifts. Foreign ambassadors advised their masters that the way to find favor with the King of Prussia was to send him giants. Peter especially appreciated his fellow sovereign's interest in nature's curios, and Russia supplied the Prussian King with fifty new giants every year. (Once, when Peter recalled some of the Russian giants lent to Frederick Willian and replaced them with men who were a trifle shorter, the King was so upset that he could not discuss business with the Russian ambassador; the wound in his heart, he said, was still too raw.)

Needless to say, the King never risked his cherished colossi in the face of enemy fire. In turn, they provided the ailing monarch with his greatest delight. When he was sick or depressed, the entire two battalions, preceded by tall, turbaned Moors with cymbols and trumpets and the grenadiers' mascot, an enormous bear, would march in a long line through the King's chamber to cheer him up.

Not surprisingly, Frederick Willian's Queen, Sophia Dorothea, was unhappy with this strange man. She wanted more grandeur, more courtiers, more jewels, more balls. Especially after her father became King of England and a potentate on a par with the Emperor in Vienna, she looked down on the House of Hohenzol-lern and this frugal little court in Berlin. Nevertheless, she bore her husband fourteen children and protected them by hiding them in her private rooms when her enraged husband was chasing them through the palace with his stick. Their two firstborn were sons, both named Frederick, and both died quickly. The third, also named Frederick, survived, along with nine younger brothers and sisters. He was a delicate, polite little boy who loved everything French—the language, clothes, even hair styles—and whose tongue was so quick he could run circles around his father in an argument. Despite his sensitive nature, he was brought up as a warrior prince, the heir to a military state. His father gave him his own toy regiment, the Crown Prince Cadets, made up of 131 little boys whom the Prince could command and play with as he liked. At fourteen, the small boy (he never grew to be more than five feet seven inches) was made a major of the giant Potsdam Grenadiers, and on the parade ground he commanded these titans, who towered over him.

Relations worsened between father and son. The King, who was often in a wheelchair suffused with agony, treated his son contemptuously. At the same time, realizing what he was doing, the King told Frederick, "If my father had treated me as I treat you, 1 wouldn't have put up with it. I would have killed myself or run away."

In 1730, at the age of eighteen, Frederick did run away. He was quickly recaptured, and the King treated his son and Frederick's companion, the esthetic Hans Hermann von Katte, a Francophile and the son of a general, as deserters from the army. They were imprisoned, and one morning the Prince awoke to see Von Katte led into the prison courtyard and beheaded by a saber stroke.

In 1740, the disintegrating King Frederick William died, and Prince Frederick, at twenty-eight, succeeded to the Prussian throne. Within several months, he had put the Prussian war machine so carefully created by his father and grandfather into motion. To the astonishment of Europe, he invaded Silesia, provoking war with the Hapsburg Empire. It was the first of trie brilliant military campaigns which were to proclaim the military genius of the slight young monarch and earn him the title of Frederick the Great.

In the autumn of 1712, while Peter's army was mired before Stettin and the Tsar himself was traveling between Dresden, Carlsbad and Berlin, Sweden, incredibly, was preparing a final offensive on the continent. Charles XII had commanded that still another army be raised and sent to North Germany. Its mission was to march south through Poland to rendezvous with him and an Ottoman army to pursue his dream of invading Russia. The poverty-stricken Swedes heard this command with despair. "Tell the King," wrote one of his officials, "that Sweden can send no more troops to Germany, if she has to defend herself against Denmark and especially against the Tsar, who has already conquered the Baltic provinces and part of Finland and now threatens to invade the country and lay Stockholm in ashes. The patience of Sweden is great but no so great as to wish to become Russian." Nevertheless, the King's command was finally obeyed, and with great difficulty a new army was raised. Magnus Stenbock landed in Swedish Pomerania with a mobile field army of 18,000 men. Stenbock's mission was badly damaged from the beginning when the Danish fleet intercepted a convoy of Swedish cargo ships, their holds crammed with provisions, ammunition and powder needed by his troops, and sent thirty of the ships to the bottom. Even so, Stenbock's landing caused great concern among the allies, and the destruction of his force became an urgent priority for their combined armies. From Dresden, where he was resting after his cure, Peter urged Frederick of Denmark to lead his troops from Holstein against the Swedes: "I hope Your Majesty recognized the necessity of such action. I beseech you in the most friendly and brotherly way, and at the same time I declare that although my health demands repose after my cure, yet, seeing the urgent need, I will not neglect this profitable affair and will go to the army." To Menshikov, Peter was even more insistent: "For God's sake, if there be a good opportunity, even if I do not succeed in getting to you, do not lose time, but in the Lord's name attack the enemy."

Faced by converging forces of Danes, Saxons, and Russians, Stenbock decided to attack the Danes separately before the Tsar with the main Russian and Saxon armies could arrive. Marching through a snowstorm on December 20, 1712, he caught 15,000 Danes in their camp at Gadebusch and severely mauled them, almost capturing King Frederick IV. But his victory had limited results; his force was reduced to 12,000, and he was soon being pursued by 36,000 Saxons, Russians and Danes. Still waiting for fresh supplies and reinforcements from Sweden, he saw the ice crusting in the Baltic harbors and realized that no help would come from home that winter. Seeking refuge, he marched west toward Hamburg and Bremen. He demanded of Altona, a town near Hamburg, a ransom of 100,000 thalers for his expenses, and when the town could raise only 42,000 thalers, Stenbock's men burned it to the ground, leaving only thirty houses. Two days later, a Swedish detachment came back and burned twenty-five of the thirty. Peter, reaching Altona with his pursuing army eight days later, was shaken by the sight of the refugees without shelter among the ruins, and distributed a thousand roubles among them. Stenbock's retreat eventually came to an end in the fortress of Tonning on the North Sea coast, where he was surrounded and closed in for the winter by allied troops.

On January 25, 1713, with no further military action possible until spring, Peter left the army, giving command of the Russian troops to Menshikov and leaving the allied force under the command of the King of Denmark. From Tonning, Peter traveled to Hanover to meet the Elector George Louis, soon, on the death of Queen Anne, to become King George I of England. Peter wanted not only to persuade Hanover to enter the war against Sweden but, through the Elector, to determine the attitude of England. After his visit, Peter wrote to Catherine, "The Elector appeared very favorably inclined and gave me much advice, but does not wish to do anything actively."

The Tsar then returned to St. Petersburg, and four months later, in May 1713, Stenbock capitulated at Tonning. Menshikov led the Russian army back to Pomerania, along the way threatening Hamburg and extracting a 100,000-thaler "contribution" from the free city to punish it for its highly profitable trade with Sweden. Peter was delighted with this action and wrote to Menshikov, "Thanks for the money which was taken from Hamburg in a good manner and without loss of time. Send the greater part of it to Kurakin [in Holland]. It is very necessary for the purchase of ships." From Hamburg, Menshikov marched eastward and besieged Stettin. This time, he was equipped with Saxon siege artillery, and on September 19, 1713, Stettin fell. As agreed, Stettin was then turned over to Frederick William of Prussia, who so far had not been required to fire a shot.

Now, of all Charles' once-great empire south of the Baltic Sea, only the ports of Stralsund and Wismar remained under the blue-and-yellow flag of Sweden.

44

THE COAST OF FINLAND

Peter returned to St. Petersburg on March 22, 1713, but spent only one month in his beloved city. During April, he learned from Shafirov in Turkey that, despite damaging Tatar raids in the Ukraine, the Ottoman Turks had no intention of making serious war in the south. The Tsar therefore was able to devote all his attention to readying the fleet and army to conquer the north shore of the upper Baltic.

Once the surrender of Stenbock, penned up in the fortress of Tonning, seemed inevitable, Peter turned to the opposite end of the Baltic, resolving to drive the Swedes out of Finland. He did not intend to keep the province, but any territory he took in Finland beyond Karelia would be useful for bargaining when peace negotiations began. It could, for example, be used to balance those Swedish territories such as Ingria and Karelia which Peter did intend to keep. There was another advantage to a Finnish campaign: He would be on his own, without wrangling allies to hinder his operations. After the agonizing delays in Pomerania over the delivery of artillery and the necessity of pleading with other monarchs to live up to their promises, it would be a relief to conduct a campaign exactly how and where he wished.

In fact, Peter had not waited until that spring to decide on this campaign. Already in the previous November, he had written from Carlsbad ordering Apraxin to intensify the preparation of troops and fleet for an advance into Finland. "This province," Peter wrote, "is the mother of Sweden as you yourself are aware. Not only meat, but even wood is brought from it, and if God let us get as far as Abo [a town on the east coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, then the capital of Finland] next summer, the Swedish neck will be easier to bend."

The Finnish campaign that summer and the next was swift, efficient and relatively bloodless. For this brillant success, the new Russian Baltic fleet was almost wholly responsible.

During Peter's reign, there was a radical shift in warship design and naval tactics. In the 1690's, the term "ship-of-the-line" first appeared when the confused melee of individual ship-to-ship duels was replaced by the "line" tactic—two rows of warships sailing on parallel courses and pounding each other with heavy artillery. The "line" imposed standards of design; a capital ship had to be powerful enough to lie in the line of battle, as compared to the smaller, faster frigates and sloops used for reconnaissance and commerce raiding. The qualifications were strict: stout construction, fifty or more heavy cannon and a crew trained in expert seamanship and accurate gunnery. In all these respects, Englishmen excelled.

The average ship-of-the-line carried from sixty eighty heavy cannon placed in rows of two or three gundecks and divided, port and starboard, so that even a full broadside meant that only half the guns aboard a ship could fire at an enemy. Some men-of-war were even bigger, goliaths of ninety or one hundred guns, whose crews, including marine sharpshooters posted in the rigging to pick off officers and gunners on the enemy decks, reached more than 800 men.

Apart from damage inflicted in battle, the effectiveness of warships was limited by the damage caused by time and the elements. Leaking hulls, loose masts, tattered rigging and parted lines were commonplace in ships at sea. For serious repairs, ships had to come into port, and the bases to support them were an essential element of seapower.

In winter—especially in the Baltic, where ice made naval operations impossible—fleets went into hibernation. The ships were brought alongside a quay, where sails, rigging, topmasts, spars, cannon and cannonballs were carried off and laid in rows or stacked in pyramids. At the Baltic naval bases—Karlskrona, Copenhagen, Kronstadt and Reval—the great hulls were lined up side by side like sleeping elephants, frozen into the ice for winter. In the spring, one by one, the hulls were careened—that is, rolled on one side so that rotten or damaged bottom planks could be replaced, barnacles scraped, seams recalked and tarred. This done, the ships went back to the quay, and the procedure of the previous autumn was reversed: Cannon, spars, rigging all came back on board and the hull became once more a warship.

Relative to England's Royal Navy with its 100 ships of the line, the Baltic powers had smaller fleets, intended mainly for use against each other within the confines of that enclosed sea. Denmark was almost an island kingdom whose capital, Copenhagen, was wholly exposed to the sea. The Swedish empire when Charles XII came to the throne was also a maritime entity, its integrity resting on secure communications and freedom to move troops and provisions between Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Livonia and North Germany. From her new, strategically placed naval base built at Karlskrona in 1658 to curb the Danes and protect her sea communications with her German provinces, Sweden was able to control all the middle and upper Baltic. Even after Poltava had humbled the previously invincible Swedish army, the Swedish navy remained formidable. In 1710, the year after Poltava, Sweden had forty-one ships-of-the-line, Denmark had forty-one, Russia had none. The senior Swedish admiral, Wachtmeister, was primarily occupied against the Danes, but powerful Swedish squadrons still cruised in the Gulf of Finland and off the Livonian coast.

Against the Russians, the Swedish fleet was able to do little. It could ensure the arrival of supplies and reinforcements, but once an army was committed to action on land, a fleet was not much help. At the time the Russians were besieging Riga, the entire Swedish fleet assembled off the mouth of the Dvina, but could contribute nothing to the town's defense, and eventually Riga capitulated. In the later phase of the Great Northern War, however, seapower became increasingly important. The only way to force an obdurate Sweden to make peace, Peter realized, was to reach across the Baltic Sea to threaten the Swedish homeland. One invasion avenue was directly across from Denmark to Sweden, a massive landing to be supported and covered by the Danish fleet; this projected assault occupied the Tsar during the summer and autumn of 1716. The other approach lay along the coast of Finland, then across the Gulf of Bothnia into the Aland Islands and thence toward Stockholm. It was this approach which Peter tried first, in the summers of 1713 and 1714.

Peter would have preferred to make this effort at the head of a powerful Russian sea-going battle fleet of fifty ships-of-the-line. But to lay the great keel beams in place, then add the ribs and planking, to cast the cannon, set the rigging, recruit and train the crews to sail and fight them so that they would do more damage to the enemy than to themselves, was a gigantic task. Despite the hiring of foreign shipwrights, admirals, officers and seamen, the project moved slowly. The herculean effort expended at Voronezh, Azov and Tagonrog was now fruitless; the construction of a new fleet on the Baltic had to begin from scratch.

Gradually, through 1710 and 1711, the big ships accumulated, but Peter still possessed too few to challenge the Swedish navy in a classic sea battle for control of the upper Baltic. Besides, once he had spent the immense effort in time and money necessary to build and equip the ships, he wanted to preserve them. Accordingly, he had given an order absolutely forbidding his admirals to risk the ships-of-the-line and frigates in battle unless the odds were overwhelmingly favorable. Thus, for the most part, the new big ships of Peter's Baltic fleet remained in the harbor.

Although Peter continued to build ships-of-the-line at home and to order them from Dutch and English shipyards, the brilliant success of the Tsar's naval campaigns in 1713 and 1714 in the Gulf of Finland was due to his employment of a class of ship never seen before in the Baltic, the galley. Galleys were hybrid ships. Usually around eighty to a hundred feet long, a typical galley possessed a single mast and a single sail, but also numerous benches for oarsmen. Thus equipped, it combined the qualities of sailing ships and rowed vessels and could move in wind or calm. For centuries, galleys had been used in the enclosed waters of the Mediterranean, where the wind was freakish and unreliable. Even in the eighteenth century, on these sun-baked bays and gulfs, the naval tradition of the Persian emperors and Roman republic survived. A few small cannon had been added, but the galleys were too small and unstable to carry the heavy naval guns of larger ships. Accordingly, eighteenth-century galleys fought using the tactics developed in the days of Xerxes and Pompey: They rowed toward their enemy and grappled with him, deciding the issue with a hand-to-hand infantry battle conducted on crowded, violent, slippery decks.

In Peter's time, the Ottoman navy was made up mostly of galleys. Officered by Greeks, manned by slaves, they were behemoths, the biggest carrying as many as 2,000 men divided between two decks of oarsmen and ten companies of soldiers. To fight the Turks in the confined waters of the Aegean and the Adriatic, the Venetians also built galleys, and it was to Venice that Peter sent numerous young Russians to learn the art of galley building. France kept some forty galleys in the Mediterranean, rowed by convicts sent to the galleys for life in lieu of execution. Surrounded by stormy seas, Britain had no use for galleys.

Peter had always been interested in galleys. They could be built quickly and inexpensively, of pine rather than hardwood. They could be manned by inexperienced seamen, soldiers who could double as naval infantrymen to board and attack an enemy. The largest would carry 300 men and five guns, the smallest 150 men and three guns.* Peter had constructed galleys first at Voronezh, then at Tagonrog, and those built on Lake Peipus were used in the

*A model of a Russian galley, the Dvina. built in 1721, is in the Russian Navy Museum in Leningrad today. It models a ship 125 feet long and 20 feet wide, and each of its 50 benches could accommodate four or five men, pulling an oar 43.5 feet in length.

campaigns of 1702, 1703 and 1704 to drive a Swedish flotilla from the lake. Galleys would be perfect to circumvent the Swedish advantage in big men-of-war in the Baltic. Given the nature of the Finnish coast, studded with myriad rocky islands and fjords fringed with red granite and fir trees, Peter could neutralize the Swedish fleet simply by conceding to it the open water while his more maneuverable shallow-draft galleys moved in the inshore coastal waters that the larger Swedish ships would not dare enter. Cruising along the coast, the Russian galleys could carry supplies and troops, almost invulnerable to the larger Swedish ships outside. And if the Swedes came in to meet them, the big ships might easily founder on the rocks, or if the wind dropped and left them becalmed, the Swedes would lie helpless before the Russian galleys rowing to attack.

For Sweden, Russia's surprising appearance as a Baltic naval power and Peter's heavy reliance on galleys created a painful dilemma. Traditionally, Swedish admirals were accustomed to maintain a regular fleet of modem, heavy ships-of-the-line ready to confront their traditional adversaries, the Danes. When Peter's galleys began splashing down from the construction ways, Sweden faced an entirely different kind of naval warfare. Already financially exhausted, Sweden lacked the means simultaneously to maintain its fleet against the Danes and to build a huge galley fleet to combat Russia. Thus it was that Swedish admirals and captains could only watch helplessly from their larger ships outside as Peter's oar-driven, shallow-draft galley flotillas moved inshore along the coastline, swiftly and efficiently conquering the coast of Finland.

The overall commander in these successful naval campaigns was General Admiral Fedor Apraxin, who usually also took personal command of the galley fleet. Vice Admiral Cornelius Cruys, the Dutch officer who had helped Peter build his fleet and train his seamen, customarily flew his flag on one of the ships-of-the-line, while the Tsar himself, always insisting on calling himself "Rear Admiral Peter Alexeevich" when afloat, switched back and forth between commanding squadrons of larger ships and flotillas of galleys. Apraxin impressed his foreign officers with his manner and skill. One of his English captains described him as a man "of moderate height, well-made, inclining to feed, careful about his hair which is very long and now grey; and generally wears it tied up in a ribbon. A widower of long date, without issue, yet you observe an incomparable economy, order and decency in his house, gardens, domestics and dress. All unanimously vote in behalf of his excellent temper; but he loves to have men comport themselves according to their rank." Apraxin's relations with Peter, ashore and afloat, were conducted with a delicate blend of dignity and circumspection. At court, having given his word, and convinced of the merit of his case, Apraxin continued "even if opposed by the Sovereign's absolute will to maintain the justice of his demand until the Tsar, in a passion, by his menaces enforces silence." But at sea Apraxin would not give way to Peter. The General Admiral had never been abroad and had not himself been trained in seamanship and naval tactics until he was well along in years. Nevertheless he refused to submit.

even when the Tsar, as junior flag officer, differing in opinion, will endeavor to invalidate the General Admiral's opinion by alleging his inexperience as never having seen foreign navies. Count Apraxin will instantly overrule the same invidious charge, to the utmost provocation of the Tsar; though afterwards he will submit with the following statement: "Whilst I as Admiral argue with Your Majesty in quality of flag officer, I can never give way; but if you assume the [rank of] Tsar I know my duty."

By the spring of 1713, the galley fleet was ready. At the end of April, only a month after his return from Pomerania, Peter sailed from Kronstadt with a fleet of ninety-three galleys and 110 other large boats carrying between them more than 16,000 soldiers. Apraxin commanded the whole fleet; the Tsar commanded the vanguard. The campaign was an overwhelming success. Using the galleys to leapfrog the troops from one point on the coast to another, the Russian army worked its way steadily westward along the Finnish coast. It was a classic example of amphibious warfare: Whenever the Swedish General Lybecker positioned his force in a strong defensive position, the Russian galleys, hugging the coastline, would slip around behind him, row into a harbor and disembark hundreds or thousands of men, unfatigued by marching, with cannon and supplies. There was nothing the Swedes could do to stop them and nothing Lybecker could do except retreat.

Early in May, dozens of Russian ships filled with soldiers appreared off Helsingfors [now Helsinki], a prosperous town with an excellent deep-water harbor. Faced with thousands of Russians suddenly arriving from the sea, the defenders could only burn their stores and abandon the town. Peter sailed immediately for the nearby port of Borga, and Lybecker abandoned it as well. Lybecker was never popular in Stockholm and had been the subject of constant complaints, but the Council had not dared remove him, as he had been personally appointed by the King. Now, however, the argument was heard that "It is a question of whether we shall get rid of Lybecker or of Finland."

By September 1713, the Russian amphibious advance had carried as far as Abo. Lybecker was recalled and replaced by General Karl Armfelt, a native Finn. On October 6, Armfelt's troops took a stand in a narrow pass near Tammerfors. The Russians attacked, defeated them badly and drove them out of the pass. Thereafter, a small Swedish army remained in Finland to the north of Abo, but all Swedish civilian officials, all official papers and the library of the provincial government were removed to Stockholm. Much of the Finnish population fled across the Gulf of Bothnia and took refuge in the Aland Islands. Thus, in a single summer, without the aid or encumbrance of any foreign ally, Peter had conquered all of southern Finland.

At sea, however, the Swedish fleet remained supreme. In the open water, the Swedish ships-of-the-line could stand off and pound the Russian galleys to pieces with their heavy guns. The galleys' only chance would be to tempt the bigger ships close inshore and then catch them there when the wind had dropped. This was exactly the fortuitous situation presented to Peter at the Battles of Hango in August 1714.

In preparation for the naval campaign of 1714, Peter had nearly doubled the size of his Baltic fleet. During March alone, sixty new galleys were completed. Three ships-of-the-line purchased in England arrived at Riga, and another built in St. Petersburg anchored at Kronstadt. By May, twenty Russian ships-of-the-line and almost 200 galleys were ready for action.

On June 22, 100 galleys, mostly commanded by Venetians and Greeks had had experience in the Mediterranean, sailed for Finland with Apraxin again in overall command and Peter as rear admiral serving as his deputy. Through the midsummer weeks, the Russian ships cruised off the coast of southern Finland, but did not dare venture beyond the rocky promontory of Cape Hango at the western end of the gulf lest they encounter a formidable Swedish fleet which waited for them on the horizon. This was a major squadron including sixteen ships-of-the-line, five frigates and a number of galleys and smaller vessels under the Swedish commander-in-chief, Admiral Wattrang, whose mission was to bar passage any farther westward in the direction of the Aland Islands and the Swedish coast.

For several weeks, this impasse continued. Wattrang had no intention of fighting a battle inshore, and the Russian galleys, unwilling to submit themselves to Wattrang's big guns on open water, remained anchored at Tvermine, six miles east of Cape Hango. Finally, on August 4, Wattrang's ships moved in toward the Russians and then, seeing the vast number of Russian sails, turned back to the open sea. The Russian galleys quickly pursued, hoping to catch at least some of the Swedish ships if the wind should drop. In the maneuvering that followed, most of the Swedish ships managed to withdraw out of reach.

But the following morning what Peter had hoped for finally happened. The wind died, the sea was becalmed, and on the glassy surface lay a division of the Swedish fleet commanded by Admiral Ehrenskjold. The Russians moved quickly to seize the advantage. At dawn, twenty Russian galleys left the protective waters of the coast and rowed outside to seaward of the motionless Swedish vessels. Realizing what was happening, Ehrenskjold's ships lowered small boats, which under oars tried to tow their ships away. But the power of a few oarsmen in small boats could not match the coordinated strokes of the oarsmen in the Russian galleys. That night, Apraxin's main force, over sixty galleys, slipped between the Swedes and the coast, moving out to sea between the squadrons of Wattrang and Ehrenskjold. For refuge, Ehrenskjold withdrew up a narrow fjord and formed his ships into a line, head to stern, from one side of the fjord to the other. The following day, with the Swedish squadron isolated, Apraxin was ready to attack. First, he sent an officer on board the Swedish flagship to offer Ehrenskjold honorable terms if he would surrender. The offer was refused, and the battle began.

It was a strange and extraordinary contest between warships of two different kinds, one ancient and one modem. The Swedes had superiority in heavy cannon and skilled seamen, but the Russians had an overwhelming advantage in numbers of ships and men. Their smaller, more maneuverable galleys, decks loaded with infantry, simply charged the Swedish ships en masse, taking what losses they had to from Swedish cannon fire, closing in and boarding the immobile Swedish vessels. Indeed, Apraxin launched his ships less like an admiral than a general sending in waves of infantry or cavalry. At two p.m. on August 6, he sent in the first wave of thirty-five galleys. The Swedes held their fire until the galleys were close, then raked their decks with cannon fire, the galleys to fall back. A second attack by eighty galleys was also repulsed. Then, Apraxin's combined fleet attacked, ninety-five galleys in all, concentrating on the left side of the head-to-stern line. Russian boarding parties swept over the Swedish vessels; one Swedish vessel capsized from the sheer weight of the men struggling on its deck. Once the Swedish line was broken, the Russians rowed through the gap, swarming along the remainder of the line, attacking from both sides at once and seizing ship after ship of the immobile Swedish line. The battle raged for three hours with heavy casualties on both sides. In the end, the Swedes were overwhelmed, 361 were killed and more than 900 became prisoners. Ehrenskjold himself was captured, along with his flagship, the frigate Elephant, and nine smaller Swedish ships.

There is a disagreement as to Peter's whereabouts during the battle. Some have said that he commanded the first division of Apraxin's galleys; others, that he watched the action from the shore. Hango was not a classic naval action, but it was Russia's first victory at sea, and Peter always considered it a personal vindication of his years of effort to build a navy, and a victory equal in importance to Poltava.

Elated, he meant to celebrate in the grandest style. Sending the bulk of the galley fleet westward to occuply the now unprotected Aland Islands, Peter returned with his Swedish prizes to Kronstadt. He remained for several days while Catherine was in childbirth, delivering their daughter Margarita. Then, on September 20, he staged his triumph, leading the captured frigate and six other Swedish ships up into the Neva River while cannon boomed a 150-gun salute. The ships anchored near the Peter and Paul Fortress, and both Russian and Swedish crews came ashore for the victory procession. The parade was led by the Preobrazhensky Guards and included 200 Swedish officers and seamen, the flag of the captured Admiral and Admiral Ehrenskjold himself, wearing a new suit laced in silver which was a present from the Tsar. Peter appeared in the green uniform of a Russian rear admiral laced with gold. A new triumphal arch had been erected for the occasion, adorned with a Russian eagle seizing an elephant (an allusion to the captured Swedish frigate) and the inscription, "The Russian Eagle catches no flies." From the arch, victors and vanquished marched to the fortress, where they were greeted by Romodanovsky, seated on a throne in his role as Mock-Tsar and surrounded by the Senate. Romodanvosky summoned the tall Rear Admiral before him and accepted from Peter's hands a written account of the battle at sea. The account was read aloud, after which the Mock-Tsar and senators questioned Peter on several points. After brief deliberation, they unanimously proclaimed that in consideration of his faithful service, the Rear Admiral was promoted to Vice Admiral, and the crowd broke into cheers of "Health to the Vice Admiral!" Peter's speech in thanks called his comrades' attention to the changes wrought in only two decades: "Friends and Companions: Is there any one among you who, twenty years ago, would have dared to conceive our covering the Baltic with ships built with our own hands or living in this town built on soil conquered from our enemies?"

When the ceremony ended, Peter boarded his own sloop and hoisted the flag of vice admiral with his own hands. That night, Menshikov's palace was the scene of a huge banquet for Russians and Swedes alike. Peter, rising and turning to his Russian followers, praised Admiral Ehrenskjold. "Here you see a brave and faithful servant of his master who has made himself worthy of the highest reward at his hands and who shall always have my favor as long as he is with me, although he has killed many a brave Russian. I forgive you," he said directly to Ehrenskjold, "and you may depend on my good will."

Ehrenskjold thanked the Tsar and replied, "However honorably I may have acted with regard to my master, I did only my duty. I sought death, but did not meet it, and it is no small comfort to me in my misfortune to be a prisoner of Your Majesty and to be used so favorably and with so much distinction by so grat a naval officer and now worthy a vice admiral." Later, talking to the foreign envoys present, Ehrenskjold declared that the Russians had indeed fought skillfully, and that nothing but his own experience could have convinced him that the Tsar could make good soldiers and sailors out of his Russian subjects.

The victory at Hango cleared not only the Gulf of Finland but the eastern side of the Gulf of Bothnia of Swedish ships. Admiral Wattrang now quit the upper Baltic entirely, being unwilling to risk his big ships against the Russian flotillas to continue their westward advance. In September, a fleet of sixty galleys landed 16,000 men in the Aland Islands. Soon afterward, the larger Russian ships returned to Kronstadt, but Apraxin's galleys kept working their way up into the Gulf of Bothnia. On September 20, he reached Wasa, and from there he sent nine galleys across the gulf to attack the coast of Sweden, burning the Swedish town of Umean. As some galleys were lost and the winter ice was coming, Apraxin put his fleet in winter quarters, at Abo on the Finnish coast and across the Gulf of Finland at Reval.

The success of the Finnish campaigns spurred Peter to increase his shipbuilding program. Later, near the end of the Tsar's reign, the Baltic fleet consisted of thirty-four ships-of-the-line (many of them sixty- and eighty-gun vessels), fifteen frigates and 800 galleys and smaller ships, manned by a total of 28,000 Russian seamen. This was a gigantic achievement; to complain that Peter's fleet was still smaller than Great Britain's is to overlook the fact that Peter began without a single ship; with no tradition, shipwrights, officers, navigators or seamen. Before the end of Peter's life, some Russian ships were equal to the best in the British navy and, said an observer, "were more handsomely furnished." The only weakness that Peter could never overcome was his countrymen's lack of interest in the sea. Foreign officers— Greeks, Venetians, Danes and Dutchmen—continued to command the ships; the Russian aristocracy still hated the sea and resented the imposition of naval service almost more than any other. In his love of blue waves and salt air, Peter remained unique among Russians.

45

THE KALABALIK

Bitterly frustrated by his failure to prevent the peace made on the Pruth, Charles XII had worked doggedly to undo it. To some extent, the three subsequent short "wars" a year or two apart between Russia and the Ottoman Empire had been his work, although Peter's unwillingness to hand over Azov and to withdraw his troops from Poland had also been responsible. A promising opportunity had come with the third of these wars, declared by the Turks in October 1712. Then, a huge Ottoman army had assembled at Adrianople under the personal command of the Sultan. As part of a joint war plan, Ahmed III had agreed to send Charles XII north into Poland with a strong Turkish escort so that the King could rendezvous with a new Swedish expeditionary force under Stenbock's command. But when Stenbock landed in Germany, he moved west, not south, and he was eventually captured in the fortress of Tonning. Charles remained a king without an army, and the Sultan, reflecting on the uncertainties of invading Russia alone, had decided to make peace and return to his harem.

Thus, by the winter of 1713, Charles XII had been in Turkey for three and a half years. Moslem hospitality notwithstanding, most Turkish officials had grown weary of him. He was indeed a "heavy weight on the Sublime Porte." The Sultan wanted to make a permanent peace with Russia, but Charles' constant intrigues had made this difficult. It was decided, one way or another, to send Charles home.

Out of this decision developed a plot. Devlet Gerey, the Tatar Khan, had originally been an admirer of Charles, but his feelings had changed when the King refused to join the Turkish army marching to the Pruth. Now the Khan made contact with Augustus of Poland and worked out a plan whereby the King of Sweden would be offered a strong escort of Tatar cavalry ostensibly to cross Poland and return to Swedish territory. Once under way, the escort would be progressively weakened as parts of the force were detached under various pretexts. Across the Polish frontier, the group would be confronted by a strong force of Poles, and the diminished escort, too weak to resist, would surrender and hand over the Swedish King. Thus, both sides would profit: The Turks would get rid of Charles, and Augustus would have him.

This time, however, fortune was with Charles. A body of his men, disguised as Tatars, intercepted the messengers and brought the correspondence between Augustus and the Khan to the King at Bender. Charles learned that both the Khan and the Seraskier of Bender were involved in the plot; as best he could determine, the Sultan was not. For years, Charles had been trying to get away from Turkey, but now he made up his mind not to go. He tried to contact Ahmed III to tell him of the plot, but he found that all communication between Bender and the south had been cut. None of the messages he sent, even by roundabout routes, arrived.

In fact, the Sultan was anxious to see the last of Charles, but had worked out a different solution. On January 18, 1713, he gave orders to abduct the King, by force if necessary, but without harming him, and take him to Salonika, where he would be put on board a French ship which would carry him back to Sweden. Ahmed did not believe that force would be required. He did not know of the Khan's plot, and of course he did not know that Charles was aware of it. From this tangle of plots, partial knowledge and misunderstandings arose the extraordinary episode known by its Turkish name as the Kalabalik (tumult).

The Swedish camp at Bender had greatly changed in three and a half years. Tents had been replaced by permanent barracks built in rows as in a military camp, with glass windows for the officers and leather-covered windows for the common soldiers. The King lived in a large, new, handsomely furnished brick house which, with a chancery building, officers' quarters and a stable, formed a semifortified square in the center of the compound. From the balconies of his upper windows, he had an excellent view of the whole Swedish encampment and the surrounding cluster of coffee houses and small shops in which merchants sold figs, brandy, bread and tobacco to the Swedes. The settlement, called New Bender, was a tiny Swedish island lost in a Turkish ocean. But it was not a hostile ocean. The Janissary regiment posted to guard the King watched over him with an admiring eye. Here was a hero of the king that Turkey desperately lacked. "If we had such a king to lead us, what could we not do?" they asked.

Despite these friendly feelings, when the Sultan's orders arrived in January 1713, the air around the Swedish camp began to fill with tension. Charles' officers watched from the balconies as thousands of Tatar horsemen rode in to join the Janissaries. To confront this force, Charles had fewer than a thousand Swedes and no allies; seeing the massing of the Turkish forces, the Poles and Cossacks nominally under Charles' command had quietly drifted away and placed themselves under Turkish protection. Undeterred, the King began preparations to resist; his men began collecting provisions to last six weeks. To stiffen Swedish morale, Charles one day rode alone and unmolested through the waiting ranks of the Tatar army standing thickly "like organ pipes so close together on all sides."

On January 29, Charles was warned that an attack would come the following day. He and his men spent the night trying to build a wall around the camp, but the frozen earth made digging impossible. Instead, they created a barricade of wooden carts, wagons, tables and benches, and shoveled piles of dung between the wagons. What happened the following day was one of the most bizarre martial episodes in European history. As the dramatic tale resounded through Europe, people shook their heads, but of course, at the time, none who heard the tale knew that Charles intended simply to make a token stand to foil the plot to carry him off and betray him in Poland. Unable to inform the Sultan of this plot, he hoped by his stand to force the Khan and the Seraskier to pull back, wait and ask for new instructions from their master, Ahmed III.

The "tumult" began on Saturday, January 31, when Turkish artillery opened fire with a salvo of cannonballs at the Swedish makeshift fortress. Twenty-seven cannonballs hit the King's brick house, but the powder charges were light and the bombardment did little damage. Thousands of Turks and Tatars massed to attack. "The whole host of Tatars advanced toward our trench and made a halt within three or four steps of it, which was very frightful to see," wrote a Swedish participant. "At ten in the forenoon, there appeared several thousand Turkish horse, after that several thousand Janissaries on foot from Bender. These were drawn up in order as if they were to attack us presently."

The attack was ready, but for some reason it never came. According to one account, the Turkish soldiers were reluctant to attack the Swedish King, whom they admired, and demanded to see a written order from the Sultan commanding them to do so. Another story is that fifty or sixty Janissaries carrying only white staves marched up to the Swedish camp and entreated Charles to place himself in their hands, swearing that not a hair of his head would be touched. Supposedly, Charles refused, warning, "If they do not go away, I will singe their beards," whereupon all the Janissaries threw down their weapons, declaring they would not attack. Finally, there is a story that, just before the assault, three rainbows, one on top of the other, appeared over Charles' house. The astonished Turks refused to attack, saying that Allah was protecting the Swedish King. The most likely reason is that the Seraskier and the Khan had simply staged the bombardment and the massing of troops to cow Charles into submission without violence. In any case, the Turkish army stood silent and still, the cannonade stopped and the ranks eventually broke up.

On the morning of the following day, Sunday, February 1, the view from the Swedish camp was depressing: "Such a vast number of these infidels that when we were on top of the Royal House we could not see over them." Small red, blue and yellow flags fluttered along the waiting lines of Turks, and on a hill behind was a huge red standard, "planted to signify that they were going to push the Swedes to the last drop of blood." Shaken by this sight, some of the Swedish soldiers and junior officers, not understanding that all this was a game and seeing themselves as the prospective victims of a massacre, began to trickle out across the barricades to places themselves under the protection of the Turks. To stiffen their courage, Charles ordered his trumpeters to blow and his kettledrummers to beat their drums on top of his house. To halt the desertions, he sent a promise and a threat to all his men: "That His Majesty did assure every one from the highest to the lowest who should stand with him for two hours longer and not desert, should be rewarded by him in the kindest manner. But whoever should desert to the infidels he would never see more."

As it was Sunday, the King went to a church service in his house, and he was listening to the sermon when the air was suddenly filled with the thunder of cannon and the whistling of cannonballs. The Swedish officers, rushing to the upper windows of the house, saw a mass of Turks and Tatars, swords in hand, running toward their camp, shouting, "Allah! Allah!" At this, the Swedish officers on the barricade called to their men, "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" A few men fired their muskets, but most of the men on the barricades surrendered quickly. This act, even against hopeless odds, was so unlike the normal behavior of Swedish soldiers that it strongly implies a royal order to avoid bloodshed.

Similarly, on the other side, the Khan and the Seraskier apparently gave equivalent instructions. Although a "cloud of arrows" fell on the compound, few hit anything. The cannonballs directed at the King's house either "flew over the house and did no hurt" or, fired with a minimum charge of powder, bounced harmlessly off the walls.

Nevertheless, although the original intention on both sides may have been to stage a battle rather than to fight one, a drama involving cannoballs, musket shots and naked swords is difficult to keep entirely peaceful. Very soon, tempers became inflamed and blood began to flow. With most of the Swedes scarcely resisting, the Turks swarmed into Charles' house and began looting. The great hall of the house filled with Turks taking everything in sight as plunder. This insult was more than Charles could stand. In a rage, with a sword in his right hand and a pistol in his left, the King threw open the doors and rushed into the hall, followed by a band of Swedes. There were pistol volleys on both sides, and the room filled with the dense smoke of gunpowder. Through the swirling haze, Swedes and Turks, choking and coughing, thrust and parried in hand-to-hand combat. As so often on the battlefield, the impetus of the Swedish charge had its effect; besides, in the house itself, the numbers of Swedes and Turks were more nearly equal. The hall and house soon were cleared; the last Turks jumped out the windows.

At this point, one of Charles' Drabants, Axel Roos, looked around and did not see the King. He dashed through the house and found Charles in the High Steward's Chamber, "standing betwixt three Turks, both arms raised in the air, sword in the right hand. ... I shot down the Turk with his back to the door. . . . His Majesty lowered his sword arm and stabbed the second Turk through the body and I was not slow in shooting the third Turk dead." "Roos," cried the King through the smoke, "is it you who have saved me?" When Charles and Roos stepped over the bodies, the King's face was bleeding from nose, cheek and the lobe of an ear where bullets had nicked him. His left hand was badly sliced between thum and forefinger where he had warded off a Turkish sword by grasping the enemy blade bare-handed. The King and Roos rejoined the others, who had driven the Turks out of the house and were firing at them from the windows.

The Turks wheeled up cannon, which began to boom at close range. The balls shattered the masonry, but the thick walls held up. Charles filled his hat with musket balls and toured the house, parceling reserves of powder and ammunition to the men stationed at the windows.

By now, dusk was falling. The Turks understood the absurdity of trying to storm a house containing less than a hundred men with an army of 12,000, particularly when they were under orders not to kill the hundred. They decided to try a new tactic to force the Swedes into the open. Tatar archers fastened burning straw to their arrows and shot them at the wood-shingled roof of the King's house. At the same time, a group of Janissaries rushed to a comer of the house with bales of hay and straw, which they piled up and set afire. When the Swedes attempted to push the burning bundles away with iron bars, the Tatar archers, aiming accurately, forced them back. Within minutes, the roof was ablaze. Charles and his comrades rushed into the attic to fight the flames from below. Using swords, they hacked at the roof, tearing away as much as possible, but the fire spread rapidly. The burning beams, roaring with flames, forced the King and his followers to retreat down the staircase with coats over their heads to protect themselves from the scorching heat. On the ground floor, the exhausted men drank brandy, and even the King, equally parched, was persuaded to swallow a glass of wine. It was the first time since leaving Stockholm thirteen years before that Charles had touched alcohol.

Meanwhile, burning shingles were falling from the roof onto the top floors, spreading the flames. Suddenly, what remained of the roof fell, and the whole upper half of the house became a furnace. At this point, some of the Swedes, seeing nothing to be gained by being burned alive, proposed surrender. But the king, in great excitement, possibly inspired by his unaccustomed gulps of wine, refused to yield "until our clothes begin to burn."

Still, they obviously could not remain. Charles agreed to a proposal that they dash to the chancery building, which was still untouched fifty paces off, and renew the struggles from there. The watching Turks, wondering if the King were still alive, amazed that men could survive in the furnace before their eyes, suddenly saw King Charles, sword and pistol in hand, emerge at the head of his small band and run through the night, silhouetted against the blazing building. The Turks dashed forward. It was a race. Unfortunately, as Charles rounded a comer of the building, he tripped over one of the spurs he always wore and fell headlong.

Before he could rise, the Turks were upon him. One of his followers, Lieutenant Aberg, threw himself on top of the King to protect his master from Turkish steel. Aberg received a saber blow in the head and was dragged off, bleeding. Two Turks then hurled themselves on the King to wrench his sword from his hand. Their weight inflicted on Charles his most serious wound of the day: Two bones in his right foot were broken. Unnoticing, the Turks began tearing the King's coat to shreds; the man who could deliver the Swedish King alive had been promised six ducats, and the coat would be proof of who made the capture.

Despite the pain in his foot, Charles rose. He was not otherwise harmed, and the Swedes behind him, seeing that the King had given up, themselves surrendered immediately. They were stripped on the spot of their watches, money and the silver buttons on their coats. Charles was bleeding from nose, cheek, ear and hand, his eyebrows were singed off, his face and clothes were black with gunpowder and reeking with smoke, and his coat was torn into strips, but he resumed his usual air of calm, almost amused unconcern. He had done what he had set out to do and had resisted not for two but for eight hours. Satisfied, he allowed himself to be carried to the house of the Seraskier of Bender. Charles entered ragged, blood-stained, his face caked with blood and dirt, but with imperturbable serenity. The Seraskier received him politely with apologies for the misunderstanding that had led to the fight. Charles sat down on a couch, asked for water and a dish of sherbet, refused the supper that was offered him and promptly fell alseep.

The following day, Charles and all who had fought with him were escorted to Adrianople. Some who saw him go were distressed by the sight. Jefferyes wrote to London: "I cannot express to Your Excellency what a melancholy spectacle this was to me, who had formerly seen this prince in his greatest glory and terror, now to see him so low as to be the scorn and derision of the Turks and infidels." But others thought that Charles seemed cheerful. "In as good a humor as in the days of his luck and liberty," said one, and to another he seemed as pleased with himself "as if he had all the Turks and Tatars in his power." Certainly, he had succeeded in his objective: After a battle on this scale, the Khan and the Seraskier would not be carrying him off to Poland.

Ironically, on the day after the Kalabalik, new orders from the Sultan arrived in Bender countermanding the permission he had given to use force to abduct Charles. An emissary of the Sultan met the King and pleaded that "his Great Master was an utter stranger to these hellish conspiracies."

In Adrianople, Charles was received with honor and installed in the stately castle of Timurtash, where he lay for weeks, waiting for his foot to heal. In punishment for the Kalabalik, both the Khan and the Seraskier were deposed. Three months later, the Ottoman Empire embarked on a fourth brief war with Russia. Charles' action had been a temporary success on all points.

Throughout Europe, the Kalabalik caused a sensation. Some saw it as heroism: Like a legdendary hero, the King had fought in personal combat against overwhelming odds. But many saw it as sheer insanity. How could the King so offend the Sultan's hospitality? This was Peter's attitude when he heard the news: "I now perceive that God has abandoned my brother Charles, inasmuch as he has taken it upon himself to attack and irritate his only friend and ally."

And, in fact, was it such a heroic story? On the surface, 100 Swedes with muskets, pistols and swords defended themselves against 12,000 Turks equipped with cannon. Stories circulating in Europe told of Turks falling in droves, of bodies piling up in heaps in front of the King's house. Actually, forty men were killed on the Turkish side* while the Swedes lost twelve. Even this loss was unnecessary, for the Janissaries had used great forbearance. Had the Turks not burst into Charles' house and begun wild-eyed looting, most of those who died would have remained alive. The truth was that the Kalabalik was a charade turned bloody, played for political reasons, to prevent the King's deportation and capture. But it was also a game which Charles desperately enjoyed and allowed to continue. He had not had a fight for over three years; he had suffered the humiliation of the Pruth; here at least he could wield his sword. The Kalabalik took place because Charles XII loved the heady excitement of battle.

For twenty months after the Kalabalik, Charles remained in Turkey, installed as the Sultan's guest at the castle of Timurtash with its handsome park and beautiful gardens. It took many weeks for the bones in his foot to heal completely, and it was ten months before he could walk or ride. Meanwhile, in Europe, events had been moving swiftly. In April 1713, the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht finally ended the twelve-year War of the Spanish Succession. Nobody had won. The Sun King's grandson Philip de Bourbon sat on the Spanish throne as Louis XIV had wished, but the kingdoms of France and Spain were carefully separated by the terms of the peace treaty. At seventy-one, Louis himself was two years away from death and France was impoverished by war. The other claimant to the Spanish crown, Charles of Austria, now occupied a different throne, having become the Holy Roman Emperor on the death of his older brother, in 1711.

During these years, Russia and Turkey at least made a permanent peace. After the Pruth and the three bloodless wars which followed, Peter finally gave up Azov and withdrew his troops from Poland. The Turks were anxious for peace; the end of the war in Western Europe had freed the Austrian army for possible action against Turkey in the Balkans, and the Sultan wished to be ready. On June 15, 1713, the Treaty of Adrianople was signed, pledging peace for twenty-five years.

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 was a master shipwright named Schmidt. 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 continued to raise buildings) 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 triumphs 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.

Once Poltava had dissipated the Swedish threat, the city spread from its original center east of the fortress to other islands and to the mainland. Downstream, on the north side of the main branch of the Neva, lay the largest island of the river delta, Vasilevsky Island, whose leading inhabitant was Prince Menshikov, the city's governor general, to whom Peter had given most of the island as a present. In 1713, on the embankment facing the river, Menshikov had begun construction of a massive stone palace three stories high, with a roof of iron plates painted bright red. This palace, designed by the German architect Gottfried Schadel, remained the largest private house in St. Petersburg throughout Peter's life, and was richly decorated with elegant furniture, ornate silver plate and many articles which, the Danish ambassador commented dryly, appeared "to have been removed from Polish castles." Its spacious main hall was the principal site of the city's great entertainments, weddings and balls. Peter used Menshikov's palace much as he had used the large house built earlier in Moscow for Francis Lefort, preferring himself to live more simply in houses with no chamber sufficiently large for mass entertaining. Sometimes, when Menshikov was receiving for the Tsar, Peter would look across the river from his own smaller house, see the lighted windows of Menshikov's great palace and say to himself with a chuckle, "Danil'ich is making merry."

Behind Menshikov's house were the Prince's private church, with a bell tower and a soft chime, and a large, formal garden with latticed walls, hedges and a grove of trees, houses for his gardeners and a farm with chickens and other animals. Being on the north side of the river, the garden made the most of the southern exposure, and, shielded from the wind by trees and hedges, produced fruits and even melons. The rest of the island contained a few wooden houses and grazing fields for horses and cattle, but most of Vasilevsky Island was still covered with forest and bushes.

Always, the heart of the city was the great river, a deep torrent of cold water sweeping silently and swiftly down from the inland sea of Lake Ladoga, past the fortress, past Menshikov's great red-roofed mansion and out through the islands, flowing so vigorously into the Gulf of Finland that the current was still visible a mile from shore. The tremendous surging power of the current, the pressure of winter ice and the crunch of ice floes in springtime all would have made it difficult to build a bridge in Peter's time; but these were not the reasons that no bridge was built. Peter wanted his subjects to learn seamanship and sailing, so he insisted that they cross the Neva by boat—without oars. For those who could not afford a private boat, twenty government-authorized ferryboats were permitted, but the boatmen, most of them ignorant peasants, were often confounded by the rapid current and by strong gusts of wind. Only after the Polish ambassador, a major general and one of the Tsar's own doctors had drowned in successive sailing accidents did Peter relent and allow the ferrymen the use of oars. For the general population, crossing remained risky; if a storm came up, people might be detained on the wrong side of the river for several days. In winter, citizens could easily walk across the ice, but in summer when there were storms, in autumn or spring when the ice was forming or melting, the people on the islands in the Neva were virtually cut off from the rest of Russia. (In April 1712, Peter devised a way to cross the river without much danger from falling through the thinning ice: he had a four-oared rowboat put upon a sled and he sat in the boat; horses and sled might go through the ice, but boat and tsar would float.)

Because of this isolation, government buildings and private mansions began to spring up along the south bank of the river, which was the mainland. The largest of these was the thirty-room palace of General-Admiral Apraxin, which stood next to the Adrniralty on a corner of the site now occupied by the 1,100-rcom Winter. Palace built by Rastrelli for Empress Elizabeth. Upriver along the southern embankment were the houses of Attorney General Yaguzhinsky, Vice Admiral Cruys and the Winter Palace of Peter himself, standing on the ground which Catherine the Great's small Hermitage occupies today. Peter's palace was made of wood, two stories high, with a central building and two wings, but, except for a naval crown over the doorway, it was undistinguished from other mansions along the river. The Tsar felt ill at ease in spacious chambers and preferred small, low ceilinged rooms, but in order to present a symmetrical line in the facades of the palaces along the river, he was forced to make each story of his own house higher than he liked. His solution was to install a false lower ceiling beneath the upper one in all the rooms he inhabited. The first Winter Palace was torn down in 1721 to be replaced by a larger structure of stone.*

In 1710, a mile upstream from the Admiralty, at the point where the Fontanka River flows into the Neva, Trezzini began to construct a beautiful Summer Palace, with wide-latticed windows looking out over water on two sides, with two solid Dutch chimneys and a step gabled roof crowned by a gilded weathervane in the form of St. George on horseback. Peter and Catherine lived here together, and its fourteen light and airy rooms were divided equally between husband and wife, Peter occupying the seven rooms on the ground floor and the seven rooms on the floor above belonging to Catherine. His chambers reflected his own modest taste and practical interests; hers displayed her desire to frame herself in royal luxury and grandeur. The walls of Peter's study and reception room, for example, were covered to window level with hundreds of blue Dutch tiles, each depicting a view of ships or a nautical or pastoral scene. The ceilings of his reception room and small bedroom were decorated with paintings of winged cherubs celebrating "The Triumph of Russia." On the Tsar's desk was an ornate ship's clock and compass of brass and engraved silver, presented to him by King George I of England. Peter's canopy bed, covered with red cut velvet, was large but not large enough for the Tsar to stretch out on; in the eighteenth century, people slept propped up by pillows. The most interesting room on Peter's floor was the Turning Room, where the Tsar kept lathes to

* The Second Winter Palace also vanished, and today it is the fifth Winter Palace which occupies the site and, transformed into the Hermitage Museum, has become the city's center.

use in his spare time. Against a wall of this room stood the carved wood frame, twelve feet high, of a special instrument made for Peter by Dinglinger in Dresden in 1714. Three large dials, each three feet in diameter, showed the time and, by means of rods connected to the weathervane on the roof, the direction and force of the wind. Peter's dining room was large enough only for his family and a few guests; all public banquets were held at Menshikov's palace. Peter's kitchen walls were covered with blue tiles with different floral designs. Water was brought to its black marble sink by the first system of water pipes in St. Petersburg. Most important, a window from the kitchen opened directly into the dining room; Peter liked hot food and hated those large palaces in which food grew cold wending its way from the oven to the table.

On the floor above, Catherine had a reception room, a throne room and a dancing room as well as a bedroom, a nursery with a crib carved as a boat, and her own kitchen. Her rooms had painted ceilings, parquet floors, walls hung with Flemish and German tapestries or Chinese silk wallpaper woven with gold and silver thread, drapes, carpets, furniture inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl, and Venetian and English mirrors. Today, this little palace, superbly restored and filled with original or period objects, decorated with numerous portraits of Peter's family and lieutenants, is—along with the little pavilion Mom Plaisir at Peterhof— the place where one can most intimately sense the lingering presence of Peter himself.

In 1716, another foreign architect arrived in St. Petersburg to leave a permanent mark on Peter's "paradise." This was the French architect Alexandre Jean Baptiste LeBlond. A Parisian and a pupil of the great Le Notre who had designed the gardens at Versailles, LeBlond was only thirty-seven, but was already well known in France for his buildings in Paris and for books he had written on architecture and formal gardens. In April 1716, LeBlond signed an unprecedented contract to come to Russia for five years as Architect General at a guaranteed salary of 5,000 roubles a year. He was also to be given a state apartment and permission to leave Russia at the end of his five-year term without having to pay duty on any of his possessions. In return, LeBlond promised to do his best to pass along his knowledge to the Russians who would work with him.

En route to his new appointment, LeBlond passed through Pyrmont, where Peter was taking the waters, and the two men talked about the Tsar's plans and hopes for his new city. Peter was delighted with his new employee and, on LeBlond's departure, wrote enthusiastically to Menshikov in St. Petersburg:

Welcome LeBlond in a friendly manner and respect his contract, for he is better than the best and a veritable prodigy, as I could see in no time. Besides he is an energetic and intelligent man and highly respected in the ateliers of France, so that we can, through him, engage whomsoever we wish. Therefore, all our architects must be told that from now on they are to submit all their plans for new construction to LeBlond for approval, and, if there is still time, carry out his instructions for correcting the old ones.

Armed with his title of Architect General, his princely contract and the glowing commendation of the Tsar, LeBlond arrived in Russia intending to take charge. In his train, he brought not only his wife and six-year-old son but several dozen French draftsmen, engineers, joiners, sculptors, stonemasons, bricklayers, carpenters, locksmiths, chiselers, goldsmiths and gardeners. Immediately, he established a new Chancellery of Building, an administrative office through which all plans for building would have to pass for his approval. Then, on the basis of his talks with Peter, he began to draft an overall plan which would dictate the major development of the city for years to come.

The most ambitious part of this new scheme was to be the creation of a city of canals, modeled after Amsterdam, on the eastern half of Vasilevsky Island. This would be a rectangular grid of parallel streets and intersecting canals cut through the low-lying marshy ground. Two main canals would run the length of the island and twelve smaller canals would cross it, and even the smaller canals would be wide enough for two boats to pass. Every house was to have a courtyard, a garden and a dock for the householder's boat. In the center of this great watery checkerboard, the Tsar was to have a new palace with an extensive formal garden.

LeBlond began as soon as he arrived in August 1716, using poles driven into the marshy ground to mark the outlines of his new town. That autumn and the following spring, digging of the canals was begun and the first new householders, sternly commanded by Peter's order, commenced construction of their dwellings. All did not go well, however. In wielding his new power, LeBlond had impinged on both the prerogative and the possessions of an even more powerful Petersburger, Menshikov, who was both governor general of the city and the owner of a large part of Vasilevsky Island, some of which was to be taken for LeBlond's new city of canals. Menshikov did not dare oppose directly a plan which Peter had approved, but the Tsar would be away for many months and in the meantime the Governor General would be in overall command of every activity in the city— including the new construction. Menshikov's retaliation came in a typical way. The canals were built, but they were narrower and shallower than LeBlond had called for; two boats could not pass each other, and soon the shallow waterways began to sit up with mud. When Peter returned and went to look at the new construction, he was pleased to see the new houses rising along the canals, but, noticing the dimensions of the waterways, he was astonished and enraged. LeBlond, who by this time knew better than to challenge Menshikov directly, remained silent. With his architect beside him, Peter walked across the island and then, turning to LeBlond, asked him, "What can be done to carry out my plan?"

The Frenchman shrugged. "Raze, sire, raze. There is no other remedy than to demolish all that has been done and dig the canals anew." This, however, was too much, even for Peter, and the project was abandoned, although from time to time Peter would go to Vasilevsky Island to look at the canals and come home sorrowfully without uttering a word. On the south bank, however, LeBlond built the city's main boulevard, the great Nevsky Prospect, cutting straight through two and a half miles of meadows and forests from the Admiralty to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. The Nevsky was constructed and paved by gangs of Swedish prisoners (who were also ordered to clean it every Saturday) and soon became the most famous street in Russia.

LeBlond almost made a remarkable contribution to another famous St. Petersburg landmark, the Summer Garden. Even before Poltava, Peter had begun the garden, which spread over thirty-seven acres behind his Summer Palace at the junction of the Neva and the Fontanka. At the height of his worry about the Swedes, the Tsar constantly issued orders about the garden. Moscow was commanded to send "seeds and roots, together with thirteen young lads to train as gardeners." Books on the gardens of France and Holland were sought. Trees were ordered to line the avenues: lime and elm trees from Kiev and Novgorod, chestnuts from Hamburg, oaks and fruit trees from Moscow and the Volga, cypresses from the south. Flowers arrived from everywhere: tulip bulbs from Amsterdam, lilac bushes from Liibeck, lilies, roses and carnations from other parts of Russia.

LeBlond's contribution to the Summer Garden was water. "Fountains and water are the soul of a garden and make the principal ornament of it," he had written. He pumped water from the Fontanka (the name derives from Fountain) into a new water tower, from which elevation the pressure would cause his new fountains to jet and spray. There were fifty fountains scattered through the garden: grottoes, cascades, plumes of water spouting from the mouths of dolphins and horses. In the basins beneath these fountains, creatures real and mythical—stone gargoyles, real fish and even a seal—swam or splashed. Nearby, rare birds sang in cages shaped like pagodas, a blue monkey chattered and a porcupine and sables stared morosely back at human sightseers.

Using the lesson he had learned from Le Notre created for Peter a true French formal garden. He traced parterres of flower, shrubs and gravel in intricate curving lines. He pruned the crowns of trees and shrubs into spheres, cubes and cones. He built a glassed conservatory and installed orange, lemon and bay trees and even a small tree of cloves. Italian sculptures were placed at the intersections of all the walks and along the avenues; eventually, sixty white mable statues depicting scenes from Aesop's fables were set in place along with other sculptures titled "Peace and Abundance," "Navigation," "Architecture," "Truth" and "Sincerity."

When Peter was in St. Petersburg, he came often to the Summer Garden. There the Tsar would sit on a bench and drink beer or play draughts with his friends while Catherine and her ladies walked along the paths. The garden was open to the public, and society came to stroll during the afternoons, or to sit by its fountains during the long white nights of June and July. In 1777, a terrible flood wreaked fearful damage on the Summer Garden, uprooting trees and shattering the fountains, and afterward, Catherine the Great reconstructed the garden on different lines, preferring the less formal English garden to the French style; she did not rebuild the fountains, and the trees and shrubs were allowed to grow normally. But the Summer Garden maintained its charm and appeal. Pushkin lived nearby and often came to walk there; Glinka and Gogol were constant visitors to Peter's Summer Garden. As old as the city itself, the Summer Garden still renews itself every spring and remains as young as the newest leaf and the tenderest bud.

Menshikov was increasingly jealous of LeBlond's favor with the Tsar and used the Summer Garden as another means of striking at the Frenchman. In 1717, he wrote to Peter that LeBlond was cutting down the Summer Garden trees of which he knew the Tsar was extremely proud—in fact, LeBlond had only lopped some branches to improve the view and shape the trees according to French concepts. When Peter returned and encountered LeBlond, he flew into a rage, thinking of his lost trees. Before he knew what he was doing, he had struck the architect with his cane, sending LeBlond to bed with shock and fever. Peter then went to see the garden and realizing that the trees had only been trimmed, hastily sent apologies to LeBlond and instructions that the Architect General should be specially cared for. Soon after, the Tsar met Menshikov on a stairway. Seizing him by the collar and pushing him up against a wall, Peter shouted, "You alone, you rascal, are the cause of LeBlond's illness!"

LeBlond recovered, but a year and a half later he contracted smallpox. In February 1719, at thirty-nine, he died, having spent only thirty months in Russia. Had he lived and continued to wield the great power of Peter's favor, the face of St. Petersburg would have been far more French. One glorious example of this architecture-that-might:have-been actually exists. Before his death, LeBlond had chosen the site, prepared the drawings and laid out the garden for the fabled summer estate and palace by the sea that is known as Peterhof.

Peterhof was conceived long before LeBlond came to Russia; its origins were linked with Kronstadt. In 1703, within a few months of his conquest of the Neva delta, Peter sailed out on the Gulf of Finland and first saw Kotlin Island. Soon afterward, he decided to build a fortress there to protect St. Petersburg from the sea. Once work was under way, the Tsar visited the island often to observe its progress. At times, and especially in autumn when there were frequent storms, he could not sail directly from the city. On these occasions, he went by land to a point on the coast just south of the coast just south of the island and made the shorter journey by boat, and there he built a small landing wharf and a two-room cottage on the shore where, if necessary, he could wait until the weather improved. This cottage was the genesis of Peterhof.

Once the victory of Poltava had ensured possession of Ingria, Peter divided the land along the south coast of the Gulf of Finland outside St. Petersburg into tracts which he distributed among his chief lieutenants. Many built palaces or mansions along the fifty-or-sixty-foot ridge which ran about a half-mile from the shore. The largest and finest of this semicircular row of great country houses looking out on the gulf belonged to Menshikov, for whom Schadel erected an oval-shaped palace, three stories high, which Menshikov named Oranienbaum.

Peter's first summer house by the gulf, built at a place called Strelna, did not rival the magnificent palace of the Serene Prince. Strelna was only a large wooden cottage whose most distinctive feature was a treehouse which the Tsar could reach by ladder. In the evening, Peter would smoke his pipe and gaze out contentedly at the boats on the bay. Eventually, he wanted something grander, and it was to LeBlond that he entrusted the task of building a palace to rival Oranienbaum, a Versailles-by-the-Sea: Peterhof.

LeBlond's grand palace, a large, two-storied structure handsomely decorated and furnished, opened onto a wide, formal French garden behind the palace. But it was far smaller and less omate than either Versailles or the enlarged and remodeled palace which Rastrelli was to create for Empress Elizabeth on the same site a generation later. The glory of Peterhof—and it is LeBlond's masterpiece—is in the use of water. Water soars high in the air at Peterhof; it plumes and sprays from dozens of imaginative fountains; it splashes over statues of men and gods, horses and fish and unidentifiable creatures which neither man nor god has ever seen; it glides in mirror-like sheets over the edge of marble steps; it runs deep and dark in basins, pools and canals. The great cascade in front of the palace flows down giant twin marble stairways which flank a deep grotto, opening out into a wide central basin. Along the stairs, gilded statues flash in the sunlight; in the center of the basin, bathed in the jets of myriad water spouts, stands a dazzling golden Samson prying open the jaws of a golden lion. From the basin, the water flows toward the sea through a long canal wide enough to bring small sailing ships up to the foot of the palace. Cutting straight through the center of the lower garden, the great canal is flanked by more fountains, statues and rows of trees. The water to supply these fountains came not from the gulf but through wooden pipes from a source on higher ground thirteen miles away.

In this lower garden, between the palace and the sea, crisscrossed by avenues and paths, studded with fountains and white marble statues, LeBlond also created three exquisite summer pavilions which stand to this day—the Hermitage, Marly and Mon Plaisir. This Hermitage is a tiny, elegant structure surrounded by a little moat over which a drawbridge leads to the single door. It is two stories high, the ground floor being occupied by a kitchen and an office, the upper floor by a single, airy room with tall windows opening onto balconies. This room was used solely for private dinner parties. In the center of the room, a huge oval table, seating twelve, incorporated a spectaculr French mechanical surprise: When the host rang a bell between courses, the central part of the table was lowered to the first floor, where dishes were removed and the next course was served, after which the table would rise back into position. In this way, the diners were never embarrassed by the presence of servants.

Marly was named after the private retreat of Louis XIV, but it "in no way resembles Your Majesty's," the French ambassador reported to Paris. Peter's Marly was a simple Dutch house with oak-paneled rooms and Dutch tiles, set at the edge of a quiet lake.

The most important of these pavilions was Mon Plaisir, which

Peter preferred to all his other country houses. It is a one-story red-brick house in Dutch style, perfectly proportioned, set right by the sea, and in its way it is a second jewel to match the Tsar's small Summer Palace in the Summer Garden. Tall French windows made it possible to step directly from any room onto a brick terrace a few feet above the water. Inside, a central hall and reception room is lined with dark oak in the Dutch fashion, with paintings of Holland, especially Dutch ships, set in the panels. The ceiling is painted in gay French arabesques, while the floor is set with large black and white tiles to form a human-sized checkerboard.

Today, Mon Plaisir is almost as it was when Peter lived there. The furniture, decorations and household articles are period, if not actually the Tsar's possessions. On one side of the central hall is Peter's study overlooking the gulf, his desk covered with nautical instruments, the walls faced to window level with blue Dutch tiles depicting ships, and wood-paneled above. The next little room is Peter's bedroom, and from his bed he could watch the sea. On the other side of the hall is the blue-tiled kitchen, only one step from the dining table. A curiosity is the elegant little Chinese room, completely decorated in red-and-black lacquer. Each side of the house is flanked by a handsome gallery with tall, wide windows, those in front opening onto the sea, those in back onto a garden filled with tulips and fountains; between the windows, more Dutch paintings, mostly seascapes, were mounted. Peter loved this little house and liked to live here even when Catherine was in residence in the Grand Palace on the ridge above. From here, he could look at the water or lie in bed by an open window and hear the waves. More than anywhere else, in the later part of his life the restless monarch found tranquillity at Mon Plaisir.

47

AN AMBASSADOR REPORTS

When Peter moved his court, his government and his noblemen from Moscow to St. Petersburg, the foreign ambassadors accedited to the Tsar were also forced to settle along the Neva. Many of these diplomats left accounts of their service, among them Whitworth of England, Campredon of France, Juel of Denmark and Bergholz of Holstein. But the richest eyewitness picture of the later years at Peter's court comes from Friedrich Christian Weber, the ambassador of Hanover, whose description of life at court in

St. Petersburg complements the description of life at court in Moscow presented by the Austrian Johann Korb twenty years before. Weber arrived in Russia in 1714 and spent seven years in St. Petersburg before returning to his homeland and publishing his lengthy memoir. He was a dignified, relatively open-minded man who admired Peter and was interested in everything he saw, although he saw some things of which he did not approve.

At his very first public function, the stolid Hanoverian envoy received an indication of the talents required of an ambassador to the court of the Tsar. "I had hardly arrived," Weber begins, "when Admiral Apraxin gave a magnificent entertainment to the whole court, and, by His Tsarish Majesty's order, caused me to be invited." At the door, however, the new Ambassador had trouble with the guards: "They used foul language to me, they kept putting their halberds across the door, then, with greater rudeness, they turned me down the stairs." Finally, through the intervention of a friend, Weber was admitted. He had learned his first lesson about life in Russia. It was:

that I ran great hazard of exposing myself to the like treatment in the future unless I changed my plain, though clean, dress and appeared all trimmed with gold and silver, and with a couple of footmen walking before me and bawling out "Clear the way!" I was soon made more sensible that I had a great many more things to learn. After having gulped down at dinner a dozen bumpers of Hungary wine, I received from the hands of the Vice Tsar Romodanovsky a full quart of brandy, and being forced to empty it in two draughts, I soon lost my senses, though I had the comfort to observe that the rest of the guests lying asleep on the floor were in no condition to make reflections on my little skill at drinking.

In his first days, Weber's dignity was subjected to other strains:

I went, according to the custom of all polite countries, to pay my respects to the chief nobility of the Russian court in order to get acquainted with them. As it was not the custom to send word ahead ... I was obliged to wait in the cold until his lordship came out. Having made my compliments to him, he asked whether I had anything else to say; upon my answering in the negative, he dismissed me with this reply: "I have nothing to say to you either." I ventured to go a second time to visit another Russian. But as soon as he heard me mentioning my own country, he cut me short and flatly told me, "I know nothing of that country. You may go and apply to those of whom you are directed." This put an end to my desire of making visits and I firmly resolved never to go any more to any Russians without being invited except to the ministers with whom I had business, who indeed showed me all imaginable civility. A week after, I met those impolite courtiers at court and as they had observed His Tsarish Majesty discoursing with me for a considerable while and treating me with a great deal of favor, and besides that he had given Admiral Apraxin to see me well entertained, they now both came up to me and in a very mean and abject manner asked my pardon for their fault, almost falling down to the ground, and very liberally offering me all their brandy to oblige me.

During Peter's absence with his fleet, his sister, Princess Natalya, gave a banquet which provided Weber with another opportunity to observe Russian customs:

The toasts are begun at the very beginning of the meal, in large cups and glasses in the form of bells. At the entertainment of people of distinction no other wine is given but that of Hungary. ... All the beauties of Petersburg appeared at this entertainment, they were already at that time in the French dress, but it seemed to fit very uneasy upon them, particularly the hoop petticoats, and their black teeth were a sufficient proof that they had not yet weaned themselves from the notion so fast riveted in the minds of the old Russians, that white teeth only become blackamoors and monkeys.

The custom of blackening the teeth faded quickly, and by 1721, when he was writing his account, Weber assured his readers that this and other primitive habits "have since been so far removed that a stranger who comes into a polite assembly at Petersburg will hardly believe he is in Russia, but rather, as long as he enters into no discourse, think himself in the midst of London or Paris."

Among his fellow ambassadors in St. Petersburg, Weber was especially intrigued by the representatives of the Kalmuck and Uzbeki khans. One morning, Weber recalled,

I had the honor to meet an ambassador of the Khan of Kalmucks at the Chancery Office for Foreign Affairs. He was a man of frightful and fierce aspect. His head was shaved all over except a lock of hair which hung from the crown down to the neck according to the custom of that nation. He delivered on the part of his master, who is the Tsar's vassal, a roll of paper. Then he threw himself down to the ground, muttering for a long while something between his teeth. Which compliment, being interpreted to the Grand Chancellor Golovkin, he had this short answer that it was very well. This ceremony over, the ambassador resumed his fierce air.

Later that year, another ambassador arrived from the Kalmuck Khan bearing an odd commission. Some time before, Weber wrote, Prince Menshikov had "made a present of a handsome coach of English make to the Khan. Now, one of the wheels being broken, this ambassador was sent to ask the Prince to let him have another wheel. The ambassador told us that his master gave audience to the envoys of his neighbors in this coach and that on solemn days he dined in it."

On May 17, 1714, an ambassador of the Khan of Uzbek arrived in St. Petersburg. Among the ambassador's commissions was an offer from his master to the Tsar of

a passage through his dominions for the Tsar's yearly caravans to China, an incredible advantage, considering that the caravans were at that time obliged to make their journey to Peking with great inconvenience and in a year's time, through the whole extent of Siberia, following the windings and turnings of the rivers, there being no beaten rod, whereas they might go thither through his master's dominions on a good road in four months.

He afterward laid many silks and other Chinese and Persian goods together with rare furs at the Tsar's feet as a present from his master, adding that he left some Persian horses and beasts behind at Moscow and expressing his concern that a fine leopard and an ape had died on the road. In this speech, he never styled the Tsar other than the Wise Emperor, which with them is the highest title of honor. The ambassador was . . . about fifty years of age, of a lively and venerable aspect. He wore a long beard and on his turban he wore an ostrich feather, which he reported only princes and lords of the first rank were allowed to wear in his country.

Weber described Easter, the greatest of all Russian religious holidays.

The festival of Easter was celebrated with particular pomp, when large amends were made for the severe and pinching abstinence to which the Russians are kept during the preceding Lent. Their mirth, or rather madness in those days, is inexpressible, it being their opinion that he who has not been drunk at least a dozen times has shown but little of Easter devotion. Their singers in church are so extravagant as any of them, and it was little surprise to me to see two parties of them who fell out among themselves at a public house come to blows and beat each other with great poles so furiously that several of them were carried off for dead. The most remarkable ceremony in the said holidays is that the Russians of both sexes present ech other with painted eggs, giving the Kiss of Peace, the one saying "Christos voskres, Christ is risen," and the other answering "Voistino voskres, verily He is risen," whereupon they exchange eggs, and so part. For this reason many persons, particularly foreigners, who delight in that way of kissing the women, are seen rambling up and down with their eggs the whole day long.

In Peter's time, dwarfs and giants were much valued throughout Europe as exotic decorations in royal and noble households. King Frederick William of Prussia had collected most of the giants on the continent, although Peter kept Nicholas Bourgeois, the seven-foot-two-inch giant he had found in Calais. For years, Nicholas stood behind Peter's table, and in 1720 the Tsar married him to a Finnish giantess in hopes of producing oversized offspring. Peter was disappointed; the couple remained childless.

Dwarfs were more evenly distributed. Every Infanta of Spain was accompanied by a court dwarf to underscore whatever beauty she possessed. In Vienna, the Emperor Charles VI kept a famous Jewish dwarf, Jacob Ris, as a kind of ex-officio counselor at the Imperial court. More often, dwarfs were kept as human pets whose antics and droll appearance were even more amusing and diverting than talking parrots or dogs that could stand on their hind legs. In Russia, dwarfs were especially prized. Every great noble wanted a dwarf as a symbol of status or to please his wife, and competition among the nobility for their possession became intense. The birth of a dwarf was considered good luck and dwarfs born as serfs were often granted their freedom. To encourage the largest possible population of dwarfs, Russians took special care to marry them together in hopes that a dwarf couple would produce dwarf children.

It was a lavish gift when a dwarf or, even more, a pair of dwarfs was given away. In 1708, Prince Menshikov, a particularly keen collector of dwarfs, wrote to his wife: "I sent you a present of two girls, one of whom is very small and can serve as a parrot. She is more talkative than is usual among such little people and can make you gayer than if she were a real parrot." In 1716, Menshikov appealed to Peter: "Since one of my daughters possesses a dwarf girl and the other does not, therefore I beg you kindly to ask Her Majesty the Tsaritsa to allow me to take one of the dwarfs which were left after the death of the Tsaritsa Martha.

Peter was enormously fond of dwarfs. They had been around him all his life. As a child, he went to church walking between two rows of dwarfs carrying red silken curtains; as tsar, he kept at court a large population of dwarfs to amuse him and to play prominent roles on special occasions. At banquets, they were placed inside huge pies; when Peter cut into the pastry, a dwarf popped out. He liked to combine their strange shapes with the mock ceremonies in which he reveled. Dwarf weddings and even dwarf funerals, closely aping the ceremonies his own court performed, set Peter to laughing so hard that tears rolled down his cheeks.

In 1710, two days after the marriage of Peter's niece Anne to

Duke Frederick William of Courland, a marriage of two dwarfs was celebrated with exactly the same ceremony and pomp as the marriage of the royal couple. On the basis of accounts from others, Weber described this festivity, which was attended by seventy-two dwarfs:

A very little dwarf marched at the head of the procession, as being the marshal . . . conductor and master of the ceremony. He was followed by the bride and bridegroom neatly dressed. Then came the Tsar attended by his ministers, princes, boyars, officers and others; next marched all the dwarfs of both sexes in couples. They were in all seventy-two, some in the service of the Tsar, the Tsarina Dowager, the Prince and Princess Menshikov, and other persons of „ distinction, but others had been sent for from all parts of Russia, however remote. At the church, the priest asked the bridegroom whether he would take his bride to be his wife in a loud voice. He answered in a loud voice, addressing himself to his beloved, "You and no other." The bride being asked whether she had not made any promise of marriage to another than her bridegroom, she answered, "That would be very pretty, indeed." However, when the main question came to be asked, whether she would have the bridegroom for her husband, she uttered her "Yes" with such a low voice as could hardly be heard, which occasioned a good deal of laughter to the company. The Tsar, in token of his favor, was pleased to hold the garland over the bride's head according to the Russian custom. The ceremony being over, the company went by water to the Prince Menshikov's palace. Dinner was prepared in a spacious hall, where two days before the Tsar had entertained the guests invited to the Duke's marriage. Several small tables were placed in the middle of the hall for the new-married couple and the rest of the dwarfs, who were all splendidly dressed after the German fashion. . . . After dinner the dwarfs began to dance after the Russian way, which lasted till eleven at night. It is easy to imagine how much the Tsar and the rest of the company were delighted at the comical capers, strange grimaces, and odd postures of that medley of pygmies, most of whom were of a size the mere sight of which was enough to provoke laughter. One had a high bunch on his back, and very short legs, another was remarkable by a monstrous big belly; a third came waddling along on a little pair of crooked legs like a badger; a fourth had a head of prodigious size; some had wry mouths and long ears, little pig eyes, and chubby cheeks and many such comical figures more. When these diversions were ended, the newly married couple were carried to the Tsar's house and bedded in his own bedchamber.

Perhaps the Tsar's own abnormal height fed this taste for reveling with the physically deformed; in any case, it included not only giants and dwarfs, but all who were handicapped or afflicted by age or illness. On January 27 and 28, 1715, for example, the whole court joined in a two-day masquerade, preparations for which had been under way for three months. The occasion was the wedding of Nikita Zotov, who forty years before had been Peter's tutor and now, having served as Mock-Pope, was in his eighty-fourth year. The bride was a buxom widow of thirty-four.

"The nuptials of this extraordinary couple were solemnized by the court in masks," reported Weber.

The four persons appointed to invite the guests were the greatest stammerers that could be found in ail Russia. Old decrepit men who were not able to walk or stand had been picked out to serve for bridesmen, stewards and waiters. There were four running footmen, the most unwieldy fellows, who had been troubled with gout most of their lifetime, and were so fat and bulky they needed others to lead them. The Mock-Tsar of Moscow, who represented King David in his dress, instead of a harp had a lyre covered with a bearskin to play upon. He was carried on a sort of pageant [float], placed on a sled, to the four comers of which were tied as many bears, which, being pricked with goads by fellows purposely appointed for it, made such a frightful roaring as well suited the confused and horrible din raised by the disagreeing instruments of the rest of the company. The Tsar himself was dressed like a Boor of Frizeland, and skillfully beat a drum in company with three generals. In this manner, bells ringing everywhere, the ill-matched couple were attended by the maskers to the altar of the great church, where they were joined in matrimony by a priest a hundred years old who had lost his eyesight and memory, to supply which defect a pair of spectacles were put on his nose, two candles held before his eyes, and the words sounded into his ears so that he was able to pronounce them. From the church the procession went to the Tsar's palace, where the diversions lasted some days.

Weber's memoir, of course, ranges wider than his descriptions of the people and activities of Peter's court. He was fascinated by Russia and the Russian people. He admired the calm endurance of the average man and women, while at the same time he was often appalled by what he described as their "barbarous customs." In the following description of Russian baths, for example, amazement is mingled with a touch of admiration. (Weber fails to mention, however, that the Russian custom of a weekly bath kept the Russian people far cleaner than most Europeans, who sometimes went weeks or months without taking a bath.)

The Russian way of bathing, which they make use of for a universal medicine against any indisposition, includes four different sorts of baths out of which they choose one which they think to be proper against their particular distemper. Some sit naked in a boat, and having brought themselves by violent rowing into a great sweat, suddenly throw themselves into the river and after having swum for some time, they get out and dry themselves either by the sun or with their shirts. Others leap cold into the river and afterward lie close to a fire which they make on the shore, rubbing themselves over the whole body with oil or grease, and then,turn themselves so long about the fire till it is chafed in; which' in their opinion renders their limbs supple and nimble.

The third sort is the most common: along a little river are built upwards of thirty bagnios, one half for men and the other half for women. Those who have a mind to bathe, undress under the open sky, and run into the bagnio; after having sufficiently sweated and got cold water poured upon them, they go to bask and air themselves, and run up and down through the bushes sporting with one another. It is astonishing to see not only the men, but also the women unmarried as well as married . . . running about to the number of forty or fifty, and more together, stark naked, without any sort of shame or decency, so far from shunning the strangers who are walking thereabouts that they even laugh at them. The Russians in general both men and women use this sort of bathing both winter and summer twice a week at least; they pay one kopek a head, the bagnios belonging to the Tsar. Those that have bagnios in their houses pay yearly something for it; which universal bathing throughout Russia brings considerable revenue into the Tsar's coffers.

There is a fourth sort of bathing which is their most powerful remedy to the greatest distempers. They cause an oven to be heated as usual, and when the heat is somewhat abated (yet still so hot that I was not able to hold my hand on the bottom a quarter of a minute), five or six Russians, more or less, creep into it and having stretched themselves out at their full length, their companion who waits without shuts the hole so fast that they can hardly breathe within. When they can endure it no longer they call, upon which he that is upon the watch lets the sick come out again, who after having breathed some fresh air, creep into the oven again and repeat this operation till they are almost roasted, and coming out, their bodies being ruddy like a piece of red cloth, throw themselves in the summertime into the water, or in winter, which they love best, into the snow, with which they are covered all over, leaving only the nose and eyes open, and so they lie buried for two or three hours according to the state of their distemper; this they count an excellent method for the recovery of their health.

' Weber also witnessed Russians at sports and recreation. In a large, grassy field on the south side of the Neva, peasants, laborers and common people of all sorts gathered on Sunday afternoons after drinking in taverns. Men and boys divided into groups to box and fight for fun, screaming and shouting. Foreigners were appalled by these dusty, drunken melees, report -

ing that when the combat was over "the ground lies full of blood and hair, and many had to be carried away."

In the height of summer, the heat in St. Petersburg was almost intolerable; not even during the few hours of night when the sun disappeared below the horizon did the air become really cool. For some Russians, beer was a solution. But one visit to a Russian taphouse to see how the beer was dispensed was enough to put most foreigners off Russian beer forever. As Weber described this scene:

The liquor stands there in an open tub or cooler to which the common people crowd, taking it out with a wooden dipper and drinking it, holding their mouths over the tub that nothing may be spilled, so that if by any chance any of it misses their mouths, it runs down their beards and falls again into the tub. If a customer happens to have no money, he leaves his old fur coat, a shirt, a pair of stockings or some other part of his wearing apparel, to pawn until the evening when he receives his wages. In the meantime, those filthy pledges [the clothing] hang on the brim round the tub, nor does it matter much whether they are pushed in and float there for some time.

While his people were brawling in the fields and cooling themselves with beer, Peter's favorite summer relaxation was to sail on the Gulf of Finland. Sometimes, when he sailed to Kronstadt or Peterhof, he invited foreign ambassadors to accompany him. Weber's account of one such excursion presents a graphic picture of what it was like to spend a weekend in the country as a guest of Peter the Great:

On June 9, 1715, the Tsar went to Kronstadt, where we also followed in a galley, but in consequence of a great storm, we were obliged to remain at anchor in this open boat for two days and two nights without lights, without beds, without food and drink. When at last we arrived at Kronstadt, the Tsar invited us to his villa at Peterhof. We went with a fair wind, and at dinner wanned ourselves to such a degree with old Hungarian wine, although His Majesty spared himself, that on rising from the table, we could scarcely keep our legs, and when we had been obliged to empty a bowl holding a quart apiece from the hands of the Tsaritsa, we lost our senses, and in that condition they carried us out to different places, some to the garden, some to the woods, while the rest lay on the ground here and there.

At four o'clock in the afternoon, they woke us up and again invited us to the summer house, where the Tsar gave us each an axe and bade us follow him. He led us into a young wood, where he pointed out trees which it was necessary to fell in order to make an allee straight to the sea about a hundred paces long, and told us to cut down the trees. He himself began to work on the spot (there were seven of us besides the Tsar) and although this unaccustomed work, especially when we had not half recovered our senses, was not at all to our liking, we nevertheless cut boldly and diligently, so that in about three hours the allee was ready and the fumes of wine had entirely evaporated. None of us did himself any harm except a certain ambassador who hacked at the trees with such fury that by the fall of one, he was hit, knocked down, bruised, and badly scratched. After verbal thanks, we received our real recompense after supper in a second drink, which was so strong that we were taken to our beds unconscious.

We had hardly succeeded in sleeping an hour and a half before the Tsar's favorite appeared at midnight, pulled us out of our beds and dragged us willing or unwilling to the bedroom of a Circassian prince, asleep there with his wife, where by their bedside they plied us with so much wine and vodka that on the following day none of us could remember how we got home.

At eight o'clock in the morning we were invited to the palace for breakfast, which instead of coffee or tea as we expected, consisted of a good glass of vodka. Afterward we were taken to the foot of a little hill and made to mount eight wretched country nags without saddles or stirrups and ride about in review for an hour in the sight of Their Majesties, who leaned out the window. A certain Russian of distinction led the vanguard, and by the help of switches or sticks we made our jades mount uphill as best we could. After having taken a turn for an hour in the wood and refreshed ourselves with hearty draughts of water, we had a fourth drinking bout at dinner.

As the wind was strong we were put in the Tsar's covered boat, in which the Tsaritsa with her maid of honor had occupied the cabin, while the Tsar stood with us on the open deck and assured us that in spite of the strong wind we should arrive at Kronstadt at four o'clock. But after we had been tacking back and forth for two hours, we were caught by such a frightful squall that the Tsar, leaving aside all his jokes, himself took hold of the rudder, and in that danger displayed not only his great skill in working a ship, but an uncommon strength of body and undauntedness of mind. The Tsaritsa was laid on high benches in the cabin, which was full of water, the waves beating over the vessel, and violent rains falling, in which dangerous condition she also showed a great deal of courage and resolution.

We all gave ourselves up wholly to the will of God, and consoled ourselves with the thought that we should drown in such noble company. All effects of the drink disappeared very quickly, and we were filled with thoughts of repentance. Four smaller boats on which were the court of the Tsaritsa and our servants were tossed about on the waves and driven ashore. Our boat, which was strongly built and crewed with experienced sailors, after seven dangerous hours reached the harbor of Kronstadt, where the Tsar left us saying: "Good night to you, gentlemen. This was carrying the jest too far."

Next morning, the Tsar was seized with a fever. We on our part, being thoroughly soaked, having for so many hours sat in water up to the middle, made haste to get ashore on the island. But not being able to get either clothes or beds, our own baggage being gone another way, we made a fire, stripped stark naked, and wrapped our bodies up again in the coarse covers of sleds which we had borrowed from the peasants. In this condition we passed the night, warming ourselves at the fire, moralizing and making grave reflections on the miseries and uncertainties of human life.

On the 16th of July, the Tsar put to sea with his fleet, which we had not the good fortune to see, being all of us ill with fevers and other indispositions.

48

THE SECOND JOURNEY WEST

Peter's second historic journey to the West, in 1716-1717, came nineteen years after the Great Embassy of 1697-1698. The curious and enthusiastic young Muscovite giant who insisted on anonymity while he learned to build ships and who was regarded in Europe as something between a bumpkin and a barbarian had now become a powerful and victorious monarch, forty-four years old, whose exploits were known and whose influence was felt wherever he traveled. This time, of course, the Tsar was a familiar figure in many of the places he visited. In 1711, 1712 and 1713, Peter had visited the towns and princely courts of the North German states, and the oudandish stories about his appearance and behavior were disappearing. Still, he had never been to Paris; Louis XIV had been a friend of Sweden, and it was not until the Sun King died in September 1715 that the Tsar felt free to visit France. Ironically, Peter's visit to Paris, the most memorable event in this second journey, was not on his itinerary when he left St. Petersburg. His trip had three purposes: to try to improve his health, to attend a royal marriage and to attempt a final blow at Charles XII and end the war with Sweden.

Peter's doctors had long insisted that he go. For a number of years, the Tsar's health had given them concern. It was not his epileptic convulsions that bothered them; they were of short duration, and a few hours after they had passed, Peter seemed quite normal. But fevers—sometimes as a result of unrestricted drinking, sometimes because of the fatigue of travel and worry, sometimes from a mixture of these causes—kept him in bed for weeks. In November 1715, after a drinking bout at Apraxin's house in St. Petersburg, Peter became so ill that the Last Sacrament was given to him. For two days, his ministers and senators remained in an adjacent room, fearing the worst. But within three weeks the Tsar was on his feet and able to go to church, although his face was pale and shrunken. During this illness, one of Peter's physicians went to Germany and Holland for consultation, and returned with the opinion that the patient should travel as soon as possible to Pyrmont near Hanover, where the mineral waters bubbling out of the earth were thought to be milder than the waters of Carlsbad, which Peter had visited previously.

Peter was also going to oversee the marriage of his niece Catherine, the daughter of his half-brother, Ivan. Ivan's wife, Tsaritsa Praskovaya, was devoted to Peter and had allowed her daughters, Anne and Catherine, to be used as marriage partners to promote his German alliances. Anne had married the Duke of Courland in 1709 only to be widowed two months later. Now, Catherine, at twenty-four the older of the two, was to wed the Duke of Mecklenburg, whose small duchy lay on the Baltic coast between Pomerania, Brandenburg and Holstein.

Peter's third purpose in traveling west was to meet his allies, Frederick IV of Denmark, Frederick William of Prussia and George Louis of Hanover, who since September 1714 was now also King George I of England. Peter's ambassador in Copenhagen, Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, had been urging King Frederick IV to join Peter in an allied invasion of the Swedish province of Scania, which lay three miles across the Oresund from the Danish coast of Zealand. Frederick was hesitating, and Peter believed that only by going in person would he be able to persuade the Danes to take what now seemed the only step that could force Charles to end the war.

On January 24, 1716, the royal party left St. Petersburg. With Peter were the senior officials of the Foreign Ministry, Golovkin, Shafirov and Tolstoy, and the rising second-level men, Osterman and Yaguzhinsky. Catherine would look after Peter's health, leaving her little son, Peter Petrovich, three months old, and his sisters, Anne, now eight, and Elizabeth, seven, in the care of the Tsaritsa Praskovaya, who every day wrote a brief but affectionate account of the health and progress of the children. Praskovaya, in turn, was trusting her daughter "Katusha" (Catherine, the intended bride) to Peter's care.

Peter arrived in Danzig on February 18, a Sunday, just in time to attend a church service, accompanied by the Burgomeister. During the sermon, feeling a draft, Peter reached over, removed the Burgomeister's wig and put it on his own head. At the end of the service, he returned the wig with thanks. It was later explained to the startled official that it was Peter's habit, when his head was cold, to borrow a wig from any nearby Russian; in this case, the Burgomeister's had been the handiest.

Although all parties were on hand to celebrate the marriage in Danzig, the terms of the settlement had not yet been worked out. Duke Karl Leopold of Meckleburg has been described as "a tyrannical boor and one of the most notorious little despots that only the decay of the German constitution at that time had allowed to grow up." Meckleburg was small and weak and needed a powerful protector; marriage to a Russian princess would bring the Tsar's support. Knowing that two daughters of Tsar Ivan V were available, not caring which he received, he sent a betrothal ring to St. Petersburg with a letter of proposal in which the name of the recipient had been left blank. Catherine had been chosen.

The wedding took place on April 8, with Peter and King Augustus both present. The bridegroom was dressed in a Swedish-style uniform, with a long Swedish sword, but he forgot to wear his cuffs. At two o'clock, the Tsar's carriage arrived to bring Karl Leopold and his chief minister, Baron Eichholtz, to Peter's house. In front of a crowd of people filling the square before the house, the Duke stepped out of the carriage—and his wig caught on a nail. Bareheaded, he stood in front of the crowd while the faithful Eichholtz scrambled up and detached the wig from the nail. Then, with the bride, who wore the crown of a Russian grand duchess, the party walked through the streets to a small Orthodox chapel which Peter had had built especially for the service. The Orthodox ceremony, performed by a Russian bishop, lasted two hours, during which time Peter moved freely through the congregtion and the choir, prompting in the Psalter and helping with the singing. After the service, as the wedding party again walked through the streets, people in the crowd cried out, "Look! The Duke has no cuffs on!"

In the evening, there was a fireworks display on the square in front of the house where the Duke was staying. Peter led Augustus and the new bridegroom through the crowd, personally setting off the rockets. So long did this last that at one o'clock in the morning Eichholtz had to remind his master that his bride had gone to bed three hours earlier. Karl Leopold departed, but even here Eichholtz had to worry. The bridal chamber had been decorated with many lacquered objects, including a lacquered bed. The Duke hated the sharp odor and Eichholtz feared that he would be unable to sleep on it, but the Duke managed, and the next day the newly married pair and the entire wedding party dined with a satisfied and happy Peter. The festivities ended badly, however, when officials in both parties fell to squabbling over the exchange of commemorative gifts. The Duke had made handsome presents to the Russian ministers, but the Mecklenburgers received nothing—"not even a crooked pin." Worse, Tolstoy, who was used to the exchange of fabulous stones in Constantinople, complained that the ring he received was less valuable than those presented to Golovkin and Shafirov. Osterman, a junior diplomat in the Russian party, tried to calm Tolstoy's wrath by giving him also the small ring with which he had been presented, but Tolstoy continued to complain that he had been insulted.

To Peter's chagrin, the marriage caused grave complications with his North German allies, especially Hanover, which, with Prussia, had joined Russia, Denmark and Poland against Sweden. The common motive of these new allies was to expel Charles XII from the continent and to pick up and distribute among themselves the pieces of former Swedish territory inside the Holy Roman Empire. Increasingly, however, they began to realize that the destruction and disappearance of Swedish power was being accompanied by the rise of a new and greater power, that of the Russian Tsar. Until the Meckleburg marriage, the suspicions of the North German princes remained beneath the surface. In July 1715, the Danish and Prussian troops besieging Stralsund had even asked for Russian help. Sheremetev's army lay in western Poland and could easily have marched, but Prince Gregory Dolgoruky, the experienced Russian ambassador in Warsaw, feared that the situation in Poland was still too volatile and insisted that Sheremetev stay where he was. Accordingly, Stralsund fell without the participation of a single Russian soldier. When he heard the news, Peter was furious at Dolgoruky: "I am truly astonished that you have gone out of your mind in your old age and have let yourself be carried away by these constant tricksters and so have held these troops in Poland."

As Peter feared, a few months later when it came the turn of Wismar, the last Swedish port on the continent to be besieged, Russian troops were deliberately excluded. Wismar, a Pomeranian coastal town which Peter had specifically promised to Duke Karl Leopold of Mecklenburg as part of Princess Catherine's dowry, was invested by Danish and Prussian troops. When Prince Repnin arrived with four Russian infantry regiments and five regiments of dragoons, he was told to take them away. An argument broke out and the Russian and Prussian commanders almost came to blows, but the Russians withdrew. When Peter heard, he was chagrined, but he kept his temper, as he needed allied help for his sea-borne invasion of Sweden.

Shortly afterward, the situation worsened. A Prussian detachment passing through Mecklenburg was intercepted by a larger Russian force and conducted forcibly to the frontier. Frederick Willian of Prussia was outraged, declaring that his men had been treated "as if they were enemies." He canceled a meeting with the Tsar and threatened to withdraw completely from the alliance. "The Tsar must give me complete satisfaction," he fumed, "or I shall immediately concentrate my army, which is in good condition." To one of his ministers, he sputtered on, "Thanks be to God I am not in need like [the King of Denmark], who has let himself be cozened by the Muscovites. The Tsar may know that he has to do with no King of Poland or Denmark but with a Prussian who will break his pate for him." Frederick William's anger passed quickly, as did most of his rages. Beneath the surface, his annoyance and suspicion of Hanover were greater than his fear of Russia, and he soon agreed to meet Peter in Stettin, where he handed over the port of Wismar to the Duke of Mecklenburg. First, he insisted that the fortifications of the town be razed, for, he said, to give it to Karl Leopold with its ramparts intact "would be like putting a sharp knife in the hands of the child."

One of Frederick William's reasons for turning Wismar over to the Duke of Mecklenburg was that he thought it would irritate the Hanoverians, and he was right. Here in Hanover lay a deeper and more suspicious antagonism toward Peter and the Russian presence in North Germany. In part, it was personal: Bernstorff, the leading Hanoverian minister of King George I, was a native Mecklenburger and a member of the aristocratic party which was strongly hostile to Duke Karl Leopold. From his position at King George's elbow, he was able to insinuate his prejudices into the King's ear. Why was the Tsar establishing such close dynastic relations with a small duchy deep in the heart of North Germany? Why were ten Russian regiments to be permanently stationed there? Was not the Tsar's demand that Wismar be turned over to Mecklenburg as part of his niece's dowry simply a clever way of establishing a Russian base in the western Baltic? If more Russian troops were coming, supposedly to participate in an invasion of Sweden, who could say what use would be found for them once they were in North Germany? To all these prejudices and suspicions, George I listened with a ready ear, for he was himself worried about the growing Russian influence and the prospect of large numbers of Russian troops being quartered so close to Hanover. Had Peter been properly informed and counseled regarding these Hanoverian suspicions, he might have acted differently in regard to Mecklenburg. But Peter was already in Danzig, the marriage agreement was already drawn, and although he was eager to maintain an alliance with Hanover and gain an alliance with England, the Tsar refused to go back on his word.

After three weeks in Pyrmont drinking the waters and taking his cure, Peter returned to Mecklenburg, where he had left the Tsaritsa Catherine with Duke Karl Leopold and his bride, Catherine. It was now midsummer, and during the visit Peter preferred to dine in the garden of the Duke's palace, looking out over a lake. Karl Leopold insisted that to give the scene the proper formality, a number of his tall guardsmen, all of whom possessed giant mustaches, must stand at attention around the table, with drawn swords. Peter, who liked to relax at dinner, found this ridiculous and repeatedly asked that the guardsmen be dispensed with. Finally, one evening, he suggested to his host that they might all be more comfortable if the guardsmen would lay down their swords and use their large mustaches to swat the gnats which swarmed over the table.

Against a backdrop of suspicion and dissension between allies, Peter went ahead with his plans for a joint invasion of Sweden in the summer of 1716. Obstinate "Brother Charles" showed no sign of making peace; on the contrary, the Charles who returned to Sweden after the fall of Stralsund was busily raising a new army and preparing once again to attack. Rather than leave the initiative to his enemies, he had already, in February, lashed out at his nearest enemy, Denmark. If the ice had frozen the Oresund that winter, he would have marched across into Zealand and stormed the city of Copenhagen with an army of 12,000 men. The ice formed, but broke up in a storm, and Charles marched his army instead into southern Norway, then still a province of Denmark. He swept through the mountain passes, quickly overcoming the rocky fortresses and occupying the city of Kristiania (now Oslo) before being forced to retreat because of inadequate supplies.

To Peter, Charles' offensive demonstrated that the only way to end the war was to invade Sweden and defeat Charles XII on his home ground. To do this, Russia needed allies. Even despite his commanding position on the upper Baltic, Peter did not dare risk a large-scale, water-borne invasion of Sweden with only the Russian fleet to protect his troopships; the Swedish navy was still too strong. Thus it was that in the spring of 1716, while Peter was overseeing a marriage in Mecklenburg and taking the waters at Pyrmont, the Russian galley fleet began moving westward down the southern coast of the Baltic, first to Danzig, then to Rostock. Stopping in Hamburg before taking the waters, Peter had met King Frederick IV of Denmark and worked out a general plan for the invasion. It called for a combined Russian-Danish landing in Scania, the southernmost province of Sweden, while simultaneously a strong entirely Russian force would land on the Swedish east coast, thus forcing Charles to fight on two fronts. Both invasion forces would be covered by the Russian and Danish fleets, acting as a unit under the Danish Admiral Gyldenl0ve. England also would contribute a powerful squadron, although neither Peter nor Frederick was certain that the English would actually fight if a naval battle occurred. Peter agreed to supply 40,000 Russian soldiers including infantry and cavalry, plus his entire Russian fleet, both galleys and men-of-war. The Danes would contribute 30,000 men, most of the artillery and ammunition for the entire army, and the whole of the Danish navy. To transport the huge number of men and horses and their equipment across the Oresund, Frederick IV also agreed to commandeer the Danish merchant fleet for the entire summer. Frederick William I of Prussia declined to participate in the actual invasion, but did agree to supply twenty transport ships for use in convoying the Russian infantry assembled at Rostock to Copenhagen, the jumping-off point for the Scania invasion. On paper, at least, it seemed a formidable aggregation, especially against a supposedly helpless Sweden. One part of the plan, devised to satisfy the egos of Frederick and Peter, appeared unwise: Supreme command of the expedition was to be divided, with the two monarchs assuming control in alternate weeks.

After three weeks in Pyrmont, Peter went to Rostock, where his troops were concentrated, and, leaving Catherine, set out with a flotilla of forty-eight galleys for Copenhagen, arriving in the harbor on July 6. He was received with thunderous honors and wrote to Catherine, "Let me know when you will be here, so that I can meet you, for the formalities here are indescribable. Yesterday, I was at such a ceremony as I have not seen for twenty years."

Despite this welcome, time was passing. July slipped away and Peter wrote to Catherine, "We are only chattering in vain." The main problem was that the Danish fleet, necessary to cover the invasion force, was still cruising off the coast of Norway, watching over the withdrawal of the Swedish force which had captured Kristiania. This fleet did not return to Copenhagen until August 7, and even then the transports were not ready for the troops to board. Meanwhile, with die arrival of Admiral Norris and an English squadron of nineteen ships-of-the-line, a gigantic combined fleet had assembled at Copenhagen. In the interim until the armies could be embarked, Admiral Norris proposed a cruise of the joint fleets in the Baltic. Peter, tired of doing nothing, consented. As neither Norris nor the Danish Admiral Gyldenl0ve would consent to serve under the other, the Tsar was named as commander-in-chief. On August 16, Peter hoisted his flag on the Russian ship-of-the-line Ingria and signaled the fleet to weigh anchor. It was the noblest fleet of sail ever to appear in the Baltic: sixty-nine men-of-war—nineteen English, six Dutch, twenty-three Danish and twenty-one Russian warships—and more than 400 merchantmen, all under the command of a self-made sailor whose country had not possessed a single ocean-going ship twenty years before.

Yet, for all its majesty and overwhelming strength, it achieved little. The Swedish fleet, its twenty ships-of-the-line outnumbered three to one, remained in Karlskrona. Norris wanted to brave the fortress guns, enter the harbor and try to sink the fleet at its moorings, but the Danish Admiral, partly out of jealousy and partly because his government had secretly instructed him to withhold the fleet from risky action, declined. Peter was frustrated and, after returning to Copenhagen, went back to the Swedish coast with two small frigates and two galleys to reconnoiter. He found that Charles XII had not wasted the time provided him by the allied delays; as Peter's ships edged in close to shore to get a better look, cannon balls hit his ship. Another Russian ship suffered more serious damage. A troop of Cossacks landed from the galleys and captured some prisoners, who declared that the King of Sweden had an army of 20,000 men.

In fact, Charles had worked wonders. He had garrisoned and provisioned all the fortresses along the coast of Scania. At inland towns, reserves of infantry and cavalry were gathered, ready to counterattack an enemy bridgehead. A large reserve of artillery was held at Karlskrona, awaiting the King's command. Charles had only 22,000 men—12,000 cavlary and 10,000 infantry—but he knew that not all the invaders could be brought across at once, and his hope was to attack and defeat the vanguards before they could be reinforced. If he himself was forced to retreat, he was prepared to follow Peter's example and burn all the villages and towns of southern Sweden, confronting the invaders with a blackened desert. (It helped, in forming this plan, that Scania had been Danish until the mid-seventeenth century.)

In Zealand, through the early days of September, the preparation went ahead. Seventeen regiments of Russian infantry and nine regiments of Russian dragoons, totaling 29,000 men, had been brought from Rostock. Added to 12,000 Danish infantrymen and 10,000 Danish cavalry, the combined allied force totaled 51,000. The landing date, September 21, was fixed. Then on September 17, just before the regiments were to move to their embarkation sites, Peter suddenly announced that the invasion had been called off. It was too late in the year, he declared; the assault would have to wait until the following spring. Both George I of England and Frederick IV of Denmark, as well as their ministers, admirals and generals, were stunned by this unilateral decision. Frederick protested that postponement meant cancellation, as he could not possibly commandeer the merchant fleet of Denmark for two years in a row.

Nevertheless, Peter remained adamant. His allies had lost the summer through procrastination, he argued, and now the arrival of autumn made the expedition hazardous. He understood that Charles would meet the first invaders ashore with a pulverizing counterblow and explained that to repulse this stroke and gain a secure foothold which could be held through the winter, a large number of troops would have to be landed very quickly, a successful battle fought and at least two towns, Malmo and Landskrona, besieged and taken. If this operation failed, he asked, where were his troops to spend the icy winter? The Danes replied that the soldiers could shelter in pits dug in the earth. Peter replied that this would kill more men than a battle. And how could his men find food and forage in the unfriendly province of Scania? "Thirty thousand Swedish troops are sitting at that table," Peter said, "who will not easily give place to uninvited guests."

The Danes argued that provisions could be brought across the Danish islands. "Soldiers' bellies," said Peter, "are not satisfied with empty promises and hopes but they demand ready and real storehouses." Further, he asked, how could the allies prevent Charles from burning and ravaging the country as he retreated north? How could they force him to stand and give battle? Might the allied armies not find themselves dwindling away in a hostile country in the dead of winter, just as Chares' own army had dwindled away in the Russian winter? Instead of delivering the coup de grace to Sweden, might they not be courting disaster for themselves? Peter understood and had great respect for Charles. "I know his way of making war. He would give us no rest, and our armies would be weakened." No, he repeated decisively, given the lateness of the season and the strength of the enemy, the invasion must be postponed until the following spring.

Peter's decision caused a diplomatic storm. Abandonment of the expedition seemed to confirm the worst suspicions of his allies. Cleverly, Peter had brought 29,000 Russian soldiers to Copenhagen not to invade Sweden but to occupy Denmark, seize Wismar and dictate the politics of North Germany. Frederick IV of Denmark was apprehensive about the numerous Russian regiments camped in the suburbs of his capital; he was also angry that

Peter's sudden decision had robbed him of certain victory over Sweden. The English were worried about the effect a powerful Russian army and fleet stationed at the entrance to the Baltic would have on English trade in that sea. But it was the Hanoverians who were most violently distressed by this Russian "plot." Bernstorff, their chief minister, went to see the English General Stanhope, who was then in Hanover with King George I, and hysterically proposed that English "crush the Tsar immediately and secure his ships, even seize his person" as a means of ensuring that all Russian troops would evacuate Denmark and Germany. Stanhope refused, and Bernstorff thereupon sent an order directly to Admiral Norris at Copenhagen to seize the Tsar and the Russian ships. Norris prudently refused also, saying that he took orders from the government of England, not of Hanover.

While all these accusations flew behind his back, Peter remained at Copenhagen, where he continued to be honored by the Danes. The Tsar was especially pleased by the treatment accorded Catherine. She was accepted as his wife and Tsaritsa, and in acknowledgement of her rank, the Queen of Denmark paid a formal call to welcome her to the capital. Admiral Norris was respectful and amiable to his fellow admiral, the Tsar. On the anniversary of the Battle of Lesnaya, the victory for which Peter had taken personal credit, all the ships of the English squadron thundered a salute.

In fact, the suspicions of the Tsar's allies were groundless. Peter's intention had been to invade Sweden in order to end the war. When the invasion attempt seemed too risky, he canceled it, but immediately he began looking for another means to achieve his purpose. As early as October 13, he had written to the Senate in St. Petersburg, explaining what he had done and declaring that the only possibility remaining would be to attack the Swedish homeland from a different direction: across the Gulf of Bothnia from the Aland Islands. He ordered such an attack prepared. As for the threat to Denmark and Hanover, it melted away even as Bernstorff was proclaiming doom. The Russian battalions quietly returned to Mecklenburg and thence—with the exception of a small force of infantry and one cavalry regiment—to Poland. The Russian fleet sailed north for its winter harbors, Riga, Reval and Kronstadt. On October 15, Peter and Catherine also left the Danish capital, traveling slowly through Holstein to meet King Frederick William of Prussia at Havelsberg.

Frederick William disliked Hanover, although both his wife and his mother were Hanoverian princesses. When Bernstorff accused the Russians of wishing to occupy Lubeck, Hamburg and Wismar, Frederick William stood by Peter. "The Tsar has given his word

that he will take nothing for himself from the empire," the Prussian King pointed out. "Besides, part of his cavalry is marching toward Poland, and it would be impossible for him to take those three cities without artillery which he does not possess." To a report from his own minister, Ilgen, on the Hanoverian insinuations, the King replied, "Tomfoolery! I shall refuse and sit fast by brother Peter." Not surprisingly in view of Frederick William's attitude, the Tsar's meeting with the King went well. As tokens of friendship, the two monarchs exchanged gifts: Peter promised more Russian giants for the Potsdam Grenadiers, while Frederick William presented the Tsar with a yacht and a priceless amber cabinet.

It was winter in Northern Europe. Darkness came early, the air had a chilling edge, the roads were hardening into ruts. Soon, snow would cover everything. Catherine was in advanced pregnancy and the long journey back to St. Petersburg would not be easy. Peter decided, accordingly, not to return to Russia for the winter, but to travel farther westward and pass the coldest months in Amsterdam, which he had not seen for eighteen years. Leaving Catherine to follow more slowly, he traveled through Hamburg, Bremen, Amersfoort and Utrecht, arriving in Amsterdam on December 6. Even on these relatively well-traveled roads, conditions were primitive. Peter wrote to warn Catherine:

What I have written before I now confirm, not to come by the way which I came, for it is indescribably bad. Do not bring many ' people, for life in Holland has become very expensive. As to the church singers, if they have not already started, half of them will be enough. Leave the rest in Mecklenburg. All who are with me here sympathize with you about your journey. If you can endure it, you had better stay where you are, for the bad roads may be dangerous to you. However, do as you please, and for God's sake do not think that I do not want you to come, for you know yourself how much I wish it, and it is better for you to come than to be lonely and sad. Still, I could not desist from writing and I know that you will not endure being left alone.

Catherine started, but after a difficult journey she was forced to halt at Wesel, near the Dutch frontier. Here, on January 2, 1717, she gave birth to a son, whom they had agreed should be called Paul. The Tsar, who was once again lying in bed with a six-week bout of fever, wrote to her enthusiastically:

I received yesterday your delightful letter in which you say that the Lord God has blessed us by giving us another recruit ... for which praise be to him and unforgetting thanks. It delighted me doubly, first about the newborn child, and that the Lord God has freed you from your pains, from which also I became better. Ever since Christmas I have not been able to sit up as long as yesterday. As soon as possible, I will immediately come to you.

The following day, Peter received a shock: His son was dead and his wife was very weak. Peter, who had already sent couriers to Russia to announce the birth, tried to be helpful to Catherine.

I received your letter about what I knew before, the unexpected occurrence which has changed joy to grief. What answer can I give except that of the long-suffering Job? The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord. I beg you to reflect on it in this way; I do as far as I can. My illness, thank God, lessens from hour to hour, and I hope to soon go out of the house. It is now nothing but irritation. Otherwise, I praise God I am well, and should long ago have gone to you if 1 could have gone by water, but I fear the shaking up of land traveling. Besides, I am waiting for an answer from the English King, who is expected here in these days.

Although Peter tried to cast off his unhappiness at losing a son and thought for the moment that he was getting better, little Paul's death seemed to aggravate his fever and he remained in bed for another month. Catherine found him there when she arrived in Amsterdam. Because of this illness, Peter did not meet the stolid Hanoverian who had become England's King. When George I passed through Holland to board his ship for England, Peter sent Tolstoy and Kurakin to call on him, but the Russian envoys were not received. Later, George I apologized, saying that he had been already on board the ship and had had to sail with the tide.

When he began to feel better, Peter enjoyed his stay in Holland. Catherine was with him, and he devoted himself to revisiting and showing her the places where he had been happy as a young man. He returned to Zaandam with Catherine and saw again the East India Company wharf where he had built a frigate. He journeyed to Utrecht, the Hague, Leyden and Rotterdam. And in the spring, if his plans worked out, he would at last visit Paris and see the city renowned throughout the world for its culture, its elegant society and its architectural splendor.

49

"THE KING IS A MIGHTY MAN

The France which Peter proposed to visit in 1717 was like a vast, intricately complex system of orbiting spheres whose sun, once the source of warmth, life and meaning for the whole, was now extinct. On September 1, 1715, Louis XIV, the Sun King, died at the age of seventy-six, after a reign which had lasted seventy-two years. For thirty-five of those years, Louis' reign had run parallel to that of Peter, the other great monarch of the time. But Louis and Peter were of different generations, and as Peter's influence and Russia's power had grown, the Sun King's glory had begun to fade.

Louis' last years were blighted by domestic tragedy; his only surviving legitimate child, his heir, the colorless Grand Dauphin, who was terrified of his father, died in 1711. The new Dauphin, the dead man's son and the King's grandson, was the Due de Bourgogne, a handsome, charming, intelligent young man who embodied France's hopes for the future. His beautiful wife, Marie Adelaide of Savoy, was almost more brilliant than he. Brought as a child bride to Versailles, she grew up in the presence of the aging King, who doted on her. It was said that of all the women he had ever loved, he never loved any as much as his grandson's bride. Suddenly, in 1712, both the new Dauphin and his gay young wife were gone, dead of measles within a week of each other, he at thirty, she at twenty-seven. Their eldest son, Louis' great-grandson, became the next Dauphin. Within a few days, he died of the same disease.

There remained to the seventy-five-year-old King only one great-grandson, a pink-cheeked child of two, the last surviving infant in the direct line. He, too, had measles, but he survived the disease because his governess locked the doors and would not permit the doctors to touch him with their bleedings and emetics. This new little Dauphin remained miraculously alive and lived to rule France for fifty-nine years as Louis XV. On his deathbed, Louis XIV called for his great-grandson and heir who by then was five. Face to face, these two Bourbons who between them ruled

France for 131 years regarded each other. Then the Sun King said, "My child, you will one day be a great king. Do not imitate me in my taste for war. Always relate your actions to God and make your subjects honor Him. It breaks my heart to leave them in such a state."

On the sun King's death, Versailles was quickly deserted. The great rooms were stripped of furniture, the magnificent court was dissolved. The new King lived in the Tuileries in Paris, and sometimes strollers in the garden could see him, a chubby, pink-cheeked boy with long, curling hair, long eyelashes and a lengthening Bourbon nose.

The ruling power in France had passed into the hands of a regent—Louis XIV's nephew, Philippe, Due d'Orleans, who was the First Prince of the Blood and the direct heir to the throne after the boy King. In 1717, Philippe was forty-two, small, robust and a heroic womanizer: noblewomen, girls from the opera, girls from the street. He savored whores especially and liked to try out new girls as soon as they arrived in Paris. He cared not a whit whether the women were beautiful or ugly. His mother admitted, "He is quite crazy about women. Provided they are good-tempered, indelicate, great eaters and drinkers, he troubles little about their looks." Once when she said something to Philippe about this last point, he countered amiably, "Bah, Maman, at night all cats are gray."

The Regent's private suppers at the Palais Royal were the talk of France. Behind barricaded doors, he and his friends lay on couches and dined with women from the opera ballet who wore flimsy, transparent dresses and later danced naked. The Regent not only cared nothing for convention; he delighted in shocking it. His language at the table was so gross that his wife refused to invite anyone to dinner. He scorned religion and once brought a book by Rabelais to mass and read from it ostentatiously during the service. His wife, a daughter of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan, bore him eight children and spent most of her time locked in her room, suffering from migraines.

Under the circumstances, many in France feared for the life of the young King Louis XV. For if something happened to the boy, the Regent would become king. In fact, these fears were groundless. Philippe d'Orleans, for all his grossness, had many good qualities. He was humane and compassionate as well as sensual, and his sins did not include personal envy or ambition. He had great charm of voice and smile, and when he wished, his manners and gestures were graceful and eloquent. He was fascinated by science and art. His suite in the Palais Royal was hung with Titians and Van Dycks, and he wrote chamber music which still is played today. He was completely devoted to the small boy placed in his charge, and desired only to protect the throne until the King reached his majority. He began work at six a.m., no matter how hard he had debauched the night before. None of his co-hedonists, male or female, had the slightest effect on his decisions or policy. He saw clearly the desperate state of poverty to which his glorious uncle's martial adventures had reduced his country. During the eight years of Philippe's regency, except for a fracas with Spain, French soldiers stayed in their barracks. Philippe's foreign policy was based on peace. Even more incredible to all of Europe, the cornerstone of this new French policy was friendship with England.

Shortly before Peter's visit to Paris, the pattern of many years in Western Europe had been broken by a series of dramatic events. The fall of the Whig ministry in England had stripped Marlborough of his power, and the Anglo-Dutch invasion of northern France had ground to an inconclusive halt. The new Tory ministry was anxious for peace, and the exhausted, aging Sun King had been happy to agree. Peace was signed in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht, and the great War of the Spanish Succession, which had engulfed all the kingdoms and empires of Western Europe, ended. Soon after, the Sun King himself was gone. In England, too, a royal death occurred. Queen Anne died, leaving no Protestant Stuart heir, all sixteen of her children having died in infancy or childhood. In order to ensure the Protestant succession, as agreed by Parliament in advance, the Elector of Hanover, George Louis, ascended the throne of England as King George I while retaining his rule over Hanover.

Taken as a whole, these events created an entirely new diplomatic landscape in Europe. With peace among themselves, the nations of the West could devote more attention to what, for them, had^ been a secondary threater: the War in the North. England, which had emerged from the War of the Spanish Succession virtually unchallenged in its supremacy at sea, was concerned that the growing power of Russia in the Baltic might affect British trade in that area, and powerful British naval squadrons began to appear in that northern sea. Hanover was also hostile to Peter, fearing the Tsar's new presence in northern Germany. Three times the King-Elector refused Peter's overtures for a meeting, demanding first that all Russian troops be evacuated from Germany.

Meanwhile, the foreign policy of France had done a revolutionary flip-flop. Instead of hostility to England and support for the Catholic Jacobites, France, under the regency of Philippe, sought friendship with England and guaranteed the rights of the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty. France's long support of Sweden also seemed ready for change. For years, the Sun King had subsidized the Swedes and used them as a counterpoise to keep the Austrian emperor distracted in Germany. Now, with the Swedes defeated and driven completely out of Germany, and with the power of the Hapsburg Emperor greatly enhanced, France needed a new ally in the East. Peter's Russia, which had soared to prominence within the past decade, was a natural possibility. Through diplomatic channels, various hints and overtures began to pass. And Peter was eager to listen. Although throughout his reign France had opposed him in Poland and in Constantinople, he knew that the structure of Europe was changing. An alliance or an understanding with France would be a balance to his increasingly difficult relations with Hanover and England. Even more, he saw France's help as a possible way of ending the Northern War. France was still paying monthly subsidies to Sweden; if these could be cut off and France's diplomatic support of Sweden withdrawn, Peter felt that he might at last persuade an isolated Charles XII that Sweden must make peace.

Peter's proposal to France, when it came, was a bold one: that France take Russia instead of Sweden as her ally in the East. In addition, Peter suggested that he could bring Prussia and Poland into the arrangement. Aware that France's treaties with England and Holland would be a stumbling block, Peter argued that the new alliance would not threaten the earlier one. Specifically, he proposed that, in return for Russian guarantees of the Treaty of Utrecht, France halt its subsidies to Sweden and instead pay to Russia 25,000 crowns a month for the duration of the Northern War—which, with France behind him, he hoped would be short. Finally, Peter proposed a personal link between the two nations. To seal the alliance and to mark Russia's emergence as a great power, he would marry his eight-year-old daughter Elizabeth to the seven-year-old King of France, Louis XV.

Such proposals were not unattractive to the Regent of France, but to the decisive power in French foreign policy, the Abbe Guillaume Dubois, they were unwelcome. The new alliance with England was his handiwork, and he feared that any arrangement with Russia would throw the whole thing off balance. In a letter to the Regent advising against the Russian proposal, Dubois said, "If, in establishing the Tsar, you chase the English and the Dutch from the Baltic Sea, you will be eternally odious to these two nations." Further, Dubois warned, the Regent might be sacrificing England and Holland in return for only a short-term relationship with Russia. "The Tsar has chronic maladies," he pointed out, and deciding that he might accomplish more by seeing the Regent in person, decided to go to Paris. Besides, he had seen Amsterdam, London, Berlin and Vienna, but never Paris. Through Kurakin, his ambassador in Holland, he informed the Regent that he would like to make a visit.

There could be no question of refusing, although the Regent and is advisors had misgivings. Following diplomatic custom, the host country paid the expenses of the guest, and for the Tsar and his suite, this expense would be enormous. Further, Peter had a reputation as an impetuous monarch, sensitive to insult and quick to anger, and the men of his suite were said to be of similar character. Nevertheless, the Regent made ready; the Tsar was to be received as a grand European monarch. A cavalcade of carriages, horses, wagons and royal servants under the command of Monsieur de Liboy, a gentleman of the King's household, was sent to Calais to escort the Russian guests to Paris. Liboy was to honor Peter, wait upon him and pay all his expenses. In Paris, meanwhile, the apartments of the Sun King's mother, Anne of Austria, in the Louvre were prepared for the guest. At the same time, Kurakin, knowing Peter's tastes, suggested that his master might be happier in a smaller, more private place. Accordingly, a handsome private mansion, the Hotel Lesdiguieres, was also prepared. On the chance that the Tsar would choose it, the hotel was handsomely furnished from the royal collection. Magnificent armchairs, polished desks and inlaid tables were carried there from the Louvre. Cooks, servants and fifty soldiers were assigned to provide the Tsar with nourishment, comfort and security.

Meanwhile, Peter and his party of sixty-one persons, including Golovkin, Shafirov, Peter Tolstoy, Vasily Dolgoruky, Buturlin, Osterman and Yaguzhinsky, traveled slowly through the Low Countries. As was his custom, the Tsar stopped often to visit towns, examine curiosities and study the people and their way of life. Although he had again adopted the partial facade of traveling incognito to minimize the time wasted in official ceremonies, he was pleased to hear church bells rung and cannon fired in his honor as he passed by. Catherine accompanied him as far as Rotterdam; to simplify the journey, she would wait at The Hague while he visited France. He felt that her presence would demand additional time-consuming ceremonies which by himself he could avoid.

From Rotterdam, Peter traveled by boat to Breda and up the

Shceldt to Antwerp, where he climbed the cathedral tower to gaze out over the city. In Brussels, he wrote to Catherine: "I wish to send you lace for fontange and engagements [that is, lace ribbons to be clustered in the hair and across the bodice—the latest style in Paris], for the best lace in all Europe is made here, but they make it to order only. Therefore, send the pattern and what name or arms you wish worked on it." From Brussels, Peter moved on to Ghent, Bruges, Ostend and Dunquerque, finally reaching the French frontier at Calais, where he rested for nine days to observe the last week of Lent and to celebrate Russian Easter.

At Calais, the Russian travelers met Liboy and the French welcoming escort. For Liboy, this first exposure to the Russian character was traumatic. The guests complained about the carriages to which they were assigned, and they spent freely, every ecue of which had to be paid by Liboy. In desperation, he urged Paris that the Tsar and his suite be put on a fixed daily allowance, not to be exceeded, allowing them to argue among themselves how the sum would be spent.

Liboy had been ordered to report to Paris on the habits of the visitors and to ascertain the purpose of their visit. He found it impossible to understand Peter, who, instead of doing anything serious, seemed only to be idly amusing himself, ambling along, examining things which, in Liboy's eyes, were irrelevant. "This littl court," he wrote of the Russian party of twenty-two persons of rank and thirty-nine orderlies, "is very changeable and irresolute and from the throne to the stable, very subject to anger." The Tsar, he reported, "is of very great stature, a little stooped, with the habit of holding his head down. He is dark and there is a fierceness in his expression. He appears to have a lively mind and a ready understanding, with a certain grandeur, in his movements, but with little restraint." Elaborating in a subsequent report, Liboy continued:

In the Tsar, one does indeed find seeds of virtue, but they are wild and very mixed with failings. I believe that he lacks most of all uniformity and constancy of purpose and that he has not arrived at that point where one can rely on what would be concluded with him. I admit that Prince Kurakin is polite; he appears to be intelligent and to desire to arrange everything to our mutual satisfaction. I do not know if it is by temperament or through fear of the Tsar, who appears, as I have said, very hard to please and quick-tempered. Prince Dolgoruky appears a gentleman and to be much esteemed by the Tsar; the only inconvenience is that he understands absolutely no language but Russian. In this respect allow me to remark that the term "Muscovite" or even "Muscovy" is deeply offensive to all this court.

The Tsar rises very early, dines about ten o'clock, sups about seven and retires before nine. He drinks liquors before meals, beer and wine in the afternoon, sups very little and sometimes not at all. I have not been able to perceive any sort of council or conference for serious business, unless they discuss affairs while tippling, the Tsar deciding alone and promptly whatever is presented. This prince varies on all occasions his amusements and walks and is extraordinarily quick, impatient and very hard to please. ... He likes especially to see the water. He lives in the great apartments and sleeps in some out-of-the-way room if there by any.

To counsel the French mais d'hotel and chefs who would be preparing food for the Russian visitor, Liboy forwarded specific recommendations:

The Tsar has a head cook who prepares two or three dishes for him every day and who uses for this purpose enough wine and meat to serve a table of eight.

He is served both a meat and a Lenten dinner on Fridays and Saturdays.

He likes sharp sauces, brown and hard bread, and green peas. He eats many sweet oranges and apples and pears. He generally drinks light beer and dark vin de nuits without liquor.

In the morning he drinks aniseed water [kummel], liquors before meals, beer and wine in the afternoon. All of them fairly cold.

He eats no sweetmeats and does not drink sweetened liquors at his meals.

On May 4, Peter left Calais on the road to Paris, characteristically refusing to follow and expected route. A formal reception had been prepared for him at Amiens; he skirted the city. At Beauvais, where he saw the nave of the largest cathedral in France, still unfinished since the thirteenth century, he spumed a banquet which was offered. "I am a soldier," he told the Bishop of Beauvais, "and when I find bread and water I am content." Peter was exaggerating; he still liked wine, although he preferred his favorite Hungarian Tokay to the French varieties. "Thanks to the Hungarian wine, which here is a great rarity," he wrote to Catherine from Calais. "But there is only one bottle of vodka left. I don't know what to do."

At noon on May 7, at Beaumont-sur-Oise, twenty-five miles northeast of Paris, Peter found the marshal de Tesse waiting for him with a procession of royal carriages and an escort of red-coated cavalry, of the Maison de Roi. Tesse, standing beside the Tsar's carriage, made a deep, low bow, flourishing his hat, as Peter stepped out. Peter greatly admired the Marshal's carriage and chose to ride in it as he entered the capital through the Porte St.

Denis. But he did not want Tesse in the carriage with him, preferring instead three of his own Russians. Tesse, whose duty was to please, followed in another carriage.

The procession arrived at the Louvre at nine p.m. Peter entered the palace and walked through the late Queen Mother's apartments which had been prepared for him. As Kurakin had predicted, the Tsar found them too magnificent and too brilliantly lighted. While there, Peter looked at a dinner table which had been superbly set for him and sixty people, but he only nibbled some bread and radishes, tasted six kinds of wine and drank two glasses of beer. Then he returned to his carriage and, with his suite following, drove to the Hotel Lesdiguieres. Peter liked this better, although here, too, he found the rooms assigned to him to be too large and luxuriously furnished and ordered his own camp bed to be placed in a small dressing room.

The next morning, the Regent of France, Philippe d'Orleans, came to pay his official welcoming call. As the Regent's carriage entered the couryard of the Hotel Lesdiguidicres, it was met by four noblemen of the Tsar's suite, who conducted the Regent into the reception hall. Peter emerged from his private chamber, embraced the Regent and then turned and walked into the private chamber ahead of Philippe, leaving him and Kurakin, who was to serve as interpreter, to follow. The French, noting every nuance of protocol, were affronted by Peter's embrace and his walking ahead of the Regent; these acts, they said, displayed "a haughty air of superiority" and were "without the slighest civility."

In Peter's room, two armchairs had been placed facing each other, and the two men sat down with Kurakin nearby. For nearly an hour they talked, devoting themselves entirely to pleasantries. Then the Tsar walked out of the room, "the Regent once again behind him. In the reception hall, Peter made a deep bow (rendered in mediocre fashion, says Saint-Simon), and left his guest at the same spot where he had met him on entering. This precise formality was unnatural for Peter, but he had come to Paris on a mission and he thought it important to comply with the demands of his etiquette-conscious hosts.

The remainder of that day and the day following (a Sunday), -Peter remained cloistered in the Hotel Lesdiguieres. Anxious as he was to get out and see Paris, he forced himself to observe protocol and remain secluded until he had received the formal visit of the King. As he wrote to Catherine during this weekend:

For two or three days, I must stay in the house for visits and other ceremonies and therefore I have as yet seen nothing. But tomorrow or the day after I shall begin sightseeing. From what I could see on the road, the misery of the common people is very great. P.S. I have this moment received your letter full of jokes. You say that I'll be looking about for a lady, but that would not be at all becoming to my old age.

On Monday morning, King Louis XV of France arrived to greet his royal guests. The Tsar met the King as he stepped down from his carriage and, to the astonishment of the French party, he took the little boy in his arms, lifted him into the air until their faces were at the same level, and hugged and kissed him several times. Louis, although unprepared for this display, took it well and showed no fear. The French, once having overcome their shock, were struck by Peter's grace and by the tenderness he showed the boy, somehow establishing their equality of rank while at the same time recognizing the difference in their ages. After embracing Louis again, Peter returned him to the ground and escorted him into the Tsar's reception chamber. There, Louis made a short speech of welcome, filled with memorized compliments. The remainder of the conversation was furnished by the Due du Maine and Marshal de Villeroy, with Kurakin again interpreting. After fifteen minutes, Peter rose and, again taking Louis in his arms, escorted him to his carriage.

The next afternoon at four, Peter went to the Tuileries to return the King's visit. The courtyard was filled with companies of the red-coated Maison du Roi, and as the Tsar's carriage approached, a line of military drummers began to beat. Seeing little Louis waiting to meet his carriage, Peter jumped out, picked the King up in his arms and carried him up the palace steps for a meeting which also lasted only fifteen minutes. Describing these events to Catherine, Peter wrote: "Last Monday the little King visited me, who is only a finger or two taller than our Luke [a favorite dwarf]. The child is very handsome in face and build and very intelligent for his age, which is only seven." To Menshikov, Peter wrote: "The King is a mighty man and very old in years, namely seven."

Peter's formal call on the King at the Tuileries fulfilled the requirements of Protocol. At last, the Tsar was free to go out and see the great city of Paris.

50

A VISITOR IN PARIS

In 1717 as Today, Paris was the capital and the center of everything that matters in France. But Paris, with its 500,000 citizens, was only the third largest city in Europe; both London (750,000) and Amsterdam (600,000) were larger. In relaton to toal nation populations, Paris was even smaller. In Britain, one man in ten was a Londoner, in Holland one man in five was from Amsterdam, while in France only one Frenchman in forty lived in Paris.

To those who know it now, the Paris of 1717 seems small. The great palaces and squares which today lie in the heart of Paris— the Tuileries, the Luxembourg, the Place Vendome, the Invalides—were then on the city's fringes. Beyond Montparnasse were fields and pastures. The Tuileries looked through its splendid gardens to the wilder part of the Champs-Elysees rising up to the wooded hill where the Arc de Triomphe now stands. To the north, a single road ran through the meadows up to the ridge of Montmartre.

The Seine was the heart of the city. The river was not confirmed by its present granite quais, and along its muddy banks women did their washing, oblivious to the unpleasant odors of slaughterhouse and tannery wastes poured directly into the stream. Passing through the city, the river flowed beneath five bridges. The two most recent, the magnificent Pont Royal and the Pont Neuf, were open-sided; the others were lined by four- and five-story buildings. The Paris of wide, tree-lined boulevards did not exist; the city in 1717 was a jumble of narrow streets and four- and five-story buildings with pointed roofs. The great twin towers of Notre Dame rose above the city, but the world-famous view of the cathedral facade was unavailable because the place was a cluster of tiny streets crowded with buildings. Louis XIV had begun to change the face of the medieval city. Early in his reign, he had ordered the city's fortified ramparts destroyed and boulevards planted with trees laid out where the walls had been. Only one great square, the elegant Place Royale (now Place des Vosges), had been in existence when the Sun King reached the throne.

During Louis' reign, he added the Place des Victoires, the Place Vendome and the immense church and esplanade of the Invalides.

Each section of the city had a special flavor. The Marais attracted the aristocracy and the higher bourgeoisie. Wealthy financiers built their houses at the other end of the city, around the new Place Venddme. Foreigners and foreign embassies preferred the quarter surrounding St. Germain des Pr6s, where the streets were wider and the air was said to be purer. Travelers were also advised that the best hotels were available near St. Germain des Pres. but a visitor could find a room in many private mansions; even the highest members of the aristocracy rented their top floor to a paying guest. The Latin Quarter then, as now, was for students.

During the day, the people of Paris swarmed through the streets. Pedestrians were in constant danger as horses, carriages and carts tried to thrust themselves through narrow passageways already jammed with people. The noise of iron-rimmed wheels and shouting men was deafening; the smells from human excrement dumped from the windows, from piles of manure and from the courtyards where butchers slaughtered their animals were dreadful. To reduce the noise and give traction to the wheels, as well as to maintain a modicum of cleanliness, fresh straw was laid down daily, the dirty straw being swept up and dumped in the river. To avoid the dangers and inconvience of walking in these streets, those who could afford them used private carriages which they owned or rented by the day or month. Others used closed sedan chairs carried by two men.

The Pont Neuf and the Place Dauphine on the tip of the He de la Cite swarmed with itinerant vendors, quack doctors, marionette shows, stilt walkers, street singers and beggars. Pickpockets waited outside the doors of fashionable hotels to brush against unwary foreigners. It was easy to find women. The most desirable, the girls of the Opera and the Comedie, were generally reserved for the French aristocracy, but the streets were crowded with parading prostitutes. Visitors were warned, however, that they risked their health if not their lives.

At night, the streets were relatively safe until around midnight. Paris in 1717 was the best-lighted city in Europe with 6,500 candle lamps suspended over the streets. Replaced each day and lighted at dark, the fat tapers cast a murky glow over the vicinity. But at midnight, when the candles guttered out one by one and the city was plunged into darkness, all who wished to see morning were behind a door.

The Opera and Comedie were always crowded. Moliere was still the favorite, but people also wanted to see Racine, Corneille and the newly fashionable Marivaux. After the theatre, cafes and cabarets remained open until ten or eleven o'clock. Society flocked to the 300 new coffee houses clustered near St. Germain des Pres or the Faubourg St. Honore\ to drink tea, coffee or chocolate. For many, the best recreation was a stroll in a park or garden. The most elegant strollers favored the long Cours la Reine, a walk along the right bank of the Seine which extended from the Tuileries down the river as far as the present Place de 1'Alma. This flowered walk was so popular that its use was extended into the evening by placing torches and lanterns along the path. Other gardens open to the public were the garden of the Palais Royal, the Luxembourg Gardens and the Jardin du Roi, now known as the Jardin des Plantes.

Then, as now, the most famous garden in Paris was the Jardin des Tuileries. There, in the afternoon and evening, one met the greatest personages of the kingdom, even the Regent himself, strolling along. Beyond the Tuileries lay the Champs-Elysees, flanked by symmetrical rows of trees. Here people exercised on horseback and opened the windows of their carriages to enjoy the fresh air. Still farther west, beyond the village of Passy, lay the wood later turned into the park of the Bois de Boulogne. The wood was filled with deer, which riders and dogs hunted for sport, but it was also a place where, on warm Sunday and holiday afternoons, Parisians spread themselves on the grass to picnic and sleep. The wood was also a place for love affairs, which took place inside carriages with the curtains drawn, the coachman sitting impassively atop the carriage, the reins loose, the horses peaceably munching the grass.

When the boy King left Versailles and moved back to Paris, most of the aristocracy followed, building or refurbishing its mansions (hotels particuliers) in the fashionable section of the Marais on the eastern edge of the city, or across the river in the Faubourg St. Germain. The Hotel Lesdiguieres, in which Peter was living during his six weeks in Paris, was one of the grandest of the mansions of the Marais* with gardens spreading over a large block. It's walls, filled with sheds and stables, touched the

*Many of the splendid mansions of the Marais still stand, but the Hotel Lesdiguieres has disappeared. In 1866, its grounds were pierced when the engineer Baron Georges Haussmann, then driving his broad boulevards through Paris at the command of Emperor Napoleon III, laid the Boulevard Henri IV through the hotel garden. Thereafter, the mansion survived only a few years and was torn down in 1877. Today, there remains only a plaque commemorating Peter's visit on the wall above No. 10 Rue de la Cerisaie. Across the street at No. 11, in a house which was standing there during Peter's visit, the author lived for three of the years he was writing this book.

Rue St. Antoine, and behind lay the Cerisaie, the King's cherry orchard with rows of handsome little trees.

The Bastille stood directly adjacent to the hotel, and its eight thin gray stone towers towered directly over the garden wall. While strolling, the Tsar had only to raise his eyes to see the legendary stronghold. In fact, the fourteenth-century fortress has been the most unjustly maligned of all the castles of France. Depicted as a grim, gigantic symbol of the oppression of the French monarchy, it was actually rather small: seventy yards long and thirty yards wide (although a dry moat with drawbridges and an outer courtyard surrounded by guard buildings made the space it occupied seem larger). The furious Paris mob which tore it down on July 14, 1789, and the happy crowds of Frenchmen who still celebrate Bastille Day every July 14, have imagined the Bastille as a mournful den where a tyrant wreaked his will on the suffering people of France. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Bastille was the most luxurious prison which has ever existed. Imprisonment there carried no dishonor. With rare exceptions, its occupants were aristocrats or gentlemen who were received and treated according to their rank. The King could order troublesome nobles put there until he or they changed an opinion. Fathers could send unruly sons to the Bastille for several months to cool their foolishness. Rooms were furnished, heated and lighted according to the means and tastes of the prisoners. A servant could be kept, and guests could be invited for dinner— Cardinal de Rohan once gave a banquet for twenty. There was competition for the more favorable rooms; those at the tops of the towers were the least desirable, being coldest in winter and hottest in summer. Nothing was required of the prisoner. He could play his guitar, read poetry, exercise in the governor's garden and plan menus to please his guests.

Many a famous man spent time in the Bastille. The most mysterious was the Man in the Iron Mask, whose identity was ornamented by Alexandre Dumas into a twin brother of Louis XIV. Like most stories about the Bastille, this one was mostly imaginary; the famous mask was not of iron, but of black velvet, although even the governor of the Bastille was not allowed to lift it, and the prisoner died, still unknown, in 1703. During the weeks Peter spent in Paris, another famous Frenchman was locked in the Bastille, and it is possible that this prisoner looked down from a tower window into the gardens of the Hotel Lesdiguieres to see the Tsar strolling among the trees. This was twenty-three-year-old Francois-Marie Arouet, a waspish young epigrammist whose suggestive verses about the relations between the Regent and his daughter the Duchesse de Berri had inspired the Regent to lock him up. Forty years later, using the name Voltaire, the prisoner would write a History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great.

Before coming to Paris, Peter had made a list of everything he wanted to see, and the list was long. Once the welcoming ceremonies were over, he asked the Regent that all protocol be dispensed with; he wanted to be free to visit whatever he liked. Subject to his insistence that the Tsar be always escorted by the Marshal de Tesse or some other member of the court, and that Peter allow himself to be accompanied by a bodyguard of eight soldiers of the royal guard whenever he went out, the Regent agreed.

Peter began his sightseeing by rising at four a.m. on May 12 and walking in the early light down the Rue St. Antoine to visit the Place Royale and see the sun reflected in the great windows which looked down on the royal parade ground. That same day, he visited the Place des Victoires and the Place Vendome. The next day, he crossed to the Left Bank and visited the Observatory, the factory of the Gobelins, famous for tapestries, and the Jardin des Plantes, which had over 2,500 species. In the days that followed, he visited the shops of artisans of every kind, examining everything and asking questions. One morning at six a.m. he was in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, where the Marshal de Villars showed him the enormous models of Vauban's great fortresses which guarded the frontiers of France.* Then, leaving the Louvre, he walked in the Tuileries Garden, where the usual crowd of strollers had been asked to leave.

A few days later, Peter visited the vast hospital and barracks of the Invalides, where 4,000 disabled soldiers were housed and cared for. He tasted the soldiers' soup and wine, drank to their health, clapped them on their backs and called them his "comrades." At the Invalides, he admired the famous dome of the church, recently completed, towering 345 feet and considered to be the marvel of Paris. Peter sought out interesting people. He met the refugee Prince Rakoczy, the Hungarian leader who had rebelled against the Hapsburg Emperor and whom Peter had once

*These astonishing exact-scale models, created by order of Louis XIV, including mountains, rivers and details of cities as well as of the fortifications, were gigantic, some as large as 900 square feet. Considered secrets of war, they were kept under guard in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre until 1777, when they were transported to the top floor of the Invalides. There, they have remained for 200 years and can be seen today by anyone willing to climb the stairs.

proposed to make King of Poland. He dined with the Marshal d'Estrees, who came for him at eight one morning and talked to him the entire day about the French navy. He visited the house of the director of the Post Office, who was a collector of all kinds of curiosities and inventions. He spent an entire morning at the Mint and watched a new goldpiece being struck. When it was taken and placed, still warm, in Peter's hand, he saw to his surprise that on the coin were his own face and the inscription "Petrus Alexievitz, Tzar, Mag. Russ. Imperat." He was solemnly received at the Sorbonne, where a group of Catholic theologians gave him a plan for the reunion of the Eastern and Western churches (Peter took it back with him to Russia, where he ordered his Russian bishops to study it and give him an opinion). He visited the Academy of Science, and on December 22, 1717, six months after his departure from Paris, the Tsar was formally elected a member of the Academy.

As Paris began to see him frequently, reports and impressions circulated rapidly. "He was a very tall man," wrote Saint-Simon,

well proportioned, rather thin with a roundish face, a broad forehead and handsome, sharply defined eyebrows, a short, but not-too-short nose, large at the end. His lips were rather thick, his complexion a ruddy brown, fine black eyes, large, lively and piercing, and well apart. When he wished, his look was majestic and gracious, at other times it was fierce and severe. He had a nervous, twitching smile which did not come often, but which contorted his face and his whole expression and inspired fear. That lasted but a moment, accompanied by a wild and terrible look, and passed away as quickly. His whole air showed his intellect, his reflection and his greatness, and did not lack a certain grace. He wore only a linen collar, a round brown wig without powder which did not touch his shoulders, a brown tight-fitting coat, plain with gold buttons, a waistcoat, breeches, stockings, and no gloves or cuffs. He wore the star of his order on his coat and the ribbon underneath; his coat was often quite unbuttoned, his hat was always on a table and never on his head even out of doors. With all this simplicity, and in whatever bad carriage or company he might be, one could not fail to perceive the air of greatness that was natural to him.