Peter the Great

Peter was now twenty-two, in the prime of his young manhood. To those who were seeing the Tsar for the first time, his most awesome physical characteristic was his height: at six feet seven inches, the monarch towered over everyone around him, the more so because in those days the average man was shorter than today. Tall as he was, however, Peter's body was more angular than massive. His shoulders were unusually thin for a man of his height, his arms were long and his hands, which he was eager to display, were powerful, rough and permanently calloused from his work in the shipyard. Peter's face in these years was round, still youthful and almost handsome. He wore a small mustache and no wig; instead, he let his own straight, auburn-brown hair hang halfway between his ears and his shoulders.

His most extraordinary quality, even more remarkable than his height, was his titanic energy. He could not sit still or stay long in the same place. He walked so quickly with his long, loose-limbed stride that those in his company had to trot to keep up with him. When forced to do paperwork, he paced around a stand-up desk. Seated at a banquet, he would eat for a few minutes, then spring up to see what was happening in the next room or to take a walk outdoors. Needing movement, he liked to burn off his energy in dancing. When he had been in one place for a while, he wanted to leave, to move along, to see new people and new scenery, to form new impressions. The most accurate image of Peter the Great is of a man who throughout his life was perpetually curious, perpetually restless, perpetually in movement.

It was, however, during these same years that a worrisome, often mortifying physical disorder began to afflict the young Tsar. When he was emotionally agitated or under stress from the pressure of events, Peter's face sometimes began to twitch uncontrollably. The disorder, usually troubling only the left side of his face, varied in degree of severity: Sometimes the tremor was no more than a facial tic lasting only a second or two; at other times, there would be a genuine convulsion, beginning with a contraction of the muscles on the left side of his neck, followed by a spasm involving the entire left side of his face and the rolling up of his eyes until only the whites could be seen. At its worst, when violent, disjointed motion of the left arm was also involved, the convulsion ended only when Peter had lost consciousness.

With only unprofessional descriptions of Peter's symptoms available, neither the precise nature of his illness nor its cause will ever be known. Most likely, he suffered from facial epileptic seizures, among the milder of a range of neurological disorders whose most severe form is grand-mal epilepsy. There is no evidence that Peter suffered from this extreme condition; there are no reports that he collapsed totally unconscious on the floor, foamed at the mouth or lost control of his bodily functions. In Peter's case, the disturbance began in a part of the brain affecting muscles of the left side of his neck and face. If the provocation continued without alleviation, the focus of the disturbance could spread to adjacent parts of the brain affecting the motion of the left shoulder and arm.

Not knowing the nature of the affliction, it is even more difficult to pinpoint the cause. At the time, and in subsequent historical writing, a wide range of opinions has been offered. Peter's convulsions have been ascribed to the traumatic horror he suffered in 1682 when, as a ten-year-old boy, he stood by his mother and watched the massacre of Matveev and the Naryshkins by the rampaging Streltsy. By others, his condition has been traced to the shock of being awakened in the middle of the night at Preobrazhenskoe seven years later and told that the Streltsy were coming to kill him. Some have blamed it on the excessive drinking which the Tsar learned at Lefort's elbow and practiced with the Jolly Company. There was even a rumor, passed to the West in correspondence from the German Suburb, that the Tsar's affliction had been caused by poison administered by Sophia endeavoring to clear her path to the throne. The most likely cause of this kind of epilepsy, however, especially in the absence of a hard blow which could have left permanent scar tissue on the brain, is high fever over an extended period. Peter suffered such a fever during the weeks between November 1693 and January 1694 when he became so ill that many believed he would die. A fever of this kind in the nature of encephalitis can cause local scarring of the brain; subsequently, when specific psychological stimuli disturb this damaged area, a seizure of the kind which Peter suffered can be triggered.

The psychological impact of this illness on Peter was profound; it accounts in large part for his unusual shyness, especially with strangers who were not familiar with his convulsions and therefore unprepared to witness them. For paroxysms of this kind, as disturbing to those around him as to Peter himself, there was no real treatment, although what was done then would still be considered eminently reasonable today. When the tremor was no more than a tic, Peter and those in his company tried to proceed as if nothing had happened. If the convulsion became more pronounced, his friends or orderlies quickly brought someone to him whose presence he found relaxing. Eventually, whenever she was nearby, this was his second wife, Catherine, but before Catherine appeared, or if she was not present, it was some young woman who could soothe the Tsar. "Peter Alexeevich, here is the person to whom you wished to speak," his worried orderly would say and then withdraw. The Tsar would lie down and place his shaking head on the woman's lap and she would stroke his forehead and temples, speaking to him softly and reassuringly. Peter would fall asleep, his loss of consciousness clearing the electrical disturbances in his brain, and when he awoke an hour or two later, he was always refreshed and in far better humor than he had been before.

In the winter of 1695, Peter sought some new outlet for his energy. His two summers in Archangel, his brief cruises on the White Sea, his long talks with English and Dutch sea captains had stimulated him. Now, he wanted to travel farther, to see more, to sail more ships. One recurring idea was an expedition to Persia and the East. This subject came up often during winter evenings in the German Suburb, where Dutch and English merchants talked grandly of the Europe-to-Persia and Europe-to-India trade which could be developed along the rivers to Russia. From Archangel, Lefort had written to his family in Geneva that "there was talk of a journey in about two years' time to Kazan and Astrachan." Later, the Swiss wrote, "Next summer we are going to construct five large ships and two galleys which, God willing, will got two years hence to Astrachan for the conclusion of important treaties with Persia." "There is also an idea of constructing some galleys and going to the Baltic Sea," wrote Lefort.

With talk of Persia and the Baltic in the air, Moscow was surprised in the winter of 1695 at the announcement that Russia would embark the following summer on a renewed war against the Tatars and their overlords, the Ottoman Empire. We do not know exactly why Peter decided that winter to attack the Turkish fortress of Azov. It has been suggested that this sudden plunge into active war stemmed entirely from Peter's restlessness and that it served mainly as an outlet for his energy and curiosity. Thus, seen in retrospect, it becomes another step in the great maritime adventure of his life: first the Yauza, then Lake Pleschev, then Archangel— so the sequence runs. Now, he dreamed of creating a fleet. But

Russia's only seaport was frozen solid six months of the year. The nearest sea, the Baltic, was still firmly gripped by Sweden, the dominant military power in Northern Europe. Only one avenue to salt water remained: to the south and the Black Sea.

Or, if this new adventure was not a Game of Neptune, perhaps it was a Game of Mars. For twenty years, Peter had been playing with soldiers; first toys, then boys, then grown men. His games had grown from drills involving a few hundred stable boys and falconers to 30,000 men involved in the assault and defense of the river fort of Pressburg. Now, seeking the excitement of real combat, he looked for a fortress to besiege, and Azov, isolated at the bottom of the Ukrainian steppe, suited admirably.

Unquestioningly, Peter's compulsion to reach the sea and his desire to test his army both played a part in the Azov decision. But there were other reasons, too. Russia was still at war with the Ottoman Empire, and every summer the horsemen of the Tatar Khan rode north to raid the Ukraine. In 1692, an army of 12,000 Tatar cavalry appeared before the town of Neimerov, burned it to the ground and carried away 2,000 prisoners to be sold in the Ottoman slave marts. A year later, the number of Russian prisoners mounted to 15,000.

Since Sophia's fall, Moscow had done little to defend these southern border regions, despite their appeals to the capital. Indeed, the Tsar's indifference had led to a stinging jibe from Dositheus, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem. "The Crimean Tatars are but a handful," he wrote to Peter, "and yet they boast that they receive tribute from you. The Tatars are Turkish subjects, so it follows that you are Turkish subjects. Many times you have boasted that you will do such and such, but all finished with words only and nothing in fact is done."

In addition, there was a diplomatic reason for a resumption of hostilities with the Turks and Tatars. Moscow's ally King Jan Sobieski of Poland, judging that Russia had contributed nothing of consequence in the common war against Turkey, had threatened to make a separate peace with the Ottoman Empire which would ignore Russia's interests completely. Indeed, the King complained to the Russian resident in Warsaw, he could scarcely be blamed for abandoning Moscow's interests since no one had troubled to explain to him exactly what Moscow's interests were.

The Azov campaign, then, was more than an elaborate war game mounted for the Tsar's private education and amusement. The desire to suppress the Tatar raids and the need to make a military effort to satisfy the Poles were serious pressures to which any Russian government would have had to respond. These two factors happened to dovetail perfectly with Peter's private desires.

The decision remained as to where the campaign would take place. There were two objectives: to harry the Turk and to suppress the Tatar. Golitsyn's two unhappy campaigns had left the Russians wary of still another direct attack across the steppe toward Perekop. Instead, this time the two prongs of the Russian attack would fall on either side of the peninsular stronghold. The dual objectives would be the mouths of the rivers Dnieper and Don, where Turkish forts blocked Ukrainian Cossack or Russian access to the Black Sea. This time, instead of marching across the dry steppe, trundling supplies in thousands of wagons, the Russian army would travel south by water, using barges as vehicles of supply.

Two very different Russian armies were formed to make the double offensive. The eastern army was to move down the Don to attack the powerful Turkish fortress of Azov and was composed of Peter's play soldiers, the men who had attacked or defended Pressburg in the previous autumn games at Kozhukhovo. They included the new Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards Regiments, the Streltsy and the Western-trained artillery and cavalry—31,000 men in three divisions, commanded by Lefort, Golovin and Gordon. To avoid jealousy, none of the three was named supreme commander; each division was to operate independently, and the three generals were to make overall decisions in council in the presence of the twenty-three-year-old Bombardier Peter.

The second or western prong of the Russian offensive, which would move down the Dnieper to attack the major Turkish forts at Ochakov and Kazikerman and three smaller forts guarding the mouth of the river, was made up of a much larger, more traditional Russian army, commanded by the boyar Boris Sheremetev. This army was reminiscent of the huge forces which Golitsyn had led south: 120,000 men, most of them peasant levies called up in the old Russian style for a single summer of campaigning: In the overall plan, Sheremetev's effort was to be subsidiary to Peter's; its purpose was not simply to capture the Dnieper forts but also to distract the main army of Tatar horsemen from riding east to attack Peter's troops before Azov. In addition, Peter hoped that the presence of this huge covering force would sever the communications between the Crimea and the European Ottoman provinces to the west, thus obstructing the customary annual movement of Tatar cavalry to join the Sultan's army in the Balkans. This would be a direct contribution to Russia's hard-pressed allies. Further, the mere presence of this vast Russian army in the Ukraine would strengthen the Tsar's influence among the volatile, impressionable Cossacks.

Once the plan of campaign was decided, Peter plunged into preparations. Exuberantly, he wrote to Apraxin in Archangel. "At Kozhukhovo we jested. Now we are going to play the real game before Azov."

Gordon's division was ready first and left Moscow in March, moving south! across the steppe "full of flowers and herbs, asparagus, wild thyme, marjoram, tulips, pinks, meliot and maiden gilly flowers," according to the commander's diary. The main body with Peter, Lefort and Golovin left in May, embarking directly onto barges in the Moscow River and moving downstream to join the Volga. It followed the great river as far as Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd), then dragged the cannon and supplies across to the lower Don, where it re-embarked on other boats. Progress was slow because of the leaky barges and inexperienced boatmen and Peter angrily wrote to Vinius: "Most of all the delay was caused by stupid pilots and workmen who call themselves masters but in reality are as far from being so as the earth is from heaven." On June 29, the main body of 21,000 men reached Azov to find Gordon's 10,000 soldiers entrenched before the city.

The fortress town of Azov stood on the left bank of the southernmost branch of the Don about fifteen miles upstream from the Sea of Azov. In 500 B.C., a Greek colony, one of a number of Greek settlements around the coast of the Black Sea, had occupied the site. Later, the town, commanding the entrance to the great river and its trade, had been a colony of the merchant state of Genoa. Taken by the Turks in 1475, it became the north-eastern link in their absolute control of the Black Sea and served as a barrier to any Russian advance down the Don. They had fortified the town with towers and walls, and, as part of the barrier system, two Turkish watchtower forts were situated a mile upriver from the city, with iron chains stretched between them across the river to prevent the light Cossack galleys slipping past the town and out into the sea.

With Peter present before the town, the Russian cannon opened fire, and for fourteen weeks the bombardment continued. There were many problems. Experienced engineers were lacking, and in Peter's day a seige was as much a matter for engineers as for artillerymen or foot soldiers. The Russian supply organization was unable to cope with the problem of feeding 30,000 men in the open air for so long a time, and the army quickly denuded the meager countryside around Azov. The Streltsy were unwilling to follow orders given by European officers and were often useless. Of the overall situation, Gordon said, "We sometimes acted as if we were not in earnest."

At first, the two Turkish watchtower forts above the town prevented the passage of Russian barges down the river with supplies for the army. The supplies had to be unloaded above this point and carried in wagons overland to the troops, and the wagons were exposed to swooping attacks from the Tatar cavalry which hovered on the periphery of the Russian camp. Capture of the two forts became a primary objective, and the army was cheered when the Don Cossacks stormed one of the forts; soon after, under intense artillery fire, the Turks abandoned the other fort.

Peter's happiness at this success was quickly spoiled by an episode of treachery in his own camp. A Dutch sailor named Jacob Jensen defected from the Russians to the Turks carrying important information. Originally a seaman on a Dutch ship in Archangel, Jensen had entered Russian service, accepted the Orthodox faith and served in the new Russian artillery. Peter, liking both Dutchmen and artillery, had kept Jensen near him and, during the days and nights before Azov, had confided in him. When Jensen deserted, he betrayed to the Pasha in Azov the numbers and disposition of the Russian troops, the strengths and weaknesses of the siege works and what he knew of Peter's intentions. He also made a suggestion based on the immutable habit of all Russians, including soldiers, of taking a nap after the big midday meal. A few days later, at exactly this hour, a formidable Turkish sortie into the Russian trenches was launched. At first, the sleepy Russians ran, but Gordon managed to rally them, and after a desperate three-hour battle the Turks were driven back. The thrust was costly to the besiegers: 400 Russians were killed and 600 wounded, and many of the siege works were wrecked.

Even more damaging than Jensen's treachery was the inability of the Russian army to cut off and isolate the fortress. Gordon, the most experienced soldier present, wanted a total investiture of the town, but, for lack of men, the Russian siege works did not even completely encircle the land side of Azov. Between the end of the Russian trenches and the river was an open gap through which Tatar cavalry maintained communication with the Azov garrison. And the siege was rendered even less effective by lack of ships to control the river. Peter could only watch helplessly when twenty Turkish galleys came upstream and anchored near the town to deliver supplies and reinforcements to the Turkish garrison.

Through the long weeks of the siege, Peter himself toiled indefatigably. He continued to play two roles. As a common artilleryman, the bombardier who called himself Peter Alexeev helped load and fire the siege mortars that hurled bombs and shells into the town. As Tsar, he presided over the senior war council and discussed and reviewed all plans and operations. In addition, he kept up a constant correspondence with his friends in Moscow. Endeavoring to raise his own drooping spirits, he maintained his jesting tone, addressing Romodanovsky in Moscow as "My Lord King" and signing himself with expressions of great respect as "Bombardier Peter."

Increasingly, the problem of divided command hampered the Russian siege operation. Lefort and Golovin both resented General Gordon's superior military experience and tended to side together in council to overrule the veteran Scot. Peter also grew impatient with the course of the siege and, together with Lefort and Golovin, forced a decision to launch a sudden major assault in an effort to take the town by storm. Gorden argued that to take a fortress of this strength they must advance the trenches closer to the walls so that the troops could be protected until the moment of attack and not be lengthily exposed on the open ground before the walls. His warnings were brushed aside, and on August 15 the attack was made and it failed, as predicted. "Such was the result of this ill-timed and rash undertaking," wrote Gordon in his diary. "Of the four regiments, 1,500 men were killed, not including officers. About 9 o'clock, His Majesty sent for me and the other officers. There was nothing to be seen but angry looks and sad countenances." The Russian adversity continued. Two huge land mines, intended to be placed under the Turkish walls, blew up while still inside the Russian trenches with further heavy casualties.

Autumn was beginning. Peter knew that he could not leave his men in the trenches throughout the winter; either he would have to take the town or retreat. But a final attack was no more successful than the first, and on October 12, with the soldiers' morale very low and the weather growing colder, Peter raised the siege. That he planned to return the following year, however, was indicated by the fact that he left the two watchtower forts strongly garrisoned by 3,000 men.

The retreat northward was a disaster, more costly in lives and equipment than the entire summer siege. For seven weeks, through heavy rains, the Russians trudged and stumbled north across the steppe, hotly pursued and harried by Tatar horsemen. The rivers were swollen by the rains, the grass had been burned in the summer and now was sodden, there was nothing for the animals to eat, and the men had difficulty finding dry wood to start a fire. The Austrian diplomat Pleyer was accompanying the army, and his report to Vienna was a tale of calamity: "Great quantities of provisions, which could have kept a large army [were] either ruined by bad wether, or lost by barges going to the bottom . . .

It was impossible to see without tears how through the whole steppe for five hundred miles men and horses lay half-eaten by the wolves, and many villages were full of sick, some of whom died."

On December 2, the army reached Moscow. Peter, imitating the precedent of Sophia and Golitsyn which he himself had condemned, attempted to mask his defeat by staging a triumphal entry into the capital. He marched through the city with a single pathetic Turkish prisoner walking ahead of him. No one was fooled, and the grumbling against the Tsar's foreign military advisors increased. How could an Orthodox army expect to conquer when it was commanded by foreigners and heretics?

This argument was given additional weight by the fact that Sheremetev's army, an old-style Russian host entirely officered by Russians, had achieved considerable success on the lower Dnieper. Together with the horsemen of the Cossack Herman Mazeppa, Sheremetev's troops had stormed two of the Turkish fortresses along the river, after which the Turks had withdrawn from two others. This achievement gave the Russians control of the whole line of the Dnieper almost down to its estuary on the Black Sea.

But, despite Sheremetev's successes, Peter's own campaign against Azov had been a failure. His vaunted "Western-style" army had been held at bay and had suffered disastrously in retreat. Yet, if defeat was a shock for the exuberant twenty-three-year-old, it did not discourage him. Peter meant to return. Making no excuses, acknowledging failure, Peter threw himself into preparations for a second attempt. He had been thwarted by three mistakes: divided command, a lack of skilled engineers to construct efficient siege works and an absence of control of the sea at the river mouth to seal off the fortress from outside help.

The first defect was easiest to rectify: The following summer, a supreme military commander would be named. Peter attempted to remedy the second problem by writing to the Austrian Emperor and the Elector of Brandenburg for competent siege experts to aid in defeating the infidel Turk. Far more difficult was the third factor, a fleet to control the river. And yet Peter decided he had to provide one, and demanded that by May—in five short months—a war fleet of twenty-five armed galleys and 1,300 new river barges be built for transporting troops and supplies. The galleys were to be not merely shallow-draft river craft but respectable sea-going men of war fit to defeat Turkish warships on the estuary of the Don or even on the open waters of the Sea of Azov.

The effort appeared impossible. Not only was the time ridiculously short, but these particular five months were the worst time of the year. Rivers and roads were frozen by ice and snow, the days were short as winter night came early, men working in the open air would hammer and saw with fingers numbed by cold. And there was no seaport, no shipbuilding site. Peter would have to build his ships somewhere- in the interior of Russia and float them downriver to bring them into position to fight the Turks. Moreover, in the Russian heartland there were no real shipwrights. Russians knew only how to make river boats, simple craft 100 feet long by 20 feet wide, fitted together without the use of a single nail, used for one voyage down the river and then broken up for timber or firewood. Peter's plan, then, was to build the shipyards, assemble the workmen, teach them to mark, cut and hew the timber, lay the keels, build the hulls, step the masts, shape the oars, weave the ropes, sew the sails, train the crews and sail the whole massive fleet down the River Don to Azov. All within five winter months!*

He went to work. As a shipbuilding site, he chose the town of Voronezh on the upper Don, about 300 miles below Moscow and 500 miles above the sea. The town had several advantages. Sheer distance made it secure from the threat of Tatar raids. It was situated above the line of the treeless steppe and lay in a belt of thick virgin forest where timber was readily available. For these reasons, since the reign of Alexis and the adherence of the Ukraine to Russia, Voronezh had been a site for building the simple barges which carried goods to the Don Cossacks. On the low eastern bank of the river at Voronezh, Peter built new shipyards, expanded the old ones and summoned huge numbers of conscripted unskilled laborers. Belgorod province, where Voronezh lay, was commanded to send 27,828 men to work in the shipyards. Peter sent to Archangel for skilled carpenters and shipbuilders, routing foreign and Russian artisans out of their winter indolence, promising that they would finish by summer. He appealed to the Doge of Venice to send him experts in the construction of galleys. A galley ordered from Holland and newly arrived at Archangel was cut into sections and brought to Moscow, where it served as a model for others being built that winter at Preobrazhenskoe. These one- and two-masted vessels, constructed at Preobrazhenskoe or Lake Pleschev, were built in sections like modern prefabricated ships; then the sections were mounted on sledges and dragged over the snowy roads for the final assembly at Voronezh.

*Naval shipbuilding began in Russia and America at about the same time. In 1690. five years before Peter commenced his urgent shipbuilding program at Voronezh, a small man of war, the Falkland, was built for the British navy at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The vessel, constructed entirely by colonial shipwrights, was the first warship built in North America.

* * *

In the middle of Peter's Herculean effort, on February 8, 1696, Tsar Ivan suddenly died. Feeble, uncomprehending and harmless, gentle Ivan had passed most of his twenty-nine years as a living icon, presented at ceremonies or dragged forward in moments of crisis to calm an angry mob. The difference between restless, energetic Peter and his silent, passive half-brother and co-Tsar was so great that there remained great affection between them. By keeping the royal title, Ivan had lifted many wearisome burdens of state ceremony from the royal bombardier and skipper. During his travels, Peter had always written tender and respectful letters to his brother and co-monarch. Now that Ivan was gone, buried in state in the Kremlin's Archangel Michael Cathedral, Peter took Ivan's young widow, the Tsaritsa Praskovaya, and her three daughters under his care. Praskovaya, in gratitude, remained loyal to Peter for the rest of her life.

Ivan's death had no active political significance, but it put a final, formal seal on Peter's sovereignty. He was now sole Tsar, the single, supreme ruler of the Russian state.

When Peter returned to Voronezh, he found vast activity and confusion. Mountains of timber had been cut and dragged to the building yards, and dozens of barges had already taken shape. But there were endless problems: Many of the ship's carpenters were slow in arriving from Archangel; many unskilled laborers, improperly housed and badly fed, deserted; the weather varied between thaws which turned the ground to mud and sudden new freezes which turned the river and the roads to ice.

Peter hurled himself into action. He slept in a small log house next to the shipyard and rose before dawn. Warming himself by a fire next to his carpenters, surrounded by the sound of blows of axe, hammer and mallet, Peter worked on a galley, the Principium, which he was building along Dutch lines. He reveled in the work. "According to the divine decree to our grandfather Adam, we are eating our bread in the sweat of our face," he wrote.

In March, the weather improved, and in mid-April three galleys, including the Principium, were launched. Hundreds of new barges were already moored in the river, ready for loading. To crew this new armada, Peter sent for boatment from even the most distant Russian rivers and lakes. To man the war galleys, he created a special marine force of 4,000 men culled from many regiments, with a heavy proportion coming from his own Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards.

The overall mobilization was smaller than it had been the previous summer—in this second campaign there would be no march on the Dnieper—but the force destined to make the second assault on Azov would be double the size of the previous summer. Forty-six thousand Russian soldiers would be bolstered by 15,000 Ukrainian Cossacks, 5,000 Don Cossacks and 3,000 Kalmucks— wiry, brown-skinned, semi-Asiatic horsemen, who could ride with any Tatar. A single officer, the boyar Alexis Shein, had been appointed commander-in-chief of the expedition. Shein was not an experienced military commander, but he came from a distinguished family, his judgment was considered sound and his appointment silenced those conservative Muscovites who grumbled that a Russian army commanded by a foreigner could never succeed. Lefort, although no seaman, was made admiral of the new fleet, while Peter, shifting his interest from Mars to Neptune, took the title of naval captain rather than artillery bombardier.

On May 1, Shein, the generalissimo, boarded his commander's galley and raised on its stern a great embroidered banner bearing the Tsar's arms. Two days later, the first ships weighed anchor and the long procession of galleys and barges began the voyage down the Don. Peter, starting later with a battle squadron of eight fast galleys, overtook the main fleet on May 26. By the end of the month, the entire fleet of barges and galleys had reached the Russian-held watchtower forts above Azov.

Fighting began immediately. On May 28, the leader of the Don Cossacks, who had gone ahead with 250 men to reconnoiter the mouth of the river, sent back word that two large Turkish ships were anchored there. Peter decided to attack. Nine galleys were selected, and one of Gordon's best regiments embarked in them. They were accompanied down the river by forty Cossack boats, each carrying twenty men. In unfamiliar waters and with unfavorable winds, the galleys began to go aground and were ordered to turn back. Peter transferred into one of the lighter Cossack boats and continued down the river, but at its mouth he found not two but thirty Turkish craft, including warships, barges and lighters. This force he judged too strong for his small boats, and he returned upstream to the Russian camp; the Cossacks, however, remained in the vicinity of the Turkish ships. The following night, while the Turks were still moving supplies from the sea-going ships to the shore, the Cossack raiders attacked and captured ten of the smaller Turkish boats. The remainder of the Turkish force fled back to the main anchorage, where the Turkish captains became so alarmed that, although their unloading was still incomplete, the entire Turkish fleet weighed anchor and sailed the open sea. This was the last succor the city of Azov was to receive.

A few days later, Peter returned to the mouth of the river, bringing his entire force of twenty-nine galleys safely past the fortress of Azov. The city was now isolated, and any help sent by the Sultan would have to fight its way upriver through Peter's flotilla. To strengthen his grip, Peter landed troops at the mouth of the river and constructed two small forts containing artillery. When these were finished, he wrote to Romodanovsky, "We are now completely out of danger of the Turkish fleet." On June 14, a number of ships appeared and attempted to land troops to attack the Russian forts, but the approach of Peter's galleys quickly frightened them away. Two weeks later, the Turks tried again, but again the arrival of the Russian galleys forced them to withdraw.

Meanwhile, with the sea secure and the city isolated, Peter's generals and engineers could proceed with the siege. Fortunately for them, the Turkish garrison of Azov, not expecting the Russians to return after their previous failure, had done little to improve its situation. The Turks had not bothered to level the Russian earth siege works or fill in the Russian trenches of the previous summer, and Peter's returning soldiers reoccupied them quickly with a minimum of fresh digging. With twice its former numbers, the Russian army was now able to spread its siege lines completely around the land side of the city.

Once his artillery was in place, Peter called on the Turkish Pasha in Azov to surrender. On June 26, when the Tsar's demand was refused, the Russian cannon opened fire. Through the days that followed, Peter lived primarily on his galley anchored at the mouth of the Don, coming upstream at times to watch the bombardment. When news of his activities reached Moscow, his sister Natalya, alarmed by reports that he was exposing himself to enemy fire, wrote and begged him not to go near enemy cannonballs and bullets. Lightheartedly, Peter replied, "It is not I who go near to cannonballs and bullets, but they come near to me. Send orders for them to stop it."

As all hope of reinforcement from the sea was gone, Peter repeated his offer of good surrender terms to the garrison. A Russian archer fired an arrow over the walls bearing a written offer of honorable terms, granting the garrison the right to depart the fortress with all its arms and baggage if it surrendered before the coming assault. The answer was a billowing line of smoke from the walls as all the Turkish cannon fired back in unison.

Meanwhile, the siege works progressed. Under Gordon's direction, 15,000 Russians toiled with shovels, filling baskets of earth and piling up dirt higher and higher, and nearer and nearer the Turkish walls, until at last a vast earth platform had been built from which it was possible to see and fire directly down into the streets of the town. By mid-July, the Austrian siege engineers sent by the Emperor Leopold arrived. They had been four months en route, having understood that the campaign would not begin until late summer. When Peter discovered that their ignorance was due to the unwillingness of Ukraintsev at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow to reveal the army's plan to Austria for fear it would leak to the Turks, he wrote in fury to Vinius, the culprit's brother-in-law: "Has he any healthy good sense? Entrusted with state matters, yet he conceals what everybody knows. Just tell him that what he does not write on paper I shall write on his back!"

The Austrian engineers were impressed by the magnitude of the Russian earth mound, but suggested a more scientific approach, using mines, trenches and well-placed siege cannon. Nevertheless, it was the earth mound that resulted in the taking of the town. A number of Cossacks, disgusted by the endless work with shovels and baskets and finding carrying earth a poor substitute for fighting, determined to attack the town on their own. On July 27, without orders from their generals, 2,000 Cossacks stormed down from the earth mound onto the walls and into the streets of the town. Had they been supported by regular soldiers or Streltsy, they would have been successful. As it was, a desperate Turkish counterattack forced them back, but they managed to keep control of one of the comer towers of the wall, where they were finally reinforced by soldiers sent by Golovin. The following day, to exploit the breakthrough, Shein ordered a general assault, but before it could begin, the Turks signaled by lowering and waving their banners that they were ready to surrender. The Pasha, seeing his wall breached, had decided to accept the Russian offer of surrender under honorable conditions.

The terms allowed the Turks to withdraw with all their arms and baggage, along with their wives and children, but Peter insisted that" the Dutch traitor Jensen be delivered. The Pasha hesitated as Jensen screamed at him, "Cut off my head, but don't give me up to Moscow!" But the Tsar insisted, and Jensen was brought, tied hand and foot, into the Russian camp.

The following day, with banners flying, the Turkish garrison marched out of Azov and through the Russian lines to board the Turkish ships which had been permitted to approach. Shein, the victorious commander, waited on horseback by the embarkation point. The Pasha thanked him for keeping his word, lowered his banner in respect, boarded his ship and sailed away. Ten Russian regiments marched into the empty city, which was found heavily damaged by the bombardment. The Cossacks could not be restrained and looted the empty houses while the Russian commanders sat down to a victory banquet which spared "neither drink nor powder."

Azov was now a Russian town, and Peter ordered the immediate razing of all the siege works. Under the supervision of the Austrian engineers, he began reconstruction of the town's own fortified walls and bastions. The streets were cleared of ruins and rubble, and the mosques were transformed into Christian churches. Peter heard mass in one new church before he left the city.

Now he needed a harbor for his new Don River fleet. Azov itself was too far upstream, and the mouths of the Don were treacherous: too shallow in some spots, too deep in others. For a week, Peter cruised along the nearby coasts of the Sea of Azov seeking an anchorage, sleeping on a bench of one of his new galleys. Finally, he decided to build a harbor on the north shore of the sea, thirty miles from the mouth of the Don. The site lay behind a point known to the Cossacks as Tagonrog, and here Peter ordered the construction of a fort and harbor which were to become the first real naval base in Russian history.

News of the Azov victory astonished Moscow. For the first time since the reign of Alexis, a Russian army had won a victory. "When your letter came," Vinius reported to Peter, "there were many guests at the house of Lev Kyrilovich [Naryshkin, Peter's uncle]. He immediately sent me with it to the Patriarch. His Holiness, on reading it, burst into tears, ordered the great bell to be rung and, in the presence of the Tsaritsa and the Tsarevich, gave thanks to the Almighty. All talked with astonishment of the humility of their lord, who, after such a great victory, has not lifted up his own heart, but has ascribed all to the Creator of Heaven and has praised only his assistants, although everyone knows that it was by your plan alone, and by the aid you got from the sea, that such a noted town has bowed down to your feet."

Peter sent word to Vinius that if "the laborer is worthy of his hire" it would be appropriate to honor him and the commander-in-chief with a triumphal arch and a victory parade. Vinius immediately began to make preparations while, to allow him time, Peter delayed his homeward journey. He inspected the ironworks of Tula and worked with the famous blacksmith Nikita Demidov, whose later family fortune rested on the Tsar's immense grants to him of mining territory in the Urals.

On October 10, the Tsar joined his troops at Kolomenskoe for the triumphal march into the capital. To the bewilderment of the Muscovites, it was staged not in the traditional Orthodox religious setting which had greeted Alexis' triumphs with holy icons borne by church dignitaries but with new pagan pageantry inspired by Greek and Roman mythology. The triumphal arch erected by Vinius near the Moscow River was classically Roman, with massive statues of Hercules and Mars supporting it and the Turkish Pasha depicted lying in chains beneath it.

The procession itself stretched several miles. At its head rode eighteen horsemen, followed by a six-horse carriage bearing Peter's aged tutor, the Prince-Pope Nikita Zotov, dressed in armor and bearing sword and buckler. Then came fourteen more horesmen before the guilded carriage of Admiral Lefort, who was wearing a crimson coat trimmed with gold. Fedor Golovin and Lev Naryshkin were next, then thirty cavalrymen in silver cuirasses. Two companies of trumpeters preceded the royal standard of the Tsar, which was surrounded by guards with pikes. Behind the standard, in another gilded carriage, rolled the commander-in-chief, Alexis Shein, followed by sixteen captured Turkish standards, their shafts reversed and their banners trailing in the dirt. A grim warning followed: a simple peasant cart containing the trussed-up figure of the traitor Jensen. Around his neck he wore a sign proclaiming EVILDOER; by his side stood two executioners surrounded with axes, knives, whips and pincers, to give lurid display to the fate that awaited Jensen and other traitors.

And where, amidst all this gorgeous assemblage of flashing colors, of prancing horses and marching men, was the Tsar? To their amazement, Muscovites finally saw Peter not on a white horse or in a golden carriage at the head of his army, but walking with other galley captains behind the carriage of Admiral Francis Lefort. He was recognizable by his great height and by his German captain's uniform, with foreign breeches, a black coat and a wide black hat in which, as a single sign of special rank, he had placed a white feather. On foot, in this fashion, the victorious Tsar walked through his capital the nine miles from Kolomenskoe south of the city to Preobrazhenskoe on the northeast.

News of the young Tsar's triumph reverberated quickly through

Europe, causing astonishment and admiration. Vinius wrote directly to Witsen, Burgomaster of Amsterdam, asking that he pass the news of victory to Peter's hero, King William III of England. In Constantinople, the news brought consternation. The weary Turkish soldiers returning home from the long siege were arrested, three officials were executed and the Pasha who had surrendered the town was forced to flee for his life.

Azov was only a beginning. Those Russians who hoped that now after a great victory, the first in three decades, Peter would quietly settle down to rule as his father, Alexis, and brother Fedor had done soon learned of the new projects and ideas bubbling in their master's mind. The first was construction of a sea-going fleet. What Peter wanted were real ships, not just the galleys he had built for the single purpose of supporting a land campaign and sealing off a fortress from the sea. By taking Azov, Peter had won access only to the Sea of Azov; entry into the Black Sea itself was still blocked by the powerful Turkish fortress at Kerch astride the strait between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, and to force this strait, Peter would need a fleet of sea-going ships.

Scarcely had the Moscow triumph been celebrated when Peter summoned his council of boyars to Preobrazhenskoe and announced his plans to colonize Azov and Tagonrog and begin the construction of a navy. A stream of edicts flowed from this historic meeting. Three thousand peasant families and 3,000 Streltsy with their wives and children were uprooted and dispatched to Azov as military colonizers. Twenty thousand Ukrainian laborers were drafted and sent to Tagonrog to build the naval harbor. The new ships themselves were to be built at Voronezh, where the present shipyards would be vastly expanded; from there, the finished vessels would be floated down the Don. Responsibility for building die ships was allocated. All who could afford to help— church, landowners, merchants—would join the state in paying the costs. The state itself would build ten large ships. Every great landowner would build one ship. Every large monastery would build one ship. All these ships were to be fully constructed, equipped and armed within eighteen months. The government would provide the timber, but the landowners or church officials were to provide everything else: ropes, sails, cannon, fittings.

The order was harshly enforced. Failure meant immediate confiscation of property. When the merchants of Moscow and other cities, feeling that their allocation of twelve ships was too much for them, petitioned the Tsar for a lighter burden, their share was increased to fourteen. Usually, the ships were built at Voronezh without the landowners or merchants actually taking personal charge of construction. They simply paid the necessary costs and hired foreign shipbuilders from the German Suburb to perform the skilled work.

Shipbuilders from Europe began to arrive; the thirteen galley experts requested of the Doge of Venice came and were set to work; fifty other Western shipwrights arrived in Moscow and were sent to Voronezh. But these foreigners were only a cadre. To construct the fleet that Peter envisaged would require many more shipbuilders and, once the ships were afloat, many naval officers to command them. At least some of these would have to be Russian. On November 22, 1696, a few weeks after the shipbuilding effort was announced, Peter declared that he was sending more than fifty Russians, most of them young and sons of the noblest families, to Western Europe to study seamanship, navigation and shipbuilding. Twenty-eight were sent to Venice to study the famed Venetian galleys; the rest were dispatched to Holland and England to study the larger ships of the two great maritime powers. Peter himself drew up the syllabus for study: The Russian students were to familiarize themselves with charts and compasses and other tools of seafaring, to learn the art of shipbuilding, to serve on foreign ships, starting at the bottom as common sailors, and, if possible, to participate in naval warfare. None was to return to Russia without a certificate signed by a foreign master attesting to the student's proficiency.

Peter's command fell on horrified ears. Some of those selected were already married—Peter Tolstoy, the oldest of the students, was fifty-two when sent abroad—and they would be uprooted from wives and children and sent into the temptations of the Western world. Their parents feared the corrupting effect of Western religion, and their wives feared the seductive arts of Western women. And all had to travel at their own expense. But there was no recourse; they had to go. None returned to Russia to become distinguished admirals, but their years abroad were not wasted. Tolstoy employed his knowledge of the West and his facility in the Italian language to effective use as ambassador to Constantinople. Boris Kurakin became Peter's leading ambassador in Western Europe. Yury Trubestkoy and Dmitry Golitsyn became senators, Golitsyn being regarded as one of the most erudite men in Peter's Russia. And these fifty were but the first wave. In the years that followed, scores of Russian youths, commoners as well as noblemen, were routinely sent abroad for naval training. The knowledge they brought home helped to change Russia.

The massive building program for the Azov fleet and the sending of dozens of young Russians abroad to learn seamanship were not the greatest shocks that awaited Russia in the wake of Peter's victory over the Turks. Two weeks after the dispatch of the first naval apprentices, Councilor Ukraintsev of the Foreign Ministry made another, even more dramatic announcement:

The Sovereign has directed for his great affairs of state that to the neighboring nations, to the Emperor, to the Kings of England and Denmark, to the Pope of Rome, to the Dutch states, to the Elector of Brandenburg, and to Venice shall be sent his great Ambassadors and Plenipotentiaries: the General and Admiral Francis Lefort, General Fedor Golovin and Councilor Prokofy Voznitsyn.

The Great Embassy, as it came to be called, would number more than 250 people, and it would be absent from Russia for more than eighteen months. As well as giving its members an opportunity to study the West at first hand and to enlist officers, sailors, engineers and shipwrights to build and man a Russian fleet, it would enable Westerners to see and report their impressions of the leading Russians who made the trip. Soon after the announcement, two almost unbelievable rumors raced through Moscow: the Tsar himself meant to accompany the Great Embassy to the West, and he meant to go not as Great Lord and Tsar, autocrat and sovereign, but as a mere member of the ambassadors' staff. Peter, who stood six feet seven inches, intended to travel incognito.

Part Two

THE GREAT EMBASSY

I

- I

THE GREAT EMBASSY TO WESTERN EUROPE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louis was born September 5, 1638, the belated first fruit of a marriage which had been barren for twenty-three years. The death of his father, Louis XIII, made the boy King of France at four. During his childhood, France was ruled by his mother, Anne of Austria, and her chief minister (who was perhaps also her lover), Cardinal Mazarin, the protege of and successor to the great Richelieu. When Louis was nine, France erupted into the limited revolution known as the Fronde. This humiliation scarred the boy King, and even before the death of Mazarin he was determined to be his own master, to allow no minister to dominate him as Richelieu had dominated his father and Mazarin his mother. Nor, for the rest of his life, did Louis ever willingly set foot in the narrow, turbulent streets of Paris.

Louis was always a country man. In the first years of his reign, he traveled with the court back and fourth between the great royal chateaux outside Paris, but kings of France, especially great kings, built their own palaces to reflect their personal glory. In 1668, Louis chose the site of his own palace, the land of his father's small hunting chateau at Versailles, twelve miles west of Paris. Here, on a sandy knoll rising only slightly above the rolling woodland of the He de France, the King ordered his architect, Le Vau, to build. For years, the work continued. Thirty-six thousand men labored on the scaffolding which surrounded the building or toiled in the mud and dust of the developing gardens, planting trees, laying drainpipes, erecting statues of marble and bronze. Six thousand horses dragged timbers or blocks of stone on carts and sledges. The mortality rate was high. Nightly, wagons carried away the dead who had fallen from a scaffolding or been crushed by the unexpected sliding of a heavy piece of stone. Malarial fever raged through the crude barracks of the workmen, killing dozens every week. In 1682, when the chateau was finally finished, Louis had built the greatest palace in the world. It had no ramparts:

Louis had built his seat undefended, in the open country, to demonstrate the power of a monarch who had no need of moats and walls to protect his person.

Behind a facade one fifth of a mile in length were enormous public galleries, council chambers, libraries, private apartments for the royal family, boudoirs and a private chapel, not to mention corridors, stairways, closets and kitchens. In decoration, Versailles has been said to represent the most conspicuous consumption of art and statuary since the days of the Roman empire. Throughout the palace, the high ceilings and great doors were emblazoned in gold with the mark of Apollo, the sign of the flaming sun, the symbol of the builder and occupant of this enormous palace. The walls were covered with patterned velvet, paneled in marble or hung with tapestries, the windows curtained with embroidered velvet in winter and flowered silk in summer. At night, thousands of candles flickered in hundreds of glass chandeliers and silver candelabra. The rooms were furnished with exquisite inlaid furniture—gilded tables whose legs were scrolled or decorated with flowers and leaves, and broad-backed chairs upholstered with velvet. In the private apartments, rich carpets were laid over inlaid floors and the walls were hung with huge paintings by Andrea del Sarto, Titian, Raphael, Rubens and Van Dyck. In Louis' bedroom hung the "Mona Lisa."

The gardens, designed by Le Notre, were as spectacular as the palace. Millions of flowers, bushes and trees were laid out with precise geometrical precision amidst grassy avenues, terraces, ramps and staircases, ponds, lakes, fountains and cascades. The fountains, with 1,500 jets of water spouting from octagonal lakes, became—and remain—the envy of the world. Tiny clipped hedges curved into ornate designs, separating flowers of every color and description, many of them changed daily. The King was especially fond of tulips, and every year (when he was not at war with Holland) four million tulip bulbs were imported from Dutch nurseries to turn Versailles flaming crimson and brilliant yellow in spring. The King's passion for orange trees led Le Notre to design a huge orangery, depressed below the open air so that the trees would be protected from the wind. Even this was not enough, and Louis brought some of his orange trees indoors and kept them by the windows of his private rooms, planted in silver tubs.

Standing at the tall windows of the Galeries des Glaces in the palace's western facade, the King could look down long prospects of grass, stone and water, adorned with sculpture, to the Grand Canal. This body of water, constructed in the shape of a huge cross, was more than a mile long. Here the King was taken to boat and sail. On summer evenings, the entire court boarded gondolas sent as a gift from the Doge of Venice, and spent hours floating and drifting beneath the stars while Lully and the court orchestra, on a raft nearby, filled the air with music.

Versailles became the symbol of the supremacy, wealth, power and majesty of the richest and most powerful prince in Europe. Everywhere on the continent, other princes recorded their friendship, their envy, their defiance of Louis by building palaces in emulation of his—even princes who were at war with France. Each of them wanted a Versailles of his own, and demanded that his architects and craftsmen create palaces, gardens, furniture, tapestries, carpets, silver, glass and porcelain in imitation of Louis' masterpiece. In Vienna, Potsdam, Dresden, at Hampton Court and later in St. Petersburg, buildings arose and were decorated under the stimulus of Versailles. Even the long avenues and stately boulevards of Washington, D.C., which was laid out over a century later, were geometrically designed by a French architect in imitation of Versailles.

Louis loved Versailles, and when distinguished visitors were present, the King personally conducted them through the palace and gardens. But the palace was much more than Europe's most gorgeous pleasure dome; it had a serious political purpose. The King's philosophy rested on total concentration of power in the hands of the monarch; Versailles became the instrument. The vast size of the palace made it possible for the King to summon and house there all the important nobility of France. Into Versailles, as if drawn by an enormous magnet, came all the great French dukes and princes; the rest of the country, where the heads of these ancient houses had hands, heritage, power and responsibilities, was left deserted and ignored. At Versailles, with power out of their reach, the French nobility became the ornament of the king, not his rival.

Louis drew the nobles to him, and once they were there, he did not abandon them to dreariness and boredom. At the Sun King's command, brilliant entertainment kept everyone busy from morning until night. Everything revolved in minute detail around the King. His bedroom was placed at the very center of the palace, looking eastward over the Cours de Marbre. From eight o'clock in the morning, when the curtains of the royal bed were drawn aside and Louis woke to hear, "Sire, it is time," the monarch was on parade. He rose, was rubbed down with rosewater and spirits of wine, was shaved and dressed, observed by the most fortunate of his subjects. Dukes helped him to pull off his nightshirt and pull on his breeches. Courtiers argued over who was to bring the King his shirt. They jostled for the privilege of presenting the King with his chaise percee, (his "chair with a hole in it"), then crowded around while the King performed his daily natural functions. There was throng in his chamber when he prayed with his chaplain, and when he ate. It followed as he walked through the palace, strolled through the gardens, went to the theater or rode to his hounds. Protocol determined who had a right to sit in the King's presence and whether on a chair with a back or only on a stool. So glorified was the monarch that even when his dinner was passing by, courtiers raised their hats and swept them on the ground in salute, declaring respectfully, "La viande du roi" ("The King's dinner").

Louis loved to hunt. Every day in good weather, he rode with sword or spear in hand, following baying dogs through the forest in pursuit of boar or stag. Every evening, there was music and dancing and gambling at which fortunes were won and lost. Every Saturday night, there was a ball. Often, there were masquerades, elaborate three-day festivals when the entire court dressed up as Romans, Persians, Turks or Red Indians. The feasts at Versailles were gargantuan. Louis himself ate for two men. Wrote the Princess Palatine: "I have often seen the King eat four different plates of soup of different kinds, a whole pheasant, a partridge, a large plate of salad, two thick slices of ham, a dish of mutton in garlic-flavored sauce, a plateful of pastries, and then fruit and hard-boiled eggs. Both the King and 'Monsieur' [Louis' younger brother] are exceedingly fond of hard-boiled eggs." The King's grandchildren later were taught the polite innovation of using a fork to eat with, but when they were invited to dine with the monarch, he would have none of it and forbade them using these tools, declaring, "I have never in my life used anything to eat with but my knife and my fingers."

The main feast at Versailles was a feast of love. The enormous palace with its numberless rooms to slip away to, its crisscrossing alleys of tress, its salutes to hide behind, made a gorgeous stage. In this, as in everything, the King played the leading role. Louis' wife, Maria Theresa, who had came to him as an infanta of Spain, was a simple, child-like creature with large blue eyes. She surrounded herself with half a dozen dwarfs and dreamed of Spain. As long as she lived, Louis upheld his marriage duties, finding his way into her bed eventually every night, dutifully making love to her twice a month. The court always knew these occasions by the fact that the Queen went to confession the following day and her face had a special glow. But the Queen was not enough for Louis. He was highly sexed, always inclined to go to bed with any woman who was handy and relentless in pursuit. "Kings who have a desire, seldom sigh for long," said the courtier Bussy-Rabutin, but there is no record that Louis was ever seriously rebuffed. On the contrary, the court was filled with beautiful woman, most of them married but still ambitious, who flaunted their availabiiity. The three successive Maitresses en Titre (the acknowledged royal mistresses), Louise de La Valliere, Madame de Montespan and Mademoiselle de Fontanges, were but the tip of the iceberg, although with Madame de Montespan it was a grand passion which lasted twelve years and resulted in seven children. No one was disturbed about these arrangements except perhaps the Marquis de Montespan, who angered the King by making a jealous fuss and referring to his wife through all these years as "the late Madame de Montespan."

Whomever the King chose, the court honored. Duchesses rose when a new mistress entered the room. In 1673, when Louis went to war, he took with him the Queen, Louise de La Valliere and Madame de Montespan, then extremely pregnant. All three ladies lumbered along after the army in the same carriage. On campaign, Louis' military tent was made of Chinese silk and had six chambers, including three bedrooms. War, for the Sun King, was not all hell.

Even in France, the view of Louis as a gracious, majestic monarch was not universally held. There were those who found him inconsiderate: he would set off on long carriage rides of five or six hours, insisting that ladies ride with him even when they were pregnant, and then would absolutely refuse to halt so that they might relieve themselves. He seemed unconcerned about the common people: those who tried to speak to him of the poverty his wars were inflicting were excluded from his presence as persons of bad taste. He was stern and could be ruthless: after the Affaire des Poisons, in which numerous court personages who had recently died were alleged to have been poisoned and a plot against the life of the King was hinted, thirty-six of the accused were tortured and burned at the stake, while eighty-one men and women were chained up for life at the bottom of French dungeons, their jailors commanded that if they spoke, they were to be whipped. The story of the Man in the Iron Mask, whose identity was known only to the King, and who was held for life in solitary confinement, was whispered at court.

Outside France, a few in Europe regarded the Sun King's rays as wholly beneficial. To Protestant Europe, Louis was an aggressive, brutal Catholic tyrant.

The instrument of Louis' wars was the army of France. Created by Louvois, it numbered 150,000 in peacetime, 400,000 in wartime. The cavalry wore blue, the infantry pale red, and royal guards—the famed Maison du Roi—scarlet. Commanded by the great marshals of France, Conde, Turenne, Vendome, Tallard and Villars, the army of France was the envy—and menace—of Europe. Louis himself was not a warrior. Although as a young man he went to war, making a dashing figure on horseback in a gleaming breastplate, a velvet cape and a plumed three-cornered hat, the King did not actually participate in battles, but he became quite expert in the details of strategy and military administration. When Louvois died, the King assumed his role and became his own minister of war. It was he who discussed the grand strategy of campaigns with his marshal and saw to the raising of supplies, the recruiting, training and allocation and the collection of intelligence.

Thus the century unrolled, and the prestige of the Sun King and the power and glory of France mounted year by year. The splendor of Versailles aroused the admiration and envy of the world. The French army was the finest in Europe. The French language became the universal language of diplomacy, society and literature. Anything, everything, was possible, it seemed, if beneath the paper bearing the command there appeared the tall, shaky signature "Louis."

At the time of the Great Embassy, the gap between Russia and the West seemed far wider than anything measurable in terms of seagoing ships or superior military technology. From the West, Russia appeared dark and medieval—the glories of its architecture, its icons, its church music and its folk art were unknown, ignored or despised—whereas, to its own educated inhabitants at least, late-seventeenth-century Europe seemd a brilliant, modern community. New worlds were being explored not only across the oceans but also in science, music, art and literature. New instruments to meet practical needs were being invented. Today, many of these achievements have become the necessities and treasures of modern mart—die telescope, the microscope, the thermometer, the barometer, the compass, die watch, the clock, champagne, wax candles, street lighting and the general use of tea and coffee all made their first appearance in these years. Fortunate men already had heard the music of Purcell, Lully, Couperin and Corelli; within a few years, they would listen also to the works of Vivaldi, Telemann, Rameau, Handel, Bach and Scarlatti (the last three all born in the same year, 1685). At court and in the ballrooms of the nobility, ladies and gentlemen danced the gavotte and the minuet. France's trio of immortal playwrights, Moliere, Corneille and Racine, probed deep into the foibles of human nature, and their plays, first performed before their royal patron at Versailles, spread rapidly in performance and reading to every corner of Europe. England was giving to literature Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, the poets

John Dryden and Andrew Marvell and, above all, John Milton. In painting, most of the mid-seventeenth-century giants—Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Vermeer, Frans Hals and Velasquez— had departed, but in France distinguished men and women still had their portraits painted by Mignard and Riguad, or in London by Sir Godfrey Kneller, a pupil of Rembrandt, who painted ten reigning sovereigns, including the youthful Peter the Great.

In their libraries and laboratories, the scientists of Europe, liberated from obeisance to religious doctrine, were plunging forward, deducing conclusions from observed facts, shrinking from no result because it might be unorthodox. Descartes, Boyle and Leeuwenhoek produced scientific papers on coordinate geometry, the relations between the volume, pressure and density of gases, and the astonishing world that could be seen through a 300-power microscope. The most original of these minds ranged over multiple fields of intellect; for example, Gottfried von Leibniz, who discovered the differential and integral calculus, also dreamed of drawing up social and governmental blueprints for an entirely new society; for years, he was to pursue Peter of Russia in hopes that the Tsar would allow him to use the Russian empire as an enormous laboratory of his ideas.

The greatest scientific mind of the age, spanning mathematics, physics, astronomy, optics, chemistry and botany, belonged to Isaac Newton. Born in 1642, Member of Parliament of Cambridge, knighted in 1705, he was fifty-five when Peter arrived in England. His greatest work, the majestic Principia Mathematica, formulating the law of universal gravitation, was already behind him, published in 1687. Newton's work, in the appraisal of Albert Einstein, "determined the course of Western thought, research and practice to an extent that nobody before or since his time can touch."

With the same passion for discovery, other seventeenth-century Europeans were setting out on other oceans to explore and colonize the globe. Most of South America and much of North America were ruled from Madrid. English and Portuguese colonies had been planted in India. The flags of half a dozen European nations flew over settlements in Africa; even so unlikely and non-maritime a state as Brandenburg had established a colony on the Gold Coast. In the most promising of all the new regions being explored, the eastern half of North America, two European states, France and England, had established colonial empires. France's was much larger in territory: from Quebec and Montreal, the French had penetrated through the Great Lakes into the heartland of modern America. In 1672, the year of Peter's birth, Jacques Marquette explored the region around Chicago. A year later, he and Father Louis Jolliet descended the Mississippi in canoes as far as Arkansas. In 1686, when Peter was sailing boats on the Yauza, the Sieur de La Salle claimed the entire Mississippi Valley for France, and in 1699 the lands at the mouth of the great river were named Louisiana in honor of Louis XIV.

The English settlements scattered along the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts through Georgia were more compact, more densely settled and therefore more tenacious in times of trouble. The Dutch New Netherlands—absorbed into today's New York and New Jersey—and the colony of New Sweden, near modern Wilmington, Delaware, both had fallen as spoils to England during the Anglo-Dutch naval wars of the 1660's and 1670's. By the time of Peter's Great Embassy, New York, Philadelphia and Boston were substantial towns of more than 30,000 inhabitants.

Around the globe, the majority of mankind lived near the earth. Life on the land was a struggle for survival. Wood, wind, water and the straining muscles of men and beasts were the sources of energy. Most men and women talked only about people or events within the horizon of field and village; things that happened elsewhere were beyond their ken and interest. When the sun went down, the world—its plains and hills and valleys, its cities, towns and villages—was plunged into darkness. Here and there, a fire might burn or a candle flicker, but most human activity stopped and people went to sleep. Staring into the darkness, they warmed themselves with private hopes or wrestled with personal despair, and then they slept to ready themsleves for the coming day.

All too often, life was not only hard but short. The rich might live to fifty, while the life of a poor man terminated, on the average, somewhere between thirty and forty. Only half of all infants survived their first year and the toll in palaces was as heavy as in cottages. Of the five children born to Louis XIV and his Queen, Maria Theresa, only the Dauphin survived. Queen Anne of England, desperately trying to produce an heir, gave birth sixteen times; not one of these children lived beyond ten years. Peter the Great and his second wife, Catherine, were to produce twelve children, but only two daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, reached adulthood. Even the Sun King was to lose his only son, his eldest grandson and his eldest great-grandson, all prospective kings of France, to measles within a span of fourteen months.

In fact, through the seventeenth century, the population of Europe actually declined. In 1648, it was estimated at 118 million; by 1713 the estimate had fallen to 102 million. Primarily, the causes were the plagues and epidemics that periodically devastated the continent. Sweeping through a city, borne by fleas in the fur of rats, plague left behind a carpet of human corpses. In London in 1665, 100,000 died; nine years before in Naples, 130,000. Stockholm lost one third of its population to plague in 1710-1711 and Marseilles half of its inhabitants in 1720-1721. Bad harvests and consequent famine also killed hundreds of thousands. Some died directly from starvation, but most were prey to illnesses whose task was easier because of lowered resistance due to malnutrition. Poor public sanitation was also responsible for many deaths. Lice carried typhus, mosquitoes carried malaria, and the piles of horse manure in the streets attracted flies that bore typhoid and infantile diarrhea to carry off thousands of children. Smallpox was almost universal—some died and some survived, marked by deep pits across the face and body. The dark face of Louis XIV was marred by the pox, as were the fair features of Charles XII of Sweden. Not until 1721 was the dread disease partially contained by the development of an inoculation. Then, the brave decision of the Princess of Wales to submit to the procedure not only stirred the courage of others, but even made it fashionable.

Into this modern seventeenth-century world, with all its radiance and energies and all its ills, those few Russians who traveled abroad emerged blinking like creatures of the dark led into the light. They disbelieved in or disapproved of most of what they saw. Foreigners, of course, were heretics, and contact with them was likely to contaminate; indeed, the whole process of conducting relations with foreign governments was at best a necessary evil. The Russian government had always been reluctant to receive permanent foreign embassies in Moscow. Such embassies would only "bring harm to the Muscovite state and embroil it with other nations," explained one of Tsar Alexis' leading officials. And the same blend of disdain and distrust governed Russian attitudes toward sending their own embassies abroad. Russian envoys journeyed westward only when there were compelling reasons. Even then, such envoys customarily were ignorant of foreign countries, knew little about European politics or culture and spoke only Russian. Sensitive about their inadequacies, they compensated by paying elaborate attention to matters of protocol, titles and modes of address. They demanded that they be allowed to deliver all communications from their master into the hands of the foreign monarch himself. Further, they demanded that when this foreign monarch received them, he should inquire formally after the health of the Tsar and, while so doing, rise and remove his hat. Needless to say, this was not a ceremony that greatly appealed to Louis XIV or even to lesser European princes. When offended hosts suggested that Russian ambassadors conform to Western practices, the Russians coldly answered, "Others are not our model."

In addition to being ignorant and arrogant, Russian envoys were rigidly limited as to their freedom of action. Nothing could be agreed to in negotiation unless it had been foreseen and accepted in their advance instructions. Anything new, even of the least importance, had to be cleared with Moscow although this effort required weeks of waiting while couriers rode. Thus, few courts welcomed the prospect of a Russian mission, and those foreign officials detailed to deal with a party of visiting Muscovites considered themselves to be powerfully unlucky.

Such an encounter occurred in 1687 when the Regent Sophia sent Prince Jacob Doigoruky and a Russian embassy to Holland, France and Spain. In Holland, they were well received, but in France everything possible went wrong. The courier sent ahead to Paris to announce their arrival had refused to deliver his message to anyone except the King in person. As neither the Minister of Foreign Affairs nor anyone else could wrench this adamant Russian from his purpose, he was sent back without anyone in Paris opening and reading his letter. The embassy proceeded from Holland toward France anyway. On reaching the French frontier at Dunkirk, all embassy baggage was sealed by customs men with the explanation that it would be opened, examined and passed by more qualified officials once it reached Paris. The Russians promised to leave the customs seal intact, but the moment they reached Saint-Denis on the outskirts of Paris, they broke the seals, opened the baggage and spread its contents, mostly valuable Russian furs, out on tables for sale. French merchants thronged about and business was brisk. Subsequently, horrified French court officials sniffed that the Russians had forgotten "their dignity as ambassadors, that they might act as retail merchants, preferring their profit and private interests to the honor of their masters."*

The ambassadors were received by the King at Versailles and things went well until another customs official arrived to examine the baggage. When the Russians refused to allow this, the police arrived, accompanied by locksmiths. The enraged Russians shouted insults, and one of the ambassadors actually drew his knife, whereupon the French withdrew, reporting the matter to the

*The apparent brazenness of Russian behavior was the result of the normal arrangements made for any Russian diplomatic mission traveling abroad. Russian ambassadors were paid Hide or no salary, but instead were supplied by the state with goods, primarily furs, which were much in demand in Europe. They were expected to sell these furs to pay their expenses and to obtain their own recompense. Naturally, since the furs were in effect their salary, Russian diplomats were anxious to get their baggage through customs without paying duty.

King. Louis indignantly ordered the Russians to leave France, telling them to take back to the two Tsars the presents they had sent to him. When the ambassadors refused to go before having another audience with the King, French officials removed all furniture from the house in which the Russians were staying and cut off their supply of food. Within a day, the Russians capitulated, pleading for an audience, claiming that if they returned to Moscow without one, they would lose their heads. This time, they tamely agreed to allow their baggage to be examined and to conduct their negotiations with lesser officials if only Louis would receive them. Two days later, the King invited them to dine at Versailles and personally showed them the gardens and fountains. The ambassadors were so entranced that they did not wish to leave and began producing imaginative reasons for prolonging their stay. Upon returning home, however, they complained loudly of their treatment in Paris, and Russian umbrage over this diplomatic fracas was a partial factor in the subsequent poor relations between Russia and France. Along with French support of Turkey, with which Russia was at least nominally at war until 1712, it influenced Peter's decision not to travel to Paris until after the Sun King's death. And thus it was that as the Great Embassy prepared to leave Russia, it did not contemplate a visit to the greatest monarch of the West, and, sadly for both history and legend, the two royal colossi of the age, Peter and Louis, never stood in the same room.

13

"IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE HIM"

As chief of the Great Embassy, with the rank of First Ambassador, Peter named Lefort, now titled Governor-General of Novgorod as well as General-Admiral. Lefort's two fellow ambassadors both were Russian: Fedor Golovin, the Governor-General of Siberia, and Prokofy Voznitsyn, Governor of Bolkhov. Golovin was one of Russia's first professional diplomats. At the age of thirty-seven, he had negotiated for Sophia the Treaty of Nerchinsk with China, and!since Peter's assumption of power he had become one of the Tsar's close companions and most useful servants.

Conduct of foreign affairs was entrusted to him, and eventually he was granted the title of General-Admiral. In 1702, he was created a Count of the Holy Roman Empire and became, in effect, Peter's prime minister. Voznitsyn also had previous diplomatic experience, having served on missions to Constantinople, Persia, Venice and Poland.

Chosen to escort the ambassadors were twenty noblemen and thirty-five young Russian "volunteers" who, like those dispatched in previous months, were going to England, Holland and Venice to learn shipbuilding, navigation and other nautical sciences. Many of the noblemen and "volunteers" were Peter's comrades from the play regiments at Preobrazhenskoe, his boatbuilding days at Pereslavl, the visits to Archangel and the campaigns against Azov. Prominent among these were his childhood friend Andrei Matveev and the brash young Alexander Menshikov. To complete the Embassy, there were chamberlains, priests, secretaries, interpreters, musicians (including six trumpeters), singers, cooks, coachmen, seventy soldiers and four dwarfs, bringing the total above 250. And somewhere in the ranks was a tall young man, brown-haired, dark-eyed, with a wart on the right side of his face, whom the others addressed simply as Peter Mikhailov. For members of the Embassy to address him as anything else, to reveal that he was the Tsar or even to mention that the Tsar was present with the Embassy, was punishable by death.

To govern Russia in his absence, Peter established a three-man regency council. The first two were his uncle Lev Naryshkin and Prince Boris Golitsyn, both faithful and trusted older men who had advised his mother during the years of exile at Preobrazhenskoe and who had guided his party during the final crisis with Sophia. The third regent was Prince Peter Prozorovsky, the Tsar's treasurer, who suffered from the strange malady of being unwilling to touch the hand of another person or even to open a door least he contaminate himself. Nominally subordinate to these three men, but in fact the real viceroy of Russia during Peter's absence, was Prince Fedor Romodanovsky, the Governor-General of Moscow, commander of the four regiments of the Guard and Prince-Caesar of the Jolly Company. Given supreme jurisdiction in all civil and military cases and charged with maintaining order, Romodanovsky was sternly commanded to deal in the severest manner with any flickerings of discontent or rebellion. Alexis Shein, the generalissimo of the successful Azov expedition, was left in command of Azov, while Boris Sheremetev, leaving on his own private three-year journey to Rome, was replaced on the Dnieper frontier by Prince Jacob Dolgoruky.

On the eve of the Embassy's departure, Peter was happily celebrating at !a banquet at Lefort's mansion when a messenger brought disquieting news. As Gordon wrote in his diary, "A merry night has been spoiled by an accident of discovering treason against his Majesty." Three men—a colonel of the Streltsy, Ivan Tsykler, and two boyars—were seized and accused of plotting against Peter's life. The evidence was thin. Tsykler had been one of the first of Sophia's officers to go to Troitsky and cast in his lot with Peter. For this switch of alliance he had expected great rewards, and had been disappointed; now, he was being sent to serve in the garrison at Azov. Disgruntled, he may have expressed his discontent too publicly. The two boyars involved were outspoken men who were representative of a rising tide of complaint about the style and direction of Peter's rule: The Tsar had deserted his wife and the Kremlin; he maintained his shameful relations with foreigners in the German Suburb; he had lowered the dignity of the throne by walking in the Azov victory parade behind the carriage of the Swiss Lefort; now he was abandoning them to spend many months with foreigners in the West.

Unfortunately, their grumbling touched a raw nerve in Peter's character: Once again, the Streltsy were mixed up in charges of treason. His fear and loathing of them boiled forth. The three men were bloodily executed on Red Square, losing first their arms and legs to the axe, and then their heads. In addition, Peter's fear that their dissent might be only the prelude to an attempted Miloslavsky restoration stirred him to a lurid act of contempt against that family. The coffin of Ivan Miloslavsky, who had been dead for fourteen years, was placed on a sledge, yoked to a team of swine and dragged into Red Square. There, the coffin was opened beneath the execution block, so that the blood of the newly condemned men would spatter the face of the corpse.

Five days after this barbaric scene in Moscow, the Great Embassy set out to study the civilization and technology of the West. On March 20, 1697, the Embassy departed for Novgorod and Pskov in a long procession of sledges and baggage wagons. Among the bulky carts were gorgeous costumes of silk and brocade sewn with pearls and jewels for use by Lefort and the other ambassadors in formal audiences, a large consignment of sable furs to be used to cover expenses where gold, silver or bills on Amsterdam would not suffice, an immense supply of honey, salmon and other smoked fish, and Peter's personal drum.

Crossing the Russian frontier, the Great Embassy entered the Swedish-held Baltic province of Livonia (whose territory was generally that of modern Latvia). Unfortunately, the Swedish governor of Riga, Eric Dahlberg, was completely unprepared for so large a group and especially for the distinguished visitor concealed in its ranks. For this, the Russian Governor of Pskov, the Russian town nearest the frontier, was partly at fault. He had been ordered to make arrangements, but in his letter to Dahlberg he neglected to mention either the size of the visiting Embassy or, more importantly, what august personage would be traveling incognito along with it. Dahlberg had replied with a formal letter of welcome, saying he would do everything possible "with neighborly friendliness." He pointed out, however, that his reception would necessarily be pinched because of a disastrous harvest that had brought the province to the brink of famine. To make matters worse, in addition to inadequate advance warning, there was a missed connection. Dahlberg sent carriages with an escort of cavalry to the frontier to bring the Tsar's ambassadors into Riga in diplomatic style. Because the important members of the Embassy, Peter included, were traveling ahead of the main party, they missed this welcome. Just outside Riga, when the carriages and escort finally caught up with the ambassadors, the Swedes offered a second reception and staged a military parade to make amends.

Had this been the only mishap and had Peter been able to pass through Riga quickly and cross the River Dvina* as intended, all might still have been well. But he arrived in early spring just as the ice was breaking in the river, which flowed beneath the city walls. There was no bridge, and the large ice floes in the river made crossing by boat impossible. For seven days, Peter and the Russian party were forced to wait in the city for the ice to melt.

Although impatient and anxious to leave, Peter initially was pleased by the honor done to his ambassadors. Every time they came or went from the citadel, a salute of twenty-four guns roared out.

Riga, the capital of Livonia, was a Protestant Baltic city of tall, thin church spires, gabled roofs, cobbled streets and thriving independent merchants, totally different from Pskov and Russia not far away. Riga was also a major citadel and a powerful anchor of the Swedish Baltic empire, and, with this in mind, the Swedish hosts were nervous about these Russian visitors and - especially about the presence of the inquisitive twenty-four-year-old Tsar. Predictably, Peter was determined to study the city's fortifications. Riga was a modern fortress, carefully constructed on the latest Western lines by Swedish military engineers. As such, it was far more powerful and thus more interesting to Peter than the old-style fortifications of simple walls and towers which characterized all Russian fortresses, including the Kremlin, and which Peter had

*The river emptying into the White Sea at Archangel is also called Dvina, The Archangel Dvina is often called the North Dvina and the river at Riga, the West Dvina.

faced and conquered at Azov. Here was stone-faced bastions and palisaded conterscarpes built after the model of the French master Vauban. To Peter, it was a rare opportunity and he meant to make the most of it. He climbed over the ramparts, made pencil sketches, measured the depth and width of the moats, and studied the angles of fire of the cannon at the embrasures.

Peter regarded his own activity as that of a student studying a modem fortress in the abstract, but the Swedes understandably saw it somewhat differently. To them, Peter was a monarch and military commander whose father's army had besieged this city only forty years before. The fortress which Peter was examining and measuring with such care had been erected specifically to protect the city from the Russians and to prevent Russian penetration to the Baltic coast. Thus, the sight of the tall young man standing on their ramparts working with his sketch pad and measuring tapes was unnerving. In addition, there was the problem of Peter's incognito. One day, a Swedish sentry, observing the foreigner copying details into a notebook, ordered him away. Peter ignored the sentry and persisted in his activity. Raising his musket, the Swedish soldier threatened to fire. Peter was outraged, regarding this not so much as an insult to rank as a breach of hospitality. Lefort, as First Ambassador, protested to Dahlberg. The Swedish Governor, whatever his private feelings at this reconnaissance of his fortifications, apologized and assured the ambassador that no discourtesy had been intended. Lefort accepted the explanation and agreed that the soldier should not be punished for doing his duty.

Nevertheless, relations between the Swedish hosts and Russian guests continued to deteriorate. Dahlberg was in a difficult position. The Russian Great Embassy was not officially accredited to the Swedish court. In addition, the fact that the Tsar was present did not wish his presence acknowledged created thorny protocol problems. Dahlberg, therefore, was formally polite, doing what protocol demanded for important ambassadors of a neighboring monarch, but nothing more. No entertainment was planned; there were no banquets, no fireworks, no amusements of the sort Peter enjoyed. The stiff, cold Swedish commander simply withdrew and—it seemed to the Russians—ignored them. Also, as the Embassy was not bound for Sweden itself, but only in transit through Swedish territory, the normal diplomatic procedure by which the host country paid the expenses of diplomatic visitors was not observed. The Russians were left to pay for their own food, lodgings, horses and fodder, and for these the ambassadors paid a price inflated by famine and the desire of Riga merchants to extract as much as they could from the visitors.

In addition to feeling these grievances, Peter was increasingly irritated by the crowds that came to stare at him. When finally, after a week, the ice was sufficiently melted so that they could cross the river, Dahlberg attempted to send his visitors off in style. Boats carrying the royal yellow-and-blue flag of Sweden ferried the Russian Embassy across the river while, from the fortress, cannon thundered in salute. But it was too late. In Peter's mind, Riga was a city of meanness, inhospitality and insults. As he traveled around Europe, Riga suffered further by contrast. In most of the other cities Peter visited, the reigning sovereign was there to greet him, and even though Peter insisted on his incognito, these electors, kings and even the Austrian Emperor always found a way to meet him privately, to entertain him lavishly and to pay his bills.

Peter's antagonism toward Riga rankled deeply. Three years later, needing excuses for beginning the Great Northern War against Sweden, he cited his rude reception by Riga. And thirteen years later, in 1710, when Russian troops surrounded the city and began the siege that led to its capture and incorporation for over two centuries into the Russian empire, Peter himself was present to fire the first three shells into the city. "Thus," he wrote to Menshikov, "the Lord God has enabled us to see the beginning of our revenge on this accursed place."

Once across the Dvina, Peter entered the Duchy of Courland, whose capital, Mitau, was thirty miles south of Riga. Nominally a fief to the Polish kingdom, Courland was sufficiently distant from Warsaw to maintain a practical autonomy, and with Poland now disintegrating, the Duke of Courland was almost his own master. Here, there was no question of making the mistake that Dahlberg had made in Riga. The Tsar was the Tsar; the incognito would be respected, but everyone would know who was incognito. Thus, although his duchy was poor, Duke Frederick Casimir honored the Embassy with lavish entertainment. "Open tables were kept everywhere with trumpets and music attended by feasting and excessive drinking as if His Tsarish Majesty had been another Bacchus. I have not yet seen such hard drinkers," wrote one of the Duke's ministers. Lefort's drinking was especially notable. "It never overcomes him, but he always continues master of his reason." The Russians, it was whispered by the foreigners among them, were really no more than "baptized bears."

Knowing that the Tsar loved the water, the Duke of Courland arranged to charter a yacht so that his guest could make the next stage of his journey by sea. Peter's destination was Konigsberg, then a town in the large and powerful North German electoral state of Brandenburg. On hand in the town to welcome the Tsar was the Elector himself, Frederick III. A member of the ambitious House of Hohenzollem, Frederick had expansive plans for himself and his domains. His dream was to transform his electorate into a powerful kingdom to be known as Prussia, and to transform himself into Frederick I, King of Prussia. The title could be granted by the Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna, but the real augmentation of power could come only at the expense of Sweden, whose fortresses and territories were spread along the coast of North Germany. Frederick was anxious for Russian support as a counterweight to Sweden. And here, as if in answer to his need, came the Tsar himself, intending to pass through the territory of Brandenburg. Naturally, Frederick was in Konigsberg to greet him.

Peter, traveling by sea, slipped into Konigsberg and came ashore at night. He took a modest lodging and made a private visit to the Elector. The first conversation lasted an hour and a half while the two rulers discussed ships, gunnery and navigation. Thereafter, Frederick took Peter hunting near his country house, and together they watched a fight between two bears. Peter astonished his hosts by playing loudly on the trumpet and drum, and his curiosity, liveliness and readiness to be pleased made a favorable impression.

Eleven days later, the horseman and wagons of the Russian Great Embassy arrived by road, and Peter watched from a window to see how they were received. Frederick granted them a handsome expense allowance for their visit and served a magnificent welcoming dinner, followed by fireworks. Peter along with the other young noblemen of the Embassy attended in a scarlet coat with gold buttons. Later, Frederick confessed that he had had to struggle to keep a straight face when, as dictated by protocol, he had asked the ambassadors for news of the Tsar and whether they had left him in excellent health.

In their negotiations, Frederick was anxious to reconfirm an old alliance which Tsar Alexis had made with Brandenburg against Sweden, but Peter, still at war with Turkey, was unwilling to do anything which might provoke the Swedes. Finally, in talks aboard the Elector's yacht, the two monarchs agreed on a new treaty, promising generally to help each other against their mutual enemies. Frederick also asked the Tsar to assist in his campaign to promote himself to king. Peter agreed to treat the Elector's ambassadors in Moscow at the same level as that accorded to his own ambassadors in Brandenburg; this was vague, but it was something that Frederick could use in making his case to the Emperor in Vienna.

Although anxious to leave for Holland, Peter lingered in Konigsberg until the situation in Poland became clearer. In June 1696, when Jan Sobieski died, the Polish throne became vacant, and two contenders, Augustus, Elector of Saxony, and the Bourbon Prince de Conti, the nominee of Louis XIV, were competing for it. Russia, Austria and most of the German states were firmly opposed to Conti's election. A French king on the Polish throne meant an immediate end to Polish participation in the war against Turkey, a Franco-Polish alliance and the extension of French power into Eastern Europe. To prevent this, Peter was prepared to fight, and he moved Russian troops to the Polish border. With the issue still cloudy, the two parties still maneuvering and the Diet still not prepared to vote, Peter decided to wait in Konigsberg before proceeding westward. While he waited, Peter examined things in Konigsberg which interested him. With Colonel Streltner von Sternfield, chief engineer of the army of Brandenburg and an expert in the science of artillery, Peter studied both the theory and the practice of ballistics. He fired cannon of various sizes at targets while Von Sternfeld corrected his aim and explained his mistakes. When Peter left, Von Sternfeld made out a certificate attesting to the knowledge of skill of his pupil Peter Mikhailov.

Unfortunately, in Konigsberg as in Riga, Peter got into trouble. This time, his hasty temper rather than his curiosity was responsible. On his Name Day, more important than a birthday to all Russians, Peter had counted on a visit from Frederick, and had planned his own fireworks display for the Elector's benefit. But Frederick, not realizing the significance of the day, had left Konigsberg to meet the Duke of Courland, delegating several of his ministers to represent him at the Tsar's celebration. Peter was hurt and publicly humiliated when Frederick failed to appear, and showed his pique openly to the representatives, saying loudly in Dutch to Lefort, "The Elector is very good, but his ministers are the devil." Thinking he saw one of the ministers smile at his words, Peter flew into a rage, rushed at the Brandenburger, cried, "Get out! Get out!" and pushed him out of the room. After his anger cooled, he wrote a letter to his "dearest friend" Frederick. The letter was an apology, but into it crept the nature of his complaint. On departure, Peter made further amends by sending Frederick a large ruby.

In mid-August, after Peter had spent seven weeks in Konigsberg, the news came that Augustus of Saxony had arrived in Warsaw and been elected King of Poland. Peter was pleased by this outcome and anxious to leave immediately by sea for Holland, but the presence of a squadron of French warships in the Baltic forced him to change his plans; he had no wish to wind up an involuntary guest aboard a vessel flying the great white fleur-de-lis banner of the King of France. Disappointed, he took the only path open to him: by land, across the German electoral states of Brandenburg and Hanover.

Peter's disappointment at not being able to travel by ship was compounded by a new problem he now faced in traveling by land: all along his route, people wanted to see him. The long delay in Konigsberg had provided ample time for news of his presence with the Embassy to spread across Europe, and everywhere there was great excitement and curiosity: For the first time, a Muscovite tsar, the ruler of a dimly perceived, exotic land, was traveling in Europe, where he might be seen, examined and marveled at. The Tsar was upset by attentions of this kind.

Having left Konigsberg in secret, he urged his coachman to hurry, hoping to avoid notice and detection. He passed through Berlin quickly, sitting far back in a corner of the coach to avoid recognition. This speed and reclusiveness carried him rapidly across North Germany, but he was not to avoid an encounter with two redoubtable ladies who had laid plans to waylay him. These were Sophia, the widowed Electress of Hanover, and her daughter Sophia Charlotte, Electress of Brandenburg. The two Electresses were eager to examine for themselves the much-talked-about Tsar. The younger Electress, Sophia Charlotte, who had been visiting her mother in Hanover while her husband, the Elector Frederick, was welcoming Peter in Konigsberg, was especially intrigued. She had expected to meet him in Berlin, and now, determined to overtake him as he approached Hanover, she packed her mother, her brothers and her children into carriages and hurried to intercept the Russian party at the town of Koppenbriigge. Arriving just ahead of Peter, she sent a chamberlain to invite the Tsar to dinner.

At first, seeing the size of the ladies' retinue and the crowd of local citizens milling curiously outside the gate, Peter refused to come. The chamberlain persisted, and Peter yielded on the assurance that, apart from Sophia Charlotte and her mother, there would be only her brothers, her children and the important members of Peter's suite. Ushered into the presence of the two royal ladies, Peter faltered, blushed and was unable to speak. They were, after all, the first aristocratic, intellectually inclined Western ladies he had ever met; his only previous contact with Western women had been with the middle-class wives and daughters of the Western merchants and soldiers in the German Suburb. But these two ladies were exceptional even among European aristocracy. Sophia of Hanover, then sixty-seven, was the vigorous, commonsensical, successful ruler of that thriving North German state. A few years after this meeting with Peter, she, as the granddaughter of King James I of England, would be picked by die British parliament to succeed Queen Anne and thereby secure the Protestant succession in England.* Her daughter, twenty-nine-year-old Sophia Charlotte of Brandenburg, was equally strong-minded and made a dazzling figure among the ladies of the North German courts. For a while, she had been the designated bride of Louis XIV's grandson, the Duke of Burgundy, before politics had dictated that Burgundy should marry Marie Adelaide of Savoy. During the two years Sophia Charlotte had lived at Versailles, her wit and beauty had attracted the admiration of the Sun King himself. She was well educated, and Leibniz had become her friend as well as her tutor. Indeed, so delightful and appealing was Sophia Charlotte that her husband, who built the Charlottenburg Palace for her in Berlin, was actually in love with her. Naturally, in deference to the august example set for lesser monarchs by Louis XIV, Frederick felt that he must have a mistress, but he vastly preferred his charming and clever wife.

Peter, confronted by these poised and elegant ladies, simply covered his face with his hands and muttered in German, "I don't know what to say." Realizing his difficulty, Sophia Charlotte and her mother put their guest at ease by placing him between them at the table and beginning to talk to him. Before long, his shyness began to pass and he started speaking so freely that the two women had to compete for his attention. The dinner lasted four hours and both Electresses were eager to go on plying him with questions, but Sophia Charlotte was afraid that he was bored and called for music and dancing. Peter at first refused to dance, saying that he had no gloves, but once again the ladies changed his mind and soon he was performing heartily. Turning them around the floor, he felt strange things under their dresses: the whalebones in their corsets. "These German women have devilish hard bones," he shouted to his friends. The ladies were delighted.

Peter was enjoying himself immensely. This party was gayer than those in the German Suburb, gayer even than the roaring banquets of the Jolly Company. He overflowed with good spirits. He ordered his dwarfs to dance. He kissed and pinched the ear of his favorite dwarf. He planted kisses on the head of the ten-year-

*Sophia did not live to wear the British crown. She died before Queen Anne, and both her Hanoverian and English titles passed to her son, George Louis, who ruled the two simultaneously as Elector of Hanover and King George 1 of England.

old Princess Sophia Dorothea, the future mother of Frederick the Great, destroying her coiffure. He also embraced and kissed the fourteen-year-old Prince George, who would later become King George II of England.

In the course of the evening, the two Electresses closely observed the Tsar. He was, they found, far from the uncivilized young barbarian described by rumor. "He has a natural, unconstrained air which pleased me," wrote Sophia Charlotte. His grimaces and facial contortions were not as bad as they had expected and, Sophia Charlotte added sympathetically, "Some are not in his power to correct." The elder Electress, an experienced judge of men, described the evening and the guest of honor in detail:

The Tsar is very tall, his features are fine, and his figure very noble. He has great vivacity of mind, and a ready and just repartee. But, with all the advantages with which nature has endowed him, it could be wished that his manners were a little less rustic. We immediately sat down at table. Herr Koppenstein, who did the duty as marshal, presented the napkin to His Majesty, who was greatly embarrassed, for at Brandenburg, instead of a table napkin, they had given him a ewer and basin [to clean his hands] after the meal. He was very gay, very talkative, and we established a great friendship for each other, and he exchanged snuff-boxes with my daughter. We stayed in truth a very long time at table, but we would gladly have remained there longer still without feeling a moment of boredom, for the Tsar was in very good humor, and never ceased talking to us. My daughter had her Italians sing. Their song pleased him though he confessed to us that he did not care much for music.

I asked him if he liked hunting. He replied that his father had been very fond of it, but that he himself, from his earliest youth, had had a real passion for navigation and fireworks. He told us that he worked himself in building ships, showed us his hands, and made us touch the callous places that had been caused by work. He brought his musicians, and they played Russian dances, which we liked better than the Polish ones. . . .

We regretted that we could not stay much longer, so that we could see him again, for his society gave us much pleasure. He is a very extraordinary man. It is impossible to describe him, or even to give an idea of him, unless you have seen him. He has a very good heart, and remarkably noble sentiments. I must tell you also, that he did not get drunk in our presence, but we had hardly left when the people of his suite began to make ample amends.

He is a prince at once very good and very bad; his character is exactly that of his country. If he had received a better education, he would be an exceptional man, for he has great qualities and unlimited natural intelligence.

Peter signaled his own pleasure at the evening by sending each of the Electresses a trunkful of Russian sables and brocade. Then he left immediately, ahead of the main party. For Holland was only a few miles farther down the Rhine.

14

PETER IN HOLLAND

In the second half of the seventeenth century, Holland, a term used to describe the seven United Provinces of the Northern Netherlands, was at the peak of its world power and prestige. With its dense, teeming population of two million hard-working Dutchmen crowded into a tiny area, Holland was by far the richest, most urbanized, most cosmopolitan state in Europe. Not surprisingly, the prosperity of this small state was a source of wonder and envy to its neighbors, and often this envy turned to greed. On such occasions, the Dutch drew on certain national characteristics to defend themselves. They were valiant, obstinate and resourceful, and when they fought—first against the Spaniards, then against the English and finally against the French—they fought in a way which was practical and, at the same time, desperately and sublimely heroic. To defend their independence and their democracy, a people of two million maintained an army of 120,000 and the second-largest navy in the world.

Holland's prosperity, like its freedom, rested on ingenuity and hard work. In most European nations of the day, the vast majority of the people were tied to the land, engaged in the simple process of feeding themselves and creating a small surplus to feed the towns and cities. In Holland, one Dutch peasant, by producing larger crop yields per acre, by somehow extracting more milk and butter from his cows and more meat from his pigs, was able to feed two of his non-farming fellow citizens. Thus, in Holland more than half the population was freed for other activities, and they bustled into commerce, industry and shipping.

Commerce and shipping were the source of Holland's enormous wealth. The seventeenth-century Dutch were a trading, sea-faring people. The great sister ports of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, situated at the twin mouths of the Rhine, were at the junction of Europe's canals, its most important rivers and the oceans of the world. Almost everything passing in and out of Europe, up and down Europe's coast and across the sea passed through Holland. English tin, Spanish wool, Swedish iron, French wines, Russian furs, Indian spices and teas, Norwegian timber and Irish wool flowed into the Netherlands to be graded, finished, woven, blended, sorted and shipped out again on the watery highways.

To carry these goods, the Dutch had a near-monopoly on the world's shipping. Four thousand Dutch merchantmen—more merchant ships than those possessed by the rest of the world combined—sailed the world's oceans. The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, and the newer West India Company had offices in every major port in the world. Dutch seamen, combining the vigor of the explorer with the calculation of the trader, were always seeking new markets and new ports. As ships sailed ceaselessly to and fro, goods and profits piled up and the Dutch merchant republic became richer and richer. New services were developed in the city of Amsterdam to protect and encourage trade: insurance was devised to spread the risks; banks and the stock exchange found ways to deal in credit and to float public loans on an unprecedented scale to finance great commercial enterprises; printers printed contracts and bills of lading and all the multiple paper forms necessary to organize, advertise and confirm the thousands of business transactions occurring daily. Wealth bred confidence, confidence bred credit, credit bred more wealth, and Holland's power and fame spread farther. Holland was the true model of the rich, successful mercantile state, a commerical paradise to which young men came from all over Protestant Europe, especially England and Scotland, to learn the commerical and financial techniques of Holland's supremacy.

It was to this glittering mecca of commerce, sea power, culture and world empire that an eager young Russian named Peter Mikhailov was hurrying across Germany in the late summer of 1697.

At Pereslavl, at Archangel, at Voronezh, talking with Dutch shipwrights and sea captains, Peter had often heard the name of Zaandam. This Dutch town on the banks of the great gulf of the Ij, ten miles north of Amsterdam, was said to build the finest ships in Holland. In the fifty private shipbuilding yards in and around the town, as many as 350 ships a year were constructed, and so rapid and expert were the Zaandamers reputed to be that from the moment a keej was laid until the vessel was ready for sea, not more than five weeks were allowed to pass. Over the years, Peter's desire to visit and learn to build ships in Zaandam had taken firm root. Now, as he traveled across Germany, he told his comrades that he meant to remain in Zaandam through the autumn and winter learning shipbuilding. When he reached the Rhine at Emmerich near the Dutch frontier, he was so impatient that he hired a boat and, leaving most of the Embassy behind, sailed straight down the river, passing through Amsterdam without even stopping to rest.

Early on Sunday morning, August 18, Peter and his six companions were sailing along a canal approaching Zaandam when the Tsar noticed a familiar figure sitting in a rowboat, fishing for eels. It was Gerrit Kist, a Dutch blacksmith who had worked with Peter in Moscow. Overjoyed to see a familiar face, Peter boomed out a greeting. Kist, snatched from his thoughts and raising his eyes to see the Tsar of Russia sailing by, almost fell out of his boat. Steering for the bank and jumping from his boat, Peter hugged Kist excitedly and swore him to secrecy regarding his presence. Then, finding that Kist lived nearby, the Tsar immediately announced that he would stay with the blacksmith. Kist had many objections, arguing that his house was too small and plain for a monarch, and proposing instead the house of a widow who lived just behind his own house. With an offer of seven florins, the widow was persuaded to move in with her father. Thus, within a few hours Peter was happily settled into a tiny wooden house consisting of two small rooms, two windows, a tiled stove and a curtained, airless sleeping closet so small that he could not fully stretch out. Two of his companions stayed with him; the other four found nearby quarters.

Because it was Sunday, the shipyards were closed, but Peter was intensely excited and found it impossible to sit quietly and do nothing. He went out into the streets, which were filled with people strolling on a summer Sunday afternoon. The crowd, attracted by the news that a strange boat had arrived carrying-foreigners in exotic costumes, began to notice him. Annoyed, he tried to find refuge at the Otter Inn, but there also people stared at him. It was only the beginning.

Early Monday morning, Peter hurried to a store on the dike and bought carpenter's tools. Then he went to the private shipyard of Lynst Rogge and, under the name Peter Mikhailov, signed himself up as a common workman. He began working happily, shaping timbers with his hatchet and constantly asking the foreman the name of every object he saw. After work, he began visiting the wives and parents of Dutch shipbuilders still in Russia, explaining to them that he worked side by side with their sons and husbands, declaring with pleasure, "I, too, am a carpenter." He called on the widow of a Dutch carpenter who had died in Russia, to whom he had previously sent a gift of 500 florins. The widow told him that she had often prayed for a chance to tell the Tsar how much his gift had meant to her. Touched and pleased, Peter sat down and had supper with her.

On Tuesday, anxious to be out on the water, Peter bought a small rowboat, having haggled over the price in the best Dutch fashion. He obtained it for forty florins, and then he and the seller went to a tavern and shared a pitcher of beer.

Despite Peter's wish that no one learn his identity, the secret quickly began to evaporate. On Monday morning, Peter had ordered his companions to shed their Russian robes for the red jackets and white canvas trousers of Dutch workmen, but, even so, the Russians did not look like Dutchmen. Peter's own great height made real anonymity impossible, and by Tuesday everyone in Zaandam knew that "a person of great importance" was in town. This was confirmed by an incident on Tuesday afternoon when Peter, walking down a street and eating plums from his hat, offered some to a group of boys he encountered. There was not enough fruit to go around, and the boys began to follow him. When he tried to chase them away, they pelted him with stones and mud. Peter took shelter in the Three Swans Inn and sent for help. The Burgomaster himself came and Peter was forced to explain who he was and why he was there. The Burgomaster immediately issued an order forbidding Zaandamers to trouble or insult "distinguished persons who wish to remain unknown."

Soon, the most "distinguished person" was precisely identified. A Zaandam shipwright working in Russia had written home to his father that the Great Embassy was coming to Holland and that the Tsar would probably be with it, traveling incognito. He advised his father that Peter would be easy to recognize because of his great height, the shaking or twitching of his head and left arm, and the small wart on his right cheek. The father had just read this letter aloud on Wednesday to everyone in Pomp's barber shop when a tall man with exactly those distinguishing marks walked in. Like barbers everywhere, Pomp regarded it as part of his calling to pass along all local gossip, and he forthwith broadcast the news that the tallest of the strangers was the Tsar of Muscovy. To verify Pomp's report, people hurried to Kist, who was harboring the stranger and who was known to be familiar with the Tsar from his years in Russia. Kist, faithful to Peter's wish, stoutly denied his guest's identity until his wife said, "Gerrit, I cannot stand it any longer. Stop lying."

Even though Peter's secret was out, he still tried to maintain his incognito. He refused an invitation to dine with the leading merchants of Zaandam and declined to eat fish cooked in the special Zaandam style with the Burgomaster and his councilors. To both these invitations, Peter replied that there was no one of importance present; the Tsar had not yet come. When one leading merchant came to Peter's comrades to offer a larger house with a garden filled with fruit trees which would be more suitable for them and their master, they replied that they were not noblemen but servants, and that their present accommodations were ample.

News of the Tsar's appearance in Zaandam spread rapidly across Holland. Many people flatly refused to believe it, and numerous bets were placed. Two merchants who had met Peter at Archangel hurried to Zaandam. Seeing him at his house on Thursday morning, they came out, pale with emotion, and declared, "Certainly, it is the Tsar, but how and why is he here?" Another acquaintance from Archangel told Peter of his amazement at seeing him in Holland in workman's clothes. Peter replied simply, "You see it," and refused to say anything else on the subject.

On Thursday, Peter bought a sailboat for 450 florins and installed a new mast and bowsprit with his own hands. When the sun rose on Friday, he was sailing on the Ij, tiller in hand. That afternoon, after dinner, he went sailing again, but as he cruised on the Ij, he saw a large number of boats putting out from Zaandam to join him. To escape, he steered for shore and jumped out, only to find himself in the middle of another curious crowd, pushing to see him and staring at him as if he were an animal in the zoo. In anger, Peter cuffed one spectator on the head, provoking the crowd to shout at the victim, "Bravo! Marsje, now you have been knighted!" By this time, the numbers of people in boats and on the shore had grown so great that Peter secluded himself in an inn and would not return to Zaandam until darkness fell.

The following day, Saturday, Peter had intended to observe the interesting and delicate mechanical operation by which a large, newly constructed ship was dragged across the top of a dike by means of rollers and capstans. To protect him, a space had been enclosed with a fence so that he could watch without being crushed by the crowd. By Saturday morning, however, the news of Peter's anticipated presence had brought even larger crowds of people from as far as Amsterdam; there were so many that the fences were trampled down. Peter, seeing the windows and even the roofs of the surrounding houses jammed with spectators, refused to go, even though the Burgomaster came in person to urge him. In Dutch, Peter replied, "Too many people. Too many people."

On Sunday, crowds came from Amsterdam, boatload after boatload. In desperation, the guards on the Zaandam bridges were doubled, but the crowd merely pushed them aside. Peter did not dare step outside all day. Pent up indoors, his anger and frustration smoldering, he pleaded with the embarrassed town council for help, but it could do nothing with the torrent of strangers which was growing every minute. As a last resort, he decided to leave Zaandam. His boat was brought from its normal mooring to a place near the house. By vigorous use of his knees and elbows, Peter managed to force his way through the crowd and climb on board. Although a high wind which had been blowing since morning had now reached the proportions of a storm, he insisted on leaving. A stay in the rigging parted as he cast off, and for a moment the boat was in danger of foundering. Nevertheless, despite the urging of experienced seamen. Peter sailed away, arriving three hours later in Amsterdam. Here, too, a crowd of Dutchmen pressed against one another to see him. Once again, several of them caught blows from the angry Tsar. Finally, he made his way to an inn which had been reserved for the Great Embassy.

This was the end of Peter's long-dreamed-of visit to Zaandam. Trying to work in an open shipyard or move freely about the town was plainly impossible, and Peter's intended stay of several months was reduced to an actual stay of a single week. Later, he sent Menshikov and two other members of his party back to Zaandam to learn the special technique of making masts, and he himself returned for two brief visits, but the education in Dutch shipbuilding that Peter had planned for himself was to take place not in Zaandam but in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam, in Peter's time, was the greatest port in Europe and the wealthiest city in the world. Built where two rivers, the Amstel and the Ij, flowed into the Zuider Zee, the city rose up from the water. Piles had been driven into the marshy ground to give it a footing, and the water flowed through the city in concentric rings of canals—five such rings in Peter's day. Each canal was bisected and trisected by smaller canals, so that the entire city was pratically afloat, an archipelago of seventy islands, linked by 500 bridges arching over the canals to allow boats and barges to pass beneath. The city walls were constructed just inside the outermost canal so that the canal itself made a natural moat. Embedded ip these ramparts were sturdy, round defensive watch-towers which—typically—the utilitarian Dutch had put to a second usei On top of the towers they set windmills, whose rotating varies supplied energy to pumps working constantly to drain the water from small patches of dry ground. Standing on the fortifications, a watcher gazed out across a wide expanse of flat, watery countryside studded in every direction with other windmills, great and small, turning ceaselessly to pump out the sea.

The city's buildings proclaimed its wealth. Seen from the harbor, Amsterdam was a panorama of red-brick church towers, symmetrical and practical, designed in the distinctive rounded Dutch style. The city fathers were enormously proud of their City Hall, regarding the building, which rested on 13,659 piles, as the Eighth Wonder of the World. (Today, the building is a royal palace.) Throughout the city, there were breweries, sugar refineries, tobacco warehouses, storehouses for coffee and spices, bakeries, slaughterhouses and ironworks, each contributing by its shape or its pungent smell to a scene of enormous variety and richness. But mosdy it was in the stately homes built along the canals by the city's prosperous merchants that Amsterdam's wealth was displayed. Set back from the canals, on streets lined with elms and linden trees, these red-brick mansions remain today Amsterdam's handsomest feature. Very narrow (because the owners were taxed on the basis of the width of their houses), they rose four or five stories to an elegant, pointed gable at the peak. From this peak, a beam usually projected out over the street and was used as an anchor for block and tackle to haul heavy furniture and other objects up from the street and in through the windows of the upper floors, the stairs being too narrow for this purpose. Through these tall windows the owner could look down on the street, the trees, the elegant iron lampposts and the shaded, rippling water of the canals.

Water and ships were everywhere. Turning every corner, a visitor caught sight of masts and sails. The waterfront was a forest of spars. Along the canals, pedestrians stepped over ropes, iron rings for mooring boats, pieces of timber, barrels, anchors, even cannon. The whole city was a semi-shipyard. And the harbor itself was crowded with ships of every size—the small, gaff-rigged fishing boats just back at midday from an early morning's catch on the Zuider Zee; the big, three-masted East India Company merchantmen and seventy- or eighty-gun ships-of-the-line, all showing the typical Dutch design with round, tumed-up bows, broadbeamed hulls and shadow bottoms, looking exactly like outsized Dutch wooden shoes equipped with masts and sails; the elegant state yachts, with bulbous Dutch bows and large, ornate after-cabins with leaded windows opening over the stern. And at the eastern end of the harbor, in a section called Ostenburg, lay the Dutch East India Company dockyards with the great wharves and shipbuilding ramps where the company's ships were constructed. Row on row, the great, round, bulbous hulls of the East Indiamen took shape, up from the keel, rib by rib, plank by plank, deck by deck. Nearby, veteran ships returning from long voyages were overhauled—first, the rigging and masts were removed, then the hulls were dragged into shallow tidal water and rolled on their sides. There they lay like beached whales with carpenters, fitters and other workmen swarmed over them, scraping their bottoms of rich layers of marine growth, replacing their rotten planks and melting fresh tar into the seams to keep out the sea.

It was to this dockyard, a special seaman's paradise within the larger paradise that was all of Amsterdam, that Peter came to spend four months.

Peter's return to Amsterdam had been forced by the crowds in Zaandam, but he would have returned in any case to greet his own Great Embassy, which was just arriving. The ambassadors had been received in royal style at Cleves near the frontier, and four large yachts and numerous carriages had been placed at their disposal. The city fathers of Amsterdam, understanding the potential significance of this Embassy in terms of future trade with Russia, decided to receive it with extraordinary honors.

The reception included ceremonial visits to the City Hall, the Admiralty and the docks, special performances of opera and ballet, and a major banquet which ended with a display of fireworks set off from a raft in the Amstel. During these festivities, Peter had a chance to talk to the extraordinary man who was Burgomaster of Amsterdam, Nicholas Witsen. Cultured, wealthy, respected for his character as well as his achievements, he was an explorer, a patron of the arts and an amateur scientist, as well as a public official. One of his passions was ships, and he took Peter to see his collections of ship models, navigational instruments and tools used in shipbuilding. Wisten was fascinated by Russia and for a long time, along with his other duties, and interests, Witsen had acted as the unofficial minister of Muscovy in Amsterdam.

During the months that Peter was in Amsterdam, the Tsar and the Burgomaster spoke daily and Peter turned to Witsen with the problem of the crowds in Zaandam and Amsterdam. How could he work quietly, learning to build ships, surrounded by curious, staring strangers? Witsen had an immediate suggestion. If Peter remained in Amsterdam, he could work in the shipyards and docks of the East India Company, which were enclosed by walls and barred to the public. Peter was delighted by the idea, and Witsen, a director of the company, undertook to arrange it. The following day, the board of directors of the East India Company resolved to invite "a high personage present here incognito" to work in its shipyard and, for his convenience, to set aside for him the house of the master ropemaker so that he could live and work undisturbed inside the shipyard. In addition, to assist him in learning shipbuilding, the board ordered the laying of the keel of a new frigate, 100 feet or 130 feet long, whichever the Tsar preferred, so that he and his comrades could work on it and observe Dutch methods from the very beginning.

That night, at the formal state banquet given the Embassy by the city of Amsterdam, Witsen told Peter of the decision reached by the directors earlier in the day. Peter was enthusiastic and, although he loved fireworks, he could scarcely restrain himself through the rest of the meal. When the last skyrocket had burst, the Tsar jumped to his feet and announced that he was leaving for Zaandam right then, in the middle of the night, to fetch his tools so that he could work in the morning. Attempts by both Russians and Dutchmen to stop him were useless, and at eleven p.m. he boarded his yacht and sailed away. The following morning, he was back and went straight to the East India Company shipyard in the Ostenburg section. Ten Russian "volunteers" including Men-shikov went with him, while the rest of the "volunteers" were scattered by Peter's command around the harbor, learning the trades of sailmaker, ropemaker, mast turning, the use of block and tackle, and seamanship. Prince Alexander of Imeritia was dispatched to The Hague to study artillery. Peter himself enrolled as a carpenter under the master shipwright, Gerrit Claes Pool.

The first three weeks were spent in collecting and preparing the necessary timbers and other materials. So that the Tsar could see exactly what was being done, the Dutch gathered and laid out all the pieces before even laying the keel. Then, as each piece was fastened into place, the ship was assembled rapidly, almost like a huge model made from a kit. The frigate, 100 feet long, was called The Apostles Peter and Paul, and Peter worked enthusiastically on every stage of its assembly.

Every day, Peter arrived at the shipyard at dawn, carrying his axe and tools on his shoulders as the other workmen did. He allowed no distinction between himself and them, and strictly refused to be addressed or identified by any title. In his afternoon leisure hours, he liked sitting on a log, talking to sailors or shipbuilders or anyone who addressed him as "Carpenter Peter" or "Baas [Master] Peter." He ignored or turned away from anyone who addressed him as "Your Majesty" or "Sire." When two English noblemen came to catch a glimpse of the Tsar of Muscovy working as a laborer, the foreman, in order to point out which one was Peter, called to him "Carpenter Peter, why don't you help your comrades?" Without a word, Peter walked over and put his shoulder beneath a timber which several men were struggling to raise and helped lift it into place.

Peter was happy with the house assigned to him. Several of his comrades lived there with him in the manner of a group of common workmen. Originally, the Tsar's meals were prepared by the staff of the inn at which the Embassy was staying, but this bothered him; he wanted an entirely independent household. He had no fixed hours for meals; he wished to be able to eat whenever he was hungry. It was arranged that he should be supplied with firewood and foodstuffs and then left alone. Thereafter, Peter lighted his own fire and cooked his own meals like a simple carpenter.

But although he was in a foreign land, wearing the clothes and practicing the trade of a laborer, neither Peter nor his countrymen ever forgot who he really was or the awesome power he wielded. His viceroys in Moscow were reluctant to act without his consent, and every post brought him thick bundles of letters asking for guidance, requesting favors or passing on news. Peter himself, in a shipyard a thousand miles from his capital, took far more interest in his own government than ever before. He insisted on being informed of even the smallest details of those public affairs which he had once so happily neglected. He wanted to know everything that was happening: How are the Streltsy behaving? What progress is being made on the two Azov forts? What about the harbor and the forts at Tagonrog? What is happening in Poland? When Shein wrote about a victory over the Turks outside Azov, Peter celebrated by giving a magnificent banquet for the principal merchants of Amsterdam, followed by a concert, a ball and fireworks. When Peter learned of the climactic victory Prince Eugene of Savoy won over the Turks at Zenta, he sent the news to Moscow along with the fact that he had given another banquet to honor this success. He tried to reply every Friday to the letters from Moscow, although, as he wrote to Vinius, "sometimes from weariness, sometimes from absence, sometimes from Khmelnitsky [drink], we cannot accomplish it."

On one occasion, Peter's power over two of his subjects, both noblemen serving with the Embassy in' Holland, was stayed. Hearing that these Russians had criticized his behavior, saying that he should make less of a spectacle of himself and act more in keeping with his rank, Peter flew into a fury. Presuming that he wielded in Holland as he did in Russia the power of life and death over his subjects, he ordered the pair placed in irons as a preliminary to their execution. Witsen interfered, asking Peter to remember that he was in Holland, where no execution could take place except by sentence of a Dutch court. Gently, Witsen suggested that the men be freed, but Peter was adamant. Finally, he reluctantly agreed to a compromise which saw the two unfortunates exiled to the farthest overseas colonies of Holland: one to Batavia, the other to Surinam.

Outside the shipyard, Peter's curiosity was insatiable. He wanted to see everything with his own eyes. He visited factories, sawmills, spinning mills, paper mills, workshops, museums, botanical gardens and laboratories. Everywhere he asked, "What is that for? How does it work?" Listening to the explanations, he nodded: "Very good. Very good." He met architects, sculptors and Van der Heyden, the inventor of the fire pump, whom he tried to persuade to come to Russia. He visited the architect Simon Schnvoet, the museum of Jacob de Wilde, and learned to sketch and draw under the direction of Schonebeck. He engraved a plate depicting a tall young man, who closely resembled himself, holding the cross high, standing on the fallen crescent and banners of Islam. At Delft, he visited engineer Baron von Coehorn, the Dutch Vauban, who gave him lessons in the science of fortifications. He visited Dutchmen in their homes, especially Dutchmen engaged in the Russian trade. He became interested in printing when he met the Tessing family, and granted one of the brothers the right to print books in Russian and to introduce them into Russia.

Several times, Peter left the shipyard to visit the lecture hall and dissecting room of Professor Fredrik Ruysch, the renowned professor of anatomy. Ruysch was famous throughout Europe for his ability to preserve parts of the human body and even whole corpses by injection of chemicals. His magnificent laboratory was considered one of the marvels of Holland. One day, Peter was present in front of the body of a small child so perfectly preserved that it seemed alive and smiling. Peter gazed at it a long time, marveling, and finally could not resist leaning forward and kissing the cold forehead. Peter became so interested in surgery that he had difficulty leaving the laboratory; he wanted to stay and observe more. He dined with Ruysch, who advised him on his choice of surgeons to take back to Russia for service with his army and fleet. He was intrigued by anatomy and thereafter considered himself qualified as a surgeon. After all, he was able to ask, how many others in Russia had studied with the famous Ruysch?

In later years, Peter always carried two cases with him, one filled with mathematical instruments to examine and verify construction plans presented to him, the other filled with surgical instruments. He left instructions that he was to be informed whenever an interesting operation was to be performed in a hospital in his vicinity, and he was usually present, frequently lending assistance and acquiring sufficient skill to dissect, to bleed, to draw teeth and to perform minor operations. Those of his servants who fell ill tried to keep it a secret from the Tsar lest he appear at their bedsides with his case of instruments to offer—and even insist on their acceptance of—his services.

In Leyden, Peter visited the famous Dr. Boerhaave, who supervised a celebrated botanical garden. Boerhaave also lectured on anatomy, and when he asked Peter what hour he would like to visit, the Tsar chose six o'clock the following morning. He also visited Boerhaave's dissection theater, where a corpse was lying on a table with some of its muscles exposed. Peter was studying the corpse with fascination when he heard grumbles of disgust from some of his squeamish Russian comrades. Furious, and to the horror of the Dutch, he ordered them to approach the cadaver, bend down and bite off a muscle of the corpse with their teeth.

In Delft, he visited the celebrated naturalist Anton von Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the microscope. Peter spent more than two hours talking with him and looking through the miraculous instrument by which Leeuwenhoek had discovered the existence of spermatozoa and had studied the circulation of blood in fish.

On free days in Amsterdam, Peter wandered the city on foot, watching the citizens bustling by, the carriages rattling over the bridges, the thousands of boats rowing up and down the canals. On market days, the Tsar went to the great open-air market, the Botermarket, where goods of every kind were piled up in the open or under arcades. Standing next to a woman buying cheeses, or a merchant choosing a painting, Peter observed and studied. He especially enjoyed watching street artists performing before a crowd. One day, he watched a celebrated clown juggling while standing on top of a cask, and Peter stepped forward and tried to persuade the man to come back with him to Russia. The juggler refused, saying he was having too much success in Amsterdam. In the market, the Tsar witnessed a traveling dentist who pulled aching teeth with unorthodox instruments such as the bowl of a spoon or the tip of a sword. Peter asked for lessons and absorbed enough to experiment on his servants. He learned to mend his own clothes and, from a cobbler, how to make himself a pair of slippers. In winter, when the skies were eternally gray and the Amstel and the canals were frozen, Peter saw women dressed in furs and woolens and men and boys in long cloaks and scarves go speeding by on ice skates with curved blades. The warmest places, he found, and the places where he was happiest, were the beer houses and taverns where he relaxed with his Dutch and Russian comrades.

Observing Holland's immense prosperity, Peter could not escape asking himself how it was that his own people, with an endless stretch of steppe and forest at their disposition, produced only enough to feed themselves, whereas here in Amsterdam, with its wharves and warehouses and forest of masts, more convertible wealth had been accumulated than in all the expanse of Russia. One reason, Peter knew, was trade, a mercantile economy, the possession of ships; he resolved to dedicate himself to achieving these things for Russia. Another reason was the religious toleration in Holland. Because international trade could not flourish in an atmosphere of narrow religious doctrine or prejudice, Protestant Holland practiced the widest religious toleration in the Europe of that day. It was to Holland that the dissenters fled from James I's Calvinist England in 1606, from there to sail a decade later to Plymouth Bay. It was to Holland also that the French Protestant Huguenots swarmed by the thousands when Louis XTV revoked the Edict of Nantes. Throughout the seventeenth century, Holland served as Europe's intellectual and artistic clearinghouse as well as its commerical center. It was to defend their religious liberties as much as their commercial supremacy that the Dutch resisted so fiercely the aggrandizements of Louis XIV's Catholic France. Peter was intrigued by this atmosphere of religious toleration. He visited many Protestant churches in Holland and asked questions of the pastors.

One brilliant facet of Holland's seventeenth-century culture did not much interest him. This was the new and remarkable painting of the great masters of the Dutch School—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals and their contemporaries and successors. Peter bought paintings and took them back to Russia, but they were not the Rembrandts and other masterpieces which later were collected by Catherine the Great. Instead, Peter collected pictures of ships and the sea.

15

THE PRINCE OF ORANGE

In a predatory world, Holland's wealth and power were neither gained nor maintained without a struggle. The republic had been born in the sixteenth-century struggle of the Protestant provinces of the northern Netherlands to break the grip of their Spanish master, Philip II. In 1559, they finally achieved independence. With skill and determination, the Dutchmen developed the sea power that defeated the Spanish admirals, inherited Spain's worldwide ocean trade routes and laid the foundation for Holland's overseas empire. But as the republic waxed in prosperity, it aroused the envy and greed of its two most powerful neighbors, England and France. Coveting the Dutch near-monopoly on European trade, the English under both Oliver Cromwell and Charles II assaulted Holland, and three Anglo-Dutch naval wars resulted. It was in the second of these wars that an English fleet commanded by the King's brother, the Duke of York (later to become King James II), seized the harbor of New Amsterdam and named the village at the tip of Manhattan Island "New York" after himself. Later, the Dutch retaliated with a daring naval raid up the Thames estuary, thrusting into the main British naval base at Chatham, burning four ships-of-the-line at anchor and sailing away with the Royal Charles, the pride of the Royal Navy, in tow. In these wars at sea between two seafaring peoples, the Dutch more than held their own. Led by two superb admirals, Tromp and de Ruyter, the Dutch sailed their smaller, round-nosed warships against the larger, heavier English ships with such bravery and seamanship that Holland became the only nation ever consistently to defeat the British navy.

Holland's wars against England were fought at sea and in the colonies. A far deadlier threat to the United Provinces was to come by land from Holland's mighty neighbor, the France of Louis XIV. To the men gathered around Louis at Versailles, the success of the tiny Protestant republic was an affront to France's greatness, a sin against her religion and, most important, a barrier and competitor to her commerce. The King, his finance minister Colbert and his war minister Louvois were united in their desire to crush the remarkable, upstart Dutchmen. In 1672, with the largest and finest army in the history of Western Europe and the Sun King in personal command, France swept across the Rhine to within sight of the steeples of Amsterdam. Holland was finished . . . or would have been if not for the emergence into history of one of the seventeenth century's most extraordinary figures, William of Orange.

William, Prince of Orange, simultaneously Stadholder of Holland and the United Netherlands and King William III of England, was perhap the most interesting political figure Peter was to meet in his lifetime. Two dramatic, almost miraculous events had set the direction of William's life. At twenty-one, at a moment when an apparently invincible French army had swallowed half the Dutch republic, William was handed supreme military and political power and asked to repel the aggressors. He succeeded. Fifteen years later, at thirty-six, without relinquishing his Dutch officers and titles, he conducted the only successful invasion of England since the days of William the Conqueror.

Physically, William of Orange was not blessed. Slender and unusually short, with a slight deformity of the spine which crooked his back, he had a thin, dark face, black eyes, a long, aquiline nose, full lips and black hair hanging in heavy curls which gave him an appearance more Spanish or Italian than Dutch. In fact, William possessed very little Dutch blood. He was born into a curious European family, a princely house whose history is integral to the struggle for independence of the Netherlands, and yet whose hereditary principality of Orange lies hundreds of miles to the south, in the Rhone Valley of France, a few miles north of Avignon. Since the days of William the Silent, who led the Dutch to freedom against Spain in the sixteenth century, the House of Orange had furnished the republic with elected leaders—stadholders—in times of danger. The family's blood was good enough for marriage into other royal families, and half of William's ancestors were Stuarts. His grandfather was King Charles I of England, his mother was an English princess, her brothers—his uncles—two Kings of England: Charles II and James II.

William became the head of the House of Orange at the moment of birth; his father had died of smallpox a week before. Brought up by his grandmother, he suffered severely from asthma, and through his childhood he was lonely, delicate and unhappy. In those years, the office of stadholder was vacant and Holland was ruled by an oligarchy led by two brothers, John and Cornelius De Witt, who believed that by careful conciliation they could placate Louis XIV. Then, in 1672, the year of Peter's birth, came the first crisis of William's life. In that spring, Louvois presented Louis with a magnificent new French army of 110,000 men massed at Charleroix on the northern frontier. Louis, arriving to assume personal command of the blow which was to destroy the Protestant republic, expected no difficulty. "I now possess an escort which will allow me to take a quiet little journey into Holland," he said contentedly.

Although the Sun King was in nominal command, the experienced Marshal Turenne and the Prince de Conde gave the actual orders. Louis' army easily forced the Rhine on new copper pontoon bridges, and Dutch cities and fortresses fell like ninepins. Seeing the French implacably advancing, the people of Holland panicked. There were riots against the De Witts, who were held personally responsible for the country's plight. In The Hague, a frenzied mob burst in upon the brothers and lynched them.

It was at this moment of crisis that the Dutch suddenly turned like terrified children to the House of Orange, which had provided salvation a century before. William was only twenty-one, but on July 8 he was appointed Stadholder of Holland and Captain General of the Army for life. His program was straightforward and bleak: "We can die in the last ditch." Immediately, he began to demonstrate the qualities for which he was to become famous. He took the field wearing the commander's garb which was to be his attire for many years: the azure uniform of the Dutch Blue Guards, light armor covering his back and chest, a full cravat of Brussels lace, an orange sash and scarf, high boots, fringed braided gloves and belt, a broad-brimmed hat with feathers. Remaining on horseback from dawn until nightfall, indifferent to fatigue, the slight young prince threw down the gauntlet before Louis and his veteran marshals.

Within a week of taking command, William was forced to make an appalling decision. Despite his efforts, his army could not hold the French, who thrust swiftly forward into the heart of the United Netherlands. Arnhem fell and Utrecht, only twenty-two miles from Amsterdam. Then, when the French were only a day's march away from the great Dutch port, the Dutch obeyed William's command and cut the dikes. The sea rolled in, flooding crops and meadows, engulfing rich country houses and gardens, drowning cattle and pigs, and undoing the labor of many generations. As soldiers opened the sluices and cut the dikes, desperate farmers, unwilling to see their farms disappear beneath the onrushing waters, fought to prevent them. Amsterdam, hitherto almost defenseless, now became an island. The French, lacking boats, could only stare at the great city from a distance.

To Louis' chagrin, although the Dutch army was beaten and half of Holland inundated, William refused to yield. The Dutch battalions, unable to defeat the more numerous French, nevertheless remained in the field, waiting. Conde settled into winter quarters in Utrecht, hoping that when winter came he could attack Amsterdam across the ice. But the winter was mild, and Louis, who never liked to have French armies operating far from France, became nervous. Meanwhile, William had been active diplomatically. To the Hapsburg Emperor, to Brandenburg, Hanover, Denmark and Spain, he pointed out that Louis' power and ambition were a threat not just to Holland but to other states as well. All were impressed by the argument, and even more by the continuing Dutch resistance. In the spring, the war widened.

William's small army began to attack the French lines of communication, and Louis became more nervous. At last, systematically destroying the towns they had occupied, the French withdrew. This partial victory—the survival of Holland—was almost solely the achievement of a twenty-one-year-old soldier and statesman who in those few months became the second most important national leader in Europe.