Peter the Great

Numbers of magnates were around His Majesty and amidst them all the Tsar stood preeminent, with a handsome figure and lofty look. We made our reverential obeisances which His Majesty acknowledged with a gracious nod which augured kindness. . . . The Tsar admitted the Lord Envoy and all the officials of the embassy and the missionaries present to kiss his hands.

But Korb and his colleagues quickly found that the formality of this welcome was only a facade. In fact, Peter could not tolerate official functions of this kind, and when forced to participate he became awkward and confused. Dressed in ceremonial finery, standing or sitting on the throne, listening to newly accredited ambassadors, was painful for him and he would breathe heavily, grow red in the face and perspire. He considered, as Korb was to. learn, that it was "a barbarous and inhuman law enacted against kings alone that prevented them from enjoying the society of mankind." He rejected such laws and dined and talked with his companions, with German officers, with merchants, with ambassadors of foreign countries—in short, with anyone he liked. When he was ready to eat, no flourishes of trumpets sounded. Instead, someone shouted, "The Tsar wants to eat!" Then, meat and drink were placed on the table in no special order, and each reached for what he wanted.

To the Austrian visitors, accustomed to the formal banquets of the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, these Moscow banquets seemed informal and rowdy. Korb wrote:

The Tsar ordered a dinner to be prepared by General Lefort and all the ambassadors and chief boyars to be invited. The Tsar came later than usual, having been engaged in important business. Even at table, without taking notice of the presence of the ambassadors, he still continued discussing some points with his boyars, but the consultation was almost an altercation, neither words nor hands being spared, everyone excited beyond measure, each defending his own opinion with obstinacy, and with a warmth perilous beneath the eye of His Majesty. Two, whose lower rank excused them from mingling in this knotty discussion, sought favor by trying to hit one another's heads with the bread which they found upon the table; for all, in their own way, did their best to give genuine proofs of their true origin. Yet even among the Muscovite guests some there were whose more modest speech betokened high character of soul. An undisturbable gravity of manners was remarkable in the aged Prince Lev Cherkassky; ripe prudence of counsel characterized Boyar Golovin; an apt knowledge of public affairs was distinguishable in Artemonowicz. These men shone all the more as their species was evidently very rare. Artemonowicz, indignant that such a variety of madmen should be admitted to a royal banquet, exclaimed aloud in Latin, "The whole place is full of fools," that his words might more easily reach the ears of those who knew Latin.

Peter used these banquets to conduct all kinds of business:

Dancing followed immediately after the table was removed and now took place the farewell to the envoy of the Poles. The Tsar broke hastily away, quite unexpectedly from the gay crowd into a place next to the dining room where the glasses and drinking cups were kept, commanding the Polish ambassador to follow him. The whole body of guests, eager to know what was going on, crowded after them. Impeded by their own haste, they had not all got into the room when the letters of credentials had been handed back to the Polish envoy, and the Tsar, coming out of the room, bumped into those who were still pushing and shoving to get in.

For all their disdainful attitude, the Westerners sometimes behaved as badly and as childishly as the Muscovites. At one dinner for the ambassadors of Denmark and Poland, the Polish ambassador received twenty-five dishes from the Tsar's table and the Dane merely twenty-two. The Dane was indignant, and his pique was mollified only when he was allowed to precede his Polish rival at the moment of kissing the royal hands upon departure. Thereupon, the foolish Dane so preened and strutted his minor victory that the Pole was furious. Eventually, Peter heard of the argument and, hating all protocol, cried out, "Both of them are donkeys!"

Some of the foreign ambassadors tended to make the same mistake that Peter's boyars occasionally made: having the Tsar among them as comrade and fellow carouser, they forgot who the tall man with whom they were heatedly arguing actually was. Then, suddenly, the argument would turn a corner and they would be brought up sharply with the perilous fact that they were challenging a man who was an absolute autocrat, the sole arbiter of life and death for an entire nation. Some of these arguments were relatively mild. At one dinner, Peter was telling the company that in Vienna he had been getting fat, but on his return the nature of the fare in Poland had made him quite slender again. The Polish ambassador, a man of great girth, disputed this, saying that he had been brought up in Poland and owed amplitude to the Polish diet. Peter shot back, "It was not in Poland, but here in Moscow that you crammed yourself"—the Pole, like all ambassadors, was provided with his food and expenses by the host government. The Pole, wisely, let the matter drop.

On another occasion,

during dinner, there was discussion about the differences between countries; the one that lay next to Muscovy [Korb does not say which one] was very ill-spoken of. The ambassador who came from there replied for his part that he had noticed a great many things in Muscovy that were deserving of censure. The Tsar retorted: "If thou were a subject of mine, 1 would add thee as a companion to those of mine that are now hanging from the gibbet—for I well know what thy speech alludes to."

The Tsar later found an opportunity of setting the same personage to dance with his fool, a laughing-stock of the court, amidst a general titter. And yet the ambassador [danced away, thinking that Peter's jest was meant as a sign of affection], not understanding what a shameful trick was played on him until the Imperial ambassador had quietly given him warning not to forget the dignity of his office.

Peter's moods were strange and unpredictable, given to violent swings between elation and sudden anger. One minute he was jovial, happy to be in the company of his friends, jesting over the surprising appearance of a newly shaven companion, yet a few minutes later he could sink into deep, irritable gloom or explode with sudden rage. At one banquet, Peter angrily accused Shein of selling offices in the army for cash. Shein denied it, and Peter stormed out of the room to question soldiers on sentry duty around Lefort's house

to learn from them how many colonels and other regimental officers the General-in-Chief had made without reference to merit, merely for money.

Continuing this account, Korb describes what happened next:

In a short time when he came back, his wrath had grown to such a pitch that he drew his sword, and facing the General-in-Chief horrified the guests with this threat: "By striking thus, I will mar thy mal government." Boiling over with well-grounded anger, he appealed to Prince Romodanovsky and to Zotov. But finding them excuse the General-in-Chief, he grew so hot that he startled all the guests by striking right and left, he knew not where, with his drawn sword. Prince Romodanovsky had to complain of a cut finger and another of a slight wound on the head. Zotov was hurt in the hand as the sword was returning from a stroke. A blow far more deadly was aiming at the General-in-Chief [Shein], who beyond doubt would have been stretched in his gore by the Tsar's right hand, had not General Lefort (who was almost the only one that might have ventured it), catching the Tsar in his arms, drawn back his hand from the stroke. But the Tsar, taking it ill that any person should dare to hinder him from the sating of his most just wrath, wheeled around upon the spot, and struck his unwelcome impeder a hard blow on the back. He [Lefort] is the only one that knew what remedy to apply; none of the Muscovites is more beloved by the Tsar than he. . . . This man [Lefort] so mitigated his [Peter's] ire, that, threatening only, he abstained from murder. Merriment followed this dire tempest. The Tsar with a face full of smiles, was present at the dancing, and to show his mirth, commanded the musicians to play the tunes to which he had danced at his most beloved lord and brother's [King Augustus] when that most august 276 host was entertaining exalted guests. Two young ladies, departing by stealth, were, at the order of the Tsar, brought back by soldiers. Again, twenty-five great guns saluted the toasts, and the hilarity of the fete was protracted till half past five in the morning.

The following day, the promotions made by Shein were canceled, and Patrick Gordon was thereafter placed in charge of deciding which officers should be advanced in rank.

This was not the only occasion on which Lefort accepted Peter's blows or thrust himself forward between the Tsar and an intended victim of Peter's wrath. On October 18, Peter was dining again at Lefort's when, says Korb, "an inexplicable whirlwind troubled the gaieties. Seizing upon General Lefort and flinging him to the floor, His Tsarish Majesty kicked him." Lefort, however, was almost the only man who could stay Peter's wrath. At a banquet for 200 of the nobility at Lefort's house, an argument began between two of the former regents, Peter's uncle Lev Naryshkin and Prince Boris Golitsyn. Peter was so exasperated that "he loudly threatened he would cut short the dispute with the head of one or the other—whichever should be found most at fault. He commissioned Prince Romodanovsky to examine the affair and with a violent blow of his clenched fist, thrust back General Lefort who was coming up to mitigate his fury."

Korb especially disliked Prince Fedor Romodanovsky, the tall, heavy-browed Governor of Moscow and Mock-Tsar, who was also Peter's Chief of Police. Romodanovsky was a grim figure with a leaden sense of humor. He enjoyed forcing his guests to drink a large cup of pepper brandy by having the cup presented in the paws of a large, upright, trained bear; if the cup was refused, the bear proceeded to pull off the hat, wig and other articles of clothing of the reluctant guest. He disdained foreigners. Once he kidnapped a young German interpreter who worked for one of the Tsar's physicians and returned him only when the doctor complained to Lefort. Another time, he arrested a foreign physician. When, on release, the doctor "inquired of Prince Romodanovsky why he was so long kept in confinement, [he] got no answer other than that it was done to vex him."

On October 12, Korb reported, "The ground was covered with a dense fall of snow and everything was frozen up with the intense cold." Both the feasts and the executions went on, although Peter soon left Moscow to visit the shipyard at Voronezh. Before the holidays, however, the Tsar was back. "Today being Christmas eve," Korb's journal continued,

which is preceded by a Russian fast of seven weeks, all the markets and public thoroughfares are seen to be filled to overflowing with meats. Here you have an incredible multitude of geese; in another place such a store of pigs already killed that you would think it enough to last the whole year. The number of oxen killed is in proportion. Fowl of every kind looked as if they had flown together from all of Muscovy to this one city. It was useless to attempt naming all the varieties. It is enough to say that everything one could wish for was to be had.

On Christmas, Korb saw the celebration of the Nativity mingled with the horseplay of the Mock-Synod:

The false Patriarch with his sham followers and the rest in eighty sledges make the round of the city and the German Suburb, carrying crosses, miters and other insignia of their assumed dignities. They all stop at the houses of the richer Muscovites and German officers and sing the praises of the newborn Deity in strains for which the inhabitants of those houses have to pay dearly. After they had sung the praises of the newborn Deity at his house. General Lefort received them all with pleasanter music, banqueting and dancing.

These raucous Christmas carolers expected a handsome reward for their effort. When it was not sufficiently generous, the result was worse for the householder:

The wealthiest merchant of Muscovy, whose name in Filadilov, gave such offense by having only presented twelve roubles to the Tsar and his boyars when they sang the praises of God newborn at his house, that the Tsar, with all possible speed, sent off a hundred of the populace to the house of the merchant with a mandate to pay forthwith to every one of them a rouble each.

Feasting went on until Epiphany, when the traditional blessing of the river took place beneath the Kremlin walls. Contrary to custom, the Tsar did not seat himself with the Patriarch on his throne, but appeared in uniform at the head of his regiment, drawn up with other troops amounting to 12,000 men on the thick ice of the river. "The procession to the river, which was frozen solid, was led by General Gordon's regiment, the exquisite red of their new uniforms adding to their splendid appearance," wrote Korb.

Then came the Preobrazhensky Regiment in handsome new green uniforms with the Tsar marching ahead as their colonel. There followed a third regiment, the Semyonovsky, in blue uniforms. Each regiment had a band of musicians. . . .

A place was marked off by rails on the river ice, with the regiments drawn up around it. Five hundred ecclesiastics, sub-deacons, deacons, priests, abbots, bishops and archbishops, robed in gold and silver with gems and precious stones, lent an air of greater majesty. Before a splendid gold cross, twelve clerics bore a lantern with three burning wax lights. The Muscovites consider it unlawful and shameful for the cross to appear in public unattended by lights. An incredible multitude of people thronged every side. The streets were full, roofs of the houses were covered, the walls of the city were crowded with spectators.

When the clergy filled up the large space of the enclosure, the sacred ceremony began. Multitudes of wax candles were lighted. After the Almighty was invoked, the Metropolitan went around swinging his censer filled with smoking incense through the whole enclosure. In the middle, the ice was broken, allowing the water to appear like a well. Here he passed the censer three times, and hallowed the well, three times dipping the burning wax light into it. Nearby, on a pillar stood the standard bearer, holding the standard of the realm, white with a double-headed eagle embroidered in gold. It is unfurled once the clergy have entered the enclosure. Thereafter the standard bearer has to watch the ceremonies—the incensing, the blessings—each of which he indicated by waving the standard. His motions are closely observed by the regimental standard bearers, in order to wave at the same time he does.

When the benediction of the water is over, all the regimental standards approach and stand around to be duly sprinkled with the hallowed water. The Patriarch, or, in his absence, the Metropolitan, leaving the enclosure, then bestows this sprinkling on His Majesty the Tsar and all the soldiers. To complete, the artillery of all the regiments roared out, followed by a triple volley of musketry.

The bacchanals of autumn and winter reached a peak in the carnival week before the beginning of Lent. A key role in the bacchanal was played by the Mock-Synod, whose members trooped in mock-solemn procession to Lefort's palace to worship Bacchus. Korb watched them pass:

He that bore the assumed honors of the Patriarch was conspicuous with vestments proper to a bishop. Bacchus was decked with a miter and went stark naked to betoken lasciviousness to the lookers-on. Cupid and Venus were the insignia on his crozier lest there be any mistake about what flock he was pastor of. The remaining crowd of the Bacchanalians came after him, some carrying great bowls full of wine, others mead, others beer and brandy, that last joy of heated Bacchus. And as the wintry cold hindered their binding their laurel, they carried great dishes of dried tobacco leaves, with which, when ignited, they went to the remotest corners of the palace, exhaling those most delectable odors and most pleasant incense to Bacchus from their smutty jaws. Two of those pipes through which some people are pleased to puff smoke, being set crosswise, served the scenic bishop to confirm the rites of consecration!

Many of the Western ambassadors were shocked by this parody, and Korb himself was amazed that "the cross, that most precious pledge of our redemption, was held up for mockery." But Peter saw no reason to conceal his games. During Lent, when the newly arrived ambassador of Brandenburg had presented his credentials,

the Tsar commanded him to stay for dinner which was splendid with the principal ambassadors and principal boyars present. After dinner, the Mock-Patriarch began to give toasts. He that drank did so on bended knee to revere the sham ecclesiastical dignitary and beg the favor of his benediction which he gave with two tobacco pipes in the shape of a cross. Only the Austrian ambassador withdrew furtively, saying that the sacred sign of our Christian faith was too holy to be involved in such jests. Dancing was going on in the room next to the festivities. . . . The curtains with which the place was handsomely decorated being drawn a little, the Tsarevich Alexis and [Peter's sister Natalya] were seen by the guests. The natural beauty of the Tsarevich [then nine years old] was wonderfully shown off by his civilized German dress and powdered wig. . Natalya was escorted by the most distinguished of the Russian ladies. This day too beheld a great departure from Russian manners, which up to this forbade the female sex from appearing at public assemblies of men and at festive parties, for some were not only allowed to be at dinner, but also at the dancing afterward.

Meanwhile, as a grim accompaniment to this Mardi Gras, the execution of the Streltsy continued relentlessly. On February 28, thirty-six died in Red Square and 150 at Preobrazhenskoe. That same night, there was a splendid feast at Lefort's, after which the guests watched a glorious display of fireworks.

With the first week of March came Lent and, with it, an end to the twin carnivals of feasting and death. A calm descended on the city so serene that Korb noted,

The silence and modesty of this week is as remarkable as last week's tumult and fury. Neither shops nor markets are open, the courts did not sit, the judges had nothing to do. . . . With the most strict fast they mortify the flesh on dry bread and fruits of the earth. It is such an unexpected metamorphosis that one can hardly believe one's eyes.

In the quietness of Lent, the authorities finally began to unstring the bodies of the Streltsy from the gibbets where they had hung through the winter and take them out for burial. "It was a horrible spectacle," said Korb. "Corpses lay huddled together in carts, many half-naked, all higgledy-piggledy. Like slaughtered sheep to market they were led to their graves."

Besides life at Peter's court, Korb observed many facets of ordinary life in Moscow. The Tsar decided to do something about the clamoring hordes of beggars who pursued citizens up and down the streets from the moment they left their doors until they entered another house. Frequently, the beggars managed to blend their pleas with a simultaneous deft picking of the victim's pockets. By decree, begging was forbidden and so was the encouragement of begging; anyone caught giving alms to beggars was fined five roubles. To deal with the beggars themselves, the Tsar attached a hospital to every church, personally endowed by himself, to provide for the poor. That the conditions in these hospitals may have been stark was suggested by another ambassadorial witness, who wrdfe "This soon cleared the streets of those poor vagrants, many of whom chose to work rather than to be locked up in the hospitals."

Korb was astonished, even in those days of lawlessness in all countries, by the sheer number and audacity of the robbers of Moscow, who operated in packs and boldly took what they liked. Usually at night, but sometimes in broad daylight, they mugged and then frequently murdered their victims. There were mysterious, unsolved murders. A foreign sea captain dining with his wife at the house of a boyar was invited to go out for a night sleigh ride across the snow. When he and his host returned, they found that the wife's head had been cut off, and there were no clues as to the identity or motive of the assassin. Government officials were no safer than private citizens. On November 26, Korb wrote,

A courier sent off to His Majesty last night at Voronezh with letters and some valuable utensils was violently seized on the stone bridge at Moscow and robbed. The letters, with the seals broken, were found scattered on the bridge at daybreak, but where the utensils and the courier himself have been carried, there is no trace.

The courier, it was presumed, had been disposed of in the handiest way, by being "thrust beneath the ice into the waters of the river."

Foreigners had to be especially careful, as they were considered fair game not only by robbers but also by ordinary Muscovites. One of Korb's servants who knew Russian reported that he had just encountered a citizen who mouthed a stream of oaths and threats against all foreigners: "You German dogs, you have been robbing long enough at your ease, but the day is coming when you shall suffer and pay the penalty." To catch a foreigner alone, especially if he was reeling with drink, provided some Muscovies with the rare opportunity for vindictive pleasure. Nor was it always safe to defend oneself against violence. Trying to reduce the number of deaths in the streets, Peter had made it a crime to draw a sword, pistol or knife when drunk, even if the weapon was raised in self-idefense and even if it was not actually used. One night, an Austrian mining engineer named Urban was riding tipsily home from Moscow to the German Suburb when he was set upon by a Russian, first with words and then with fists. According to Korb: "Urban, losing patience, and indignant at being insulted by such a filthy rascal, and using the natural right of self-defense, drew a pistol. The ball which he wildly fired at his assailant merely grazed the fellow's head, but lest the complaints of the wounded man be fussed with a great noise to the Tsar's Majesty, Urban came to an amicable agreement with the fellow for four roubles to say nothing about it." But Peter did hear about it, and Urban was arrested and charged with a capital crime. When Urban's friends argued that the Austrian had been drunk, the Tsar replied that he would allow drunken scuffling to go unpunished, but not drunken shooting. Nevertheless, he reduced the punishment from death to knouting and, only on the continued pleas of the Austrian ambassador, finally canceled that.

Not that the robbers, when caught, were dealt with lightly. They went in batches to the rack and gallows; on a single day, seventy were hung. Still it did not stop their colleagues. For them, crime was a way of life and disobedience to the law so deeply ingrained that attempts to enforce it often aroused an indignant fury in those accustomed to breaking it. For example, although brandy was a state monopoly whose sale in private was strictly forbidden, it was being sold in a private house. Fifty soldiers were sent to seize the contraband. A battle took place, and three soldiers were killed. Far from being daunted or thinking of flight, the private brandy makers threatened even fiercer vengeance should the attempt at seizure be repeated.

In fact, the police and soldiers charged with enforcing the laws were themselves scarcely law-abiding. Korb observed that

soldiers in Muscovy are in the habit of tormenting their prisoners in every way at their fancy, without respect of person or the matter of which they are accused. The soldiers are guilty of bruising them with their muskets and with sticks, and with thrusting them into the most beastly holes, especially the wealthy, whom they unblushing-ly say they will not cease from tormenting until they have paid a certain sum. Let a prisoner go willingly or unwillingly to jail, he is beaten all the same.

At one point in April 1699, the price of foodstuffs in Moscow rose precipitously. Investigation revealed that the soldiers, having been ordered to cart the bodies of the executed Streltsy out of the city before the spring thaw, had been commandeering peasant carts arriving in the city with wheat, oats and other grains, forcing the peasants to unload the food and reload their carts with bodies to carry away and bury, while the soldiers kept the food to eat or sell themselves. Faced with these thefts, the peasants had stopped bringing food into the city, and the prices of what was already there soared astronomically.

With the coming of milder weather, the foreign envoys were often invited to visit the lovely, blooming countryside outside Moscow. Korb and his ambassador were asked to a banquet at the estate of Peter's uncle Lev Naryshkin. "The rare profusion of viands," Korb said,

the costliness of the gold and silver plate, the variety and exquisiteness of the beverages, bespoke plainly the close blood relationship to the Tsar. After dinner there was an archery match. Nobody was excused because of the sport being strange to him or for his want of skill. A sheet of paper stuck on the ground was the target. The host perforated it several times amidst general applause. As the rain drove us from this pleasant exercise, we returned to the apartments. Naryshkin saluted the Lord Envoy by taking him by the hand to his wife's chambers to salute and be saluted. There is no higher mark of honor among the Russians than to be invited by the husband to embrace his wife and to receive the compliment of a sip of brandy from her hand.

On another occasion, the envoy saw the Tsar's menagerie, containing "a colossal white bear, leopards, lynxes, and many other animals that are kept merely for the pleasure of looking at them." Still later, he visited the famous New Jerusalem Monastery built by Nikon. "We saw its huge walls and the cells of the monks. A stream glides past it with wide, open fields around, affording a charming view. We amused ourselves delightfully, boating and enticing the unwary fish into the nets, a diversion all the more pleasant when we knew we should have them for supper."

The ambassadors were invited to the Tsar's estate at Ismailovo.. It was July, a time of great heat in Moscow, and they found the estate "laid out most agreeably, surrounded by a grove of trees, not thickly planted but growing to a prodigious height, and affording an admirable refuge beneath the cool shade of their lofty spreading branches from the burning heat of summer." Musicians were present "to aid the gentle whisperings of the woods and winds with sweeter harmonies."

Korb's visit, tied to that of his ambassador, lasted fifteen months. In July 1699, they departed after lavish ceremonies. Peter distributed gifts, including numerous sable furs, to the envoy and his entire suite. By Peter's order, a magnificent procession was staged, and the ambassador rode in Peter's personal state carriage, with trappings of gold and silver and gems encrusting the doors and ceiling. Then the coach and the other carriages carrying the Austrian embassy were escorted out of the city by the squadrons of Peter's new cavalry and detachments of his new Western infantry.

21

VORONEZH AND THE SOUTHERN FLEET

From the hour of his return to Moscow, Peter had longed to see his ships being built at Voronezh. Even while the tortures continued at Preobrazhenskoe, while he and his friends drank through the gloomy autumn and winter nights, the Tsar desired to be on the Don, joining the Western shipwrights whom he had recruited and who even now were beginning to work in the shipyards on the riverbank.

He had made a first visit late in October. Many of the boyars, anxious to remain in the Tsar's good graces by staying close to his person, followed him south. Prince Cherkassky, the respected elder whose beard had been spared, was left behind as Prefect of Moscow, but soon discovered that his authority was not unique. Typically, Peter had confided the government not to one but to several. Before leaving, he had also said, to Gordon, "To you I commit everything." And to Romodanovsky, "Meanwhile, I commit all my affairs to your loyalty." It was Peter's maxim of absentee government: By dividing power among many and confusing all as to what power each had, they would remain in constant dissent and confusion. The system was not likely to promote efficient government in his absence, but it would prevent a single regent from ever challenging his power. With the causes of the Streltsy revolt still undetermined, this was Peter's first consideration.

At Voronezh, in the shipyards sprawling along the banks of the broad and shallow river, Peter found the carpenters sawing and hammering, akd he found many problems. There were shortages and great wastage of both men and materials. In haste to comply with the Tsar's commands, the shipwrights were using unseasoned timber, which would rot quickly in the water.* On arriving from Holland, Vice Admiral Cruys inspected the vessels and ordered many hauled out to be rebuilt and strengthened. The foreign shipwrights, each following his own designs without guidance or control from above, quarreled frequently. The Dutch shipwrights, commanded by Peter's orders from London to work only under the supervision of others, were sullen and sluggish. The Russian artisans were in no better mood. Summoned by decree to Voronezh to learn shipbuilding, they understood that if they showed aptitude, they would be sent to the West to perfect their skills. Accordingly, many preferred to do just enough work to get by, hoping somehow to be allowed to return home.

The worst problems and the greatest sufferings were among the mass of unskilled laborers. Thousands of men had been drafted— peasants and serfs who had never seen a boat bigger than a barge or a body of water wider than a river. They came carrying their own hatchets and axes, sometimes bringing their own horses, to cut and trim the trees and float them down the rivers to Voronezh. Living conditions were primitive, disease spread quickly and death was common. Many ran away, and eventually the shipyards had to be surrounded by a fence and guards. If caught, deserters were beaten and returned to work.

Although outwardly Peter was optimistic, the slowness of the work, the sickness, death and desertion of the workers, made him gloomy and despondent. Three days after arriving, on November 2, 1698, he wrote to Vinius, "Thank God we have found our fleet in excellent condition. Only a cloud of doubt covers my mind whether we shall ever taste these fruits, which, like dates, those who plant never succeed in harvesting." Later, he wrote, "Here, by God's help, is great preparation. But we only wait for that blessed day when the great cloud of doubt over us shall be driven away. We have begun a ship here which will carry sixty guns."

Despite Peter's worries, the work moved forward although the shipyards were without machinery of any kind and all work was done with hand tools. Gangs of men and teams of horses moved the tree trunks, trimmed them to logs and pulled them through the yard and into position over pits in the earth. Then, with some men beneath the log and others leaning or sitting on it to steady it, the long planks or curved frame timbers were sawed or hewn out. There was tremendous waste, as very few planks were obtained from a single log. Once the rough board was obtained, it was turned over to more skillful artisans who worked with hatchets,

*The problem of using green timber was not restricted to Russian ships. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the average life of British navy ships was only about ten years, due to the use of unseasoned timber.

hammers, mauls, augers and chisels to create the exact shapes needed. The heaviest, strongest pieces went into the keels, laid just above the earth. Then came the ribs curving out and up to be fastened together. Finally, along the sides came the heavy planks that would keep out the sea. And then work could begin on decks, interiors and all the special structures that would make the ship both a place of habitation and a machine of work.

Through the winter, ignoring the cold, Peter labored with his men. He walked through the shipyards, stepping over logs covered with snow, past the ships standing silent in the stocks, past the workers huddled around outdoor fires trying to warm their hands and bodies, past the foundry with its huge bellows driving air into the furnaces where anchors and metal fitting were being cast. He was indefatigable, pouring out his energy, commanding, cajoling, persuading. The Venetians building die galleys complained that they were working so hard they had no time to go to confession. But the fleet continued to grow. When Peter arrived in the autumn, he found twenty ships already launched and anchored in the stream. Every week, as the winter progressed, another five or six went into the water, or waited ready to be launched when the ice melted.

Not content with his overall supervision, Peter himself designed and began to build, solely with Russian labor, a fifty-gun ship called the Predestination. He laid the keel himself and worked on it steadily, along with the boyars who accompanied him. The Predestination was a handsome, three-masted ship, 130 feet long, and working on it provided Peter with the happy sensation of having tools in his hands and with the knowledge that one of the ships which would eventually sail the Black Sea would be his own creation.

It was in March during his second trip to Voronezh that the Tsar was stunned by a personal blow: the death of Francis Lefort. Both times Peter went to work on his ships that winter, Lefort remained in Moscow. At forty-three, his great strength and hearty enthusiasm seemed intact. As First Ambassador of the Great Embassy, he had survived eighteen months of ceremonial banquets in the West, and his prodigious drinking capacity had not deserted him during the feasts and roaring entertainments of the fall and winter in Moscow. He still seemed gay and in high spirits when he saw Peter off for Voronezh.

But in the days before his death, while Lefort went on with his frantic life, a strange story was heard. One night when he was away from his house, sleeping with another woman, his wife heard a terrible noise in her husband's bedroom. Knowing that Lefort was not there, but "supposing that her husband might have changed his mind and come home in a great fury, she sent someone to ascertain the cause. The person came back, saying that he could see nobody in the room." Nevertheless, the uproar went on, and, if one is to believe the wife—the story is told by Korb—"the next morning all the chairs, tables and seats were scattered, topsy-turvy all about, besides which deep groans were constantly heard all through the night."

Soon afterward Lefort gave a banquet for two foreign diplomats, the ambassadors of Denmark and Brandenburg, who were departing to visit Voronezh at Peter's invitation. The evening was a great success, and the ambassadors stayed late. Finally, the heat in the room grew overpowering, and the host led his guests, reeling, out into the frozen winter air to drink under the stars without coats or wraps. The following day, Lefort began to shiver. A fever mounted rapidly and he became delirious, raving and shouting for music and wine. His terrified wife suggested sending for the Protestant Pastor Stumpf, but Lefort shouted that he wanted no one to come near him. Stumpf came anyway. "When the pastor was admitted to see him," writes Korb,

and was admonishing him to be converted to God, they say he only told him "not to talk much." To his wife, who in his last moments asked his pardon for her past faults if she had committed any, he blandly replied, "1 never had anything to reproach thee with; I always honored and loved thee." . . . He commended his domestics and their services, desiring that their wages should be paid in full.

Lefort lived for another week, solaced on his deathbed by the music of an orchestra which had been brought to play for him. Finally, at three in the morning, he died. Golovin immediately sealed the house and gave the keys to Lefort's relatives, at the same time urgently dispatching a courier to Peter at Voronezh.

When Peter heard the news, the hatchet fell from his grasp, he sat down on a log and, hiding his face in his hands, he wept. In a voice hoarse with sobbing and grief, he said, "Now I am alone without one trusty man. He alone was faithful to me. Whom can I confide in now?"

The Tsar returned immediately to Moscow, and the funeral was held on March 21. Peter took charge of the funeral arrangements himself: The Swiss was to have a state funeral grander than any in Russia except that for a tsar or a patriarch. The foreign ambassadors were invited and the boyars commanded to be present. They were instructed to assemble at Lefort's house at eight in the morning to carry the body to the church, but many

were late and there were other delays and not until noon was the procession formed. Meanwhile, inside the house, Peter had observed the Western custom of laying out a sumptuous cold dinner for the guests. The boyars, surprised and pleased to find this feast before them, hurled themselves upon it. Korb described the scene:

The tables were laid out, groaning under viands, and drinking cups in long array, and bowls with every description of wine. Mulled wine was served to those who preferred it. The Russians—for everybody of any rank or office had by the tsar's orders to be present—sat at a table ravenously devouring the viands which were cold. There was a great variety of fish, cheese, butter, caviar and so forth.

Boyar Sheremetev, refined by much travel and dressed in the German fashion, wearing his Cross of Malta at his breast, thought it beneath his propriety to give himself up to voracity with the rest. The Tsar coming in showed many tokens of grief; fixed sorrow was in his face. To the ambassadors who paid their becoming court, bowing to the ground according to custom, the monarch replied with exquisite politeness. When Lev Naryshkin left his seat, and hastened to meet the Tsar, he received indeed his salutations graciously, but remained absent without answering for a little while, until, recollecting himself, he bent to embrace him. When the moment for removing the body came, the grief and former affection of the Tsar and some others was manifest to everybody, for the Tsar shed tears most abundantly, and in the sight of all the vast crowd of people who were assembled, he gave the last kiss to the corpse.

. . . Thus the body was conducted to the Reformed Church, where Pastor Stumpf preached a short sermon. On leaving the temple, the boyars and the rest of their countrymen disturbed the order of the procession, forcing their way with inept arrogance up to the very body. The foreign ambassadors, pretending however to take no notice of the haughty pretensions, suffered every one of the Muscovites to go on before them, even those whose humble lot and condition [did not merit this]. As they came to the cemetery, the Tsar noticed that the order was changed; that his subjects who previously had followed the ambassadors now preceded them; therefore he called young Lefort [Francis Lefort's nephew] to him and inquired: "Who disturbed the order? Why have those that followed, just now gone foremost?" And as Lefort remained prostrate without giving any answer, the Tsar commanded him to speak. And when he said that it was the Russians who had violently inverted the order, the Tsar, greatly in wrath, said: "They are dogs, not my boyars."

Sheremetev, on the contrary—and to his prudence it may be attributed—still continued to accompany the ambassadors, although all the Russians had gone on before. In the cemetery itself and on the highway there were cannon drawn up, which shook the 288 air with a triple discharge, and each regiment also delivered a triple volley of musketry. One of the artillerymen, remaining stupidly before the cannon's mouth, had his head carried off by the shot. The Tsar went back with his troops to the house of Lefort and all followed him. Everybody that had attended the mourning was presented with a gold ring, on which was engraved the date of the death and a death's head. The Tsar having gone out for a minute, all the boyars were hastening with anxious speed to go home. They had already gone down some steps when, meeting the Tsar returning face to face, they came back into the room. The haste of the boyars to get away gave rise to a suspicion that they were glad of the death, and it put the Tsar in such a passion that he wrathfully addressed them in the following terms. "Ho! You are made merry at his death! It is a grand victory for you that he is dead. Why can't you all wait? 1 suppose the greatness of your joy will not allow you to keep up this forced appearance and the feigned sorrow of your faces."

The death of this Western friend left an enormous gap in Peter's personal life. The jovial Swiss had steered his young friend and master through the early years. Lefort, the mighty reveler, had taught the youth to drink, to dance, to shoot a bow and arrow. He had found him a mistress and invented new, outrageous burlesques to amuse him. He had accompanied him on the first military campaign at Azov. He had persuaded Peter to go to the West and then personally led the Great Embassy whose ranks included Peter Mikhailov, and the long journey had inspired Peter's effort to bring back to Russia the technology and manners of Europe. Then, almost on the eve of Peter's greatest challenge, the twenty-year war with Sweden which would convert the high-strung, enthusiastic young Tsar into the great conquering Emperor, Lefort died.

Peter understood what he had lost. All his life, he was surrounded by men trying to turn their rank and power in the state to their own personal profit. Lefort was different. Although his proximity to the sovereign had given him many opportunities to make himself rich by becoming a channel for favors and bribes, Lefort died penniless. There was so little money, in fact, that before Peter's return from Voronezh the family had to beg from Prince Golitsyn the money to buy the elegant suit in which Lefort was to be interred.

Peter kept Lefort's nephew and steward, Peter Lefort, in his service. He wrote to Geneva, asking that Lefort's only son, Henry, come to Russia, saying that he wanted someone from his friend's immediate family always to be near him. In the years afterward, Lefort's role was played by others. Peter always liked to have around him enormously powerful companion-favorites, whose devotion to the Tsar was mostly personal, and whose power came solely from their intimacy with him. Of these, the most prominent was Menshikov. But Peter never forgot Lefort. Once after a splendid party at Menshikov's palace, when Peter had been happily surrounded by cronies, he wrote to the absent host, "This was the first time I have really enjoyed myself since Lefort's death."

And then, six months later, as if to make the last year of the old century an even more marked dividing point in Peter's life, he lost a second of his devoted Western counselors and friends, Patrick Gordon. The old soldier had been in failing health. On New Year's Eve 1698, he noted in his diary, "In this year I have felt a sensible failing of my health and strength. But Thy will be done, O my gracious Lord." His last public appearance had been with his soldiers in September 1699, and in October he retired permanently to his bed. Near the end of November, as Gordon's strength ebbed away, Peter visited him repeatedly. He came twice on the night of November 29, with Gordon sinking rapidly. The second time, a Jesuit priest who had already given the Last Sacrament withdrew from the bedside when the Tsar entered. "Stay where you are, Father," Peter said, "and do what you think fit. I will not interrupt you." Peter spoke to Gordon, who remained silent. Then Peter took a small mirror and held it to the old man's face, hoping to see a sign of breath. There was none. "Father," said the Tsar to the priest, "I think he is dead." Peter himself closed the dead man's eyes and left the house, his own eyes filled with tears.

Gordon also was given a state funeral attended by everyone of importance in Moscow. The Russians came willingly, for the old soldier's devotion to three Tsars and his services to the state were universally appreciated. His coffin was carried by twenty-eight colonels, and twenty ladies of the highest birth followed the widow in the mourning procession. As Gordon's coffin was placed in a vault near the altar of the church, twenty-four cannon outside fired in salute.

Peter soon felt Gordon's loss, both professionally and personally. Gordon was Russia's ablest soldier, with considerable experience in many campaigns. His value as a commander and counselor in the coming war with Sweden would have been great; had he been present, the disaster at Narva, only twelve months after his death, might never have happened. Peter also would miss the grizzled Scot at his table, where the old soldier loyally tried to please his master by matching drink for drink with men half his age. For both these reasons, a saddened Peter said at Gordon's death, "The state has lost in him an ardent and courageous servant who has steered us safely through many calamities."

By spring, the fleet was ready. Eighty-six ships of all sizes, including eighteen sea-going men-of-war carrying from thirty-six to forty-six guns were in the water, in addition, 500 barges had been built for carrying men, provisions, ammunition and powder. On May 7, 1699, this fleet left Voronezh and the villagers along the Don saw a remarkable sight: a fleet of full-rigged ships sailing past them down the river. Admiral Golovin was in nominal command, with Vice Admiral Cruys in actual command of the fleet. Peter took the role of captain of the forty-four-gun frigate Apostle Peter.

One day as the long procession of ships moved downriver, Peter saw a group of men on the bank preparing to cook some tortoises for dinner. To most Russians, eating tortoise was a repugnant idea, but Peter, ever curious, asked for some for his own table. His comrades dining with him tasted the new dish, not knowing what it was. Thinking it was young chicken and liking it, they finished what was on their plates, whereupon Peter ordered his servant to bring in the "feathers" of these chickens. When they saw the tortoise shells, most of the Russians laughed at themselves; two were sick.

On arriving at Azov on May 24, Peter anchored his fleet in the river and went ashore to inspect the new fortifications. There was no doubt that they were needed: Again that spring, a horde of Crimean Tatars had swept eastward across the southern Ukraine, approaching Azov itself, burning, raiding, leaving behind desolate fields, charred farms, villages in ashes and the population stricken and fleeing. Satisfied with the new defensive works, Peter moved on to visit Tagonrog, where dredging and construction were under way for the new naval base. When the ships had assembled there, Peter took them to sea, where they began to drill in signaling, gunnery and ship-handling. Through most of July the maneuvers continued, culminating in a mock sea battle of the sort Peter had witnessed on the Ij in Holland.

The fleet was ready, and now Peter faced the problem of what to do with it. It had been built for war with Turkey, to force a passage onto the Black Sea and to contest the right of the Turks to control that sea as a private lake. But the situation had changed. Prokofy Voznitsyn, an experienced diplomat, had remained in Vienna to salvage what he could for Russia from the negotiations which the allied powers, Austria, Poland, Venice and Russia, were about to begin with the partially defeated Turks. The problem was that, as the peace treaty would probably only confirm surrender of those territories actually occupied, Peter wanted the war to continue, at least for a while. It was, in fact, in order to press the war and seize Kerch, achieving entry onto the Black Sea, that he had labored so hard all winter to build his fleet.

When the peace congress finally met at Carlowitz, near Vienna, Voznitsyn urged the allied emissaries not to make peace until all of Russia's objectives were met. But the weight of other national interests was against him. The Austrians already stood to regain all of Transylvania and«most of Hungary. Venice was to keep its conquests in Dalmatia and the Aegean, and Poland would keep certain territories north of the Carpathians. The English ambassador in Constantinople, instructed to do everything possible to broker a peace and free Austria for the impending contest with France, persuaded the weary Turks to be generous; grudgingly, the Turks agreed to cede Azov to Russia, but refused absolutely to yield any territory not actually conquered, such as Kerch. Voznitsyn, isolated from his allies, could do nothing except refuse to sign the general treaty. Knowing that Peter was unready to attack the Turks on his own, he proposed instead a two-year truce, during which time the Tsar could prepare for more extensive offensive operations. The Turks agreed, and Voznitsyn wrote to Peter suggesting that the time also be used to send an ambassador directly to Constantinople to see whether Russia might gain by negotiation what she had so far failed to gain—and seemed uncertain of gaining in the future—by war.

All this happened during the winter of 1698-1699 while Peter was building his fleet at Voronezh. Now, with the fleet ready at Tagonrog and yet with the new Turkish truce making active use of it impossible, Peter decided to accept Voznitsyn's suggestion. He appointed a special ambassador, Emilian Ukraintsev, the white-haired chief of the Foreign Ministry, to go to Constantinople to discuss a permanent treaty of peace. There was even in this plan a role for the new fleet: It would escort the Ambassador as far as Kerch, from where he would sail to the Turkish capital in the biggest and proudest of Peter's new ships.

On August 5, twelve large Russian ships, all commanded by foreigners except the frigate whose skipper was Captain Peter Mikhailov, sailed from Tagonrog for the Strait of Kerch. The Turkish pasha commanding the fortress whose cannon dominated the strait which linked the Sea of Azov with the Black Sea was taken unawares. One day, he heard the salvos of Peter's saluting cannon and rushed to his parapet to see a Russian naval squadron on his doorstep. Peter's request was that a single Russian warship, the forty-six-gun frigate Krepost (Fortress), be allowed to pass through the strait bearing his ambassador to Constantinople. The pasha at first unmuzzled his guns and refused, saying that he had no orders from his capital. Peter riposted by threatening to break through by force if necessary, and his men-of-war were joined by galleys, brigantines and barges carrying soldiers. After ten days, the pasha consented, insisting that the Russian frigate submit to an escort of four Turkish ships. The Tsar withdrew, and the Krepost sailed through the strait. Once on the Black Sea, her Dutch captain, Van Pamburg, put on all sail and soon left his Turkish escort behind the horizon.

The moment was historic: For the first time, a Russian warship, bearing the banner of the Muscovite Tsar, was sailing alone and free on the Sultan's private lake. At sundown on September 13 when the Russian man-of-war appeared at the mouth of the Bosphorus, Constantinople was surprised and shaken. The Sultan reacted with dignity. He sent a message of welcome and congratulations and dispatched caiques to bring Ukraintsev and his party ashore. The Ambassador, however, refused to leave the ship and demanded that it be permitted to sail up the Bosphorus and carry him directly into the city. The Sultan bowed and the Russian warship moved up the Bosphorus, finally anchoring in the Golden Horn directly in. front of the Sultan's palace on Seraglio Point in full view of the Elect of God. For nine centuries, since the middle days of the great Christian empire of Byzantium, no Russian ship had anchored beneath those walls.

The Turks, staring out at the Krepost, were disquieted not only by the appearance but also by the size of the Russian ship—they could not understand how so large a vessel could have been built in the shallow Don—but were calmed to some extent by their naval architects, who pointed out that the vessel must be very flat-bottomed and would therefore be unstable as a gun platform in the open sea.

Ukraintsev was handsomely treated. A number of high officials waited at the dock when he came ashore, a splendid horse was provided for him and he was escorted to a luxurious seaside guest villa. Thereafter, in accordance with Peter's orders to display to the fullest Russia's new naval capacity, the Krepost was opened to visitors. Hundreds of boats came alongside and crowds of people of all classes swarmed aboard. The culmination was a visit by the Sultan himself, who, with an escort of Ottoman captains, inspected the ship in great detail.

The visit went peacefully, although Van Pamburg, the exuberant Dutch captain, once almost brought ruin on himself and the larger diplomatic mission. He was entertaining Dutch and French acquaintances on board and kept them until after midnight. Then, as he sent them ashore, he decided to salute them by firing all forty-six of his guns with powder but no shot. The cannonade directly beneath the walls of the palace awakened the whole city, including the Sultan, who thought it must be a signal for a Russian fleet to attack the city from the sea. The following morning, the angry Turkish authorities ordered the frigate seized and the captain arrested, but Van Pamburg threatened to blow up his ship when the first Turkish soldier set foot on it. Subsequently, with apologies and promises not to repeat the offense, the incident was smoothed over.

Meanwhile, however, the Turks were in no hurry to accommodate Ukraintsev. Not until November, three months after the Russian envoy's arrival in Constantinople, did they even consent to open negotiations. Thereafter, Ukraintsev held twenty-three meetings with his Ottoman counterparts until in June 1700 a compromise of sorts was reached. In the beginning, Peter's hopes had been ambitious. He demanded the right to keep Azov and the fortresses captured on the lower Dnieper, all already in his possession by conquest. He asked permission to sail Russian commercial (but not war) vessels on the Black Sea. He asked the Sultan to forbid the Crimean Khan to make further raids into the Ukraine, and to cancel the Khan's right to ask for annual tribute from Moscow. Finally, he asked that a Russian ambassador be permanently accredited to the Porte, as Britain, France and other powers were so represented, and that Orthodox churchmen have special privileges at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

For months, the Turks gave no definite answers as wrangling, disputes and delays arose over even the smallest details of the proposed agreement. Ukraintsev sensed that the other diplomatic representatives in Constantinople—those of Austria, Venice and England as well as France—were determined to impede his mission in order to prevent Russia and the Ottoman Empire from becoming too intimate. "I get no sort of assistance and not even any information from the Emperor or from Venice," Ukraintsev complained in a report to Peter. "The English and Dutch ministers range themselves beside the Turks and have better intentions toward them than they have toward you, Sire. They hate you and envy you because you have begun to build ships and have inaugurated navigation at Azov as well as at Archangel. They fear this will hamper their maritime trade." The Tartar Khan of the Crimea was even more anxious to prevent an agreement. "The Tsar," he wrote to his master, the Sultan, "is destroying the old customs and faith of his people. He is altering everything according to German methods and is creating a powerful army and fleet, thereby annoying everyone. Sooner or later he will perish at the hands of his own subjects."

On one point the Turks were adamant and needed no bolstering from West European ambassadors or Tatar chieftains: They refused absolutely Peter's demand that Russian ships of any kind be allowed access to the Black Sea. "The Black Sea and its coasts are ruled by the Ottoman Sultan alone," they told Ukraintsev. "From time immemorial no foreign ship has sailed its waters, nor ever will sail them. . . . The Ottoman Porte guards the Black Sea like a pure and undefiled virgin which no one dares to touch, and the Sultan will sooner permit outsiders to enter his harem than consent to the sailing of foreign vessels on the Black Sea." In the end, Turkish resistance proved too strong. Although generally defeated in the war, the Turks now faced only a single enemy, Russia, and they could not be forced to give up more than they had already lost in battle. Peter, too, was anxious to conclude the negotiations, as he had more tempting prospects to the north in the Baltic. The agreement, called the Treaty of Constantinople, was not a treaty of peace but a thirty-year truce which abandoned no claims, left all questions open and assumed that on expiration, unless it was renewed, the war would begin again.

The terms were a compromise. Territorially, Russia was allowed to keep Azov and a band of territory to the distance of ten days' journey from its walls. On the other hand, the forts on the lower Dnieper, seized from the Turks, were to be razed, and the land returned to Turkish possession. A zone of unpopulated, supposedly demilitarized land was to stretch across the Ukraine from east to west, separating the lands of the Crimean Tatars from Peter's domain. The demand for Kerch and access to the Black Sea had previously been dropped by the Russians.

In the non-territorial clauses, Ukraintsev was more successful. The Turks promised informally to assist Orthodox Christians in their access to Jerusalem. Peter's refusal to pay further tribute to the Tatar Khan was formally accepted. This infuriated the incumbent Khan, Devlet Gerey, but the ancient aggravation was finally ended and never reintroduced, even after the disaster that befell Peter eleven years later on the Pruth. Finally, Ukraintsev secured for Russia what Peter considered a major concession: the right to keep a permanent ambassador at Constantinople on equal footing with England, Holland, Austria and France. This was an important step in Peter's drive to have Russia recognized as a major European power, and Ukraintsev himself remained on the Bosphorus to become the Tsar's first permanent ambassador to a foreign power.

Ironically, the signing of a thirty-year truce with Turkey largely negated the great effort which had gone into the fleet built at Voronezh. Long before the thirty years had passed, the crews would have been dispersed and the timbers of the ships rotted away. At the time, of course, in Peter's mind the truce was only a postponement. Although his primary attention was beginning to turn to the Great Northern War with Sweden, the projects in the south, at Voronezh, Azov and Tagonrog, only slowed and did not come to a halt. Never in his lifetime did Peter give up the idea of an eventual thrust out onto the Black Sea; indeed, to the anger and despair of the Turks, the shipbuilding at Voronezh continued, new ships sailed down to Tagonrog and the walls of Azov grew higher.

As it happened, Peter's fleet was never used in battle and Azov's walls were never attacked. The fate of ships and city was decided not in a battle at sea, as Peter had hoped, but by the struggle of armies hundreds of miles to the west. And in this struggle, the ships did serve their master. When Charles XII, invading deep into Russia, bid for a Turkish alliance in the months before Poltava, the fleet at Tagonrog was one of Peter's strongest cards in persuading the Turks and Tatars not to intervene. In those critical months in the spring of 1709, Peter urgently strengthened the fleet and doubled the number of troops at Azov. In May, two months before the climactic battle at Poltava, he went himself to Azov and Tagonrog and maneuvered his fleet before a Turkish envoy. The Sultan, impressed by his envoy's report, forbade Devlet Gerey, the Tatar Khan, to take his thousands of Tatar horsemen to Charles' side. This effect of the Voronezh fleet alone justified all the effort expended on it.

Part Three

THE GREAT NORTHERN WAR

MISTRESS OF THE NORTH

The Baltic is a northern sea, brilliant blue in sunlight, murky gray in fog and rain, and deep gold at sunset when the world turns the color of the true amber which is found only on these shores. On its northern coasts, the Baltic is fringed with pine forests, fjords of red granite, pebble beaches and a myriad of tiny islands. The southern coast takes a gentler form: there, a green shore is lined with white sand beaches, dunes, marshes and low mud cliffs. Long stretches are edged with shoals and sand spits outlying shallow lagoons a dozen miles wide and fifty miles long. Through this flat and marshy country, four historic rivers make their way to the sea: the Neva, the Dvina, the Vistula and the Oder, all pouring fresh water into the sea, so that the prevailing current is out of the Baltic. For this reason, it is difficult for salt water to enter the Baltic, and there are no tides at Riga, Stockholm or the mouth of the Neva.

It is the lack of salt that brings the ice. Winter comes to the Baltic late in October with heavy frosts at night and flurries of snow. By October, in the days of sailing ships, the foreign vessels were leaving, heading down the Baltic, their holds filled with iron and copper, their decks piled high with timber. The native Baltic captains steered their ships into port, unrigged them and left the hulls locked in the ice until spring. By November, water in the bays and inlets was already covered with a thin scum of ice. By the end of the month, Kronstadt and St. Petersburg were frozen in; by December, Tallinn and Stockholm. The open sea did not freeze, but drifting ice and frequent storms made navigation difficult. The narrow sound between Sweden and Denmark was often choked by floating drift ice, and some winters the channel was sheeted over. (In 1658, a Swedish army marched across the ice to take its Danish enemy by surprise.) The northern half of the Gulf of Bothnia is solid ice from November until early May.

Spring loosens the ice and once more the Baltic comes to life. Then, in Peter's day, the fleets of merchantmen would begin arriving from Amsterdam and London, steering through the three mile-wide channel of the sound, with the low cliffs and the famous castle of Elsinore to starboard and the hills on the Swedish shore to port. In June, the Baltic was filled with sails: Dutch merchantmen, the cobalt-colored water creaming back from their rounded bows, the wind filling their huge mainsails; and stout, oaken-hulled English vessels, sent to load the pine masts and spars, tar and turpentine, resins, oils and flax for sails without which the Royal Navy could not survive. Through the short northern summer, under bright blue skies, ships crisscrossed the Baltic, anchored in its harbors, tied up to the quays, the captains ashore dining with merchants, the seamen drinking in bars and lying with women.

The port cities and towns of the Baltic were, and remain today, German in character, with cobbled streets and medieval stone buildings marked by high-pitched roofs, gables, turrets and battlements. The ancient town of Reval (now Tallinn), capital of Estonia, is centered on a medieval citadel perched on a great, craggy upthrust of rock. Swallows dip and soar around its high, round towers, and blond Estonian children play under the blooming chestnut trees and lilacs in the park beneath the massive walls. Riga, the capital of Latvia, is larger, more modern, but the old town on the bank of the Dvina River is also a world of cobbled streets and German drinking houses, topped by the Baroque spires of St. Peter's and St. Jacob's churches and the mighty Dom Cathedral. Outside the city, a wide white sand beach framed by dunes and pine trees runs for miles along the Gulf of Riga.

In Peter's day, the architecture, the language, the religion and the entire cultural flavor of these small states were alien to those of the colossal Russian mass adjacent to them. Ruled by the Teutonic Knights and later a German aristocracy, constituents of the Hanseatic League and the Lutheran Church, they retained their cultural and religious independence even after Peter's army marched from Poltava, captured Riga and absorbed these provinces for 200 years into the Russian empire.

To the north, in a world of forests and lakes, lies Sweden, in Peter's time at the peak of its imperial power. From the southernmost coast on the Baltic to the north beyond the Artie Circle, Sweden stretches for a thousand miles. It is a land of evergreens and birches, of 96,000 lakes, of snow and ice. As in northern Russia, the summers are short and cool. Ice forms in November and breaks up in April, and only five months are without frost. It is a cold, sternly beautiful land, and it has bred a race of hard, uncomplaining people.

In the seventeenth century, there were scattered over all this vastness only a million and a half people. Most were farm families, living in simple wooden cabins, using wooden plows and making their own clothes as they had for centuries. Between one farm and the next, and between the small towns and villages, travel was slow and hazardous. The roads were poor and, as in Russia, it was easier to travel in winter when a sleigh or sledge could glide over the surface of the frozen lakes. Hiding from the icy winds, Swedish peasants spent the endless winter days huddled around their warm stoves or sharing the public baths which were the most efficient means of getting the chill out of their frozen bones.

Sweden's primary exports were the products of its mines: silver, copper and iron. Iron, essential in both peace and war, was the most important, and provided half of Sweden's export trade. Most of this trade went through Stockholm, the capital, which in 1697 had a population of about 60,000. The city was located on Sweden's east coast which is fringed with a belt of islands protecting the coastline from the open sea. This belt is thickest at the point where the Gulf of Bothnia joins the Baltic. From the sea, a main channel, the Saltsjo, leads for forty-five miles through the mass of islands to Stockholm on the mainland. Here, at at juncture of lakes, rivers and the Saltsjo, medieval Stockholm was built, a little walled town of narrow, winding streets, gabled fronts and thin church spires, similar to those of other North German and Baltic towns.

In the seventeenth century, Stockholm became an important commercial port. Dutch and English merchantmen thronged the harbor and tied up at the broad shipping quay to load Swedish iron and copper. As the city's docks, shipyards, marketplaces and banking institutions grew, the town expanded to other islands. With increased wealth, the church spires and roofs of public buildings were sheathed in copper which glowed a brilliant orange when touched by the rays of the setting sun. The luxurious tastes of Versailles reached into the city's palaces and the mansions of the nobility. Ships which had sailed from Sweden carrying iron returned from Amsterdam and London bringing English walnut furniture, French gilt chairs, Dutch Delft china, Italian and German glass, gold wallpaper, carpets, linens and ornate table silver.

This wealth was built on empire as well as on iron and copper. The seventeenth century was Sweden's hour of greatness. From the accession of seventeen-year-old Gustavus Adolphus in 1611 to the death of Charles XII in 1718, Sweden stood at the pinnacle of its imperial history. The Swedish empire covered the entire northern coast of the Baltic and key territories along the southern shore. It embraced all of Finland and Karelia, Estonia, Ingria and Livonia, thus lapping completely around the Gulf of Bothnia and the Gulf of Finland. It held western Pomerania and the seaports of Stettin, Stralsund and Wismar on the North German coast. It commanded the bishoprics of Bremen and Verden, which were west of the Danish peninsula and gave access to the North Sea. And it held most of the islands of the Baltic.

Trade was even more important than territory. Here, Sweden's supremacy was secured by the planting of her blue-and-yellow flag at the mouth of all but one of the rivers that flowed into the Baltic: the Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland; the Dvina, which met the sea in the marshy ground near Riga; and the Oder, which reached the Baltic at Stettin. Only the mouth of the Vistula, flowing north through Poland and emptying into the Baltic at Danzig, was not Swedish.

That these vast territories should be possessed by a crown whose own people numbered scarcely a million and a half was the achievement of Sweden's great commanders and sturdy soldiers. The first and greatest of these was Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, savior of the Protestant cause in Germany, whose campaigns led him as far as the Danube and who was killed at thirty-eight while leading a cavalry charge.* The Thirty Years' War, which continued after his death, ended with the Peace of Westphalia, which richly rewarded Sweden's efforts. Here it gained the German provinces which gave control of the mouths of the Oder, the Weser and the Elbe. These German possessions also resulted in the anomaly that Sweden, Protestant Mistress of the North, was also a part of the Holy Roman Empire and occupied seats in the imperial Diet. More significant than this hollow power, however, was the access to Central Europe which they gave Sweden. With these territories serving as beachheads on the

*Gustavus Adolphus was succeeded by his only child, a six-year-old daughter who was to become the legendary Queen Christina. Assuming full royal power at eighteen, Christina ruled Sweden for ten years from 1644 to 1654. Her passion was learning. She rose at five a.m. to begin reading. Foreign scholars, musicians and philosophers, including Descartes, were enticed to her court by tales of her genius and her largess. Then, suddenly, at twenty-eight, she abdicated, pleading that she was ill and that the burdens of ruling were too heavy for a woman. The real reason, however, was her secret conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, which was illegal in Protestant Sweden. The throne went to Christina's cousin, who became King Charles X and the grandfather of Charles XII. Christina herself left immediately for Rome, where she lived for the remaining thirty-four years of her life, a friend of four popes, !a magnificent patroness of the arts and the lover of Cardinal Azzolini.

continent, Swedish armies could march anywhere in Europe, and that made Sweden a force to be reckoned with in every European calculation of war and peace.

Sweden, in sum, was a phenomenon—a great power, but one with weaknesses. It was not only satiated with conquest, it was over-extended. It had many advantages: hard-working people, disciplined soldiers, kings who commanded brilliantly on the battlefield. Nevertheless, to maintain its position, it also needed wisdom. The nation's strength had to be husbanded, not flung into wild, new adventures. As long as its monarchs understood this and acted wisely, there was no reason that Sweden should not remain indefinitely the Mistress of the North.

The seeds of the Great Northern War lay in history and economics as well as in Peter's longing for the sea. The struggle between Russia and Sweden for possession of the coastal lands on the Gulf of Finland was centuries old. Sweden had been the enemy of the city-states of Moscow and Novgorod since the thirteenth century. Karelia and Ingria, which spread north and south of the Neva River, were ancient Russian lands; the Russian hero Alexander Nevsky won the name Nevsky ("of the Neva") by defeating the Swedes on the Neva River in 1240. During Russia's Time of Troubles following the death of Ivan the Terrible, Sweden had occupied a vast belt of territory which even included Novgorod itself. In 1616, Sweden gave up Novgorod, but kept the entire coastline anchored in such fortresses as Noteborg on Lake Ladoga, Narva and Riga, continuing Russia's isolation from the sea. Tsar Alexis had made an attempt to regain these lands, but he had been forced to abandon it. His more important wars were with Poland, and Russia could not fight Poland and Sweden simultaneously. Swedish possession of the provinces was reconfirmed by the Russian-Swedish Peace of Kardis in 1664.

Nevertheless, in Peter's mind these were Russian lands, and Russia was suffering substantial economic loss from their being in foreign hands. Through the Swedish-held ports of Riga, Reval and Narva flowed a wide river of Russian trade, and on this trade Swedish handlers and toll collectors levied heavy duties, and the Swedish treasury fattened. Finally, of course, there was the pull of the sea. In Vienna, when he found the Emperor determined on peace, Peter understood that he could not make war alone on the Ottoman Empire, and realized that his access to the Black Sea was blocked. But here was the Baltic, its waves lapping a coast only a few miles from the Russian frontier, which could serve as a direct avenue to Holland, England and the West. Presented with a chance to repossess this territory by making war on a boy king in

the company of Poland and Denmark, he found the temptation irresistible.

Yet, the war might still not have begun had fate not suddenly dispatched to the scene a dedicated man to stir the potent brew. Johann Reinhold von Patkul was a patriot without a country. He was a member of the old Livonian nobility, the hardy Germanic descendants of the Teutonic Knights, who had conquered and held Livonia, Estonia and Courland until the middle of the sixteenth century. After the severe defeats inflicted on the Knights by Ivan the Terrible, the Teutonic order was dissolved and Livonia fell into the hands of Poland. But the Poles were harsh masters, insisting on the Polish language, Polish laws and the Catholic religion, and eventually the Protestant Livonians sought the protection of Protestant Sweden. In 1660, after a long struggle, Livonia became a Swedish province and, as such, shared in the political affairs of the rest of Sweden. These included the famous and widely resisted "reduction" policy of Charles XI. After the early death of Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish aristocracy had rapidly increased its relative power in the state, at the same time making itself hated by other classes of the population. On the accession of Charles XI, both the new King and the Swedish Parliament were determined to reduce the influence of the aristocracy by granting the King absolute power. One effective means was to demand the return to the crown of numerous lands parceled out to the nobles for administration. (The noblemen had begun to treat these lands as their own hereditary estates.) This "reduction," begun in 1680, was applied with ruthless severity, not only to Sweden itself, but to all provinces of the Swedish empire, including Livonia. This command struck Livonia all the more painfully because only two years earlier Charles XI had solemnly affirmed the rights of the Livonian barons, expressly promising that they would not be subjected to any "reduction" which might be imposed. The barons protested the confiscation and sent emissaries to Stockholm to plead their case.

Patkul was one of these emissaries. He was a strong, handsome, cultured man who spoke numerous languages, wrote Greek and Latin and was an experienced military officer. He was also hot-tempered, single-minded and ruthless. When he spoke, his courage and fierce dedication to his cause made him a commanding, majestic figure. He pleaded his case with eloquence—Charles XI was so moved that he touched Patkul on the shoulder, saying, "You have spoken like an honest man for your fatherland. I thank you"—but the King reaffirmed reduction as a "national necessity" and declared that Livonia could not be treated differently from the rest of the realm. Patkul returned to Livonia and drafted a fiery petition which he sent to Stockholm. Its contents were deemed treasonable and he was sentenced in absentia to lose his right hand and his head. But he escaped the Swedish officers sent to arrest him and began wandering through Europe, searching for an opportunity to free his native country. For six years, he dreamed of creating an anti-Swedish coalition which might bring independence to Livonia or at least restore the power of the Livonian nobility, and when Charles XI died and a fifteen-year-old boy mounted the throne of Sweden, the opportunity seemed to present itself.

Patkul was impatient, but he was also realistic. He knew that to throw off the Swedish yoke a small province would have to accept the help and probably the sovereignty of another large power, and Poland—a republic dominated by its nobility, who elected the king—seemed a good choice. Under so loose a system, Patkul reasoned, the Livonian nobility would be more likely to maintain its rights. Further, the newly elected Polish King, Augustus of Saxony, was German and therefore could be expected to sympathize with the German nobility of Livonia.

In October 1698, Patkul secretly arrived in Warsaw and set about persuading Augustus to take the initiative in forming an anti-Swedish alliance. Patkul had already visited King Frederick IV of Denmark and found him willing. The Danes had never fully accepted the loss of territory in southern Sweden inflicted on them by Gustavus Adolphus and looked forward to restoring the days when the Oresund, the sound that separates the Baltic from the North Sea, and Denmark from Sweden, could be looked upon as "a stream that runs through the dominions of the King of Denmark." Further, the Danes resented and feared the presence of Swedish troops on their southern border in the territory of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp.

Augustus was intrigued by Patkul's proposition, especially by his statement that the Livonian nobles were ready to acknowledge Augustus as their hereditary king. To Augustus, this opened a glittering prospect. His ambition was to make his elective Polish crown a hereditary one. By seizing Livonia with Saxon troops and then presenting the province to the Polish nobility, he hoped to gain its support in making a permanent claim on the Polish throne. Under Patkul's spell, Augustus grew more eager. Assessing the possible reaction of the major European powers to such a war—a concern of Augustus—Patkul estimated that Austria, France, Holland and England would doubtless "make loud noises about their trade, but would probably do nothing." As a further inducement to Augustus, Patkul assured the King that the conquest of Livonia would prove easy, and he even supplied an exact description of the fortifications of Riga, the city which would be Augustus' major objective.

The result of Patkul's efforts was beyond his grandest imaginings: An offensive treaty was made between Denmark and Poland against Sweden. Frederick IV was to clear the provinces of Schleswig and Holstein of Swedish troops preparatory to an attack across the sound on Scania, the southernmost of Sweden's home provinces. Augustus was to be prepared by January or February of 1700 to march hib Saxon troops into Livonia and attempt to seize Riga by surprised Swedish forces would thus be split between North Germany, the upper Baltic and the homeland, and, in the absence of an adult king to rally the nation and lead the army, it was hoped that the Swedish empire would crumble quickly. Finally, Patkul proposed that Peter of Russia be brought into the war as an additional ally against the Swedes. Russian attacks on Ingria at the head of the Gulf of Finland would distract the Swedes. Peter might provide money, supplies and men to support the Saxon forces besieging Riga. Neither Patkul nor the others put much trust in the quality of Russian troops, but it was hoped that their quantity would make up the difference. "Russian infantry would be most serviceable for working in the trenches and for receiving the enemy's shots," Patkul suggested, "while the troops of the King [Augustus] could be preserved and used for covering the approaches"; i.e., the Russians would serve as cannon fodder.

The plotters did worry that, once Russian troops had entered the Baltic provinces, it might not be easy to persuade them to leave. "It would also be absolutely necessary," warned Patkul, "to bind the hands of the Tsar in such a way that he should not eat before our eyes the piece roasted for us; that is, should not get hold of Livonia and should restrict his attack on Narva, for in that case he could threaten the center of Livonia and take Dorpat, Reval, and the whole of Estonia almost before it could be known in Warsaw."

Under the name Kindler and hidden in a group of twelve Saxon engineers hired by the Tsar, Patkul accompanied Augustus' personal representative, General George von Carlowitz, from Warsaw to Moscow to attempt to persuade Peter.* But in Moscow, the two conspirators found themselves in a peculiar situation. The Swedes, sensing that alliances were being formed against them, hoped to mollify Peter by sending to Moscow in the summer of 1699 a splendid embassy which would announce the accession of King Charles XII and ask for confirmation and renewal of all existing treaties, as was customary on the accession of a new monarch. The splendor of the Swedish embassy was meant to atone for the slight which the Tsar complained of having suffered when he passed through Riga in 1697. When the embassy arrived at the Russian frontier in mid-June, Peter's uncle Lev Naryshkin received them politely, but explained that they would have to await the return of the Tsar, who was with his fleet at Azov.

Peter's return to Moscow in early October was a dramatic moment. He found two embassies waiting for him: the formal Swedish embassy asking him to confirm the existing treaties of peace, and the secret Polish embassy of Carlowitz and Patkul asking him to make war on Sweden. Thereafter, for weeks, the

*The agreement at Rawa between Peter and Augustus had been only an exuberant burst of camaraderie. So far, there was no actual plan, either of alliance or of campaign.

two sets of negotiations continued side by side, the formal and unwelcome negotiations with Sweden being conducted openly at the Foreign Office, while the serious secret negotiations with Carlowitz were conducted personally by Peter at Preobrazhenskoe, with only Fedor Golovin and an interpreter, Peter Shafirov, present at the Tsar's side.

The Swedes were aware of Carlowitz' presence and knew that some kind of treaty was being discussed, but thought it was a peaceful treaty and suspected nothing of the truth. To avoid arousing suspicions, the Swedes were received with honor by Peter, to whom they presented a full-length picture of their new young King on horseback. And to bolster the deception, Peter went through the formality of confirming the previous treaties with Sweden, but, as a slight salve to his conscience, he avoided kissing the cross at the ceremony of signature. When the Swedish ambassadors noticed the omission and complained, Peter said that he had already taken an oath to observe all treaties when he came to the throne and that it was the Russian custom not to repeat it. On November 24, the Swedish ambassadors had a final audience with the Tsar. Peter was genial and gave them a formal letter from himself to King Charles XII confirming the treaties of peace between Sweden and Russia.

Meanwhile, the mission of Carlowitz and Patkul was proceeding successfully. Peter received Carlowitz (Patkul remained in disguise) and read the letter presented by Carlowitz but probably written by Patkul. In return for the Tsar's alliance, it offered Augustus' promise to support Russia's claims to Ingria and Karelia. Peter then called in Heins, the Danish ambassador, who was privy to the secret negotiations as Denmark had already signed its treaty of alliance with Poland. Heins endorsed the promise of the letter. Thus it was that, only three days after the Swedish embassy left Moscow, Peter signed a treaty agreeing that Russia would attack Sweden, if possible in April 1700. The Tsar carefully refused to name a specific date, and a clause stated that the Russian attack would come only after the signing of a peace or armistice between Russia and Turkey. Once the agreement was signed, Patkul, who until now had remained in the background, was presented to the Tsar. Two weeks later, Carlowitz left Moscow for Saxony, planning to take the road through Riga and use the opportunity to examine the city's fortifications.

Peter, having promised to attack a major Western military power within a few months, now turned to the enormous work of preparing for war. Since his return from the West, he had been primarily interested in the fleet. Overnight, he had to shift his attention from the building of ships to the accumulation of guns, powder, wagons, horses, uniforms and soldiers. With the Streltsy demoralized and only a few regiments still actually in existence, Peter's professional army consisted primarily of the four regiments of Guards, the Preobrazhensky, Semyonovsky, Lefort and Butursky. Thus, if the Tsar was to keep his promise to Augustus, an entire new army had to be raised, trained, equipped and placed on the march within three months.

Peter acted quickly. A decree was addressed to all civil and clerical landowners. Civil landowners were required to send the Tsar one serf recruit for every fifty serf households in their possession. Monasteries and other ecclesiastical landlords were more severely taxed at the rate of one recruit for every twenty-five households. Peter also asked for volunteers from among the freemen of the population of Moscow, promising good pay: eleven roubles a year plus an allowance for drink. All these men were ordered to muster at Preobrazhenskoe in December and January, and through the wintry days a stream of recruits poured into Peter's camp. Twenty-seven new infantry regiments were to be formed on the model of the four Guards regiments, with two to four battalions apiece. Now, Peter professionally felt the loss of Patrick Gordon. Lacking the Scotsman's experienced hand, Peter supervised the training himself, assisted by General Avtemon Golovin, the commander of the Guard, and Brigadier Adam Weide. Meanwhile, Prince Nikita Repnin was sent to enlist and train men from the towns along the lower Volga.

Although the commanders of the three new army divisions, Golovin, Weide and Repnin, were Russian, all of the regimental commanders were foreigners, some of whom had seen action in the Crimean and Azov campaigns, others newly hired from the West. Peter's greatest difficulty was with the older Russian officers, many of whom had no taste whatever for going to war. To replace those who were cashiered, many courtiers were enrolled as officers. They seemed to pick up soldiering so quickly that Peter exclaimed prematurely, "Why should I spend money on foreigners when my own subjects can do as well as they?" Subsequently, nearly all the court chamberlains and other palace officials entered the army.

The new soldiers were uniformed on the German model with coats of dark-green cloth, breeches, boots and three-cornered hats. They were armed with muskets and bayonets, and a beginning was made in teaching them to march in columns, deploy into line and stand firmly side by side and fire on command. The artillery, which was numerous—thanks to 300 guns sent as a present from King Charles XII to help the Tsar fight the Turks—was under the command of Prince Alexander of

Imeritia. The Prince had been Peter's companion in Holland and had devoted himself to the study of artillery at The Hague. Brigadier Weide, who had served in the Austrian army under Prince Eugene of Savoy, drew up the articles of war under which infractions of army discipline were to be severely punished.

Through the spring of 1700, Peter was caught suspended between the war he wanted to end and the war he wanted to begin. During the negotiations in February 1700, the rumors from Constantinople grew so ominous that he decided he must prepare for renewal of the war with the Sultan. He left his new regiments drilling at Preobrazhenskoe and went to Voronezh, where he worked furiously to help make his ships ready for war. Near the end of April, in the presence of his son, his sister and many boyars, he launched the sixty-four-gun ship Predestination, on which he himself had worked.

While Peter was at Voronezh, both of his Baltic allies struck their planned blows at Sweden. In February, without any declaration of war, 14,000 Saxon troops suddenly invaded Livonia and laid siege to the great fortress city of Riga. The Swedes counterattacked and drove them back, killing General Carlowitz in the process. Peter was disgusted, especially with Augustus; the King, he said, should have been in Livonia leading his troops himself instead of "diverting himself with women" in Saxony.

In March, the second of Peter's new allies, Federick IV, invaded the territories of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, south of Denmark, with 16,000 men and laid siege to the town of Tonning. Now, if ever, was the time for Peter to add his weight by striking at Ingria. But the Tsar's hands were tied. "It is a pity," he replied to Golovin, "but there is nothing to be done. I have not heard from Constantinople."

During the spring, rumors of Turkish preparations for war grew so strong and so disturbing to Peter that he felt it necessary to re-cement his formal good relations with Sweden. Rumors of his secret treaties with Denmark and Poland were seeping out and, to reassure the Swedes of his good intentions, he proposed sending a Russian embassy to Stockholm. Thomas Knipercrona, the Swedish ambassador in Moscow, who was entirely ignorant of the plotting which had gone on under his nose the previous autumn, was pleased by the projected embassy, and Peter deliberately played on Knipercrona's trust. On the day after his return from Voronezh, the Tsar called on Knipercrona in Moscow and jokingly rebuked the Ambassador's wife for writing to her daugher that all the Swedes in Moscow were in terror because the Russian army was about to invade Livonia. The daughter had been visiting in Voronezh and had shown the Tsar her mother's letter. "I could hardly calm your daughter, she was crying so bitterly," said Peter.

"You cannot think that I would begin an unjust war against the King of Sweden and break an eternal peace which I have just promised to preserve." Knipercrona begged the Tsar to forgive his wife. Peter embraced the Ambassador affectionately and swore that if the King of Poland captured Riga from Sweden, "I will tear it from his hands." Thoroughly convinced, Knipercrona reported in his dispatch to Stockholm that the Tsar had no thought of aggression against Sweden.*

The spring passed, then June, then July, and still no word came from Constantinople. On July 15, Peter received a Saxon envoy, Major General Baron Langen. Augustus, who finally had joined his army before Riga, begged the Tsar to begin military operations. Reported Langen: "The Tsar sent his ministers out of the room, and, with tears in his eyes, said to me in broken Dutch how grieved he was at the delay in concluding a peace with Turkey. . . . [He said that] he had ordered his ambassador to conclude a peace or truce in the quickest possible time even to his own loss, in order to have his hands free to aid his allies with all his forces." Finally, on August 8, news from Constantinople arrived. The thirty-year armistice had been signed on July 3, and Ukraintsev's messenger, traveling by the fastest means, reached Moscow with the news thirty-six days later.

Free at last to act, Peter moved with great speed. On the evening of the day Ukraintsev's dispatch arrived, the temporary peace with Turkey was celebrated in Moscow with an extraordinary display of fireworks. The following morning, war with Sweden was declared in the manner of the old Muscovite tsars, from the Bedchamber Porch in the Kremlin. "The Great Tsar has directed," the proclamation went, "that for the many wrongs of the Swedish king, and especially because during the Tsar's journey through Riga he suffered obstacles and unpleasantness at the hands of the people of Riga, his soldiers shall march in war on the Swedish towns." The proclaimed objectives of the war were the provinces of Ingria and Karelia, "which by the Grace of God and according to law have always belonged to Russia and were lost during the Time of Troubles." That same day, Peter dispatched a handwritten letter to Augustus informing him of what had happened and saying, "We hope, by the help of God, that Your Majesty will not see other than profit."

*Then, as now, morality played a peripheral role in war and diplomacy. Most states seized whatever territories or colonies they could. In Peter's view, these coastal regions were ancient Russian lands; now was simply the best time to reclaim them. Similarly, Peter's simultaneous negotiations with the Swedes and the Saxons were nothing to be ashamed of in that day. Similar characters were acted out routinely in London, Paris. Vienna and Constantinople.

* * *

Thus began the Great Northern War, or, as Voltaire called it, "The Famous War of the North." For twenty years, two youthful sovereigns, Peter and Charles, would wrestle for supremacy in a conflict that would settle the fate of both their empires. In the early years, 1700 to 1709, Peter would be on the defensive, preparing himself, his army and his state for the hour when the Swedish battering ram would be pointed toward his backward kingdom. In these years, amidst the storms of war, Russia would continue her transformation. Reforms would be made not as a result of careful planning and methodical execution, but rather as desperate, hurried measures dictated by the need to stave off a relentless enemy. Later, after Poltava, the tide would turn, but both sovereigns would fight on, the one enmeshed and distracted by largely useless alliances, the other burning to avenge his defeat and restore his crumbling empire.

23

LET THE CANNON DECIDE

Peter of Russia and Charles of Sweden, Frederick of Denmark, Augustus of Poland, Louis of France, William of England, Leopold of Austria and most of the other kings and princes of the era eventually submitted their differences to the decision of war. War was the final arbiter between nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as, indeed, it has been in the twentieth. Dynastic rivalries, the drawing of frontiers, possession of cities, fortresses, trade routes and colonies, and ultimately the destinies of kingdoms and empires all were decided by war. The axion was succinctly put by one of Louis XIV's young officers: "There is no judge more equitable than cannon. They go directly to the goal and they are not corruptible."

For fifty years, through the second half of the seventeenth century, the armies of France were the most powerful and most admired in Europe. Its forces were overwhelmingly the largest on the continent. In peacetime, it kept a standing army of 150,000, and expanded this to 400,000 in time of war. During the War of the Spanish Succession, eight large French armies, each commanded by a marshal of France, campaigned simultaneously in the Low Countries, on the Rhine, in Italy and in Spain. Thanks to the King and Louvois, France's soldiers were the best trained, the best equipped and the best supplied in Europe. Thanks to generals such as Turenne, Cond6 and Vendome, they were overall also the most successful. The Duke of Marlborough's shattering defeat of Marshal Tallard at Blenheim (the Duke was aided by his companion-in-arms, Prince Eugene of Savoy) was the first great defeat of the French army since the Middle Ages.

Throughout this period, the size, firepower and destructiveness of all armies was growing rapidly. As energetic finance ministers enlarged the tax base for the support of armies, increasing numbers of troops could be put into the field. In the first half of the seventeenth century, a European battle might see as few as 25,000 troops involved on both sides. In 1644, at Marston Moor, the decisive battle of the English Civil War, Cromwell pitted 8,000 men against an equal number under King Charles I. Sixty-five years later, at Malplaquet, Marlborough led 110,000 allied troops against 80,000 Frenchmen. At the peak of its strength, Sweden, with a home population of a million and a half, supported an army of 110,000. Peter, even after dismissing the disorganized, irregular mass of feudal soldiery he inherited from Sophia and Golitsyn, eventually raised and trained a completely new army of 220,000.

Although, as wars dragged on, conscription became necessary to fill the ranks, most armies in this period were made up of professional soldiers. Many of these, both officers and men, were foreign mercenaries—in that time, a soldier could join any army he liked as long as he did not fight against his own king. Frequently, kings and princes who were at peace rented out whole regiments to warring neighbors. Thus, Swiss, Scots and Irish regiments served in the French army; Danish and Prussian regiments in the Dutch army; and the Hapsburg Imperial army contained men from all the German states. Individual officers changed sides as often as modern executives change jobs, nor did their past or future employers bear them ill-will for their actions. As a twenty-four-year-old colonel, Marlborough served under Marshal Turenne against the Dutch and was personally praised at a great parade by Louis XIV himself. Later, in command of a predominantly Dutch army, Marlborough almost toppled the Sun King from his throne. For a while, both before and after Peter came to the throne, most of the senior officers in the Russian army were foreigners; without them, the Tsar could have fielded little more than a mob.

Customarily, these professional soldiers conducted warfare by accepted rules. There was a seasonal rhythm to war which was rarely broken: summer and autumn were for campaigning and battles; winter and spring were for rest, recruiting and replenishment. In the main, these rules were dictated by the weather, the crops and the state of the roads. Every year, the armies waited until the spring thaw had melted the snows and enough fresh green grass had sprouted to nourish the horses of the cavalry and baggage trains. In May and June, once the mud had dried to dust, long columns of men and wagons began to move. The generals had until October to maneuver, besiege and offer battle; by November, when the first frost appeared, the armies began going into winter quarters. These rules were almost religiously observed in Western Europe. Through ten consecutive years of campaigning on the continent, Marlborough regularly left the army in November and returned to London until spring. In the same months, senior French officers returned to Paris or Versailles. A long-vanished aspect of those civilized wars was the issuance of passports to prominent officers to travel through hostile territory on the shortest routes for winter leave. Common soldiers, of course, did not enjoy these priviliges. There was no question of home leave for them until the war was over. If they were fortunate, they were confined to billets in town through the coldest months. All too often, however, they were crowded into winter encampments of huts and hovels, prey to frostbite, disease and hunger. In the spring, the gaps chewed through their ranks by pestilence would be filled by fresh consignments of recruits.

On the march, an army of .this period moved slowly, even when its passage was unopposed; few armies could move faster than ten miles a day, while the average daily march was five. Marlborough's historic march from the Low Countries up the Rhine to Bavaria before the Battle of Blenheim was considered a "lightning stroke" at the time—250 miles in five weeks. The limiting factor usually was the artillery. The horses struggling to pull the cumbersome, heavy cannon, whose wheels fearsomely rutted the roads for those that followed, simply could not move faster.

Armies marched in long columns, battalion after battalion, a screen of cavalry riding in front and on the flanks, the carts, carriages and gun caissons trundling along in the rear. Normally, an army marched at sunrise and camped in mid-afternoon. Making a new camp every night required almost as much effort as the day's march. Tents were erected in lines, baggage unpacked, cooking fires lit, water provided for men and animals, and the horses set to grazing. If the enemy was nearby, each camp had to be placed on suitable ground and prepared with temporary earthworks and wooden palisades as a potential strongpoint able to resist attack. Then, after an exhausted sleep, the men were roused, and in the pre-dawn darkness all this had to be dismantled and packed into wagons for the next day's march.

Not everything, of course, could be carried in wagons. An army of 50,000 to 100,000 men could maintain itself only by marching through fertile countryside which could supply many of its wants, or by having additional supplies brought to it by water. In Western Europe, the great rivers were the railways of war. In Russia, where the rivers flow north and south and the war between Russia and Sweden was east-west, rivers were of little value, and the consequent dependence on wagon trains and local foraging was far greater.

In Western Europe, most campaigns proceeded in a leisurely manner. Sieges were popular and much preferred to the greater risks and nasty surprises of open-field battle. Siege warfare was conducted with exquisite, almost mathematical precision; on each side, at any given moment the commander knew exactly where matters stood and what was going to happen next. Louis XIV was devoted to siege warfare; there was no risk of losing the great army which he had so carefully and expensively built. Also, it enabled him to participate safely in the Game of Mars. Besides, in Louis de Vauban, the Sun King possessed the greatest master of fortification and siege operations in the history of warfare. On behalf of his master, Vauban personally laid siege to fifty towns without failure, and his own fortresses were the models for the age. Sometimes purely military bastions, sometimes large fortified towns or cities, they covered and protected the frontiers of France like an interlocking web. Carefully adapted to the particular terrain, each was a work not only of supreme utility but also of art. They tended to be shaped like a gigantic star, with each rampart built so as to be protected by flanking enfilade fire from cannon or at least musketry at right angles. Each salient was a self-contained fort, with its own artillery and garrison, its own sally ports for sudden sorties by the defenders. Around these great stone ramparts ran a tracery of ditches, twenty feet deep and forty feet wide, also faced with stone—bleak and desolate places for attacking infantry to find itself. When they were built, France's armies were on the offensive, and these fortresses, their great doors decorated with gilt fleur-de-lis and opening onto buildings of severe splendor, were intended not as static defense points but as pivots on which French armies could maneuver. Later, as Marlborough's armies were battering their way toward Paris and Versailles, Vauban's fortresses saved the Sun King his throne.

Louis himself paid credit to his servant: "A town defended by

Vauban is a town impregnable; a town besieged by Vauban is a town taken."* Under Vauban's direction, sieges became formal theatrical spectacles, immaculately staged and timed. Once the fortress was surrounded, Vauban began a series of trenches which zigzagged ever nearer to the fortress walls. Calculating the angles with mathematical precision, Vauban placed the trenches so that defending fire from the fortress walls could scarcely touch the infantry in the trenches digging their way ever closer. Meanwhile, the besieger's artillery fired day and night at the ramparts, silencing defending cannon, smashing holes in the parapets. When the moment of assault came, the attacking infantry stormed out of the trenches and across the ditches (which they had filled with portable fascines of tightly bound brush) and through the breaches in the pulverized walls. Few sieges, however, reached this climax. In the rigorous etiquette which governed both sides, once the defender knew that it was mathematically certain that his fortress would fall, he was free to surrender with honor; neither his own government nor the besieger expected anything less. But if, in a burst of unreasoning passion, the defender refused to surrender and the assailant was forced to go to the expense in time and lives of taking the city by storm, then, once taken, the entire city was given up to rape, sack and flames.

Although Vauban's art has never been excelled, then, as now, the greatest commanders of the era—Marlborough, Charles XII, Prince Eugene—were practitioners of the war movement. Of these, the greatest unquestionably was John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who commanded the armies of Europe against Louis XIV from 1701 to 1711 and who never fought a battle he did not win or besieged a fortress he did not take. In ten years of war, fighting against one marshal of France after another, he defeated them all, and when political change in England cost him his command, he was driving relentlessly through Vauban's great fortress barrier toward Versailles itself. Marlborough was not interested in the conventional, limited warfare of the time; it was not a single town or fortress that he sought. His belief was in decisive, major action, even at great risk. His objectives were the annihilation of the French army and the humbling of the Sun King in a great open-field battle. He was ready to stake a province, a campaign, a war, even a kingdom, on the outcome of a single afternoon. Marlborough was the most successful all-around soldier of the age. He acted simultaneously as field commander, allied commander-in-chief and England's foreign minister and

*Although when the King himself was present at a siege, the credit had to be shared. As Louis put it: "Monsieur de Vauban proposed to me the steps which I thought best."

virtual prime minister. In terms of our own most recent major war, it was as if he combined the functions and duties of Churchill, Eden, Eisenhower and Montgomery.

But Marlborough's command always had a certain balance, a blend of grand strategy and tactical purpose. The most daring and aggressive soldier of the age was Charles XII of Sweden. Charles, it seemed to his enemies and to a watching Europe, was anxious for battle, at any time and at any odds. He was utterly devoted to rapid movement and shock tactics. His impetuosity and eagerness to attack have brought the charge of rashness, even of fanaticism, and it is true that his tactics were those of George S. Patton: Always attack! But it was not attack based on madness; rather, the Swedish attack was based on rigid training and iron discipline, on total dedication and belief in victory, and on excellent battlefield communications. Informed by drums and messengers, subordinate commanders always knew what was expected of them. Any weakness in their own army was quickly covered; any weakness in the enemy's ranks was rapidly exploited.

Charles was willing to break the seasonal tradition of warfare— the hard frozen ground was easier for his wagons and cannon, and perhaps his troops were more used to the freezing weather—and was ready to campaign in winter. Obviously, in a war of movement the army with the greater mobility had the advantage. Campaigns were as often decided by transportation and logistics as by pitched battles. Thus, anything which improved mobility was important; the French were enormously pleased by the development of a new portable baking oven which could be set up, fired and produce fresh bread within hours.

Although field commanders were always wary when an enemy army was nearby, few battles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fought unless both sides were willing to fight. It was difficult to find suitable terrain and to arrange the necessary elaborate array of men, horses and guns. A commander reluctant to fight could usually avoid battle by remaining in rough, scrubby, broken ground. Should one general begin the hours of preparation necessary to ready his lines for battle, the other, if unwilling, could march away. Thus, two armies could exist in reasonable proximity for days without a major engagement.

When both commanders had compelling reasons to fight—to contest a river crossing or a strong position on a main road—the armies wheeled into position 300 to 600 yards apart. If there was time, the army which expected to be on the defensive—usually the Russians when confronted by Charles XII or the French when faced by Marlborough—erected barriers of sharpened stakes called chevaux de frise planted in the ground before the infantry lines to give some protection against advancing enemy cavalry. At points along the line, artillery officers sited their guns, ready to fire cannonballs weighing three, six, eight pounds or even sixteen and twenty-four pounds for the heaviest guns, 450 to 600 yards into the enemy ranks. A set-piece battle usually began with an artillery bombardment; a long pounding could be damaging, but was rarely decisive against experienced and disciplined troops. To an astonishing degree, the men simply stood waiting in ranks while cannonballs whistled through the air or bounded along the ground, tearing bloody lanes through their lines.

The greatest advances in field artillery during the seventeenth century had been made by Sweden. Gustavus Adolphus had standarized field-artillery calibers so each gun would not need its own supply of balls and, in the heat of battle, the same ammunition could feed any gun. Then, as artillery became almost an end in itself, Swedish generals realized that artillerymen often were forgetting the need to support their own infantry. To compensate, they attached light cannon directly to the infantry battalions, two guns per battalion, which could give close support by firing directly at the enemy infantry opposing that battalion. Later, Swedish artillery was attached even to cavalry. This highly mobile horse artillery could unharness, fire into enemy cavalry formations and be away in a matter of minutes.

The decisive arm, however, was not the artillery or the cavalry but the infantry, and the great battles of the age were won by infantry battalions advancing or standing in line, fighting each other with muskets, flintlocks, pikes and, later, bayonets. The seventeenth century had been a time of rapid transition in infantry equipment and tactics. For centuries, the ancient pike—a heavy steel-tipped lance fourteen to sixteen feet long—had been the all-conquering "Queen of Battles." Rows of pikemen, their long lances extended, advanced on each other, and the thrust of a wall of pikes brought the decision. But the development of firearms gradually made this famous weapon obsolete. When pikemen faced a line of musketeers, the musketeers could stand at a distance and fire musket balls into their ranks, dropping them one by one. By the end of the century, only a few pikemen still appeared on the battlefield, assigned exclusively to defending the musketeers from hostile cavalry. It still was a fearsome thing for a horseman to ride into a wall of long, sharp pikes, but when the pikeman was not under immediate attack at close qaurters, there was no one more useless or less dangerous on the battlefield. He simply stood in ranks, holding his long pike, being battered by enemy artillery and killed by enemy musket balls, while waiting for someone to approach and impale himself on his pike.

The solution was the bayonet, a device which enabled the musket to serve two purposes: It could be fired until the enemy got very close, and then, with a knife blade attached to the end, could be used as a short pike. At first, this was done by fitting a blade into the barrel. But this restricted firing and was soon succeeded by the permanent ring-held bayonet, which continued in use into the present century. The infantryman could fire until his enemy was on top of him and was still able to greet his foe with a gleaming blade. The bayonet arrived just as the Great Northern War was beginning. The Drabants, the Swedish Guards, were equipped with the bayonet in 1700, and within a few years most armies, including the Russian, had it in use.

Over the latter part of the seventeenth century, the musket itself had been greatly improved. The old matchlock was a cumbersome weapon weighing fifteen pounds or more. In order to lift and use it, the musketeer carried a long, forked stick which he planted in the ground, resting the barrel in the crotch while he aimed and fired. The process of loading and firing a single ball required twenty-two separate motions, among them loading the powder, ramming home wad and bullet, priming, raising to shoulder, aligning on the wooden stick, lighting the match and applying it to the touch hole in the weapon. All too often, because of dampness, the musketeer sighting down his long barrel and waiting for it to fire was disappointed—or worse than disappointed if enemy infantry or cavalry was fast approaching.

The replacement for the matchlock was the flintlock, in which a spark was produced automatically by a piece of steel striking against a piece of flint, the spark then dropping directly into the powder chamber. The weapon was lighter, although only relatively, weighing ten pounds, but it needed no forked stick, and the number of loading and firing motions was cut in half. A good rifleman could loose off several rounds a minute. The flintlock quickly became the standard infantry weapon in all Western armies. Only the Russians and Turks continued to issue old, heavy matchlock muskets, to the detriment of their infantry firepower.

Equipped with this new weapon—the flintlock with attached bayonet—infantry became a highly effective, dangerous and, before long, dominant force on the battlefield. The bayonet not only made two weapons of one, but made the new weapon much less clumsy than the pike, thus giving far greater battlefield mobility to infantry soldiers. The greater speed in firing muskets also demanded new tactics and new formations to make the most of this increased firepower. Cavalry, which had dominated battlefields for centuries, became secondary. Marlborough's contribution was in understanding and using the new firepower of the infantry. English soldiers were trained to deploy rapidly from column into line and to deliver steady, disciplined fire, platoon by platoon. As a smaller number of men could now deliver the same volume of fire, the size of battalions was reduced to make them easier to handle. Command became easier, quicker, more responsive. In order to allow larger numbers of muskets to be aimed at the enemy, and also to reduce the depth of the target presented to enemy artillery, infantry lines were extended on the flanks, thus increasing the width of the battlefield itself. Everything was practiced over and over in peacetime, in hope that by repetition it would become flawless habit. The test would come in the heart-shaking moments when the musketeers had fired, with no time for another shot before a wave of enemy horsemen, swords in hand, fell upon them.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the enormously increased firepower of the infantry had made the battlefield a more dangerous place than ever before. It was far easier to kill men by standing off and cutting them down with devastating volleys of musket fire than it was to move in and kill them hand to hand as had been required in all previous centuries. In earlier battles, ten percent of. the armies engaged might become casualties; now the rates soared higher. Yet, despite its new predominance, infantry still depended for its own safety in battle on keeping perfect order. With their great firepower, if they could hold ranks and not be forced to break, infantrymen could inflict great damage on cavalry which came too close. But they had to depend on strict array when all around swirled enemy cavalry squadrons which, on the slightest hint of disorder, could ride them down, crumple their ranks and trample them into the dust.

The organization of a battle—keeping thousands of men in ranks, arriving in proper formations at the proper moment, under enemy fire—was in itself a stupendous task. Nature conspired against commanders; there was always a copse of trees, a ditch or even a hedge which could impede or disrupt the columns of moving men. Even so, nothing could be hurried. An advance into the most murderous enemy fire had to be slow and sure; haste could jeopardize the balance and timing of an army. Frequently, even with men dropping on all sides, an attacking column would be halted to dress the ranks into better alignment or to allow a parallel column to catch up.

With the rarest exceptions, successful commanders were those who attacked. Marlborough's unvarying tactic was to begin a battle by attacking the strongest part of the enemy line. Habitually, he used his own superbly trained, red-coated English infantry for this purpose. As the worried enemy commander fed more and more of his reserves into this area of the battle, Marlborough maintained and even increased the pressure, accepting whatever casualties he must. Then, when other segments of the enemy line were weakened, Marlborough unleashed his own reserves, usually a mass of cavalry, against a denuded point of the enemy front. Repeatedly, a breakthrough occurred and the Duke rode a victor across the field.

In the sheer dynamism of their attack, however, the finest infantry and cavalry in Europe were not the English but the Swedes. Swedish soldiers were trained to think only in terms of attack, no matter what the odds. If an enemy somehow seized the initiative and began to advance toward Swedish lines, the Swedes immediately charged forward to break the attack with a counterattack. Unlike the English under Marlborough, whose infantry tactics were based on making the most of its devastating firepower, the basis of the Swedish attack remained the "armes blanches"—cold steel. Both infantry and cavalry deliberately sacrificed the firepower of their muskets and pistols in favor of closing with sword and bayonet.

It made an awesome sight. Slowly, steadily, silently except for the beating of their drums, the Swedish infantry advanced, holding its own fire until the last minute. At close range, the columns deployed out into a long wall of blue and yellow four ranks deep, halted, poured in a single volley and then erupted with a bayonet charge into the reeling enemy lines. It was many years before Peter's Russian levies could stand before this kind of fierce attack. The unexcelled momentum of the Swedish attack derived from two sources; religious fatalism and constant training. Each soldier was taught to share the King's belief that "God would let no one be killed until his hour had come." This produced a calm courage which was anchored in months and years of practice in marching, wheeling, halting, firing, which gave the Swedish infantry maneuverability and cohesion second to none.

Although, increasingly, infantry was the decisive arm, it still was the cavalry which provided the high drama and often, by breaking the enemy when he began to waver, carried the day. Light cavalry was used for screening the army, for reconnaissance, for foraging and for raiding. The Russians employed Cossacks for this purpose, and the Ottoman army, Tatars; the Swedes used the same horsemen in these peripheral duties and in the thick of battle. Heavy regular cavalry was organized into squadrons of 150 men, armored for battle in breastplates and backplates, and armed with swords and often pistols for use against ambush along the roads. In most modern armies of the day, the cavalry was as carefully and rigidly trained in tactical maneuver as the infantry. But there were limits on its use. One, obviously, was terrain; cavalry needed flat or gently rolling open fields. Another was the endurance of horses; even the best cavalry horses were reckoned capable of no more than five hours' fighting at a stretch. Still another was the growing destructiveness of infantry firepower. As flintlock muskets became more rapid-firing and accurate, cavalry had to beware. Neither Marlborough nor Charles XII sent cavalry into action until the climactic moment, when as a shock force it might break a crumbling enemy line, slam down on the flank of an advancing line of infantry or, in pursuit, turn a retreat into a rout.

Despite such limitations, however, these were still the great days of cavalry (Waterloo with its massed cavalry charges was still a century away, and the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava a century and a half). From a quarter to a third of the men in most armies were horse soldiers, and in the Swedish army the proportion was higher. Charles trained his cavalry to attack in tight formations. The Swedish horse approached an enemy at a slow trot, riding in a wedge formation, knee to knee, one trooper locked in beside and slightly behind the next. Three ranks deep, this broad arrow bore down relentlessly on whatever opponent, mounted or on foot, its officers designated.

Seen from afar, a cavalry charge made war seem beautiful: colorful squadrons of horsemen riding across an open field, their swords and breastplates flashing in the sun, their flags and pennants whipping in the wind, moving bravely toward an enemy line. But for those on the battlefield, it was a place of carnage, a corner of hell: cannon roaring and flashing; infantrymen struggling to keep their rigid formations and follow the commands to load and fire, while around their knees writhed the shattered bodies of comrades; men on horseback riding full tilt into a line of men on the ground; the force of impact, shouts, screams and grunts; men stumbling and falling; horsemen leaning from their saddles, slashing frantically with razorsharp blades at everyone in sight; the men on the ground thrusting upward toward the saddles with bayonets, catching riders in the chest, the legs, the back; on both sides, the instant of terrible pain, the last flash of surprise and recognition of what was happening, the overwhelming gush of bright-red blood; running men, riderless horses and, over it all, drifting clouds of thick, blinding, choking smoke. And when the firing had ceased and the smoke had lifted, a blood-soaked field carpeted with men still screaming or gasping, or lying quietly, gazing at heaven with unseeing eyes.

Thus did the nations decide their differences.

CHARLES XII

The blond, blue-eyed child who became King Charles XII of Sweden was born on June 17, 1682, almost exactly ten years after the birth of his great antagonist, Peter of Russia. Charles' parents were Charles XI, a stern, deeply religious man who had himself become king at the age of five, and Queen Ulrika Eleonora, a Danish princess who had managed by her warmth of character to maintain the affection of both the Danish and Swedish people, even when the two countries were at war. Seven children had been born during the first seven years and nine months of their marriage, but only Prince Charles and two sisters, Hedwig Sophia, a year older than he, and Ulrika Eleonora, six years younger than Charles, had survived. Four younger brothers died, one after another, before reaching the age of two.

Although Charles' body was frail, his boyhood was spent in rough, masculine activity. When he was only four, the people of Stockholm became accustomed to seeing his small figure in the saddle, riding behind his father at military reviews. At six, he was taken out of the care of women and installed in his own apartment with male tutors and servants. At seven he shot a fox, at eight he killed three deer in one day, at ten he killed his first wolf and at eleven his first bear. At eleven also, he lost the last element of feminine warmth in his life when his mother died at thirty-six. The Queen was beloved by her family, and at her death the King fainted and had to be bled and Prince Charles was carried to bed with a fever; soon after, he came down with smallpox, but his body was actually stronger after the disease than before. His face was pocked with deep scars, which he proudly considered marks of manliness. At fourteen, Charles had a slender, wiry body and was a superb horseman, an excellent hunter and an avid student of the military arts.

After the death of Queen Ulrika, King Charles XI spent as much time as possible with his children, who reminded him of their mother. The Prince took on as many of his father's beliefs and mannerisms as he could; his speech became brief, dry and understated, saved from being hopelessly cryptic by occasional glimmers of sympathy and wit. Honor and the sanctity of one's word became his two cardinal principles: A king must put justice and honor ahead of everything; once given, his word must be kept.

Charles' tutors found that he had a quick intelligence and learned easily. He did not much care for the Swedish language and always spoke and wrote it unevenly. German, the court language of all the northern kingdoms, came more easily to him and he used it as his mother tongue. He became extremely proficient in Latin, speaking it and listening to university lectures in it with much enjoyment. He was taught French, but, despite his tacit alliance with Louis XIV during his years of rule, he disliked speaking it; nevertheless, he read it with ease, and admired French theater. During his fifteen years of campaigning on the continent, he read and reread Corneille, Moliere and Racine. The idea of travel stirred him immensely and he devoured accounts and drawings by travelers and explorers. As a boy, he wistfully wished for a brother who might stay in Sweden to rule while he himself traveled the world. He was fascinated by history and biography, especially the lives of the military conquerors—Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Sweden's Gustavus Adolphus; later, he carried a biography of Alexander with him through all his campaigns, sometimes making specific comparisons between the Macedonian and his own military achievements. Charles was genuinely interested in religion. As a boy and young man, he spent an hour every morning with a bishop discussing the chapters of the Bible one by one. He was intrigued by mathematics and, like Peter, by its application to the arts of artillery ballistics and fortification. While his tutors admired his quick grasp, they worried about the strength of his will, which often seemed pure obstinacy. Once the Prince considered himself right, they discovered, it was impossible to change his mind.

Charles' education, off to a good start, was permanently interrupted when he was fourteen. On April 5, 1697, King Charles XI died at forty-two of cancer of the stomach. Traditionally, Swedish princes did not reach their majority and could not be crowned until they were eighteen, and with this in mind, the dying King appointed a council of regents, including the boy's grandmother, the Dowager Queen Hedwig Eleonora. After his father's death, Charles attended meetings of the Regency Council and at first made an excellent impression by his intelligent questions and, even more, by his willingness to remain silent and listen to the debate among his elders. He also surprised everyone by his cool behavior during a great fire which destroyed the royal palace even as his father's body lay in state inside the building. In contrast to his grandmother, who totally lost her head, the boy calmly issued orders and saved the body from the flames although the building itself was reduced to ashes.

Within six months, it became apparent that the Regency Council would not work. The Regents were divided in their opinions and often could not reach decisions, and Charles was too intelligent and too strongly attracted to power to be left on the sidelines while others ruled his kingdom. The regents, reminded by the late King's will that they would be held responsible for their actions when young Charles reached his majority, grew eager to have his views on every subject under discussion. Increasingly, he was surrounded by those anxious to gain his favor, and the power of the regents was heavily undercut. The government of Sweden was lapsing into paralysis. The only solution, taken in November 1697, was to declare the boy, then fifteen, to be of age and to crown him King of Sweden.

To most of his countrymen, Charles' coronation ceremony was a shock. He was succeeding to the crown as the sole and absolute ruler of Sweden, unchecked by council or parliament, and he meant to drive the point home in his coronation. He refused to be crowned as previous kings had been: by having someone else place the crown on his head. Instead, he declared that, as he had been born to the crown and not elected to it, the actual act of coronation was irrelevant. The statesmen of Sweden, both liberal and conservative, and even his own grandmother were aghast. Charles was put under intense pressure, but he did not give way on the essential point. He agreed only to allow himself to be consecrated by an archbishop, in order to accede to the Biblical injunction that a monarch be the Lord's Anointed, but he insisted that the entire ceremony be called a consecration, not a coronation. Fifteen-year-old Charles rode to the church with his crown already on his head.

Those who looked for omens found many in the ceremony. By the new King's command, in respect for his father's memory, everyone present, himself included, was dressed in black; the only touch of color was the purple coronation mantle worn by the King. A violent snowstorm produced a stark contrast of black on white as the guests arrived at the church. The King slipped while mounting his horse with his crown on his head; the crown fell off and was caught by a chamberlain before it hit the ground. During the service, the archbishop dropped the horn of anointing oil. Charles refused to give the traditional royal oath and then, in the moment of climax, he placed the crown on his own head.

This astonishing scene soon was followed by further evidence of the new King's character. The nobility, hoping that Charles would mitigate the stern "reduction" decrees, was distressed to find the young monarch determined to continue his father's policy. Members of the council shook their heads over the King's self-confidence, his obstinacy, his absolute refusal to turn back or change a decision once he had made it. At meetings, he would listen for a while, then stand and interrupt the dialogue, saying that he had heard enough, that he had made up his mind and that they had his permission to depart. Too late, the Swedish statesmen repented their hasty advancement of the King's coming of age. Now, they and the greatest power in Northern Europe were under the absolute power of a headstrong, willful adolescent. Feeling their hostility, Charles decided to downgrade, if not eliminate, the council. The old councilors and ministers were kept waiting in anterooms sometimes for hours before the King would see them— then, after listening briefly to their arguments, he would dismiss them. Only later would they learn what decisions had been taken on the gravest national matters.

Charles' formal education came abruptly to an end; his indoor hours were now completely taken up by affairs of state. But he was still a vigorously healthy adolescent, attracted by violent physical exercise and a keen wish to test his body and spirit against a whole spectrum of physical challenges. To satisfy his urge to break free of responsibility and the reproachful words and glances of older people, he began taking long rides on horseback. Determined to absorb his energy and drive away his problems by shear physical exhaustion, he chose to concentrate on immediate challenges such as clearing a high wall on his favorite horse or beating a friend to a distant tree at a dead gallop. In the winter, accompanied only by a page and an officer of the guard, he left the palace in the darkness of early morning to ride through the forest among the lakes outside the capital. There were accidents. Once, in deep snow, his horse fell on him, pinioning him so that he could not move. As usual, he was far in advance of his companions, and by the time they found him he was nearly frozen. Another time, riding across a frozen lake, Charles had almost reached the far side when he found a fifteen-foot stretch of open water between himself and the bank. Although he could not swim, he urged his horse into the icy water and clung to its back while the animal swam across.

Every sport had to provide him the thrill of danger—and the greater the danger, the more attraction it held for him. Just to prove that he could, he rode his horse straight up a steep cliff, and both horse and rider fell over backward; the horse was injured, but not the King. He raced toboggans down icy hills. He drove sledges at breakneck speed, sometimes fastening a number of sledges together in a long train down a slope. In spring, summer and fall, he hunted, but, having decided that it was cowardly to hunt with firearms, he took only a pike and a cutlass when he went in search of bears. After a while, he decided that even the use of steel was unfair, and he went with only a strong wooden pitchfork. The sport was to taunt the cornered bear until it rose on its hind legs, then spring forward and catch it in the throat with the fork and hurl it over backward, whereupon the King's companions would hurry to bind the animal in a net.

Even more dangerous were the military games Charles loved. As Peter had done at Preobrazhenskoe, Charles divided his friends and staff into two companies, equipping them with staves and supposedly harmless hand grenades made of pasteboard which nevertheless exploded with painful effect. While the King was storming a snowy rampart, one such blast shredded his clothing and wounded several of his friends.

The King's closest companion and greatest competitor in these martial sports was Arvid Horn, a young captain of the elite Royal Cavalry Guards, the Drabants. The Drabants were essentially a kind of cadet corps, whose ranks were filled with men who would eventually become officers of the Swedish army; indeed, each cavalryman in the ranks was already a future lieutenant and, as such, received a lieutenant's pay. With Horn at his side, Charles threw himself fervently into the vigorous and often violent training program of the Drabants. Frequently, two groups of horsemen, with Charles commanding one and Horn the other, rode at each other without saddles, using stout hazel sticks as weapons. Blows were given with maximum force; no one, not even the King, was spared. In one such fray, Charles, trading blows with Horn, lost his temper and lashed out at his adversary's face, which was not permitted. As it happened, Charles' blow landed on an already swollen boil on Horn's cheek. The Captain fell fainting from his saddle, was carried to bed and developed a fever. In an anguish of guilt, Charles visited him every day.

Sometimes the mock battles took place at sea. The royal yacht and other ships in Stockholm harbor were rigged with fire pumps and hoses to serve as cannon and maneuvered as if in battle. On one of these occasions, Horn stripped off most of his clothes and jumped from his yacht into a rowboat, rowing vigorously straight at the King. He was repelled by powerful jets of water from Charles' ship which soon filled Horn's small dinghy so that it began to sink. Horn leaped into the water and calmly swam around to the other side of the royal ship. Charles, leaning over the rail, shouted down to ask his friend whether swimming was difficult. "No," cried Horn, "not as long as you are not afraid."

Stung by the challenge, Charles immediately leaped into the water. Unfortunately, he did not know how to swim. He was thrashing violently but sinking when Horn grabbed him by his clothes and towed him ashore.

To his elders, the King's behavior seemed recklessly dangerous, but Charles in fact was teaching himself the lessons of war. He set out deliberately to harden himself and to increase his resistance to fatigue. Having slept half the night in bed, he would rise and spend the rest of the night half naked on the bare floor. One week in winter, he slept three nights without undressing in a freezing stable, covered by hay. He was ashamed of any sign of weakness. He considered his delicate, fair skin to be effeminate and tried to darken it in the sun. He wore the traditional wig only until he began his first campaign against Denmark, then he threw it away and never wore another.

His older sister, Hedwig Sophia, was his closest friend as a child, but Charles saw no other girls and came to dislike the society of women. He was cold, arrogant and violent, and there was nothing warm or inviting about his personality to attract the opposite sex—except his rank. As sovereign of the leading state in Northern Europe, Charles was of great interest to. monarchs and foreign ministers eager to make alliances through royal marriages. Even in his early years, six different princesses were proposed to him. Nothing came of it, and for a long time even the mention of marriage distressed him. The only serious candidate was Princess Sophia of Denmark, five years older than Charles, who could not be considered after the Great Northern War began and Denmark became one of his enemies.

In 1698, a different impending marriage brought him a new companion when his cousin Frederick IV, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, arrived in Stockholm to marry Hedwig Sophia. The Duke was six years older than Charles, and even more frenetically madcap. From April to August, he egged Charles into a spate of wild behavior which came in Sweden to be known as "the Gottorp Fury." Together with a suite of high-spirited young men who accompanied the Duke, the two cousins competed in wild and dangerous pranks. They raced their horses until the exhausted animals collapsed foaming to the ground. They chased a wild hare around the gallery of the Parliament building. They shattered palace windows with pistol balls and threw tables and chairs down into the palace courtyard. At dinner, it was said, they threw cherry pits in the faces of the King's ministers and knocked dishes from the servants! hands. In broad daylight, they galloped through the streets, waving naked swords and jerking hats and wigs from the heads of anyone within reach. In the middle of the night, when they came back from their little rides, galloping and shouting through the silent streets, townspeople who stumbled to their windows saw their King, his shirttails flying, riding after the Duke. Once, the King even led his Holstein comrades on horseback into a room where his grandmother, the Dowager Queen, was playing cards. The old lady collapsed in fright.

Many of the stories were exaggerated, deliberately so, to discredit the unwelcome Duke and the coming marriage. There is no firm evidence of the tales of bloody orgies at the palace in which the two young men practiced beheading sheep to determine who had the greater force of muscle and skill with a sword. But the rumors continued: The floors of the palace were said to be slippery with blood; the blood was running in rivers down the staircases; the severed heads of animals were being tossed at random out the palace windows into the street.

True or not in every detail, the reckless behavior of these two headstrong young men, to whom no one apparently had the authority to say no, greatly angered the people of Stockholm. They tended to blame the Duke, saying that he wanted to injure the King, perhaps even see him killed, so that through Charles' sister he might himself gain the throne. As the episodes continued, the murmurs grew louder. One Sunday, three Stockholm clergymen all preached sermons on the same theme: "Woe to thee, O Land, when thy King is a child." Charles, sincerely pious like his father, was strongly affected by these admonitions. In August 1698, when the Duke married his sister and returned to Holstein, Charles became more quiet and reflective and went back to affairs of state. He rose early every morning, spent more time at devotions and began to interest himself in architecture and theater.

There was one relapse. When Duke Frederick returned in the summer of 1699, a great drinking bout took place in which a captive bear was forced to drink so much Spanish wine that he lumbered to a window, lurched out into the courtyard below and was killed by the fall. Charles was found, his clothes in disarray, his speech slovenly, at this scene. When he realized what he had done, he was deeply ashamed and vowed to his grandmother that he would never drink alcohol again. For the rest of his life, with all the Protestant fervor of the North, he stuck to this promise. Except on two famous occasions when he was wounded or overcome with thirst in battle, he never touched another drop of strong liquor. Across Europe, he became famous as the king who drank nothing stronger than watery beer.

Eighteen-year-old Charles was deep in the forest hunting bear when he heai;d the news that Augustus' troops had invaded Swedish Livonia without a declaration of war. He took it calmly, smiled, turned to the French ambassador and said quietly, "We will make King Augustus go back the way he came." The bear hunt continued. But when he returned to Stockholm, Charles addressed the council. "I have resolved never to begin an unjust war," he said, "but also never to end a just war without overcoming my enemy." It was a promise which he was to pursue, beyond all normal policy, almost beyond all reason, for the rest of his life. When, a few weeks later, he heard the less surprising news that Frederick of Denmark had entered the war by marching into the territory of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, Charles said, "It is curious that both my cousins, Frederick and Augustus, wish to make war on me. So be it. But King Augustus has broken his word. Our cause, then, is just and God will help us. I intend to finish first one of my enemies and then will talk with the other." At this point, Charles did not know that a third enemy, Peter of Russia, was also preparing to enter the field against him.

None of his enemies took Sweden's power lightly; its military reputation was far too high. But the nation's point of weakness, as these enemies saw it, lay at the top. All responsibility and authority, military and civil, now rested on the shoulders of an eighteen-year-old King. Charles might have counselors and ministers, tutors, generals and admirals, but he was an absolute monarch, and his behavior, as had been well reported, swung between obstinate rudeness and obsessive recklessness. It seemed an unlikely combination for leading a nation to resist the combined attack of three powerful foes.

Unfortunately for them, Charles' enemies did not and could not know the King's true character. The boy who dreamed of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great was not afraid of the challenge; he welcomed it. He was prepared not only for war, but for fierce, desperate, far-ranging war; not for one quick battle and a petty little peace treaty, but for sweeping, radical solutions. His father's advice before his death had been to keep Sweden at peace "unless you are dragged into war by the hair." This "unjust war" thrust on Sweden by surprise brought all of Charles' stem Northern morality into play. He was not prepared, like other monarchs, to back and fill, to compromise, to outlast his enemies by intrigue, to fight one day and dance the next. He had been unjustly attacked by Augustus, and, no matter how long it took, he would not rest until Augustus was driven from his throne. In attacking Charles, the allies had unleashed a thunderbolt. Proud, rash, willful, glorying in challenge, jealous of the reputation of Sweden, anxious to test his own courage in the greatest game of all, Charles turned to war not only with determination but with glee.

When Charles XII said, "I intend to finish first one of my enemies and then will talk with the other," he was describing his military strategy in a nutshell. Thereafter, no matter what was happening elsewhere in Sweden's empire, the King concentrated his attention and his forces on one enemy alone. When this enemy was totally defeated and destroyed, then he would turn to face his other foes. The first Swedish blow was to fall on the nearest of Charles' enemies; Denmark. He ignored the Saxon troops marching into Livonia across the Baltic. This province would be left to be defended by the local garrison in Riga, and the hope was that it could hold out until the Swedish field army could arrive. If not, it must fall and be avenged on a future day. But nothing must hinder the concentration of forces against the foe selected by Charles.

In his campaign against Denmark, Charles was fortunate in having the support of the two Protestant sea powers of William III, England and Holland. William, single-mindedly bent on maintaining the great coalition he had spent his life building against Louis XIV, wanted no distractions in the form of minor wars in Northern Europe. If or when Louis XIV reached out for the Spanish throne—and with it all the power and wealth of Spain and its overseas empire—William wanted Europe to be ready to resist; any new war anywhere in Europe, therefore, must be prevented or snuffed out quickly lest it spread into Germany and disrupt his grand coalition. For this reason, England and Holland needed peace in the North and had guaranteed the status quo. When Frederick of Denmark moved troops into the Holstein-Gottorp territories at the foot of the Danish peninsula, he was in effect breaking the status quo; as Denmark was the aggressor, the two sea powers would cooperate with Sweden to defeat the Danes as quickly as possible and restore the status quo. A combined Dutch and English fleet was dispatched to the Baltic to assist the Swedes.

The Anglo-Dutch squadron was an essential factor in Charles' plans. The Swedish navy consisted of thirty-eight ships-of-the-line and twelve frigates—a formidable force in the Baltic, where Russia had neither fleet nor seacoast and Brandenburg and Poland had only negligible forces. But the Swedish fleet was second, in both size and experience, to the Danish-Norwegian navy, which was accustomed to operating not only in the Baltic but also in the North Sea and the Atlantic, and which jeeringly looked on Swedish sailors as mere "farmhands dipped in salt water." That there was some truth in this was evident from Charles' own reaction to the sea. Despite his mock sea battles in Stockholm harbor, the open waves made him seasick, and he looked upon his ships primarily as a means of transporting his soldiers from one side of the Baltic to the other. Certainly, he was not prepared to move his troops by water while a more powerful Danish fleet waited to intercept them. And he was not prepared to deal with that Danish fleet until his own navy had been reinforced by the Anglo-Dutch squadron on its way.

Through the weeks of March and April, Sweden pulsed with preparations for the coming campaign. The fleet at the main Swedish naval base, Karlskrona, was fitted out for sea. Ships were careened, their bottoms scraped, patched and retarred, their masts installed and rigging set. Cannon were trundled aboard and placed in carriages. Five thousand new seamen were recruited, raising the strength of the fleet to 16,000 men. All commercial vessels in Stockholm harbor, of both Swedish and foreign registry, were seized for use as troop transports.' The training of the army was intense. Infantry and cavalry regiments were enlisted, based on the Swedish system which called for each district or town to be responsible for providing the men and equipment of a specific-sized unit. The ranks of the army grew to 77,000 men, and the men were equipped with the new muskets and bayonets so successfully used by the French, English and Dutch armies on the continent.

By mid-April, Charles was ready to depart Stockholm. On April 13, 1700, he came at night to say goodbye to his grandmother and his two sisters. It was a sad occasion, but it would have been much sadder had any of those present known what the future held. The eighteen-year-old King was leaving two of these dear relatives forever. Although Charles would live another eighteen years, he would never see his grandmother, his older sister or Stockholm, his capital, again.

The King to whom these women bade farewell had grown from an adolescent to a young man. He was five feet nine inches—tall by the standards of the day—with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. He carried himself with almost rigid straightness, yet he was enormously supple: On horseback, he could bend down from the saddle and pick up a glove at a full gallop. His open face had a jutting nose, full lips and pink skin, although campaign life was soon to darken and harden it. His eyes were deep blue, lively and intelligent. He wore his hair short and brushed up from the sides to form a crown. Its color varied as the sun bleached it from auburn to dark blond in the summer. Over the years it turned to gray streaked with white and began to recede, exposing a full, domed forehead.

Leaving his sisters and grandmother, the King hurried south, visiting military depots along the way On June 16, at Karlskrona, he embarked on board the King Charles, flagship of the Swedish Admiral Wachtmeister. The Anglo-Dutch fleet of twenty-five ships-of-the-line had now arrived off the western Swedish port of Goteborg, and as Charles set sail from Karlskrona, the allied fleet moved down the Kattegat. The two fleets were now approaching each other, but in the middle lay the formidable barrier of the sound with its three-mile-wide channel, its shoals and its defensive cannon. In addition, the Danish fleet of forty men-of-war lay at the Baltic entrance to the main channel, determined to bar the uniting of their opponents.

It was Charles who solved the problem. Standing on the deck of the flagship, he instructed Admiral Wachtmeister to take the fleet through the shallow and more treacherous subsidiary channel close to the Swedish shore. Wachtmeister was reluctant, fearing for the safety of his ships, but Charles took the responsibility, and, one by one, the great ships bearing the blue-and-yellow flag passed slowly up the channel. Three of the largest ships drew too much water and had to be left behind. Nevertheless, at a single stroke, the Anglo-Dutch and Swedish fleets had joined to make a combined force of sixty men-of-war to face the forty Danish ships. It was a superiority which the Danish admiral did not wish ;:o challenge, and it permitted the next phase of the Swedish plan to unfold. Charles and his generals planned to move a Swedish army across the sound onto the Danish island of Zealand, on which the capital, Copenhagen, was situated. As the main Danish iirmy was far away with King Frederick, fighting the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, the Swedes hoped to march swiftly on Copenhagen, threaten and perhaps seize the capital and thus bring King Frederick to terms. The plan, devised by Charles' leading commander, Field Marshal Carl Gustav Rehnskjold, had the King's enthusiastic support. The Dutch and English admirals were less enthusiastic, but eventually they, too agreed.

On July 23, the assault force of 4,000 men was embarked in transports and sailed in rain and high wind. Although the force was smaller than the 5,000 Danes defending Zealand, the Swedes had the advantage of mobility and could choose their landing spot. Feinting first to mislead the defenders, the Swedish landing parties came ashore in small boats and found themselves opposed by only 800 men. Covered by heavy cannon fire from the men-of-war, the Swedish soldiers quickly established a beachhead. Charles himself came ashore by boat, wading the last few yards. To his chagrin, he found that by the time he arrived the enemy had already withdrawn.

The Swedish build-up was rapid. Within the following ten days, another 10,000 Swedish troops including cavalry and artillery were ferried across the sound. The outnumbered Danish forces withdrew into the city of Copenhagen, and Charles' army followed, setting siege lines around the city and beginning a bombardment. It was this dismaying situation which the King of Denmark found when he hurried back from the south: his fleet outnumbered and useless, his capital under siege, his main army engaged far to the south. Frederick knew that he was beaten and quickly came to terms. On August 18, 1700, he signed the Peace of Travendal, by which he gave back the Holstein-Gottorp territories he had taken and dropped out of the war against Sweden. Charles was satisfied—he had no designs on Danish territory, and could now turn his attention to Augustus. The English and Dutch were satisfied—the war on the boundaries of Germany and the Hapsburg empire had been snuffed out. The status quo had been restored.

Charles' first campaign of the war, thus, had been swift, successful and almost bloodless. Within two weeks, two bold decisions—to force the lesser channel with the Swedish fleet, and to land troops on the island of Zealand behind King Frederick's back—had restored the rights of his ally, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and driven one enemy from the war. Not all the success in this brief, brilliant campaign can be credited to Swedish arms alone; it was the presence of the Anglo-Dutch fleet that made the descent on Zealand possible.

And so Denmark was out of the war. Charles realized that, given a promising chance, Frederick might reopen hostilities, but not for a while. At least the Swedish thrust into Zealand had gained valuable breathing time. Now, Charles could make ready to hurl himself on a second enemy. At the end of the Danish campaign, he thought that his next adversary would be Augustus of Poland. But events dictated differently. In fact, the second Swedish blow was to fall on Peter of Russia.

NARVA

The Tsar's declared objective in attacking Sweden was to seize the Baltic provinces of Ingria and Karelia. Ingria was a comparatively narrow strip of land extending seventy-five miles along the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, from the mouth of the Neva to the town of Narva; Karelia was a much larger expanse of forest-and-lake country between the gulf and Lake Ladoga, extending as far west as Vyborg. Together, the two provinces, which had been taken from Russia during the Time of Troubles, would give Peter an adequate opening to the Baltic.

Narva, a coastal town and fortress in Estonia on the border of Ingria, had not been included in Peter's original war aims; it was part of the territory which Patkul and Augustus had designated to go to Poland. Nevertheless, Peter felt that the surest way of securing Ingria would be to capture this town. And as he studied his maps of the region, it seemed that a thrust at Narva would not be difficult; the Russian frontier lay only twenty miles to the southeast of the town, a short march for an invading army.

Peter's decision was received unhappily by Patkul and Baron Langen, Augustus' representative in Moscow. They were not eager to see Swedes replaced in Estonia by Russians, even if, for (he moment, the Russians were their allies. As Baron Langen reported to Patkul, "I have done everything possible, with the help of the Danish ambassador, to distract him [the Tsar] from this intention. We found him so stubborn that we feared to touch any more on such a delicate subject and must be satisfied with the Tsar's break with Sweden in the hope that in time Narva will be in our hands." Patkul worried that, having taken Narva, Peter would move down the Baltic coast, swallowing the whole of Livonia without Augustus being able to prevent him. But there was nothing to be done; the Tsar was determined.

By mid-September 1700, Prince Trubetskoy, Governor of Novgorod, had received orders to march on Narva and invest the city with an advance guard of 8,000 men. Command of the main army was given to Fedor Golovin, who had served as ambassador, foreign minister and admiral and now was to be a field marshal.

Under Golovin, the army was divided into three divisions, to be commanded respectively by Avtemon Golovin, Adam Weide and Nikita Repnin. In all, the army totaled over 63,000 men, but the troops were widely scattered. As Trubetskoy's men were moving slowly in the direction of Narva, Repnin's division was still assembling on the Volga, a thousand miles away. By October 4, 35,000 Russians were building trenches before the town and Peter himself had arrived to oversee the siege. He was awaiting only the arrival of cannonballs and powder to begin the bombardment.

The town of Narva, built by the Danes in the thirteenth century, had been a flourishing seaport in the time of the Hanseatic League, and even in Peter's day it handled a substantial amount of Russian trade from Pskov and Novgorod. It was like many another Baltic German town, with gabled brick houses and the thin spires of Lutheran churches rising above tree-lined streets. Situated on the west bank of the River Narova on a neck of land made by a wide bend in the river, the town was in effect surrounded on three sides by water, and because it was so close to the Russian frontier, it was strongly defended. A high wall of stone laced with bastions encircled the city. Across a stone bridge was the squat, powerful castle of Ivangorod, built by the Russians in 1492 when the river was the frontier. Then, Ivangorod was intended to overawe the town of Narva, but now town and castle formed a single, integrated defense system. The garrison consisted of 1,300 infantry, 200 cavalry and 400 armed civilians.

Under the direction of Lieutenant General Ludwig von Hallart, a Saxon engineer lent to Peter by Augustus, the Russians established siege lines opposite the land walls on the western side of Narva. There, astride the only road by which a relief force could approach the town, the Russians entrenched themselves between double walls which cut off the town from the west and at the same time protected their own siege lines against attack from the rear. In time, these walls developed into earthworks four miles long, nine feet high, with a trench six feet deep in front.

The siege went more slowly than Peter had hoped. Although Narva was only twenty miles from the Russian frontier, it was well over a hundred miles from the nearest Russian cities, Novgorod and Pskov. The meager roads, sodden from the autumn rains, caused the transport wagons to mire and become bogged down. There were too few artillery harnesses, the carts went to pieces and the horses collapsed. Golovin did his best to move the soldiers quickly, seizing local horses and carts, but it was not until the end of October that most of his troops were in position.

The Russian artillery bombardment began on November 4. Meanwhile, Sheremetev was sent westward with 5,000 horsemen to report any sign of a Swedish rescue force. For two weeks, the Russian cannon battered the ramparts and towers of Narva with little success; the gun carriages were so badly made or so damaged in transport that many fell to pieces after three or four shots. Two Russian infantry assaults on Ivangorod were easily repulsed. By November 17, there was not sufficient ammunition to continue the bombardment beyond a few days, and the guns were silenced until new supplies could arrive. At the same time, two distressing reports arrived in Peter's camp: King Augustus had given up the siege of Riga and retired into winter quarters. And King Charles XII had landed with a Swedish army at Pernau on the Baltic coast, 150 miles southwest of Narva.

Once the Peace of Travendal was signed, the Swedish army was rapidly withdrawn from Zealand. Charles' officers were not anxious to leave their troops on the Danish island once the Dutch and English squadrons had departed for home, and these great ships were preparing to sail. True, the Danes had made peace, but who could tell what temptations might occur to them if the small Swedish expeditionary force was left alone and exposed on the wrong side of the sound. In addition, the King was eager to transfer the soldiers quickly in order to use them in a second campaign before winter. By August 24, the last Swedish soldier had been embarked and transported back to southern Sweden. During the last days of August and the first weeks of September, Charles refused to listen to any suggestions of peace, thinking only of deciding on the place where his counterblow against Augustus should fall. It was generally assumed that the army would sail for Livonia to relieve the city of Riga and drive the Saxon armies out of the province. But word began to reach him of Russian troops massing on the frontier of Ingria in such numbers that there could be little doubt of Tsar Peter's warlike intentions. And in fact, before the end of September, Charles received the Tsar's declaration of war and the news that a Russian army had crossed the frontier and appeared before the Swedish fortress of Narva.

The Swedish decision was for Livonia. Two enemies, Augustus and Peter, were attacking in that region; two major Swedish fortresses, Riga and Narva, were in danger. The king thereafter closed his mind to everything else and devoted his energy to getting his expedition under way before storms and ice on the Baltic made movement by sea impossible. In a letter from Swedish headquarters, one of Charles' officers declared, "The King is resolved to go to Livonia. He refuses to see the French and

Brandenburg ambassadors lest they be carrying peace proposals. He wishes at any price to fight with King Augustus and is annoyed at anything which seems likely to hinder his doing this."

On October 1, spurning all warnings of danger from autumn storms on the Baltic, Charles sailed from Karlskrona for Livonia. Although the troops were crowded aboard the ships, there still were only enough transports to carry 5,000 men on this first voyage. On the third day, with the fleet in mid-Baltic, a storm swept down as predicted and scattered the ships far and wide. Some anchored and rode out the storm off the coast of Courland, others foundered and were lost. Many of the cavalry horses were crippled as the ships heaved and rolled in the waves, and Charles was desperately seasick.

On October 6, what was left of the battered Swedish fleet entered the port of Pernau at the top of the Bay of Riga. The mayor and the city council greeted the King on the quay, and an honor guard of soldiers fired its muskets in the air as he walked through the cobbled streets to his temporary lodgings. As soon as the storm damage could be repaired, the fleet was dispatched to Sweden to bring another 4,000 men, more horses and the remainder of the artillery. In Pernau, Charles heard that Augustus of Poland had lifted the siege of Riga, halted military operations and withdrawn into winter quarters. Back in mid-July, the Polish King had personally joined the siege with 17,000 Saxon soldiers, but the news of the Peace of Travendal with its sudden toppling of his once-bellicose Danish ally had surprised and disheartened him. Now, learning of the impending Swedish descent on Livonia, Augustus had prudently withdrawn to await developments. Charles received this intelligence with bitter disappointment. He had hoped to fight Augustus; he was determined to fight somebody. And, in this context, there remained a possibility. Only 150 miles away, Peter of Russia was in the field with a Russian army, besieging the fortress of Narva. Charles made his decision quickly: If the Saxons would not fight, he would fight the Russians. He would march against the Tsar to the relief of Narva.

Charles began by concentrating all his available troops. With the men he had brought and the additional soldiers sailing from Sweden, plus some of the Riga garrison now freed by Augustus' retirement, he estimated that he could amass 7,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry by November. For five weeks, he intensively drilled the army at Wesenberg, and during this period Swedish cavalry patrols skirmished regularly with Sheremetev's horsemen along the road to Narva.

Not everyone in the Swedish camp was enthusiastic about the idea of a winter campaign against the Russians. To many of Charles' officers, the enterprise seemed extremely hazardous. The Russian army, they argued, outnumbered them four to one—some rumors said eight to one; the Russians would be defending a fortified line which the Swedes, despite their inferior numbers, would have to attack; it was a seven-day march to Narva through a burned, despoiled countryside, on dangerous, boggy roads winding through three formidable passes which the Russians would certainly defend; illness had begun to spread among the Swedish soldiers and the ranks were thinning; winter was coming and no winter quarters had been prepared.

To these arguments Charles retorted simply that they had come to fight and an enemy awaited them. If the Swedish army withdrew and Narva was taken, the Russians would flood through Ingria, Estonia and Livonia and then all the eastern Baltic provinces would be lost. The King's optimism and energy won over some of the officers and helped improve the morale of the troops. All understood that responsibility for the campaign, its success or failure, would belong entirely to the eighteen-year-old King. "If the King succeeds," declared Rehnskjold before the march began, "there never was anyone who had to triumph over such obstacles."

At dawn on November 13, without waiting for the arrival of 1,000 cavalrymen expected from Reval, the expedition set out. The columns following the blue-and-yellow flag included every man fit to march, 10,537 in all. The conditions were, as predicted, appalling. The roads were mired by autumn rains and the men had to march and sleep in thick, syrupy mud. The ravaged country was studded with burned-out farmhouses, set alight by Russian horsemen. There was no fodder for the horses and no food for the men except what they carried in their knapsacks. Throughout the march, a steady, cold November rain drenched the men to the skin. At night, when the temperature dropped, the rain turned to flurries of snow and sleet and the ground began to freeze. The King slept with his men under the open sky, receiving the rain and snow on his face.

Despite the bad weather, the Swedish army was pleasantly surprised to find its march almost unopposed. Two of the three passes along the road were entered and occupied without any opposition at all. On the fourth day, the leading troopers of the advance Swedish cavalry screen rode into the Pyhajoggi Pass, eighteen miles west of Narva, where the road ran alongside a stream through a deep valley surrounded by steep hills. Five thousand Russian horsemen commanded by Sheremetev waited on the far side of the stream, but the bridge across had not been cut.

Charles, riding with the advance guard, was informed of

Sheremetev's presence. He ordered that eight pieces of horse artillery be brought forward. Then, at the head of a detachment of dragoons and a part of a battalion of Guards—no more than 400 men in all—the King charged down the valley. The Swedish horse artillery, screened from Russian eyes by the line of galloping dragoons and brought up unexpectedly to the very front line, was suddenly unmasked and opened fire at close range on the clusters of Russian horsemen on the opposite bank. The Russians, startled and frightened by the sudden flash and roar of cannon and having no guns of their own with which to reply, wheeled their horses and galloped away, leaving the pass undefended. Subsequently, it was learned that the Russian retreat was a planned withdrawal and not a flight, as Sheremetev had orders from Peter not to involve his troops in a fight with the main Swedish army. But by the weary Swedes, the charge of a small part of the army followed by what seemed a Russian rout was seen as a victory and provided much-needed encouragement. A pass which properly defended, could have cost the Swedish army heavily to force had been taken for nothing. The road to Narva lay open.

That night, still soaked with rain and covered with mud, the Swedes pitched camp on the eastern side of the Pyhajoggi Pass. The depth of the mire forced many soldiers to spend the night standing up. The following afternoon, the 19th, hungry and half frozen, the army reached the gutted manor house and village of Lagena, about seven miles from Narva. Not knowing whether the fortress was holding out, Charles ordered the firing of a prearranged signal of four cannon shots. Soon, four dull and distant sounds replied from the beleaguered fortress. Narva was still in Swedish hands.

Sheremetev had been sent westward with his cavalry only to observe and not to oppose any Swedish movements. Once the Swedish army began its eastward march, he followed instructions and retreated, devastating the country, as far as the Pyhajoggi Pass. Here, the Russian commander, believing that, if fortified, the pass could easily be defended and the Swedish advance on Narva blocked, had wanted to stop and fight. But Peter, who did not fully appreciate the geography of the area, had rejected Sheremetev's proposal. In Peter's view, the pass was too far from the main camp and he did not want to divide the army. Instead, the decision had been made to fortify the land side of the Russian camp at Narva against an attack by Charles' approaching force, while at the same time vigorously prosecuting the siege. Within the next decade, Marlborough was to take town after town in exactly this manner, first encircling the town with his army, and then fortifying the outer rim of his circular camp to hold off rescuing armies while he strangled the town or fortress within his constricting ring.

On November 17, Sheremetev led his horsemen back into camp, announcing that the Swedes had occupied the Pyhajoggi Pass and were following close behind. Peter called his officers into council. Additional rounds of ammunition were served out and vigilance was doubled, but that night and the next passed peacefully. In fact, the Russians did not expect any sudden attack by the Swedes once Charles' army arrived. Rather, they anticipated a gradual build-up of forces, a period of reconnaissance, skirmishing and maneuver, with a battle sometime in the future.

At three a.m. on the night of November 17-18, the Tsar summoned the Due du Croy, a nobleman from the Spanish Netherlands who was with the army as an observer on behalf of -Augustus of Poland, and asked him to take command. Peter and Fedor Golovin, the nominal Russian commander-in-chief, were leaving immediately for Novgorod to speed up the reinforcements and to discuss with King Augustus the future conduct of the war. Peter wanted Augustus' explanation of his withdrawal from Riga, a move which had aroused Peter's disappointment and suspicion, and it was for this reason that he took Golovin with him; Golovin, in addition to being commander of the army, was also minister of foreign affairs.

Some say that Peter's departure from the army the night before the Battle of Narva was an act of cowardice. The picture of a trembling Tsar fleeing in terror before the approach of Charles and leaving the unhappy Du Croy to bear the responsibility for what was to happen has been added to the story of Peter's earlier nocturnal flight to Troitsky to create an image of a man afraid of danger who panicked in moments of stress. The accusation is unfair, both generally and in this particular. Peter risked his life too many times, both on battlefields and on the decks of warships, for the charge of physical cowardice to have merit. The explanation is quite simple: Peter, the one man in Russia on whom all responsibility rested, was going where he felt he could do the most good. Accustomed to the measured pace of Russian military operations, the Tsar assumed that the Swedes would act with similar caution. No one dreamed that an army just arrived after a long, exhausting march would launch an immediate attack on an enemy four times its strength and protected by a ditch six feet wide and an earth wall nine feet high, studded with 140 cannon. Nor was anyone in the Russian camp fully aware of the impetuous character of Charles XII.

The unlucky figure in this decision was Du Croy. Charles Eugene, Due du Croy, Baron, Margrave and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, had served for fifteen years in the Imperial army in wars against the Turks, but had been forced to resign after he retreated before the approach of the Grand Vizier and an enormous Ottoman army. Seeking employment, he had presented himself to Peter in Amsterdam in 1698, but the Tsar did not engage him and he subsequently found work with Augustus. It was Augustus who had sent Du Croy to Peter to persuade the Tsar to send 20,000 men to help in the siege of Riga rather than embarking on his own campaign in Ingria. The Tsar followed his own plan, but took Du Croy along as an observer and advisor.

Now, suddenly, Du Croy was asked to take command. Perhaps, had Peter made his decision two weeks earlier, it might have been correct, but now it was too late. Du Croy argued that, lacking the Russian language and unfamiliar with the Russian officers, he would have difficulty issuing orders and ensuring that his commands were obeyed. And he was not happy with the disposition of the Russian troops—the line of circumvallation around the city was too long and the Russian forces were scattered too thinly along its length; a strong Swedish attack on one section of the line might easily succeed before troops from other sections could be brought to help.

Nevertheless, under strong persuasion from the Tsar, Du Croy consented. Peter gave him absolute power over the whole army. His written instructions were to postpone a battle until more ammunition could arrive, but to maintain the siege and prevent Charles' army from breaking into the town. Baron Langen, in writing to Augustus, noted wryly the change of command: "I hope when the Due du Croy shall have the absolute command, that our affairs will take quite another turn, for he has no more wine or brandy; and being therefore deprived of his element, he will doubtless double his assaults to get nearer the cellar of the commandment." No one in the Russian camp had an inkling of what was about to happen.

At dawn on the morning of the 20th, the Swedish columns had been mustered at Lagena and were moving through the cold rain in the direction of Narva. By ten a.m., the vanguard of the army became visible to the watching Russians. The Due du Croy, impressive in a red uniform and riding a gray horse, was in the middle of his morning inspection when early musket fire made him realize that the Swedes were approaching. He rode up in time to see the enemy emerging in rain-drenched columns from a wood on top of the Hermannsberg ridge. Du Croy felt no great anxiety: an assault on a fortified line of earthworks such as his was a slow and intricate procedure and he knew from experience that it would develop gradually. Nevertheless, studying the Swedish ranks through his telescope, he was surprised by their small size and he worried that this might be only the vanguard of a larger force. Even so, he would have sent part of his own army, perhaps 15,000 men, out to attack the Swedes, attempting to disrupt their formations and drive them back, had he not found his Russian officers strongly disinclined to leave the protection of their lines. Accordingly, he ordered his regiments to plant their standards along the earthworks, stand to arms and wait.

Charles and Rehnskjold meanwhile were standing on top of the Hermannsberg, sweeping their own telescopes up and down the Russian lines. The battlefield lay spread below them, bounded on both sides by the banks of the Narva River flowing in a wide curve around the town, with the Ivangorod fortress across the stream. Along the foreground lay the Russian siege line. A bridge that crossed the river behind the northern end of the Russian line was the only apparent Russian route of supply—or, should it come to that, of retreat. The defensive fortifications appeared impressive: a ditch, backed by an earth rampart studded with sharpened stakes, the chevaux de frise. Along the earthworks, separate bastions had been constructed, each lined with cannon. The Russian army inside the camp was obviously much larger than the Swedish force. Nevertheless, it was also clear from the activity that could be observed inside the Russian camp that no Russian attack was coming.

The situation Charles and Rehnskjold found themselves in was awkward; many commanders might have considered it desperate. Small and exhausted armies did not normally attempt to storm fortified lines manned by a force four times as large, but the very nakedness of the Swedish army dictated an attack. To remain inert in the face of an enemy this size was impossible, to retreat equally impossible; the only solution seemed to be assault. Besides, Charles and Rehnskjold had noticed the same weakness which Du Croy had pointed out to Peter: The Russian army was spread along the four-mile length of the line. A concentrated assault on one section of the line might pierce it before sufficient reinforcements could be brought up from other sectors, and Charles trusted his disciplined Swedish regiments, once inside the Russian camp, to exploit the chaos he hoped would ensue. He therefore ordered Rehnskjold to attack, and the General quickly worked out a plan.

The Swedish infantry, heavily concentrated, was to deliver the