Peter the Great

Peter wanted his subjects to learn seamanship and sailing, so he insisted that they cross the Neva by boat—without oars. For those who could not afford a private boat, twenty government-authorized ferryboats were permitted, but the boatmen, most of them ignorant peasants, were often confounded by the rapid current and by strong gusts of wind. Only after the Polish ambassador, a major general and one of the Tsar’s own doctors had drowned in successive sailing accidents did Peter relent and allow the ferrymen the use of oars.

Peter used Menshikov’s palace much as he had used the large house built earlier in Moscow for Francis Lefort, preferring himself to live more simply in houses with no chamber sufficiently large for mass entertaining. Sometimes, when Menshikov was receiving for the Tsar, Peter would look across the river from his own smaller house, see the lighted windows of Menshikov’s great palace and say to himself with a chuckle, “Danil’ich is making merry.”

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

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

new triumphal arch had been erected for the occasion, adorned with a Russian eagle seizing an elephant (an allusion to the captured Swedish frigate) and the inscription, “The Russian Eagle catches no flies.”

Frederick William despised the people, the language, the culture and even the food of France. When criminals were hanged, the King first had them dressed in French clothes.

The lifetime of Peter the Great and the rise of Russia also saw the emergence of a new, highly disciplined military state in North Germany, the kingdom of Prussia. It sprang from the electorate of Brandenburg, whose ruling house, the House of Hohenzollern, had descended from the Teutonic Knights. Its capital, Berlin, was still only a town in Peter’s day, with a population in 1700 of 25,000. Its people were Protestant, frugal and efficient, with a capacity for organization, a willingness to sacrifice and a belief that duty was the highest call. Other Germans—Rhinelanders, Bavarians, Hanoverians and Saxons—thought of Brandenburgers as semi-feudal, less civilized and more aggressive than themselves.

Prizing this talented and useful servant, Peter gave Tolstoy the hereditary rank of count, but he never completely forgot the older man’s earlier opposition. Once, when this dark thought flitted across his mind, the Tsar took the older man’s head between his two powerful hands and said, “Oh, head, head! You would not be on your shoulders now if you were not so wise.”

One sultan, Ibrahim the Mad, encased his beard in a network of diamonds and passed his days tossing gold coins to the fish in the Bosphorus. He wanted to see and feel nothing but fur, and levied a special tax for the import of sables from Russia so that he might cover the walls of his apartments with these precious furs. Deciding that the bigger a woman was, the more enjoyable she would be, he had his agents search the empire for the fattest woman they could find. They brought him an enormous Armenian woman, who so fascinated the Sultan that he heaped riches and honors upon her and finally made her Governor General of Damascus.

Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Albania, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Aden, Kuwait, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia, Algeria, Cyprus, not to mention huge stretches of the Soviet Ukraine, Crimea, the Caucasus, Armenia and Georgia.