Peter the Great

Peter was right. The Swedes did return—but again and again they were beaten off. Through the centuries, none of the conquerors who subsequently entered Russia with great armies—Charles XII, Napoleon, Hitler—was able to capture Peter’s Baltic port, although Nazi armies besieged the city for 900 days in World War II. From the day that Peter the Great first set foot on the mouth of the Neva, the land and the city which arose there have always remained Russian.

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.

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.”*

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.

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.

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.

… 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.”

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 wrote, “This soon cleared the streets of those poor vagrants, many of whom chose to work rather than to be locked up in the hospitals.”

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.

Through most of the eighteenth century, Englishmen were executed for stealing five shillings, and women were hanged for stealing a handkerchief.