urging the Tsar to avoid contact with all heretics, Protestant or Catholic, to drive them out of Russia and to eschew personally all foreign clothes and customs. Above all, he demanded that Peter appoint no foreigners to official positions in the state or army where they would be in a position to give orders to the Orthodox faithful. Peter's response, once Joachim was buried, was to order himself a new set of German clothes and, a week later, go for the first time to dine as Gordon's guest in the German Suburb.
The choice of a new patriarch turned on the same issues that Joachim himself had provoked: liberalism versus conservatism, toleration of foreigners versus a fierce defense of traditional Orthodoxy. Some of the more educated clergy, supported by Peter, favored Marcellus, Metropolitan of Pskov, a scholarly churchman who had traveled abroad and spoke several languages, but the Tsaritsa Natalya, the ruling group of boyars, the monks and most of the lower clergy preferred the more conservative Adrian, Metropolitan of Kazan. The contest within the church was heated, with the partisans of Adrian charging that Marcellus had too much learning, would favor Catholics and had already trod on the fringes of heresy. After five months of debate, Adrian was chosen, because, said a disappointed Patrick Gordon, of the new patriarch's 'ignorance and simplicity.'
Peter was stung by this rebuff. Seven years later, he described the election of Adrian with bitter disgust to a foreign host. 'That Tsar told us,' said the foreigner, 'that when the Patriarch in Moscow was dead, he designed to fill that place with a learned man who had traveled, who spoke Latin, Italian and French. [But] the Russians petitioned him in a tumultuous manner not to set such a man over them, alleging three reasons: first, because he spoke barbaric language; second, because his beard was not big enough for a patriarch; and third, because his coachman sat upon the coach seat and not upon the horses as was usual.' I
In fact, despite the wish or decree of any patriarch, the West was already firmly installed only three miles from the Kremlin.
Outside Moscow, on the road between the city and Preobrazhenskoe, stood a remarkable, self-contained Western European town known as the German Suburb.* Visitors strolling along its broad, tree-lined avenues, past its two- and three-story brick houses with large European-style windows, or through its stately squares with splashing fountains, could scarcely believe that they were in the heart of Russia. Behind the stately mansions decorated with columns and cornices lay precisely arranged European gardens studded with pavilions and reflecting pools. Along the streets rolled carriages made in Paris or London. Only the onion domes of Moscow's churches rising across the fields in the distance reminded visitors that they were a thousand miles from home.
In Peter's day, this prosperous foreign island was relatively new. A previous settlement for foreigners founded by Ivan the Terrible inside the city had been dispersed during the Time of Troubles. After the advent of the first Romanov in 1613, foreigners settled wherever they could throughout the city. This development angered Muscovite conservatives who believed that their holy Orthodox city was being profaned, and in the uprising of 1648 bands of Streltsy made random attacks on foreign dwellings. In 1652, Tsar Alexis decreed that foreigners were forbidden to live or have churches within the walls of Holy Moscow, but he permitted a new foreign settlement, the German Suburb, to be laid out on the banks of the Yauza with plots of ground allotted on the basis of rank to all foreign officers, engineers, artists, doctors, apothecaries, merchants, schoolmasters and others in Russian service.
Originally, the colony had been made up predominantly of Protestant Germans, but by the middle of the seventeenth century there were numerous Dutchmen, Englishmen and Scots. The Scots, mostly royalists and Catholics in flight from Oliver Cromwell, were assured a refuge despite their religion because of Tsar Alexis' violent anger at the beheading of King Charles I. Among the Scottish Jacobite names prominent in the German Suburb were Gordon, Drummond, Hamilton, Dalziel, Crawford, Graham and Leslie. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, ending France's official toleration of Protestantism. The Regent and Vasily Golitsyn permitted a number of French Huguenot refugees, fleeing the new persecution in France, to come to Russia. By Peter's adolescence, accordingly, the German Suburb had become an international colony of 3,000 West Europeans, where royalists mingled with republicans and Protestants
*The German Suburb—in Russian 'Nemetskaya Sloboda'—derived its name from the Russian word for 'German,' which.is 'Nemets.' To most Russians, unable to distinguish between different foreign tongues, all foreigners were 'Germans'—'Nemtsy.'
and Catholics, their national, political and religious differences softened by distance and exile.
Enclosure in a separate suburb made it easy for them to maintain the habits and traditions of the West. The inhabitants wore foreign clothing, read foreign books, had their own Lutheran and Calvinist churches (Catholics were not permitted a church, but priests could say mass in private homes), spoke their own languages and educated their children. They kept up a constant correspondence with their native countries. One of the most respected foreigners, the Dutch resident Van Keller, sent and received news from The Hague every eight days, keeping the Suburb closely informed of all that was happening beyond Russia's frontiers. General Patrick Gordon waited eagerly for the scientific reports of London's Royal Society. English wives received volumes of poetry along with their fine china and scented soap. Then, too, the Suburb contained a seasoning of actors, musicians and adventurers who helped produce the repertory theater, the concerts, balls, picnics, as well as the love affairs and duels which kept the Suburb distracted and amused.
Obviously, this foreign island, a nucleus of a more advanced civilization, did not remain untouched by the Russian sea around it. The houses and gardens of the German Suburb bordered the royal lands at Sokolniki and Preobrazhenskoe, and eventually,, despite the Patriarch's ban, bolder Russians, thirsty for knowledge and intelligent conversation, began to mingle socially with the foreigners who lived only a few hundred yards away. Through them, foreign habits began to permeate Russian life. Soon, Russians who had laughed at foreigners for eating 'grass' were also eating salads. The habit of smoking tobacco and taking snuff, anathematized by the Patriarch, began to spread. Some Russians like Vasily Golitsyn even began to trim their hair and beards and converse with Jesuits.
Contact rubbed both ways, and many foreigners adopted Russian qualities. Lacking foreign women to marry, they took Russians as wives, learned the Russian language and allowed their children to be baptized in the Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, as a result of their enforced residency in the German Suburb, most maintained their own Western style of life, language and religion. A marriage in the opposite direction was still rare, as few Western women were willing to marry a Russian and accept the inferior status of Russian women. But this was changing. Mary Hamilton had married Artemon Matveev and presided over the household in which Tsar Alexis had met Natalya Naryshkina. As Russian gentlemen became more westernized, they had no trouble finding Western wives, a practice which flourished happily until the very end of imperial Russia in 1917. Peter's son Alexis married a Western wife, and every tsar thereafter who reached the age to marry chose or had selected for him a princess from Western Europe.
From childhood Peter had been curious about the German Suburb. As he passed along the road, he had seen its handsome brick houses and shaded gardens. He had come to know Timmerman and Brandt, and the foreign officers who had supervised the building of his play forts and the firing of his artillery, but until the death of the Patriarch Joachim in 1690 his contacts with the foreign suburb were restricted. After the old churchman's death, Peter's visits became so frequent that he seemed almost to live there.
In the German Suburb, the young Tsar found a heady combination of good wine, good talk and fellowship. When Russians spent an evening together, they simply drank until everyone was asleep or there was nothing more to drink. The foreigners also drank deeply, but amidst the haze of tobacco smoke and over the clank of beer tankards there was also conversation about the world, its monarchs and statesmen, scientists and warriors. Peter was excited by these discussions. When news reached the German Suburb of the victory of the English fleet over the French at La Hogue in 1694, he was enthusiastic. He asked for the original message, had it translated immediately and then, leaping up and shouting for joy, ordered an artillery salute to King William III of England. In these long evenings, he also listened to a wealth of advice about Russia: to institute more frequent drill for his army, to give his soldiers sterner discipline and regular pay, to capture the Orient trade by diverting it from the Ottoman-dominated Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and the Volga River.
Once the inhabitants of the Suburb understood that this tall young monarch liked them, they invited him everywhere and competed for his company. He was asked to participate in weddings, baptisms and other family celebrations. No merchant married a daughter or baptized a son without asking the Tsar to join the feast. Peter often served as a godfather, holding Lutheran and Catholic children at the font. He was best man at numerous
foreign marriages, and in the dancing afterward he became an enthusiastic participant in the rollicking country dance known as the Grossvater.
In a society which mingled Scottish soldiers, Dutch merchants and German engineers, Peter naturally found
