earth platform had been built from which it was possible to see and fire directly down into the streets of the town. By mid-July, the Austrian siege engineers sent by the Emperor Leopold arrived. They had been four months en route, having understood that the campaign would not begin until late summer. When Peter discovered that their ignorance was due to the unwillingness of Ukraintsev at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow to reveal the army's plan to Austria for fear it would leak to the Turks, he wrote in fury to Vinius, the culprit's brother-in-law: 'Has he any healthy good sense? Entrusted with state matters, yet he conceals what everybody knows. Just tell him that what he does not write on paper I shall write on his back!'
The Austrian engineers were impressed by the magnitude of the Russian earth mound, but suggested a more scientific approach, using mines, trenches and well-placed siege cannon. Nevertheless, it was the earth mound that resulted in the taking of the town. A number of Cossacks, disgusted by the endless work with shovels and baskets and finding carrying earth a poor substitute for fighting, determined to attack the town on their own. On July 27, without orders from their generals, 2,000 Cossacks stormed down from the earth mound onto the walls and into the streets of the town. Had they been supported by regular soldiers or Streltsy, they would have been successful. As it was, a desperate Turkish counterattack forced them back, but they managed to keep control of one of the comer towers of the wall, where they were finally reinforced by soldiers sent by Golovin. The following day, to exploit the breakthrough, Shein ordered a general assault, but before it could begin, the Turks signaled by lowering and waving their banners that they were ready to surrender. The Pasha, seeing his wall breached, had decided to accept the Russian offer of surrender under honorable conditions.
The terms allowed the Turks to withdraw with all their arms and baggage, along with their wives and children, but Peter insisted that' the Dutch traitor Jensen be delivered. The Pasha hesitated as Jensen screamed at him, 'Cut off my head, but don't give me up to Moscow!' But the Tsar insisted, and Jensen was brought, tied hand and foot, into the Russian camp.
The following day, with banners flying, the Turkish garrison marched out of Azov and through the Russian lines to board the Turkish ships which had been permitted to approach. Shein, the victorious commander, waited on horseback by the embarkation point. The Pasha thanked him for keeping his word, lowered his banner in respect, boarded his ship and sailed away. Ten Russian regiments marched into the empty city, which was found heavily damaged by the bombardment. The Cossacks could not be restrained and looted the empty houses while the Russian commanders sat down to a victory banquet which spared 'neither drink nor powder.'
Azov was now a Russian town, and Peter ordered the immediate razing of all the siege works. Under the supervision of the Austrian engineers, he began reconstruction of the town's own fortified walls and bastions. The streets were cleared of ruins and rubble, and the mosques were transformed into Christian churches. Peter heard mass in one new church before he left the city.
Now he needed a harbor for his new Don River fleet. Azov itself was too far upstream, and the mouths of the Don were treacherous: too shallow in some spots, too deep in others. For a week, Peter cruised along the nearby coasts of the Sea of Azov seeking an anchorage, sleeping on a bench of one of his new galleys. Finally, he decided to build a harbor on the north shore of the sea, thirty miles from the mouth of the Don. The site lay behind a point known to the Cossacks as Tagonrog, and here Peter ordered the construction of a fort and harbor which were to become the first real naval base in Russian history.
News of the Azov victory astonished Moscow. For the first time since the reign of Alexis, a Russian army had won a victory. 'When your letter came,' Vinius reported to Peter, 'there were many guests at the house of Lev Kyrilovich [Naryshkin, Peter's uncle]. He immediately sent me with it to the Patriarch. His Holiness, on reading it, burst into tears, ordered the great bell to be rung and, in the presence of the Tsaritsa and the Tsarevich, gave thanks to the Almighty. All talked with astonishment of the humility of their lord, who, after such a great victory, has not lifted up his own heart, but has ascribed all to the Creator of Heaven and has praised only his assistants, although everyone knows that it was by your plan alone, and by the aid you got from the sea, that such a noted town has bowed down to your feet.'
Peter sent word to Vinius that if 'the laborer is worthy of his hire' it would be appropriate to honor him and the commander-in-chief with a triumphal arch and a victory parade. Vinius immediately began to make preparations while, to allow him time, Peter delayed his homeward journey. He inspected the ironworks of Tula and worked with the famous blacksmith Nikita Demidov, whose later family fortune rested on the Tsar's immense grants to him of mining territory in the Urals.
On October 10, the Tsar joined his troops at Kolomenskoe for the triumphal march into the capital. To the bewilderment of the Muscovites, it was staged not in the traditional Orthodox religious setting which had greeted Alexis' triumphs with holy icons borne by church dignitaries but with new pagan pageantry inspired by Greek and Roman mythology. The triumphal arch erected by Vinius near the Moscow River was classically Roman, with massive statues of Hercules and Mars supporting it and the Turkish Pasha depicted lying in chains beneath it.
The procession itself stretched several miles. At its head rode eighteen horsemen, followed by a six-horse carriage bearing Peter's aged tutor, the Prince-Pope Nikita Zotov, dressed in armor and bearing sword and buckler. Then came fourteen more horesmen before the guilded carriage of Admiral Lefort, who was wearing a crimson coat trimmed with gold. Fedor Golovin and Lev Naryshkin were next, then thirty cavalrymen in silver cuirasses. Two companies of trumpeters preceded the royal standard of the Tsar, which was surrounded by guards with pikes. Behind the standard, in another gilded carriage, rolled the commander-in-chief, Alexis Shein, followed by sixteen captured Turkish standards, their shafts reversed and their banners trailing in the dirt. A grim warning followed: a simple peasant cart containing the trussed-up figure of the traitor Jensen. Around his neck he wore a sign proclaiming EVILDOER; by his side stood two executioners surrounded with axes, knives, whips and pincers, to give lurid display to the fate that awaited Jensen and other traitors.
And where, amidst all this gorgeous assemblage of flashing colors, of prancing horses and marching men, was the Tsar? To their amazement, Muscovites finally saw Peter not on a white horse or in a golden carriage at the head of his army, but walking with other galley captains behind the carriage of Admiral Francis Lefort. He was recognizable by his great height and by his German captain's uniform, with foreign breeches, a black coat and a wide black hat in which, as a single sign of special rank, he had placed a white feather. On foot, in this fashion, the victorious Tsar walked through his capital the nine miles from Kolomenskoe south of the city to Preobrazhenskoe on the northeast.
News of the young Tsar's triumph reverberated quickly through
Europe, causing astonishment and admiration. Vinius wrote directly to Witsen, Burgomaster of Amsterdam, asking that he pass the news of victory to Peter's hero, King William III of England. In Constantinople, the news brought consternation. The weary Turkish soldiers returning home from the long siege were arrested, three officials were executed and the Pasha who had surrendered the town was forced to flee for his life.
Azov was only a beginning. Those Russians who hoped that now after a great victory, the first in three decades, Peter would quietly settle down to rule as his father, Alexis, and brother Fedor had done soon learned of the new projects and ideas bubbling in their master's mind. The first was construction of a sea-going fleet. What Peter wanted were real ships, not just the galleys he had built for the single purpose of supporting a land campaign and sealing off a fortress from the sea. By taking Azov, Peter had won access only to the Sea of Azov; entry into the Black Sea itself was still blocked by the powerful Turkish fortress at Kerch astride the strait between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, and to force this strait, Peter would need a fleet of sea-going ships.
Scarcely had the Moscow triumph been celebrated when Peter summoned his council of boyars to Preobrazhenskoe and announced his plans to colonize Azov and Tagonrog and begin the construction of a navy. A stream of edicts flowed from this historic meeting. Three thousand peasant families and 3,000 Streltsy with their wives and children were uprooted and dispatched to Azov as military colonizers. Twenty thousand Ukrainian laborers were drafted and sent to Tagonrog to build the naval harbor. The new ships themselves were to be built at Voronezh, where the present shipyards would be vastly expanded; from there, the finished vessels would be floated down the Don. Responsibility for building die ships was allocated. All who could afford to help— church, landowners, merchants—would join the state in paying the costs. The state itself would build ten large ships. Every great landowner would build one ship. Every large monastery would build one ship. All these ships were to be fully constructed, equipped and armed within eighteen months. The government would provide the timber, but the landowners or church officials were to provide everything else: ropes, sails, cannon, fittings.
The order was harshly enforced. Failure meant immediate confiscation of property. When the merchants of
