not to travel to Paris until after the Sun King's death. And thus it was that as the Great Embassy prepared to leave Russia, it did not contemplate a visit to the greatest monarch of the West, and, sadly for both history and legend, the two royal colossi of the age, Peter and Louis, never stood in the same room.
'IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE HIM'
As chief of the Great Embassy, with the rank of First Ambassador, Peter named Lefort, now titled Governor- General of Novgorod as well as General-Admiral. Lefort's two fellow ambassadors both were Russian: Fedor Golovin, the Governor-General of Siberia, and Prokofy Voznitsyn, Governor of Bolkhov. Golovin was one of Russia's first professional diplomats. At the age of thirty-seven, he had negotiated for Sophia the Treaty of Nerchinsk with China, and!since Peter's assumption of power he had become one of the Tsar's close companions and most useful servants.
Conduct of foreign affairs was entrusted to him, and eventually he was granted the title of General-Admiral. In 1702, he was created a Count of the Holy Roman Empire and became, in effect, Peter's prime minister. Voznitsyn also had previous diplomatic experience, having served on missions to Constantinople, Persia, Venice and Poland.
Chosen to escort the ambassadors were twenty noblemen and thirty-five young Russian 'volunteers' who, like those dispatched in previous months, were going to England, Holland and Venice to learn shipbuilding, navigation and other nautical sciences. Many of the noblemen and 'volunteers' were Peter's comrades from the play regiments at Preobrazhenskoe, his boatbuilding days at Pereslavl, the visits to Archangel and the campaigns against Azov. Prominent among these were his childhood friend Andrei Matveev and the brash young Alexander Menshikov. To complete the Embassy, there were chamberlains, priests, secretaries, interpreters, musicians (including six trumpeters), singers, cooks, coachmen, seventy soldiers and four dwarfs, bringing the total above 250. And somewhere in the ranks was a tall young man, brown-haired, dark-eyed, with a wart on the right side of his face, whom the others addressed simply as Peter Mikhailov. For members of the Embassy to address him as anything else, to reveal that he was the Tsar or even to mention that the Tsar was present with the Embassy, was punishable by death.
To govern Russia in his absence, Peter established a three-man regency council. The first two were his uncle Lev Naryshkin and Prince Boris Golitsyn, both faithful and trusted older men who had advised his mother during the years of exile at Preobrazhenskoe and who had guided his party during the final crisis with Sophia. The third regent was Prince Peter Prozorovsky, the Tsar's treasurer, who suffered from the strange malady of being unwilling to touch the hand of another person or even to open a door least he contaminate himself. Nominally subordinate to these three men, but in fact the real viceroy of Russia during Peter's absence, was Prince Fedor Romodanovsky, the Governor-General of Moscow, commander of the four regiments of the Guard and Prince-Caesar of the Jolly Company. Given supreme jurisdiction in all civil and military cases and charged with maintaining order, Romodanovsky was sternly commanded to deal in the severest manner with any flickerings of discontent or rebellion. Alexis Shein, the generalissimo of the successful Azov expedition, was left in command of Azov, while Boris Sheremetev, leaving on his own private three-year journey to Rome, was replaced on the Dnieper frontier by Prince Jacob Dolgoruky.
On the eve of the Embassy's departure, Peter was happily celebrating at !a banquet at Lefort's mansion when a messenger brought disquieting news. As Gordon wrote in his diary, 'A merry night has been spoiled by an accident of discovering treason against his Majesty.' Three men—a colonel of the Streltsy, Ivan Tsykler, and two boyars— were seized and accused of plotting against Peter's life. The evidence was thin. Tsykler had been one of the first of Sophia's officers to go to Troitsky and cast in his lot with Peter. For this switch of alliance he had expected great rewards, and had been disappointed; now, he was being sent to serve in the garrison at Azov. Disgruntled, he may have expressed his discontent too publicly. The two boyars involved were outspoken men who were representative of a rising tide of complaint about the style and direction of Peter's rule: The Tsar had deserted his wife and the Kremlin; he maintained his shameful relations with foreigners in the German Suburb; he had lowered the dignity of the throne by walking in the Azov victory parade behind the carriage of the Swiss Lefort; now he was abandoning them to spend many months with foreigners in the West.
Unfortunately, their grumbling touched a raw nerve in Peter's character: Once again, the Streltsy were mixed up in charges of treason. His fear and loathing of them boiled forth. The three men were bloodily executed on Red Square, losing first their arms and legs to the axe, and then their heads. In addition, Peter's fear that their dissent might be only the prelude to an attempted Miloslavsky restoration stirred him to a lurid act of contempt against that family. The coffin of Ivan Miloslavsky, who had been dead for fourteen years, was placed on a sledge, yoked to a team of swine and dragged into Red Square. There, the coffin was opened beneath the execution block, so that the blood of the newly condemned men would spatter the face of the corpse.
Five days after this barbaric scene in Moscow, the Great Embassy set out to study the civilization and technology of the West. On March 20, 1697, the Embassy departed for Novgorod and Pskov in a long procession of sledges and baggage wagons. Among the bulky carts were gorgeous costumes of silk and brocade sewn with pearls and jewels for use by Lefort and the other ambassadors in formal audiences, a large consignment of sable furs to be used to cover expenses where gold, silver or bills on Amsterdam would not suffice, an immense supply of honey, salmon and other smoked fish, and Peter's personal drum.
Crossing the Russian frontier, the Great Embassy entered the Swedish-held Baltic province of Livonia (whose territory was generally that of modern Latvia). Unfortunately, the Swedish governor of Riga, Eric Dahlberg, was completely unprepared for so large a group and especially for the distinguished visitor concealed in its ranks. For this, the Russian Governor of Pskov, the Russian town nearest the frontier, was partly at fault. He had been ordered to make arrangements, but in his letter to Dahlberg he neglected to mention either the size of the visiting Embassy or, more importantly, what august personage would be traveling incognito along with it. Dahlberg had replied with a formal letter of welcome, saying he would do everything possible 'with neighborly friendliness.' He pointed out, however, that his reception would necessarily be pinched because of a disastrous harvest that had brought the province to the brink of famine. To make matters worse, in addition to inadequate advance warning, there was a missed connection. Dahlberg sent carriages with an escort of cavalry to the frontier to bring the Tsar's ambassadors into Riga in diplomatic style. Because the important members of the Embassy, Peter included, were traveling ahead of the main party, they missed this welcome. Just outside Riga, when the carriages and escort finally caught up with the ambassadors, the Swedes offered a second reception and staged a military parade to make amends.
Had this been the only mishap and had Peter been able to pass through Riga quickly and cross the River Dvina* as intended, all might still have been well. But he arrived in early spring just as the ice was breaking in the river, which flowed beneath the city walls. There was no bridge, and the large ice floes in the river made crossing by boat impossible. For seven days, Peter and the Russian party were forced to wait in the city for the ice to melt.
Although impatient and anxious to leave, Peter initially was pleased by the honor done to his ambassadors. Every time they came or went from the citadel, a salute of twenty-four guns roared out.
Riga, the capital of Livonia, was a Protestant Baltic city of tall, thin church spires, gabled roofs, cobbled streets and thriving independent merchants, totally different from Pskov and Russia not far away. Riga was also a major citadel and a powerful anchor of the Swedish Baltic empire, and, with this in mind, the Swedish hosts were nervous about these Russian visitors and - especially about the presence of the inquisitive twenty-four-year-old Tsar. Predictably, Peter was determined to study the city's fortifications. Riga was a modern fortress, carefully constructed on the latest Western lines by Swedish military engineers. As such, it was far more powerful and thus more interesting to Peter than the old-style fortifications of simple walls and towers which characterized all Russian fortresses, including the Kremlin, and which Peter had
*The river emptying into the White Sea at Archangel is also called Dvina, The Archangel Dvina is often called the North Dvina and the river at Riga, the West Dvina.
faced and conquered at Azov. Here was stone-faced bastions and palisaded conterscarpes built after the model of the French master Vauban. To Peter, it was a rare opportunity and he meant to make the most of it. He climbed over the ramparts, made pencil sketches, measured the depth and width of the moats, and studied the angles of fire of the cannon at the embrasures.
Peter regarded his own activity as that of a student studying a modem fortress in the abstract, but the Swedes understandably saw it somewhat differently. To them, Peter was a monarch and military commander whose
