diplomatically the projected crusade. His foreign tour, during which he visited Germany, Holland, England, France and Austria, lasted nearly a year and a half, and was suddenly interrupted, when on his way from Vienna to Venice to study the construction of war-galleys, by the alarming news that the turbulent stryeltsi of Moscow had mutinied anew with the intention of placing Sophia on the throne. On arriving in Moscow he found that the mutiny had been suppressed and the ringleaders punished, but he considered it necessary to reopen the investigation and act with exemplary severity. Of the surviving mutineers over twelve hundred were executed, some of them by his own hand, and the entire corps was disbanded.
From this moment may be dated the personal reign of Peter, for he now began to direct personally all branches of the administration, and governed with indefatigable vigour for twenty-seven years, during which he greatly increased the area and profoundly modified the internal condition of his country. At first he concentrated his attention on foreign affairs. During his foreign tour he had discovered that the idea of a grand crusade against the infidel was irrealizable, for France was, according to her traditional policy, the ally of the sultan, Austria wished to avoid trouble on her eastern frontier in order to devote her energies to the question of the Spanish succession, and all the other countries which he wished to draw into the coalition had good reasons of their own for desiring the maintenance of peace in eastern Europe. For his Baltic schemes, on the contrary, he had found the ground well prepared. During a halt of a few days in Poland on his way back from Vienna, King Augustus had explained to him a project for partitioning the trans-Baltic provinces of Sweden, by which Poland should recover Livonia and annex Esthonia, Russia should obtain Ingria and Karelia, and Denmark should take possession of Holstein. As Sweden was known to be exhausted by the long wars of Gustavus Adolphus and his successors, and weakened by internal dissensions, the dismemberment seemed an easy matter, and Peter embarked on the scheme with a light heart; but his illusions were quickly dispelled by the eccentric young Swedish king, Charles XII., who arrived suddenly in Esthonia and completely routed the Russian army before Narva. Thus began the so-called Northern War, which lasted intermittently for more than twenty years, and was terminated by the treaty of Nystad (Sept. 10, 1721). By that treaty Peter acquired not only Ingria and Karelia, as originally contemplated, but also Livonia, Esthonia and part of Finland. The problem of obtaining a firm footing on the Baltic coast, on which Ivan the Terrible had squandered his resources to no purpose, was now solved satisfactorily.
Peter's other favourite scheme, that of acquiring the command of the Black Sea, was as far from realization as ever. In the midst of the Northern War, shortly after the great Russian victory of Poltava (1709), the sultan, at the instigation of Swedish and French agents, determined to recover Azov, and made great military preparations for that purpose. Having annihilated at Poltava the army of Charles XII., Peter was not at all indisposed to renew the struggle with Turkey, and began the campaign in the confident hope of making extensive conquests; but he had only got as far as the Pruth when he found himself surrounded by a great Turkish army, and, in order to extricate himself from his critical position, he had to sign a humiliating treaty by which Azov and other conquests were restored to the sultan. His dreams of freeing the Christians from the yoke of the infidel had to be abandoned, and the conquest of the northern shores of the Black Sea was postponed till the reign of Catherine II.
Those tedious and exhausting wars did not prevent Peter from attending to internal affairs, and he displayed as a reformer Peter the Great's reforms. even more vigour and tenacity than as a general in the field. His first reforms were connected with the army. Several of his immediate predecessors had come to recognize that Russia, with her antiquated military organization, was unable to cope with her Western neighbours, and had begun to organize, with the help of foreigners, a military force more in accordance with modern requirements; but the progress made in that direction had been slow and unsatisfactory. Unlike his predecessors, Peter was in a hurry to realize his plans, and he set to work at once. In less than two years from the time of disbanding the stryeltsi he contrived to create an army of 40,000 men. This army, it is true, was so inefficient that it was completely routed by the Swedish king with a most inferior force, but it was improved gradually until it learned to conquer its Swedish opponents. To accomplish such a feat it was necessary, of course, to expend large sums of money; and as the country could ill bear an increase of taxation, the whole financial system had to be improved and the natural resources of the country had to be developed. At the same time the military and financial requirements dislocated the local and central administration, and consequently a series of radical administrative reforms had to be undertaken. Thus one reform led to another; but Peter was not dismayed by the magnitude of the task, and worked vigorously in all departments with a sublime disregard for the clamour of reactionary opponents and for the feelings and prejudices of his subjects in general. A prudent ruler in his position would have sought to preserve the outward forms while changing the inner substance, but Peter was not at all prudent in that sense. Very often he wantonly provoked opposition, as when he shaved off his beard and compelled his chief officials to do likewise, though he well knew that the operation was regarded by the ignorant masses and the pious of all ranks as a sinful defacing of the image of God. In his eyes the beard was a symbol of the old régime, and as such it must be removed. Reckless of consequences, he swept away the venerated ceremonial formalities which his ancestors had scrupulously observed, openly scoffed at ancient usage, habitually dressed in foreign costume, and generally chose foreign heretics as his boon companions. In adopting foreign innovations, he showed, like the Japanese of the present day, no sentimental preference for any particular nation, and was ready to borrow from the Germans, Dutch, English, Swedes or French whatever seemed best suited for his purpose. The innovations, it must be admitted, did not prove so efficient as he expected, because human nature and traditional habits cannot be changed as quickly as institutions. When the Boyar Duma became the Senate, and the Prikazi or administrative departments were organized under the name of Colleges, and when every important town was endowed with a Rathhaus, a Polizeimeister, gilds, aldermen, and all the municipal paraphernalia of western Europe, the vices of the old institutions survived in the new. Notwithstanding the changes in organization and terminology, the officials remained ignorant, indolent, careless, indifferent to the public welfare, high-handed and extortionate, and the local self-government which was intended to enlighten and control them proved sadly wanting in vitality and practically worthless. So inefficient, indeed, were the reforms as a whole, and so unsuited to the national character and customs, that the Slavophil critics of a later date could maintain plausibly the paradoxical thesis that in regard to internal administration Peter was anything but a national benefactor. However that may be, it must be confessed even by Slavophils that he dragged his countrymen, more by force than by persuasion, from the paths of traditional routine and pushed them along with all his might on the broad road of progress in the modern sense of the term. Abandoning the ancient Muscovite capital, where many influential personages were fanatically hostile to his innovations and not a few of the superstitious inhabitants regarded him with horror as Antichrist, he built at the mouth of the Neva a new capital which Foundation of St Petersburg. was to serve as “a window through which his people might look into Europe”; and laying aside the national title of tsar he proclaimed himself (1711) emperor (Imperator) of all Russia—much to the surprise and indignation of foreign diplomatic chancelleries, which resented the audacity of a semi-barbarous potentate in claiming to be
