diers numbering 20,000 or 30,000, organized by Ivan the Terrible as a sort of imperial body-guard. In their ungovernable turbulence, they remind us of the Pretorians of Rome. The mutiny settled Peter in his determination to rid himself altogether of the insolent and refractory body. Its place was taken by a well-disciplined force trained according to the tactics of the Western nations.
The disbanding of the seditious guards was only one of the many reforms effected by Peter. So intent was he upon thoroughly Europeanizing his country, that he resolved that his subjects should literally clothe themselves in the "garments of Western Civilization." Accordingly he abolished the long-sleeved, long-skirted Oriental robes that were at this time worn, and decreed that everybody save the clergy should shave, or pay a tax on his beard. We are told that Peter stationed tailors and barbers at the gates of Moscow to cut off the skirts and to train the beards of those who had not conformed to the royal regulations, and that he himself sheared off with his own hands the offending sleeves and beards of his reluctant courtiers. The law was gradually relaxed, but the reform became so general that in the best society in Russia at the present day one sees only smooth faces and the Western style of dress.
As additional outgrowths of what he had seen, or heard, or had suggested to him on his foreign tour, Peter issued a new coinage, introduced schools, built factories, constructed roads and canals, established a postal system, opened mines, framed laws modelled after those of the West, and reformed the government of the towns in such a way as to give the citizens some voice in the management of their local affairs, as he had observed was done in the Netherlands and in England.
Charles XII. of Sweden.—Peter's history now becomes intertwined with that of a man quite as remarkable as himself, Charles XII. of Sweden, the "Madman of the North." Charles was but fifteen years of age when, in 1697, the death of his father called him to the Swedish throne. The dominions which came under his sway
