Peter the Great (28 page)

In March, the weather improved, and in mid-April three galleys, including the
Principium,
were launched. Hundreds of new barges were already moored in the river, ready for loading. To crew this new armada, Peter sent for boatment from even the most distant Russian rivers and lakes. To man the war galleys, he created a special marine force of 4,000 men culled from many regiments, with a heavy proportion coming from his own Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards.

The overall mobilization was smaller than it had been the previous summer—in this second campaign there would be no march on the Dnieper—but the force destined to make the second assault on Azov would be double the size of the previous summer. Forty-six thousand Russian soldiers would be bolstered by 15,000 Ukrainian Cossacks, 5,000 Don Cossacks and 3,000 Kalmucks— wiry, brown
-skinned, semi-Asiatic horsemen,
who could ride with any Tatar. A single officer, the boyar Alexis Shein, had been appointed commander-in-chief of the expedition. Shein was not an experienced military commander, but he came from a distinguished family, his judgment was considered sound and his appointment silenced those conservative Muscovites who grumbled that a Russian army commanded by a foreigner could never succeed. Lefort, although no seaman, was made admiral of the new fleet, while Peter, shifting his interest from Mars to Neptune, took the title of naval captain rather than artillery bombardier.

On May 1, Shein, the generalissimo, boarded his commander's galley and raised on its stern a great embroidered banner bearing the Tsar's arms. Two days later, the first ships weighed anchor and the long procession of galleys and barges began the voyage down the Don. Peter, starting later with a battle squadron of eight fast galleys, overtook the main fleet on May 26. By the end of the month, the entire fleet of barges and galleys had reached the Russian-held watchtower forts above Azov.

Fighting began immediately. On May 28, the leader of the Don Cossacks, who had gone ahead with 250 men to reconnoiter the mouth of the river, sent back word that two large Turkish ships were anchored there. Peter decided to attack. Nine galleys were selected, and one of Gordon's best regiments embarked in them. They were accompanied down the river by forty Cossack boats, each carrying twenty men. In unfamiliar waters and with unfavorable winds, the galleys began to go aground and were ordered to turn back. Peter transferred into one of the lighter Cossack boats and continued down the river, but at its mouth he found not two but thirty Turkish craft, including warships, barges and lighters. This force he judged too strong for his small boats, and he returned upstream to the Russian camp; the Cossacks, however, remained in the vicinity of the Turkish ships. The following night, while the Turks were still moving supplies from the sea-going ships to the shore, the Cossack raiders attacked and captured ten of the smaller Turkish boats. The remainder of the Turkish force fled back to the main anchorage, where the Turkish captains became so alarmed that, although their unloading was still incomplete, the entire Turkish fleet weighed anchor and sailed the open sea. This was the last succor the city of Azov was to receive.

A few days later, Peter returned to the mouth of the river, bringing his entire force of twenty-nine galleys safely past the fortress of Azov. The city was now isolated, and any help sent by the Sultan would have to fight its way upriver through Peter's flotilla. To strengthen his grip, Peter landed troops at the mouth of the river and constructed two small forts containing artillery. When these were finished, he wrote to Romodanovsky, "We are now completely out of danger of the Turkish fleet." On June 14, a number of ships appeared and attempted to land troops to attack the Russian forts, but the approach of Peter's galleys quickly frightened them away. Two weeks later, the Turks tried again, but again the arrival of the Russian galleys forced them to withdraw.

Meanwhile, with the sea secure and the city isolated, Peter's generals and engineers could proceed with the siege. Fortunately for them, the Turkish garrison of Azov, not expecting the Russians to return after their previous failure, had done little to improve its situation. The Turks had not bothered to level the Russian earth siege works or fill in the Russian trenches of the previous summer, and Peter's returning soldiers reoccupied them quickly with a minimum of fresh digging. With twice its former numbers, the Russian army was now able to spread its siege lines completely around the land side of the city.

Once his artillery was in place, Peter called on the Turkish Pasha in Azov to surrender. On June 26, when the Tsar's demand was refused, the Russian cannon opened fire. Through the days that followed, Peter lived primarily on his galley anchored at the mouth of the Don, coming upstream at times to watch the bombardment. When news of his activities reached Moscow, his sister Natalya, alarmed by reports that he was exposing himself to enemy fire, wrote and begged him not to go near enemy cannonballs and bullets. Lightheartedly, Peter replied, "It is not I who go near to cannonballs and bullets, but they come near to me. Send orders for them to stop it."

As all hope of reinforcement from the sea was gone, Peter repeated his offer of good surrender terms to the garrison. A Russian archer fired an arrow over the walls bearing a written offer of honorable terms, granting the garrison the right to depart the fortress with all its arms and baggage if it surrendered before the coming assault. The answer was a billowing line of smoke from the walls as all the Turkish cannon fired back in unison.

Meanwhile, the siege works progressed. Under Gordon's direction, 15,000 Russians toiled with shovels, filling baskets of earth and piling up dirt higher and higher, and nearer and nearer the Turkish walls, until at last a vast 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 astonishme
nt and admiration. Vinius wrote
directly to Witsen, Burgomast
er of Amsterdam, asking that he
pass the news of victory to Pe
ter's hero, King William III of
England. In Constantinople, the
news brought consternation. The
weary Turkish soldiers returnin
g 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.