The Great Northern War
Peter the Great wanted Russia to join the nations of Western Europe, but the nations of Western Europe refused to make room for him.
1700-1721
Queen Anne 1702-1714
By Nikolai Florianovitch Dobrovolskiy (1837-1900), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
‘Here the city will be founded’, painted in 1880 Nikolai Florianovich Dobrovolsky (1837-1900). It shows Peter the Great looking out over the site of what will become St Petersburg, the city he established in the northwest corner of Russia on May 27th, 1703. Brushing off a humiliating defeat to Sweden three years earlier at Narva, Peter pressed ahead with his quest for a European seaport on the Baltic, and in 1713 (four years after he had his revenge at Poltava) he moved his capital here. In 1721, following the Peace of Nystad, St Petersburg became an imperial city when Peter declared himself Emperor of all the Russias.
Introduction
On the eve of the Great Northern War (1700-1721), most Europeans saw Russia only as an uncouth land useful as a supplier of wax, hemp and leather goods. Her ambitious new Tsar, Peter I, swore that Germany would soon admire her industry, and France her elegance, and that the Dutch and English would salute her navies; but without a European seaport, all this was an idle dream.
IN 1698, the young Tsar Peter of Russia toured Europe,* drumming up support for his campaign to clear the Ottoman Turks out of the northern coasts of the Black Sea and win a priceless European sea-port at Azov.* Neither William III in England nor any Continental crowned head gave him the support he wanted, so Peter began to look to Russia’s northwest and the Baltic Sea, then dominated by Sweden. He made overtures of friendship to Poland and Denmark, but Charles XII of Sweden hurriedly stepped in, invading Denmark and crushing Peter’s Russian army at Narva on November 19th, 1700.*
Charles goaded Peter, vowing that ‘he would treat with the Tsar in Moscow’; but he took his troops unexpectedly south instead, and then east through Poland and the Ukraine towards Zaporozhia on the River Dnieper, near the Black Sea. The veteran leader of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Ivan Mazepa,* had assured Charles that thirty thousand Cossacks would fight for him against the Russians. Charles was bitterly disappointed when only three thousand joined Sweden’s side; the rest remained loyal to Peter.
* See The Grand Embassy.
* Azov lies at the mouth of the River Don, where the river empties into the Sea of Azov to the east of the Crimea, and thence into the Black Sea. Peter lost control of Azov in 1711.
* Narva was at that time in the Swedish Empire, and now lies in Estonia.
* Ivan Mazepa (1639-1709) was from Mazepyntsi near Bila Tserkva in what is now Ukraine. At that time it lay within the Kiev Voivodeship of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He is often remembered for his ignominious (but historically doubtful) exit from the court of Polish king John II Casimir, following an affair with a married lady of the court; the story goes that for his impertinence, Mazepa was strapped to a wild horse and carried away for many miles. The tale, which had already appeared in Voltaire’s History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731), was worked up into long narrative poem by Lord Byron in 1819. There is no known foundation for it, though Mazepa did leave the Polish court rather suddenly in 1663.
