During the following month, in St. Petersburg, the Tsar again was ill. At the beginning of June, learning that the siege of Vyborg was nearing an end, he wrote to Apraxin, "I hear that you intend making the assault today. If this has already been ordered, God aid you. But if it is not fixed for today, then put it off till Sunday or Monday when I can get there, for this is the last day that I take medicine and tomorrow I shall be free."
On June 13, 1710, Vyborg with its garrison of 154 officers and 3,726 men fell to Apraxin. Peter arrived just in time to witness the surrender. The subsequent clearing and permanent occupation of Kexholm and all the Karelian Isthmus provided a northern buffer one hundred miles thick for St. Petersburg, meaning that Peter's "holy paradise" would no longer be sujected to surprise attacks by Swedish armies from the north. Relieved and happy, the Tsar wrote from Vyborg to Sheremetev, "And thus through the taking of this town, final safety has been gained for St. Petersburg." To Catherine, he wrote, "Now, by God's help, it is a strong cushion for St. Petersburg."*
All the Swedish citadels on the southern coast of the upper
*Through the years, Russians have continued to try to protect St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, from threats from this direction. For 109 years, while Finland was an Imperial Russian grand duchy, the threat was nonexistent, but in 1918, Finland gained independence and Vyborg and Karelia were attached to the new state. The Soviet government felt keenly the naked exposure of Leningrad, its second largest city, now only twenty miles from the Finnish frontier, and desired, as Peter had, a larger "cushion." In 1940, the Soviet Union attacked Finland primarily to regain this buffer territory. At first, the "Winter War" went badly for the Soviets. The Finns fought gallantly and attracted the admiration of the West. The Soviet army, its officer corps riddled by Stalin's purges, was stopped in its tracks. Eventually, sheer weight of numbers had an effect and the Red Army ground its way through the Finnish Mannerheim Line. The peace which followed established a new frontier in approximately the same place as in Peter's day. This extra buffer helped save Leningrad during the 900-day siege of the city between 1941 and 1943 by the Nazi and Finnish armies.
Baltic surrendered during the summer of 1710. On July 10, the great city of Riga with its garrison of 4,500 fell to Sheremetev after an eight-month siege. The city had been pounded by 8,000 Russian mortar shells and the garrison was decimated by hunger and disease which Peter called "the wrath of God." Although Peter's agreement with Augustus had assigned Livonia and Riga to Poland, Peter now decided that the city and the province had been bought with Russian blood at Poltava at a time when Augustus was no longer King of Poland and a Russian ally. The Tsar therefore determined to keep them. Of these territories, he was to become a tolerant overlord. Although requiring an oath of allegiance from the Baltic nobility and Riga merchants, he promised to respect all of their former privileges, rights, customs, possessions and immunities. The churches were to remain Lutheran, and German was to remain the language of provincial administration. For many years, the essential problem in these provinces was simple survival, the war having reduced the land and towns to a semi-desert, but the nobility and gentry were not displeased to exchange a Swedish master for a Russian one.
Three months after the fall of Riga, Reval—the last of the fruits of Poltava—capitulated. Peter was overjoyed. "The last town has surrendered and Livonia and Estonia are entirely cleared of the enemy," he wrote. "In a word, the enemy does not now possess a single town on the left side of the Baltic, not even an inch of land. It is now incumbent upon us to pray the Lord God for a good peace."
Part Four
ON THE EUROPEAN STAGE
THE SULTAN'S WORLD
It was extraordinarily fortunate for Peter that while he was tsar Russia never had to fight two enemies simultaneously. Poland, Moscow's traditional enemy, had been transformed into an ally by the treaty of 1686. The war with Turkey, reignited by Peter's two campaigns to seize Azov, had been suspended by a thirty-year armistice signed in August 1700, after which Peter could join Poland and Denmark in an attack on Sweden. Through the perilous years before Poltava when Charles XII seemed invincible and a Turkish-Swedish alliance would have sealed Russia's fate, the Sultan kept the peace. Only after Poltava, when the Swedish army had disintegrated into a column of prisoners, did the Ottoman Empire ponderously decide to make war on the Tsar. Even then, because of over-optimism on Peter's part and betrayal by one of his new Balkan Christian allies, this campaign had near-catastrophic results for Russia.
The Ottoman Empire, every hectare conquered by the sword, stretched over three continents. The sweep of the sultan's rule was greater than that of a Roman emperor. It embraced the whole of southeastern Europe. It stretched westward across the entire coast of Africa to the Moroccan border. It touched the shores of the Caspian Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The Black Sea was an Ottoman lake. Great cities as distant and as different as Algiers, Cairo, Bagdad, Jerusalem, Athens and Belgrade were ruled from Constantinople. Twenty-one modern nations have.been created from the former territories of the Ottoman Empire.*
Within this immense sweep of mountains, deserts, rivers and fertile valleys lived some twenty-five million people, a huge number in that day, almost twice the population of any European empire or kingdom except France. The empire was Moslem; it
*Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Albania, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Aden, Kuwait, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia, Algeria, Cyprus, not to mention huge stretches of the Soviet Ukraine, Crimea, the Caucasus, Armenia and George.
surrounded, in the heart of Arabia, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, whose sacred shrines it was the sultan's personal responsibility as caliph to protect. Among the Moslem peoples, the Ottoman Turks were the dominant minority, but there were also Arabs, Kurds, Crimean Tatars, Circassians, Bosnians and Albanians. The sultan also ruled over millions of Christian subjects: Greeks, Serbs, Hungarians, Bulgars, Walachians and Moldavians.
Almost necessarily, the political bonds that tied such a polyglot of peoples and religions were flexible and loose. From Constantinople, the sultan ruled, but his rule was administered locally by a bevy of pashas, princes, viceroys, beys, khans and emirs, some of them autonomous in all but name. The Christian princes of the rich Balkan provinces of Walachia and Moldavia, lying between the Danube and the Carpathians (present-day Romania), were personally chosen by the sultan, but once in office, their allegiance was manifested solely by payment of annual tribute. Every year, wagons loaded with gold and other tax monies arrived from the north before the gates of Sublime Porte in Constantinople. The Tatar Khan of the Crimea ruled his peninsula as an absolute lord from his capital, Bakhchisarai, owing only the duty to bring himself and 20,000 to 30,000 horsemen when summoned to the sultan's wars. Twelve hundred miles to the west, the Barbary states of Tripoli, Tunis and Algeria obliged their Ottoman master in war by diverting their fast corsair ships, normally engaged in lucrative peacetime piracy against all nations, to attack the fleets of the great Christian naval powers, Venice and Genoa.