In September of that year, 1694, a wide valley near the village of Kozhukhovo on the bank of the Moscow River was the site of Peter's last and greatest peacetime army maneuvers. This time, 30,000 men were involved, including infantry, cavalry, artillery and long columns of supply wagons. The combatants were divided into two armies. One, commanded by Ivan Buturlin, consisted of six Streltsy regiments plus numerous squadrons of cavalry. The opposing side was commanded by Fedor Romodanovsky, the mock King of Pressburg, who commanded Peter's two Guards regiments, the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky, plus two additional regular regiments and a number of companies of militia summoned from towns as far from Moscow as Vladimir and Suzdal. In essence, the war game revolved around an assault by Buturlin's army on a riverbank fort to be defended by Romodanovsky's force.
Before the maneuvers began, Moscow was treated to the excitement of seeing the two armies in parade uniforms, accompanied by scribes, musicians and the special troop of dwarf cavalry, marching through the city streets on their way to the maneuver ground. As the Preobrazhensky Regiment approached, Muscovites gasped: In front of the troops, dressed as a regular artilleryman, marched the Tsar. For a population accustomed to glimpsing tsars at a distance in all their majesty, it was an unbelievable sight.
In the maneuvers, the fighting was conducted with zest, inspired by the natural rivalry between the Streltsy regiments and the Guards, both determined to prove their merit before the Tsar. Bombs and cannon were fired, and although there was no ball and shot, faces were burned and bodies maimed. The assaulting army threw a bridge across the Moscow River and began to mine the Pressburg fort. Peter had counted on a long seige in which all the Western arts of mining and countermining under fortifications could be practiced, but, unfortunately, Bacchus also was on the scene, and most days ended with huge banquets and drinking bouts. After one of these, the attacking force, flushed with confidence, decided to make a sudden assault. The defenders, equally flushed, were in no state to resist, and the fort was easily taken. Peter was furious at this hasty conclusion. The following day, he ordered the victors out of the fort and all prisoners returned, and commanded that the fort not be stormed again until the walls had been properly mined and had properly caved in. He was obeyed, and this time it took three weeks to subdue the fort in the textbook manner.
The Kozhukhovo maneuvers were concluded late in October, and as the regiments returned to their barracks for winter, Peter began to discuss with his advisors how he might best employ them in the coming year. Perhaps the moment had come to stop playing at war; perhaps it was time to turn this new weapon he had forged against the Turks, with whom Russia was still technically at war. That some action of this kind was being considered that winter is revealed in a letter written by Gordon in December 1694. "I believe and hope," the Scot wrote to a friend in the West, "that this coming summer we shall undertake something for the advantage of Christianity and our allies."
11
AZOV
Peter was now twenty-two, in the prime of his young manhood. To those who were seeing the Tsar for the first time, his most awesome physical characteristic was his height: at six feet seven inches, the monarch towered over everyone around him, the more so because in those days the average man was shorter than today. Tall as he was, however, Peter's body was more angular than massive. His shoulders were unusually thin for a man of his height, his arms were long and his hands, which he was eager to display, were powerful, rough and permanently calloused from his work in the shipyard. Peter's face in these years was round, still youthful and almost handsome. He wore a small mustache and no wig; instead, he let his own straight, auburn-brown hair hang halfway between his ears and his shoulders.
His most extraordinary quality, even more remarkable than his height, was his titanic energy. He could not sit still or stay long in the same place. He walked so quickly with his long, loose-limbed stride that those in his company had to trot to keep up with him. When forced to do paperwork, he paced around a stand-up desk. Seated at a banquet, he would eat for a few minutes, then spring up to see what was happening in the next room or to take a walk outdoors. Needing movement, he liked to burn off his energy in dancing. When he had been in one place for a while, he wanted to leave, to move along, to see new people and new scenery, to form new impressions. The most accurate image of Peter the Great is of a man who throughout his life was perpetually curious, perpetually restless, perpetually in movement.
It was, however, during these same years that a worrisome, often mortifying physical disorder began to afflict the young Tsar. When he was emotionally agitated or under stress from the pressure of events, Peter's face sometimes began to twitch uncontrollably. The disorder, usually troubling only the left side of his face, varied in degree of severity: Sometimes the tremor was no more than a facial tic lasting only a second or two; at other times, there would be a genuine convulsion, beginning with a contraction of the muscles on the left side of his neck, followed by a spasm involving the entire left side of his face and the rolling up of his eyes until only the whites could be seen. At its worst, when violent, disjointed motion of the left arm was also involved, the convulsion ended only when Peter had lost consciousness.
With only unprofessional descriptions of Peter's symptoms available, neither the precise nature of his illness nor its cause will ever be known. Most likely, he suffered from facial epileptic seizures, among the milder of a range of neurological disorders whose most severe form is grand-mal epilepsy. There is no evidence that Peter suffered from this extreme condition; there are no reports that he collapsed totally unconscious on the floor, foamed at the mouth or lost control of his bodily functions. In Peter's case, the disturbance began in a part of the brain affecting muscles of the left side of his neck and face. If the provocation continued without alleviation, the focus of the disturbance could spread to adjacent parts of the brain affecting the motion of the left shoulder and arm.
Not knowing the nature of the affliction, it is even more difficult to pinpoint the cause. At the time, and in subsequent historical writing, a wide range of opinions has been offered. Peter's convulsions have been ascribed to the traumatic horror he suffered in 1682 when, as a ten-year-old boy, he stood by his mother and watched the massacre of Matveev and the Naryshkins by the rampaging Streltsy. By others, his condition has been traced to the shock of being awakened in the middle of the night at Preobrazhenskoe seven years later and told that the Streltsy were coming to kill him. Some have blamed it on the excessive drinking which the Tsar learned at Lefort's elbow and practiced with the Jolly Company. There was even a rumor, passed to the West in correspondence from the German Suburb, that the Tsar's affliction had been caused by poison administered by Sophia endeavoring to clear her path to the throne. The most likely cause of this kind of epilepsy, however, especially in the absence of a hard blow which could have left permanent scar tissue on the brain, is high fever over an extended period. Peter suffered such a fever during the weeks between November 1693 and January 1694 when he became so ill that many believed he would die. A fever of this kind in the nature of encephalitis can cause local scarring of the brain; subsequently, when specific psychological stimuli disturb this damaged area, a seizure of the kind which Peter suffered can be triggered.
The psychological impact of this illness on Peter was profound; it accounts in large part for his unusual shyness, especially with strangers who were not familiar with his convulsions and therefore unprepared to witness them. For paroxysms of this kind, as disturbing to those around him as to Peter himself, there was no real treatment, although what was done then would still be considered eminently reasonable today. When the tremor was no more than a tic, Peter and those in his company tried to proceed as if nothing had happened. If the convulsion became more pronounced, his friends or orderlies quickly brought someone to him whose presence he found relaxing. Eventually, whenever she was nearby, this was his second wife, Catherine, but before Catherine appeared, or if she was not present, it was some young woman who could soothe the Tsar. "Peter Alexeevich, here is the person to whom you wished to speak," his worried orderly would say and then withdraw. The Tsar would lie down and place his shaking head on the woman's lap and she would stroke his forehead and temples, speaking to him softly and reassuringly. Peter would fall asleep, his loss of consciousness clearing the electrical disturbances in his brain, and when he awoke an hour or two later, he was always refreshed and in far better humor than he had been before.