Latest / The Romanov Dynasty: Rise, Power, and Bloody End — Fexingo History / The Romanovs and Peter the Great's Grand Embassy to the West
Transcript
- Lucas: So, Luna, we've talked a lot about Peter the Great—his founding of St. Petersburg, his Table of Ranks, his wars. But there's a journey he took that really made all that possible. In 1697, Peter did something no Russian tsar had ever done: he left Russia. Not just for a diplomatic visit, but for an eighteen-month tour of Western Europe. Luna: Wow, that's a big deal. Didn't most tsars stay pretty cloistered in Moscow? Lucas: Exactly. The Grand Embassy—Velikoye posolstvo in Russian—was officially a diplomatic mission to build an alliance against the Ottoman Empire. But Peter had a much bigger agenda. He wanted to see the technology, the ships, the cities, the governments of the West firsthand. And he went incognito, under the name Pyotr Mikhailov, a simple sergeant in the Preobrazhensky Regiment. Luna: Incognito? That must have been hard to pull off for a six-foot-eight tsar. Lucas: It was an open secret. Everyone knew who he was, but they played along. The embassy was huge—about 250 people, including diplomats, soldiers, and young nobles sent to learn. Peter's closest advisors, Franz Lefort and Patrick Gordon, led the mission. They traveled through Swedish-ruled Livonia, then to Prussia, and then to the Dutch Republic, which was Peter's primary destination. Lucas: He was obsessed with shipbuilding. The Dutch had the finest ships in the world, and Peter wanted to learn every detail. So in the small town of Zaandam—Zaandam, near Amsterdam—he actually stayed with a blacksmith and worked as a shipwright in the shipyards. He swung an axe, he sawed planks, he got his hands dirty. Luna: That's incredible. A tsar working manual labor. Lucas: And he loved it. But he couldn't stay incognito for long—the locals recognized him, crowds gathered, and he got fed up with the attention. After just a week, he moved to Amsterdam, where he worked at the Dutch East India Company's shipyards under the master shipwright Gerrit Claesz Pool. He even helped build a frigate, the Amsterdam, from keel to mast. Lucas: You know, it's a small thing, but this kind of travel takes resources. And our show runs on listener support. If you've been getting something out of these conversations—about Eastern Europe, about the Romanovs—a couple of dollars a month genuinely keeps these going. Buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. Luna: Yeah, it really does make a difference. And we don't run ads, so it's just listeners like you who keep us going. Lucas: Anyway, back to Peter. In Amsterdam, he didn't just build ships. He visited botanical gardens, anatomical theaters, and museums. He hired hundreds of Dutch engineers, architects, and officers to come to Russia. He even sat in on lectures—though he couldn't understand Dutch, so he had translators. He was like a sponge, absorbing everything. Luna: Did he make it to England too? Lucas: He did. In January 1698, Peter and a small retinue crossed the English Channel to meet King William III. William gave him a tour of the Royal Navy docks at Deptford, and Peter spent weeks studying English shipbuilding techniques. He even commandeered a house near the dockyard—Sayes Court, the home of the diarist John Evelyn—and pretty much trashed it. The gardens were ruined, the furniture broken, the paintings used for target practice. Luna: Oh no. So much for diplomacy. Lucas: William III was reportedly not thrilled, but he understood that Peter was more interested in practical knowledge than courtly manners. Peter also visited the Royal Society, the Greenwich Observatory, and the Mint, where he met Isaac Newton—though we don't know what they talked about. He even attended a session of Parliament in secret, hiding in a garret above the chamber. Lucas: From England, Peter traveled to Vienna to meet the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. His goal was to push the anti-Ottoman alliance, but Leopold was more concerned with the looming War of the Spanish Succession. So the diplomatic part of the embassy was largely a failure. But Peter wasn't done—he planned to go to Venice to study galley-building. Then news came from Moscow that changed everything. Luna: The Streltsy uprising? Lucas: Exactly. In June 1698, the streltsy—the Moscow musketeers—rebelled while Peter was abroad. They were unhappy with their conditions, their officers, and the foreign influence Peter was bringing. The revolt was crushed by General Patrick Gordon before Peter even returned, but he rushed back anyway. He arrived in Moscow in August, and he was furious. He personally participated in the interrogations and executions—hundreds of streltsy were tortured, hanged, or beheaded. Some sources say Peter chopped off heads himself. Luna: That's a brutal homecoming. But it also shows how serious he was about change. Lucas: Absolutely. The Grand Embassy changed Peter's vision for Russia. He saw that the West was ahead in technology, in military organization, in education. He came back determined to modernize Russia by force if necessary. He started by forcing the boyars to shave their beards and wear Western clothes. He reformed the calendar, the alphabet, the army. And he began planning a war with Sweden—the Great Northern War—to give Russia a Baltic port. The Grand Embassy was the spark for all of it. Luna: It's like he saw the future and decided Russia had to catch up overnight. Lucas: Exactly. And he never stopped. Within a few years, he had built a navy from scratch, founded St. Petersburg on conquered Swedish land, and turned Russia into a major European power. But it all started with that journey—a tsar who went to learn from the West, and came back to remake his country. Luna: I'm wondering—how did the people he met in Europe actually see him? Was he just a curiosity, or did they take him seriously? Lucas: It was mixed. Some were impressed by his energy and intelligence—the Dutch shipbuilders respected his craftsmanship. Others were put off by his crude manners, his heavy drinking, and his violent temper. The English diarist John Evelyn, after seeing the wreckage of his house, called Peter 'a mighty prince' but also 'a barbarian.' But most European leaders realized that Russia under Peter was a rising power. They might have laughed at his antics, but they didn't underestimate him. Lucas: One story sums it up. In the Dutch town of Zaandam, Peter bought a small boat that had belonged to a local fisherman. He later had it shipped to St. Petersburg and kept it as a relic. That boat—the 'St. Nicholas'—is still preserved in the Central Naval Museum. It's a symbol of how Peter, the tsar who learned to build ships, built an empire. Luna: That's a great image to end on. Thanks for walking us through that journey, Lucas.