Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [252]
What was the young Tsar thinking of?
As time passed, it seemed to Eudokia that when he was sober, young Tsar Peter thought only of two things. One was war.
‘And the other is boats. Boats – everything with this man is boats!’ she would complain. And when Procopy laughingly reminded her that Russia was a land of rivers she would brush him aside irritably. ‘You know very well what I mean. It’s these accursed boats that go to sea. No Russian has ever needed to go to sea.’
‘Not so. The ancient Rus went to sea. They went across the Black Sea to Constantinople. And that’s what we’ll do now.’
‘First it’s the Crimean Khan and his Tatars, now it’s the Turkish Sultan himself you want to attack,’ she said drily.
‘Precisely.’
For though Peter’s conduct might be odd, there was no doubt that he had, from the first, dreams of conquest. They were very natural dreams.
Who, after all, were Russia’s heroes? Were they not great men like St Vladimir, Yaroslav the Wise, and mighty Monomakh in the days of ancient Kiev? And in those times, had not the state of Rus traded freely from the Baltic to the warm Black Sea? Did it not crush the tribesmen of the southern steppe? Had not the ancient Rus kept a settlement by the mouth of the Don in old Tmutarakan? Was there not a colony of Rus in the imperial city of Constantinople herself? Yet now, Russia possessed only a miserable little toehold, at the frozen northern end of the Baltic Sea, while the rich Baltic ports were still in the hands of the Swedes and Germans. In the south, the mouth of the Don was closed to Russians, guarded by the Turkish port of Azov, and the Turkish fleet entirely controlled the warm Black Sea. Finally, most insulting of all, and centuries after Moscow had thrown off the Tatar yoke, the Tatar Khan of the Crimea still sent huge raiding parties across the steppe, stealing Slavs by the thousands from the villages of the Ukraine and sending them to the slave markets of the Middle East. He even had the impertinence to claim tribute from the Tsar; and though his claim was ignored, the Russian government – humiliatingly – still found it wise to send him handsome gifts.
So if Peter, like Ivan the Terrible before him, wanted to break out to north and south, it was not so surprising.
Boats: they were the answer. Young Peter had discovered boats – real boats – from the foreigners in the German suburbs. He had built a boat of his own. He had seen, up in the north, the foreign vessels that came to distant Archangel or plied the Baltic Sea.
That was what he needed – a fleet to go down the mighty Don and break through, past Azov, to the warm Black Sea. It was time to turn his war games into the real thing. They would build galleys first, for the Don; then real ships for the sea.
Strangely, if Procopy Bobrov had been excited by this adventure, his father was equally so. For though he was not required on the campaign, the sixty-five-year-old former official had now acquired a new lease of life. The young Tsar needed timber for his fleet. Above all, he needed ash trees for masts.
‘They’re getting some from Tula, but we have plenty on our estates,’ he had declared happily, and immediately made the Tsar a present of one of his woods.
When the news came, in 1696, that the Turkish fort of Azov had fallen, he was ecstatic.
‘Can’t you feel it?’ he cried to Eudokia. ‘I can. I feel a warm wind blowing into our northern forests – a warm wind from the south.’
One other development had taken place during the Azov campaign: Peter’s invalid half-brother Ivan had died. It was not an important event in itself but it meant that now, as he returned to Moscow in triumph, Tsar Peter at the age of twenty-four sat alone upon the throne.
‘He may be wild,’ Nikita had assured his wife, ‘but now we shall see great things.’
Even he however had