[Illustration: PETER THE GREAT. (After a painting at Hampton Court, by G.
Kneller, 1698.)]
PETER'S FIRST VISIT TO THE WEST (1697-1698).—With a view to advancing his naval projects, Peter about this time sent a large number of young Russian nobles to Italy, Holland, and England to acquire in those countries a knowledge of naval affairs, forbidding them to return before they had become good sailors.
Not satisfied with thus sending to foreign parts his young nobility, Peter formed the somewhat startling resolution of going abroad himself, and learning the art of ship-building by personal experience in the dockyards of Holland. Accordingly, in the year 1697, leaving the government in the hands of three nobles, he set out incognito for the Netherlands. Upon arriving there he proceeded to Zaandam, a place a short distance from Amsterdam, and there hired out as a common laborer to a Dutch shipbuilder.
Notwithstanding his disguise it was well enough known who the stranger was. Indeed there was but little chance of Peter's being mistaken for a Dutchman. The way in which he flew about, and the terrible energy with which he did everything, set him quite apart from the easy-going, phlegmatic Hollanders.
To escape the annoyance of the crowds at Zaandam, Peter left the place, and went to the docks of the East India Company in Amsterdam, who set about building a frigate that he might see the whole process of constructing a vessel from the beginning. Here he worked for four months, being known among his fellow-workmen as Baas or Master Peter.
It was not alone the art of naval architecture in which Peter interested himself; he attended lectures on anatomy, studied surgery, gaining some skill in pulling teeth and bleeding, inspected paper-mills, flour-mills, printing-presses, and factories, and visited cabinets, hospitals, and museums, thus acquainting himself with every industry and art that he thought might be advantageously introduced into his own country.
From Holland Master Peter went to England to study her superior naval establishment. Here he was fittingly received by King William III., who had presented Peter while in Holland with a splendid yacht fully armed, and who now made his guest extremely happy by getting up for him a sham sea-fight.
Returning from England to Holland, Peter went thence to Vienna, intending to visit Italy; but hearing of an insurrection at home, he set out in haste for Moscow.
PETER'S REFORMS.—The revolt which had hastened Peter's return from the West was an uprising among the Strelitzes, a body of soldiers numbering 20,000 or 30,000, organized by Ivan the Terrible as a sort of imperial body-guard. In their ungovernable turbulence, they remind us of the Prætorians of Rome. The mutiny settled Peter in his determination to rid himself altogether of the insolent and refractory body. Its place was taken by a well-disciplined force trained according to the tactics of the Western nations.
The disbanding of the seditious guards was only one of the many reforms effected by Peter. So intent was he upon thoroughly Europeanizing his country, that he resolved that his subjects should literally clothe themselves in the "garments of Western Civilization." Accordingly he abolished the long-sleeved, long-skirted Oriental robes that were at this time worn, and decreed that everybody save the clergy should shave, or pay a tax on his beard. We are told that Peter stationed tailors and barbers at the gates of Moscow to cut off the skirts and to train the beards of those who had not conformed to the royal regulations, and that he himself sheared off with his own hands the offending sleeves and beards of his reluctant courtiers. The law was gradually relaxed, but the reform became so general that in the best society in Russia at the present day one sees only smooth faces and the Western style of dress.