Peter the Great (100 page)

In 1703, when Sultan Mustapha II was replaced by his brother Ahmed III, Tolstoy at first was allowed to go where he pleased; then came a new grand vizier and again he was restricted. Despairingly, the ambassador wrote to Moscow: "The new Vizier is very ill-disposed to me, and my wretched situation, my troubles and fears are more than before. Again no one dares to come to me and 1 can go nowhere. It is with great trouble that I can send this letter. This is the sixth Vizier in my time and he is the worst of all." The sixth vizier was soon replaced by the seventh, but Tolstoy's situation remained bleak.

In part, the ill-treatment of Tolstoy was due to the complaints of a Turkish envoy to Moscow about
his
treatment by the Russians. The Turkish ambassador sent to announce the accession of Ahmed

UJ had been politely received, but had been made to wait a long time before seeing the Tsar. This delay was deliberate: Peter had wanted to gain time and impress on the envoy the power of the Russian Tsar. In addition, Peter fended the envoy away from what he most wanted to see: the Russian fleet base at Azov and its building site at Voronezh. Peter wrote to the governor of Azov, "Do not go near Voronezh. Be as slow on the road as possible, the longer, the better. Do not allow him to see Azov on any account."

All of this rebounded on Tolstoy's head when the envoy sent a letter home describing his treatment in Russia. "What he [his counterpart, the Turkish ambassador in Russia] has written, I do not know," said Tolstoy, "but they ill-treat me in a frightful way, and they shut us all up in our house and allow no one either to go out or to come in. We have been some days almost withouot food because they let no one out to buy bread, and it was with difficulty that I succeeded by great presents in getting permission for one man to go out to buy victuals."

Tolstoy also worried that one of his own staff would convert to Mohammedanism and then betray his intelligence service. Eventually, such a case did occur, and the Ambassador dealt with it summarily:

I am in great fear of my attendants [he wrote to Moscow]. As I have been living here for three years they have gotten acquainted with the Turks and have teamed the Turkish language. Since we are now in great discomfort, I fear that they will become impatient on account of the imprisonment and will waver in their faith because the Mohammedan faith is very attractive to thoughtless people. If any Judas declare himself, he will do great harm because my people have seen with which of the Christians I have been intimate and who serves the Tsar . . . and if any one rums renegade and tells the Turks who has been working for the Tsar, not only will our friends suffer, but there will be harm to all Christians. I follow this with great attention and do not know how God will turn it. I have had one affair like this. A young secretary, Timothy, having got acquainted with the Turks, thought of turning Mohammedan. God helped me to learn about this. I called him quietly and began to talk to him and he declared to me frankly that he wished to become a Mohammedan. Then I shut him up in his bedroom till night, and at night he drank a glass of wine and quickly died. Thus God kept him from such wickedness.

As time went on, Tolstoy had other troubles. His salary failed to arrive, and in order to make ends meet, he was forced to sell some of the sable skins he had been given to use as gifts. He wrote to the Tsar begging for his pay and also for permission to resign and come home. Peter wrote back refusing, telling him his services were essential. Tolstoy struggled along, bribing, intriguing, doing his best. In 1706, he reported that "two of the most prudent pashas have been strangled at the instigation of the Grand Vizier, who does not like capable people. God grant that all the rest may perish the same way."

During Bulavin's Cossack rebellion on the Don and the Swedish invasion of Russia, Peter feared that the Sultan might be tempted to try to retake Azov. His instinct was to appease, and he gave orders to be sure that no Turk or Tatar prisoners were still being held in Russian prisons. Tolstoy disagreed with this approach. He felt that the better policy was to be forceful, even threatening, with the Turks, in order to keep them quiet. Events seemed to bear him out. In 1709, the spring and summer of Poltava, the Turks not only failed to intervene on the side of Sweden, but talk of war with Russia and rumors of the appearance of a Russian fleet at the mouth of the Bosphorus caused panic in the streets of Constantinople.

Thus, for eight difficult years Tolstoy successfully upheld his master's interests and preserved the peace between Russia and Turkey. Then, in 1709, Charles XII, fleeing Poltava, arrived within the Sultan's dominions. Thereafter, four times within three years, the Sultan declared war on Russia.

When Charles XII crossed the Bug River and entered the territory of the Ottoman Empire, he became the Sultan's guest. The King and the Cossack Hetman Mazeppa had sought asylum within the Sultan's dominions; this, according to the religion of Islam, imposed on Ahmed III the duty to receive and protect them. So strongly was this obligation felt that when word reached Constantinople of the delaying tactics of the local pasha which had resulted in the massacre of the stranded Cossacks on the far side of the river, the Sultan contemplated sending the pasha a silken cord.

Once he knew that the King of Sweden was within his empire, the Sultan moved quickly to make amends. Within a few days, the Seraskier of Bender, Yusuf Pasha, arrived with a formal welcome and a wagon train of special provisions. Soon, the famished Swedish survivors were feasting on melons, mutton and excellent Turkish coffee. Yusuf Pasha also brought the Sultan's suggestion, tinged with the weight of command, that his guests move to Bender on the Dniester River, 150 miles farther southwest. At this new site, Charles pitched camp in a row of handsome Turkish tents set in a meadow lined with fruit trees along the bank of the Dniester. In this pleasant country now called Bessarabia, the restless King of Sweden was to spend three years.

At the time he moved there, Charles could have no inkling of this future. The King's intention had been to return to Poland and take command of the armies of Krassow and Stanislaus as soon as his foot was healed. In Poland, he also hoped to rendezvous with the troops under Lewenhaupt which he had left behind at Perevoluchna. In addition, he had sent orders to the governing Council in Stockholm to raise new regiments and send them across the Baltic. Nature and politics conspired against him. The wound healed slowly, and it was another six weeks before the King was able to mount a horse. During this recuperation, he learned that his eldest sister, the widowed Duchess of Holstein, Hedwig Sophia, had died in Stockholm during an epidemic of measles. For days, the bachelor King could not stop weeping. Shutting himself in his tent, he refused to see even his closest comrades; for a while he even refused to believe the report, although the news had been transmitted in an official letter of condolence from the Swedish Council. To his younger sister, Ulrika, he wrote that he hoped that the "too terrible, quite unexpected rumor which totally numbed me" would be contradicted. Later, he wrote to Ulrika that he would have been happy if he had been the first of the three to die, and prayed now that at least he would be the second.

Another sorrow quickly followed. Mazeppa, the aging Hetman who had ruinously cast his lot with Charles before Poltava, had been carried from Charles' camp to a house in the town of Bender, where during the hot summer days his condition worsened. Charles remained faithful: When an offer from Peter arrived, suggesting that the Tsar would free Count Piper if Charles would hand over Mazeppa, the King refused. On September 22, 1709, Mazeppa died, and Charles hobbled on crutches to attend the funeral.

Blow followed upon blow. In quick succession, Charles learned that Lewenhaupt had surrendered at Perevoluchna, that Russian troops under Menshikov were flooding Poland, that Stanislaus and Krassow had retreated, that Augustus had broken the Treaty of Altranstadt and invaded Poland to reclaim his crown, that Denmark had reentered the war against Sweden and that Sweden itself was invaded by a Danish army. Meanwhile, Peter's Russian troops were marching through the Baltic provinces, occupying Riga, Pernau, Reval and Vyborg. Why did Charles not return to Sweden to take command? The journey would not have been easy. Bender was 1,200 miles south of Stockholm. The route through Poland was closed by the soldiers of Peter and Augustus. A recurrence of the plague had caused the Austrians to seal all their frontiers. Louis XIV repeatedly offered a ship to bring Charles home—the Sun King was eager to have the Swedish thunderbolt making mischief again in Eastern Europe behind the backs of his English, Dutch and Austrian opponents—but Charles worried about being seized by pirates. And if he accepted passage from the French—or even from the English or Duth—what would be the price? Almost certainly, it would mean choosing sides in the War of the Spanish Succession.

In fact, once his disappointment at being unable to leave immediately for Poland had passed, Charles actually preferred to stay in Turkey. As he saw it, his presence inside the Ottoman Empire provided him with an impressive new opportunity. If he could arouse the Sultan to make war on the Tsar and join him in one successful southern offensive, Peter might still be beaten and all that Sweden had lost might be regained. Beginning in the autumn of 1709, Charles' agents, Poniatowski and Neugebauer, plunged into the murky politics of Constantinople, toiling to undo Tolstoy's work.

Their task was not easy. The Turks did not want to fight. This general feeling was reinforced by the news of Poltava, which had made an enormous impression in Constantinople: How long now would it be before the Tsar's fleet appeared at the mouth of the Bosphorus? Faced with these dangers, many of the Sultan's advisors would have been happy to do as Peter demanded and expel the Swedish troublemak
er from their empire. "The King
of Sweden," reads a contemporary Turkish document, "has fallen like a heavy weight on the shoulders of the Sublime Porte." On the other hand, there were parties inside the Ottoman Empire who were eager for war with Russia. The most prominent was the violent Russophobe Khan of the Crimea, Devlet Gerey, who had been stripped of his right to tribute from Russia by the treaty of 1700. He and his horsemen were thirsting for a chance to renew the great raids on the Ukraine which had been so lucrative in booty and prisoners. In addition, Neugebauer was so fortunate as to gain the ear of Sultan Ahmed's mother. This lady's imagination had already been captured by the hero legend of Charles XII; now Neugebauer made her see how her son could help her "lion [Charles] devour the Tsar."

Another element was necessary to Charles' plan. It was not enough simply to induce the Sultan to go to war; the campaign must be successfully fought and the right objectives achieved. Charles understood that in order to have a voice in these matters, he needed to command a fresh Swedish army on the continent. Even as the Ottoman army was mobilizing, Charles was writing urgently to Stockholm "to ens
ure the safe transport into Pom
erania of the aforesaid regiments in good time, that our part in the forthcoming campaign may not fall to the ground."

In Stockholm, the Council was astonished, even aghast, at this request. Already in November 1709, after Poltava, a newly emboldened Denmark had broken the Peace of Travendal and reentered the war against Sweden. Danish troops had invaded southern Sweden. To the Swedish Council, confronting immediate threats to the homeland along with the crushing burden of paying for a war which seemed already lost, the King's command that another expeditionary force be sent to Poland seemed madness. A message was sent to Charles that no troops could be spared.

In the end, ironically, Neugebauer and Poniatowski were successful in
Constantinople while Charles XII
failed in Stockholm. The Ottoman Empire was persuaded to go to war, but none of the proud Swedish regiments which might have steeled the ranks of the Turkish army and given weight to the voice of the Swedish King were present. Although he was incontestably the greatest commander within the empire, and although the Turkish army in general and the Janissaries in particular idolized the warrior King, Charles was not a formal ally of the Turks and played no active part in the coming military campaign. Because of this, his last and perhaps his greatest opportunity to defeat Peter crumbled into dust.

It was not only the Turks who were concerned about the presence of Charles XII in the Ottoman Empire. Ever since the King's arrival, Peter had pressed through Tolstoy for Charles' surrender of expulsion. As the months passed, the tone of his messages became increasingly peremptory, and this played directly into the hands of the war party in Constantinople and Adrianople. The Tsar's categorical demand that the Sultan reply by October 10, 1710, to his request that Charles be expelled from Turkey was considered insulting to the dignity of the Shadow of God. This, following, the persuasions of the Khan, the Swedes, the French and the Sultan's mother, tipped the balance. On November 21, in a solemn session of the Divan, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. Tolstoy was the first to suffer. Under Turkish law, ambassadors had no immunity in wartime, and Tolstoy was seized, stripped of half his clothes, set on an aged horse and paraded through the streets to confinement in the Seven Towers.

With the declaration of war came a new Grand Vizier, Mehemet Baltadji, appointed for the express purpose of making war on Russia. He was a curious choice, described by a contemporary as a dull-witted, blundering old pederast who had never been a serious soldier. Yet he decided on an offensive campaign. That winter, as soon as the Khan's horsemen could make ready, a mobile Tatar army would strike north from the Crimea into the