Peter the Great (65 page)

In January 1702, Sheremetev won an important victory over the unfortunate Schlippenbach near Dorpat at Erestfer in Livonia. The Swedish army of 7,000 had already gone into winter quarters when Sheremetev appeared with 8,000 Russian infantry and dragoons in winter clothing, supported by fifteen cannon mounted on sledges. In a four-hour battle, the Russians not only succeeded in driving the Swedes out of their winter camp, but inflicted over 1,000 casualties by Swedish admission (the Russians claimed 3,000, and admitted losing 1,000 of their own men). More important in a symbolic sense, the Russians took 350 Swedish prisoners and sent them to Moscow. Peter was overjoyed when he heard the news, declaring, "Thank God! We can at last beat the Swedes." He promoted Sheremetev to field marshal and sent him the blue-ribboned Order of St. Andrew and his own portrait set in diamonds. Sheremetev's officers were promoted, and each of the common soldiers received one rouble of the Tsar's newly coined money. In Moscow, church bells rang, cannon fired and a Te Deum was sung. Peter gave a great banquet in Red Square and ordered fireworks. When the Swedish prisoners arrived, Peter made a triumphal entry into the capital with the captives marching in his train. Russian spirits, depressed since Narva, began to rise.

The following summer, in July 1702, Sheremetev again attacked Schlippenbach in Livonia, this time at Hummelshof, and this time the Swedish force of 5,000 men was almost annihilated. Twenty-five hundred were killed or wounded and 300 captured, along with all the artillery and standards. The Russian losses were 800.

After Hummelshof, Schlippenbach's mobile army ceased to exist and Livonia was left undefended except for the static garrisons at Riga, Pernau and Dorpat. Sheremetev's army and especially his savage Kalmuck and Cossack horsemen were able to move at will through the province, burning farms, villages and towns, taking thousands of civilian prisoners. Thus did Patkul's war for the liberation of Livonia wreak devastation on his homeland. So many civilians were crowded into Russian camps that they were being bought and sold as serfs. Sheremetev, writing to Peter, asked for instructions:

I send Cossacks and Kalmucks to different estates for the confusion of the enemy. But what am I to do with the people I have captured? The prisons are full of them, besides all those that the officers have. There is danger besides because these people are so sullen and angry. . . Considerable money is necessary for their support, and one regiment would be too little to conduct them to Moscow. I have selected a hundred families of the best of the natives who are good carpenters, or are skilled in some other branch of industry— about four hundred souls in all—to send to Azov."

Among the prisoners was an illiterate seventeen-year-old girl whom Sheremetev did not send to Azov but kept in his own house. In time, this girl would rise. Martha Skavronskaya, as she was born, would join the ho
usehold of the great Prince Men
shikov, become the mistress of the Tsar, Peter's wife, and, finally, sovereign in her own right, Catherine I, Empress of Russia.

Along with his land victories, Peter, whose thoughts were never far from the sea, imaginatively devised a new means of attacking Swedish power fn the Baltic provinces: by the use of small boats on the lakes and rivers. If Sweden had incontestable supremacy in larger, conventional ships of war, Peter would build swarms of smaller ships which could overwhelm the enemy squadrons by sheer weight of numbers. He began by building small naval craft, propelled by oars and a single sail, on Lake Ladoga, Europe's largest lake, where Sweden maintained a naval squadron of brigantines and galleys. On June 20, 1702, at the southern end of the lake, 400 Russian soldiers in eighteen small boats attacked a Swedish squadron of three brigantines and three galleys. The Swedes were caught at a disadvantage; their ships were anchored and most of the crews were ashore pillaging a village when the Russian boats arrived. In the ensuing fracas, the Swedish flagship, a twelve-gun brigantine, was damaged, and the Swedes had to retreat. On September 7, the same Swedish squadron was again attacked near Kexholm, this time by thirty Russian boats. With the Russians harrying his ships like jackals, the Swedish Admiral Nummers found his position untenable and decided to evacuate the whole of Lake Ladoga. The withdrawal of his fleet down the Neva opened the lake to unchallenged Russian movement and made possible an important Russian victory that autumn at Noteborg.

Meanwhile, Peter's men were employing the same tactics on Lake Peipus, south of Narva. On May 31 that year, four larger Swedish vessels were attacked by nearly a hundred Russian boats. The Swedes beat them off and sank three, but had to withdraw to the northern half of the lake. On June 20 and July 21, two individual Swedish ships, running supplies and ammunition across the lake, were attacked by the Russian flotillas. One went aground and was abandoned after the captain threw his guns over the side. The other was boarded and then blew up. As a result, the Swedes withdrew completely from Lake Peipus in 1702. The following year, they returned in strength, sank twenty of the Russian boats and recaptured mastery of the lake. But in 1704, the Russians turned the tables once and for all. Catching the Swedish flotilla moored up the River Embach at Dorpat, the Russians threw a boom across the mouth of the river and placed artillery on the shore. Beyond the boom, 200 Russian boats waited for any Swedish ship which might break through. When the thirteen Swedish ships came down the river, the current carried them helplessly against the boom, where the Russian shore batteries began blowing them to pieces. The Swedish crews landed, desperately stormed one of the batteries and finally fought their way back to Dorpat. But one by one the ships were destroyed and the Swedish naval presence on Lake Peipus was annihilated. Later that year, both Narva and Dorpat were captured by the Russian army.

In the spring of 1702, Andrei Matveev picked up intelligence in Holland that the Swedes were planning a larger attack on Archangel that summer. To make sure that his country's only port remained in Russian hands, Peter resolved to go there himself. He set out with the twelve-year-old Tsarevich Alexis at the end of April on the thirty-day trip to the north, accompanied by five battalions of the Guard, 4,000 men in all. When he arrived, the defenses were put in order and the wait began. Almost three months passed while Peter occupied himself with shipbuilding, launching the
Holy Spirit
and the
Courier
and laying the keel of a new twenty-six gun warship, the
St. Elijah.

In August, the annual fleet of Dutch and English merchantmen arrived, far more numerous than usual, for all the trade which had previously come into Russia through the Swedish Baltic ports was now diverted to Archangel. Along with their goods, the thirty-five English and fifty-two Dutch ships brought news that the Swedes had abandoned any thought of an attack on Archangel that summer. Peter immediately departed for the south. Upon reaching the northern shore of Lake Ladoga, he signaled Sheremetev, who had just won his victory at Hummelshof in Livonia, and Peter Apraxin, who was harassing the Swedes in Ingria, to rendezvous with him and the Guards in order to seize absolute control of the lake by capturing the Swedish fortress of Noteborg at the point where Lake Ladoga empties into the Neva River.

Noteborg was a powerful fortress originally built by the city of Novgorod in the fourteenth century. The small island on which it was situated, just at the point where the Neva flows out of the lake and begins its forty-five-mile course to the sea, was shaped like a hazelnut; thus its Russian name, Oreshka, and its Swedish name, Noteborg. By dominating the mouth of the river at this vital juncture, the citadel controlled all the trade which passed from the Baltic up to Lake Ladoga and through the Russian river network to the interior. Whoever controlled Oreshka controlled trade as far as the Orient. In Russian hands, it served as a barrier to shield the Russian heartland from the Swedes. When the Swedes took it in 1611, it served them as a barrier to keep the Russians away from the Baltic. Now, its thick walls and galleries of brick and stone, its six great round white towers, were studded with 142 cannon. The Swedish garrison was small, only 450 men, but the swift current of the river made an enemy's approach by boat difficult, even without being subjected to the additional hazard of flying cannonballs. |

Peter was enthusiastic about the prospect of seizing the fortress.

"God gives time not to be wasted," he wrote to Sheremetev, instructing him to come in a hurry. Once the Russian soldiers and siege guns were in place, the isolated fortress, which had no hope of help from a relieving army, was doomed. The lake was covered with flotillas of small Russian boats poised to carry troops into an assault. The riverbanks—the south bank was 300 yards away— were lined with heavy siege mortars planted behind earthworks. A premature Russian assault with boats and scaling ladders was beaten off, but the mortars then began a steady devastating bombardment, methodically shattering the fortress walls. On the third day of the bombardment, the wife of the Swedish commandant sent a letter to the Russian camp asking that she and the wives of the Swedish officers be allowed to depart. Peter himself replied, explaining in an ironically gallant tone that he disliked the thought of separating the Swedish ladies from their husbands; of course they could leave, he said, on condition that they took their husbands with them. A week later, after ten days of bombardment, the survivors in the fortress surrendered.

Peter was ecstatic at this capture of the first important fortress to be taken from Sweden by his new army and his new guns made from the melted-down church bells of Russia. Writing that night to Vinius, he said, "In truth, this nut was very hard, but, thank God, it has been happily cracked. Our artillery did its work magnificently." As a symbol of its importance as the key to the Neva and thus the Baltic, he fixed the key to the fort surrendered to him by the Swedish commandant to the Western bastion of the fortress and renamed the fortress Schlusselburg, from the word "schliis-sel" (key) in German. The Tsar celebrated the triumph with another entry into Moscow, three new triumphal arches and a laurel wreath laid on his own head. Meanwhile, he ordered the damage to the citadel repaired and the defenses enlarged and strengthened with outerworks and quarters for up to 4,000 men. Alexander Menshikov was named governor of the rechristened fortress. Thereafter, Peter always had a special place in his heart for Schlusselburg. Whenever he was in the vicinity on October 22, the anniversary of its capture, he took visitors, or even his entire court, to the site for celebrations and a banquet.

The fall of Noteborg-Schltisselburg was a blow to Sweden. It had shielded the Neva and the whole of Ingria against Russian advance from the east. Charles, at the time far away in Poland, recognized the significance when the news was brought to him by an unhappy Count Piper. "Console yourself, my dear Piper," the King said calmly. "The enemy will not be able to drag the place away with them." Nevertheless, on other occasions the King said grimly that the Russians would pay dearly for Noteborg.

In the spring of the following year, 1703, with Charles still in Poland, Peter determined "not to lose the time granted by God" and to strike directly at establishing a Russian coastline on the Baltic. An army of 20,000 men under Sheremetev's command marched from Schlusselburg down through the forest on the north bank of the river toward the sea. Peter followed by water with sixty boats brought from Lake Ladoga. The Neva is only forty-five miles long and is less a river than a broad, fast-flowing chute from the lake to the Gulf of Finland. Along the way, there were no serious Swedish defenses. A s
ingle Swedish settlement, Nyens
kans, lay several miles upriver from the gulf. Although it was prosperous, with numerous busy mills, its fortifications were unfinished. Russian siege guns began their bombardment on May 11, 1703, and the following day the small garrison capitulated.

On the evening Nyenskans surrendered, word reached the Russian camp that a Swedish fleet was sailing up the gulf. Nine ships commanded by Admiral Nummers appeared off the mouth of the Neva and announced their arrival to their countrymen at Nyenskans by firing two signal guns. In order to deceive the Swedish seamen, the signal was answered immediately. Uncertain, Nummers sent a boat up the river to investigate. The boat was captured. Three days later, still more puzzled, Nummers ordered two of his smaller ships, a three-masted brigantine and a galley, to enter the river and find out what was happening. The two vessels moved upstream through the treacherous, fast-moving water as far as Vasilevsky Island, where they anchored for the night. Meanwhile, Peter and Menshikov had embarked two regiments of Guards in thirty large boats. Slipping down the Neva, they concealed themselves in the marshy waters among the numerous islands. At dawn on May 18, they suddenly appeared, rowing to attack the Swedish ships from all sides. The battle was fierce, with the Swedes firing their cannon to smash the Russian boats crowding around them, and the Russians replying with grenades and musket fire. Eventually, Peter and his men succeeded in boarding the two ships and capturing the few Swedes left alive. The ships and prisoners were brought up to Nyenskans, now renamed Sloteburg. Peter was elated at this first naval action in which he personally had participated, and, in consequence, both he and Menshikov were awarded the Order of St. Andrew.

With this victory, Peter gained—temporarily at least—the object for which he had declared war. He had occupied the length of the Neva River and regained access to the Baltic Sea. The province of Ingria was restored to Russia. In another triumphal entry into Moscow, one of the banners in the procession showed the map of Ingria with the inscription: "We have not taken the land of others, but the inheritance of our fathers."