32.3 Europe: a.d. 1701 to 1800  (Page 26/28)

Peter had gained his opening to the Baltic by taking Fort Noeteborg (renamed Schluesselburg) and he soon controlled the ancient area of Ingria, along with the area where he was soon to build a city, St. Petersburg, at the mouth of the Neva. That city is at the same latitude as Hudson's Bay and when built, New York was already 77 years old and Boston 73. The first digging for the new city was in May, 1702 on Hare Island. Although still occasionally under attack by Swedes, the new city received its f irst merchant ships for trade in 1703. The hardships of building a fortress and a city on the swamps were stupendous, requiring thousands of laborers, who were drafted from all parts of the empire

Cossacks, Siberians, Tatars, Finns and Russians. Scurvy, dysentery, malaria, etc. cut them down by the hundreds, perhaps overall some 30,000 dying. All the stone and most of the timber and all food was imported from inland. People, from nobles and merchants down to peasants, were forced there to live. Fires were common and the czar himself of ten led the firefighters. Floods were also frequent and devastating, with the entire town sometimes under water. In the area around St. Petersburg, most of the original Finns had been eliminated by war and plague

The czar had to control Livonia and Estonia to safeguard his new city and to accomplish this while still administering the entire country meant that he had to travel constantly.

Except in winter, travel was extremely difficult and hazardous,- with rutted or muddy roads, worn out bridges, crude ferries and fords and few fresh horses. His whole concern was war and taxes to support war. The money came from an increasing number of state monopolies, with the state taking control of production and sale of innumerable commodities from alcohol to chessmen, salt and furs

In the interval af ter Peter defeated the Swedish king at Narva and after the cessation of the War of the Spanish Succession, Peter tried to make deals with any and every European power for help against further Swedish advances, but he had no luck. And then Karl XII struck again with 26,000 of his own men and almost 42,000 men from Saxony, leaving the latter country in August of 1707, going through Protestant Silesia. Ahead of that army, however, in western Poland, Cossacks and Kalmuks had ridden, laying waste the countryside and poisoning the wells with dead, uncooperative Poles. All Russian soldiers were withdrawn from western Poland to a line near Minsk. Then, while waiting for Karl's forces, Peter married his Lithuanian, low-born mistress of many years, Martha Skavronskaya, who had taken the name Ekaterina (Catherine). Karl came relentlessly on through the winter over the frozen Vistula and soon captured Grodno, leaving Poland and entering Lithuania. Then the tides of war wavered toward one side and then the other, but gradually the battle lines shifted more southward towards the Ukraine and away from Moscow.