Thus Peter was by no means weak when he went to war, though he was probably no more aware of his advantages at first than other contemporaries. In his agreements with Augustus, he had demanded little, giving most of the Baltic provinces to Poland and asking only for a small coastal strip, basically Russia's pre-1617 territory. He had built a new army and navy, and was quickly learning how to mobilise resources, but he had only some experience of success and admired the alleged political and military skills of Augustus.The question that to some extent still eludes us is, however, what did he want to accomplish? The three wars of Peter's reign, the Azov Campaign, the Northern War and the Persian Campaign, were all different, but they had one thing in common, the desire for ports. This desire does not imply that Peter was trying to found a commercial empire, but it does seem to have been high on his priorities in all three cases.
The Azov Campaign is the most difficult to explain simply because of the character of record-keeping in seventeenth-century Russia. The Russian state kept detailed records of decrees, orders, military and tax rosters, diplomatic negotiations and judicial proceedings, but not of the discussions leading up to decisions. Thus we can only infer Peter's motives. In joining the Holy League, Sofia had demanded of the Ottomans access to the Black Sea at the Dnieper and Don and the destruction of the Crimean Khanate. Golitsyn's military strategy, a frontal attack on the peninsula, seems to vindicate the seriousness of these demands. After her overthrow, the Naryshkin government moderated these demands, requiring not the destruction ofthe Khanate but only a cessation of raids, and access to the Black Sea by the two rivers. The Naryshkins, however, were too indecisive to actually realise their presumed aims. Peter's military moves, a main blow at Azov with a secondary campaign on the Dnieper under Boris Sheremetev and Hetman Mazepa, fitted the Russian demands, which now gave priority to the river mouths. At the same time Russia's post-1667 borders had placed her in direct confrontation with the Ottomans. Not only were the Crimeans closer but from Kiev it was only a short journey across the steppe to the Ottoman forts at Bender and Khotin, the gates to the Balkans. The competition for power and territory was unavoidable, and in addition the religious factor is not to be discounted. Peter's propaganda and diplomacy stressed Christian solidarity against Islam, and given Peter's real ifrather unconventional piety, as well as the culture of the age, these were serious motives. All this being said, we still have to infer Peter's reasons primarily from his actions.
The Northern War is another situation entirely, for there are many, if often imperfect, testimonies to Peter's motives. During the Great Embassy of 16978 a number of the Europeans who met Peter and his entourage recorded some discussion about acquiring a Baltic port, and diplomats back in Moscow picked up the same talk. We have nothing from Peter's hand that records this notion, but the envoy of Peter's new ally Augustus II, Georg Carl von Carlowitz, reported Peter's words, that the tsar felt that he was unjustly deprived of a Baltic port, both for his navy and for commerce, and wanted to revenge himself on Sweden. The latter remark may have referred to the insult Peter felt he had received at Riga in 1697 but also pointed to another issue that surfaced in the war and in Peter's private correspondence as well as public propaganda. The lands at the head of the Gulf of Finland, Ingria and the Kexholm province, had been part of Novgorod and then of Russia since the beginning of recorded history and were lost only in the Time of Troubles. The population remained to a large extent Orthodox (though most of it was probably Finnish speaking) after 1617. Thousands had left for Russian territory, fleeing Lutheran pastors and Swedish landlords, and new, Lutheran, settlers from the Finnish interior came to replace them in many areas. Of course the ethnic structure of the area per se was a matter of indifference in seventeenth-century Europe, but the whole story served as a reminder of the territory's Russian past. In the original treaty with Augustus II these territories were to be Russia's prize.
The problem with Ingria was that it had no port, so it is not surprising that once he declared war on Sweden in August 1700, Peter marched not into Ingria but towards Narva, in Estonia. This move disturbed Augustus II, since the treaty with Peter gave him all of Livonia and Estonia (including Narva) in the event of victory over Sweden. There was nothing Augustus could do, however, and the move did have a certain military logic, for Narva was more important a fortress than any ofthe small Swedish positions in Ingria. In the event Charles XII (with Anglo-Dutch naval help) knocked Denmark out of the war and turned towards Estonia. Peter's army suffered its greatest defeat before Narva on 19 /30 November, an event that forced him to change direction, and in 1702-3 he captured Ingria, from the head of the Neva at Noteborg (Oreshek, after 1703 Shlissel'burg) to Estonia, with the island of Retusaari in the gulf itself. At the mouth of the Neva Peter began to build St Petersburg, precisely the naval and commercial port he had wanted. Retusaari became Kronslot (Kronstadt), his main naval base in the Baltic. Peter's subsequent behaviour and statements underscored the centrality of the new city in his plans. During 1706-8 he made a number of overtures to Charles XII for a compromise peace. Though he had captured Narva and Dorpat in 1704, he offered to surrender all of his conquests with the exception of St Petersburg and its immediate vicinity. Charles rejected the offers, but they show what Peter considered absolutely essential. Nothing that Peter did or said after Poltava contradicts the priority given to the new port. Peter took Viborg in 1710 to provide a better defensive perimeter to the new city on the north-west, and the capture of Reval and Riga served the same aim, as well as expanding Russia's naval and commercial possibilities. Peter left Baltic society in the hands of the local nobility and encouraged the towns to act as ports for the empire as a whole. Similarly he had no interest in Finland west of Viborg, for the country was too poor, lacked good ports and significant commerce, and was not essential for the defence of Petersburg.
The priority given to the port was perhaps the basis of Peter's commitment to the war with Sweden, but it was not the only element. He seems to have really felt that the losses from the Smuta needed to be rectified. In 1716 he commissioned Shafirov to write a long defence of his policies in the war, which he personally edited and supplemented,[98] and had it translated into German and other European languages The thrust of the text was that he was only rectifying past injustice, the seizure of Ingria and Karelia in the Time of Troubles and also Sweden's failure to uphold Russian claims to Livonia, which it had (he argued) recognised in the 1564 truce with Ivan the Terrible. The argument was that Russia, not the dynasty, had claim to all this, and indeed Shafirov even said that the 'Russian empire' (rossiiskaia imperiia) had such claims, thus using the term five years before Peter adopted the title of Emperor (imperator). In claiming the territory for Russia, Shafirov and Peter did two things. They abandoned the older Russian claims to territory based on patrimonial inheritance: Ivan IV had claimed that Livonia was his personal inherited estate (votchina) as a
Riurikovich, as he and his ancestors had also done in the cases of Smolensk and Polotsk. The authors also fit their claims into the then usual definitions of a just war. Samuel Pufendorf, who came to be Peter's favourite European historian and political thinker, alleged two sorts of just war, defence against an attempt against one's life and property (defensive war) and an attempt to recover things lost unjustly in previous conflicts (offensive war) [Pufendorf, De Officio hominis et civis, 1682, bk. II, chapter 16.2]. They also followed Pufendorf in pointing to Charles XII's attempt to stir up rebellion in Russia, something both Pufendorf and Grotius had condemned as inflicting more harm on the enemy than humanity in warfare allowed [Pufendorf, De Officio, II, 16.12]. The Russians did not, however, follow Pufendorf in all respects. Pufendorf believed in the interests of states, and that these interests were the main motives of their policies, as he described in his history of Europe (translated into Russian in 1710). Peter and Shafirov also got from Pufendorf their idea of Sweden's main motive in the war, to keep Russia ignorant and weak, to prevent it from learning the arts of war of the West. They do not allege any such state interests for Russia, however, perhaps only because the need for a port coincided so neatly with the recovery of unjustly taken territories. It is also the case that European monarchs still preferred to downplay or just plain conceal their own state interests while emphasising those of their opponents. Shafirov's tract followed this example.
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