Much more important in its consequences was Nikon's activity as an ecclesiastical reformer. During the Russian Dark Ages
Reforms of Nikon.
certain clerical errors had crept into the liturgical books and certain peculiarities had been adopted in the ritual. These had been detected and pointed out by learned ecclesiastics of Kiev, where some of the ancient learning of Byzantium had been preserved, and Nikon determined to make the necessary corrections. He determined also to introduce into the Church many desirable reforms. His project was approved by an ecclesiastical council and was supported by the tsar, but it met with violent opposition from a large section of the clergy, and it alarmed the ignorant masses, who regarded any alterations in the ritual, however insignificant they might be, as heretical and very dangerous to salvation. When put into execution the project produced in the Russian Church a great schism and numerous fantastic sects. The cruel persecutions instituted by the authorities with a view to securing conformity increased the number and fanaticism of the schismatics and heretics, and created among them a widespread belief that the reign of Antichrist, foretold in the Apocalypse, was at hand. In support of this idea, independently of the ecclesiastical innovations, many significant facts could be adduced. Numerous foreigners had been allowed to settle in Moscow and to build for themselves a heretical church, and their strange unholy customs had been adopted by not a few courtiers and great dignitaries. Matveyev, the most influential of the boyars, had married a foreigner who conversed freely with her husband's male friends, contrary to the Muscovite notions of respectability and decorum, and his house, in which the tsar was a frequent visitor, was furnished and decorated in foreign fashion. Books on mundane subjects, not at all conducive to the spiritual edification of the faithful, were read by the tsar's counsellors, and a theatre had been erected, in which the tsar often witnessed very unedifying dramas and ballets. Worst of all, the Orthodox tsar occasionally abandoned the decorous flowing robes of his venerated ancestors, and appeared publicly in the unseemly costume of heretical foreigners, whilst his consort, when carried through the streets in a litter, did not conceal her face from the public gaze. Such innovations troubled deeply the pious souls of the conservative Muscovites, and confirmed them in their repugnance to accept the ecclesiastical reforms. Though this original fanaticism gradually cooled and the rigorists had to make many concessions to the exigencies of practical life, a large section of the Russian people remained outside the official fold, so that at the present day, if we may credit the most competent authorities, the schismatics and heretics number more than twelve millions.
While the Muscovites of the upper classes were thus beginning to abandon their old oriental habits, their government was
Foreign relations.
preparing to make a political evolution of a similar kind. Notwithstanding the efforts of the Poles and the Military Orders to exclude Russia from the shores of the Baltic and keep her in a state of isolation, she was coming slowly into closer relations with central and western Europe. The emperor, the governments of England, Holland, France and Sweden, and even the Grand Turk made advances to the tsar. Some of them wished to gain him as an ally against their rivals, whilst others hoped to obtain from him commercial privileges and permission to trade directly with Persia. The political and the commercial proposals were alike received with coldness, because the native diplomatists had aims which could not be reconciled completely with the policy of any other country, and the native merchants were afraid of foreign competition. The negotiations gave, therefore, little tangible result, but they helped to prepare the way for the new order of things which was soon to be introduced by Alexius's son, Peter the Great.
Before reaching the new order of things, the country had to pass through an internal crisis similar to that which followed the death of Ivan the Terrible, but not nearly so severe. Alexius had been twice married and had left several children by each of his wives, and, as generally happened in such cases, a struggle for power ensued between the two rival families. The late tsar's
Theodore III., 1676-82.
eldest son, Theodore, was weak in health and died without male issue after an uneventful reign of six years (1676-82). As the second son, Ivan, next in the order of succession, was almost an imbecile, the third son, Peter, born of the second marriage, was proclaimed tsar, and his maternal relations became the dominant faction but their triumph was of very short duration. An ambitious, energetic sister of Ivan, well known in Russian history as Sophia
Sophia Alexeyevna.
Alexeyevna, instigated the stryeltsi ( strelitz ), as the troops of the unreformed standing army were called, to upset the arrangement. After making a tumult in the Kremlin and assassinating several of the men in power, they insisted
Ivan V. (II.), 1682-89.
that Ivan should be proclaimed tsar conjointly with Peter, and that Sophia should act as regent during the minority of the two young sovereigns. She accepted unhesitatingly the difficult and dangerous post, and ruled autocratically for seven years (1682-89), but this did not satisfy her ambition. Having discovered that Peter, who had reached the age of seventeen, was thinking of taking the administration into his own hands, she conspired against him with the commander of the stryeltsi and some of his maternal relations; but she was circumvented by the rival faction and interned in a convent, and Peter's mother was put in her place. The importance of these incidents, which are very characteristic of political life in the tsardom of Muscovy, will appear in the sequel.
If Peter really thought of taking the administration into his own hands, he very soon abandoned the idea and returned to
Peter the Great, 1689-1725.
the irregular suburban life he had led during his half-sister's regency—associating with foreigners who could teach him the mechanical arts of the West, drilling troops, building and sailing boats, forming projects for the creation of a great navy, indulging publicly in Bacchanalian revels and boisterous amusements not at all to the taste of his pious countrymen, and appearing in Moscow as Orthodox tsar only on great ceremonial occasions. Already the desire to make his country a great naval power was becoming his ruling passion, and when he found by experience that the White Sea, Russia's sole maritime outlet, had great practical inconveniences as a naval base, he revived the project of getting a firm footing on the shores of the Black Sea or the Baltic. At first he gave the preference to the former, and with the aid of a flotilla of small craft, constructed on a tributary of the Don, he succeeded in capturing Azov from the Turks. Greatly elated by this success, he recommended to the council of boyars the construction of a powerful fleet for carrying on war with the infidel, and he himself went abroad to learn more about shipbuilding and useful foreign inventions, and to prepare diplomatically the projected crusade. His foreign tour, during which he visited Germany, Holland, England, France and Austria, lasted nearly a year and a half, and was suddenly interrupted, when on his way from Vienna to Venice to study the construction of war-galleys, by the alarming news that the turbulent stryeltsi of Moscow had mutinied anew with the intention of placing Sophia on the throne. On arriving in Moscow he found that the mutiny had been suppressed and the ringleaders punished, but he considered it necessary to reopen the investigation and act with exemplary severity. Of the surviving mutineers over twelve hundred were executed, some of them by his own hand, and the entire corps was disbanded.