Essay on Peter the Great

1550 Words4 Pages

Peter the Great was born on June 9, 1672. However, according to the Old Style calendar he was born on May 30, 1672. He was the son of father Tsar Alexis and mother Natalya Kirillovna Naryshkina. When Peter was four years old, his father Tsar Alexis died and was succeeded by Peter’s half-brother Fydor III. (Parrish, 2009) On the eve of his tenth birthday Peter the Great came to the throne despite the fact that he was still a minor. He grew up under the threat of a palace takeover and enjoyed little formal education. He was seven-foot-tall and his accomplishments would soon match that. (Hunt, Martin, Rosenwein & Smith, 2012)
Peter was only ten years old when the Kremlin saw an open and violent struggle of power between the Naryshkins and Miloslavskys. He had witnessed killings including his mother’s former guardian. These vicious and unnecessary killings created a deep hatred in Peter for the streltsy and revulsion against the Kremlin and its politics. Peter had spent the next seven years in the village of Preobrazhenskoe and his mother whom now served as a head of state. Peter then used his own devices to familiarize himself which in fact were military matters and Western technology. His mother’s death in 1694 and Ivan the Terrible’s death in 1696 made Peter the sole ruler of Russia. (Gupta, 2006) Despite the fact that he had no formal or complete education, Peter was beyond his years physically and mentally. He gained knowledge from mostly foreigners when it came to technical skills who worked for Russian service that had lived nearby. He spent a majority of his time in the German quarter in Moscow learning from the scholars from the German University. (Hutchinson, 2011) A new revolt of the streltsy took place in...

... middle of paper ...

...ore active policy on his southeastern frontier. Peter invaded Persian territory himself after hearing that the Ottoman Turks would take advantage of Persia's weakness and invade the Caspian region in 1722. In 1723 Persia surrendered the western and southern shores of the Caspian to Russia in return for military aid.
Peter the Great was tsar of Russia until 1725. He died in Saint Petersburg, Russia on February 8, 1725. He had left an empire that had stretched from Arkhangelsk on the White Sea to the Caspian, to the Baltic Sea, and to the Pacific Ocean. He had not nominated anyone despite the fact that he had back in 1722 issued a decree reserving to him the right to nominate his successor. His widow Catherine I, succeeded him to the temporary omission of his grandson Peter II. Back in 1724 Peter the Great had crowned Catherine as empress. (Alekseyevich, 2012)

Open Document