page_title: Military history of the Russian Empire
section_title: Siege of Azov, the Grand Embassy, and the Streltsy rebellion
hierarchical_section_title: Military history of the Russian Empire / Peter the Great / Siege of Azov, the Grand Embassy, and the Streltsy rebellion
context_page_description: The military history of the Russian Empire encompasses the history of armed conflict in which the Russian Empire participated. This history stretches from its creation in 1721 by Peter the Great, until the Russian Revolution, which led to the establishment of the Soviet Union. Much of the related events involve the Imperial Russian Army, Imperial Russian Navy, and from the early twentieth century, the Imperial Russian Air Service.
context_section_description: In 1695, Peter conducted his first major operation with his fledgling military. Having assumed control in 1694, Peter inherited the Holy League's war with Turkey. Under Ottoman power, Turkey controlled the area of the Crimean Tatars at the mouth of the Sea of Azov. The Turks and the Russian had been in on-and-off wars since 1568, vying to control the area around the Black Sea. Previous attempts to take the Crimea directly had failed, so Peter opted to lay siege to Turkish-controlled fortress of Azov at the mouth of the river Don. He envisioned a two-part plan; first, acting as a diversion, a large cavalry force would move towards Turkish forts on the lower Dnieper. Meanwhile, a smaller infantry force moved down the Don river, laying siege to Azov in the summer of 1695. In a characteristic show of bravado Peter the Great arrived as an artilleryman.
  Russian forces first had to take a pair of watchtowers guarding heavy chains restricting Russian movements on the water, during which a successful sortie was launched by the Turks that captured many of the Russian siege engines. The Russians accepted the losses and laid down a steady bombardment onto the fort. However, the fort was constantly receiving supplies by water, and the attrition was hurting Peter's forces more than the Turks. After three months, Peter was forced to withdraw.
  Although his first attack on Azov proved to be a farce, Peter was tenacious. He understood that the reason he had lost the first battle was Turkish control of the sea, so Peter commissioned the construction of a large fleet at Voronezh on the upper Don. He worked vigilantly himself, using the shipbuilding skills he had learned earlier in his life to great effect. Thus, he was able to launch a fleet of 30 seagoing vessels and over 1,000 transports north of Azov in April 1696. This fleet accompanied a force of 70,000 infantry, twice that which Peter had brought with him during the first siege, and successfully cut off the flow of Turkish supplies. After a month of attrition, a force of 2,000 cossacks stormed the fort and, although rebuffed, captured part of its outer workings. The Turks, accepting defeat, ceded the fort to the Russians on July 18, 1696.
  The events at Azov proved to Peter the value of a sea-borne fleet. Although his predecessors had built primitive fleets on an as-needed basis, the second siege of Azov was their first successful application. Thus, with a need for shipbuilding knowledge and a desire to develop a mighty coalition against the Turks, Peter organized a 250-man expedition for Europe in March 1697. Although Peter traveled incognito as Peter Mikhailov he fooled no one; the six-foot eight tsar was literally heads and shoulders above others, although his disguise spared him having to partake in court formalities. He traveled through Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands, Prussia, England, and the Habsburg Empire, enlisting himself as a workman in many different docks and factories across the continent. For 18 months, Peter ingested everything he could about European craftsmanship, especially navigation, as well as European society in general. His trip was stopped short of a planned passage through Italy by news of a streltsy rebellion at home, and Peter rushed back to Russia in 1698, along with 750 foreigners he had recruited for Russian industry. The hoped-for political gains of the embassy turned out to be dubious at best, but the military gains were enormous.
  Peter returned to Moscow to find that the rebellion had already been dealt with. He proceeded to interrogate the streltsy, torturing many into revealing that they sympathized with his half-sister and former tsarina Sophia. Thousands of strelets were executed and hung in public, and Sophia, who had been exiled to a monastery near Moscow, was now forced to become a nun. Peter had the bodies of hundreds of streltsy hung outside her window to remind her of the consequences of confronting him. He also ended his marriage with Eudoxia Lopukhina, who sympathized with the streltsy, and forced her to become a nun as well.
caption: Morning of the execution of the streltsy, by Vasily Surikov
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