The czar and czarina observed the same plain manner of living; and had Charles been with them, the world might have beheld four crowned heads, with less pomp and state about them than a German bishop, or a cardinal of Rome. Never were luxury and effeminacy opposed by such noble examples.
It cannot be denied, that if one of our fellow-subjects had, from mere curiosity, made the fifth part of the journeys that Peter I. did for the good of his kingdom, he would have been considered as an extraordinary person, and one who challenged our consideration. From Berlin he went to Dantzic, still accompanied by his wife, and from thence to Mittau, where he protected his niece, the duchess of Courland, lately become a widow. He visited all the places he had conquered, made several new and useful regulations in Petersburg; he then goes to Moscow, where he rebuilds the houses of several persons that had fallen to ruin; from thence he transports himself to Czaritsin, on the river Wolga, to stop the incursions of the Cuban Tartars, constructs lines of communication from the Wolga to the Don, and erects forts at certain distances, between the two rivers. At the same time he caused the military code, which he had lately composed, to be printed, and erected a court of justice, to examine into the conduct of his ministers, and to retrieve the disorders in his finances; he pardons several who were found guilty, and punishes others. Among the latter was the great prince Menzikoff himself, who stood in need of the royal clemency. But a sentence more severe, which he thought himself obliged to utter against his own son, filled with bitterness those days, which were, in other respects, covered with so much glory.
Proceedings against prince Alexis Petrowitz.
Peter the Great, at the age of seventeen, had married, in the year 1689, Eudocia Theodora, or Theodorouna Lapoukin. Bred up in the prejudices of her country, and incapable of surmounting them like her husband, the greatest opposition he met with in erecting his empire, and forming his people, came from her: she was, as is too common to her sex, a slave to superstition; every new and useful alteration she looked upon as a species of sacrilege; and every foreigner, whom the czar employed to execute his great designs, appeared to her no better than as corruptors and innovators.