Palmer Chapter 5

Elections of independent religious patriarchs in Russia

Sweedish genius

In 1613 a national assembly, hoping to settle the trouble, elected a 17-year-old boy as tsar, believing him young enough to have no connection with any of the warring faactions. The new boy tsar was Michael Romanov, of a gentry family, related by married to the old line of Ivan the Terrible.

The Hohenzollerns had earlier, in 1614, come to control the small state of Cleves on the Rhine at the Dutch border and a few other small terretories also in Western Germany

Brilliant and erratic Sweedish queen

Fredrick William, a.k.a. 'The Great Elector'

By a law of 1646 landowners were required to enter the names of all their peasants in government registers; peasants once so entered, together with their descendants, were regarded as attached to the estate on which they were registered.

Recovery & growth

In the 1650s the Russian patriarch undertook certain church reforms, mainly to correct mistranslations in Russian versions of the Bible and other sacred writings.

Stephen Razin leads rebellion of rural population in Russia

A law of 1675 allowed the lords to sell peasants without the land, and thus to move peasants like chattles at the will of the owner.

Amazing Sweedish militarist

Drives Ottoman forces out of Hungary

In 1697, the Sweedish king having died, Peter entered into an alliance with Poland and Denmark to partition the overseas possessions of the Sweedish house

Peter on his visit to Europe in 1697-1698 recreuited almost 1,000 experts for service in Russia

Tsar Peter the Great introduces European reforms in Russia

Streltsi: a king of Moscow gaurd, complsed of nobles & constantly active in politics

Turks yeild most of Hungary, plus Transylvania and Croatia, to Hapsbourgs; Ottoman empire pushed back permanently to Romania and the Balkans

Annexation of the old Spanish Netherlands, Milan, and Naples to Hapsbourgs after the War of the Spanish Succession

Drew a new frontier that remained unchanged on the Austrian side until the 20th century

"In 1742 the French obtained the elevation of their Bavarian ally to the imperial throne."

St. Petersburg is renamed Petrograd

Replacing (or taking back) St. Petersburg

Required all gentry to put their sons in school. He sent many abroad to study. He simplified the Russian alphabet. He edited the first newspaper to appear in Russia. He ordered the preparation of the first Russian book of ettiquete, teaching his subjects not to spit on the floor, scratch themselves, or gnaw bones at dinner, to mix socially with women, take off their hats, converse plesantly, and look at people while talking. The beard he took as a symbol of Muscovite backwardness; he forbade it in Russia, and himself shaved a number of men at his court. He forced people to attent evening parties to teach them manners. He had no respect for hereditary aristocracy, torturing or executing the higborn as readily as the peasants. As for religion, Peter was described as a pieous man who enjoued singing in church, but he was contemptous of ecclestical dignity, and in one wild revel paraded publicl with drunken companions in religious vestments and mocking the priests. Like many revolutionists of his time, he was aggressively secular.