Bibliography.—Letters and Papers of Peter the Great (Rus.) (St Petersburg, 1887, &c.); S. M. Solovev, History of Russia (Rus.), vols. xiv.–xviii. (St Petersburg, 1895, &c.); A. Brueckner, Die Europäisierung Russlands (Gotha, 1888); R. Nisbet Bain, The Pupils of Peter the Great, chs. i.–iv. (London, 1897), and The First Romanovs, chs. vii.–xiv. (London, 1905), E. Schuyler, Life of Peter the Great (London, 1884); K. Waliszewski, Pierre le Grana (Paris, 1897); V. N. Aleksandrenko, Russian Diplomatic Agents in London in the 18th Century (Rus.) (Warsaw, 1897–1898, German ed., Guben, 1898); S. A. Chistyakov, History of Peter the Great (Rus.) (St Petersburg, 1903), S. M. Solovev, Public Readings on Peter the Great (Rus.) (St Petersburg, 1903); Documents relating to the Great Northern War (Rus.) (St Petersburg, 1892, &c.). (R. N. B.)
PETER II. (1715–1730), emperor of Russia, only son of the
Tsarevich Alexius, was born on the 18th of October 1715.
From his childhood the orphan grand duke was kept in the
strictest seclusion. His grandfather, Peter the Great, systematically
ignored him. His earliest governesses were the wives
of a tailor and a vintner from the Dutch settlement; a sailor
called Norman taught him the rudiments of navigation; and,
when he grew older, he was placed under the care of a Hungarian
refugee, Janos Zeikin, who seems to have been a conscientious
teacher. During the reign of Catherine I. Peter was quite
ignored, but just before her death it became clear to those
in power that the grandson of Peter the Great could not be kept
out of his inheritance much longer. The majority of the nation
and three-quarters of the nobility were on his side, while his
uncle, the emperor Charles VI., through the imperial ambassador
at St Petersburg, Rabutin, persistently urged his claims. The
matter was arranged between Menshikov, Osterman and Rabutin,
and on the 18th of May 1727 Peter II., according to the
terms of the supposed last will of Catherine I., was proclaimed
sovereign autocrat. The senate, the privy council and the
guards took the oath of allegiance forthwith. The education
of the young prince was wisely entrusted to the vice-chancellor
Osterman. Menshikov, who took possession of Peter II. and
lodged him in his own palace on the Vasily island, had intended
to marry Peter to his daughter Maria; the scheme was frustrated
by his fall (Sept. 21, 1727); but Peter only fell into the
hands of the equally unscrupulous Dolgoruki, who carried
him away from Petersburg to Moscow. Peter’s coronation
was celebrated at that city on the 25th of February 1728.
He was betrothed to Catherine, second daughter of Alexis
Dolgoruki, and the wedding was actually fixed for the 30th
of January 1730; but on that very day the emperor died of
small-pox.
PETER III. (1728–1762), emperor of Russia, only son of
Charles Frederick, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and of Anne, eldest
surviving daughter of Peter the Great, was born at Kiel on the
21st of February 1728. In December 1741 he was adopted by
his aunt, Elizabeth Petrovna, as soon as she was safely established
on the Russian throne, and on the 18th of November
1742 was received into the Orthodox Church, exchanging his
original name of Karl Peter Ulrich for that of Peter Fedorovich.
On the 21st of August 1745, by the command of his aunt, he
married the princess Sophia Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst,
who exchanged her name for that of Catherine Aleksyeevna.
The union between a prince who physically was something
less than a man and mentally little more than a child,
and a princess of prodigious intellect and an insatiable love
of enjoyment, was bound to end in a catastrophe. But there
is no foundation for the stories of Peter’s neglect and brutality.
It took the spouses five years to discover that their tastes were
divergent and their tempers incompatible. Even when Peter III
succeeded his aunt on the 5th of January 1762, he paid off all
the debts that Catherine had contracted without inquiring what
they were for. On her birthday, in April, he made her a present
of domains worth £10,000 per annum, though he had already
readjusted her establishment on a truly imperial scale. A great
deal has been made of Peter’s infidelity towards his consort;
but the only one who really suffered from his liaison with the
ugly, stupid and vixenish countess Elizabeth Vorontsòva was
the unfortunate emperor. So far from being scandalized by
the juxtaposition of “Das Fräulein” in the Winter Palace,
Catherine accepted it as a matter of course, provided that her
own relations with the handsome young guardsman, Gregory
Orlov, were undisturbed. Nor was Peter’s behaviour to his
consort in public of the outrageous character we have been
led to suppose. Peter, in fact, was too good-natured and inconsequent
to pursue, or even premeditate, any deliberate course
of ill treatment. No personal wrongs, but the deliberate determination
of a strong-minded, capable woman to snatch the reins
of government from the hands of a semi-imbecile, was the cause
of Peter’s overthrow, and his stupendous blunders supplied
Catherine with her opportunity. Peter’s foreign policy was
the absolute reversal of the policy of his predecessor. He had
not been on the throne for two months when he made pacific
overtures to the wellnigh vanquished king of Prussia, whom he
habitually alluded to as “the king my master.” Peter’s
enthusiastic worship of Frederick resulted in a peace (May 5)
and then (June 19) in an offensive and defensive alliance
between Russia and Prussia, whereby Peter restored to Prussia
all the territory won from her by Russia during the last five
years at such an enormous expense of men and money, and
engaged to defend Frederick against all his enemies. This was
followed up by a whole series of menacing rescripts addressed
by Peter to the court of Vienna, in which war was threatened unless
Austria instantly complied with all the demands of the king
of Prussia. Finally he picked a quarrel with Denmark for not
accepting as an ultimatum the terms to be submitted by Russia
to a peace conference to meet at Berlin for the purpose of
adjusting the differences between the two powers. On the 6th
of July the Russian army received orders to invade Denmark
by way of Mecklenburg. This advance was only arrested,
when the opposing forces were almost within touch of each
other, by the tidings that a revolution had taken place at St
Petersburg, and that Peter III. was already a prisoner in the
hands of his consort. The coup d’état of the 9th of July 1762
properly belongs to the history of Catherine II. (q.v.). Here
only a few words must be said as to the mysterious death of
Peter at the castle of Ropsha, to which he was removed immediately
after his surrender. Here he remained from the evening
of the 9th to the afternoon of the 18th of July. At first Catherine
and her counsellors could not make up their minds what to do
with “the former emperor.” Imprisonment in Schlüsselburg
for life, or repatriation to Holstein, were proposed only to be
rejected as dangerous. The Orlovs had even stronger motives
than Catherine for suppressing the ex-emperor, for Gregory
Orlov aspired to win the hand as well as the heart of his imperial
mistress, and so long as Catherine’s lawful husband lived, even
in a prison, such a union would be impossible. The available
evidence points to the irresistible conclusion that on the afternoon
of the 18th of July 1762, Peter III., with his consorts connivance,
was brutally murdered at Ropsha by Alexius Orlov,
Theodore Baryatinski, and several other persons still unknown.
See R. N. Bain, Peter III, Emperor of Russia (London, 1902); V. A. Bilbasov, History of Catherine II. (Rus.), vol i. (Berlin, 1900). (R. N. B.)
PETER (Pedro), the name of several Spanish kings.
Peter I., king of Aragon (d. 1104), son of Sancho Ramirez, the third in order of the historic kings of Aragon, belonged to times anterior to the authentic written history of his kingdom; and little is known of him save that he recovered Huesca from the Mahommedans in 1096.
Peter II., king of Aragon (1174–1213), son of Alphonso II. and his wife Sancia, daughter of Alphonso VIII. of Castile, was born in 1174. He had a very marked and curious personal character. As sovereign of lands on both sides of the Pyrenees, he was affected by very different influences. In his character of Spanish prince he was a crusader, and he took a distinguished part in the great victory over the Almohades at the Navas de Tolosa in 1212. But his lands to the north of the Pyrenees brought him into close relations with the Albigenses. He was a favourer of the troubadours, and in his ways of life he indulged in the laxity of Provençal morals to the fullest extent. We are told in the chronicle written by Desclot soon after his time,
