Peter (I) the Great

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Tsar of Russia from 1682 on the death of his half-brother Tsar Feodor III; he took full control of the government in 1689. He attempted to reorganize the country on Western lines. He modernized the army, had a modern fleet built, remodelled the administrative and legal systems, encouraged education, and brought the Russian Orthodox Church under state control. On the Baltic coast, where he had conquered territory from Sweden, Peter built a new city, St Petersburg, and moved the capital there from Moscow.

When Feodor III died in 1682 without an heir, the patriarch of Moscow (leader of the Russian Church) and leading noblemen chose the ten-year-old Peter to be tsar rather than his 16-year-old half-brother Ivan, who was mentally incapable of taking on the position. Ivan's older sister Sophia organized a coup by the palace guards that resulted in the coronation of Ivan and Peter as joint tsars, with Sophia as regent.

Taking power
Peter spent the next seven years with his mother in a village near Moscow. Although he received no formal education, he was physically and mentally far in advance of his years. He gained a mass of knowledge and technical skills, mainly from foreigners in Russian service who lived nearby; for example, he spent much time in the German quarter of Moscow, learning from the scholars of the German university there. In 1689, having been warned that Sophia was plotting against him, Peter forced her to resign. He let Ivan remain as official joint tsar, but was now able to rule the country alone.

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