There are many blank spots and ridiculous inconsistencies in history. But the phenomenon of Peter I stands alone here. The first 28 years of his life are especially dimly lit. Even the very origin of Peter I is not as obvious as it seems at first glance. The obvious anti-Russian emphasis of his policy, rejection of Orthodox traditions and the destruction of the centuries-old structure of Russian society have no unambiguous explanation. After all, that's what he and the tsar, to defend the ancient Russian values. That is why he and the Sovereign Father, to protect his people. And Peter hated not only Russia, not only his subjects, but also his own crowned predecessors. There were persistent rumors among the people about the non-Russian origin of Peter. They called him the Antichrist, the German foundling. The difference between Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and his son was so striking,that many historians had suspicions of the non-Russian origin of Peter. Moreover, the official version of Peter's origin was too unconvincing. She left and leaves more questions than answers. Many researchers have tried to lift the curtain of a strange lack of understanding about the Peter the Great phenomenon. However, all these attempts instantly fell under the strictest taboo of the ruling house of the Romanovs. The Peter phenomenon remained unsolved.
This is how we, through the efforts of official history, should imagine Peter I in childhood.
But, as studies by our remarkable contemporary Alexander Kas show, this was not entirely true. Or rather, not at all …
In an incomprehensible way, until the middle of the 19th century, not a single work was published with a complete historiography of Peter the Great. The first who decided to publish a complete scientific-historical biography of Peter was the remarkable Russian historian Nikolai Gerasimovich Ustryalov. In the Introduction to his work "The History of the Reign of Peter the Great", he sets out in detail why until now (mid-19th century) there is no scientific work on the history of Peter the Great.
The complete history of Peter written by his contemporaries simply does not exist. If any modern history teacher tells you that everything is known about Peter I - DO NOT BELIEVE! ABOUT PETER THE FIRST NOTHING IS DEFINITELY KNOWN, at least, THE FULL STORY OF PETER THE I WAS NOT EXISTING TO THE MIDDLE 19th century.
Let's talk about Peter's childhood. Here, probably, we will find a lot of reliable material. Everyone should know about his birth. And what we see … Ustryalov rummaged through all the available archives, devoted almost his entire life to his research, but he could not shed light on the origin of the phenomenon of Peter. He states with regret: “In the history of man is not an ordinary person, his very infancy is curious for posterity, who wants to know whether signs of a great soul were not found in children's games? Adolescence is even more curious when mental powers begin to develop. Unfortunately, contemporaries left us a few, jerky notes about Peter's youth. In addition, there are several later legends … Until the age of fifteen Peter, until the time about which he himself speaks with posterity and reveals his secret thoughts,we do not have the means to follow the gradual development of his mental abilities, and we can only guess …"
Honest and hardworking historian Ivan Zabelin in his fundamental work "Life of the Russian Tsars" writes with surprise that not a single document remains about the birth of Peter. He was especially struck by the fact that there was no official news of the birth of the anointed of God in the birth registers of the Patriarch and the Moscow Metropolitan. He rummaged through all the church archives and found nothing.
Then Zabelin reports that there was no celebration in Moscow on the occasion of the birth of the tsarevich. Not on the day Peter was born, not the next day, not after. Feel all the utopianism of the situation: the prince was born - and no celebrations are observed.
Promotional video:
Historian M. M. Bogoslovsky is trying to find at least some justification for this incident: “It was impossible to arrange the usual“delivery”table the next day after Peter's birth, on Friday, May 31st: it required extensive preparations, and meanwhile, on Saturday, June 1, it was impossible there was a ceremonial feast on the eve of the holiday, but on Sunday, the 2nd, there was already a spell before Peter's Lent.
So in between the birth of the prince and missed, lack of time.
Celebrations on the occasion of the birth of the tsarevich are a MANDATORY CANON, wide celebrations began immediately, on the birthday. And on the first Sunday after birth, christening celebrations are scheduled, regardless of any fasts, as evidenced, for example, by a contemporary of Tsar Alexei, diplomat Carlyle: "For baptism they always appoint the first Sunday after birth, they perform it with many ceremonies."
Therefore, the absence of any information about the solemn baptism of the prince is an absolutely inexplicable thing.
With all this, the exact place of birth of Peter I is not known.
MM Bogoslovsky notes with surprise: “There were different legends about the place of his birth, which was not indicated exactly in the official news: the village of Izmailovo and the village of Kolomenskoye were indicated.
These are the miracles! The exact place and date of birth is written about any peasant in the church registers. And then the king was somehow overlooked! The most interesting thing is that in the discharge notes there are two conflicting records about the hour of the birth of the tsarevich. But this cannot be, the category is one, and the exact date should be ONE. Before us are forged documents. We agreed on the day, but did not have time for an hour. At the same time, the main question, where exactly the future king was born, remained unanswered.
By the way, information about the birth of Peter in the Kremlin was introduced into Russian historiography by Gerhard Miller personally, as reported by I. I. Golikov in his History of Peter I. Black holes in the biography of Peter were added by different "historians" at different times, so there were disagreements that Gerhard Miller diligently corrected.
The baptism of our hero is also a detective story.
MM Bogoslovsky reports: “The tsar's confessor was baptized by the archpriest of the Annunciation Cathedral, Andrei Savinov; the recipients of the font were Tsarevich Fyodor Alekseevich and the sovereign's sister Princess Irina Mikhailovna."
Immediately insoluble questions arise: why did not the Patriarch baptize Peter? Why some kind of archpriest? After all, the baptism of the anointed of God is a purely patriarchal affair, in extreme cases, the Metropolitan of Moscow. But in the archives of Patriarch Pitirim there was not a word about this event. And the underage Fedor could not baptize his brother - this is prohibited by the canon.
But there is other news about that mysterious baptism: “The Tsarevich was baptized on June 29, on Saturday, on the feast of the Supreme Apostles Peter and Paul, in the Chudov Monastery, by Patriarch Joachim. The recipients were his brother, Tsarevich Theodor Alekseevich, and his aunt, Princess Irina Mikhailovna."
Let’s think about it, when did this baptism take place? At the time of Peter's birth in 1672, the patriarch was not Joachim, but Pitirim. Joachim could baptize Peter only after 1674, when he became patriarch. If Tsarevich Fyodor was Peter's successor at the christening, then he had to be at least 15 years old. According to the ancient canon, only an adult baptized man can be a baptismal father. So it turns out that Peter could be baptized no earlier than 1677. Rather, CROSS into another faith, for as we have already noted, the baptism of princes took place on the first Sunday after birth. This was the strict canon.
Little Peter could have been baptized according to the Orthodox canon, because at that time he was of the Latin faith. That is why baptism was accepted by Patriarch Joachim and, already an adult, Tsar Fedor. Immediately after the coup of 1676, the conspirators began to prepare their protégé for the kingdom, for only the Orthodox could become a king. Therefore, it was at this time that the Tsarevich began to study Russian literacy, according to P. N. Krekshin, this happened on March 12, 1677.
Peter was born not in Moscow, but in distant Brandenburg. Therefore, no festivities were noted in Moscow. Therefore, the exact place of birth of Peter is not known either. Before that, all the princes were born only in the Kremlin chambers, but no news about Peter in the Kremlin ranks has survived. So I had to take the place of birth to one of the villages near Moscow.
Utopia? So what to do? The lack of information about the solemn baptism is now quite understandable: Peter's real father was a Lutheran and baptized his son according to Latin custom far from Moscow. The festivities took place in Königsberg. Therefore, the only documentary news about the birth of Tsarevich Peter we find in a foreign letter from the Dutch diplomat Nicholas Geynesius to John George Grevius in Utrecht on July 1, 1672. At least, this is officially considered so.
There was no news at all about Peter's first two years. The Prussian falsifiers were well aware that a lot of news should have been preserved about the childhood of the young prince in the discharge documents. And they were not. It was troublesome to edit all the documents, and the correction will immediately become obvious, discrepancies are inevitable. Then the false historians took the simplest path and simply REMOVED ALL DOCUMENTS FROM THE PALACE DISCHARGE!
We read MM Bogoslovsky: “Where, besides the Kremlin chorus, did Peter visit in his early infancy? It is impossible to say with certainty whether it was taken out or not to any of the residences near Moscow in the fall of 1672 and in the spring and summer of 1673, since during this period of time both the Palace ranks and the records of the royal exits were lost. So, everything ingenious is simple.
And what surrounded our Peter in later childhood? Probably Russian gusli, samovars, gingerbread …
Not at all. For some reason, he was surrounded by German things: “as soon as Peter began to remember himself, he was surrounded in his nursery by foreign things; everything he played reminded him of a German … Together with the image of the savior, Peter takes from the Kremlin both a dining clock with an Arab and a German screw carbine."
Bogoslovsky mentions among Peter's things German organs, a German carriage, a German bullfinch, even Peter's children's room was upholstered with "Hamburg worm cloth."
Where did German things come from in the Kremlin chambers? The Germans were not allowed to go to the Kremlin, to Russia. The last Europeans who were allowed to enter Russia were the Dutch, but they also lost this right in 1667.
Now we understand that Peter had all these German things since childhood only because he spent his childhood in German Brandenburg. Therefore, these things are known only from the personal memories of Peter himself. He loved to remember his childhood, and the court historians were unable to shut up the drunken Emperor.
How impossible it was to hide the fact that Peter was surrounded by only foreigners from early childhood. And not only adults, but also peers. I. I. Golikov writes about Peter's childhood: "He, having among his children surrounded several foreign ones, whom he loved from his very infancy, he was informed by them about European customs and rituals."
So this is how Peter got his foreign habits - he learned from his young friends of his foreign ones. And what could foreign children do when surrounded by an Orthodox prince? This is not possible in principle, for the Russian princes were strictly guarded and until the age of fifteen had no way out of the royal chorus at all. Moreover, the children of foreign heretics could not surround the prince under any circumstances.
Imagine the picture: the Russian tsar always washed his hands with disgust after their kisses. And then, all of a sudden, he launched foreign kids to his child … And where did Peter get his incomprehensible love for foreigners "from his very infancy" ??? Did he suck this love with his mother's milk? But even this does not go away, for Peter's mother was of Orthodox ascetic morals. With his mother's milk, Peter could only absorb love for everything Russian.
Foreigners surrounded Peter from infancy, due to the fact that Peter himself was a foreigner from infancy. All other explanations are ridiculous. Peter was born abroad, so we find the first evidence of his birth in a letter from a foreigner Nikolai Geynesius to another foreigner, John George Grevius.
Geynesius himself was not in Moscow at the time of Peter's birth. Therefore, he could describe the details of the birth of Peter in Europe. Where Peter was actually born.
And here is what the letter says: "God grant that Peter in his time would be a good shepherd of nations, and that he would conquer the Scythian barbarism, darkening the north in his fur coats, with the laws of salvation."
Liberation from Scythian barbarism is associated with the born Peter, he is called the SHEPHERD OF THE PEOPLES.
At the same time, from the text of the letter, we can outline the geographical location of the birthplace of Peter. The letter says: "On the very birthday of Peter, Louis XIV crossed the Rhine, and the Turkish sultan crossed the Dniester, and the first conquered four provinces of the united Netherlands, and the second Podolia and Kamenets." That is, the place is limited in the west by the Rhine, and in the east by Polish lands. This place could have been Prussia, which at that time was still Brandenburg.
How was Peter's further childhood? It was also almost not reflected in the category books of the Kremlin Palace. They decided to write off this fact on the absence of a child in the Kremlin. Here is how interestingly explained the Romanov historians: "At the same time, Peter leads an extremely restless way of life, always on a campaign: now he is in the village of Vorobyov, now in Kolomenskoye, now at the Trinity, now at Savva Storozhevsky, prowling around monasteries and palace villages near Moscow."
Like, was not in the Kremlin, because the fidget. Whatever the child didn’t amuse, it would be alive. Let the young Petrusha run around the villages, play Indians, the "historians" will have fewer problems. But the prince was allowed to leave the chambers of the Kremlin Palace only after reaching the age of 15. He could not play Indians in the villages near Moscow … Therefore, the absence of Peter in Moscow is an insoluble problem for official history.
And with whom did our Petrusha play? According to the textbooks, all with grooms and cakes. Is at least one of the participants in these games known? Are their memories of the little king known? "The first companions of his childhood games are also unknown."
So about Peter's childhood and adolescence, there was complete darkness. Only semi-legendary information remains that Peter spent his entire childhood in a certain Preobrazhensky. “The first years of his infancy, he spent most of the time in the suburban village of Preobrazhenskoye, three miles from Moscow…. Preobrazhenskoye remained forever dear to his heart."
Moreover, information about the location of Peter in the village of Preobrazhenskoye is discovered not earlier than 1687. On this occasion, I. I. Golikov notes: "Such a stay in the Discharge Books is not mentioned before, as in that year 1687".
The most interesting thing is that the village of Preobrazhensky in 1672 did not exist at all. And it was near Moscow at that time the village of Obrazhenskoye.
The paucity of information about Peter's childhood haunted the 19th century historian A. G. Brickner. He wanted to know the truth about Peter's childhood and had been dealing with this issue for a long time. But he was forced to state: “About the first years of Peter's life, two kinds of sources have survived: archival files and legendary legends. The latter, repeated endlessly throughout the 18th century and to this day, represent the story of Peter's childhood in some ideal light, contain many tales about the fabulous gifts of the child and deserve almost no attention."
A professional historian, after many years of in-depth study of the issue, came to the sad conclusion: EVERYTHING IS WRITTEN ABOUT PETER'S CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH IS FABULOUS.
Now let's talk about the teaching of Peter I. And here the story is very dark. According to P. N. Krekshin and I. I. Golikov's training for Peter began only on March 12, 1677. And before that, teaching the prince was somehow not leisure, they forgot a little. They gave him a toy saber, and he lost his childhood as a soldier. That's why I didn't know Russian grammar very well …
The historian N. G. Ustryalov asks an insoluble question for himself: “How, with the general indifference of that time to the sciences and arts, with a drowsy drowsiness of the mind, which was frightened by any new idea, under the guidance of mentors who hardly more than literacy extended their wisdom, is he with the charm of knowledge? Was his genius awakened by his own power, or was he awakened by a happy mortal whom the Conduct sent down to him as a leader? This is a curious question, hitherto unexplored and highly important; on the correct resolution of it depends on the fidelity of the view of the whole history of Peter."
Clever Ustryalov very correctly revealed an insoluble contradiction in Peter's historiography, because Peter's clearly pro-Western education can only be attributed to Conduct. Otherwise, there are no answers. As there are no names of those "leaders" who gave birth to the very phenomenon of Peter. According to the historian, it is from solving this fundamental question that one must begin to understand the biography of Peter. To start anew, with a clean slate … It is for these insights that N. G. Ustryalov will be consigned to almost complete oblivion, which continues to this day.
The mysterious silence about the training and education of our hero is an absolutely inexplicable thing. And this is a very weak point of. stories - everything should know about the great emperor. And you can't know - the truth is too dangerous. So they came up with a fairy tale that the tsarevich was brought up in the German settlement: “It was not the Little Russian and Polish monks and theologians who became Peter's mentors, but the inhabitants of the German settlement, which was located near the capital itself and was an example of Western European labor force, enterprise and erudition forced the clerical motives … foreigners who until that time lived in the capital itself. Therefore, the German settlement can be compared with the so-called "ghetto" … ".
So it turns out that our Petrusha lived his childhood not in special Kremlin chambers, as it was supposed to, but in a German ghetto. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich evicted the Germans from Moscow, it must be understood not out of great love, but sent his beloved son to be brought up to a nemchura in the ghetto. And this nonsense of. the story is diligently implanting, despite its obvious absurdity. Why? Because in fact, Peter was really with the Germans, but not in a remote village near Moscow, but with his father in Brandenburg.
Could G. Miller admit such a truth? Of course, he could not - Peter's German origin was revealed with all the dangerous consequences. So Peter remained in the German settlement, allegedly near Moscow until 1694. But even here the historians are in complete confusion: either in the Nemetskaya Sloboda, or in the village of Preobrazhenskoye. At the same time, nothing is heard about the German Sloboda until the end of the 17th century, there is the village of Obrazhenskoye, there is no German Sloboda.
For the first time, the German settlement appeared only in 1697, and only in June 1698, through the efforts of P. Gordon, the first Catholic church in Muscovy will be installed there. Therefore, Peter could not accidentally wander into the German settlement and gain some German wisdom. Moreover, the tsarevichs until the age of fifteen were strictly forbidden to leave the Kremlin chambers.
What language did our Peter speak? Of course, in Russian, you say. What other language should a Russian Tsarevich speak? However, with young Peter, all is not thankful.
We read the notes of a contemporary of Peter the Great, his colleague, Peter Pavlovich Shafirov, who briefly describes the image of the great tsar: “If we turn to other sciences, then although before that, apart from the Russian language, none of the Russian people knew how to read and write books, and moreover, in a gap, rather than revered for art, but now we see his Majesty himself in German verb ….
Posselt writes that in April 1697 in Libau, before the Great Embassy, "the tsar treated the skippers there in a particularly familiar manner. … In conversation he uses the Lower Saxon dialect." Where could Peter have typed in German? Well Dutch would be fine, he was in Holland during the Grand Embassy. But Peter spoke exactly German! Even before the Embassy, with a Lower Saxon accent. To get an accent, you need to live for many years in the country where it is used. Or be born there. No other way. So why did our Peter speak German with a characteristic accent from childhood?
Let's see how the Tsarevich was trained. It turns out to be very, very bad. “Peter began to study writing, it seems, at the beginning of 1680 and never knew how to write in a decent handwriting. In addition to writing and reading, Zotov did not teach Peter anything (here you can only make a mistake about arithmetic, which Peter learned quite early, it is unknown from whom). But Zotov, as a teaching aid, used illustrations brought to Moscow from abroad and known under the name of "amusing fryazhsky" or "German sheets".
It is clear why Peter spoke German. It turns out that he was taught using German sheets. What for? And God knows why. And could Zotov have taught Peter German if he himself did not know a single word in German? At the same time, historians did not keep track of who Peter got the arithmetic from, which was not included in the course of instruction of the Russian princes. Obviously not from Zotov, he did not know her at all.
The first training of Tsarevich Peter Alekseevich. Elval's engraving. Early 1840s
And now, for contrast, let us give a description of Tsar Alexei in the words of Academician S. F. Platonov: “He was one of the most educated people of Moscow society: traces of his versatile reading, biblical, church and secular, are scattered in all his works”.
High education and religiosity was characteristic of all Russian tsars and grand dukes. The princes began to be taught from childhood, the best teachers and mentors.
Jacob Reitenfels describes the upbringing of princes in 1674 as follows: “they study very carefully (apart from reading and writing in the Fatherland language) the state of their State and neighboring Powers, the spirit and needs of the subject peoples, differing in language and morals; learn to love and respect domestic customs, and unswervingly follow the rules of Religion. The duty of justice demands to say that this modest and, apparently, simple way of raising the Tsar's children in Russia gives them an excellent direction."
That is, the tsar's children received an excellent education exclusively in Russian, with the main emphasis on love for the Fatherland, Russian customs and Religion. How did it happen that Peter, the only one of all the princes, did not instill in himself a love for Russian customs and Orthodoxy? Moreover, having a father like Alexei Mikhailovich?
The Russian tsarevich, it turns out, spoke and wrote decently in German, but barely wrote letters in Russian. At the same time, Ustryalov mentions the disgusting Russian young tsar and cites several letters from which one can see "how careless the upbringing of Peter was, who at the age of sixteen could hardly deduce letters, with obvious difficulty."
And why did Peter speak and write poorly in his native language? After all, the upbringing and training of the princes was engaged from childhood. Each prince was entitled to a court educator, the so-called uncle. He was chosen from among the most noble and educated princes. This was an unshakable rule: “And as a prince will be about five years old, he will be assigned to him for the protection and teaching of a boyar, a great honor, quiet and reasonable, and he will be given the goods of an outside, or thoughtful person; also from the boyar children are chosen as servants and capitals the same young ones as the prince. And as the time is ripe, teach that prince to read and write, and teachers choose teachers, quiet and not hawkish; and they choose to write and teach from Ambassadors' clerks; but in another language, Latin, Greek, Nemetsky, and none other than Russian teaching, in the Russian state does not exist. And there are princes and princesses to everyone their mansions and people, who are to protect them, special. And until the age of 15 and more of the tsarevich, besides those people who are set up to him, and besides the boyars and nearby people, no one can see, this is more a custom, and after 15 years they will show him to all people, how he walks with his father to church and for fun."
So, what we have: the Russian tsarevich from the age of five relies on a mentor from among the most noble boyars; from early childhood, the prince is selected comrades, necessarily from among the children of noble boyars; Latin and German are strictly prohibited, the princes are taught only Russian; Until the age of 15, no one can see the tsarevich, except for the people indicated above, they live all the time in the special mansions of the Kremlin. As we can see, in the case of Peter, ALL of the above canons were violated.
Firstly, Peter, the only one of all the princes, did not have a prince educator. Among all the famous boyar princes, no one was noticed in teaching, or even communicating with the young Peter. What were the sculptors of Peter's history to do?
They came up with the following, they say, he was entrusted to the rootless Zotov, he took up his upbringing. They say that Zotov did not really deal with the tsarevich, and overlooked how the child, instead of Russian, began to study German. And at the same time, instead of the Orthodox psalter, the Latin heresy is to cram.
In this regard, V. O. Klyuchevsky, far from our worst historian, remarked very aptly: “More than once one can hear the opinion that Peter was not brought up in the old way…. Zotov bowed to his disciple in the ground and began the course of his teaching…. After listening to this story, do not say that Zotov could initiate his student into a new science, teach him some "Elin and Latin greyhounds." So where did Peter get the "Latin greyhounds"? No, Klyuchevsky did not believe in the cheap anecdote about the training of Pyotr Zotov. And we won't believe it either. Therefore, the question of training the Great Transformer still remains open.
And in continuation of all the absurdity of. version of Peter's upbringing by Zotov Klyuchevsky writes: "Subsequently, Peter appointed him prince-pope, president of the buffoonery college."
This is probably for the teacher's excessive zeal in teaching German and systematic binges with the student. Why did the Romanov scribblers insert this anecdote? So they corrected the omission and made Zotov a prince. Backdating. The uncle of the king could only be a boyar prince. And such among the real princes was not. So I had to correct my story.
But the version with Zotov is easily refuted, it is enough to read the archives. It turns out that according to the documents, in 1680 he was part of a long embassy in the Crimea, and the uncles of the princes, according to the law, should not leave their pupils for a single day. The diligent MM Bogoslovsky mercilessly dispels the legend about the mentor Zotov: “If Zotov at that time, in 1680, had already been the teacher of Tsarevich Peter, then one wonders why it would be necessary to take him away from his studies with the Tsarevich and appoint him to the embassy in Crimea ?.. the clerk Zotov is not called the Tsarevich's teacher in any of the documents of this case, and this would undoubtedly have taken place if he really were a teacher at that time … That Peter studied in 1680 is indisputable. But who taught him at that time remains to be investigated."
These are the facts that are depressing for our historians. The version with the teacher Zotov has no serious grounds. So far, we have continuous myths and outright lies.
Now about the children of the boyars - the future stewards of the tsarevich. As we have learned, they must be noble and necessarily Russian. This is the future boyar entourage of the new tsar. Where are these chosen ones surrounded by young Peter? Nothing is known about them. “The first peers of the youth Peter are not reliably known, with the exception of two: Grigory Lukin and Ekim Voronin. Both of them put their heads under the walls of Azov. Allegedly, it is known about two, but they were not a noble family, not a boyar, which contradicts the canons. And these dubious witnesses can no longer be interrogated, both of them laid down their heads near Azov.
So about the childhood and adolescence of Peter there is not a SINGLE eyewitness testimony left. Everything is shrouded in pitch darkness.
But something is known about Peter's upbringing. His first tutor was Paul Menezius. Historians know about this fact, but they keep silent about it. It is much more interesting and, most importantly, safer to write nonsense about the drunken Zotov.
Now we will understand why the figure of P. Menezius is not widely covered. De La Neuville writes about Paul Menezia: "Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, sensing imminent death, appointed him as tutor to the young Tsarevich Peter, his son, with whom he was all the time until the beginning of the reign of Tsar Ivan."
This message from Neuville is very curious. How could the king bring a foreigner, a zealous Catholic, closer to his son? Before us is the official version of the appearance of the Catholic Menezius under young Peter. This strange appearance was attributed to the last will of the dying king - go and check now who he appointed before his death. But Alexei could not make such an appointment, for there was not a single Catholic at the court of the Russian tsar - he could not stand it. Menezius was never Orthodox, moreover, he was an opponent of the Tsar's policy.
According to Nevville, he advocated the subordination of the Orthodox Church to the Pope! Neuville just below reports that Menezius even fought against the king, was captured by him and sent to Siberia! Even a madman will not appoint an enemy of a different faith to his son as a mentor. Moreover, the Orthodox devout Alexei Mikhailovich. Therefore, we will postpone the version of the appointment of Menezius by Tsar Alexei as clearly false. By the way of. history claims that Menezius was in the service of Tsar Alexei as an ambassador to the Pope. But this is nonsense, the Catholic could not defend the interests of Orthodoxy. Menezius did arrive in 1673 with a response from the Pope, but as the immediate ambassador of the Vatican. Be that as it may, the fact remains: the first mentor of Peter was the Catholic Menezius, and in the 17th century everyone knew about it.
The most interesting thing is that historians did not find a single document in the office of Tsar Alexei, or even a mention of the appointment of Paul Menezius as Peter's mentor. The discouraged NV Charykov writes: “There should have been little documentary information about Menezius's mentoring, because the relationship into which, apparently, Alexei Mikhailovich placed Menezius with Tsarevich Peter, was completely original and new. They concerned, in the words of I. Ye. Zabelin, "fun", that is, an area that does not belong to the circle of the department of any order, did not require office correspondence, was the household chores of the tsar and his family and was regulated by the personal order of the sovereign. Therefore, it is difficult even to say in the files of which institution the documents could be found on this matter”.
As we can see, historians are trying to connect the absence of documents on Peter's training with "Fun", they say, documents about fun were not saved. And Menezius apparently had to do with some "Fun". So all the childhood and adolescence of the Great Reformer became amusing: Amusing shelves, Amusing hikes, Amusing fortresses, Amusing mentors, Amusing German textbooks. And then ALL OUR HISTORY BECAME A LITTLE, with the light filing of the Prussian storytellers of the 18th century.
In fact, no documents about the first mentor Menezius have survived only because Peter's upbringing took place at the court in Brandenburg. Pavel Menezius really got to know Peter long before his first appearance in Russia. Menezius was his mentor from the Catholic Church. It was from him that Peter took hatred of Orthodoxy and Russia.
What religion was our Peter? Considering the strict Orthodox morals of "father" Alexei Mikhailovich and "mother" Natalia Kirillovna, our Peter could not get "Latin greyhounds" in Moscow. I could not, because in the conditions of that time it was physically impossible. Nevertheless, Peter was a Protestant, as Jiri David most clearly testifies: "the power passed to Peter, who, as rumor had it, was always a Protestant."
This was written in 1689, Jiri David is actually an eyewitness to the events. Therefore, the stupidest legend that Peter picked up everything foreign during a trip abroad is not consistent. Peter spoke German and confessed in German long before the Grand Embassy. Conversely, he spoke and wrote very poorly in Russian; he was hardly noted at the obligatory church events in Moscow. Peter was a German Protestant from birth, for he was born and raised in the Latin Brandenburg.