The news spread like wildfire. People came in droves from all over the country to the small town of Saardam to see if the amazing story was really true. A famous person from abroad, so it was rumoured, was living and working there as an apprentice in the shipyards under an assumed name.

The narrow streets were packed with curious onlookers. Suddenly, a hush fell as an imposing young man – he was two metres tall – edged his way forward through the crush. It was Peter the Great, tsar of all the Russias, dressed as a humble workman on his way to spend another day learning how to be a ship’s carpenter.

Could this really be the ruler of the largest empire in the world?

Revolutionising Russia
Anyone visiting Russia at this time would have thought they had stepped back into the Middle Ages. The reins of power were firmly in the grip of the Orthodox Church and the reactionary boyar aristocracy, and neither saw the need for change as long as they continued to prosper.

Peter had other ideas. His childhood experiences – as a young boy, he feared for his life during battles between the Naryshkin and Miloslavsky families over control of the throne – left him with an abiding hatred of the traditionalists and everything they stood for.

Peter was set upon modernising his country. This meant doing away with the old institutions, or at the very least bringing them firmly under his personal control. He was also determined to win his country access to the Black, Caspian and Baltic seas.

Achieving this aim became the driving force behind his foreign policy. It involved turning his country into a modern military power by reforming and expanding his army and building Russia’s first fleet. He wanted to create an army and a navy that would be feared and respected throughout Europe.

A happy childhood
On the whole, Peter enjoyed a carefree and independent childhood, exploring the woods outside the capital and making friends with foreign tradespeople and craftsmen who had been allowed by the authorities to take up residence in the suburbs. For the most part Dutch and German émigrés, they taught the young prince masonry, joinery, printing and bookbinding and how to turn ivory and wood.

One day, while on a ramble through the countryside, the 16-year-old Peter and Franz Timmerman, his Dutch friend and tutor, came across a barn. Forcing open the doors they discovered the decaying hulk of a small sailing boat.

Familiar with the broad-beamed, clumsily built barges that plied their trade on Russia’s rivers, Peter had never seen anything like it before. Enthralled, he decided there and then that he was going to learn to sail.

Karsten Brand, another Dutch friend, repaired the boat and taught Peter how to handle her. From then on, Peter spent every free moment that he had sailing on Lake Pleshcheyevo, some 50 miles north of Moscow.

From mock conflict to a major war
These were not Peter’s only obsessions. From his earliest childhood, he loved playing soldiers, organising his playmates from his mother’s and neighbouring estates into mock armies.

When he became the sole ruler of Russia after the death of his sickly half-brother, his first move was to march south into the Crimea and attack the Tatar vassals of Turkey there.

Though the campaign failed, he was not discouraged. In 1696, Peter’s forces captured the town of Azov on the River Don, the first step towards winning access to the Black Sea.

Faced with the prospect of a long, expensive war against the Turks, Peter travelled to western Europe in search of allies. He was also determined to see what the west had to offer Russia in technological and other forms of know-how.

Man on a mission
With six companions, he peeled off from the main delegation as soon as it crossed the Dutch frontier and went to Saardam, attracted by the town’s shipyards, which built many of the 4000 vessels launched in the Netherlands each year.

On his arrival, Peter met up with Gerrit Kist, who had worked for him in Moscow and rented two rooms from him. The next morning, using the alias, Pyotr Mikhaylov, he signed on as a carpenter’s apprentice at the Lynst Rogge shipyard.

No one outside Peter’s party, apart from Kist, who was sworn to secrecy, knew the real identity of Pyotr Mikhaylov.

The secret could not be kept for long, and soon the town was filled with people seeking a glimpse of the Russian tsar. Though the mayor of Saardam appealed to his fellow citizens to leave their visitor in peace, Peter could scarcely make it out of his front door. Barely a week after his arrival in the town, he left Saardam for Amsterdam.

A dream becomes reality
Once in the great port city, everything was done to help accommodate Peter’s wishes. He secured lodgings at a master sailmaker’s house and the carpenter Gerrit Glaes Pool took him on to teach him the basics of shipbuilding.

To help Peter learn the trade from the bottom up, the keel of a new frigate was specially laid down. For the next four months, from the crack of dawn, Peter swung his hammer alongside his workmates. In the evenings, when the day’s work was done, he chatted with sailors and shipwrights.

He also visited sawmills, museums, laboratories, printing presses and the city’s botanical gardens. During his stay in the Netherlands the tsar engaged many skilled workers such as builders of locks, fortresses, shipwrights and seamen.

Peter later spent four months in England. William III gave him a ship called the Royal Transport, one of the most modern in the British fleet, but declined to join Peter in his fight against the Turks. The tsar moved on to Austria, which also refused to become his ally.

As he was about to depart for Venice, news arrived that a serious rebellion had broken out against him and he quickly for home. By the time he reached Moscow, he had been away from Russia for 17 months and 17 days.

Though the uprising was crushed while he was travelling, he ordered the public execution of 1200 of the rebels, exiled many more to Siberia and sent his half-sister Sophia, whom the rebels had attempted to place on the throne, to live in a convent.

Russia’s gateway to the world
Peter proceeded to remodel Russia and its people along European lines. He ordered his nobles to shave their flowing beards, get rid of their traditional kaftans and smoke tobacco.

He drew up plans for a new capital at the mouth of the River Neva on the Baltic Sea, to which Russia gained access as a result of Peter’s victory over the Swedes at the Battle of Poltava in 1709.

St Petersburg, as Peter’s new city was named, officially replaced Moscow as the Russian capital in 1712. The city took many years to complete – and cost the lives of thousands of labourers – but eventually it became the great ‘window on Europe’ of which the tsar had dreamed. He had succeeded in his ambition of transforming his country.