But another enemy still remained, Turkey; who sought to recover her territory on the Black Sea, and who had already declared war.  Flushed with conquest, Peter in his turn became rash.  He advanced to the Turkish territory with forty thousand men, and was led into the same trap which proved the ruin of Charles XII.  He suddenly finds himself in a hostile country, beyond the Pruth, between an army of Turks and an army of Tartars, with a deep and rapid river in his rear.  Two hundred thousand men attack his forty thousand.  He cannot advance, he cannot retreat; he is threatened with annihilation.  He is driven to despair.  Neither he nor his generals can see any escape, for in three days he has lost twenty thousand men,—­one half his army.  In all probability he and his remaining men will be captured, and he conducted as a prisoner to Constantinople, and perhaps be shown to the mocking and jeering people in a cage, as Bajazet was.  In this crisis he shuts himself up in his tent, and refuses to see anybody.

He is saved by a woman, and a great woman, even Catherine his wife, who originally was a poor peasant girl in Livonia, and who after various adventures became the wife of a young Swedish officer killed at the battle of Marienburg, and then the mistress of Prince Mentchikof, and then of Peter himself, who at length married her,—­“an incident,” says Voltaire, “which fortune and merit never before produced in the annals of the world,” She suggested negotiation, when Peter was in the very jaws of destruction, and which nobody had thought of.  She collects together her jewels and all the valuables she can find, and sends them to the Turkish general as a present, and favorable terms are secured.  But Peter loses Azof, and is shut out from the Black Sea, and is compelled to withdraw from the vicinity of the Danube.  The Baltic is however still open to him; and in the mean time he has transferred his capital to a new city, which he built on the Gulf of Finland.

It was during his Swedish war, about the year 1702, when he had driven the Swedes from Ladoga and the Neva, that he fixed his eyes upon a miserable morass, a delta, half under water, formed by the dividing branches of the Neva, as the future seat of his vast empire.  It was a poor site for a capital city, inaccessible by water half the year, without stones, without wood, without any building materials, with a barren soil, and liable to be submerged in a storm.  Some would say it was an immense mistake to select such a place for the capital of an empire stretching even to the Pacific ocean.  But it was the only place he could get which opened a water communication with Western Europe.  He could not Europeanize his empire without some such location for his new capital.  So St. Petersburg arose above the marshes of the Neva as if by magic, built in a year, on piles, although it cost him the lives of one hundred thousand men.  “We never could look on this capital,” says Motley, “with its imposing though monotonous architecture, its colossal squares, its vast colonnades, its endless vistas, its spires and minarets sheathed in barbaric gold and flashing in the sun, and remember the magical rapidity with which it was built, without recalling Milton’s description of Pandemonium:—­