Some steps had already been taken in that direction.  In the year 1553 an English navigator, whilst seeking for a short route to China and India, had accidentally discovered the port of Archangel on the White Sea, and since that time the Tsars had kept up an intermittent diplomatic and commercial intercourse with England.  But this route was at all times tedious and dangerous, and during a great part of the year it was closed by the ice.  In view of these difficulties the Tsars tried to import “cunning foreign artificers,” by way of the Baltic; but their efforts were hampered by the Livonian Order, who at that time held the east coast, and who considered, like the Europeans on the coast of Africa at the present day, that the barbarous natives of the interior should not be supplied with arms and ammunition.  All the other routes to the West traversed likewise the territory of rivals, who might at any time become avowed enemies.  Under these circumstances the Tsars naturally desired to break through the barrier which hemmed them in, and the acquisition of the eastern coast of the Baltic became one of the chief objects of Russia’s foreign policy.

After Poland, Russia’s most formidable rival was Sweden.  That power early acquired a large amount of territory to the east of the Baltic—­including the mouths of the Neva, where St. Petersburg now stands—­and long harboured ambitious schemes of further conquest.  In the troublous times when the Poles overran the Tsardom of Muscovy, she took advantage of the occasion to annex a considerable amount of territory, and her expansion in this direction went on in intermittent fashion until it was finally stopped by Peter the Great.

In comparison with these two rivals Russia was weak in all that regarded the art of war; but she had two immense advantages:  she had a very large population, and a strong, stable Government that could concentrate the national forces for any definite purpose.  All that she required for success in the competition was an army on the European model.  Peter the Great created such an army, and won the prize.  After this the political disintegration of Poland proceeded rapidly, and when that unhappy country fell to pieces Russia naturally took for herself the lion’s share of the spoil.  Sweden, too, sank to political insignificance, and gradually lost all her trans-Baltic possessions.  The last of them—­the Grand Duchy of Finland, which stretches from the Gulf of Finland to the Polar Ocean—­was ceded to Russia by the peace of Friederichshamm in 1809.

The territorial extent of all these acquisitions will be best shown in a tabular form.  The following table represents the process of expansion from the time when Ivan III. united the independent principalities and threw off the Tartar yoke, down to the accession of Peter the Great in 1682: