In the meantime Peter was growing.  With no training, no education, he was in his own disorderly, undisciplined fashion struggling up into manhood under the tutelage of a quick, strong intelligence, a hungry desire to know, and a hot, imperious temper.  His first toys were drums and swords, and he first studied history from colored German prints; and as he grew older never wearied of reading about Ivan the Terrible.  His delight was to go out upon the streets of Moscow and pick up strange bits of information from foreign adventurers about the habits and customs of their countries.  He played at soldiers with his boy companions, and after finding how they did such things in Germany and in England, drilled his troops after the European fashion.  But it was when he first saw a boat so built that it could go with or against the wind, that his strongest instinct was awakened.  He would not rest until he had learned how to make and then to manage it.  When this strange, passionate, self-willed boy was seventeen years old, he realized that his sister was scheming for the ruin of himself and his mother.  In the rupture that followed, the people deserted Sophia and flocked about Peter.  He placed his sister in a monastery, where, after fifteen years of fruitless intrigue and conspiracy, she was to die.  Then, conjointly with his unfortunate brother, he commenced his reign (1689).

If Sophia had freed herself from the customary seclusion of Princesses, Peter emancipated himself from the usual proprieties of the palace.  Both were scandalous.  One had harangued soldiers and walked with her veil lifted, the other was swinging an ax like a carpenter, rowing like a Cossack, or fighting mimic battles with his grooms, who not infrequently knocked him down.  In 1693 he gratified one great thirst and longing.  With a large suite he went up to Archangel—­and for the first time a Tsar looked out upon the sea!  He ate and drank with the foreign merchants, and took deep draughts of the stimulating air from the west.  He established a dock-yard, and while his first ship was building made perilous trips upon that unknown ocean from which Russia had all its life been shut out!  His ship was the first to bear a Russian flag into foreign waters, and now Peter had taken the first step toward learning how to build a navy, but he had no place yet to use one.  So he turned his nimble activities toward the Black Sea.  He had only to capture Azof in the Crimea from the Turks, and he would have a sea for his navy—­and then might easily make the navy for his sea!  So he went down, carrying his soldiers and his new European tactics—­in which no one believed—­gathered up his Cossacks, and the attack was made, first with utter failure—­all on account of the new tactics—­and then at last came overwhelming success; and a triumphant return (1676) to Moscow under arches and garlands of flowers.  Three thousand Russian families were sent to colonize Azof, which was guarded by some regiments of the Streltsui and by Cossacks—­and now there must be a navy.