Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

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DISCOVERING
THE SCYTHIANS
In April 1698 a tall young man, 26 years old, untidily dressed and with hands
scratched and scarred through hard work, decided to take time off from studying
shipbuilding in the Deptford and Greenwich yards on the Thames to visit Oxford
with a small group of friends. The party stayed in the Golden Cross Inn in Cornmarket,
where they evidently had a convivial evening, and the next morning set out to
visit the Ashmolean Museum, then in Broad Street. The museum had been opened
fifteen years earlier, under the patronage of Elias Ashmole, to house his ‘cabinet of
curiosities’ inherited from the collector John Tradescant. The visit to the museum
was brief but the group had attracted notice and by the time they left to cross the
road to visit Trinity College chapel a large crowd had gathered. Irritated by the attention
the young man decided to return to London to immerse himself once more in
the intricacies of shipbuilding. He was Peter Alexeyevich, Tzar of Russia, later to be
known as Peter the Great.
Peter was an intellectual and a man of action. He had realized that for his country
to grow in the modern world it would have to become a great sea power. Since its few
ports on the icebound White Sea were far from adequate he set his heart on establishing
a navy on the Black Sea—an ambition which meant confronting the Ottomans,
who then controlled the region. Later in his reign he was to turn his attention
to the Baltic and the Caspian Sea, involving Russia in wars with Sweden and Persia. It
was his early realization of the importance of sea power that led him to take a deep
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