Patrick Gordon and Peter I, 1690-1698: Favorites and foreign policy

Abstract

Patrick Gordon was an almost constant companion of Peter I in the tsar’s first decade of independent rule. Aristocratic contemporaries and later historians have ascribed to him predominant influence on the young Peter. An examination of the full text of Gordon’s diary does not sustain that belief. Gordon certainly had an impact on Peter’s military affairs, and served at Azov and against the musketeer revolt of 1698, but he does not seem to have any impact on Peter’s decisions in foreign policy. He was in close contact with the ambassadors of the Habsburgs and Poland, Peter’s allies against the Ottomans and may have been the source of much of the information in their reports. Gordon, a Scottish Catholic, seems to have supported the Turkish War as did the main Catholic states in Europe other than France, ironically the patron of the Scottish Jacobites. Gordon was a major figure in Moscow in the 1690’s, but his impact was more military and cultural than political.