ABSTRACT
At Vienna, Peter’s journey was interrupted. There was bad news from Moscow: a revolt of the streltzi had just broken out. The streltzi had simply announced that the Czar was dead and then requested that the Czarina Sophia should occupy the throne. The boyar voevoda Shein and General Gordon, with his seven regiments, encountered the streltzi on the Ryazan road and wiped them out. The ‘high judges’ hanged 150 of the rebels and beheaded fifty more. The questioning of the streltzi revealed complicity on the part of the Novodevichi convent where Sophia was living. In Vienna, Peter received the high judges’ report announcing the end of the revolt. Far from being calmed by this news, Peter became like a raging madman; the memory of those terrible days, from May 15-19, 1682, when his family was butchered by the streltzi, had never left him.
