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PET  for a time his philosophical for theological studies, which he prosecuted for two years in the Jesuit college of Pont à Mousson. At the end of that time he was appointed professor of rhetoric successively at Rheims, La Fleche, and Paris. In 1618 he took the four vows of the order; and in 1621 he was appointed to a professorship of positive theology in the Jesuit college of Paris, which he continued to fill for twenty-two years, till his death, which took place 11th December, 1652. His writings were very numerous. He was a keen polemic, and his passionate, ambitious nature, which insisted upon always having the last word, made him feel at home in that troubled element. His earlier works were of a philological character, and occupied entirely with the later Greek authors. His chronological works were more important. His "Opus de Doctrina Temporum," in two folios, appeared in 1627; and his "Uranologion," a treatise on the sphere, in 1630. In 1633 he published an abridgment of his "Doctrina Temporum" under the title of "Rationarium Temporum;" a work which had a wide circulation, not only in Latin, but in French and English. In his theological works he wrote much and warmly against Salmasius; and much also, and as warmly, against the doctrines of the Jansenists. His principal work in dogmatic theology was the "De Theologicis Dogmatibus," which appeared in successive parts in Paris from 1644-50, but was left unfinished. It is particularly rich in investigations in the interesting and important field of dogmatic history. His favourite maxim in theology was "Nova quærant alii, nil nisi prisca peto." It was received coldly by his contemporaries, but was afterwards reprinted in several editions on account of its historical value.—P. L.  PETER, Emperor or Czar of Russia, was born on the 30th of May, 1672, and was the only son of the Czar Alexis by his second wife. On the sudden death of Alexis in 1677, at the age of forty-six, his eldest son, Theodore, ascended the throne; but he was of a sickly feeble constitution, and died when Peter, whom he nominated heir to the crown, was in his tenth year, passing over an elder brother named Ivan or John, who was almost blind and deaf, and subject to convulsions. But their sister, the Princess Sophia, a woman of great abilities but thoroughly unprincipled, stirred up a succession of revolts against Peter's authority; excited the soldiers against his uncles and the nobles friendly to him, on whom they perpetrated the most shocking cruelties; and finally succeeded in associating her imbecile brother with Peter in the sovereignty, and herself with them as co-regent. In order to strengthen her authority she strove to degrade the character of Peter, keeping him in ignorance and surrounding him with every temptation to excess and dissipation. At length, in 1689, his marriage with Eudoxia Frederowna Lapuchin withdrew him in a great measure from the vices which his sister had encouraged. A plot which she had formed for his assassination, along with his wife, mother, and sister, was betrayed to him by some soldiers; and through the assistance of General Gordon and other foreign officers, he succeeded in depriving his sister of power and compelling her to take the veil, while at the same time he banished her principal adherents to Siberia. Conscious of his own ignorance, and stimulated by an ardent thirst for knowledge, Peter now set himself to improve his neglected education. He formed a close intimacy with a Genevese named Le Fort, who explained to him the great superiority of trained and disciplined soldiers over savage barbarians. He in consequence conceived the daring plan of annihilating the strelitzes or native soldiery, whose mutinous conduct endangered his throne, and formed a regiment on the European system, of which Le Fort was appointed colonel; and Peter himself entered as drummer, to give his people a lesson of subordination, and rose through all the intermediate ranks before he obtained a commission. Feeling that the possession of a sea-port was indispensably necessary towards the civilization of his people, he next commenced building some vessels for the purpose of wresting Azoph, the key to the Black Sea, from the Turks. His first attack in 1695 on this important stronghold was unsuccessful, but Peter was not a man easily turned aside from his purpose. He renewed his attempt in the following year, having in the meantime constructed a fleet of twenty-three galleys, two galeases, and four fire-ships, with which he defeated the Turkish fleet, and after a siege of two months obtained possession of the coveted stronghold. Hitherto Russia had been without an official representative in any of the states of Europe, but the czar now fitted out a splendid embassy to the States of Holland, accompanying it himself incognito. He reached Amsterdam, however, fifteen days before his ambassadors, and engaged a small apartment in the public dockyard. He soon afterwards proceeded to Saardam in the dress of a Dutch skipper, and engaged himself to a shipbuilder as a journeyman carpenter, under the name of Peter Michaeloff. He spent seven weeks in this employment, living all the time in a little shingle hut, and made his own bed and prepared his own food. Here he was seen by the great duke of Marlborough, dressed in a red woollen shirt, duck trowsers, and a sailor's hat, and seated with an adze in his hand upon a rough log of timber. Peter did not confine his attention to shipbuilding, but acquired also some knowledge of surgery, mastered the Dutch language, and made considerable progress in mathematics and engineering and the science of fortification. He also visited a great number of literary, charitable, and scientific institutions, paper-mills, sawmills, and manufacturing establishments, and examined their machinery and operations with the utmost care, with the view of introducing them into his own empire. After spending nine months in Holland, he crossed over into England, mainly for the purpose of examining the dockyards and maritime establishments of that country. He was received with great attention by William III.; the marquis of Caermarthen was deputed to attend him; and he ultimately took up his residence in Sayes court, near Deptford, a mansion belonging to the celebrated John Evelyn, which suffered serious injury from the barbarous practices of its royal tenant and his suite. He spent a great deal of his time sailing or rowing on the Thames, often acting as helmsman himself; and when he and his attendants finished their day's work, they used to resort to a tavern in Great Tower Street to smoke their pipes and to drink beer and brandy. Peter also directed his attention to engineering, and took into his service and despatched to Russia upwards of five hundred engineers and skilled artificers (Ferguson the celebrated engineer and geometrician being among the number), for the purpose of carrying out a long-cherished project of opening a communication by locks and canals between the rivers Volga and Don and the Caspian sea. In the latter end of 1698 Peter left England, in order to return to his own dominions. On his way home he visited Vienna, where he was received with great pomp; but while enjoying the festivities which welcomed his arrival, the news reached him of an insurrection of the strelitzes, which had broken out in Moscow at the instigation of the Princess Sophia, but had been promptly suppressed by General Gordon. He hastened home with the utmost speed, and punished with great severity, and indeed cruelty, the ringleaders of the mutiny. Though he lost his friend and counsellor Le Fort, and his able general, Gordon, by death in 1699, Peter succeeded in carrying out his long-projected military reforms, and supplanted the strelitzes, those instruments of turbulence and insurrection, by twenty-seven new and well disciplined regiments of infantry and two of cavalry. Not content with regulating the government, the army, and the navy of his empire, the czar turned his attention to the inconvenient costume of his subjects, and compelled them to shave their long beards, and to cut off the skirts of their long and loose coats. He altered the commencement of the year from the 1st of September to the 1st of January—a proceeding which gave great offence to his people, and especially to the priests—changed their barbarous marriage customs, and introduced many other social and moral reforms. In his anxiety to promote the civilization of his own empire, he was quite regardless, however, of the rights of other countries. Moscow, the Russian capital, was ill adapted for commerce, and Peter resolved now to build a new metropolis which should be free from this defect. The spot which he selected for its site was at the mouth of the river Neva, adjoining the Gulf of Finland. The land belonged to Sweden, with whom he had no ground or even pretext for a quarrel. But Peter had no scruples about committing an act of robbery for the benefit of his people. Entering into an alliance with the kings of Poland and Denmark against Sweden, the czar at the head of sixty thousand men invaded the province of Ingria, and laid siege to the fortified town of Narva. But Charles XII. hastened to the relief of the place at the head of only nine thousand men, and inflicted upon the Russians a most ignominious defeat, capturing nearly forty thousand prisoners. Far from being dispirited at this reverse, however, Peter was only stimulated to redoubled exertions, and observed that the Swedes would at length teach his 