So radical and so vigorous were the changes made by Peter the Great in Russia that they roused the opposition of almost the entire nation. Moscow, the ancient capital, was the chief seat of this protesting conservatism; and Peter, resolved to teach his opponents how determined he was in his course and how helpless they were against his absolute power, formed the tremendous project of building a wholly new capital, one where no voice could be raised against him, where no traditions should environ him. He chose an icy desert plain looking out toward the waters which led to that Western Europe which he meant to imitate, if not to conquer. No other man--one is almost tempted to say, no sane man--would have ventured to erect a capital city in such an impossible place and on the very frontier of his dominions. That Peter not only dared, but succeeded, though at an almost immeasurable cost, makes the creation of the great metropolis, St. Petersburg, one of the most remarkable events of history. It was the chances of the great northern war that led Peter to St. Petersburg. When he first threw down the gauntlet to Sweden he turned his eyes on Livonia--on Narva and Riga. But Livonia was so well defended that he was driven northward, toward Ingria. He moved thither grudgingly, sending, in the first instance, Apraxin, who turned the easily conquered province into a desert. It was not for some time, and gropingly, as it were, that the young sovereign began to see his way, and finally turned his attention and his longings to the mouth of the Neva. In former years Gustavus Adolphus had realized the strategical importance of a position which his successor, Charles XII, did not deem worthy of consideration, and had himself studied all its approaches. Peter not only took it to be valuable from the military and commercial point of view: he also found it most attractive, and would fain have never left it. He was more at home there than anywhere else, and the historical legends, according to which it was true Russian ground, filled him with emotion. No one knows what inspired this fondness on his part. It may have been the vague resemblance of the marshy flats to the lowlands of Holland; it may have been the stirring of some ancestral instinct. According to a legend, accepted by Nestor, it was by the mouth of the Neva that the earliest Norman conquerors of the country passed on their journeys across the Varegian Sea--_their own sea_--and so to Rome.