The mock Patriarch was Zotoff, the tutor whom Natalia had given her son in his youth and who had suffered Peter to contract at an early date a love of every kind of dissoluteness. Some time before this year Peter, who led the revels in the foreign quarter and outdid all in boisterous practical jokes, had dubbed the old man--he was now nearly seventy, though he took his wine and brandy with the youngest--“Archbishop of Presburg and Patriarch of the banks of the Iaouza [the neighbouring stream], and the whole of the Kaukaui [a slang name of the wild foreign quarter].” The joke grew upon the heavy taste of the Tsar. He declared himself the Patriarch’s “deacon,” and his friends were formed into a group of “cardinals,” who must hold occasional “conclaves.” The ridicule of the Papal Court was doubtless appreciated at Moscow, but even the most thoughtless may have been sobered by the equal burlesque of the head of the Russian Church. Historians again break into a dozen different explanations. Some hold that he was preparing the way for his destruction of the power of the Russian clergy: which is to credit him with a large foresight and deliberateness of action that one finds it impossible to accept. It is more likely that he acted from sheer mockery of religion, adding the Papal details so as partially to disarm or perplex his Russian pietists. We need not suppose that Peter had definite sceptical convictions. There were few definite convictions of any kind in his sodden mind.
Earlier Tsars had humbly walked beside the Patriarch, holding the bridle of his mule, in the great procession on Palm Sunday. Peter substituted for this the procession of his mock Patriarch, an aged toper who must have made a pretty Silenus, and his court. The “cardinals” were, as I said, the hardest drinkers and most dissolute adventurers of Peter’s intimate circle. The Frenchman (or Genevan) Lefort and the Scot Patrick Gordon were prominent amongst them; and there were other foreigners. They sprang from the lowest ranks of the people or from the highest nobility. Race, religion, or rank counted for nothing in “The Council of the Mad Ones,” as the society was (amongst other titles) known. From cunning and policy, and out of his constant itching to test his authority, Peter included also men of high taste and character. When men were forced to take quarts of wine and brandy they were apt to speak their thoughts, and Peter always kept a sober ear.