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the marriage was postponed for nine months. But nothing was proved, and finally, on February 1, 1671, to the joy of most Russians and the chagrin of the Miloslavskys, Tsar Alexis and Natalya Naryshkina were married.
    From the day of their marriage, it was clear to everyone that the forty-one-year-bid Tsar was deeply in love with his handsome, black-haired young wife. She brought him freshness, happiness, relaxation and a sense of renewal. He wanted her constantly by his side and took her with him wherever he went. The first spring and summer of their marrigae, the newly weds moved happily from one to another of the Tsar's summer palaces around Moscow, including Preobrazhenskoe, where Alexis rode with his falcons.
    At court, the new Tsaritsa quickly became an agent of change. With her semi-Western upbringing in Matveev's house, Natalya loved music and theater. Early in his reign, Alexis had issued an edict sternly forbidding his subjects to dance, to play games or watch them, at wedding feasts either to sing or play in instruments, or to give one's soul to perdition in such pernicious and lawless practices as word play, farces or magic. "Offenders for the first and second offenses are to be beaten with rods; for the third and fourth to be banished to the border towns." But when Alexis married Natalya, an orchestra played at his wedding banquet, mingling its new polyphonic Western harmonies with the strains of a Russian choir chanting in unison. The blend of sounds was far from perfect; Dr. Collins described the cacophony as being like "a flight of screech owls, a nest of jackdaws, a pack of hungry wolves, and seven hogs on a windy day."
    Royal sponsorship of the theater soon followed. To please his young bride, the Tsar began to patronize play writing and ordered construction of a stage and a hall in the former house of a boyar inside the Kremlin and another at the summer retreat of Preobrazhenskoe. The Lutheran pastor in the German Suburb, Johannes Gregory, was t asked by Matveev to recruit actors and produce plays. On October 17, 1672, the first production, a Biblical drama, was ready. It was presented in the presence of Tsar and Tsaritsa with a cast of sixty, all of whom were foreigners except a few boys and young men from the court. The play lasted all day and the Tsar watched the performance for ten hours straight without rising from his seat. Four additional plays and two ballets soon followed.
    Alexis' delight in his new Tsaritsa increased even more when, in the fall of 1671, he learned that she was pregnant. Both father and mother prayed for a son, and on May 30, 1672, at one o'clock in the morning, she delivered a large, apparently health boy. The child was named Peter after the apostle. Along with good health, his mother's black, vaguely Tatar eyes, and a tuft of auburn hair, the royal infant entered the world at normal size. In accordance with the old Russian custom of "taking the measure," an image of Peter's patron saint was painted on a board of exactly the same dimensions as the infant, and the resultant image of St. Peter with the Holy Trinity measures nineteen and a quarter inches long and five and a quarter inches wide.
    Moscow rejoiced when the booming of the great bell in the Tower of Ivan the Great on the Kremlin square announced the birth of this new Tsarevich. Messengers galloped to carry the news to other Russian towns, and special ambassadors were dispatched to Europe. From the white ramparts of the Kremlin, cannon thundered in salute for three days, while the bells of the city's 1,600 churches pealed continuously.
    Alexis was overjoyed with his new son, and personally arranged every detail of a service of public thanksgiving in the Assumption Cathedral. Afterward, Alexis raised Kyril Naryshkin, Natalya's father, and Matveev, her foster father, in rank, and then himself handed vodka and wines from trays to his guests.
    The baby Peter, four weeks old, was christened on June 29, the holy day of St. Peter