Jan Pieter van Suchtelen

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Jan Pieter van Suchtelen ( George Dawe , Hermitage (Saint Petersburg) )

Jan Pieter van Suchtelen ( Russian Иоганн Питер ван Сухтелен Iogann Piter van Suchtelen ; born August 2, 1751 in Grave , † January 6, 1836 in Stockholm ) was a Dutch - Russian military engineer and diplomat .

Life

Sought Lens father Cornelis van Suchtelen (1713-1768) was Major - Engineer of the Dutch genius troops and came from an old family in the 16th century from the Duchy of Jülich-Cleves-Berg had immigrated. At the age of eight, Suchtelen was sent to Groningen to attend school . In 1765 he returned to his parents and studied mathematics first under the direct supervision of his father and then again at the university in Groningen .

In 1768 Suchtelen joined the Dutch engineering team as a lieutenant . He was involved in the wars with Great Britain (1773–1774, 1778–1779). He taught at the University of Leiden and served as adjutant to the commandant of the engineering troop Carel Diederik du Moulin , who in 1774 had become general director of the Dutch fortresses. After his marriage to Amarentia Wilhelmina Harting in 1778, he lived in The Hague , where he was a member of the Freemason Lodge L'Union Royale. In 1779 he was promoted to captain and in 1783 to lieutenant colonel .

In 1783 Suchtelen went to St. Petersburg , where Catherine II accepted him as a lieutenant colonel in the engineering service of the army and commissioned him with the water transport expedition (normally foreigners with a rank below their previous rank were hired). In the summer of 1785 he inspected the canals and locks at Vyshny Volotschok , and in autumn he and other engineers began organizing the work on the North Catherine's Canal to connect the Northern Keltma , which flows into the Northern Dvina , with the Jurich, which flows into the Southern Keltma , so that with the Kama and Volga a continuous waterway from the White Sea to the Caspian Sea was created. In 1786 he presented the model project for the construction of the Staro-Kalinkin Bridge over the Fontanka in St. Petersburg, which he then carried out together with Johann Conrad Gerhard until 1788. In January 1787 he was promoted to Polkownik .

In 1788, after the beginning of the Russo-Swedish War , Suchtelen became chief of the engineering staff in the Finnish Army . He was immediately involved in fighting, where he was wounded. In the battles at Vyborg and Fredrikshamn he led part of a corps . For his bravery, he was promoted to major general in April 1789 . For this he was ennobled . He received the Mjamjalja estate with 300 serfs in the Rajon Anjalankoski in Ujesd Friedrichshamn and the golden sword for bravery . In August 1789 he received the Russian Order of St. George IV class. After the war he inspected the fortresses on the west and south-west borders and participated in the construction of the military port in Reval .

1792–1793 Suchtelen stayed in the Republic of the Seven United Provinces . In 1794 he was sent to Poland on a diplomatic mission and to examine the fortifications . When he went to Warsaw to see King Stanislaus II August Poniatowski during the Kościuszko uprising , he was wounded and captured and then freed by the troops of Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov during the occupation of Warsaw. He then inspected the fortresses in the Vilnius Governorate and directed their renovation. In 1797 he became lieutenant general and head of the engineering department of the Finland department. He later worked in the Department of Waterways. He traveled through Russia and inspected all fortifications between the White Sea and the Black Sea from Riga and Reval to Kherson .

In 1799 Paul I appointed Suchtelen as engineer-general and sent him first to Kiev as head of the engineering department and then to Riga , where he checked the Estonia and Livonia inspection . Then he was sent to Arkhangelsk with the engineering corps .

After his accession to the throne, Alexander I called Suchtelen back to St. Petersburg in 1801 and made him manager of the quartermaster's department in 1802 . Suchtelen also became director of the Cartographic Institute. One of the main tasks was the creation of the hundred- sheet map of the Russian Empire . Topographical expeditions were carried out under his direct supervision .

During the Third Coalition War , Suchtelen took part in the campaign in the French- occupied Electorate of Hanover and in the siege of the fortress of Hameln . At the Battle of Austerlitz he belonged to Alexander I's entourage. In October 1806 he and his children received Russian citizenship. In 1807, on the highest orders, Suchtelen made Brest-Litovsk the central defense point of the western border and created a project for a new fortress there. The Franco-Russian War of 1812 prevented the execution.

After the Russo-Swedish War began in 1808, Suchtelen became Chief of Staff of the Finland Army and adviser to the Commander-in-Chief, Count Friedrich von Buxhoeveden . He participated in the planning of the campaign, and his local knowledge was of great value. He led the siege of the fortress Svartholm near Loviisa and was involved in the siege of the fortress Sveaborg . He dealt with the strategic location on the Finnish south coast and used the artillery captured in Helsingfors and other Swedish locations . When Buxhoeveden personally led the troops at Åbo , Suchtelen was given command of the siege of Sveaborg. Despite insufficient funds, Suchtelen managed to hand over Sveaborg to Russia by negotiation, for which he received the Golden Sword with Diamonds . Because of this success, he was now entitled to negotiate with the enemy in critical situations. In September 1808 he concluded the Lochteå Convention and reached an armistice in March 1809. He was then directly involved in the peace negotiations with Sweden, where his diplomatic skills showed. The result was the Fredrikshamn Treaty , which Suchtelen himself described in a book.

In 1812 Suchtelen led together with Paul von Nicolay the Russian delegation in the negotiations with Sweden and the United Kingdom , which led to the end of the British-Russian War (1807-1812) and the Swedish-British War to the Peace of Örebro . For this, Alexander I made him (and his descendants) baron of the Grand Duchy of Finland . In the following year, as head of a Russian military mission, he accompanied Jean Baptiste Bernadotte , with whom he was friends, on the campaign of the Northern Army in the War of Liberation and took part in the battles near Großbeeren , Dennewitz and Leipzig . In 1813 Suchtelen was the Russian representative to the Dutch government in exile in Berlin . In 1814 he led the pioneering work on the siege of Hamburg . He took part in the signing of the Danish- Russian peace treaty and the Kiel peace treaty . In the Swedish-Norwegian war he accompanied Bernadotte.

After the Second Peace of Paris , Suchtelen was appointed envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary minister in Stockholm in 1816 as the successor to Grigory Alexandrovich Stroganov . His house was a meeting place for Swedish cultural workers. In 1822 he received the dignity of Count of the Grand Duchy of Finland. He was a member of the State Council , honorary member of the Imperial Military Academy and inspector of the engineering corps. The college of genius was founded on his initiative . Because of his special position, he was able to have his brothers Abraham and Rochus with him as his secretaries. During his stays in St. Petersburg he lived in the abandoned Michaelsburg Palace . In the former throne room of Paul I was his office and library with rare books and manuscripts mainly on engineering .

Twelve days after Suchtelen's death, 128 cannon shots were fired at the memorial service in the Adolf-Fredriks-Kyrka in Stockholm. He was buried in the churchyard in Solna .

Suchtelen was well known as a collector of books, manuscripts, medals, pictures, signatures and autographs . He left behind an extensive collection of around 26,000 books, 260 manuscripts, including a Middle Dutch Bible manuscript, and 13,000 autographs, which were bought by Nicholas I for the Imperial Library in St. Petersburg after Suchtelen's death . Over 30,000 scientific papers ( dissertations , transcripts of speeches and disputations ) from the Suchtelen collection were donated to the library of the University of Helsinki after his death . In 1930, part of the Suchtelen collection was auctioned by the Soviet government, including a Latin translation of Aristotle ( Strasbourg 1469), the sermons of Bernhard von Clairvaux ( Mainz 1475) and two different editions of Augustin's De civitate Dei ( Paris 1468, Mainz 1473 ). The main part of the Suchtelen collection is now in the Russian State Library . A conference on Pieter van Suchtelen and his two sons was held there in 1997 with the support of the Dutch consulate. Suchtelen's personal archive with his correspondence is in the Central Historical State Archives in Moscow .

Honors

Web links

Commons : Jan Pieter van Suchtelen  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Otto S. Lankhorst: Jan Pieter van Suchtelen (1751–1836) verzamelaar van boeken en manuscripts Oftewel hoe brieven van de maatschappij der Nederlandse letterkunde in Sint-Petersburg terechtkwamen . In: Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde 1901–2000 . 1998, p. 27–44 ( [1] accessed January 9, 2018).
  2. ↑ Сухтелен, граф Петр Корнилович . In: Русский биографический словарь . tape 20 , 1912, pp. 211–212 ( [2] accessed January 10, 2018).
  3. ↑ СУХТЕЛЕН Петр Корнилиевич . In: Словарь русских генералов . tape VII , 1996, p. 565-566 ( [3] accessed January 10, 2018).
  4. ↑ PJHM Theeuwen: Pieter 't Hoen en de Post van den Neder-Rhijn (1781-1787): een bijdrage tot de kennis van de Nederlandse geschiedenis in het laatste kwart van de Achttiende eeuw . Uitgeverij Verloren, 2002, p. 603 .
  5. ↑ a b Adriaan Loosjes: Algemeene konst- en letterbode, Deel 1 . 1836, p. 244-247 .
  6. ^ A b c d e A. Pieterse: Van steentijd tot Nokia / druk 1: De Geschiedenis van Finland . KIT Publishers, 2006, p. 93-123 .
  7. ↑ КАЛИНКИНЫ МОСТЫ (January 9, 2018).
  8. ↑ P. de Suchtelen: Précis des événements militaires des campagnes de 1808 et 1809 en Finlande dans la derniére guerre entre la Russie et la Suède .
  9. ^ Otto S. Lankhorst: Wonen en koken in Franeker. A letter from Gerardt Noodt uit 1683 . In: Nieuwsbrief Universiteitsgeschiedenis (KU Leuven) . No. 2 , 1998.
  10. ^ J. Deschamps: Geschiedenis van de Middelnederlandse manuscripts . In: Middelnederlandse manuscripts uit Europese en Amerikaanse libraries . 1972 ( [4] accessed January 10, 2018).
personal data
SURNAME Suchtelen, Jan Pieter van
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Сухтелен, Иоганн Питер ван (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch-Russian military engineer and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH August 2, 1751
PLACE OF BIRTH Grave
DATE OF DEATH January 6, 1836
Place of death Stockholm