Peter the Great

Peter I became tsar of Russia as a boy in 1682, at first sharing the throne with his half-brother. Fascinated by ships and machines, he spent time in the foreign quarter of Moscow and later traveled through western Europe in disguise, working in a Dutch shipyard to learn shipbuilding. Back home he set out to make Russia a European power. He built a navy, reorganized the army, founded schools of mathematics and navigation, simplified the alphabet, changed the calendar, ordered nobles to shave their beards and wear western clothes, and made the nobility serve the state. In the long Great Northern War with Sweden he lost at first, then crushed King Charles XII at Poltava in 1709, winning land on the Baltic Sea. There, on marshland, he built a new capital, St. Petersburg, at the cost of many thousands of workers' lives. He was physically huge, energetic and often brutal; his son Alexei died after being tortured on suspicion of treason. He took the title emperor in 1721 and died in 1725.

Faith: Russian Orthodox ruler who mocked church ceremonies and did not believe in miracles. Source: Wikipedia