Buried within the bowels of Russia's Ural Mountains, some sixteen hundred kilometers east of Moscow, lay huge deposits of the invaluable raw material iron. If exploitedon a large scale, they would provide the Russian state with one of the chief ingredients of an early industrial economy. A prospering iron industry, in its turn, would expand immeasurably Russia's hitherto-limited war-making capacity—no small consideration in the early eighteenth century, an age in which war-making was still deemed the major function of the ambitious ruler. Appropriately, no Russian was more alert to the potential of Ural iron than Peter I, whose reign of some thirty-five years (1689–1725) would be distinguished by only one year completely free of war.