Peter the Great

From May the 7th, in 1682 till his death in 1725, Peter the Great or Pyotr Alekséyevich governed the Tsardom of Russia and ultimately the Russian Empire, collectively ruling before 1696 with his older half-brother, Ivan V.
He got ports on the Azov and Baltic Seas through a series of triumphant disputes, creating the structure for the Imperial Russian Navy, ending undisputed Swedish control in the Baltic, and launching the Tsardom's development into a much larger empire that would end up bein...