Catherine I of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Catherine I of Russia carried an origin story that her own successors treated as a state secret, not fit for the official record. Born as Marta Helena Skowrońska, she rose to become Empress of Russia, ruling for a short time before her death. How did an orphaned girl from Swedish Livonia end up as mistress, then wife, to the ruler of Russia? What persuaded the guards regiments to put a woman on the throne after her husband's death? And why did her marriage nearly collapse over a household scandal the year before he died? The answers start in the borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, far from any imperial court.

• 2. Origins in Livonia

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  Marta's exact birthplace is disputed. One account places it in Dorpat, now Tartu in Estonia. Another places it in Swedish Livonia or the Duchy of Courland, in a town called Jacobstadt, now Jēkabpils in Latvia. She was said to have been born on the 15th of April 1684, recorded as the 5th of April under the calendar then used in Russia. Her father, Samuel Skowroński, farmed land as a Roman Catholic in the eastern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. His own parents had come from the area around Minsk, now in Belarus. He married Dorothea Hahn in 1680 at Jakobstadt. Sources disagree on whether Marta's mother was a woman named Elizabeth Moritz, whose own father may have served as a Swedish officer. Swedish records suggest this story about her mother is probably mistaken.

  Two competing accounts describe what happened to Marta as a child. In the version recorded by the Brockhaus and Efron Dictionary, her widowed mother placed her in the household of Pastor Glück. There she was allegedly taught literacy and needlework. Another account says she first lived with an aunt, Anna-Maria Veselovskaya, until she was 12, before joining the Glück household.

  A plague epidemic killed both of Marta's parents around 1689, leaving five children behind. At age three, an aunt took Marta to Marienburg in Swedish Livonia, now Alūksne in Latvia. There the Lutheran pastor and Bible translator Johann Ernst Glück raised her. Some accounts describe her working in the Glück household as a lowly servant, scullery maid, and washerwoman. No one taught her to read or write, and she remained functionally illiterate for the rest of her life. She did become fluent in four languages, Russian, German, Swedish, and Polish, and understood some French besides.

  Marta grew into what contemporaries called a very beautiful young woman. Glück's wife reportedly feared she might become involved with her own husband or son. After the Great Northern War broke out in 1700, Marta was married off at 17 to a Swedish dragoon, either Johan Cruse or Johann Rabbe. The marriage lasted eight days in 1702, ending when Swedish troops withdrew from Marienburg.

  The Russian army was closing in on Marienburg, and her next master would be a field marshal named Boris Sheremetev.

• 3. War and Captivity

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  Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev captured Marienburg for Russia, and Pastor Glück offered himself as a translator to the occupying army. Sheremetev accepted the offer and took Glück to Moscow, while Marta herself was taken into Sheremetev's own service. She then traveled with his army back toward the Russian court, until she was passed along to Alexander Menshikov.

  Alexander Menshikov, the closest friend of Tsar Peter I, took Marta into his own household soon after. Some anecdotal sources claim Menshikov purchased her outright. He was already engaged to the woman who became his wife, which makes a romantic relationship between them disputed. What is certain is that Menshikov and Marta built a lasting political alliance instead. It is possible that Menshikov, jealous of the tsar's attentions and familiar with his tastes, wanted a mistress he could trust.

  In 1703, while Tsar Peter I was visiting Menshikov's home, he met Marta there for the first time. By 1704 she was established in the tsar's household as his mistress, and that year she gave birth to a son named Peter. She had already converted to Orthodoxy in 1703, taking the new name Catherine Alexeyevna. From then on, she and Darya Menshikova accompanied the tsar and Menshikov on military campaigns.

  The son she bore in 1704, also named Peter, would not live to adulthood. He was one of many children still to come who would not survive childhood.

• 4. Life With the Tsar

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  Catherine and Peter held a private marriage ceremony in Saint Petersburg sometime between the 23rd of October and the 1st of December 1707. The couple went on to have twelve children together, though only two survived into adulthood: Anna, born in 1708, and Elizabeth, born in 1709.

  Peter had moved Russia's capital to Saint Petersburg in 1703. While the new city was being built, he and Catherine lived together in a modest three-room log cabin that had a study but no fireplace. Many surviving letters between them reveal deep affection, and observers described Catherine as energetic, compassionate, and always cheerful. She was often the one called upon to calm the tsar during his frequent rages, and to care for him through fits and convulsions.

  In 1711, she would follow Peter onto a battlefield surrounded by a much larger Ottoman force, on his Pruth Campaign.

• 5. The Pruth Campaign

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  Surrounded by overwhelming numbers of Turkish troops, Catherine made a proposal before any talk of surrender. She suggested using her own jewels, and those of the other women present, to bribe their way out. The target was the Ottoman grand vizier, Baltacı Mehmet Pasha, whom she hoped to persuade into allowing a retreat. Mehmet did allow the retreat, though it remains unclear whether the bribe swayed him or whether trade and diplomatic considerations mattered more. Voltaire later credited Catherine with saving both Peter and his future empire, in his book titled Peter the Great.

  Peter rewarded Catherine's role in the retreat by marrying her again, this time officially. The ceremony took place at Saint Isaac's Cathedral in Saint Petersburg on the 9th of February 1712. She was Peter's second wife; his first, Eudoxia Lopukhina, had already been divorced after bearing him the heir apparent, Tsarevich Alexis Petrovich. Upon the wedding, Catherine took her husband's style and became Tsarina, and Peter marked the occasion by instituting the Order of Saint Catherine.

  Their small wooden palace at Strelna, designed around 1714, included its own botanical garden. In 1716, Catherine accompanied Peter to his second embassy to the United Provinces, though she stayed behind in Wesel to give birth. Peter did not bring her to Paris; instead she stayed in Haarlemmerhout, in the mansion of the Russian resident Osip Solovjov. In 1724, Peter had Catherine crowned Empress, though he remained Russia's actual ruler until his death.

  The year before Peter's death, an estrangement broke out between the couple over her support for one of her secretaries, Willem Mons.

• 6. The Mons Affair

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  Willem Mons, brother of Peter's former mistress Anna Mons, also had a sister among Catherine's ladies in waiting, a woman named Matryona. Mons served as Catherine's secretary and had her trust, along with a great deal of access she controlled over who could reach her husband. Peter had spent years fighting corruption in Russia. It turned out Willem and Matryona had been selling their influence, granting access to Catherine and, through her, to Peter himself. Catherine, fond of them both, appears to have overlooked what was happening until Peter discovered it himself. Peter had Willem Mons executed and exiled his sister Matryona, and afterward he and Catherine did not speak for several months. Rumors spread that Catherine and Mons had had an affair, though no evidence for that claim exists.

  Peter would die within months, on the 28th of January 1725, without ever naming who should succeed him.

• 7. Seizing the Throne

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  Catherine represented the interests of Russia's so-called new men, commoners Peter had promoted to power based on competence rather than birth. A change in government threatened to favor the entrenched aristocrats instead. During a council meeting called to choose a successor, Alexander Menshikov and others arranged a coup. The guards regiments, among whom Catherine was very popular, proclaimed her ruler of Russia. Supporting evidence was produced by Peter's secretary Makarov and the Bishop of Pskov, both new men with reason to want Catherine in power. Real power, though, rested with Menshikov, Peter Tolstoy, and the rest of the Supreme Privy Council.

  Catherine viewed the deposed empress Eudoxia Lopukhina as a threat to her new position. She had Eudoxia secretly moved to Shlisselburg Fortress near Saint Petersburg and held there as a state prisoner under strict custody.

  A chill caught after attending a blessing of the ice ceremony on the river Neva would soon end her reign for good.

• 8. Reign and Legacy

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  At the time of Peter's death, the Russian army numbered 130,000 men, supplemented by another 100,000 Cossacks, easily the largest force in Europe. That military was consuming roughly 65 percent of the government's annual revenue, and with Russia at peace, Catherine chose to reduce its expense. Advisers otherwise controlled most of her reign, but on this single issue she got her way. The resulting tax relief on the peasantry earned her a reputation as a just and fair ruler. The Supreme Privy Council itself was a new kind of institution, concentrating power in the hands of one party. In foreign affairs, Russia reluctantly joined the Austro-Spanish league to defend the interests of Catherine's son-in-law, the Duke of Holstein, against Great Britain.

  Catherine gave her name to Catherinehof near Saint Petersburg and built the city's first bridges. She was also the first royal owner of the Tsarskoye Selo estate, where the Catherine Palace still carries her name. The city of Yekaterinburg takes its name from Yekaterina, the Russian form of hers. Her name also lives on in Kadriorg Palace in Tallinn, Estonia, originally called Katharinental, or Catherine's Valley in German. The adjacent Kadriorg Park and neighborhood carry the name as well.

  After Peter's death, Catherine tracked down her four siblings, Krystyna, Anna, Karol, and Fryderyk. She granted them the newly created titles of Count and Countess and brought them to Russia. Her brother Karol was made a Count on the 5th of January 1727. His male line eventually died out with the death of his descendant Pavel Martinovich Skavronsky, father of Princess Catherine Bagration.

  That chill turned into a fever from which she never recovered. By the 17th of May 1727 she was dead at 43, in Saint Petersburg. Doctors attributed her death to tuberculosis, diagnosed at the time as an abscess of the lungs. She was buried at St. Peter and St. Paul Fortress. Before she died, Catherine recognized Peter II, the grandson of Peter the Great and Eudoxia Lopukhina, as her successor.

  Centuries later, Catherine's rise from servant to sovereign still draws storytellers. The novelist Kristina Sabaliauskaitė made her the central figure of the novel Peter's Empress.