The crown weighed five pounds, and the woman beneath it had once been sold for a handful of coins.

The Merchant's Daughter Who Became Empress: Catherine I's Unlikely Coronation

How a Lithuanian peasant girl rose from captivity to rule the largest empire on Earth

A Lithuanian peasant captured as a war prize became the first woman crowned Empress of Russia.

The morning of May 17, 1724, Moscow's Assumption Cathedral blazed with ten thousand candles. Inside, Orthodox bishops in gold-threaded vestments swung censers heavy with frankincense, while the greatest nobles of Russia knelt on cold marble floors. At the altar stood a woman who, thirty years earlier, had been scrubbing floors in a Lutheran pastor's house in Livonia.

Catherine—born Marta Helena Skowrońska to a Lithuanian peasant family—was about to become the first woman ever crowned Empress of Russia.

Peter the Great himself placed the crown upon her head. The massive Imperial Crown, encrusted with 2,564 diamonds and topped by a ruby the size of a pigeon's egg, weighed nearly five pounds. As it settled onto her graying hair, cannons thundered across the city. Peter, visibly weakened by the illness that would kill him within eight months, wept openly.

The journey from servant girl to empress defied every law of her age. Orphaned by plague around 1684, Marta had been taken in by a pastor who taught her nothing but household chores. When Russian forces captured the Swedish fortress of Marienburg in 1702, she became a spoil of war—passed between officers like chattel until she caug…

💡 Catherine I could not read or write Russian—she memorized her signature as a series of drawn symbols rather than letters.