The woman kneeling before the Orthodox priest had already lived five lives—peasant, bride, captive, concubine, and mistress—and she was about to begin her sixth: empress.

The Blacksmith's Daughter Who Became Russia's Empress

Martha Skavronska's Baptism into Destiny

A captured Lithuanian peasant was baptized on July 12, 1703—the first step toward becoming Russia's first empress.

On July 12, 1703, in a small wooden church outside Moscow, a Lithuanian peasant woman knelt before an Orthodox priest while cannon smoke still drifted over the Baltic marshes. She had been baptized Catholic, then Lutheran, then captured, then enslaved, then freed, then loved by a czar. Now she received yet another name: Yekaterina Alexeyevna. Catherine.

Martha Skavronska had been born in what is now Latvia, the daughter of a gravedigger—or perhaps a blacksmith, the sources quarrel. Orphaned young, she'd been raised in the household of a Lutheran pastor who taught her to read just enough scripture to fear God. At seventeen, she married a Swedish dragoon. Two days later, Russian forces overran the town of Marienburg. Her husband vanished into the chaos of the Great Northern War. Martha became plunder.

She passed through the hands of soldiers, then generals, then found herself in the household of Prince Alexander Menshikov, Peter the Great's closest friend. Here the remarkable began: Czar Peter saw her at dinner, was struck by her calm intelligence and earthy humor, and within months she was sharing his bed, his campaigns, and his secrets.

The baptism on July 12 was no mere formali…

💡 Catherine I kept Peter the Great's severed head of her executed lover, Willem Mons, preserved in alcohol on her bedroom shelf—possibly as Peter's final cruel joke, or as her private memorial.