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Marta of Muscovy
by Phil Stong
Chapter 1
Debut
The circumstances of Marta's birth and infancy would certainly have distressed a modern obstetrician as much as they have distressed historians since the event. For no one noted her advent; it was not suspected that she would be the most influential empress in history, that because of her the Russians would be what the Russians are, some two hundred and sixty years later. If it had been, the Germans should have sent a Herod up to the Livonian forests and pastures in what is now, roughly, Latvia, to exterminate newborn females. It would have saved a great deal of warfare and the lives of millions but it would also have debased the course of humanity, as we now conceive that course.
There is no remark, even faintly authentic, about Marta's mother in present history. Common women, and particularly wives of common men, generally kept out of sight in eastern Europe in 1683. Marta's mother was named Skavronski, because she was married to Samuel Skavronski; she has no other name now. She had at least three children before Marta, and she did not live to Marta's third birthday. That is her whole record, to this time.
Samuel Skavronski was a "peasant", forbidden to own land, and completely under the direction of his owner. In Livonia a peasant was even more strictly possessed by his landlord than in the later Muscovy whose "dead souls" could vote for the proprietor after the bodies were buried. The Livonian nobles had raised such hatred that severity had to be followed by severity up to the inevitable collapse of this system, which is a commonplace in history, in many countries.
So Marta, who was sometime to wear the greatest crown of her age, was born in a rough cabin with the smell of the stable in her nose and the sting of fresh manure in her eyes -- the ammoniac precaution of the place. Her appearance was greeted, no doubt, by the women from some neighboring cabins between the swamps and streams and trees and the small fields where cattle grazed. Then she was washed and fed and put to sleep.
Samuel Skavronski brought in his master's cows, or returned from his isolation if the birth took place during his sleeping hours -- it was a disgrace for a man to know how babies were born, beyond some clamor, and in some places it was a crime -- and he must have thought, "Another mouth." Love is the only luxury of which a peasant cannot decently be deprived, and the peasant Skavronski could not be held morally or philosophically responsible for the pink consequence which slept in its swaddle.
The circumstances of the little Marta were not so hard, in prospect, as were her grandmother's, for the odd reason that Livonia was a battleground. For four hundred years before the birth of Marta it had been the field for almost incessant wars -- usually as an innocent bystander. The Livonian Knights had made some fuss in their time, but in the later days the Russians, Poles, Swedes, and some Germans had kept things stirring in an arena which wanted principally to be left alone.
The government wanted to be left alone, the peasants -- whose lives were less agreeable than those of most Deep South Negro slaves in America -- wanted nothing. They were startled but not completely convinced when the Swedes made their final occupation of the country and began to erect churches, schools, and hospitals and to overthrow the feudal rights of the nobles. To give the Devil his due, the Swedes have always been more impatient about stupidity than they have about mere exoticism. They tolerate any intelligent heresy but they have little patience with fools, when they are sure of them.
The Swedes put in Lutheran pastors -- Luther was hardly a hundred years dead, and Gustavus Adolphus, his powerful sword, could have been Marta's father -- but Marta was born a Catholic in a Catholic family, and the people of her convictions were not molested. It might have been as well for the Baltic States if they had stayed in the hands of Sweden, as they did till Marta was a grown, married young woman.
Marta was born in the adjunct of a cattle barn -- a peasant's home -- probably on the sixteenth of April 1683, our style, or April 5, Old Style. Some accounts have her born in 1689, which would have made her eleven when she was first married; a very precocious age for a blond child. Marta was blond as a baby; later, in Moscow, which was described by an Englishman as "oriental", she dyed her hair black and her pictures show black hair, but hairdressing was not all that it could have been at that time and various observers note that it was naturally blond.
When Marta was born, Peter I, afterward to be called "the Great" and to deserve the title, of "the Great" Duchy of Muscovy, was eleven years old and under the regency of his sister Sophia, who very possibly poisoned him but not conclusively. Marta must have been conceived in the same year that Charles XII of Sweden was born -- Charles who terrified Europe and finally took his country forever from the roster of great powers by bankrupting its manpower. Needless to say, the birth of a poor Latvian peasant wench was not noticed by these royal youngsters -- she was, directly and indirectly, to be the most important person in their lives.
To fill out the historical frame: Louis XIV was probably the most powerful ruler in the world; his favorite mistress at the time was Mme. de Maintenon; one of his pensioners was Charles II, King of England. In this year the heroic Pole, Sobieski, broke the siege of Vienna by the Turks. The English colonies in America were equidistant by seven years from the old war with the Indian King Philip and "King William's War" with the French and Indians. Benjamin Franklin would be born in about twenty years and George Washington in about fifty. The Colonies were firmly established -- a fact of about as much interest and importance to Europe as our concern in the government of Liberia.
Marta was born near Marienburg, a town which is not on an ordinary map, since the place of a thousand or so inhabitants has appeared in history more or less by accident. The accident was that it was slightly over ten miles from the borders of the Great Duchy of Muscovy and still is, if it is there after recent events. It is somewhat east of a line drawn between Pskov and Dvinsk, toward the latter town. In this situation it has occasionally been a bastion city and in Marta's time was famous for two battles that were not fought there.
Ivan the Terrible marched into it during some difficulties with the Germans. The Germans and Russians always had difficulties, when they were not borrowing royal stock from each other. The affair was described by the German poet, or so-called poet, Taube.
Marienburg, das edle Schloss,
War ubergeben ohne Schoss.
Which is:
Marienburg, noble castle, Was surrendered without shooting.
Anyone who has studied the character of medieval warfare will observe that Marienburg, a tiny town faced with an overwhelming siege, was more intelligent than timid to surrender to the authorities of an army rather than succumb to the common body of troops. Two generations before, the people of an important German town of the same name by definition, Magdeburg, had endured a long siege. When it fell, living babies were spitted and roasted while their mothers were restrained as observers, with their own elaborate fates before them; other atrocities exceeded this, so that it is better not to examine Callot's engravings of the event. Almost none of the thirty-six thousand inhabitants of Magdeburg -- a great city as the populations of that time went -- survived the capture.
So that there is no shame on the little Livonian town of Marienburg, doubtful of support from any German state and unsupported by its own Livonian nation, for capitulating to Ivan, who was an enlightened ruler before some madness in his blood and the irritation of his opposition turned him into a persecution type of melancholia. It is unfortunate when anyone who believes himself persecuted has the power to destroy the fancied persecutors; it is even more unfortunate when the dement may be nearly correct and have confirmation of his delusions from some realities.
These apparent irrelevancies concern the life of Marta in several ways. She was to be married to Peter the Great, who was called "the Merciful" because his worst punishments were brutal rather than cunning. She ameliorated or even revoked punishments. Second, she had physical and moral power over Peter so that he became "the Great", instead of "the Terrible".
Third, she saved him from more than one great disaster, and finally ruled herself, alone, as the greatest empress of her time or any time.
She was in the cradle in 1683. Samuel Skavronski may have whittled and chopped something out of birch and oak some years before when his first child was born. It is more likely that she was wrapped in felt and hides on the dirt floor with half-hewn logs above and beside her; her home.
The fortunes of the baby were not too bad, except for poverty, and being born poor is like being born blind; one misses neither sight nor money till he is able to understand the difference between his lot and other people's. The Swedes were trying with determination to break down the rule of the landed classes, and if Skavronski was a good farmer and herdsman his life may have been almost comfortable and that would have meant a decent though not exactly luxurious life for the baby Marta. The conveniences and constructions of the time suggest that peasant life in Livonia must have been very similar to that of the Midwest settlers of America a hundred and fifty years later, with the difference that the American had great and well-justified hopes; the Livonian peasant had none beyond one harvest. However, to revert to the figure of blindness, the peasant did not know about hope, either, so it was not missed.
The situation of Marienburg would suggest of Marta precisely what her pictures do: that she came of a mixed stock anthropologically. The first occupants of the Baltic countries were the ancient European Finns, tall, longheaded, and blond. When the dark roundheads pushed them north they left, among other borders and groups, such people as are strikingly illustrated by the Wends in Germany, far out of their ethnic territory, and by the Baltic peoples who are roundheads and dark to the south and longheads and blond in Esthonia.
Marta was born on the border of these regions; add to the fact that she was born ten miles or so from the edge of the Slav duchy -- Skavronski is a Slav name -- and it is explained how she could be short but blond and strong; plump but broad-shouldered; that her eyes had a slight oriental tilt but were set far apart. It helps to explain her tolerance, her broad understanding of motives and actions, her ability to be all things to all men. Peter, in person, could come near to being all men; there was no woman born for him but Marta Skavronski, who could speak six languages fluently without being able to read or write her own name. She accommodated everyone but herself.
When Marta was three years old, playing among the oaks and evergreens and on the banks of Lake Aluksne, the plague came to the countryside; it had been traveling about Europe, striking here and there, for four hundred years. In one pestilence it killed, it is estimated, twenty-five million people or one fourth of the population of Europe -- the greatest mortality proportionately in any disaster of human history. The bubonic plague of Livonia was probably a cousin to that which, ambling about a slovenly Europe, had attacked London a generation before to the enrichment of Daniel Defoe.
People knew as much about it then as they do now, since it was a virus disease which attacked the glands and killed swiftly, but a significant concomitant factor is that when people began to take frequent baths and keep their sewage out of the streets the plague vanished. Probably almost everyone in Europe had fleas or lice or both intermittently or constantly during the seventeenth century. The transmission of disease by insect carriers accounts for the bewilderment of the contemporary physicians over the fact that when the plague struck London, on each occasion, it did not strike in one place only, in spite of a merciless house quarantine that was a sentence of death for everyone in the house, but struck all over town almost simultaneously.
Had Marta lived in civilized London in 1686 she would have been subject to house quarantine and the rest of her history could be written with a red cross and the cynically hopeful phrase, painted on the doors of infected houses, "God have mercy on us all". She was a poor Livonian peasant baby and was certainly removed from her father's cabin by neighbors who were too stupid to understand infection and house quarantine when her father first showed the deadly symptoms. All of the children survived, which they would not have done in London.
Samuel Skavronski, peasant, died and left four young children, or more.
A three-year-old girl was not a very valuable property in Latvia at that time but the Lutheran pastor of the Marienburg district, Pastor Ernst Gluck, a German, took the little Catholic girl into his home, which already had children. Though very little is known about Gluck, his picture comes out with sufficient clarity from this gentle act and the fact that his life seems to have been given up to translating religious books into the Baltic and Russian languages. He translated the Old and New Testaments into Lettish, also the Great Catechism of Luther -- jobs which must have taken a good many years, since the Bible is a longish treatise -- and, when captured by the Russians, calmly turned his attention to Russian translations of Mosaic books and psalms, unperturbed by warfare, like a pious Archimedes.
One gets a notion from this of a gentle, scholarly, and conventionally uxorious pedant and family man -- perhaps a little like Tristram Shandy's father. His fate was more agreeable than that of the great Greek mathematician, for his capture led him almost instantly from the pastorate of Marienburg to the headmastership of one of Peter's first academies in Moscow -- a position of very considerable honor and remuneration. This was, of course, more than a teacher's job, since Gluck was trusted with one of the Tsar's innovations and was chosen to establish it and justify it.
This was what happened to a man of scholarship and good will at the hands of a man of intelligence who knew how to employ intelligence. Indeed, it is supposed that the Romans were commanded not to disturb Archimedes, but killed him by mistake, after which he was buried with great honors. Peter did not permit such mistakes; all of his life he collected minds as a chief treasure, so he is called Peter "the Great".
In 1686 Ernst Gluck was motivated merely by humanity when he brought the small Marta into his home, an act which did not finally work to his advantage or disadvantage, probably, since it would be fifteen years before Marta had influence in the conqueror country and his favor would have been established as a scholar long before hers was as a wife. He died peacefully, in honor, in 1705 -- a final and certainly happy translation.
The little Marta's entrance into the Gluck household may have been less warmly accepted by Frau Gluck, but she was almost certainly under the humble, inflexible dominion of the studious husband. Such men may concede outposts like mad but they never lose a wall. Marta remained with the Glucks for fifteen years before Frau Gluck "got rid of her", in the words of the Britannica historian, Robert Bain. The phrase needs examination. The historical scandal is that Frau Gluck married Marta off to a Swedish dragoon to save an elder son from the seductions of the siren, and Marta did marry such a man. But between three and eighteen -- a very ripe age for marriage in the time and place -- Frau Gluck had taught Marta everything she could have taught a dearly beloved daughter.
Later the Empress of Russia laundered her own fine garments because she was not only the first lady of Muscovy but as far as she was concerned she was the first laundress. Some of her charms for Peter were her dill pickles, her distillation of anisette, and her spiced apples. Her housekeeping had the voluntary and enthusiastic testimonials of a marshal and a prince.
As to her manners, Peter mentioned to many listeners his wonder that Marta could assume, magnificently, the behavior of a great empress without ever forgetting her peasant origin and her peasant virtues. It is not likely that Frau Gluck educated an unwelcome intruder from her third year to her eighteenth in a fashion that would account for these accomplishments. Nor is it likely that she would "get rid of" the person so accomplished.
Pastor Gluck and Frau Gluck both must have labored over Marta's training as they did over that of their own children, but practically, since the orphaned daughter of a peasant could hardly expect the same career as that of the children of the pastor of Marienburg. This assumption proved to be correct. But finally there is ample evidence that Marta held the Glucks in deep affection through all her days of greatness, and nearly all of her days were great.
The days of Marta with the Gluck family must have been happy and good. One of her attractions for Peter, mentioned by him, was the fact that she was never disturbed or unamiable, a frequent phenomenon with orphans who learn very early that their fortunes are founded on their best behavior. Marta seems to have been instinctively gentle, however, and that she was reasonable is indicated by the fact that she frequently outreasoned the ruler of the age. There is no record in history that she ever showed anger, or was ever impulsive in act or speech. She quietly enslaved every historical personage who came to know her and it is not likely that the Glucks were exceptions.
