him from Peter in that year indicates that he had special charge of the Tsar's wardrobe. But when the war began, Menshikov plunged into it, displaying a talent for military command as great as his talent for everything else. He was with Peter at Narva and left with the Tsar before the disastrous battle began. During the operations in Ingria in 1701, which Peter conducted personally, Menshikov distinguished himself as Peter's lieutenant. After the siege and capture of Noteborg (now Schlusselburg), Menshikov was named governor of the fortress. He participated in the advance down the Neva, the taking of Nyenskans and the ambush and capture of the Swedish flotilla at the mouth of the river. With the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 and the building of the Peter and Paul Fortress, Menshikov was assigned responsibility for construction of the one of the six great bastions which subsequently bore his name. That same year, he became Governor General of Karelia, Ingria and Estonia. In 1703, to please the Tsar, Peter Golitsyn, envoy to the imperial court at Vienna, arranged to have Menshikov named a Count of Hungary. In 1705, the Emperor Joseph created Alexashka a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Two years later, after Menshikov's victory over the Swedes at Kalisz in Poland, Peter gave him the Russian title of Prince of Izhora, with large estates. Significantly, only two weeks after receiving these lands, the new Prince wrote to ascertain the number of parishes and people therein, what revenue could be collected from them, and to command that in religious services in churches in the district his name be mentioned with that of the Tsar.
Infinitely more important than titles or wealth—for both titles and wealth wholly depended on it—was Peter's friendship. The death of Lefort in 1699 left the Tsar with no close friend to whom he could reveal both his greatness and his pettiness, his visions, his hopes and his despair. Menshikov assumed this role, and during the early years of war Peter's friendship grew into deep affection. Alexashka would follow Peter anywhere and turn his hand to any enterprise the Tsar commanded. He could be the companion of Peter's drunken orgies, the confidant of his amours, the commander of his cavalry and a minister of his government— all with equal devotion and skill. As their personal relationship grew more intimate, Peter's form of addressing Menshikov changed. In 1703, the Tsar still called him 'Mein Herz' and 'Mein Herzenchen.' In 1704, it became 'Mein Liebster Kamerad' and 'Mein Liebster Freund.' After that, it was 'Mein Brudder.' Peter ended his letters to Menshikov with the lines, 'All is well. Only God grant to see you in joy again. You yourself know.'*
As Menshikov's life progressed, honors and rewards continued to shower on him—and his enemies proliferated. To them he appeared obsequious, ambitious and, when he had power, despotic. He could be harsh and cruel and never forget a disservice done to him. His greatest flaw, several times his near-undoing, was avarice. Born with nothing and then surrounded by opportunities for acquiring wealth, he grabbed whatever he could. As he grew older, this trait became more pronounced—or at least less easy to hide. Peter, aware that his old friend was using his offices to amass wealth and often was stealing directly from the state, tried several times to stop him. Menshikov was hauled before the courts of justice, stripped of his powers, fined, even beaten by the infuriated Tsar. But always the comradeship of thirty years intervened, Peter's anger abated and Menshikov was reinstated.
In fact, Menshikov was far more than a clever, greedy sycophant. Although he rode to the heights on Peter's back, he was indispensable to Peter as a friend. He became, as much as any man could, Peter's alter ego; he knew so well how the Tsar would react to any situation that his commands were accepted as if they
*Was there anything else? Whitworth wrote that 'some have thought their intimacy rather resembled love than friendship, they having frequent jars and constant reconcilements.' But there is, in fact, no evidence of any homosexual relationship between Peter and Menshikov.
were Peter's. 'He does what he likes without asking my opinion,' Peter once said of him. 'But I for my part never decide anything without asking him his.' For better or for worse, Menshikov helped Peter create a new Russia.
The origins of Martha Skavronskaya are even more obscure than those of Menshikov. Her life before her meeting with the Tsar in 1703, when she was nineteen, is only conjecture. The likeliest story is that she was one of four children of a Lithuanian peasant, possibly a Catholic, named Samuel Skavronsky. Skavronsky had moved from Lithuania and settled in the Swedish province of Livonia, where, in 1684, in the village of Ringen near Dorpat, Martha was born. When she was still an infant, her father died of plague, followed soon after by her mother. The destitute children were scattered, and Martha was taken into the family of Pastor Ernst Gluck, a Lutheran minister of Marienburg. Although not exactly a servant, she was expected to make herself useful in the household, doing laundry, sewing, baking bread and looking after the other children. That she was not considered a full member of the family seems likely since, in this relatively well-educated household, no effort was made to educate her and she left the Gluck family unable to read or write.
In adolescence, Martha grew into a comely, sturdy girl whose warm, dark eyes and full figure attracted attention. One story is that Frau Gluck grew wary, fearing the effect of the blossoming girl on her growing sons or even on the Pastor. Martha, accordingly, was encouraged to accept the suit of a Swedish dragoon whose regiment was quartered in the neighborhood. She was betrothed to him and, according to some accounts, was actually married to him for a brief span of eight days in the summer of 1702. At this point, the rapid successes of the invading Russians suddenly compelled his regiment to evacuate Marienburg. Martha never saw her fiance/husband again.
With the Swedish withdrawal, the district of Dorpat fell into the hands of Sheremetev's Russian army, and along with the entire population, Pastor Gluck and his family were taken prisoner. Sheremetev, a sophisticated man, received the Lutheran clergyman with kindness and accepted Gluck's offer to go to Moscow to serve the Tsar as a translator. The attractive foundling Martha, however, did not go to Moscow, but remained for six months in the domestic service of Sheremetev himself. (One tale presents the vivid picture of the girl being brought into the Field Marshal's camp wrapped only in a soldier's cloak to cover her nakedness.) Some assume that the girl became his mistress, which would not have been impossible, although nothing indicates that such a relationship actually existed between the illiterate seventeen-year-old girl and the cultivated, middle-aged Field Marshal. Later, as Peter's wife, she bore Sheremetev no ill-will, nor, on the other hand, did she especially favor him. In short, nothing except proximity suggests intimacy between them, and the likelihood is that the future Empress was a serving woman in Sheremetev's household and nothing more.
Martha's relations with her next protector, Menshikov, were closer and more complex. He was already emerging as the Tsar's favorite when, visiting Sheremetev, he spotted her. Her comeliness had increased; her hands, once red with work, had become whiter and less coarse with her new, less arduous role. She had accepted the Orthodox faith and taken the Russian name of Ekaterina (Catherine). No one knows how Menshikov persuaded Sheremetev to transfer the Lithuanian girl to his own household— some say that he simply bought her. In any case, in the autumn of 1703 he took her to Moscow.
There is the possibility that during these months the eighteen-year-old woman shared the bed of the thirty- two-year-old favorite. True or not, the bond formed at this time between them became unbreakable and lifelong. They were to be the two most powerful people in the Russian empire after the Tsar himself, yet because of their mutually humble origins, both were totally dependent on Peter. Aside from the Tsar's protection, the only separate strength either the wife or the favorite possessed was the support and alliance of the other.
In fact, there is no proof that Catherine was Menshikov's mistress, and, indeed, there is circumstantial evidence that she was not. During these years, Menshikov was strongly attached to one of a group of girls who carried the title of Boyar Maidens and whose duties consisted only of being companions to the royal ladies. In 1694, after the death of Peter's mother, the Tsar's lively younger sister, Natalya, moved in to live with him in his masculine world at Preobrazhenskoe, bringing with her a small group of such maidens, including two sisters, Darya and Barbara Arseneeva, the daughters of an official in Siberia. Menshikov, as Peter's friend, was welcomed at the feminine court around Natalya, and there soon developed an attachment between him and the beautiful Darya Arseneeva. Through his secretary, he wrote to her regularly from wherever he was and sent her rings and jewels. She wrote back and sent him dressing gowns, bed linen and shirts. In 1703, when Menshikov returned to Moscow in triumph from his military victories in Ingria, the Arseneev sisters came to live in the household which his own two sisters kept for him. It was to this same household that Menshikov brought Catherine. Although it is possible that he may, while courting a lady of higher birth, have amused himself with a Lithuanian serving girl, he was much in love with Darya, who later became his wife.
When Peter met Catherine in the autumn of 1703, she was a member of Menshikov's household with a status which, if uncertain to us, must have been quite clear to him. She was important enough to have access to the Tsar and to speak to him, although he was thirty-one and she was only nineteen, and Peter admired her. His own twelve-year relationship with Anna Mons was breaking apart.* Here before him was a sturdy, healthy, appealing girl in the full bloom of youth. She was far from a classic beauty, but her velvet black eyes, her thick blond hair (which
