Catherine's Medal

On December 7, 1714, Peter I established a new imperial medal: the Order of the Great Martyr Saint Catherine. Russia already had a few medals, but this one was special.

The honored saint was the celestial protector of Peter’s wife, her namesake, although the future Catherine I had started life as Marta Skowronska, who legend had it served as washerwoman to Russian army officers after being captured during the Great Northern War. Somehow, she managed to win the tsar’s affections and attain the status of Empress Consort, and, after Peter’s death, the Russian throne, which she occupied from 1725 to 1727.

Catherine exerted exceptional influence over her husband. When Peter’s rage would begin to boil over, as it often did, his courtiers would call for “matushka empress” (matushka being an untranslatable expression of respect and endearment rooted in the word for mother). She was always able to calm him down.

The medal, however, was not established in honor of Catherine’s ability to soothe her husband. As the story goes, three years earlier, in 1711, she saved the tsar and his army when they were surrounded by Ottoman forces. The tsaritsa, who had accompanied her husband on his military campaign, set out to negotiate with the commander of the Ottoman Army, Baltaci Mehmet Pasha. Amazingly, she managed to persuade him to sign a peace treaty advantageous to Russia, despite the fact that the Russians were hardly negotiating from a position of strength.

How Catherine achieved this diplomatic feat remains a mystery. Some believe that she bribed Baltaci with her diamonds. Skeptics wonder why the Pasha would have been swayed by a bribe, since the next day he could easily have defeated the Russians and taken whatever treasures he wished. This would probably have better pleased the Ottoman sultan, who sent Baltaci into exile, where he died shortly thereafter.

In his novel, His Majesty’s Jews, David Markish imagines Catherine using her feminine charms on Baltaci. This also seems doubtful, considering the fact that she was in her seventh month of pregnancy at the time. Whatever the case may have been, she saved her husband and his troops, and now a glorious medal bore her name.

Ten years later, Peter learned that Catherine was cheating on him, had her lover decapitated, and put his pickled head in a jar in her bedroom for her edification.

Her medal, however, she got to keep.