A woman born as the orphaned daughter of plague victims in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth rose to become Empress of Russia, one of the few figures in history to make such an unprecedented ascent. Marta Helena Skowrońska, born on April 15, 1684, lost her parents around 1689 during a major outbreak of bubonic plague in Eastern Europe. Left orphaned at just four or five years old, she eventually ended up in the household of Johann Ernst Gluck, a German Lutheran preacher living in the Baltic region, where she worked as a servant during her childhood and early teenage years. When the Great Northern War broke out in 1700 between Russia and Sweden, the 16-year-old Marta found herself caught in a volatile conflict zone.
In 1702, she was briefly married to a Swedish cavalry officer for just eight days before Russian forces drove the Swedes out of the region. Soon after, she became the mistress of Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev, the leading general of Tsar Peter I, and was brought to Moscow with him following Russia’s conquest of much of Livonia. In Moscow, Marta entered the household of Prince Alexander Menshikov, Peter’s closest confidant and one of the most powerful men in Russia. Whether Menshikov was initially her lover or deliberately positioned her to gain the Tsar’s attention, the strategy worked.
By 1703 or early 1704, Peter had taken Marta as his lover. It was around this time that she converted from Roman Catholicism to Greek Orthodox Christianity, changing her name to Catherine Alexeievna, and in 1704 she gave birth to a son named after the Tsar. Peter I was a complex ruler who had come to the throne in 1682 at age ten but only began ruling in his own right in 1696. He had traveled extensively through Europe to bring modernizing ideas back to Russia, and at the same time he met Marta, he was beginning construction of a new capital city on the Baltic Sea called St.
Petersburg. Catherine would spend most of the rest of her life there. The couple’s marriage situation was complicated. Peter’s first marriage to Eudoxia Lopukhina had ended in divorce, leaving him free to remarry, but Catherine was a foreigner of very modest background.
While this would have precluded marriage for monarchs in Western Europe, Russia had different conventions. Peter still hesitated, and the couple married in secret in late 1707, with no records of the event existing. They married officially on February 9, 1712, at St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St.
Petersburg, nearly ten years after their relationship began. Their union was clearly one of genuine companionship. Their surviving correspondence attests to their affection, and Catherine supported Peter strongly in his efforts to transform Russia into a great European nation. In February 1712, when they finally married officially, Peter established the Order of St.
Catherine in her honor. However, the couple suffered enormous personal tragedy. Catherine bore twelve children between 1704 and 1724, but only two daughters, Anna born in 1708 and Elizabeth born in 1709, survived into adulthood. Nearly all the others died in infancy or before reaching five years of age, an unusually cruel toll even by early modern standards.
Peter died in January 1725 at the age of 52, having earned the epithet “Peter the Great” for establishing Russia as a major European power and modernizing its government and society. He had proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721, making Catherine his Empress consort. However, he had never named his heir and had no living legitimate son. The next in line was Peter Alexeivich, a nine-year-old grandson from Peter’s earlier marriage.
With the complicity of Prince Menshikov and other government figures, Catherine declared that one of Peter’s dying wishes was that she should succeed him. The orphan from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was crowned Empress Catherine I of Russia in 1725. Catherine’s reign was brief but successful. She effectively shared power with Menshikov and other nobles, but oversaw a drastic reduction of the Russian military, which had grown to nearly a quarter of a million men during the Great Northern War.
The cost of supporting this enormous force had fallen heavily on the Russian people through oppressive taxes. Once Catherine convinced the nobles to scale back the military and lower taxes, poverty declined substantially, and she earned much credit for setting a precedent whereby female monarchy in Russia was celebrated by its people. She also undertook a search in the Baltic region and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for her four siblings, from whom she had been separated after their parents’ deaths. She successfully located them and established all four as Russian nobles.
Early in 1727, Catherine was diagnosed with a lung abscess, though the real malady was most likely tuberculosis, a disease not fully identified until the 1820s. Unlike Peter, she had prepared for the succession and named Peter Alexeivich as her successor. He became Peter II when Catherine died on May 17, 1727, at age 43. Catherine’s reign opened a remarkable period of female rule in Russia.
Peter II died prematurely in 1730 and was succeeded by Anna I, Peter the Great’s niece. After her death in 1740, Catherine’s own daughter Elizabeth came to the throne as Elizabeth I. When she died in 1762, Peter III succeeded her briefly before being deposed by his own wife after six months. That woman, also named Catherine, ruled Russia for 34 years and became known as Catherine the Great.
Thus, Catherine the First’s reign opened up a period in which Russia was dominated by a succession of female rulers down to the end of the 18th century. The second story takes us to the early 16th century Ottoman Empire. A woman who would become queen of the empire was born around 1502 in Rohatyn, a town in the region known as Ruthenia, today part of western Ukraine but then a province of the Kingdom of Poland. Her birth name is unknown, though one expert on her life has speculated it was either Anastasia Lisowska or Alexandra Lisowska.
Southern Europe was experiencing growing pressure from the expanding Ottoman Empire during her early years. The Turkish Muslim nation had emerged from Anatolia in the 14th century and rapidly expanded through the Balkans and the Levant in the 15th century. In 1453, Constantinople was conquered, ending the Eastern Roman Empire after nearly 1,200 years. In the 1470s, the Ottomans established a protectorate over Crimea, whose ports became centers of slave trading for captives from Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.
The future queen likely arrived in Istanbul through this slave trade, probably captured during a raid in 1516 and taken to the Ottoman capital. She was placed in the imperial harem by 1517 or 1518 and acquired the name Hürrem, a Persian word roughly meaning “joyful” or “laughing. ” Her other name, Roxelana, was applied later by European observers and roughly means “the maiden from Ruthenia. ”
Hürrem’s ascent began in 1520 when she became the concubine of Suleiman, the son of the reigning Sultan Selim I.
When Suleiman succeeded to the throne on September 30, 1520, at age 25, his 45-year reign would see enormous expansion of the empire and what became known as a golden age of Ottoman culture, earning him the title Suleiman the Magnificent. Hürrem soon rose to considerable prominence among Suleiman’s concubines. In 1522, she gave birth to their first child, a son named Mehmed, followed by three more sons and one daughter in the next four years, with a fifth son arriving in 1531. The birth of multiple children indicated her rise above an average concubine, as Ottoman concubines were generally restricted to having only one son with a sultan.
For many years, Suleiman and Hürrem remained unmarried, almost certainly due to reservations about how the union would be perceived. Hürrem was European and, most worryingly, an Eastern Orthodox Christian rather than a Muslim. However, the death in 1534 of Suleiman’s mother, Hafsa Sultan, who had held the title of queen mother, removed an obstacle. In 1536, Suleiman and Hürrem were married, making the slave girl from Ruthenia his legal wife, and the union caused a stir throughout Europe.
A representative of the Bank of Genoa working in Istanbul reported: “This week there has occurred in this city the most extraordinary event, one absolutely unprecedented in the history of the sultans. The Grand Signor Suleiman has taken to himself as his empress a slave woman from Russia. There is great talk about the marriage and none can say what it means. ”
The marriage was one of genuine affection, with a considerable correspondence between the sultan and his wife surviving to this day.
Hürrem was afforded a prominent role in government, a wholly novel development. She transformed the imperial harem into an institution exercising considerable political power, paving the way for what became known as the “Sultanate of Women,” an extended period lasting over 100 years during which women played important roles in governing the vast empire. Much of Hürrem’s influence lay in foreign relations during a period of rapid expansion that included the conquest of Hungary, parts of North Africa, and much of what is now Iraq. She may have been pivotal in ensuring Suleiman did not go to war with her native Poland.
There was even correspondence between Hürrem and King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland from 1548 to 1572, the only known instance of an Ottoman queen being in direct contact with a European monarch. This contact may have contributed substantially to an alliance formed between the Ottomans and the Polish Kingdom in 1551 that lasted nearly two decades. In the 1550s, a succession struggle emerged. By then, Suleiman had four living sons: three by Hürrem and one, Mustafa, by his other senior consort Mahidevran.
For many years, Mustafa, born in 1515, was considered the heir apparent, not least due to his popularity within the Ottoman army. But during a war with the Persian Empire in 1552, Mustafa came under suspicion of plotting to remove his father from the sultanate. In the autumn of 1553, he was executed by Suleiman’s personal guards. There was rampant suspicion that Hürrem had been critical in arousing her husband’s suspicions to ensure one of her own sons would succeed, but the evidence is inconclusive and speculation only.
Hürrem continued to influence events in Istanbul and became well known for her charitable endeavors, endowing numerous mosques in Istanbul and other cities such as Jerusalem, establishing hospitals and poor houses, and setting up a public soup kitchen at Mecca to feed poorer pilgrims undertaking the Hajj. She generated such interest in Christian Europe that several portraits of her exist from the mid-16th century, though artists working in Italy did not travel to Istanbul to paint her in person. The Ottoman queen died on April 15, 1558, at about age 56, having suffered for some time from a combination of illnesses, most likely malaria and colic. She was interred in the cemetery of the Süleymaniye Mosque, built by her husband in the early 1550s, where an elaborate tomb was constructed to honor the woman who had risen from slavery to become queen of the Ottoman Empire.
Eight years later in 1566, Suleiman died and was interred in a tomb near her. Their son Selim eventually succeeded as Selim II in 1566, establishing a direct line of sultans for many years after. The third story takes us to 1630s France. Françoise d’Aubigné was born on November 27, 1635, in the town of Niort in western France.
Her father, Constant d’Aubigné, was a member of the minor nobility and a Huguenot, or French Protestant. He had been imprisoned in Niort by Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of King Louis XIII, for his religious beliefs. While in prison, he met Jeanne, the daughter of his jailer, and Françoise was conceived. Her early years were spent under the unusual circumstance of her father being held in a prison run by her maternal grandfather.
Constant was released in 1645 when Françoise was ten years old. The family left soon after for the West Indies, where Constant had been assured he would be appointed governor of the small island of Marie-Galante. When they arrived, they discovered this was misinformation. The family returned to France, where Françoise’s father died in 1647.
Her mother, an ardent Catholic in contrast to her husband, died in 1651. Françoise then became the charge of Madame de Neuillant, whose daughter was Françoise’s godmother. But Madame de Neuillant was anxious to rid herself of her ward and sent her to live in the house of Paul Scarron, a well-known crippled French poet and author. Françoise married him months later despite a 25-year age gap, stating she would prefer to marry Scarron rather than enter a convent.
As his wife, she presided over his literary salon and remained as his nurse as his health deteriorated until his death in 1660, nine years after their marriage. At 25, Françoise found herself a widow, childless and attractive. As host of Scarron’s literary salon, she had come into contact with some of the most prominent individuals in French society, including Anne of Austria, the mother of King Louis XIV, who provided her with an annual allowance of 2,000 livres, a very considerable sum for the time. However, when the queen mother died in 1666, the king suspended the payment.
In financial straits, Françoise accepted an offer from Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, the Marquise de Montespan, one of the king’s mistresses, to visit the court. Louis XIV, although married to Queen Maria Theresa, had many mistresses and would eventually father seven illegitimate children with Montespan alone. When one of these was born in 1669, the Marquise placed the child with Françoise in Paris, providing her with a salary and servants. The king, in recognition of her work in raising his illegitimate child, gave her 200,000 livres, with which she bought an estate at Maintenon.
Later he awarded her the title of Marquise de Maintenon. It is not wholly clear when Françoise’s relationship with the king became more than ruler and servant. Louis XIV was the most powerful monarch in 17th-century Europe. He had succeeded his father in 1643 at just four years old and began ruling in his own right in 1661, showing a steely determination to rule by decree and through the divine right of kings.
He had ordered the construction of a vast new royal palace at Versailles, some 20 kilometers outside Paris. It was at Versailles that Françoise and Louis’s relationship blossomed, perhaps as early as 1673, and clearly ongoing by 1678. By the early 1680s, she was chief among his mistresses and had replaced the Marquise de Montespan in the king’s affections. What substantially altered the situation was the death of Queen Maria Theresa on July 30, 1683, from complications of an abscess.
The king determined to marry his mistress, but not in an official capacity. Shortly after the queen’s death, Louis and Françoise were married in a private ceremony officiated by the Archbishop of Paris, François de Harlay de Champvallon, most likely on October 9, 1683, though some suggest January 1684. The ceremony was attended by a small group including the king’s confessor and a handful of court officials. Françoise d’Aubigné, the Marquise de Maintenon, became queen of France, a queen almost nobody knew was the king’s new wife.
Various explanations have been offered for the secrecy. Some suggest the prior affair could have created a public scandal, but the real reason was most likely that Françoise’s inferior social status did not make it acceptable according to royal conventions. A king of Louis’s stature was expected to marry someone of royal blood, and so the marriage was not acknowledged to the wider realm. Yet it would have been clear to all at Versailles, as Françoise was installed in apartments at the top of the grand staircase directly facing those of the king, and contemporaries noted he always spent significant parts of the day with her.
The new queen’s political influence has been debated considerably. She was criticized extensively by Protestant authors who believed she had some role in Louis’s decision to recommence persecution of French Protestants in 1685 with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. However, there is no evidence to suggest she was responsible, and recent research has suggested the opposite, that she was a strong opponent of some of the worst persecutions that followed. In reality, Françoise’s influence was not extensive for the first seven years of her reign.
A change occurred in 1700 when the War of the Spanish Succession broke out across Europe. Louis began to rely much more extensively on his wife for advice, and throughout the war, which dragged on until 1714, Françoise is generally believed to have been an unofficial government minister. One of her most significant contributions was her patronage of women’s education. She established the Maison Royale de Saint-Louis at Saint-Cyr, where young French women from impoverished noble families received an education that included not just religion but also literary, social, and intellectual instruction.
The school could accommodate 250 students, with dozens of teachers teaching arithmetic, geometry, reading, writing, geography, and history. Students were encouraged to play chess and checkers and pursue fashionable intellectual pastimes. Françoise reigned as a secret queen of France for 32 years. Louis XIV died on September 1, 1715, after a reign of 72 years and 110 days, the longest of any European monarch in history.
The couple had no children. Louis XV, who succeeded, granted Françoise an extensive pension, and she retired to Saint-Cyr, where she hosted distinguished literary and political figures, notably Peter the Great of Russia on one of his famous trips through Europe. Françoise died on April 15, 1719, at age 83. Since she was never affirmed as queen, she was not given a state funeral or interred in the royal tomb but was buried, according to her wishes, on the grounds of the school she had established.
Owing to the peculiar marital arrangement, she has appeared in works by Alexandre Dumas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The final story stays in France but moves to the early 18th century. Jeanne Antoinette Poisson was born on December 29, 1721, in Paris.
Her parents were the successful François Poisson and his wife Madeleine de La Motte. However, there were suspicions that her mother had an extramarital affair that could have made Jeanne’s father either the financier Jean Pâris de Monmartel or the tax collector Charles François Paul Le Normant de Tournehem, who would become her legal guardian after François Poisson fled town in 1725 due to unpaid debts. Growing up, Jeanne was known for being sickly. At age nine, she was sent home from a Ursuline convent where she’d been educated since age five, having fallen ill with what was most likely whooping cough.
After arriving home, Le Normant de Tournehem arranged private education with some of the best tutors, but Jeanne was never a strong student in traditional academics. She flourished under instruction in the arts, learning dancing, drawing, painting, and theater, and was known for memorizing entire plays and being a strong patron of the arts. As a child, Jeanne’s mother took her to a fortune teller who told her she would one day reign over the heart of a king. Her mother held tightly to that prediction, insisting her daughter would fulfill that destiny, and began referring to her as “Reinette,” meaning “little queen.
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Jeanne’s happy childhood ended with her marriage at age 19 to Charles Guillaume Le Normant d’Étiolles, the nephew of Le Normant de Tournehem. The marriage in 1740 involved a large financial gain for her guardian, who made his nephew his sole heir, awarding his estate at Étiolles to the newlyweds. The property was located on the edge of the royal hunting grounds, something that would prove important for Jeanne’s future plans. The marriage was a relatively happy one, with Charles falling deeply in love with Jeanne.
While she cared for him, she promised to remain faithful and stay with him unless the other man was the king, though she didn’t tell him that. During her marriage, Jeanne visited popular salons in Paris where she met figures such as Voltaire, Helvétius, and Montesquieu. As she became more popular, she created her own salon at Étiolles, which became incredibly successful. She became a master of conversation and perfected a sharp wit for which she would be known.
Her marriage produced two children: a son who died in infancy and a daughter, Alexandrine, born in 1744, who was loved dearly but died at age nine of acute peritonitis. Despite her marriage, Jeanne was certain the fortune teller’s words would ring true. She was determined to meet King Louis XV. Because the property she shared with her husband was at the end of the royal hunting grounds, she was able to observe the king while he was out hunting.
One day, she deliberately parked herself in the middle of the grounds despite not being allowed to, wearing a blue dress while sitting in a pink carriage. On the following occasion, she returned wearing a pink dress in a blue carriage. Just as intended, she caught the king’s attention. He sent her a gift of venison to express his affections, but because the role of chief mistress was already held by Madame de Châteauroux, nothing could come of the gesture.
It wasn’t until December 1744, when Madame de Châteauroux died, that opportunities arose. Less than a month later, Jeanne received a formal invitation to a masked ball at Versailles. The ball proved pivotal. The king publicly proclaimed his affections for her.
He was dressed as a yew tree while Jeanne was dressed as Diana the huntress, the costumes representing their encounter on the hunting field. To compensate for taking his wife, Louis XV offered Charles the position of ambassador to Turkey, but he refused. Charles was heartbroken and never forgave his wife, consoling himself with affairs with other women and later remarrying. By March 1745, Jeanne had officially separated from her husband and secured her place at court.
She was given royal apartments and the marquisate of Pompadour, making her a marquise. To be presented at court, one needed a title, and Jeanne became Madame de Pompadour. On September 14, 1745, she was presented at court, escorted by the king’s cousin. At court, Jeanne was determined to secure her position.
She mastered court etiquette, befriended those in positions higher than herself, and made it very clear to Queen Marie Leszczyńska that she respected her role as queen. She had no intention of replacing or overstepping her, and the queen seemed to both accept and appreciate this gesture. Officially accepting the new mistress was one thing, but the role of chief mistress was far more than a sexual one. Madame de Pompadour became a duchess and then the 13th lady-in-waiting to the queen, the highest role for a woman at court.
She acted as a prime minister would, responsible for appointments, advancements, favors, and dismissals, and contributed to domestic and foreign politics. Her influence was so great that in 1755, the Austrian diplomat Wenzel Anton, Prince of Kaunitz-Rietberg, approached her to intervene in negotiations leading to the Treaty of Versailles, which promised mutual aid between France and Austria if either were attacked by Britain or Prussia. Her role saw the end of the Seven Years’ War, which ultimately resulted in France losing its North American colonies and falling into near bankruptcy. She was said to have comforted the king after the loss, helping him through a difficult period.
Her support for various figures and policies that ultimately failed brought more negativity onto France. This, combined with the king’s frequent willingness to listen to her ideas, led many at court to dislike her. Despite the disastrous policies, she was an advocate for ministers who introduced important fiscal and economic reforms, including trade, infrastructure, and income taxes, which helped France’s financial position. Despite her enemies, Madame de Pompadour was continuously supported by the king.
Even after their sexual relationship ended in 1750, she remained his closest friend and adviser. The king was known for bouts of melancholy, and it was often said only Madame de Pompadour could pull him from such feelings. Over time, she became the only person he trusted, throwing parties and hunting trips just for him. Her support of the arts and Enlightenment-era ideas could be considered her most important area of influence.
She inspired and supported many, including the physiocratic school which paved the way for Adam Smith and his economic theories. She purchased a porcelain factory, served as a model for paintings and sculptures, and supported amateur print makers and talented stage actresses at Versailles. She is also said to have inspired the iconic Rococo style of art. Through her support of creative pursuits, she played a role in making Paris the perceived capital of taste and culture in Europe.
By the time her sexual relationship with the king ended, her health was declining. She had been sickly since her bout of whooping cough at age nine, suffering from recurring colds, bronchitis, spitting blood, and headaches. She also had three miscarriages during her involvement with the king, which worsened her poor health. Madame de Pompadour died at age 42 after contracting tuberculosis.
The king had remained devoted to her, trying and failing to nurse her back to health. While her enemies rejoiced, the king and the artists and thinkers she supported were devastated. Voltaire wrote: “I am very sad at the death of Madame de Pompadour. I was indebted to her and I mourn her out of gratitude.
It seems absurd that while an ancient pedant, hardly able to walk, should still be alive, a beautiful woman in the midst of a splendid career should die at the age of 42. ” The king reportedly stated as he watched her coffin depart Versailles in the middle of a rainstorm: “The marquise will not have good weather for her journey. “
