Catherine’s Origins.
Catherine II who was to reign over Russia from 1762 to 1796 had absolutely no claim to the throne at all. She was born in 1729 as Princess Sophia of Anhalt Zerbst, the daughter of a lesser-known German prince in the service of the Prussians. The Emperor Frederick II of Prussia found her “buried away in a tumble-down castle” and decided to bring Catherine and her mother to court.[1] This young person went by the name of Sophie ‘Figchen’ and was fifteen years of age. According to one German aristocrat, Baroness Printzen, the future Empress was “serious-minded, cold and calculating, with nothing carefree, nothing light-hearted or fanciful about her.”[2] To satisfy his ambitions, Frederick married off Sophie to her fifteen- year old second cousin, Peter of Holstein Gottorp, grandson of Peter I, named heir of the Russia throne. The marriage was not a success: on their wedding night Peter collapsed drunk and Catherine compensated herself by turning to lovers like the young Pole, Stanilas Ponitowski and the cavalry officer Gregory Orlov who would help in the plot to overthrow her husband Peter III. There were various reasons for Peter’s probable assassination which need not be gone into here; but with his removal Sophie was proclaimed “the Most Serene and Very Powerful Princess and Dame, Catherine the Second, Empress and Autocrat of All the Russians” in the Church of the Annunciation in Moscow (above). The new Empress was thirty-three and dreamed of extending her empire to Athens and the Mediterrean; but like many despots she would have to limit her ambitions: under Catherine Poland was partitioned, the Turks were beaten in the Crimea, and of course the hated French were defeated in another way by the annexation of many of their art treasures.
[1] Pierre Cabanne, The Great Collectors, (Cassell, 1961), 1.
[2] Ibid.
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