115 Facts About Catherine The Great

Catherine The Great came to power following the overthrow of her husband and second cousin, Peter III.

An admirer of Peter the Great, Catherine continued to modernise Russia along Western European lines.

The Manifesto on Freedom of the Nobility, issued during the short reign of Peter III and confirmed by Catherine The Great, freed Russian nobles from compulsory military or state service.

Catherine The Great is often included in the ranks of the enlightened despots.

Catherine The Great failed to become the duke of Duchy of Courland and Semigallia and at the time of his daughter's birth held the rank of a Prussian general in his capacity as governor of the city of Stettin.

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Catherine The Great's rise to power was supported by her mother Joanna's wealthy relatives, who were both nobles and royal relations.

Catherine The Great disliked his pale complexion and his fondness for alcohol at such a young age.

Catherine The Great later wrote that she stayed at one end of the castle, and Peter at the other.

Catherine The Great applied herself to learning the Russian language with zeal, rising at night and walking about her bedroom barefoot, repeating her lessons.

Catherine The Great credited her survival to frequent bloodletting; in a single day, she had four phlebotomies.

Catherine The Great soon became popular with several powerful political groups that opposed her husband.

Catherine The Great disparaged her husband for his devotion to reading on the one hand "Lutheran prayer-books, the other the history of and trial of some highway robbers who had been hanged or broken on the wheel".

Catherine The Great was especially impressed with his argument that people do not act for their professed idealistic reasons, and instead she learned to look for the "hidden and interested motives".

Catherine The Great nonetheless left the final version of her memoirs to Paul I in which she explained why Paul had been Peter's son.

Catherine The Great wanted to become an empress herself and did not want another heir to the throne; however, Empress Elizabeth blackmailed Peter and Catherine The Great to produce this heir.

Peter and Catherine The Great had both been involved in a 1749 Russian military plot to crown Peter in Elizabeth's stead.

Catherine The Great became friends with Princess Ekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova, the sister of her husband's official mistress.

Catherine The Great would announce trying drills in the morning to male servants, who later joined Catherine in her room to sing and dance until late hours.

In 1759, Catherine The Great became pregnant with her second child, Anna, who only lived to 14 months.

Catherine The Great thus spent much of this time alone in her private boudoir to hide away from Peter's abrasive personality.

Catherine The Great recalled in her memoirs her optimistic and resolute mood before her accession to the throne:.

Catherine The Great had her husband arrested, and forced him to sign a document of abdication, leaving no one to dispute her accession to the throne.

Peter the Great had succeeded in gaining a toehold in the south, on the edge of the Black Sea, in the Azov campaigns.

Catherine The Great named Sahin Giray, a Crimean Tatar leader, to head the Crimean state and maintain friendly relations with Russia.

In 1787, Catherine The Great conducted a triumphal procession in the Crimea, which helped provoke the next Russo-Turkish War.

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Catherine The Great waged a new war against Persia in 1796 after they, under the new king Agha Mohammad Khan, had again invaded Georgia and established rule in 1795 and had expelled the newly established Russian garrisons in the Caucasus.

Catherine The Great refused the Duchy of Holstein-Gottorp which had ports on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, and refrained from having a Russian army in Germany.

Catherine The Great acted as mediator in the War of the Bavarian Succession between the German states of Prussia and Austria.

Catherine The Great provided support to a Polish anti-reform group known as the Targowica Confederation.

Catherine The Great perceived that the Qianlong emperor was an unpleasant and arrogant neighbour, once saying: "I shall not die until I have ejected the Turks from Europe, suppressed the pride of China and established trade with India".

Catherine The Great failed to reach any of the initial goals she had put forward.

Catherine The Great lost the large territories of the Russian protectorate of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania and left its territories to Prussia and Austria.

Catherine The Great's dynasty lost power because of this and of a war with Austria and Germany, impossible without her foreign policy.

Catherine The Great imposed a comprehensive system of state regulation of merchants' activities.

Catherine The Great had more success when she strongly encouraged the migration of the Volga Germans, farmers from Germany who settled mostly in the Volga River Valley region.

Catherine The Great found that piecemeal reform worked poorly because there was no overall view of a comprehensive state budget.

Catherine The Great made use of the social theory ideas of German cameralism and French physiocracy, as well as Russian precedents and experiments such as foundling homes.

Catherine The Great launched the Moscow Foundling Home and lying-in hospital, 1764, and Paul's Hospital, 1763.

Catherine The Great had the government collect and publish vital statistics.

Catherine The Great established a centralised medical administration charged with initiating vigorous health policies.

Catherine The Great decided to have herself inoculated against smallpox by Thomas Dimsdale, a British doctor.

Catherine The Great gave them this new right, but in exchange they could no longer appeal directly to her.

Catherine The Great did this because she did not want to be bothered by the peasantry, but did not want to give them reason to revolt.

Naturally, the serfs did not like it when Catherine The Great tried to take away their right to petition her because they felt as though she had severed their connection to the autocrat, and their power to appeal to her.

The rebellion ultimately failed and in fact backfired as Catherine The Great was pushed away from the idea of serf liberation following the violent uprising.

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Catherine The Great was a patron of the arts, literature, and education.

Catherine The Great shared in the general European craze for all things Chinese, and made a point of collecting Chinese art and buying porcelain in the popular Chinoiserie style.

Catherine The Great had at first attempted to hire a Chinese architect to build the Chinese Village, and on finding that was impossible, settled on Cameron, who likewise specialised in the chinoiserie style.

Catherine The Great made a special effort to bring leading intellectuals and scientists to Russia, and she wrote her own comedies, works of fiction, and memoirs.

Catherine The Great worked with Voltaire, Diderot, and d'Alembert – all French encyclopedists who later cemented her reputation in their writings.

Catherine The Great recruited the scientists Leonhard Euler and Peter Simon Pallas from Berlin and Anders Johan Lexell from Sweden to the Russian capital.

Catherine The Great enlisted Voltaire to her cause, and corresponded with him for 15 years, from her accession to his death in 1778.

Catherine The Great lauded her accomplishments, calling her "The Star of the North" and the "Semiramis of Russia".

Catherine The Great acquired his collection of books from his heirs, and placed them in the National Library of Russia.

Catherine The Great read three sorts of books, namely those for pleasure, those for information, and those to provide her with a philosophy.

Catherine The Great expressed some frustration with the economists she read for what she regarded as their impractical theories, writing in the margin of one of Necker's books that if it was possible to solve all of the state's economic problems in one day, she would have done so a long time ago.

Catherine The Great called together at Moscow a Grand Commission – almost a consultative parliament – composed of 652 members of all classes and of various nationalities.

Catherine The Great began issuing codes to address some of the modernisation trends suggested in her Nakaz.

In 1785, Catherine The Great conferred on the nobility the Charter to the Nobility, increasing the power of the landed oligarchs.

Catherine The Great issued the Code of Commercial Navigation and Salt Trade Code of 1781, the Police Ordinance of 1782, and the Statute of National Education of 1786.

Catherine The Great warned of uprisings in Russia because of the deplorable social conditions of the serfs.

Catherine The Great decided it promoted the dangerous poison of the French Revolution.

Catherine The Great had the book burned and the author exiled to Siberia.

Catherine The Great received Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun at her Tsarskoye Selo residence in St Petersburg, by whom she was painted shortly before her death.

Catherine The Great was very fat, but her face was still beautiful, and she wore her white hair up, framing it perfectly.

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Catherine The Great's genius seemed to rest on her forehead, which was both high and wide.

Catherine The Great's eyes were soft and sensitive, her nose quite Greek, her colour high and her features expressive.

Catherine The Great held western European philosophies and culture close to her heart, and she wanted to surround herself with like-minded people within Russia.

Catherine The Great believed a 'new kind of person' could be created by inculcating Russian children with European education.

Catherine The Great believed education could change the hearts and minds of the Russian people and turn them away from backwardness.

Catherine The Great appointed Ivan Betskoy as her advisor on educational matters.

Catherine The Great consulted British education pioneers, particularly the Rev Daniel Dumaresq and Dr John Brown.

However, Catherine The Great continued to investigate the pedagogical principles and practice of other countries and made many other educational reforms, including an overhaul of the Cadet Corps in 1766.

Catherine The Great was strongly in favour of the adoption of the Austrian three-tier model of trivial, real, and normal schools at the village, town, and provincial capital levels.

Some claimed Catherine The Great failed to supply enough money to support her educational program.

Catherine The Great nationalised all of the church lands to help pay for her wars, largely emptied the monasteries, and forced most of the remaining clergymen to survive as farmers or from fees for baptisms and other services.

Catherine The Great did not allow dissenters to build chapels, and she suppressed religious dissent after the onset of the French Revolution.

However, in accord with her anti-Ottoman policy, Catherine The Great promoted the protection and fostering of Christians under Turkish rule.

Catherine The Great placed strictures on Catholics, mainly Polish, and attempted to assert and extend state control over them in the wake of the partitions of Poland.

Nevertheless, Catherine The Great's Russia provided an asylum and a base for regrouping to the Jesuits following the suppression of the Jesuits in most of Europe in 1773.

Catherine The Great took many different approaches to Islam during her reign.

Catherine The Great avoided force and tried persuasion to integrate Muslim areas into her empire.

Catherine The Great promised more serfs of all religions, as well as amnesty for convicts, if Muslims chose to convert to Orthodoxy.

Catherine The Great chose to assimilate Islam into the state rather than eliminate it when public outcry became too disruptive.

Catherine The Great created the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly to help regulate Muslim-populated regions as well as regulate the instruction and ideals of mullahs.

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In 1785, Catherine The Great approved the subsidising of new mosques and new town settlements for Muslims.

When Catherine The Great agreed to the First Partition of Poland, the large new Jewish element was treated as a separate people, defined by their religion.

Catherine The Great separated the Jews from Orthodox society, restricting them to the Pale of Settlement.

Catherine The Great levied additional taxes on the followers of Judaism; if a family converted to the Orthodox faith, that additional tax was lifted.

Catherine The Great tried to keep the Jews away from certain economic spheres, even under the guise of equality; in 1790, she banned Jewish citizens from Moscow's middle class.

In 1785, Catherine The Great declared Jews to be officially foreigners, with foreigners' rights.

Catherine The Great's decree denied Jews the rights of an Orthodox or naturalised citizen of Russia.

Taxes doubled again for those of Jewish descent in 1794, and Catherine The Great officially declared that Jews bore no relation to Russians.

Catherine The Great closed 569 of 954 monasteries, of which only 161 received government money.

In 1762, to help mend the rift between the Orthodox church and a sect that called themselves the Old Believers, Catherine The Great passed an act that allowed Old Believers to practise their faith openly without interference.

Catherine The Great transformed the clergy from a group that wielded great power over the Russian government and its people to a segregated community forced to depend on the state for compensation.

In 1767, Catherine The Great decreed that after seven years in one rank, civil servants automatically would be promoted regardless of office or merit.

Catherine The Great kept her illegitimate son by Grigori Orlov near Tula, away from her court.

Poniatowski, through his mother's side, came from the Czartoryski family, prominent members of the pro-Russian faction in Poland; Poniatowski and Catherine The Great were eighth cousins, twice removed, by their mutual ancestor King Christian I of Denmark, by virtue of Poniatowski's maternal descent from the Scottish House of Stuart.

Catherine The Great supported Poniatowski as a candidate to become the next king.

Catherine The Great sent the Russian army into Poland to avoid possible disputes.

News of Catherine The Great's plan spread, and Frederick II warned her that if she tried to conquer Poland by marrying Poniatowski, all of Europe would oppose her.

Catherine The Great had no intention of marrying him, having already given birth to Orlov's child and to the Grand Duke Paul by then.

Catherine The Great represented an opposite to Peter's pro-Prussian sentiment, with which Catherine disagreed.

Grigory Orlov and his other three brothers found themselves rewarded with titles, money, swords, and other gifts, but Catherine The Great did not marry Grigory, who proved inept at politics and useless when asked for advice.

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Catherine The Great received a palace in Saint Petersburg when Catherine became empress.

Catherine The Great called Potemkin for help – mostly military – and he became devoted to her.

Catherine The Great appointed General Aleksandr Bibikov to put down the uprising, but she needed Potemkin's advice on military strategy.

Catherine The Great later became the de facto absolute ruler of New Russia, governing its colonisation.

Potemkin convinced Catherine The Great to expand the universities in Russia to increase the number of scientists.

Catherine The Great was worried that Potemkin's poor health would delay his important work in colonising and developing the south as he had planned.

Catherine The Great recovered well enough to begin to plan a ceremony which would establish her favourite grandson Alexander as her heir, superseding her difficult son Paul, but she died before the announcement could be made, just over two months after the engagement ball.

Catherine The Great was given the last rites and died the following evening around 9:45.

Catherine The Great was stretched on a ceremonial bed surrounded by the coats of arms of all the towns in Russia.

Catherine The Great's face was left uncovered, and her fair hand rested on the bed.