CHAPTER ONE

FROM POMERANIA TO ST PETERSBURG 1729–1744

In a scene far removed from the splendour of the Moscow Kremlin, Princess Sophie Auguste Friderike of Anhalt-Zerbst was born in a merchant’s house in the Grosse Domstrasse, nestled in the shadow of St Mary’s Church, just inside the northern city wall of Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland).¹ The house offered temporary quarters to her father, Prince Christian August, who was stationed there as a general in the service of Frederick William I of Prussia (r. 1713–40), Europe’s most uncompromising soldier-king. Whereas Christian August was already thirty-nine, his wife, Princess Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, was not quite seventeen when she gave birth to their first child in the early hours of the morning of 2 May 1729 (21 April according to the Julian calendar then in use in Russia, eleven days behind the Western Gregorian calendar in the eighteenth century). Never one to suffer in silence, the young mother soon made it clear to her daughter that it had been a painful, life-threatening delivery. Though her father did his best to disguise his disappointment, Sophie was left in no doubt that both parents would have preferred a boy.²

They were lucky that she had survived at all. Since death made little distinction between the cradles of rich and poor in the eighteenth century, twenty-nine out of every thousand infants in Europe’s ruling families were stillborn, a further forty-seven were dead within a week, and 106 more failed to complete the first year of their life.³ To the fortunate infants who passed that early milestone, smallpox offered the greatest threat. Though its impact in the eighteenth century can be estimated only approximately, the total number of European deaths per annum caused by the disease is commonly put at 400,000 and the secretary of the Royal Society of London calculated that smallpox had killed a fourteenth of the city’s population between 1680 and 1743.⁴ When Catherine had herself inoculated against the greatest killer of the age in her fortieth year, she told her Prussian ally, Frederick the Great, that she had suffered ‘a thousand sorrows’ in her attempts to overcome her childhood fear of the disease. Every time she fell ill, however slight the infection, she imagined that it must be the dreaded pox.⁵ Though no eighteenth-century royal letter was sent without careful official consideration–and this one was evidently intended to portray Catherine as an Enlightened monarch confronting the forces of unreason–the emotion it implied was sincere enough. As it transpired, her worries were unnecessary. Right from the start, Sophie showed all the signs of the hearty constitution that was to carry her through to the age of sixty-seven. A bout of pneumonia when she was seven seems to have been her only serious childhood illness. Apart from that, she chose to recall only a skin infection, generally assumed to be impetigo or some form of scrofula, whose periodic attacks forced her to cover her shaven, powdered scalp with a bonnet and to wear gloves until the scabs fell off her hands.⁶

Until Christian August inherited the family seat at Zerbst in 1743, the greater part of Sophie’s childhood was spent in her bleak Baltic birthplace. Situated near the mouth of the River Oder, a hundred miles north-east of Berlin, Stettin in 1729 could boast about 11,000 inhabitants and more than 900 stone houses. Describing the town fifty years earlier, an English writer claimed that ‘the greatest beauty thereof is the palace, or prince’s Court, which is built with such art and magnificence, that none of the Italian Courts can equal it’.⁷ By then, however, Stettin’s princely glories already lay in the past. Duke Philip II of Pomerania-Stettin (r. 1606–18) had indeed been a leading artistic patron who commissioned a celebrated Kunstschrank–a cabinet made in Augsburg which opened to reveal hidden paintings, symbolic carvings, and precious objects that were believed to constitute an epitome of the universe.⁸ But when his Greifen dynasty expired in 1637, both Stettin and the surrounding duchy of Pomerania rapidly became battle-scarred pawns on the chessboard of international politics.

Sweden, the dominant Baltic power in the seventeenth century, was the first to take control, counting Stettin and Western Pomerania among its spoils at the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. But while the Swedes regarded their new German possessions primarily as a means of exerting pressure on Denmark from the south, Brandenburg-Prussia, the rising power in northern Germany, never gave up hope of capturing them. Serious damage was inflicted on Stettin during a six-month siege in 1677. Two years later, France’s diplomatic intervention on behalf of its Swedish satellite forced the Prussians to abandon their gains at the Treaty of Saint-Germain, so that it was not until 1713 that the Great Northern War again brought the town under their control, this time by agreement with Peter the Great’s Russia, the second emergent power in the Baltic. Only in February 1720, five years after the death of Louis XIV had temporarily loosened France’s stranglehold on European diplomacy, was Frederick William I finally able to purchase the town and the surrounding area for 2 million thalers under the terms of the Peace of Stockholm.⁹

It was as an officer in Prussian service that Sophie’s father, the impoverished scion of a cadet branch of the princely House of Anhalt, had been obliged to make his career. By 1729, having served in the Low Countries during the War of the Spanish Succession, he had reached the rank of major general and was stationed at Stettin in command of the 8th infantry regiment. Following his promotion to command the garrison, Christian August and his family moved from the house on the Domstrasse into the nearby ducal castle, which had been denuded of its more exuberant decoration in keeping with the king’s militarist ideals.¹⁰ Having had himself crowned ‘king in Prussia’ in 1701 at a ceremony in Königsberg that cost roughly twice the annual revenues of the Hohenzollern administration, Frederick William I’s father (Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, 1688–1713) had gone on to establish an elaborate Baroque Court. ¹¹ Almost every feature of it except the hunt was dismantled by his son. Whereas the Court of Berlin had spent 17,000 thalers on confectionery alone in 1707, its total annual expenditure was limited under Frederick William I to 52,000 thalers.¹² Surrounded by rubble from the town’s newly strengthened fortifications, Christian August’s circumstances in Stettin were even more spartan. Sophie saw little of him, though she always respected his integrity, his piety, and his knowledge of classical Rome. That was what she meant when, shortly before her fiftieth birthday, she told the Prince de Ligne that she had been ‘brought up in the army with respect for republics’.¹³

In the gloomy, granite castle, the little girl and her nurses occupied three vaulted rooms on the upper floor of the wing adjoining the chapel. Every morning and evening, Sophie knelt to say her prayers in a bedroom next to the bell tower, where she remembered being disturbed by phantom noises from the organ, allegedly made by mischievous servants. As she told her principal correspondent in adult life, Baron Melchior Grimm, on discovering that he was contemplating a visit to Stettin in 1776, ‘I gambolled across the whole of this wing three or four times a day to visit my mother, who lived on the other side.’¹⁴ Johanna Elisabeth, however, had little time for her first-born, paying more attention to her lame son, Wilhelm Christian Friedrich, who came into the world eighteen months after Sophie and was taken from it by scarlet fever at the age of thirteen. Of the three further children, only Friedrich August, born in 1734, survived to adult life: Auguste Christine Charlotte lived but twelve days in 1736; the third daughter, Elisabeth, born in 1743, not long after Wilhelm’s death, was left behind when her mother took Sophie to Russia, causing both of them grief when she died in 1745.¹⁵

Since there could be no question of formal schooling for the female offspring of a minor German prince, Sophie’s education was entrusted from the age of four to her Huguenot governess, Elisabeth (Babet) Cardel (b. 1712), the younger sister of her nurse, Magdalena. Babet taught her to spell and to read, and introduced her to a pleasure that was to remain with her for the rest of her life: listening to friends read aloud. A dancing master was employed to teach the basic courtly arts, though this was later dismissed as ‘a waste of money, because really I only learned to dance much later–this is how a precocious education usually leads nowhere’. The rudiments of a more formal curriculum in French, German and the Scriptures were taught by the Pietist pastor Friedrich Wagner, a chaplain in her father’s regiment.¹⁶ This was a far more prestigious position than it sounds. The Pietist pastors chosen to become army preachers (Feldprediger) in Frederick William I’s Prussia were a zealous elite appointed directly by the king, who relied on them to transform illiterate peasant recruits into God-fearing, disciplined soldiers. Their most prominent convert was Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau, Christian August’s cousin and the king’s leading general.¹⁷ Since the very notion of childhood was barely developed among princely households at the time–all Sophie’s dolls and toys were removed at the age of seven on the grounds that she was ‘a big girl, for whom they were no longer suitable’¹⁸–it probably never occurred to her father that an army preacher’s methods might not suit a girl of tender age. She certainly failed to respond to them. ‘I bear no grudge against Monsieur Wagner,’ Catherine told Grimm in 1778, ‘but I am intimately persuaded that he was a blockhead, and that Mademoiselle Cardel was an intelligent girl.’¹⁹

She developed the contrast in a memoir begun on her forty-second birthday in 1771. Here Wagner is portrayed as a dull pedant, keen to resort to the rod in the face of her impudent questions (she claimed to have challenged the Creation story and asked him about circumcision). Refused permission to beat his young pupil, he took his revenge by frightening her with stories of the Last Judgement and imposing an unforgiving regime of rote learning which helped to harden her mind against organised religion. Since the Word was central to Pietism–an emotional brand of religiosity which stressed the intensely personal bonds between individual believers and their God–its pastors regarded the Scriptures as the main source of religious authority and the ultimate guide to everyday behaviour. Wagner was no exception. ‘I do not believe that it could be humanly possible to remember all that I had to learn by heart,’ Catherine later complained, ‘nor that there was any point in doing so. I have kept to this day a German Bible, in which all the verses I learned from memory are marked in red ink.’²⁰ By contrast, Babet Cardel appears in the empress’s memoirs as ‘a model of virtue and wisdom’. ‘She possessed a naturally elevated soul, a cultivated mind, and an excellent heart: she was patient, gentle, gay, just, steadfast–in truth, everything one could wish to find in people who look after children.’ Babet’s gentle inquisitiveness generated a sympathetic response: ‘I yielded to her alone; she smiled to herself and reasoned with me so gently that I could not resist her. All my life, indeed, I have preserved this inclination to yield only to reason and gentleness: I have always resisted pressure of any kind.’²¹

Artless as they may seem, such reflections form part of a carefully constructed persona which Catherine had already begun to fashion in her first brief memoir, written six years before she seized the Russian throne. Taking a detached view of her own character and conduct, she anticipated many of the features of the classic Enlightenment autobiographies by presenting herself as a rational, independent spirit–‘I was excessively lively and rather wayward in my childhood’–struggling to overcome the superstitious adults who supervised her upbringing.²² While Sophie’s parents consulted leading German doctors in their attempts to cure Wilhelm’s lameness, and sent him to take the waters at Aix-la-Chapelle, Teplitz and Karlsbad, a specialist in ‘dislocation’ proved harder to find when it seemed that Sophie might grow up with a curvature of the spine. In the end, they resorted to the public hangman, who recommended that a local girl be summoned every morning to rub Sophie’s back with her saliva and designed a primitive corset to straighten her limbs. She wore it until she was ten, growing increasingly self-conscious about her appearance. ‘I don’t know whether it is true that I was ugly as a child,’ the mature empress mused, ‘but I certainly know that people often told me so.’²³

To compensate for lack of beauty, Sophie tried to be amusing instead. If we believe her memoirs, she also learned to be secretive. Since a degree of dissimulation was regarded as an important weapon in any successful ruler’s armoury–‘Behave cleverly in public,’ Catherine told Potëmkin at the height of their affair in 1774, ‘and that way no one will know what we are thinking. I so enjoy being crafty!’²⁴–we should not be surprised at her claim to have mastered the skill so early. But for all the careful construction in the empress’s memoirs, there seems little reason to doubt that she was accustomed to keeping things to herself from an early age. Most children do, as the adult Catherine came to realise. ‘One never knows what children are thinking,’ she warned Grimm in 1776, a year before the birth of her first grandson, ‘and children are difficult to get to know, especially when a severe education has turned them into docile listeners and they have learned from experience not to tell things to their teachers. From that, if you please, you will derive the fine maxim that one should not scold children, but put them at their ease, so that they do not hide their blunders from you.’²⁵

The greatest legacy of Sophie’s early education was a form of secularised Pietist work ethic that stayed with her for the rest of her life. ‘I have always been able to concentrate hard,’ she boasted in 1785, regularly peppering her instructions to subordinates with exhortations not to waste time. ‘Waste as little time as possible,’ she urged her favourite, Peter Zavadovsky: ‘Time belongs not to me but to the empire.’²⁶ Crucial as this sense of duty was to become, the mature empress gave her childhood teachers no credit for it. On the contrary, as a celebrated patron of the Enlightenment and correspondent of Voltaire, she looked back on Stettin as an isolated provincial backwater. ‘Is it my fault that I do not share the taste of my century?’ she once asked Grimm, in mock defence of her alleged aesthetic shortcomings. ‘I think that Mlle Cardel and M. Wagner belonged to another age.’²⁷

Frustrated by the constraints of Stettin’s narrow society, the vivacious Johanna Elisabeth escaped as often as she could, shuttling back and forth across the north German plain to visit better-connected relatives. At the age of three, Sophie accompanied her on the first of several trips to her maternal grandmother in Hamburg. Here, as she grew older, she would experience an exceptional degree of freedom: ‘I did what I wanted and ran about from morning until night in every corner of the house.’ On that first visit, however, the frightened child apparently had to be removed, screaming, from the opera house. ‘This scene left such an impression on me that I remember it even now,’ she wrote in 1771.²⁸ Another frequent destination was the family seat at Zerbst, an insignificant town fifty miles south-west of Berlin and roughly equidistant between Magdeburg and Wittenberg, where Martin Luther had famously nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the church in October 1517. Best of all, the ambitious Johanna Elisabeth liked Berlin, where they regularly spent part of the winter.

Zerbst and the Prussian capital, however, were primarily calling points en route to the Court of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony, where Sophie’s mother had herself been raised and where her godmother, the dowager Duchess Elisabeth Sophie Marie of Brunswick-Lüneburg, had paid her dowry and arranged her marriage to Christian August at the palace at Vechelde, six miles west of Brunswick, in 1727.²⁹ More at ease than her husband in the grande monde, Johanna Elisabeth willingly returned to spend several months of the year with her benefactress. For the growing Sophie, it proved to be a memorable experience: ‘I was cajoled and made much of, small as I was. I heard it said so often that I was clever, and that I was a big girl, that I fancied it must be true. I stayed up for all the masquerade-balls and festivals and went all over the place. I chattered like a magpie and was excessively forward.’³⁰

There was much for an inquisitive child to see. The Court of Brunswick had been an important centre for the arts since the time of Shakespeare’s contemporary Duke Heinrich Julius, himself a notable playwright. Duke Anton Ulrich (r. 1685–1714) was an even more prolific Baroque novelist and poet, and it was during his reign that the built environment of the Court was transformed. That seasoned observer of European Court life, Baron Pöllnitz, particularly admired the duke’s homage to Versailles, his new country seat (Lustschloss) at Salzdahlum, a stone-clad timber palace halfway between Brunswick and Wolfenbüttel: ‘It has a great gallery with a collection of pictures by the chief painters which is not to be met with elsewhere.’³¹ Salzdahlum’s architect Hermann Korb also designed a celebrated rotunda to house the Duke August Library at Wolfenbüttel–then, as now, one of Europe’s leading scholarly collections–of which no less a philosopher than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was chief librarian between 1691 and 1716.³² The interior of the residence itself, one of the largest castles in northern Germany, was reshaped by the addition of a suite of Baroque staterooms.³³ The long reign of Duke Karl I (r. 1735–80) proved to be a flourishing period for the arts during which Gotthold Lessing, the greatest literary figure of the German Enlightenment, took charge of the Duke August Library in the 1770s and the Court maintained both an Italian opera company and a French ballet.³⁴ As a result of such lavish expenditure, Brunswick’s national debt rose from 1 million thalers in 1693 to 11 million in 1750, by which time Karl’s Court had more than doubled in size to around 400 people.³⁵ Even so he never doubted the value of the splendour he created, and there was no sign of a decline in his dynasty’s fortunes at the time of Sophie’s visits.

Though the regal status achieved by their more powerful rivals in Dresden and Berlin proved beyond the reach of second-division German princes such as the dukes of Brunswick, there was no shortage of royalty to be found at their Court. Duke Karl’s sisters included not only Elisabeth Christine, who in 1733 had married the future Frederick the Great of Prussia (r. 1740–86), but also Sophie’s exact contemporary, Princess Juliana Maria, who corresponded with her in later life after becoming queen of Denmark. Among their brothers were Prince Ludwig of Brunswick, who became tutor to the Stadtholder of the Netherlands and Prince Ferdinand, subsequently a general in Prussian service. Sophie got to know them all. As she later recalled in a passage of her memoirs intended to show that she had by no means arrived in Russia as a naïve provincial:

The Court of Brunswick was then a truly regal one, judging by the quantity of fine houses it occupied and their decoration, by the good order that reigned at this Court, and by the number of people of various sorts whom it maintained, and by the crowd of foreigners who visited it continually, and the grandeur and magnificence that characterised every aspect of its life. Balls, operas, concerts, hunts, promenades, banquets followed one another every day. That was what I saw for three or four months of the year, every year between the ages of seven and fourteen. The Prussian Court was by no means so well regulated, nor did it seem as splendid as that of the Duke of Brunswick.³⁶

Petty German princes may have strained every sinew to emulate Versailles, but according to the French historian Adrien Fauchier-Magnan, writing shortly after the end of the Second World War, all they achieved was ‘a puerile, grimacing parody, an extravagant caricature of the luxury and elegance of the Roi Soleil’.³⁷ In this way of thinking, the best that could be expected of a German ruler was harmless eccentricity. In all too many cases, however, oddity seemed to border on insanity–‘Germany teems with princes and dukes,’ Count Manteufel observed in 1738, ‘three-quarters of whom are not right in the head’–so that the political landscape was dotted by a profusion of self-indulgent despots, each extorting taxes from his benighted subjects to fuel his obsession with personal glory.³⁸

Like all caricatures, this one incorporates a recognisable grain of truth. As Sophie was soon to discover, flagrant marital infidelity was a feature common to hothouse Court societies all over Europe. Though German Courts were no exception, there was no doubt about the identity of the monarch who had set new standards of shamelessness in his relationships with the opposite sex. When Duke Eberhard Ludwig of Württemberg scandalised his Lutheran officials in 1707 by declaring his intention to marry his paramour while his first wife was still alive, he countered their objections by pointing to the example of Louis XIV.³⁹ Louis had sired a string of royal bastards–so-called ‘children of France’–by a succession of mistresses which ended only with his secret second marriage to Madame de Maintenon in 1683. Only then, as a recent biographer remarks, did the king undergo a ‘drastic conversion to monogamy’, coming to resemble ‘a reformed alcoholic who will not have a bottle in the house’.⁴⁰

Versailles was equally inspirational in matters of Court culture. The Elector of Saxony, Augustus the Strong, was so impressed by his youthful visit to the French Court in the late 1680s that the image of Louis XIV continued to fascinate him even from the grave. Aspiring to resemble his idol as precisely as possible at his son’s wedding, Augustus ordered his Parisian agent in 1717 to send a costume doll to Dresden wearing an outfit ‘such as the late King of France wore on great occasions like his wedding’. A drawing would not suffice, Augustus insisted: it had to be a doll.⁴¹ Those unable to marvel at Louis XIV’s palace in person avidly collected the illustrated descriptions that the Bourbon kings were eager to see published as a way of propagating French culture. Karl Eugen of Württemberg employed a full-time agent in Paris from 1748, charged solely with sending to Stuttgart all new publications relating to the Court or to palace design. Goethe expressed a widespread contemporary ambivalence about the whole enterprise:

Duke Karl, to whom one must concede a certain grandeur of vision, worked nevertheless to gratify his momentary passions and to act out a series of ever-changing fantasies. But in that he strove for status, show, and effect, he had a particular need for artists. And even when his motives were less than noble, he could not help but further a higher cause. ⁴²

Fauchier-Magnan’s condescension is therefore seriously distorted. Not only does he fail to see the way that most of the smaller German Courts had risen above the drunken rusticity that disfigured some of the earliest attempts to imitate Versailles, he also misses the central political purpose of representational display. Monarchs in early-modern Europe exercised power over their subjects not by keeping them under observation (as the modern state seeks to do), but by directly representing their exalted status through a series of symbolic gestures, clothing, rhetoric and rituals.⁴³ Everything at Versailles was designed to glorify Louis XIV, from the paintings on the ceiling to the clock that made Fame crown his statue with a laurel every time it struck the hour.⁴⁴ Princes throughout Europe exhausted their revenues to compete. Since there could be no more lavish setting in which to impress their leading subjects and dynastic rivals than a magnificent palace and Court, cultural rivalry between monarchs was intense. ‘For the baroque prince,’ Tim Blanning has rightly insisted, ‘representational display was not self-indulgence, it was his métier.’⁴⁵And as Sophie discovered when she left Stettin for the last time in 1743, it was a métier practised even by such a minor potentate as Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst.

Dwarfed by their Saxon and Prussian neighbours, the princes of the House of Anhalt were among the poorest and most insignificant in Germany. Since being divided into four tiny principalities in 1603, their lands had ‘been partitioned so much that there has remained little to partition’, as the mature Catherine observed from the throne of the largest territory on earth since the fall of the Roman Empire.⁴⁶ That did not mean that their Courts were culturally barren. No less a composer than Johann Sebastian Bach was appointed Court Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen in 1717. Sandwiched between periods of even more astonishing creativity at Weimar and Leipzig, Bach’s six years in Leopold’s service produced the six Brandenburg Concertos and the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier (forty-eight preludes and fugues).⁴⁷ Yet scarcely anyone beyond the area knew anything of his genius at the time. There was nothing unusual about that in the introverted confessional world of Protestant northern Germany. The only prince of Anhalt to make a wider European impact was Sophie’s contemporary, Leopold III Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau, who created the first English-style landscape garden in eighteenth-century Germany at Wörlitz between 1763 and 1790, complete with islands named after Rousseau and Herder. Designed to symbolise the reconciliation of technical progress with sentimentalist philosophy, the garden boasted a model volcano whose eruptions were intended to represent the transformative power of Enlightened political reform.⁴⁸

Although his volcano has long since gone, Franz’s elegant neoclassical architecture still stands as an oasis of civilisation in the desert of decaying chemical plants that disfigure the former East Germany. The House of Anhalt-Zerbst can boast no such living legacy. Whereas the princes of Anhalt-Dessau survived to witness the formation of the Weimar Republic, Sophie’s father’s line came to an end even within her own lifetime at the death of her brother, Friedrich August, in 1793. Since little remains of the castle at Zerbst, it is tempting to suppose that it must have been no more distinguished than the town which surrounded it. In fact, like so many Baroque palaces in Europe, it was a quintessentially cosmopolitan creation of considerable elegance and beauty.

When its Dutch architect Cornelis Ryckwaert died in 1693, the central block planned in 1680–81 was already complete. By 1710, the addition of the west wing by the Swiss stucco-master Giovanni Simonetti provided the prince’s small retinue with all the ceremonial apartments of a Baroque Court in miniature: a central reception room (Festsaal), with ceiling paintings on themes from the Iliad and the Aeneid; a smaller reception room whose ceiling painting glorified the investiture of the first prince of Anhalt in 1212; and a formal dining hall (Speisesaal). By the time that Johann Friedrich Friedel completed the east wing in the spirit of Potsdam rococo, between 1744 and 1748, Sophie had already left for Russia, but she would have worshipped in the ornate chapel at the southern end of the west wing, where Francesco Minetti worked with other artists between 1717 and 1718, inspired by motifs from the Zwinger in Dresden, and she would also have been familiar with the tower built over the castle’s main entrance between 1718 and 1722 by Johann Christoph Schütze, who later took charge of construction at the Saxon Court.⁴⁹

In such a modest palace, it was neither possible nor necessary to replicate every element of the etiquette practised at Versailles, which had never been the only available model for the smaller German Courts. Many of them–especially though not exclusively the Catholic ones–adopted the ceremonial of the imperial Court at Vienna, where the Habsburgs preserved, in the relatively unpretentious surroundings of the Hofburg, a ritual tradition adopted from Burgundy and Spain in the sixteenth century. Whereas almost everything in the life of the kings of France was a public spectacle–from the moment they rose in the morning (lever du roi) to the moment they retired to bed (coucher)–the Austrian emperors lived in comparative seclusion, appearing in public only for a limited number of formal meals.⁵⁰ We do not know which ceremonial model was adopted at Zerbst. Neither can we be sure how far the various procedural manuals potentially available to Christian August were translated into everyday practice.⁵¹ However, the unusual fact that his private apartments were built alongside those of his wife, rather than being in separate wings or divided by the main staircase, implies a degree of domestication that serves as a reminder that the Courts of early-modern Europe were by no means monolithic. While itinerant medieval princely households had everywhere settled at a permanent dwelling place (Residenz) by 1700, the transformation took place in different ways and at different speeds, and even as more or less regular institutions formed around departments responsible for ceremonial, banqueting, the stables and the hunt, Courts remained complex social organisms, following their peripatetic monarchs to a range of summer and winter palaces, sometimes for whole seasons but often for only a few days at a time.⁵² Even Christian August had his own country seat at Dornburg on the Elbe, not far from Zerbst, where Schütze had worked his magic so that Sophie found the castle ‘not only very well situated, but embellished as much as possible, both inside and out’.⁵³

By the time she moved to Zerbst, Sophie was already chafing at the restrictions of her restricted family society. She found a more attractive model on a visit to Countess Bentinck at Varel in the duchy of Oldenbourg. ‘I found her charming. How else could she have seemed to me? I was fourteen; she rode, danced whenever the fancy took her to do so, sang and laughed and skipped about like a child, though she was well over thirty at the time–she was already separated from her husband.’⁵⁴ That phrase in the mature Catherine’s memoirs acquires an extra frisson in the light of the fate of her own assassinated spouse. At the time, however, minds were naturally concentrated on the initial task of finding her a partner.

Though both Prince William of Saxe-Gotha and Prince Henry of Prussia (who was later to visit her twice in St Petersburg) had started to pay her attention at the age of twelve or thirteen, her most assiduous suitor as she approached marriageable age was a close relative.⁵⁵ Under the disapproving gaze of Babet Cardel, Georg Ludwig of Holstein-Gottorp, her mother’s younger brother, became infatuated with Sophie when he was twenty-four and she was ten years younger. How far he awakened her adolescent sexuality remains uncertain, though the passage in her memoirs in which she refers to ‘galloping astride her pillows’ has often been interpreted as a veiled reference to masturbation.⁵⁶ Sophie saw no harm in his kisses–‘he was thoughtful and affectionate’–and apparently agreed to a wedding provided her parents consented. But while Johanna Elisabeth seems to have done little to stem her brother’s ardour, ambition had already prompted her to cast her eyes further afield.

Even when she began to look for a more promising match, closer in age to her daughter, there was no need to look beyond the confines of her well-connected family. At Eutin in 1739, on a visit to her elder brother, Adolf Friedrich, then Prince Bishop of Lübeck, Johanna Elisabeth had introduced Sophie to her second cousin, Karl Peter Ulrich, who had inherited the dukedom of Holstein-Gottorp earlier that summer at the age of eleven. Since his late father, Duke Karl Friedrich, had been nephew to the childless Charles XII of Sweden, Peter was widely expected to inherit the Swedish throne. His late mother, Anna Petrovna, who died a few months after his birth, had been the eldest daughter of Peter the Great of Russia, and he was a far more eligible prospect than Georg Ludwig. As Court gossip began to link his name with Sophie’s, Johanna Elisabeth watched his future with interest.⁵⁷

Peter’s fortunes sharply improved when Peter the Great’s surviving unmarried daughter, Elizabeth, deposed the infant Ivan VI of Russia in a bloodless coup on 25 November 1741. The following February, she brought her nephew to St Petersburg, obliged him to convert to Orthodoxy, and in November formally declared him her heir in accordance with her father’s law of 1722, which permitted reigning tsars to nominate their own successors. This move not only helped to secure the succession in Russia, but also forced Peter to renounce his claim to the throne of Sweden, with which Russia was at war between 1741 and 1743. At Elizabeth’s insistence, the Swedish succession now passed to Sophie’s uncle, Adolf Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp, giving her scheming mother an added incentive to cultivate her relationship with the empress, who had been engaged to another of her brothers, Karl August, before he died of smallpox in May 1727.

Egged on by Frederick the Great, who promoted Sophie’s father to the rank of field marshal to enhance the family’s prestige, Johanna Elisabeth sent her daughter’s portrait to the tsaritsa, who responded with a diamond-encrusted picture of herself. Elizabeth knew nothing of Sophie’s personality. Aside from ties of sentiment to the House of Holstein-Gottorp, she was attracted mainly by the prospect of a marriage alliance with a Protestant family in Prussian service. This promised the Court of St Petersburg a foothold in northern Germany to balance the diplomatic alliance with Austria which had dominated Russian foreign policy since 1726. Against the advice of her pro-Austrian vice chancellor, Aleksey Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who would have preferred a Catholic Saxon fiancée for Grand Duke Peter, Elizabeth invited Sophie to Russia at the end of 1743.

Catherine’s memoirs paint a remarkably domesticated portrait of the scene at Zerbst when the invitation arrived:

On 1 January 1744, we were all seated at the table when my father was handed a big packet of letters. After tearing open the first envelope, my father passed to my mother several letters addressed to her. I was sitting beside her and recognised the hand of the marshal of the Court of the duke of Holstein, the Grand Duke of Russia. This was a Swedish gentleman, named Brummer. My mother had written to him several times in 1739 and he had replied. My mother opened the letter and I saw the words: ‘with the princess, her elder daughter’. I knew at once what it meant–I guessed the rest and it turned out that I had guessed right. My mother had been invited by him on behalf of the Empress Elizabeth to come to Russia under the pretext of thanking Her Majesty for all the benefits she had conferred on my mother’s family.⁵⁸

Despite Catherine’s claims that the decision to accept this invitation was her own, taken in the face of her Lutheran father’s profound misgivings, the invitation had in reality been engineered by Johanna Elisabeth, who had already learned from Frederick the Great that the empress intended to pay 10,000 roubles for their travel expenses.⁵⁹ Faced with what amounted to an imperial summons, mother and daughter departed for St Petersburg without delay on 10 January 1744 NS.

Though Sophie’s feelings as she set out for Russia can only be imagined, excitement was surely tempered by trepidation. Isabella of Parma, who married the future Joseph II of Austria twelve years later, described a predicament shared by many European princesses in the eighteenth century: ‘There she is, condemned to abandon everything, her family, her country–and for whom? For an unknown person, whose character and manner of thinking she does not know.’⁶⁰ Thanks to her meeting with Peter at Eutin, that was not quite Sophie’s situation. Indeed, as a German prince, born and raised in Kiel, the grand duke might have been expected to offer her a measure of familiar comfort in alien surroundings. Kiel, after all, was almost as insignificant as Zerbst in the eyes of the Russian elite, who scoffed that the whole city was no bigger than St Petersburg’s Summer Garden.⁶¹

Neither is it necessary to suppose, as Catherine’s memoirs later implied, that she faced a stark choice between obeying her future husband and overthrowing him. Though it was by no means easy for an intelligent woman to live a fulfilled life as a royal consort in the eighteenth century, it was certainly not impossible. Cultural patronage offered a natural opportunity for uncontroversial activity, eagerly grasped by most European queens. The more determined among them could also play a significant role in government, either as political hostesses or as surrogate rulers behind the scenes. We shall never know how the philosophically minded Isabella would have coped with Joseph II, because death (a constant preoccupation in her prolific writings) snatched her from him not long after their wedding. However, Sophie’s childhood friend, Juliana Maria, overcame both shyness and a stutter to become the effective ruler of Denmark in conjunction with her favourite for twelve years after the coup of 1772.⁶² And although it was obviously easier for a female consort to dominate a weak king–Elizabeth Farnese, the ambitious second wife of Philip V of Spain, became notorious across Europe for her influence over her depressive husband⁶³–consorts of even the most powerful monarchs could carve out a workable division of labour. Frederick the Great despised Court flummery and spent progressively more of his time in male company at Potsdam to avoid its offensive trappings. But since it was unthinkable for a king entirely to dispense with a Court, the gap was filled by Juliana Maria’s elder sister, Queen Elisabeth Christine, whose summer palace at Schönhausen and regular reception days at Berlin provided a crucial meeting place for diplomats and foreign visitors.⁶⁴

However uncertain she may have been about her future, Sophie was acutely conscious of how much she was leaving behind, subsequently portraying her journey to Russia in terms of sacrifice rather than opportunity. By convention, Christian August was not invited, though he accompanied his daughter to Berlin, where Frederick looked her over while instructing her mother about her conduct in St Petersburg. Though few of her contemporaries were to play such an important part in Sophie’s life, she never saw the king again. She caught her last glimpse of her father at a tearful parting at Schwedt an der Oder on 17 January, the day after leaving Berlin. ‘The separation was as sad as one could possibly imagine,’ she remembered in 1756.⁶⁵

After that, she faced an uncomfortable trek across the wastes of Pomerania and East Prussia, so bereft of snow that winter that the journey had to be made in carriages rather than sleighs. Peering through narrow eye-slits in the woolly hats that protected their faces, they left Stargardt (now Szczecinski) in icy conditions on 18 January. From there, it was a tortuous progress eastwards through Keslin, skirting Danzig, and over the Vistula to Marienwerder.⁶⁶ Although Frederick William I had already attempted to drain the Oder Marshes in the 1730s with the help of Dutch hydraulic engineers, the epic work of transforming the watery landscape east of the Oder still lay in the future in 1744. Over the next thirty years, it would be the king’s son, Frederick the Great, and his colonists who transformed the valleys of the Elbe, the Oder, the Warthe, the Netze and the Vistula into productive agricultural land. (‘Making domain lands cultivable interests me more than murdering people,’ Frederick remarked in a characteristic jibe against his brutal father.)⁶⁷ At the time of Sophie’s departure for Russia, the whole area remained a patchwork quilt of stagnant pools and marsh, punctuated by areas of thick, waterlogged brush–an unregulated paradise for outlaws and bandits, offensive in itself to the standardising instincts of Frederick’s Enlightened administration. Like much of the rest of Europe, such a landscape was barely passable in spring and autumn, when flooding washed away the tracks that snaked across the marshes. In winter, it was a perilous wilderness. Sophie and her mother avoided the worst dangers by keeping close to the coast. ‘Our journey was long, very boring, and very painful,’ she later remembered of their odyssey between primitive roadside inns. ‘My feet were so swollen that I had to be lifted in and out of the carriage.’⁶⁸

During a rare day of rest at Königsberg, where another product of Pietism, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, was already a twenty-year-old student at the university, Sophie wrote to her father (in French). Mindful of the instructions he had signed at Zerbst on 3 January that no one must persuade her to renege on her religious beliefs, she adopted her most dutiful tone:

Monseigneur,

I have received with all imaginable respect and joy the letter in which Your Highness does me the honour of reassuring me about his health, about his remembrance of me, and his good wishes. I beg to reassure him that his exhortations and his counsel will remain eternally engraved in my heart, just as the seeds of our holy religion will be in my soul, for which I ask God to lend all the strength that I shall require to resist the temptations to which I am preparing to expose myself.⁶⁹

Before she faced those temptations, however, there was still almost two-thirds of the journey to go. Passing north-eastwards into Courland–‘at all times a desert country’, as a British diplomat had been warned by the canny purveyors of Königsberg four years earlier–she saw the ‘terrible’ comet first observed from Sweden and the Netherlands at the end of November 1743.⁷⁰ At its brightest in the following March, it displayed as many as twelve fanning rays in the manner of a peacock’s tail. ‘I have never seen a bigger one,’ the mature empress declared; ‘it seemed very near to the earth.’⁷¹ She was not alone in her fascination. Though clouds obscured the comet from much of the continent until the New Year, news of it spread rapidly in the European press. ‘The Comet this Evening appeared exceeding bright and distinct,’ recorded an Oxford astronomer on 23 January, ‘and the Diameter of its Nucleus nearly equal to that of Jupiter’s; its Tail, extending above 16 Degrees from its Body, pointed towards Andromeda; and was in Length (supposing the Sun’s Parallax 10") above 23 Millions of Miles; but cloudy Weather succeeding, we lost this agreeable Sight till Feb. 5th.’⁷² That must have been roughly when Sophie saw it. Since comets had until recently been regarded as portents of disaster, she might have been forgiven for wondering what such an apparition beheld for her in a distant foreign land. ⁷³ But she would mock Empress Elizabeth for holding such superstitious views in 1756, when popular scientific accounts of comets were about to appear in Russian journals.⁷⁴ And twenty-one years after her experiences on her journey to St Petersburg, Grigory Orlov, a keen amateur astronomer, would read aloud from one such treatise while Catherine amused the rest of the company by fantasising about what might happen if a comet carried them away and turned them all to glass.⁷⁵

It was a very different Russian nobleman who met Princess Sophie just beyond Mitau (now Jelgava in Latvia) and guided her over the frozen River Dvina into the Russian empire. Johanna Elisabeth and her daughter had first encountered the thirty-three-year-old Semën Naryshkin in Hamburg on his return from London. As a youthful ambassador to the Court of St James, he had gained ample practice in the diplomatic niceties that would serve him well as a future Marshal of Elizabeth’s Court. Now Master of the Hunt, no one was better equipped than this most flamboyant of courtiers to flatter Sophie’s mother, who assumed he must be a prince and exposed her delusions of grandeur with a gushing travel account that placed her at the centre of events. Since it had proved impossible to heat the imperial apartments at Riga, where they gained eleven days by reverting to the Julian calendar, she and Sophie were given tastefully furnished rooms at the house of a wealthy merchant, not unlike the one in which her daughter had been born. In every other respect, theirs was a royal progress, intended to overwhelm them with a sense of Russia’s imperial power and prestige as they drove through crowded streets to fanfares of trumpets and drums. ‘It feels as though I am part of the entourage of Her Imperial Majesty or some great princess,’ wrote the disingenuous Johanna Elisabeth: ‘It never enters my head that all this is for poor me.’⁷⁶

Until they entered Russian territory, Sophie’s mother had been travelling incognito as Countess Rheinbeck, accompanied by only the most modest of suites: her chamberlain, her lady-in-waiting, four chambermaids, a valet, a handful of lackeys and a cook. Now, wrapped in the priceless sables presented to them by Naryshkin, they continued their journey under cavalry escort in long imperial sleighs drawn by ten horses. As Catherine later recalled, it was quite an art even to climb into these elaborate vehicles, in which passengers lay recumbent on bulky feather mattresses, lined with silk and covered with satin cushions.⁷⁷ Still, there was little enough to see as they traversed a snowy landscape razed by the Russians in the first decade of the century when it seemed that the invading Swedish army might triumph in the Great Northern War. Not until the 1770s did Russia’s Baltic provinces recover their pre-war population levels after a campaign in which as many as 70 per cent of the population of Livland and Estland may have perished. At Dorpat (now Tartu in Estonia), which the Russians had taken from the Swedes in 1704, the signs of the bombardment were still visible.⁷⁸ Their final calling point was Narva, where 11,000 Swedish troops had humiliated Peter the Great’s 40,000-strong army in November 1700, prompting far-reaching military reforms that helped to underpin tsarist imperial expansion for the remainder of the century. From there, it was a relatively short distance along the southern shores of the gulf of Finland to the Russian capital, where they arrived on the afternoon of 3 February towards the end of the carnival season.