The story of one of the truly great female rulers in history by an
award winning historian.
The daughter of an impoverished aristocrat, Catherine was married
aged 16 to Grand Duke Peter, heir to the throne of all the Russias,
a feckless teenager with a weakness for drink. Catherine was only
able to give him an heir by passing off her lover's son as his own.
In 1762, Catherine rode out of St Petersburg at the head of an army
to arrest her husband. Three months later she became sole empress of
the largest empire on earth. She was 33 years old.
She ruled Russia as a benevolent autocrat for 34 years,fighting the
Turks abroad and rebellion at home, and shepherding her people
through the upheavals of the French Revolution. She took on many
lovers but gave her heart to General Potemkin, the foremost
statesman of her time.
She died in 1796 aged 67, revered by her people as 'our mother',
praised by Voltaire as a philosopher, reviled by her enemies as the
Messalina of the North and remembered in history as Catherine the Great.
From this extraordinary life of great events, fabulous splendour
and barbaric cruelty, Robert K. Massie has woven a thrilling
narrative based on impeccable scholarship and a cinematic eye for detail.
'A biographer with the instincts of a novelist' New York Times. 'A
masterful, intimate and tantalising portrait of a majestic monarch'
Publishers' Weekly. 'A sensitive and compelling portrait not just of a
Russian titan, but also of a flesh-and-blood woman' Newsweek. Robert
K. Massie was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1929. He studied American
History at Yale University and Modern European History at Oxford
University, which he attended as a Rhodes scholar. He lives in
Irvington, New York.
