catharine the great – The Patricians Genealogical Research Foundation

Portrait of the Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseyevna (the future Catherine the Great) around the time of her wedding, oil on canvas by Georg Christoph Grooth, 1745.
Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

The Troubled Marriage of Catherine the Great and Peter III

Coronation of Catherine II
by Stefano Torelli

Catharine Palace, Saint Petersburg, Russia

Catherine the Great Is Related to the British Royal Family via Prince Philip

Territorial extension during her reign included Crimea and much of Poland.

At the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, England’s King George III (1738 – 1820) requested 20,000 Russian troops as military aid to immediately quell the colonial uprising. Catharine the Great rejected his request and Russia remained neutral throughout the armed conflict. In 1780 she publicly issued a Declaration of Armed Neutrality and sponsored efforts to mediate between Britain and the colonists. She even allowed the residency of the diplomatic mission Benjamin Franklin sent to persuade her to recognize the Continental Colonies as a nation that same year, although she never did until after the war was over. Nevertheless, Russia’s neutrality may well have had a significant impact on its outcome, perhaps wittingly.

The principles of European enlightenment that Peter the Great embraced and started to implement continued as a major guiding course of her monarchal agenda. She championed the arts, reorganized the law code, and reformed education, all pretty much along the lines of the European practice of the day. She and Voltaire (1694 – 1778) regularly corresponded for fifteen years before his death, so her interest in French enlightenment as a philosophy was one of her compelling passions.

She continues to be regarded as an illegitimate ruler of Russia who came into power after she forced the abdication of her husband, Peter III, mainly because the Prussian-born princess wouldn’t have been considered in the Russian monarchal scheme of succession in any event. However, as an agnatic descendant of Rurik, Grand Prince of Novgorod, 1st Tsar of Russia (830 – 879) Primogenitor of the Rurikid dynasty, she likely considered her claim on the tsardom as superior to all others, particularly over her husband’s Romanov/Oldenburg lineage, which was based on agnatic monarchal succession from Charlemagne (742 – 814) King of Franks and Lombards (the last of which was Nicholas II Alexandrovich Romanov, KG, Tsar of Russia (1868 – 1918)). Her Russian subjects may have well hailed her ascent as Empress for that very reason.

Agnatic descendant of Sigge “Odin” Fridulfsson of Asgard (50 BC – 30 AD) 1st King of Scandinavia, Hengest Wihtgilsson von Sachsen, 1st Jute King of Kent (414 – 488), and Rurik, Grand Prince of Novgorod, 1st Tsar of Russia (830 – 879) Primogenitor of Rurikid dynasty; agnatic cousin of Anne of Cleves (1515 – 1557), 4th wife of Henry VIII Tudor (1491 – 1547) King of England and Ireland.

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European Royalty, Peerage & Nobility

Catharine II “the Great” Romanov

Birth 2 MAY 1729 • Szczecin, Lodzkie, Poland

Death 17 NOV 1796 • Sankt-Peterburg, Saint Petersburg, Russia