The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800

by William Monter

  Under Catherine II, foreigners no longer commanded Russian armies, but Russia's native naval officers continued to lag far behind its infantry generals, and at one point the empress even hired the naval hero of the American Revolution, John Paul Jones. When he died in 1788, her greatest naval hero, Admiral Samuel Grieg, an old Scot, belonged to no fewer than five Russian chivalric orders, including two created by Catherine II: the Order of St. George, established during her first major war in 1769, and the Order of St. Vladimir, created in 1782 to celebrate her twentieth anniversary as empress.34

  Less gloriously, Catherine II's reign confronted the last and largest popular rebellion in imperial Russia, Pugachev's revolt of 1773–74. Catherine's counterfeit husband and his main collaborators exhibited unusual panache by creating not only a counterfeit court but also a counterfeit government that issued printed and sealed decrees in the name of Peter III. A rebel nobleman conducted the illiterate Pugachev's official correspondence in French and German, while two literate Tatars did likewise in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Both its so-called College of War and the adopted names of principal rebels directly mimicked Russia's real court and government, including Catherine's lover, Count Orlov. Pugachev himself abandoned his family to marry the daughter of a Yaik Cossack, who was then addressed as Her Imperial Majesty. The real empress attempted to liquidate these affronts to her prestige as rapidly, efficiently, and completely as possible. Once the revolt was broken and the rebel leader himself captured, Catherine II concentrated her efforts first on avoiding torture, which she said always obscured the truth and had thus far proved unnecessary, and then on ensuring a minimum of bloodshed. “As regards executions,” she informed her chief prosecutor, “there must be no painful ones, and only three or four people.”35 She took special care to discover whether Pugachev had coined money, who had painted his portrait, and what medals he had granted his followers. The artist turned out to be an icon painter who had painted Tsar Peter III over a likeness of the empress captured from a government office; no coins had been minted, but captured silversmiths had made about twenty medals for him. At his execution, Pugachev's counterfeit seal was broken in his presence. Then, to the bitter disappointment of the Moscow crowd, he was beheaded before traditional barbarities were inflicted on his corpse. Catherine's final objective was to obliterate all memory of this revolt by erasing the names of key places and persons connected with it. Pugachev's house was destroyed, and his village was renamed after one of her generals. The main village of his rebellious Yaik Cossacks likewise had its name changed, and the Yaik River became the Ural. Even Pugachev's brother, who had not taken part in the revolt, had to change his surname.

  Pugachev was the most important of several men claiming to be Peter III, but he was not Russia's strangest impostor. This dubious distinction belongs to his immediate successor, the first and only documented female royal pretender in European history. Her real name remains unknown, but she became known in Russia as Tarakanova (literally, “of the cockroaches”). Accompanied by an entourage of Polish exiles and French agents who claimed she was the daughter of Empress Elisabeth, she was astutely kidnapped in 1775 at the Adriatic port of Ragusa with the help of British diplomats. Together with two Polish aides and six Italian servants, she was sent to St. Petersburg for interrogation, in French because she spoke no Russian. In captivity, she spun a series of fairy tales and wrote a letter to the empress which Catherine furiously noted “extended her insolence to the point of signing herself as Elisabeth.” This “rank scoundrel,” who died of natural causes after six months in prison, inspired several romantic novels and a very early silent French film.36

  Domestically, Catherine's first major achievement was to summon Russia's earliest elective assembly in December 1766; it would also be the last until 1905. When it opened in July 1767, it contained 29 deputies representing government institutions, including the Orthodox church, 142 deputies from the provincial nobility, 209 deputies from Russian towns, and 200 peasant deputies, including 54 from non-Russian tribes. Catherine's final document began by asserting that “Russia is a European power” and claimed in a burst of Enlightenment optimism that “Peter the Great, on introducing European manners and customs among a European people, found such facility as he himself never expected.” Its next article boasted that “the Empire of Russia contains 32 degrees of latitude and 165 of longitude on the terrestrial globe"—and Catherine II later extended its western and southern limits considerably. Article 9 asserted, “The Sovereign is absolute, for no other than absolute power vested in one person can be suitable to the extent of so vast an Empire.” She borrowed a great deal from Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws but finessed his assertion that the law of succession was the most fundamental of any country, because she could not devise one that would retrospectively justify her seizure of power.37

  Her leading biographer, Isabel de Madariaga, asserts that Catherine's Nakaz, or Instruction, to the assembled deputies constituted “one of the most remarkable political treatises ever compiled and published by a reigning sovereign in modern times.” It was also widely disseminated across Europe. A deluxe edition of 1770 was printed in Russian, Latin, French, and German, and a luxurious bilingual Russian–Greek edition followed in 1771. An English translation appeared in 1768, followed by Italian, Dutch, and Polish versions. French censorship guaranteed its notoriety by banning the work. Her famously misogynist ally Frederick the Great complimented her legislative efforts as a “masculine, nervous performance, and worthy of a great man.” Comparing the Russian autocrat to Semiramis, Elizabeth I of England, and their peer Maria Theresa, the Prussian king remarked, “We have never heard of any female being a lawgiver; this glory was reserved for the Empress of Russia.”38 The assembly attempted to honor her with the title of Mother of the Fatherland, which she refused after their proposal had entered the official record.

  Although no general law code for the empire ever emerged from these discussions, many of its central provisions were incorporated into subsequent legislation, especially the major administrative reforms which followed the end of her first Turkish war (Maria Theresa's greatest administrative reforms also followed the end of her first major war). With her usual energy, Catherine II and her advisers made six drafts, including more than six hundred worksheets written in her own hand, before the “Statute for the Administration of the Provinces [gubernyi] of the Russian Empire” was promulgated in November 1775. Its key provisions, carried out under Catherine II's constant close personal supervision, divided her empire into twenty-five major units of approximately equal population and multiplied the number of courts, schools, almshouses, public buildings, and subaltern officials in each. By 1785 further conquests and treaties had increased the number of imperial gubernyi to forty-one; they had reached fifty when she died in 1796. As these reforms were implemented, the cost of Russia's local government mushroomed from 1.7 million roubles in 1774 to 5.6 million by 1785; by her last year, they had nearly doubled again to 10.9 million. De Madariaga notes that the share of Russian state income devoted to military expenses declined considerably throughout her reign, while civilian administration ate up more than half of the budget by the time she died, and asserts that “the demilitarization of administration and society was the corollary of the presence of a woman on the throne.”39

  The sharp increase in numbers of gubernyi indicates the scale of Catherine II's territorial acquisitions at the expense of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire. From the commonwealth she claimed to have liquidated only the Slavic part, the former grand duchy of Lithuania, while leaving the Catholic Poles to her German partners in crime; in fact, she took only slightly less than Joseph Stalin would after 1945. Her southern acquisitions from the Turks gave Russia permanent control of the Black Sea. Such huge gains merely whetted Catherine's appetite for the fantastic Greek project of her old age, which envisioned destroying the Ottoman Empire completely and installing her younger grandson Constantine in the ancient Byzantine
capital of Constantinople.

  Catherine II was Europe's only female ruler to consciously promote her political greatness, and she closely supervised the production of various forms of durable propaganda to perpetuate her achievements. At her coronation, 850 commemorative medallions were struck in gold and silver for the most distinguished guests, 2,000 more in bronze for lesser notables, and about 30,000 small copper pieces were thrown to the crowd. To celebrate her tenth anniversary in power, she put her accession medal of 1767, depicting her as a helmeted Minerva, on snuffboxes for her closest associates. At the same time, she reinforced her credentials as a Russian patriot by ordering a series of 57 medals representing every previous Russian ruler from tenth-century Rurik to Tsarina Elisabeth (omitting, of course, Ivan VI and Peter III).

  Catherine II used medals far more extensively than any previous female ruler. That same year, 1772, her Prussian allies gave her a printed pamphlet listing every Russian medal in their possession. In the first decade of her reign this German-born Westernizer had issued far more of these in Russian than in Latin, mainly commemorating such new institutions as a Foundling Hospital (1763), an Academy of Fine Arts (1765), the Carousel Theater (1766), Russia's Legislative Assembly (1767), St. Isaac's Cathedral (1768), and the Economic Society (1768). More recent medals celebrated Russia's success in its ongoing war with the Ottomans; one, with a beautiful map, commemorated Alexis Orlov's naval victory over the Turks. However, Prussia did not possess all of Catherine II's early medals. Two more, both with Latin inscriptions, went to British physicians to celebrate the introduction of vaccination (1768) and “Liberation from Plague” (1770). A large collection subsequently acquired by France included medals in Russian commemorating an expedition to Kamchatka (1762), her foundation of the Smolny Institute for girls (1764), her new honorary military order of St. George (1769), the transportation of the pedestal for her great equestrian statue of Peter I (1770), and Grigory Orlov's actions in plague-ridden Moscow (1771).40

  Across the next decade, Catherine II maintained a steady stream of political accomplishments, also commemorated by medals. By 1781 she proudly enumerated no fewer than 492 notable political achievements throughout her burgeoning empire: 29 provinces reorganized, 144 towns organized and built, 30 foreign treaties, 78 military victories, 88 memorable edicts, and 123 edicts for ameliorating the general welfare of her subjects. Only a few of these deserved medals, while some of her most famous but insufficiently glorious political events of the 1770s were not commemorated in this way—for example, the suppression of Pugachev's revolt and the first partition of Poland, in which Catherine, unlike Maria Theresa, did not reclaim provinces lost many centuries earlier. Nevertheless, both London and Paris possess Russian medals from this decade commemorating such events as her renovation of the Kremlin (1773); the marriage of Crown Prince Paul (1773); her peace treaty with Turkey and her victorious general, Prince Peter Rumiantsov (both 1774); her creation of new provincial governments (1775); the second marriage of Crown Prince Paul (1776); the fifty-year jubilee of Russia's Academy of Science (1776); the birth of her first grandson, Alexander (1777), depicting the empress but not the father; homage from her new Greek subjects in the Crimea (1779); and the birth of her second grandson, Constantine (1779).

  In 1782 a whole series of medals celebrated the unveiling of Falconet's statue of Peter the Great, with tokens thrown to the crowd as at a coronation; others celebrated the strengthened Russian navy and Russia's new Imperial Academy of Language, headed by Princess Ekaterina Dashkova. In 1783 medals celebrated Potemkin's conquest of the Crimean peninsula, including a superb map; formal Russian annexation of the Crimea, also with a map; and Russia's new client, the king of Georgia. The next year produced one celebrating the creation of a free port at Theodosia (present-day Sebastopol). Those from 1788 celebrated Potemkin's victory over the Turks at Ochakov, including a diagram of the battle; another marked the death of Russia's naval hero Admiral Greig, for whom Catherine personally composed an epitaph in Tallinn's Protestant cathedral (and ensured that the inscription tells us so). A year later she also composed the inscriptions for three more medals honoring Potemkin. The empress did not overlook older events: in the 1780s she planned a new series with 235 motifs from Russian history, of which 94 were eventually struck. Another cluster of medals were struck in 1790 to celebrate both a land victory over Sweden and the subsequent peace treaty; Marshal Alexander Suvorov's victories over the Turks; and laws guaranteeing the security of private property. Catherine II's medals were so numerous that they were occasionally exported in bulk. Complete sets in silver and bronze went to Vienna in 1767 and again in 1790, by which time their number had increased to 188; numerous medals were also given to King Gustav III of Sweden during his state visit in 1777. By the end of her reign, two engravers—one doing designs of the empress while his partner engraved the subject—had together created no fewer than 250 medals.

  Here, as in much else, Catherine II surpassed nearly all of her male predecessors, and her numismatic legacy goes beyond her medals. A Swedish expert has shown how Catherine II's coinage reflected both Russian territorial expansion and the cost of war. After 1774 Russian-made coins replaced Moldavian coins, and Russianized Georgian coins employing imperial double eagles were minted during the last fifteen years of her reign. New mints were opened in Siberia and at the old Genoese port of Kaffa in the newly conquered Crimean peninsula. Paper banknotes were introduced in 1769 during Catherine II's first Turkish war, but they fell rapidly in value and were supplemented by very large and unwieldy copper roubles, which lost half of their face value by the end of her reign. However, Russia's silver coins never diminished in value throughout her entire reign.41

  To a greater extent than her female predecessors, Catherine II aided other capable women. Maria Theresa did as much as Catherine II to educate schoolgirls (and more to teach them music), and Russian policies on coeducational primary education adapted her Austrian models. Catherine II did more for women's secondary education. Early in her reign she adapted the French model developed by Louis XIV's second wife to create two boarding schools in St. Petersburg, one for girls of noble descent, which lasted until the Bolshevik Revolution, and one for nonnobles. The major statue honoring Catherine II on Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg surrounds her with prominent figures from her reign; unlike Maria Theresa's otherwise similar Denkmal in Vienna, Catherine II's group includes another woman, Princess Dashkova.

  Despite being the sister of Peter III's mistress, Dashkova was a close collaborator at Catherine's coup of 1762, and offers the best example of a talented woman being entrusted with important official positions by a female ruler. After two decades of often strained personal relations, during much of which Dashkova lived abroad as a widow raising her son, Catherine II named her to head the Academy of Sciences in 1782. On first hearing of her appointment, Dashkova wrote a protest that “even God, in making me a woman, has dispensed me from being employed as director of an Academy of Sciences.” But she took the oath of office in a cold sweat and served for twelve years in a position that no woman has held since. In 1783 the empress also named Dashkova president of the newly founded Russian Academy of Letters. Like its French prototype of 1635, it was responsible for producing an official dictionary of the Russian language. Under Dashkova's energetic direction a complete six-volume Russian dictionary appeared between 1789 and 1794.42

  Dashkova reputedly sought even less conventional posts. “It is well known,” asserted the notorious memoirist Charles-François-Philibert Masson in 1800, “that [Dashkova] long ago petitioned Catherine to make her a Colonel of the Guards, a task which she doubtless would have filled better than most of those she exercised; but Catherine was too suspicious of a woman who boasted so much of placing her on the throne to offer her such a post. However,” Masson concluded sourly, “one more female reign, and we would have seen a girl as an army general and a woman as minister of state.” After Catherine II's death, Dashkova defended her patron against such detra
ctors, considering her far superior to Peter I, a “brutal and ignorant tyrant” obsessed by “the ambition to change everything without distinguishing the useful and good from the bad.”43

  Catherine's patronage also benefited Europe's outstanding eighteenth-century woman sculptor, Marie-Anne Collot. The first Frenchwoman to master this art, she worked in St. Petersburg in 1766–78 as an assistant to the French sculptor Falconet, then creating the famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great. Collot's greatest talent lay in sculpting heads (Falconet's weakest point), and in 1770 she made Peter's head. She also did portraits. The empress invited her to court balls and gave her numerous commissions. In 1767 Russia's Academy of Fine Arts made Collot a foreign member. Her work in marble was copied in plaster, terra cotta, and bronze, and a bust of the empress she made in 1768 is in the Hermitage. Collot's portrait of Catherine II with a laurel wreath, celebrating a victory over the Turks in 1769, was copied for medals. A marble bust of the empress in an informal pose with a veil, sculpted from life, was intended as a gift for Voltaire. “Without Catherine II,” concludes a recent study, Collot “would never have been able to exhibit her talents as a portraitist, nor her artistic genius.”44