life-threatening delivery.
“My mother did not pay much attention to me,” Sophia (eventually rechristened Catherine) wrote in her Memoirs . “A year and a half later, she gave birth to a son whom she idolized. I was merely tolerated and often I was scolded with a violence and anger I did not deserve. I felt this without being perfectly clear why in my mind.”
It was not just her daughter’s sex that aggravated Johanna, but her looks as well. She deemed Sophia ugly, a genuine liability when one hoped to advance their standing through the European royal marriage market. Neither did she give the girl credit for her lively intelligence and engaging personality. In fact, these attributes were dismissed as arrogance. Yet despite all the deficits she perceived in her daughter, Johanna diddrag Sophia along on her endless rounds of visits to the other royal families of Germany, including her own, hoping to make some kind of advantageous match for her. She only dared dream that it would be someone as illustrious as the grandson of Peter the Great.
When the unexpected call came from Russia requesting fourteen-year-old Sophia’s presence there, Johanna was ecstatic. How this union between her daughter and the Russian heir would add to her own luster! Wasting not a minute, she immediately heeded the invitation to her glorious future—undeterred by the winter conditions that would make the journey to Russia treacherous, nor by the pesky fact that this trip really wasn’t about her.
Before embarking, Johanna was asked by Frederick II of Prussia to visit him in Berlin. The king, then at war with Austria, had promoted the match between Sophia and Peter with the hope that it would help keep neighboring Russia neutral in the conflict. He was eager, therefore, to meet the young princess upon whom a key part of his foreign policy depended. But Johanna arrived at King Frederick’s court unaccompanied by Sophia, who, she feared, might dim her own star. It was not until the king finally insisted that Johanna relented and brought her daughter along. Frederick was enchanted.
“The little princess of Zerbst combines the gaiety and spontaneity natural to her age with intelligence and wit surprising in one so young,” the king, known to history as Frederick the Great, wrote to his fellow monarch, Empress Elizabeth.
Much to her delight, Johanna wasn’t completely ignored in the equation. Frederick gave the self-important princess the mission to be his secret agent at the Russian court, and to undermine as best she could Elizabeth’s staunchly anti-Prussianvice chancellor, Alexis Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who vigorously opposed the proposed marriage of the German Sophia to the German Grand Duke Peter. It was a task Johanna relished, but one that would end disastrously for her and nearly ruin her daughter.
After an arduous wintertime trek across Russia—made, by the empress’s command, with their identities and purpose concealed, only a bare staff of servants to support them, and relegated to increasingly squalid accommodations along the way—Johanna and Sophia finally arrived in St. Petersburg in February 1744, to a thunderous welcome. “Here everything goes on in such magnificent and respectful style that it seemed to me … as if it all were only a dream,” Johanna wrote to her husband, Prince Christian, who had not been invited to Russia.
Johanna was clearly in her element, but for Sophia, her future was at that moment miles away in Moscow, where Empress Elizabeth and Grand Duke Peter had departed several weeks earlier and now awaited her. It was suggested to Johanna and Sophia that it would be pleasing to the empress if they timed their arrival in Moscow to coincide with Peter’s upcoming sixteenth birthday, on February 21. Accordingly, they set off in a grand cavalcade of thirty sledges.
Peter seemed genuinely pleased to see his German relatives when they arrived at Moscow’s Golovin Palace, greeting them with a goofy grin and
“My mother did not pay much attention to me,” Sophia (eventually rechristened Catherine) wrote in her Memoirs . “A year and a half later, she gave birth to a son whom she idolized. I was merely tolerated and often I was scolded with a violence and anger I did not deserve. I felt this without being perfectly clear why in my mind.”
It was not just her daughter’s sex that aggravated Johanna, but her looks as well. She deemed Sophia ugly, a genuine liability when one hoped to advance their standing through the European royal marriage market. Neither did she give the girl credit for her lively intelligence and engaging personality. In fact, these attributes were dismissed as arrogance. Yet despite all the deficits she perceived in her daughter, Johanna diddrag Sophia along on her endless rounds of visits to the other royal families of Germany, including her own, hoping to make some kind of advantageous match for her. She only dared dream that it would be someone as illustrious as the grandson of Peter the Great.
When the unexpected call came from Russia requesting fourteen-year-old Sophia’s presence there, Johanna was ecstatic. How this union between her daughter and the Russian heir would add to her own luster! Wasting not a minute, she immediately heeded the invitation to her glorious future—undeterred by the winter conditions that would make the journey to Russia treacherous, nor by the pesky fact that this trip really wasn’t about her.
Before embarking, Johanna was asked by Frederick II of Prussia to visit him in Berlin. The king, then at war with Austria, had promoted the match between Sophia and Peter with the hope that it would help keep neighboring Russia neutral in the conflict. He was eager, therefore, to meet the young princess upon whom a key part of his foreign policy depended. But Johanna arrived at King Frederick’s court unaccompanied by Sophia, who, she feared, might dim her own star. It was not until the king finally insisted that Johanna relented and brought her daughter along. Frederick was enchanted.
“The little princess of Zerbst combines the gaiety and spontaneity natural to her age with intelligence and wit surprising in one so young,” the king, known to history as Frederick the Great, wrote to his fellow monarch, Empress Elizabeth.
Much to her delight, Johanna wasn’t completely ignored in the equation. Frederick gave the self-important princess the mission to be his secret agent at the Russian court, and to undermine as best she could Elizabeth’s staunchly anti-Prussianvice chancellor, Alexis Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who vigorously opposed the proposed marriage of the German Sophia to the German Grand Duke Peter. It was a task Johanna relished, but one that would end disastrously for her and nearly ruin her daughter.
After an arduous wintertime trek across Russia—made, by the empress’s command, with their identities and purpose concealed, only a bare staff of servants to support them, and relegated to increasingly squalid accommodations along the way—Johanna and Sophia finally arrived in St. Petersburg in February 1744, to a thunderous welcome. “Here everything goes on in such magnificent and respectful style that it seemed to me … as if it all were only a dream,” Johanna wrote to her husband, Prince Christian, who had not been invited to Russia.
Johanna was clearly in her element, but for Sophia, her future was at that moment miles away in Moscow, where Empress Elizabeth and Grand Duke Peter had departed several weeks earlier and now awaited her. It was suggested to Johanna and Sophia that it would be pleasing to the empress if they timed their arrival in Moscow to coincide with Peter’s upcoming sixteenth birthday, on February 21. Accordingly, they set off in a grand cavalcade of thirty sledges.
Peter seemed genuinely pleased to see his German relatives when they arrived at Moscow’s Golovin Palace, greeting them with a goofy grin and
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