section_path: Marriage and reign of Peter III
section_name: Marriage and reign of Peter III
paragraph_text: Marriage and reign of Peter III
  
  The choice of Sophie as wife of the future tsar was a result of the Lopukhina affair, in which Count Jean Armand de Lestocq and King Frederick the Great of Prussia took an active part. The objective was to strengthen the friendship between Prussia and Russia, to weaken the influence of Austria, and to overthrow the chancellor Alexey Bestuzhev-Ryumin, a known partisan of the Austrian alliance on whom the reigning Russian Empress Elizabeth relied. The diplomatic intrigue failed, largely due to the intervention of Sophie's mother, Joanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp.
  
  Historical accounts portray Joanna as a cold, abusive woman who loved gossip and court intrigues. Her hunger for fame centered on her daughter's prospects of becoming Empress of Russia, but Joanna also infuriated Elizabeth, who eventually banned her from the country for allegedly spying for King Frederick. Elizabeth knew the family well and had intended to marry Joanna's brother Charles Augustus (Karl August von Holstein). He died of smallpox in 1727, before the wedding could take place. Despite Joanna's interference, Elizabeth took a strong liking to Sophie, and Sophie and Peter were eventually married in 1745.
  
  When Sophie arrived in Russia in 1744 at age 15, she spared no effort to ingratiate herself not only with Elizabeth, but also with Elizabeth's husband Alexei Razumovsky and with the Russian people at large. She zealously applied herself to learning the Russian language, rising late at night to repeat her lessons in her bedroom. Staying up late at night in the harsh Russian cold caused her to fall ill with pneumonia, though she survived and recovered. In her memoirs, she wrote that she made the decision then to do whatever was necessary and to profess to believe whatever was required of her to become qualified to wear the crown. Although she was able to learn Russian, she spoke with a heavy accent, and made grammatical mistakes. Her writing also contained numerous spelling errors. In most circumstances Catherine II spoke French in her court. In fact the use of French as the main language of the Russian imperial court continued until 1812, when it became politically incorrect to speak French in court due to the war with Napoleonic France.
  
  Sophie recalled in her memoirs that as soon as she arrived in Russia, she fell ill with a pleuritis that almost killed her. She credited her survival to frequent bloodletting; in a single day, she received four phlebotomies. Her mother's opposition to this practice brought her the Empress's disfavour. When Sophie's situation looked desperate, her mother wanted her confessed by a Lutheran pastor. Awaking from her delirium, however, Sophie said, "I don't want any Lutheran; I want my Orthodox father ". This increased her popularity with the Empress and her court as a whole. Elizabeth doted on Sophie and saw her as a daughter after this.
  
  Sophie's father, a devout German Lutheran, opposed his daughter's conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. Despite his objections, on 28 June 1744, the Russian Orthodox Church received Sophie as a member. It was then that she took the new name Catherine (Yekaterina or Ekaterina) and the (artificial) patronymic Алексеевна (Alekseyevna, daughter of Aleksey), so that she was in all respects the namesake of Catherine I, the mother of Elizabeth and the grandmother of Peter III. The following year, on 21 August 1745, the long-planned dynastic marriage between Catherine and Peter finally took place in Saint Petersburg. Catherine had recently turned 16. Her father did not travel to Russia for the wedding.
  
  The bridegroom, then known as Peter von Holstein-Gottorp, had become Duke of Holstein-Gottorp (located in the north-west of present-day Germany near the border with Denmark) in 1739. The newlyweds settled in the palace of Oranienbaum, which remained the residence of the "young court" for many years. From there, they governed the duchy (which occupied less than a third of the current German state of Schleswig-Holstein, even including that part of Schleswig occupied by Denmark) to obtain experience to govern Russia.
  
  Apart from providing that experience, the marriage was unsuccessful; it was not consummated for years due to Peter III's mental immaturity. After Peter took a mistress, Catherine became involved with other prominent court figures. She soon became popular with several powerful political groups that opposed her husband. Unhappy with her husband, Catherine became an avid reader of books, mostly in French. She disparaged her husband for his devotion to reading on the one hand "Lutheran prayer-books, the other the history of and trial of some highway robbers who had been hanged or broken on the wheel".
  
  It was during this period that she first read Voltaire and the other philosophes of the French Enlightenment. As she learned Russian, she became increasingly interested in the literature of her adopted country. Finally, it was the Annals by Tacitus that caused what she called a "revolution" in her teenage mind as Tacitus was the first intellectual she read who understood power politics as they are, not as they should be. She was especially impressed with his argument that people do not act for their professed idealistic reasons, and instead she learned to look for the "hidden and interested motives".
  
  According to Alexander Hertzen, who edited a version of Catherine's memoirs, Catherine had her first sexual relationship with Sergei Saltykov while living at Oranienbaum, as her marriage to Peter had not yet been consummated, as Catherine later claimed. Nonetheless, Catherine would eventually leave the final version of her memoirs to her son, the future Paul I, in which she explained why Paul had been Peter's son. Saltykov was used to make Peter jealous, and she did not desire to have a child with him; Catherine wanted to become empress herself, and did not want another heir to the throne; however, Elizabeth blackmailed Peter and Catherine to produce this heir. Peter and Catherine had both been involved in a 1749 Russian military plot to crown Peter (together with Catherine) in Elizabeth's stead. As a result of this plot, Elizabeth likely wanted to deny both Catherine and Peter any rights to the Russian throne. Elizabeth, therefore, allowed Catherine to have sexual lovers only after a new legal heir, Catherine and Peter's son Paul, survived and appeared to be strong.
  
  After this, Catherine carried on sexual liaisons over the years with many men, including Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, Grigory Grigoryevich Orlov (1734–1783), Alexander Vasilchikov, Grigory Potemkin, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov and others. She became friends with Princess Ekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova, the sister of her husband's official mistress. In Dashkov's opinion, Dashkov introduced Catherine to several powerful political groups that opposed her husband; however, Catherine had been involved in military schemes against Elizabeth with the likely goal of subsequently getting rid of Peter III since at least 1749.
  
  Peter III's temperament became quite unbearable for those who resided in the palace. He would announce trying drills in the morning to male servants, who later joined Catherine in her room to sing and dance until late hours.
  
  In 1759, Catherine became pregnant with her second child, Anna, who only lived to 14 months. Due to various rumours of Catherine's promiscuity, Peter was led to believe he was not the child's biological father and is known to have proclaimed, "Go to the devil!" when Catherine angrily dismissed his accusation. She therefore spent much of this time alone in her private boudoir to hide away from Peter's abrasive personality. In the first version of her memoirs, edited and published by Alexander Hertzen, Catherine strongly implied that the real father of her son Paul was not Peter, but rather Saltykov.
  
  Catherine recalled in her memoirs her optimistic and resolute mood before her accession to the throne:
  
  I used to say to myself that happiness and misery depend on ourselves. If you feel unhappy, raise yourself above unhappiness, and so act that your happiness may be independent of all eventualities.
  
  After the death of the Empress Elizabeth on 5 January 1762 (OS: 25 December 1761), Peter succeeded to the throne as Emperor Peter III and Catherine became empress consort. The imperial couple moved into the new Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. The Emperor's eccentricities and policies, including his great admiration for the Prussian King Frederick II, alienated the same groups that Catherine had cultivated as allies. Russia and Prussia had fought each other during the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) and Russian troops had occupied Berlin in 1761.
  
  Peter supported Frederick II, eroding much of his support among the nobility. Peter ceased Russian operations against Prussia, and Frederick suggested the partition of Polish territories with Russia. Peter also intervened in a dispute between his Duchy of Holstein and Denmark over the province of Schleswig (see Count Johann Hartwig Ernst von Bernstorff). As Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, Peter planned war against Denmark, Russia's traditional ally against Sweden.
  
  In July 1762, barely six months after becoming emperor, Peter lingered in Oranienbaum with his Holstein-born courtiers and relatives, while Catherine lived in another palace nearby. On the night of 8 July 1762 (OS: 27 June 1762), Catherine was given the news that one of her co-conspirators had been arrested by her estranged husband and that the coup they had been planning would have to take place at once. The next day, she left the palace and departed for the Ismailovsky Regiment, where she delivered a speech asking the soldiers to protect her from her husband. Catherine then left with the Ismailovsky Regiment to go to the Semenovsky Barracks, where the clergy was waiting to ordain her as the sole occupant of the Russian throne and began her reign as Empress of Russia as Catherine II.
  
  She had her husband arrested and forced him to sign a document of abdication, leaving no one to dispute her accession to the throne.
  
  On 17 July 1762—eight days after the coup that amazed the outside world and just six months after his accession to the throne—Peter III died at Ropsha, possibly at the hands of Alexei Orlov (younger brother to Grigory Orlov, then a court favourite and a participant in the coup). Peter supposedly was assassinated, but it is unknown how he died. The official cause, after an autopsy, was a severe attack of haemorrhoidal colic and an apoplexy stroke.
  
  At the time of Peter III's overthrow, other potential rivals for the throne included Ivan VI (1740–1764), who had been confined at Schlüsselburg in Lake Ladoga from the age of six months and was thought to be insane. Ivan VI was assassinated during an attempt to free him as part of a failed coup against Catherine. Like Elizabeth before her, Catherine had given strict instructions that Ivan was to be killed in the event of any such attempt. The woman later known as Princess Tarakanova (с. 1745–1775) was another potential rival.
  
  Although Catherine did not descend from the Romanov dynasty, her ancestors included members of the Rurik dynasty, which had preceded the Romanovs as rulers of Russia. She succeeded her husband as empress regnant, following the legal precedent of Empress Catherine I, who had succeeded her husband Peter I in 1725. Historians debate Catherine's technical status, whether as a regent or as a usurper, tolerable only during the minority of her son, Grand Duke Paul.