History of Russia (1721–96) drills on the Russian army, and depriving Russia of a military victory by establishing his sudden alliance with Prussia. Making use of the discontent and fearing for her own position, Peter III's wife, Catherine, deposed her husband in a coup, and her lover's brother, Aleksey Orlov, subsequently murdered him, so in June 1762 Catherine became Catherine II, empress of Russia. Peter the Great had two wives, Yevdokiya Lopukhina (the daughter of a minor noble) and Marfa Skavronskaya (a Lithuanian peasant, renamed Catherine after her conversion to Orthodoxy). Catherine I's rise through Peter I's Table of Ranks from a simple peasant
Tsardom of Russia also continued and war with Persia brought about the acquisition of territory in the Caucasus, although Russia surrendered those gains after Peter's death in 1725. There was no single flag during the Tsardom. Instead, there were multiple flags: Tsardom of Russia The Tsardom of Russia (, "Russkoje tsarstvo" later changed to , "Rossiyskoye tsarstvo"), Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth called it Tsardom of Muscovy, was the centralized Russian state from the assumption of the title of Tsar by Ivan IV in 1547 until the foundation of the Russian Empire by Peter the Great in 1721. From 1551 to 1700, Russia grew 35,000 km