Maggie McCormick’s Reviews > Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman > Status Update

“Through her open windows, Catherine could see minarets rising above the walls and breathe the scents of roses, jasmine, orange trees, and pomegranates. Surrounding the palace was the town, dominated by nineteen mosques and their high minarets, from which, five times a day. voices summoned the faithful to prayer; while she was there, Catherine ordered the construction of two new mosques. “
(In Bakhchisarai)

“Everything was done to deter me from this journey. I was assured that my progress would be bristling with obstacles and unpleasantness. They wished to frighten me with stories of the fatigue of the journey. These people had a very poor knowledge of me. They do not know that to oppose me is to encourage me, and that every difficulty they put in my way is an additional spur.”

“The physical side of her relationships offered only brief distraction. When Catherine dismissed lovers, it was not because they lacked virility but because they bored her. One need not be an empress to find it impossible to talk in the morning to a person with whom one has spent the night.”

Actually horrified by the amount of men who were in relationships with their nieces 🫩

Potemkin played hard to get when Catherine was telling him she was interested, he pretended that he was going to join a monastery to freak her out because he was jealous she had a (non-important) lover still around at the palace 😂

- Catherine started the first college of medicine in Russia and started orphanages to prevent infantcide- all children were given clean clothes, food, and an education
- She agreed to inoculate herself when smallpox threatened and then established several inoculation clinics in Russia, inoculating 2 million Russians by 1800!

- Polish government was called “The Polish Diet”?
- Catherine forced Stanislaus, her former lover before Orlov, to be King of Poland so she could use him as a pawn

- In the Nakaz, She wrote several lines dedicated to her wish to relieve serfs of their permanent servitude. All of these lines were struck away by nobles. The Nakaz ended up being only a quarter of the 526 articles she spent two years working on.
- The publishing of the Nakaz/ Summons to the Legislative commission took place 9 years before Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence!

- Catherine’s lover Orlov wore a small portrait of Catherine on his chest but was very mopey because she refused to marry him (would disrupt some political goals of hers)
- Voltaire had a sexual relationship with his niece 🫩🤮
- Catherine bought all of Diderot’s books to get him out of debt and in turn he arranged for artists and architects to swarm Russia (which was her goal)