Catherine the Great

Born Princess Sophia Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst on 2 May 1729, she arrived in Russia as a minor German noble and became Empress in 1762 after overthrowing Peter III. Her reign stretched to 1796 and redrew the map: she installed a former lover on the Polish throne before partitioning the country, annexed the Crimean Khanate after victories over the Ottomans, and pushed Russian settlement to Alaska in the east and the Black Sea coast in the south. She founded cities — Yekaterinoslav, Kherson, Sevastopol — and the Smolny Institute, Europe's first state-funded women's college. She freed th…