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 the nobility from compulsory service, filled the countryside with neoclassical estates, and governed through alliances with favourites like Grigory Orlov and Grigory Potemkin. Serfdom intensified under the weight of her wars and expansion, sparking Pugachev's Rebellion. She died 17 November 1796, having turned Russia into a recognised great power and herself into the model of the enlightened despot.