Women: Born to Rule - III

France, on the other hand, had no Queens Regnant, possibly realizing they made an excellent scapegoat, Marie Antoinette for example. They did, however, produce Eleanor of Aquitaine, a great heiress and wife, successively, to the King of France and the King of England. An exceptionally strong woman, her children ruled great chunks of Europe including England, France, Sicily, Brittany, Saxony and Castille. Russia is a different matter. Upon the death of Peter the Great in 1725, his widow became Catherine I and continued what had been a most extraordinary life. Born Martha Scowronska she was the daughter of Latvian peasants, possibly runaway serfs. Soon orphaned she lived with an aunt who was worried about the effect of her beauty on her sons. Placed in service she quickly moved up the social ladder, marrying a Swedish dragoon, which state lasted for 8 days until the Russians over-ran the Swedish position, and eventually becoming a servant/confidant to Prince Menshikov, a close friend of Peter the Great. The Tsar saw her, fell in love and, after a conversion to Orthodoxy, she married him. The fairy-tale continued upon his death when she became the first female ruler of Imperial Russia. A just ruler, she continued Peter's modernizing policies and sponsored scientific inquiry. Apparently she was successful for she ushered in nearly a century of rule by Tsarinas. Anna, another widow, this time to Peter II, was left in power on the hopes that she would be malleable and allow the nobility more power (well, she was a woman wasn't she.) Contrary to expectations she ruled autocratically, being the first to set up the secret police, ultimately to morph into the KGB. The daughter of Catherine and Peter the Great, Elizabeth, led Russia into two wars spanning 15 years of her 21 year reign. By the time of her death Russia had nearly doubled in size. Finally there was Catherine the Great, great at statecraft, intrigue and expansion. By the time she died in 1796 the Empire sprawled from the remaining slivers of Poland to the wastes of Siberia and south to the Black Sea. She revamped the administration and dragged the country into a more Western-style society. Beset by scandals, it was under her that Russia became a Great Power, only to have much of her innovation and direction undone through the following century.