Catherine the Great
9781613107386
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Early in the eighteenth century, the north German town of Stettin had all the grim and rigid characteristics of a frontier post. It was a border town and had long been a center of warfare. The broad rich lands of Pomerania, bursting with fertility, had been repeatedly devastated by the march and countermarch of Russian and Prussian soldiers. High on a strip of barren coast, the gray stone walls of Stettin overlooked a bleak northern sea over which the boats of the great Russian Peter had come sailing to batter and destroy the town. But if Stettin had trembled before Peter, who was six and a half feet tall, it had trembled even more before Frederick William who was so short that his children called him Stumpy behind his back. Ceded finally to Stumpy by treaty in 1720, Stettin settled down to the dull routine of garrison life. It was not a place in which the refinements of society flourished. A reviving commercial life brought no relief to the rigid military atmosphere which prevailed. Ships moved out of the harbor laden with guildsmen’s stuff from the interior of Germany. A chamber of commerce came into existence and a new class of prosperous trades-people appeared on the scene. But the hereditary aristocracy of Stettin was not prosperous. Stumpy’s officers were usually hard-up; they were under-paid and over-regimented. Their wives led a dull life in the Prussian garrison where society was neither gay nor gracious. Stettin had no style. Its military and religious grandees understood each other perfectly. In those days the Prussian warrior was so pious and the Lutheran believer so militant that they faded imperceptibly into each other. Frederick William and Martin Luther worshiped an identical God. The Lutheran idol was an armored hero whom a Prussian soldier could fear and respect. He dominated the spiritual climate of Stettin without a rival, except for the unimportant claims of a Calvinist deity worshiped by the French governesses and emigrant school-masters of the place. Luther had elected to throw in his lot with the German nobles and they in turn had embraced his religion with the puritanical devotion of recent converts. In military circles bigotry was the fashion. Such was Stettin in 1727, after seven years of regimentation by the Prussian king. In that year there stood at Number One in the Grosse Domstrasse a substantial gray stone house owned by the president of the Handelskammer. A newly married pair took up their residence there in early winter. They were rather ill-matched as to age, the husband being thirty-seven and the wife fifteen. They were poor but pretentious, the kind of gilded paupers that heralded the decline of feudalism. Prince Christian August of Zerbst-Dornburg was the commander of a regiment of infantry quartered in Stettin. He was one of Frederick William’s generals, who had reached this degree of promotion after many years of campaigning in the Prussian service. The business of soldiering had given him little taste or opportunity for home and the family which he was to found in Stettin was not to see a great deal of him. His wife seemed to manage just as well without him. The general was a cousin of the reigning Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst who was growing old without an heir. Christian August and his brother Johann Ludwig, of the Dornburg branch, both had an eye on the little principality and its petty emoluments which loomed large to them. The brothers were both pious and unmarried and were on excellent terms with each other. It was clearly the duty of one of them to perpetuate the family. But Johann Ludwig, the elder and the logical successor, lived in Jever with a spinster sister and did not wish to change his state. It therefore fell to Christian August to go forth and seek a wife. The history of his wooing is unfortunately not known to us. Whether he saw it as a duty or an opportunity we cannot say. At any rate, he was successful.
