Wanting to keep all of her power, she joined others in believing that absolute monarchy was the best form of government -- best, she believed, when done properly.

Under her rule, serfdom was extended to over a million people who had previously been freed.

She sought to expand Russian rule to the Black Sea and to Constantinople, to return Christianity there, and to free Moldavia and Walachia from the Ottomans.

In 1768, Catherine's army pushed southwest from the Dnieper River into the Balkans, scoring victories and calling on Christians to join them against the Ottomans. Another Russian force invaded and captured the Crimea. A Russian fleet sailed from the Baltic Sea through the Strait of Gibraltar and into Ottoman waters in the Aegean Sea where, on July 6, 1770, near the island of Chios, they sank the Turkish navy.

Austria was concerned about Russian expansion into the Balkans. To allay the hostility of the Habsburgs, Frederick, who was allied with the Russians, organized an agreement with Russia and Joseph II of Austria. The three of them were to take lands from Poland.

Russia expanded to the W. Dvina River (near the port city of Riga) and to the Dnieper River, halfway to the city of Minsk, adding 1.3 million subjects to Catherine's rule.

reduced the powers of the clergy, continued to preserve friendly relations with Prussia, France and Austria and, in 1764, she specified Poland's borders and installed one of her old lovers as king of Poland.

In 1768, she went to war with Turkey

June 1774, Cossack troops prepared to march on Moscow. At this point, Russia won the war with Turkey and Catherine crushed the rebellion.

serf liberation would be intolerable to the owners, on whom she depended, and who would throw the country into chaos once they lost their income. Catherine thus focused on strengthening a system that she had labelled as inhuman.

guided by "circumstances, conjectures and conjunctions."

The choice of her daughter as wife of the future tsar was the result of not a little diplomatic management in which Frederick the Great took an active part, the object being to strengthen the friendship between Prussia and Russia, to weaken the influence of Austria and to ruin the chancellor Bestuzhev, on whom Elizabeth relied, and who was a known partisan of the Austrian alliance.

The girl bad spared no effort to ingratiate herself, not only with the empress, but with the grand-duke and the Russian people. She applied herself to learning the language with such zeal that she rose at night and walked about her bedroom barefoot repeating her lessons. The result was a severe attack of congestion of the lungs in March 1744. During the worst period of her illness she completed her conquest of the goodwill of the Russians by declining the religious services of a Protestant pastor, and sending for Simon Todorskiy, the orthodox priest who had been appointed to instruct her in the Greek form of Christianity. When she wrote her memoirs she represented herself as having made up her mind when she came to Russia to do whatever had to be done, and to profess to believe whatever she was required to believe, in order to be qualified to wear the crown.