Such was the absorbing problem which employed Catherine’s powers from the early years of her reign almost to its close.  Europe soon saw that it was a woman of no ordinary ability who was sitting on the throne of Russia.  In her foreign policy, and in the vigor infused into the internal administration of her empire, the master-hand became apparent.

As a counter-move to her designs upon Poland, the Turks were induced to harass her by declaring war upon Russia.  There was a great surprise in store for Europe as well as for the Ottoman Empire.  This dauntless woman was unprepared for such an emergency; but she wrote to one of her generals:  “The Romans did not concern themselves with the number of their enemies; they only asked, ‘Where are they?’” Her armies swept the Peninsula clear of Tatars and of Turks, and in 1771 a Russian fleet was on the Black Sea, and the terror of Constantinople knew no bounds.  If affairs in Europe and disorders in her own empire had not been so pressing, the long-cherished dream of the Grand Princes might have been realized.

A plague in Moscow broke out in 1771 which so excited the superstitions of the people, that it led to an insurrection; immediately following this, a terrible demoralization was created in the South by an illiterate Cossack named Pugatchek, who announced that he was Peter the Third.  He claimed that instead of dying as was supposed, he had escaped to the Ukraine, and was now going to St. Petersburg with an army to punish his wife Catherine and to place his son Paul upon the throne.  As a pretender he was not dangerous, but as a rallying point for unhappy serfs and for an exasperated and suffering people looking for a leader, he did become a very formidable menace, which finally developed into a Peasants’ War.  The insurrection was at last quelled, and ended with the execution of the false Peter at Moscow.

In the midst of these distractions at home, while fighting the Ottoman Empire for the shores of the Black Sea, and all Europe over a partition of Poland, the Empress was at the same time introducing reforms in every department of her incoherent and disordered empire.  Peter the Great had abolished the Patriarchate.  She did more.  The monasteries and the ecclesiastical estates, which were exempt from taxes during all the period of Mongol dominion, had never paid tribute to Khans, had in consequence grown to be enormously wealthy.  It is said the clergy owned a million serfs.  Catherine placed the property of the Church under the administration of a secular commission, and the heads of the monasteries and the clergy were converted from independent sovereigns into mere pensioners of the Crown.  Then she assailed the receiving of bribes, and other corrupt practices in the administration of justice.  She struggled hard to let in the light of better instruction upon the upper and middle classes.  If she could, she would have abolished ignorance and cruelty in the land, not because she