A portrait of the late-eighteenth-century Russian ruler discusses how she seized and kept the throne in spite of her illegitimate claim and a series of wars, rebellions, and plagues, tracing how she rendered Russia a major European power.

"On October 1771, a merchant ship out of Amsterdam, Vrouw Maria, crashed off the stormy Finnish coast, taking her historic cargo to the depths of the Baltic Sea. The vessel was delivering a dozen Dutch masterpiece paintings to Europe's most voracious collector: Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. Among the lost treasures was The Nursery, an oak-paneled triptych by Leiden fine painter Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt's most brilliant student and Holland's...