"I knew a little, not much, about the most famous hemophiliac, the son of Nicholas II, the last czar. We didn't know where this had come from we knew nothing about this. "My first child, my son Bob Jr., was born with hemophilia. "But he had no romantic or sexual interest in her at all."įor the nearly two decades before she became empress, Catherine endured a miserable marriage her husband didn't pay attention to her, and she was under constant pressure from the empress to produce a child. "He was glad to see her, because she was German and he was German," Massie says. Peter played with little toy soldiers all the time - and wasn't particularly interested in his wife. "He was childish into his late adolescence, and he was strange throughout his life." "Peter was a very strange man, to put it mildly," Massie says. Her nephew, who became Peter III, was raised in Germany, so Elizabeth reached out to his distant cousin - young, German Catherine - to be Peter's wife, Massie explains. Empress Elizabeth - daughter of Peter the Great - couldn't have children. "That is what makes this such a great story," Massie tells NPR's Scott Simon. So how does a German teenager become the empress of Russia? Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Catherine The Great Subtitle Portrait Of A Woman Author Robert K.
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