Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to

explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

If you ask the average American what they know about Catherine the Great of Russia,

they'll probably say nothing.

And that's a shame because she was one of the more effective rulers in Russian history.

Catherine the Great was actually Prussian, and her original name was Sophie.

After she married into the Russian royal bloodline, she quickly took

power and transformed the country from a stalled feudal state into a modern imperial power.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg. It's ironic that Americans don't know much about

Catherine because they might just owe her their country. The story of Catherine's involvement in the American Revolution starts in 1775, with a man

named Sir Robert Gunning.

He was the British ambassador to Russia at the time, and he was given a difficult task.

Request Russian military aid in America.

It was a tricky situation for two reasons. For one, Sir Robert needed to

keep the British monarch, King George III, from looking like he was begging, and second, he really

needed the request to be granted. The Americans were doing much better than expected in the war.

They had both France and Spain on their side. Sir Robert and his colleagues

carefully drew up a 10-point treaty to present to the Russians, clarifying everything from the

number of troops they were asking for to how much the troops would be paid. They wanted to come

across as competent and authoritative. Gunning first met with Catherine's foreign policy advisor, Nikita Panon,

...