Hey there, Night Wanderers! Today's topic comes from one of our viewers' Cloudy Angel. Thanks for the

suggestion. A teenage German girl with no money, no army, and no real reason to be taken seriously

walks into the most dangerous court in Europe, and 30 years later, she's running the whole continent.

No, this isn't a Netflix drama. This actually happened.

Tonight we're talking about Catherine the Great, the woman who rewrote the rules of power in an empire that barely believed women had rules to rewrite.

And I promise you, the real story is wilder, smarter and messier than anything you learned in school.

Before we dive in, drop a comment right now.

Where are you watching from and what time is it there? I love knowing who's up with me on nights

like this. Get comfortable because we've got an empire to build. Let's go. Picture the year 1744.

Europe is a chessboard, and most of the pieces are men in powdered wigs making very confident

decisions about the fate of millions of people they will never meet. The continent is carved

into kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and assorted patches of territory, whose borders

shift roughly every decade depending on who recently won a war or whose cousin married whose niece.

It is, to put it diplomatically, a complicated time to be alive. And somewhere in the middle of all

this, not in Paris, not in Vienna, not in any of the grand capitals where history tends to make

its official announcements, a 14-year-old girl named Sophia is sitting in a rather modest court in a

rather. Modest German state, reading a letter that will change the rest of her life in ways she

cannot yet fully imagine. Sophia Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst. Even the name sounds like

someone read a list of German place names and combined them at random.

The principality of Anhalt-Zerbst was, to be blunt about it, not exactly the epicenter of European power.

It was small, it was provincial.

Its army, if you could call it that, was more of a suggestion than a military force.

...