Catherine the Great [antikvár]

I FIKE OF ZERBST IS BORN Early in the eighteenth century, the north German town of Stettin had all the grim and rigid characteristics of a frontier post. It was a border town and had long been a center of warfare. The broad rich lands of Pomerania, bursting with fertility, had been repeatedly devastated by the march and countermarch of Russian and Prussian soldiers. High on a strip of barren coast, the gray stone walls of Stettin overlooked a bleak northern sea over which the boats of the great Russian Peter had come sailing to batter and destroy the town. But if Stettin had trembled before Peter, who was six and a half feet tall, it had trembled even more before Frederick William who was so short that his children called him Stumpy behind his back. Ceded finally to Stumpy by treaty in 1720, Stettin settled down to the dull routine of garrison life. It was not a place in which the refinements of society flourished. A reviving commercial life brought no relief to the rigid military atmosphere which prevailed. Ships moved out of the harbor laden with guildsmen's stuff from the interior of Germany. A chamber of commerce came into existence and a new class of prosperous trades-people appeared on the scene. But the hereditary aristocracy of Stettin was not prosperous. Stumpy's officers were usually hard-up; they were under-paid and over- 3