l as for the Ottoman Empire. This dauntless
woman was unprepared for such an emergency; but she wrote to one of her
generals: "The Romans did not concern themselves with the _number_ of
their enemies; they only asked, 'Where are they?'" Her armies swept
the Peninsula clear of Tatars and of Turks, and in 1771 a Russian fleet
was on the Black Sea, and the terror of Constantinople knew no bounds.
If affairs in Europe and disorders in her own empire had not been so
pressing, the long-cherished dream of the Grand Princes might have been
realized.

A plague in Moscow broke out in 1771 which so excited the superstitions
of the people, that it led to an insurrection; immediately following
this, a terrible demoralization was created in the South by an
illiterate Cossack named Pugatchek, who announced that he was Peter the
Third. He claimed that instead of dying as was supposed, he had
escaped to the Ukraine, and was now going to St. Petersburg with an
army to punish his wife Catherine and to place his son Paul upon the
throne. As a _pretender_ he was not dangerous, but as a rallying point
for unhappy serfs and for an exasperated and suffering people looking
for a leader, he did become a very formidable menace, which finally
developed into a Peasants' War. The insurrection was at last quelled,
and ended with the execution of the false Peter at Moscow.

In the midst of these distractions at home, while fighting the Ottoman
Empire for the shores of the Black Sea, and all Europe over a partition
of Poland, the Empress was at the same time introducing reforms in
every department of her incoherent and disordered empire. Peter the
Great had abolished the Patriarchate. She did more. The monasteries
and the ecclesiastical estates, which were exempt from taxes during all
the period of Mongol dominion, had never paid tribute to Khans, had in
consequence grown to be enormously wealthy. It is said the clergy
owned a million serfs. Catherine placed the property of the Church
under the administration of a secular commission, and the heads of the
monasteries and the clergy were converted from independent sovereigns
into mere pensioners of the Crown. Then she assailed the receiving of
bribes, and other corrupt practices in the administration of justice.
She struggled hard to let in the light of better instruction upon the
upper and middle classes. If she could, she would have abolished
ignorance and cruelty in the land, not because