They were lucky that she had survived at all. Though her father did his best to disguise his disappointment, Sophie was left in no doubt that both parents would have preferred a boy. Never one to suffer in silence, the young mother soon made it clear to her daughter that it had been a painful, life-threatening delivery. Whereas Christian August was already thirty-nine, his wife, Princess Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, was not quite seventeen when she gave birth to their first child in the early hours of the morning of (21 April according to the Julian calendar then in use in Russia, eleven days behind the Western Gregorian calendar in the eighteenth century). 1713–40), Europe’s most uncompromising soldier-king. 1 The house offered temporary quarters to her father, Prince Christian August, who was stationed there as a general in the service of Frederick William I of Prussia (r. In a scene far removed from the splendour of the Moscow Kremlin, Princess Sophie Auguste Friderike of Anhalt-Zerbst was born in a merchant’s house in the Grosse Domstrasse, nestled in the shadow of St Mary’s Church, just inside the northern city wall of Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland).
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