Peter III, once placed a rat on trial, it was found guilty & sent to the gallows
She was a well educated and pragmatic daughter of an impoverished Prussian prince who grew into the longest-ruling female leader of the Russian empire and one of the most celebrated Russian rulers of either gender.
Under her reign, the empire was vastly expanded and grew in strength to such a degree that it became a force to be reckoned with throughout Europe.
Her name was Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, more commonly known as Catherine the Great, the mighty Empress of Russia.
Catherine’s spouse Peter, on the other hand, not so much.
According to every account, Peter III of Russia was creepy, malevolent, and possibly bordering on insane. His wife in her memoirs described him as an inept, crude man-child and a drunkard unfit to rule an empire, who wished nothing but to play with toys or dress up as a general, place his servants in military outfits and play-act war games with them.
He was very good at it, he learned a lot playing around with his precious collection of toy soldiers inside his chamber.
On one very notable instance, she found a rat hanging on the wall–it had been accused of treason and sentenced to death by hanging.
“One day, when I went into the apartments of His Imperial Highness, I beheld a great rat which he had hanged, with all the paraphernalia of an execution. I asked what all this meant. He told me that this rat had committed a great crime, which, according to the laws of war, deserved capital punishment,” she wrote, according to
The Empire of Russia: Its Rise and Present Power, written by John Stevens Cabot.
[Peter’s] bedroom was his battleground, [his] toy soldiers his faithful military, and he was their mighty general.
But one day an intruder, a rat that came out of the woodwork, interfered with one of his elaborate battle schemes and chewed the head off of one of his toy soldiers. It was just getting started on chewing another one nearby when Peter’s dog caught him red-handed.
It had climbed the ramparts of a fortress of cardboard which he had on a table in his cabinet and had eaten two sentinels, made of pith, who were on duty in the bastions.
“His setter had caught the criminal, he had been tried by martial law and immediately hung; and as I saw was to remain three days exposed as a public example.”
The young Peter was infuriated by this and the rat, guilty of high treason was found hanging by Catherine on a tiny gallows her husband made especially for the occasion.
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