Untangling Historical Rumors Pt. 1 | Catherine the Great

Did Catherine the Great really die having sex with a horse?

No. But the stranger question is: where did that story come from and why did anyone believe it?

In the first installment of a new series on Historical Rumors, we’re going back to eighteenth-century Russia to look at the woman behind one of history’s most persistent and outrageous legends.

Catherine’s real life hardly needed embellishment. Born a minor German princess, she came to Russia as a teenager, overthrew her husband, seized the throne, ruled an empire for more than three decades, corresponded with some of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment, expanded Russia’s territory, and yes, had a very real and very public succession of lovers.

Those relationships helped create a sexual reputation that Catherine’s political enemies were already weaponizing during her lifetime. But the infamous horse story is much harder to trace than you might expect. In fact, recent scholarship raises the possibility that the version so many of us have heard may be far more modern than Catherine herself.

So where does a historical rumor like this begin? How does it change over time? And how does a woman with one of the most consequential reigns in European history become remembered for something that never happened?

This is Untangling Historical Rumors Pt.1: Catherine the Great.

Attribution Notes:

• Every effort was made to cross-check primary sources and modern research. Where paraphrasing is used, it’s drawn from the texts below with narrative license for clarity and flow.
• If you spot an error or have a source to suggest, DM @thisagainshow

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This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

British Museum. An Imperial Stride! April 12, 1791. Satirical print. British Museum Collection.
British Museum collection record

British Museum. The Northern Bugga Bo. April 14, 1791. Satirical print. British Museum Collection.
British Museum collection record

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Project Gutenberg edition

Catherine II, Empress of Russia. Nakaz [Instruction to the Commission for the Compilation of a New Code]. 1766–67. Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. Digitized by the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library.
Presidential Library

de Madariaga, Isabel. Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.

Menchinger, Ethan. “Contemporary Ottoman Views of Catherine the Great.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, no. 1 (2019): 84–100.
University of Manchester research record

Solly, Meilan. “The True History Behind ‘The Great’ and Catherine the Great.” Smithsonian Magazine, May 15, 2020.
Smithsonian Magazine

Voltaire Foundation. “Launching CatCor: Towards a Digital Edition of the Letters of Catherine the Great.” December 16, 2021.
Voltaire Foundation

Zitser, Ernest A. “The Myth of Catherine the Great and the Horse: A Critical Review of the Historiography.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 25, no. 1 (2024).