Catherine the Great Died Having Sex With a Horse

It is worth asking why this is the one thing everyone thinks they know about one of the most consequential rulers in Russian history. Catherine suffered a stroke on 16 November 1796, was found collapsed, and died the following evening, aged 67. There was no horse, no harness, no contraption. The story appears in no contemporary record. It surfaced well after her death, almost certainly manufactured by French aristocrats and political enemies who could not stand that a clever, powerful woman took lovers the way every king before her had, and faced no consequence for it. The legend survives because it is exactly the kind of thing people want to believe about a woman with that much power. That is not history. It is revenge.