A 15-year-old girl from a minor, cash-poor German noble family arrives in a freezing foreign country, speaks not a word of the language, and is married off to a man she detests. That girl, born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, will orchestrate a bloodless coup against her own husband and rule the largest empire on earth longer than any woman in its history. This is the story of how Catherine the Great willed herself from political pawn to undisputed autocrat.

The episode follows her near-fatal assimilation campaign, including barefoot midnight language drills and a deathbed demand for an Orthodox priest instead of a Lutheran pastor, her education in raw power politics from reading Tacitus while hiding from a husband who played with toy soldiers, and the six-month window in 1762 when Peter III's blunders handed her the throne. It closes with the empire she built, the serfdom she expanded, and the smear campaign Western Europe invented to punish a woman who refused to behave.

• Deep-cover survival: why teenage Sophie burned her name, religion, and heritage to become Catherine
• Four bloodlettings in one day: the illness that produced her first stroke of political genius
• How Tacitus taught a lonely teenager to read the hidden motives behind every move at court
• Peter III's fatal mistake: handing conquered Prussia back to his idol and alienating his own army
• The myths versus the woman: where the grotesque legends came from and what her quiet final days actually looked like