Livonia was a large province, about the size of the State of Maine, nearly encircled by the Gulf of Riga, the Baltic, the Gulf of Finland and Lake Tchude. The possession of this province, which contained some five hundred thousand inhabitants, was essential to Peter in the prosecution of his commercial enterprises. During the prosecution of this war the small town of Marienburg, on the confines of Livonia, situated on the shores of a lake, was taken by storm. The town was utterly destroyed and nearly all the inhabitants slain, a few only being taken prisoners. The Russian commanding officer saw among these captives a young girl of extraordinary beauty, who was weeping bitterly. Attracted by such rare loveliness and uncontrollable grief he called her to him, and learned from her that she was born in a village in the vicinity on the borders of the lake; that she had never known her father, and that her mother died when she was but three years of age. The protestant minister of Marienburg, Dr. Gluck, chancing to see her one day, and ascertaining that she was left an orphan and friendless, received her into his own house, and cherished her with true parental tenderness. The very evening before the town of Marienburg was assaulted and taken by storm, she was married to a young Livonian sergeant, a very excellent young man, of reputable family and possessing a little property. In the horrors of the tempest of war which immediately succeeded the nuptial ceremonies, her husband was slain, and as his body could never be found, it probably was consumed in the flames, which laid the town in ashes. General Boyer, moved with compassion, took her under his protection. He ascertained that her character had always been irreproachable, and he ever maintained that she continued to be a pattern of virtue. She was but seventeen years of age when Peter saw her. Her beauty immediately vanquished him. His wife he had repudiated after a long disagreement, and she had retired to a convent. Peter took the lovely child, still a child in years, under his own care, and soon privately married her, with how much sacredness of nuptial rites is not now known. Such was the early history of Catharine, who subsequently became the recognized and renowned Empress of Russia. "That a poor stranger," says Voltaire, "who had been discovered amid the ruins of a plundered town, should become the absolute sovereign of that very empire into which she was led captive, is an incident which fortune and merit have never before produced in the annals of the world."