This dauntless woman was unprepared for such an emergency; but she wrote to one of her generals: "The Romans did not concern themselves with the _number_ of their enemies; they only asked, 'Where are they ?'" Her armies swept the Peninsula clear of Tatars and of Turks, and in 1771 a Russian fleet was on the Black Sea, and the terror of Constantinople knew no bounds.
If affairs in Europe and disorders in her own empire had not been so pressing, the long-cherished dream of the Grand Princes might have been realized.
A plague in Moscow broke out in 1771 which so excited the superstitions of the people, that it led to an insurrection; immediately following this, a terrible demoralization was created in the South by an illiterate Cossack named Pugatchek, who announced that he was Peter the Third.

He claimed that instead of dying as was supposed, he had escaped to the Ukraine, and was now going to St.Petersburg with an army to punish his wife Catherine and to place his son Paul upon the throne.

As a _pretender_ he was not dangerous, but as a rallying point for unhappy serfs and for an exasperated and suffering people looking for a leader, he did become a very formidable menace, which finally developed into a Peasants' War.

The insurrection was at last quelled, and ended with the execution of the false Peter at Moscow.
In the midst of these distractions at home, while fighting the Ottoman Empire for the shores of the Black Sea, and all Europe over a partition of Poland, the Empress was at the same time introducing reforms in every department of her incoherent and disordered empire.

Peter the Great had abolished the Patriarchate.