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Catherine I of Russia

She died just two years after Peter, at age 43, in St. Petersburg, where she was buried at St. Peter and St. Paul Fortress. It is not known what caused her early demise. Though many postulate twenty years of relentless child bearing, hard drinking, venereal disease, and consumption took their toll on Russia’s first sovereign empress.

Relentless child bearing, hard drinking, venereal disease, and consumption are four of the five events in the so-called “czarist pentathlon.” (The fifth is of course anti-Semitism.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_I_of_Russia

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