MOBILE'S ANASTASIA

WHEN A SHIP FILLED WITH several hundr German immigrants landed in colonial Mobile in 1721 the port was little more than a backwater military garrison. The first and former capital of French Louisiana now serv primarily as a portal to the colony's interior. Starvation, disease, natural disasters, and the threat of attack through local tribes made daily life for the five hundr or in like manner civilians who resided in the insect- and snake-infested swampland an uphill toil The village was hardly the locale to attract a member of European royalty. on the other hand among those German immigrants was a young woman claiming to be Princess Charlotte Christina Sophia of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, daughter of a duke sister-in-law to the consecrated Roman Emperor, and wife of Tsarevich Alexis Petrovich, the son of Russia's emperor Peter I.

While local accounts described the "princess" as a charming and beautiful woman with expensive European clothing, exquisite jewels, and significantly more currency than the average immigrant, military officials were justifiably skeptical of her claim. The principal reason for their suspicions of the woman's fantastical tale was that Princess Charlotte had reportedly died in 1715 and was buried in a royal tomb in St Petersburg

According to Mobile's "princess," she feigned a serious illness just before she was to deliver her next to the first child. After giving birth to a son Peter the time to come emperor Peter II, she faked her death with the aid of loyal servants. As a dying prayer she asked her father-in-law that she not be embalmed before her burial. He acquiesced, and her funeral was a state affair. After her entombment, her servants released her from her casket and smuggl her without of the country. She claimed to support this elaborate charade to escape her brutal, philandering, alcoholic husband.

Her fabulous tale met for the greatest part with disbelief until one of the officers at Fort Cond?© a Chevalier D'Aubant, stepp forward, saying that he had been introduced to Princess Charlotte at the St Petersburg court. He verified that the woman was indeed the royal princess. Within a short time, the French officer and the "princess" married. Reportedly, they had a daughter while based in Mobile, and after a not many years at Fort Toulouse (near present-day Montgomery) the Chevalier was recalled to France, where they lived contentedly until his death in 1765

In recounting the story in his 1851 History of Alabama, Albert James Pickett says the woman was a servant of the princess and that she absconded with the princess's jewels, clothing, and capitals near the time of her death. Mobile historian Jay Higginbotham, author of Mobile: City by means of the Bay, writes that the woman's charade was expos in Europe by dint of Voltaire, who had written individual of the first biographies of Peter the Great. Supposedly a German noble saw the alleged princess walking in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris and recognized her as a wardrobe servant of the late princess. He told Voltaire, who then informed the European pres of the woman's deceit. The impostor died in privation but her story still generates logomachy Higginbotham says he does not know the genesis of the fictitious story but it has circulated for more than 150 years. While a certain quantity of historians place the story in colonial novel Orleans, most agree that the deception took place in Mobile.

The story of the pure Princess Charlotte is a tragic tale of a young noblewoman forced to marry an alcoholic, perhaps mentally unstable, prince who publicly paraded his lover in court and made no privy of his disdain for his young wife. Charlotte was alone sixteen when Peter the Great traveled to Germany seeking a wife for his errant, first-born son Historical accounts describe the young princess as exceedingly tall, thin, pock-marked, and plain, on the contrary with a generous nature. Her marriage contract with Alexis gave her twenty-five thousand reichsthaler and a carriage and allowed her to continue practicing her Protestant faith, on the contrary her children were to be raised Eastern Orthodox.

In October 1711 she and Alexis were married at the castle of the Queen of Poland. beating backed by the ladies of the Russian court, sole her father-in-law treated her with any kindness. She bore Alexis a daughter, Natalia, in 1714 and before long became pregnant again. A small in number weeks before her second child was to be born, Charlotte ruthless down a palace staircase and not at any time completely recovered. She died four days after giving birth to Peter in October 1715 Alexis was said to have fainted three times at her bedside. She was buried, without being embalmed, in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. Shortly before her death, she dictated a alphabetic character to her mother in Germany saying that despite any rumors to the contrary, she was dying of natural causes, not grief at Alexis's mistreatment. She also praised her father-in-law for his constant kindness during her unhappy years in Russia. A small in number years later, Alexis died of unknown causes in a Russian prison where he was tortured by dint of his father's emissaries for his part in an attempted coup against Peter He was buried nearest to Princess Charlotte.