In 1766, a diminutive adventurer appeared in Cetinje, the capital of the mountainous principality of Monte- negro, and managed to supplant the rightful claimant to the position of Vladika, the ruling Prince-Bishop. The adventurer was remarkable in many respects. Firstly, he was known as ‘Scepan Mali’, ‘Stephen the Small’, in a country where physical stature and strength were highly prized. Even more bizarrely, he claimed to be Tsar Peter III of Russia, who had been deposed by his wife Catherine the Great in 1762 in St Petersburg and strangled shortly afterwards by the brothers of her lover, Grigory Orlov. In fact he was neither a warrior nor a Russian but a snake-oil salesman, quack and purveyor of medicinal herbs. Neither his contemporaries nor subsequent historians have known who he really was, but he must have been native to the shores of the Adriatic or he would not have been understood.
Montenegro was then in the grip of a savage war against its Islamic overlord, the Ottoman Padishah, and racked by civil disturbance and famine. But then as now, like its bigger brother Serbia, it looked to orthodox Russia for support and salvation. Stephen the Small’s shameless pretension to be Tsar impressed these hard-fighting mountain men. He was also a good speaker who invoked religion to explain his peacemaking mission.
There was nothing remarkable at this time about royal pretenders: a girl was already travelling around Europe claiming to be Princess Elisabeth, the daughter of the late Empress Elisabeth of Russia and her lover Count Razumovsky. (Catherine the Great ordered her to be kidnapped and imprisoned for the rest of her life.) More seriously, Emelian Pugachev, a dis- affected Volga Cossack, was also to claim to be Peter III in his great rebellion across southern Russia in 1773-4.
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