EUDOXIA LOPUKHINA (1669-1731), tsaritsa, first con sort of Peter the Great, was the daughter of the boyarin Theo dore Lopukhin. Peter, then a youth of 17, married her on Jan. 27, at the command of his mother. The marriage was in every way unfortunate. Accustomed from her infancy to the monastic seclusion of the terem, or women's quarter, Eudoxia's mental horizon did not extend much beyond her embroidery-frame or her illuminated service-book. From the first her society bored Peter unspeakably, and after the birth of their second, short lived son Alexander, he practically deserted her. In 1698 she was sent to the Pokrovsky monastery at Suzdal for refusing to consent to a divorce, and in 1699 she took the veil. But the nuns persisted in regarding her as the lawful empress; and she was permitted an extraordinary degree of latitude, unknown to Peter, who dragged her from her enforced retreat in 1718 on a charge of adultery. Eudoxia was compelled to make a public con fession. She was then divorced and consigned to the remote mon astery of Ladoga, where she remained for ten years till the accession of her grandson, Peter II., when the reactionaries pro posed to appoint her regent. She was escorted with great cere mony to Moscow in 1728 and exhibited to the people attired in the splendid, old-fashioned robes of a tsaritsa; but her friends soon saw that a convent was a much more suitable place for her than a throne. She disappeared again in a monastery at Moscow, where she died in 1731.
See R. N. Bain, Pupils of Peter the Great (1895), chaps. ii. and iv.; and The First Romanovs (1905), chaps. viii. and xii. (R. N. B.)