Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark)

November 26, 1847 – October 13, 1928

Danish princess who as the wife of Alexander III was Empress of Russia from 1881 to 1894 and was the mother of Nicholas II.

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Biography

Princess Dagmar was born in Copenhagen in 1847, the second daughter of Prince Christian, who became King Christian IX of Denmark in 1863. She grew up close to her elder sister Alexandra, the future queen of the United Kingdom.

In 1864 she was engaged to the Russian heir, Tsesarevich Nicholas, who died the following year with his last wish that she marry his brother Alexander. She married Alexander in St Petersburg in 1866, converting to Orthodoxy and taking the name Maria Feodorovna. The marriage was happy, and their eldest son, the future Nicholas II, was born in 1868.

She became empress when Alexander II was assassinated in March 1881 and was crowned in 1883. She was popular at court and with the public, led the Marie charitable institutions and the Russian Red Cross, and in 1888 survived the derailment of the imperial train at Borki with her family.

Widowed in 1894, she advised her son in his early reign and headed the Red Cross during the First World War. After the 1917 revolution she went to the Crimea and in April 1919 left Russia aboard the British battleship HMS Marlborough. She spent her last years in Denmark and died at Hvidore near Copenhagen in 1928; her remains were reburied beside her husband in St Petersburg in 2006.