Catherine the Great & Potemkin Read online

  *9 Stormont would have known that this was the positively imperial sum of two million francs. Louis XIV’s minister at the Hague offered the century’s most famous bribe to Marlborough in May 1709.

  PART FIVE

  The Colossus

  1777–1783

  14

  BYZANTIUM

  I was asked to a fête which Prince Potemkin gave in his orangery…Before the door was a little temple consecrated to Friendship which contained a bust of the Empress…Where the Empress supped was furnished in Peking, beautifully painted to resemble a tent…it only held five or six…Another little room was furnished with a sofa for two, embroidered and stuffed by the Empress herself.

  Chevalier de Corberon, 20 March 1779

  When the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, took Constantinople in 1453, he rode through the streets directly to the Emperor Justinian’s remarkable Church of Hagia Sophia. Before this massive tribute to Christianity, he sprinkled earth on his head to symbolize his humility before God and then entered. Inside, his sharp eyes spotted a Turkish soldier looting marble. The Sultan demanded an explanation. ‘For the sake of the Faith,’ replied the soldier. Mehmed slew him with his sword: ‘For you the treasures and the prisoners are enough,’ he decreed. ‘The buildings of the city fall to me.’ The Ottomans had not conquered Byzantium to lose the greatness of Constantine.

  Mehmed was now able to add Kaiser-i-Rum – Caesar of Rome – to his titles of Turkish Khan, Arabic Sultan and Persian Padi-shah. To Westerners, he was not only the Grand Seigneur or the Great Turk – henceforth he was often called Emperor. From that day on, the Ottoman House embraced the prestige of Byzantium. ‘No one doubts that you are the Emperor of the Romans,’ George Trapezountios, the Cretan historian, told Mehmed the Conqueror in 1466. ‘Whoever is legally master of the capital of the Empire is the Emperor and Constantinople is the capital of the Roman Empire…And he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also Emperor of the whole earth.’1 It was to this prize that Potemkin and Catherine now turned their attention.

  The Ottoman Empire stretched from Baghdad to Belgrade and from the Crimea to Cairo and included much of south-eastern Europe – Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia. It boasted the cream of Islam’s Holy Cities from Damascus and Jerusalem to the Holy Places themselves, Mecca and Medina. The Black Sea was for centuries its ‘pure and immaculate virgin’, the Sultan’s private lake, while even the Mediterranean shores were still dominated by his ports, from Cyprus all the way to Algiers and Tunis. So it was indeed an international empire. But it was wrongly called a Turkish one. Usually the only Turkish leader in its carefully calibrated hierarchy was the Sultan himself. Ironically, the so-called Turkish Empire was a self-consciously multinational state that was built by the renegade Orthodox Slavs of the Balkans who filled the top echelons of Court, bureaucracy and the Janissaries, the Praetorian Guards of Istanbul.

  There was little concept of class: while the Western knights were tying themselves in knots of noble genealogy, the Ottoman Empire was a meritocracy which was ruled in the Sultan’s name by the sons of Albanian peasants. All that mattered was that everyone, even the grand viziers themselves, were slaves of the Sultan, who was the state. Until the mid-sixteenth century, the sultans were a talented succession of ruthless, energetic leaders. But they were to be victims of their own Greek Project, for gradually the dirty business of ruling was conducted by their chief minister, the grand vizier, while they were sanctified by the suffocatingly elaborate ritual of the Byzantine emperors. Indeed when the French soldier Baron de Tott witnessed the coronation of Mustafa III in 1755, he recalled how the Sultan, surrounded by Roman plumage and even fasces, was literally dwarfed by the magnificence of his own importance. Based on the tenth-century order of ceremonies compiled by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the blessing and curse of the Byzantines was to turn the Ottoman sultans from dynamic conquerors astride steeds at the head of armies to limp-wristed fops astride odalisques at the head of phalanxes of eunuchs. This was not all the fault of the Greek tradition.

  At first there was no law of succession, which often meant accessions were celebrated with royal massacres. The new emperor would cull his brothers – sometimes as many as nineteen of them – by strangulation with a bowstring, a polite despatch that shed no imperial blood. Finally a sense of royal ecology stopped this foolish waste. Instead Ottoman princes were kept, like luxurious prisoners in the Cage, half embalmed by pleasure, half educated by neglect, half dead from fear of the bowstring. When they emerged into the light, like bleary-eyed startled animals, new sultans were terrified, until reassured by the corpses of their predecessors.

  The whole state became a rigidly stratified hierarchy with the grand vizier, often of Slavic origin, at the top, with a household of 2,000 and a guard of 500 Albanians. Each top official, each pasha (literally ‘the Sultan’s foot’), displayed his rank in terms of horse’s tails, relic of House of Othman’s nomadic origins. The grand vizier displayed five; lesser pashas between one and three. Viziers wore green slippers and turbans, chamberlains red, mullahs blue. The heads and feet of the Ottomans marked their rank as clearly as pips on an epaulette. Officials wore green, palace courtiers red. All the nationalities of the Empire wore the correct slippers: Greeks in black, Armenians in violet, Jews in blue. As for hats, the powers of the Empire were celebrated atop heads in a fiesta of bonnets crested with furs and feathers.

  The sultan dwelt in a palace built on the Seraglio Point, appropriately on the Byzantine Acropolis. In Turkish style, the palace was a progression of increasingly rarefied courtyards, leading into the imperial Seraglio through a series of gateways. These gates, where Turkic justice was traditionally dispensed, thus became the visible symbols of Ottoman government. That is why it was known in the West as the Sublime Porte.

  The lusts of the emperors were encouraged in order to deliver a rich reservoir of male heirs. Thus if the sultans looked for quality, the logic of the Harem demanded quantity. Incidentally, the eunuchs who ran the Court were apparently capable of sexual congress, merely being bereft of the means to procreate – so that they too had the run of the Harem. Just as the Palace School, which trained imperial pages who rose to run the Empire, was filled with Albanians and Serbs, so the Harem, which produced imperial heirs to rule the Empire, was filled with blonde-haired and blue-eyed Slav girls from the slave-markets of the Crimea. Until the late seventeenth century, the lingua franca of the court was, bizarrely, Serbo-Croat.

  The Ottoman Sultanate was dying by strangulation – not by bowstring, but by tradition. By Potemkin’s era, the sultans were constricted not just by Byzantinism but by a religious fundamentalism imposed by the Islamic court, the ulema, and by political conservatism enforced by the vested interests of court and military.

  The Empire was ruled by fear and force. The sultan still had power over life and death and he used it liberally. Instant death was part of the Court’s exquisite etiquette. Many grand viziers are more famous for being killed than for ruling. They were beheaded at such a rate that, despite the riches the position brought, it is surprising there were so many candidates for the job. Sultan Selim killed seven in one reign so that ‘Mayest thou be Selim’s vizier’ came to mean ‘Strike you dead!’ in the vernacular. Viziers always carried their wills with them if summoned by the sultan. During Potemkin’s coming war against the Turks, 60 per cent of the viziers were executed.

  The sultan’s death sentences, signified by a slight stamp of the foot in the throne room or the opening of a particular latticed window, were usually executed by the dreaded mutes, who could despatch with string or axe. The display of heads was part of the ritual of Ottoman death. The heads of top officials were placed on white marble pillars in the palace. Important heads were stuffed with cotton; middling heads with straw. More minor heads were displayed in niches while heaps of human giblets, noses and tongues, beautified the palace locale. Female victims, sometimes the gorgeous losers
of the Harem, were sewn into sacks and tossed into the Bosphorus.2

  The most direct threat to a sultan was the Janissaries of his own army, and the mob. Constantinople’s people had always been a rule unto themselves, even under Justinian. Now the riffraff of Istanbul, manipulated by the Janissaries or the ulema, increasingly decreed policy. Potemkin’s agent Pisani reported throughout the 1780s how viziers and others ‘animated the canaille’ to ‘intimidate their Sovereign’ by ‘committing all sorts of excess.’3

  Command was abysmal, discipline laughable and corruption endemic. The failure of command began at the top: in 1774, Abdul-Hamid I had succeeded the abler Mustafa III after being immured for forty-three years in the Cage. This gentle and frightened man was not equipped to be warlord or reformer, though he did rise to the occasion by fathering twenty-two children before his death.*1 He tippled wine and liked to say that, if he became an infidel, he would embrace Roman Catholic communion because the best wines grew in their countries: whoever heard of a Protestant wine? This plodding wit did not improve the discipline of his forces.

  When Tott was forming a corps of artillery, he demanded an honest man to manage its funds. ‘An honest man,’ replied the Vizier. ‘Where shall we find him? As for me I know none.’ The Vizier turned at length to his Foreign Minister: ‘And you? Can you name us an honest man?’ ‘Less than anybody,’ laughed the Reis Effendi. ‘I’m only acquainted with rogues.’4 The intellectual power of the Ottoman Government had also atrophied: the ignorance of Ottoman officials was a diplomatic joke. At the Congress of Sistova, one Turkish negotiator thought Spain was in Africa; the Reis Effendi, the Foreign Minister of an international empire, thought warships could not sail the Baltic; and all of them believed that Gibraltar was in England.5

  The Empire could no longer depend on its military power. The Ottomans solved this problem by becoming a European power like any other. Indeed they turned Clausewitz’s dictum on its head: while, for most powers, war was diplomacy by other means, diplomacy, for the Ottomans, was war by other means. The rise of Russia had changed Ottoman priorities. Russia’s potential enemies – France, Prussia, Sweden and Poland – became the four potential allies of the Sublime Porte. The game was simple: each offered subsidies to the Porte to attack Russia. None of these powers would sit by while Russia consumed the Turks.

  The Empire was, according to one of Potemkin’s envoys, ‘like an ageing beauty who could not realize her time was past’. But it still possessed vast military resources, in terms of men, and fanatical spirit, in its Islamic faith. Ruled by the bowstring, the green slipper and the canaille of Constantinople, the Empire in 1780 was more like a leprous giant whose Brobdingnagian limbs were still awesome even as they gradually fell off its colossal body.6

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  —

  On 27 April 1779, Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna gave birth to a son, whom Catherine and Potemkin named Constantine and designated to become emperor of Constantinople after the destruction of the Sublime Porte. The Grand Duchess had already produced an heir to the Russian Empire two years earlier – Catherine’s first grandson, Grand Duke Alexander. Now she produced the Heir to the Byzantine Empire of the Greeks.

  Using Classical history, Eastern Orthodoxy and his own romantic imagination, Potemkin now created a cultural programme, a geopolitical system and a propaganda campaign all in one: the ‘Greek Project’ to conquer Constantinople and place Grand Duke Constantine on its throne. Catherine hired Constantine a Greek nurse named Helen and insisted that he should be taught Greek.7 Potemkin personally contributed to the Greek education of the Grand Dukes right through the 1780s, ‘I should like to remind you’, he wrote to the Empress about changing Alexander and Constantine’s lessons, ‘that in learning languages, the Greek one should be most capital as it is the basis of the others…Where you mentioned reading the Gospel in Latin, the Greek language would be more appropriate as it was the language of the original.’ Catherine wrote at the bottom: ‘Change according to this.’8

  We do not know exactly when the partners began to discuss Classical greatness and Byzantine restoration, but it was obviously at the very beginning of their relationship (when Catherine teased him as her ‘giaour’ – the Turkish name for an infidel). Catherine must have been impressed with the Project’s odd mixture of imagination, history and practicality. Serenissimus was made for his Greek Project just as it was made for him. He was knowledgeable about the history and theology of Byzantine Orthodoxy. Catherine and Potemkin, like most educated people of their time, were brought up on the Classics, from Tacitus to Plutarch – hence Potemkin’s nickname Alcibiades – though he read Greek and she did not. He often had his readers recite the Classical historians, and his libraries contained most of them. The Classical enthusiasts of the eighteenth century did not just read about ancient times: they wished to emulate them. They built like the Greeks and the Romans.*2 Now Potemkin was also making himself an expert on the Ottoman Empire.

  The idea itself was not new: Muscovite propaganda had promoted Russia as the ‘Third Rome’ ever since the Fall of Constantinople, which Russians still called Tsargrad, city of Caesars. In 1472, the Grand Duke of Muscovy, Ivan III, married the last Emperor’s niece, Zoë Palaelogina. His Metropolitan hailed him as the ‘new Emperor of the new Constantinople – Moscow’ and he used the title Tsar (Caesar), which Ivan the Terrible adopted. In the next century, Filofey, a monk, pointed out that ‘two Romes have fallen, but the third stands and there will be no fourth’.9 But the neo-Classical splendour, the daring symmetry of religion, culture and politics, the practicality of the Austrian alliance, and the specific plan of a partition, belong to Potemkin. His talent was not merely the impulsive conception of ideas but also the patience and instinct to make them real: he had been following this Byzantine rainbow ever since coming to power and it had taken him six years to circumvent the pro-Russian Panin.

  As early as 1775, when Catherine and Potemkin celebrated the Turkish peace in Moscow, the Prince had befriended the Greek monk Eugenios Voulgaris, who would supply the Orthodox theology for the Greek Project. On 9 September 1775, Catherine appointed Voulgaris, on Potemkin’s suggestion, as the first archbishop of Kherson and Slaviansk. These cities did not yet exist. Kherson, named after the ancient Greek city of Khersonesos and the birthplace of Russian Orthodoxy, was merely a Greek name in the fevered imagination of Potemkin.

  Catherine’s decree appointing the Archbishop proclaimed the dubiously Greek origins of Russian Orthodoxy, a piece probably written by Potemkin. One of his first acts on becoming favourite was to found a Greek gymnasium. He now appointed Voulgaris to direct it. Potemkin tried to get his Greek Archbishop to be his ‘Hesiod, Strabo Chrysostomos’ and write a history of the region, ‘dig up the hidden past…’ and show the link between the Ancient Scythians and the Graeco-Slavs. Voulgaris never wrote the history, but he did translate Virgil’s Georgics and dedicated the work to Potemkin, ‘most high and eminent philhellenic prince’, along with an ode to his new Athens on the Dnieper that ended: ‘Here once again is to be seen the former Greece; Thou, famous Prince, be indeed victorious.’10 All this was just part of Potemkin’s philhellenic programme to form a Greek civilization in a new Byzantine Empire around the Black Sea.

  * * *

  —

  The genesis of the Greek Project is a window into the way the Empress and the Prince worked together. Catherine’s rising secretary Alexander Bezborodko actually drafted the ‘Note on Political Affairs’ in 1780 that laid out the Project and it has been claimed that he conceived the idea. This is to misunderstand the relationship of the troika that henceforth made Russian foreign policy.

  Potemkin conceived the Greek Project almost before Bezborodko arrived in Petersburg, as shown in his letters and conversation, his patronage of Voulgaris, the naming of Constantine and the foundation of Kherson in 1778. Bezborodko’s ‘Note’ was a feasibility study of the idea, based on an explanation of Byzantine–Ottoman�
�Russian relations since the mid-tenth century, clearly commissioned by Catherine and Potemkin. Bezborodko’s draft of the Austrian treaty of 1781 reveals how they worked: the secretary drafted on the right hand side of the page. Then Potemkin corrected it on the left in pencil, which he addressed to Catherine. From now on, Potemkin conceived the ideas and Bezborodko drafted them. Thus, on the Prince’s death, Bezborodko was speaking the literal truth when he said that Potemkin was good at ‘thinking up ideas when someone else had actually to do them’.11

  Bezborodko was an ‘awkward, clownish and negligent’ Ukrainian hobbledehoy with thick lips and popping eyes who blundered about, his stockings about his heels, with the gait of an elephant. However, as Ségur realized, he ‘concealed the most delicate mind in the most oafish envelope’. He was said to relish regular orgies in the Petersburg brothel district. Indeed he often disappeared for thirty-six hours at a time. Italian opera-singers imported young Italian girls for his seraglio; he paid a soprano, Davia, 8,000 roubles a month which she repaid by cuckolding him with anyone she could find. ‘Though richly dressed, he always appeared as if he had pulled on his clothes at the end of an orgy,’ which he probably had.

  Once he arrived home drunk to find an urgent summons from the Empress. At the Palace, Catherine demanded a document she had been promised. The factotum took out a piece of paper and read out the exquisitely drafted ukase. Catherine thanked him and asked him for the manuscript. He handed her the blank piece of paper and fell to his knees. Bezborodko had forgotten to write it, but she forgave him for his improvisation. He was an independent and outstandingly precise and sensitive intelligence who began as Potemkin’s protégé and became his political ally, even though he was friends with enemies like the Vorontsovs. The gratitude in his letters for Potemkin’s patronage showed that the Prince was always by far the senior partner.12 ‘He keeps treating me very well,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘and…I deserve it because very often I spend as much time on his private affairs as I do on European ones.’13