Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Catherine was staying in the Khan’s own apartments, which included the Girays’ ‘magnificent and eccentric audience chamber’ – big and richly ornamented with the defiant Giray declaration that threw down the gauntlet of supremacy to all the dynasties of the East: ‘The jealous and envious will have to admit that neither at Ishfan nor Damascus nor Istanbul will they find its equal.’ The Habsburg lived in the rooms of a khan’s brother. Potemkin, appropriately, lived in the Harem with Ligne, who was captivated by the magic of the place. So was Catherine. The delicious sweet scents of the gardens – orange trees, roses, jasmine, pomegranates – pervaded every apartment, each of which had a divan round its walls and a fountain in the middle. At Catherine’s dinners, she received the local muftis, whom she treated respectfully. She was inspired by the imams calling the faithful to prayer five times a day outside her window to write a bad, if rhyming, poem to Potemkin: ‘Isn’t this a place for paradise? My praise to you, my friend.’

  After dinner, Joseph rode off to inspect the nearby Chufut Kale, home of the eighth-century Karaite Jewish sect that rejected the Talmud, believed only in the original Torah and lived in joyous isolation in abandoned castles on Crimean mountaintops. Back in Bakhchisaray, Nassau, Ségur and Ligne explored the town, like schoolboys on an exeat. Ligne, despite being twenty years older than Ségur, was the most mischievous, hoping to spot a Tartar girl without her face covered. But that alluring prospect would have to wait. Back in the Harem, Potemkin reclined to watch ‘Arab dancers’, who, according to Nassau-Siegen, ‘did disgusting dances’.24 After just two nights in Bakhchisaray, the Caesars set off at 9 a.m. on 22 May, surrounded by pages, Tartars and Don Cossacks, to view Potemkin’s greatest show of all.

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  Tsarina and Kaiser were dining splendidly in a pretty palace built on the Heights of Inkerman on a spit of land that jutted out over the sea. Potemkin’s orchestra played. The hillsides swarmed with jousting and charging Tartar cavalry. Serenissimus gave a sign. The curtains were drawn back, the doors thrown open on to a balcony. As the monarchs peered out, a squadron of Tartar cavalry in mid-skirmish cantered aside to reveal ‘the magnificent sight’ that took their breath away.

  The amphitheatre of mountains formed a deep and glittering bay. In the midst of it, a numerous and formidable fleet – at least twenty ships-of-the-line and frigates, thought Joseph – stood at anchor, in battle order, facing the very place where the monarchs dined. At another hidden signal from the Prince, the fleet saluted in unison with all its guns: the very sound, remembered Ségur, seemed to announce that the Russian Empire had arrived in the south and that Catherine’s ‘armies could within 30 hours…plant her flags on the walls of Constantinople’. Nassau said the moment was ‘almost magical’. This was the naval base of Sebastopol founded three years before. Potemkin had built this entire fleet in just two.

  As soon as the guns were silent, Catherine was stimulated by this vision of raw Russian power to rise and offer an emotional toast to her ‘best friend’, looking at Joseph without naming him.*6 One can imagine Joseph cringing at her passion, sneering jealously at the Russian success, itching to inspect it himself. Fitzherbert remained utterly phlegmatic.25 All eyes turned to Potemkin: it was his achievement, a remarkable feat given the sloth of Russian officialdom, the breadth of his responsibilities, the lack of Russian naval expertise, and the distance from the nearest timber in faraway Poland. The Russians present must have thought of Peter the Great’s conquest of the Baltic and the foundation of the Russian fleet there. Which courtier would say it first? ‘Madam,’ said Ségur, ‘by creating Sebastopol, you have finished in the south what Peter the Great began in the north.’ Nassau embraced Potemkin and then asked to kiss the Empress’s hand. She refused. ‘It’s Prince Potemkin to whom I owe everything,’ she said again and again. ‘So you must embrace him.’ Then she turned laughingly to her dear consort. ‘I hope no one is going to say that he’s lazy any more,’ she said, warning against any hint that his achievements were not real. Potemkin kissed her hands and was so moved that his eyes filled with tears.26

  Serenissimus led the Tsarina and Emperor down to a landing-stage and on to a rowing-boat, which set off towards Sebastopol and the new fleet. The rest followed in a second sloop. They passed right under the bows of three sixty-six-gun ships-of-the-line, three frigates of fifty guns and ten of forty guns, which saluted the Empress in three more salvoes; sailors cheered her. They disembarked at a stone staircase that led straight up to the Admiralty, where she was staying. Around them was the new city of Sebastopol, ‘the most beautiful port I have seen’, Joseph wrote. At last, he was full of admiration: ‘150 ships were there…ready for all events of the sea.’ The port was defended by three batteries. There were houses, shops, two hospitals, and barracks. Cobenzl estimated there would soon be twelve ships-of-the-line. Even Joseph admitted they were ‘very well built’. It seemed impossible to Ségur that Potemkin had done this in such a short time. Everything was well done where only three years earlier there had been nothing. ‘One must do justice to Prince Potemkin,’ Catherine wrote that day to Grimm in Paris. ‘The Empress’, noted Joseph, ‘is totally ecstatic…Prince Potemkin is at the moment all-powerful and fêted beyond imagination.’

  The Caesars and the Prince thought of war. Catherine and Potemkin felt that they could beat the Turks on the spot. The Empress asked Nassau if he thought her ships were equal to the Ottoman ones at Ochakov. Nassau replied that the Russian vessels could put the Turkish fleet in their pocket if they liked. ‘Do you think I dare?’, she smiled at Ligne with chilling flirtatiousness. Russia was ready for war, Potemkin ‘ceaselessly’ told Ligne. If it was not for France, ‘we’d begin immediately’.

  ‘But your cannons and munitions are so new,’ said Ligne, restraining him on behalf of his Kaiser.

  ‘Everything is there,’ replied Serenissimus. ‘All I have to do is say to 100,000 men – March!’

  Catherine kept her head enough to order Bulgakov to send the Sultan a reassuring note. Neither she nor Potemkin were as warlike as they appeared. Nonetheless, the ‘Pocket Ministers’, the Sublime Porte and the chancelleries of Europe could have been forgiven for believing that Russia was chomping at the bit.27

  Catherine retired to talk alone with the overawed Emperor about the timing of war. Potemkin joined them, emphasizing his semi-royal status. Joseph urged caution, citing France and Prussia. Frederick William of Prussia (Frederick the Great had died in 1786) was ‘too mediocre’ to stop them, claimed Catherine. France will make ‘a lot of noise’, agreed Potemkin, but ‘end up taking part of the cake’. He suggested that France swallow Egypt and Candia (Crete) in the coming carve-up. Besides, added the Empress threateningly, ‘I’m strong enough, it suffices that you won’t prevent it.’ Joseph, terrified of being left out, assured them Russia could count on Austria.28 Little did any of them realize that the same debate – war or peace – was simultaneously raging, beside the same sea, one day’s sailing away, in the Divan of the Sublime Porte. The canaille of Constantinople were rioting for war, as thousands of soldiers marched through the streets on their way to the fortresses of the Black Sea and the Balkans.

  Joseph invited the diplomats to trot around Sebastopol to discuss the enigma of Potemkin in private. The ability of this exotic eccentric to achieve so much confounded the Emperor. Potemkin was all the more ‘extraordinary for his genius for activity’, he told Nassau. ‘In spite of his bizarreness’, Joseph declared to Ségur, ‘that unique man’ was not only ‘useful but necessary’ to control a barbaric people like the Russians. Joseph yearned to find some fault, so he suggested to Nassau, who had commanded at sea, that the ships were surely not ready to sail. ‘They are ready and entirely armed,’ replied the paladin. Joseph for once had to admit defeat: ‘The truth is that it is necessary to be here to believe what I see.’29

  Nassau and Ligne rode off, escorted by Cossacks and Tartars, to inspect Partheniza and Mass
andra, the estates given to them by the Prince. Partheniza, Ligne’s property, was supposedly the site of the Temple of Diana, where Iphigenia was sacrificed. Ligne was so moved that he wrote a poem to Potemkin. The guests visited the ruins of the ancient city of Khersoneses. Serenissimus headed for the hills for a day taking Nassau up to relax at an estate so fine he called it ‘Tempted’.30

  Skip Notes

  *1 The whole floating worm was 252 feet long and almost 17 feet wide, propelled by 120 rowers.

  *2 ‘There is no doubt’, Samuel told Jeremy Bentham, deluding himself winningly, ‘that the Emperor as well as everybody else praised the invention.’

  *3 The carriage is in the Dniepropetrovsk State Historical Museum.

  *4 Potemkin preferred its Greek name, Olviopol.

  *5 Potemkin had Catherine’s Crimean progress marked by milestones, engraved in Russian and Turkish and placed every ten kilometres. Only three survive: one stands today outside the Khan’s Palace in Bakhchisaray. The Giray graveyard also remains intact, if somewhat overgrown.

  *6 The Prince de Ligne saw a universal rule about women here: ‘The flattery made her drunk…the inconvenience of women on thrones.’

  25

  THE AMAZONS

  Assemblage étonnant des dons de la nature

  Qui joignez la génie à l’âme le plus pure

  Délicat et sensible à la voix de l’honneur

  Tendre, compatissant, et rempli de candeur

  Aimable, gai, distrait, pensif et penseur sombre

  De ton charmant, ce dernier trait est l’ombre

  Apprends-moi par quel art, tout se trouve en ta tête?

  The Prince de Ligne’s poem to Prince Potemkin, written on the Crimean journey

  A regiment of Amazons rode out to meet the Kaiser when he pushed ahead to inspect Balaclava. Joseph was astonished by this trick of Potemkinian showmanship. The Prince’s Greek, or ‘Albanian’, military colony there already sported a neo-Classical costume – breastplates and cloaks, along with modern pistols. These Amazons were 200 female ‘Albanese’, all ‘pretty women’, according to Ligne, wearing skirts of crimson velvet, bordered with gold lace and fringe, green velvet jackets, also bordered with gold, white gauze turbans, spangles and white ostrich feathers. They were armed to the teeth ‘with muskets, bayonets and lances, Amazonian breastplates and long hair gracefully platted’. This caprice originated in a discussion between Catherine and Potemkin, in Petersburg before the trip, about the similarities between modern and Classical Greeks. He praised the courage of his Greeks and their wives. Catherine, no feminist, doubted the wives were much use. The Prince resolved to prove her wrong.*1

  The awkward Kaiser so admired this vision that he rewarded the beautiful nineteen-year-old Amazon commander, Elena Sardanova, wife of a captain, with a most unimperial kiss on the lips. Then he galloped back to meet the Empress. She encountered Potemkin’s Amazons on her next stop at the Greek village of Kadykovka as she processed down an avenue of laurels, oranges and lemons. Potemkin told her that the Amazons would like to demonstrate their shooting prowess. Catherine, probably secretly bored with military demonstrations, refused. Instead, she embraced Sardanova, gave her a diamond ring worth 1,800 roubles, and 10,000 roubles for her troop.1

  The Amazons joined Catherine’s escort of Tartars, Cossacks and Albanians for the rest of the trip. As the imperial procession trundled along the fecund, mountainous south-eastern shore of the Crimea, its most paradaisical countryside, where they passed Potemkin’s vineyards, it must have been quite a sight. The aura of success about the ‘Road to Byzantium’ allowed the two Caesars to relax. Joseph even admitted that Potemkin kept him waiting in his anteroom like an ordinary courtier but said he could not help but forgive that extraordinary man – quite a departure for a petulant Habsburg.2

  Bouncing along in their carriage, Catherine and Joseph discussed the sort of things that heads of state have in common. Ligne sat in a royal sandwich between them, drifting off to sleep, only to wake up hearing one say, ‘I have thirty million subjects, only counting the male population,’ while the other admitted to only twenty million. One asked the other: ‘Has anyone ever tried to assassinate you?’ They discussed their alliance. ‘What the deuce shall we do with Constantinople?’, Joseph asked Catherine.3

  At Kaffa, the old slave port refounded by Potemkin as Theodosia, Serenissimus played one of his tricks on Ségur. As the party climbed into the carriages that morning, Ségur bumped into an exquisite young girl in Circassian dress. The colour drained from his face: she was the precise image of his wife. ‘I thought for a moment Madame de Ségur had come from France to meet me. Imagination moves fast in the land of marvels.’ The girl disappeared. A beaming Potemkin took her place. ‘Isn’t the resemblance perfect then?’, he asked Ségur, adding that he had seen the wife’s portrait in his tent.

  ‘Complete and unbelievable,’ replied the stunned husband.

  ‘Well, batushka,’ said Potemkin, ‘this young Circassian girl belongs to a man who will let me dispose of her and, as soon as you reach St Petersburg, I will give her to you.’

  Ségur tried to refuse because his wife might not appreciate this expression of affection. Potemkin was hurt and accused Ségur of false delicacy. So Ségur promised to accept another present,*2 whatever it might be.4 The party climbed into the rolling, green hills of the interior to view Potemkin’s gardens, dairies, flocks of sheep and goats, and his pink ‘Tartar’ Palace at Karasubazaar.*3 This, according to an Englishwoman visiting a decade later, was ‘one of those fairy palaces’ that arose ‘as if by magic by the secret arrangement of Potemkin, to surprise and charm’.5

  They found an English island here. Capability Brown would have recognized the English gardens – ‘clumps of majestic trees, a most extensive lawn’, leading to ‘woods which make a delightful pleasure ground laid out by our countryman Gould’, and there was Henderson’s English dairy. Potemkin’s idyll was incomplete without a full English tea too. Henderson’s ‘nieces’, who had travelled out with Jeremy Bentham, caught Ligne’s experienced eye: ‘Two heavenly creatures dressed in white’ came out, sat the travellers down at a table covered in flowers ‘on which they placed butter and cream. It reminded me of breakfast in English novels.’ There were barracks and soldiers to inspect for Joseph, but he was completely uncharmed. ‘We had to go through mountain roads,’ he grumbled to Field-Marshal Lacey, ‘just to make us see a billy-goat, an Angora sheep and a sort of English garden.’6

  Potemkin laid on a feu d’artifice that impressed even these firework-weary dignitaries. In the midst of a banquet, 20,000 big rockets exploded and 55,000 burning pots crowned the mountains twice with the initials of the Empress, while the English gardens were illuminated as if it was daylight. Joseph said he had never seen anything more awesome and could only marvel at the power of Potemkin, and therefore the Russian state, to do exactly what he wished, regardless of cost: ‘We in Germany or France would never have dared undertake what is being done here…Here human life and effort count for nothing…The master orders, the slave obeys.’7

  When they were back again in Bakhchisaray, Tartar women again occupied the minds of the worldly courtiers. Ligne, younger at fifty than when he was thirty, could no longer restrain his curiosity. ‘What’s the use of going through an immense garden when one is forbidden to examine the flowers? Before I leave the Crimea, I must at least see a Tartar woman without her veil.’ So he asked Ségur: ‘Will you accompany me?’ Ligne and Ségur set off into the woods. They came upon three damsels washing, with their veils on the ground beside them. ‘But alas,’ recalled Ségur, none was pretty. Quite the contrary. ‘Mon Dieu!’, exclaimed Ligne. ‘Mahomet was quite right to order them to cover their faces.’ The women ran away screaming. The peepers were pursued by Tartars shrieking curses and throwing stones.

  Next day at dinner, Catherine was silen
t, Potemkin sulky – both probably exhausted. Ligne thought he would cheer them up with his naughty escapade. It displeased the Tsarina: ‘Gentlemen, this joke was in poor taste.’ She had conquered this land and commanded that Islam should be respected. The Tartars were now her subjects under imperial protection. If some of her pages had behaved so childishly, she would have punished them.8

  Even the Kaiser was affected by the voluptuous atmosphere. Catherine let Joseph, Ligne and Ségur (perhaps as a consolation after their reprimand) watch her audience with a Giray princess. But they were disappointed with this descendant of Genghis: ‘her painted eyebrows and shining cosmetics made her look like a piece of china in spite of her lovely eyes’, thought Ségur. ‘I would have preferred one of her servants,’ Joseph told Lacey. The Kaiser was so taken with the beauty of Circassian women that this supposed pillar of the Enlightenment decided to buy one:*4 he gave one Lieutenant Tsiruli money to set off into the Kuban and purchase a ‘pretty Circassian woman’. Potemkin approved it. That mission’s outcome is unknown. However, Joseph did return to Vienna with what sounds like a different Circassian girl, aged six, whom he bought from a slave-trader.9 She was baptized as Elisabeth Gulesy, was educated at Court, and was left a pension in his will of 1,000 Gulden a year, not bad since Mozart’s pension, granted in 1787, was only 800. Later she married a nobleman’s majordomo and is lost to history.