Titans of History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  FREDERICK THE GREAT

  1712–1786

  A man who gives battle as readily as he writes an opera … he has written more books than any of his contemporary princes has sired bastards; he has won more victories than he has written books.

  Voltaire, 1772

  The outstanding soldier-statesman of his age, the paragon of gifted kingship, Frederick the Great prefigured Napoleon. The most enlightened monarch of his day, Frederick was an aesthete and lover of the arts—an accomplished writer, composer, flautist and wit. Famed in his youth as a philosopher prince, on acceding to the throne in 1740, at the age of twenty-eight, this apparent milksop astonished Europe’s crowned heads by becoming the most formidable ruler of the age.

  With his typically wry wit, Frederick once declared that he had infected Europe with warfare just as a coquette infects her clients. Introspective and self-critical, Frederick’s analysis and planning were always immaculate, his quick mind the first to seize the advantage on the battlefield. His martial qualities inspired in his formidably well-trained army the utmost respect and loyalty, despite the horrific privations his campaigns put them through. When Napoleon reached Berlin twenty years after Frederick’s death, he paid homage at Frederick’s tomb. As he entered, he declared to his men: “Hats off, gentlemen! If he were alive, we would not be here!”

  Frederick waged war to serve his state’s interests, but he was never militaristic. He deplored war’s effects and he abhorred hypocrisy. At other times he could be firmly pragmatic: “If we can gain something by being honest, we will be it; and if we have to deceive, we will be cheats.”

  In 1740 he boldly and ruthlessly invaded Austria’s rich province of Silesia, unleashing almost twenty years of savage warfare across central Europe, but he kept the territory. Europe’s hypocritical old guard was quick to share in the spoils when Frederick initiated the partition of the increasingly anarchic Poland. “She weeps, but she takes,” Frederick wryly commented of Empress Maria Theresa when she took her slice of Poland.

  The man who refused to wear spurs because he thought them cruel to horses abolished torture within days of coming to the throne. He banned serfdom in all his new territories, and in an age when capital punishment was decreed for stealing bread, the famously liberal Frederick signed only eight or ten death warrants a year. He once reprieved a father and daughter from the death sentence for committing incest on the grounds that one could not be absolutely sure about the girl’s paternity. The atheist Frederick’s religious tolerance extended to welcoming the Jesuits to Prussia—a sect that crowned heads all over Europe were trying to expel.

  The first of Europe’s enlightened despots, Frederick was tireless in fulfilling his self-designated role as the first servant of the state. Every day he forced himself to rise at 4 a.m., ordering his servants to throw a cold wet cloth in his face if he seemed reluctant. Even such an early start as this barely gave him time to do all he wanted. At his court, which he filled with artists, writers, musicians and philosophers, he practiced the flute four times a day, held concerts after supper, conducted a vast correspondence with philosophers and statesmen, wrote poetry, and administered the affairs of state.

  His endurance was as striking as his luck. He was prone to fits of depression and despair, but he never gave up. “Fortune alone can deliver me from my present position,” he declared at one point during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). The timely death of his inveterate enemy Empress Elizaveta of Russia in 1762 brought about a volte-face in foreign policy as his ardent admirer Peter III came to the Russian throne. Having teetered on the brink of total annihilation early in the war, Prussia emerged triumphant from it.

  Frederick’s insecurity may well have been instilled in him by his miserable youth. His father Frederick William I’s contempt for his son was famous. “What goes on in that little head?” the austere, violent, volatile Frederick William would demand suspiciously of his “effeminate” son, whose lifelong love for all things French directly contravened his father’s orders. Matters came to a head when the eighteen-year-old Frederick tried to flee his wretched existence. After he was caught and imprisoned, his best friend (and some say lover) Hermann von Katte was executed outside the window of his cell.

  Prussia may have grown in grandeur but Frederick did not. Toward the end of Frederick’s life, a visiting dignitary encountered an elderly “gardener” at the Sanssouci summer palace and had a friendly chat. Only later, when he was introduced to Prussia’s king, did he realize who he had been talking to.

  But he could turn nasty—in his wit, in his disciplining of his army, in his repudiation of his wife. His sexuality mystified contemporaries—there were allegations of affairs with male guardsmen. Certainly there were no mistresses. Perhaps he was asexual. He fell out spectacularly with his old correspondent Voltaire, who abused him in print as a miser and a tyrant. His pursuit of war to advance his country simultaneously exhausted its resources. His emphasis on the primacy of the state meant that his rule was never as enlightened as Voltaire had hoped.

  Frederick’s lifelong conservatism translated itself increasingly into rigidity with age. With typical self-deprecation, he frequently said that he had lived too long.

  CASANOVA

  1725–1798

  Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life.

  Giacomo Casanova

  The name of Casanova or, to give his full name, Giovanni Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt, is synonymous with womanizing and wild living. Indeed, in his racy and scandalously frank memoirs, Histoire de ma vie jusqu’à l’an 1787 (The Story of My Life Until 1787), this tall, dark and handsome self-appointed hero presents himself as “the world’s greatest lover,” describing his many conquests, as well as his early life, adventures and travels, in salacious detail. It may therefore come as a surprise to find that the notorious philanderer, who sired many children out of wedlock and was himself, it was rumored, the illegitimate son of a Venetian nobleman, was also a highly cultured man—and that is his real claim to fame. Whether they are mainly fact or boastful fiction, his memoirs are the greatest ever written.

  Precociously intelligent, Casanova attended the University of Padua from the age of thirteen, obtained a doctorate in law at the age of sixteen (ironically, perhaps, his studies included moral philosophy), took holy orders, and also considered training as a doctor.

  “The idea of settling down,” he wrote, “was always repulsive to me.” The adventurous and talented Casanova was always on the move. He started out working in the church in Venice but was soon expelled under something of a cloud, due to his sexual appetites and dandified appearance. From there he had a short-lived career as a military officer, stationed in Corfu, then as a theater violinist in Venice. He took a variety of jobs before leaving Venice in 1748, under suspicion of attempted rape (though he was later acquitted).

  Born into a world of artists, con artists and courtesans, Casanova represented a sparkling conflation of two 18th-century social types—the society fraud and the man of letters. He was one of the fascinating mountebanks and charlatans who entertained, mesmerized and swindled the royal courts of the age, claiming variously to be noblemen, necromancers, alchemists (who could turn base metals into gold), Kabbalists, magi and hierophants. The first of them was the so-called Comte de Saint-Germain (1710–84), who claimed to be 2000 years old and able to remember the Crucifixion (his valet claimed to remember it too); Louis XV gave him 10,000 livres. The ultimate was Count Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–95), born Giuseppe Balsamo in Sicily, who made a fortune in courts across Europe claiming, among other feats, that he could convert urine into gold and offer eternal life. His seductive wife, born Lorenza in Sicily, accompanied him as Serafina, Princess di Santa Croce. After a rock-star-style tour of Europe, Count Cagliostro was finally embroiled in the Diamond Necklace Affair that so damaged Queen Marie-Antoinette, and he died in 1795 in an Italian prison.

  But it was also a very literary age, when the fame of witty letter-
writers, such as Casanova, spread throughout Europe. The greatest letter-writer of the era (along with Voltaire) was the genuine high aristocrat Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne (1735–1814), Belgian grandee, Austrian field marshal and international courtier, wit and socialite, who managed to be friends simultaneously with Emperor Joseph II, Catherine the Great of Russia, and King Frederick the Great. His hilarious letters were copied from court to court, and he finally died at the Congress of Vienna.

  Passing himself off as the noble Chevalier de Seingalt, Casanova earned his living as the inventor of the Paris lottery, an agricultural adviser to the kings of Spain, an alchemist and a Kabbalist. He was repeatedly arrested for his debts and in 1755 for witchcraft and freemasonry—and then imprisoned for fifteen months in Venice’s Piombi Prison, known as the Leads, from which it was supposedly impossible to escape. Escape he did, however, across the rooftops, stopping for a recuperative coffee in St. Mark’s Square before disappearing in a gondola.

  He traveled widely, through Italy, Austria, Spain, England, Turkey and Russia, meeting Catherine the Great, George III of England and Pope Benedict XII, not to mention Rousseau and Voltaire. Most of his income came from the grandees who admired his intelligence and wit, or—in the case of the women—sought and often received his attentions. Never married, he was engaged frequently. His lovers included courtesans, peasants, heiresses, sisters, countesses and many nuns, sometimes together. In 1776, overcome by debt, he became a secret agent for the Venetian Tribunal of Inquisitors, using the name Antonio Pratiloni and snitching on heretics to the Catholic Church while living with a local seamstress.

  Tales of derring-do and romantic trysts litter the memoirs, which are the main source of information about his checkered life. Heavily censored in earlier editions, they were not published in their full unexpurgated twelve-volume form until 1960; they paint a portrait of a lovable trans-European rogue and seducer. He wrote them as an old man looking back on an adventurous life, working as the librarian to the Bohemian Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein. Casanova was never one for letting the facts stand in the way of a good tale. Some of his dates simply do not fit: people are in the wrong places and die at the wrong times, and the pseudonyms he gives his various conquests make it impossible to be certain who was who. Unreliable, self-indulgent and shameless, the memoirs are nevertheless a literary classic, a real picture of an entire epoch.

  “I have lived as a philosopher,” declared Casanova on his deathbed, “and died as a Christian.” It was rather less straightforward, and rather more interesting, than that.

  CAPTAIN COOK

  1728–1779

  The ablest and most renowned Navigator this or any country hath produced.

  Sir Hugh Palliser’s monument to Captain Cook, erected at Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, after the news of Cook’s death reached Europe

  James Cook was responsible for exploring and charting boundless areas of the Pacific hitherto unknown to Europeans. A creative captain as well as a fine navigator, he devised a diet for his crews rich in vitamin C, thereby preventing the outbreaks of scurvy that usually afflicted those on long voyages. It was curiosity and ambition as well as science that drove Cook to fulfill his desire to voyage not only “farther than any man before me, but as far as I think it is possible for a man to go.”

  Cook’s achievements were remarkable given his beginnings. The son of a Yorkshire farm laborer, as a lad he was apprenticed to a grocer. This did not satisfy his restless spirit, and he set off for the port of Whitby. Here he signed on to serve on a merchantman and spent a number of years sailing on colliers up and down the east coast of England. Having acquired the rudiments of navigation, in 1755 he volunteered for the Royal Navy and rose swiftly through the ranks. During the Seven Years’ War Cook achieved renown as a hydrographic surveyor, and his work charting the St. Lawrence River and the coast of Canada was critical to subsequent British victories. His surveys and sailing directions concerning Newfoundland were used for well over a century.

  Cook’s observations of the solar eclipse of 1766 so impressed the Royal Society that, jointly with the Admiralty, it commissioned him to make a voyage to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus—and also to explore and claim for Britain the undiscovered southern continent known as Terra Australis. The belief in the existence of such a continent—covering not only the South Pole but also extending far to the north into the Indian Ocean and the Pacific—had been held by geographers since the time of Aristotle. Cook’s discoveries conclusively put the myth to rest: in circumnavigating New Zealand for the first time (1769), discovering Australia’s east coast (1770) and sailing through the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea, Cook showed these lands to be separate entities. But the furtherance of science was only one of Cook’s aims; he also claimed for King George III many of the lands he discovered—such as New South Wales and Hawaii (which he called the Sandwich Isles in honor of his patron, the Earl of Sandwich). During his second voyage (1772–5), he achieved the first circumnavigation of the Antarctic, and in so doing became the first person to cross the Antarctic Circle.

  The scale of Cook’s achievement owes much to his brilliant and fearless seamanship. Cook consistently continued his explorations when all others would have turned back. His navigation skills were considerable, and he also had the vision to draw on the knowledge of the two Tahitians he employed on his voyages. Boundlessly tenacious, Cook was never content with what he had achieved. He invariably extended his voyages, and his willingness to exceed the orders given to him by the Admiralty was rewarded by the discoveries he made.

  Cook’s maps and charts were often the first accurate depictions of the coasts he explored: he completed the outlines of Newfoundland, the northwest coast of North America, New Zealand and Australia. His use of the K1 chronometer, which by keeping time more precisely enabled him to measure longitude more accurately, was ground-breaking, and his results are remarkable for their accuracy, given the frequently adverse conditions in which he worked and the limitations of the instrumentation available to him.

  Cook’s pioneering work on the prevention of scurvy earned him a medal from the Royal Society, who were also impressed by the scientific achievements of his expeditions, in particular the records of new flora and fauna made by the scientists he took with him. Cook—praised in the House of Lords as “the first navigator in Europe”—was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and awarded a captainship and honorary retirement by the Royal Navy. This last, however, he accepted only on the condition that he could still make further voyages. For, despite having a wife and a succession of children, Cook’s life lay at sea.

  In 1776 he set sail for the South Seas once again. During this voyage, Cook determined to make an attempt to break though the apparently impassable Arctic ice and find a route back to Europe to the north of Canada. While waiting for spring to arrive, Cook wintered in Hawaii, and here he became caught up in a disagreement with the islanders. In the resulting skirmish, Cook, who had initially been deified by the Hawaiians as the incarnation of their god, Lono, was killed. His body, according to custom, was stripped of flesh, which was then burned—or possibly eaten. His bones were distributed among various chiefs and only handed back to Cook’s men after protracted negotiations. His remains were buried at sea, as was only fitting, the sea having been his whole life. The map of the Pacific was his legacy.

  CATHERINE THE GREAT

  1729–1796

  Be gentle, humane, accessible, compassionate and open-handed; don’t let your grandeur prevent you from mixing kindly with the humble and putting yourself in their shoes … I swear by Providence to stamp these words in my heart.

  Catherine’s private note to herself on becoming empress (1762)

  Catherine the Great was not only a successful politician, a triumphant empire-builder and a remarkable self-made woman of strong passions in a male-dominated age, she was also arguably the most humane ruler that Russia has ever produced. She ranks with Elizabeth I of England a
s one of history’s outstanding female monarchs—though her achievements were even greater than Elizabeth’s.

  Catherine was certainly ruthless in her pursuit of power and admiration, self-indulgent in her famous love affairs and enormously extravagant in her enjoyment of arts and luxury—but she was also overwhelmingly benevolent, decent in her intentions, loyal to her friends, merciful to her enemies, tolerant of others, industrious, intellectual and enormously intelligent. Her success was against all the odds. She was not even Russian, had no claim to the throne and found herself, at the age of fourteen, thrown into a loveless marriage and the brutal bear pit of the Russian court.

  She was not actually named Catherine, being born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a minor German princess in the patchwork of little principalities that was the Holy Roman Empire, which served as a sort of matchmaking agency for the monarchies of Europe. In 1746 the Empress Elizaveta of Russia summoned Princess Sophie to St. Petersburg to marry her heir, Grand Duke Peter. She converted to the Orthodox Church, took the name Catherine and learned Russian—but found her husband disappointing. Puny, poxy, prejudiced, foolish and cowardly, Grand Duke Peter was out of his depth as the Russian heir—and as Catherine’s husband. He also was German, but while Catherine embraced all Russian culture, he despised and feared Russia. She immediately charmed the empress, won friends and admirers among the courtiers and the Guards regiments, and proved adept at politics. It is uncertain if Peter even consummated the marriage, but it is certain that he did not satisfy the passionate Catherine.