Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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.