Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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.