Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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.