Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The Empress sent a courier after the Prince. ‘My dear friend, come back as soon as possible,’ she wrote on 3 June 1782, adding wearily that they would have to honour their promise to reinstate the Khan – even though it was the third time they had done so. She told Potemkin the news that the British Admiral Rodney had defeated Admiral Joseph de Grasse’s French fleet at the Battle of the Saints in the Caribbean on 1/12 April, which slightly alleviated Britain’s plight as America won its freedom. In the Crimea, she realized that her policy of propping up Shagin Giray was obsolete but the delicate question of what to do depended on the Powers of Europe – and Potemkin. ‘We could decide it all in half an hour together,’ she told her consort, ‘but now I don’t know where to find you. I ask you to hurry with your arrival because nothing scares me more than to miss something or be wrong.’ Never was their partnership, and his equality, more clearly stated.²⁴

The Prince saw the Crimean tumult as a historic opportunity, because Britain and France remained distracted by war. He galloped back and almost bounded into town. He immediately sent this playfully Puckish letter to Sir James Harris in French, scrawled in his scratchy hand: ‘Vive la Grande Bretagne et Rodney; je viens d’arriver, mon cher Harris; devinez qui vous écrit and venez me voir tout de suite.’^*

Harris rushed through Tsarskoe Selo at midnight to visit ‘this extraordinary man who’, he told the new Foreign Secretary, his close friend Charles James Fox, ‘every day affords me new matter of amazement’. Sir James found Potemkin in a state of almost febrile ebullience. Serenissimus insisted on talking throughout the night, even though he had just finished ‘a journey of 3000 versts, which he had performed in 16 days, during which period he had slept only three times and, besides visiting several estates and every church he came near, he had been exposed to all the delays and tedious ceremonies of the military and civil honours which the Empress had ordered should be bestowed on him…yet he does not bear the smallest appearance of fatigue…and on our separation, I was certainly the more exhausted of the two’.²⁵

The reunited Prince and Empress resolved to reinstate Shagin Giray as Crimean khan but also to invoke the Austrian treaty in case it led to war with the Sublime Porte. Joseph replied so enthusiastically to ‘my Empress, my friend, my ally, my heroine’,²⁶ that, while Potemkin organized the Russian military response to the Crimean crisis, Catherine took the opportunity to turn their Greek Project from a chimera into a policy. On 10 September 1782, Catherine proposed the Project to Joseph, who was shocked by its impracticality yet impressed by its vision. First, Catherine wanted to re-establish ‘the ancient Greek monarchy on the ruins…of the barbarian government that rules there now’ for ‘the younger of my grandsons, Grand Duke Constantine’. Then she wanted to create the Kingdom of Dacia, the Roman province that covered today’s Rumania, ‘a state independent of the three monarchies…under a Sovereign of Christian religion…and a person of loyalty on which the two Imperial Courts can rely…’. Cobenzl’s letters make clear Dacia was specifically understood to be Potemkin’s kingdom.

Joseph’s reply was equally sweeping: he agreed to the Project in principle. In return he wanted the fortress of Khotin, part of Wallachia, and Belgrade. Venice would cede Istria and Dalmatia to him and get Morea, Cyprus and Crete in return. All this, he added, was impossible without French help – could France have Egypt? Only war and negotiation could decide the details – but he did not reject it.²⁷

Did Potemkin really believe that there would be a reborn Byzantine Empire ruled by Constantine, with himself as king of Dacia? The idea thrilled him, but he was always the master of the possible. The Dacian idea was realized in the creation of Rumania in the mid-nineteenth century, and Potemkin certainly planned to make that real. But he did not lose his head about it.²⁸ During 1785 he discussed the Turks with the French Ambassador Ségur and claimed that he could take Istanbul, but insisted that the new Byzantium was just a ‘chimera’. It was all ‘nonsense’, he said. ‘It’s nothing.’ But then he mischievously suggested that three or four Powers could drive the Turks into Asia and deliver Egypt, the Archipelago, Greece, all Europe from the Ottoman yoke. Many years later Potemkin asked his reader, who was declaiming Plutarch, if he could go to Constantinople. The reader tactfully replied it was quite possible. ‘That is enough,’ exclaimed Potemkin, ‘if anyone should tell me I could not go thither, I would shoot myself in the head.’²⁹ He was always flexible – it was he who suggested in September 1788 that Constantine could be made king of Sweden, a long way from Tsargrad.³⁰ So he wished it to serve its strategic purpose and to be as real as he could make it.