Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Catherine the Great herself settles any argument about Potemkin’s contribution to the Austrian alliance and the Greek Project. ‘The system with Vienna’s court’, she wrote later, ‘is your achievement.’³¹

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On 7 August 1782, the Empress and Serenissimus attended the unveiling of Falconet’s mammoth statue of Peter the Great – the Bronze Horseman – that still stands in Senate Square in Petersburg. It was a statement in stone of their ambitions to emulate the achievements of Peter, who had succeeded so brilliantly in the Baltic but failed in the south.

The Prince ordered his nephew, Major-General Samoilov, to begin preparatory action to restore order in the Crimea, but he decided to go south himself and conduct the main part. This trip marks the end of the domestic era of Potemkin and Catherine’s partnership and the beginning of his time of colossal achievement. From now on, Catherine understood that they were to be apart as much as they were together. This was his path to greatness and contentment, although, as she sweetly admitted to him while he was far away, ‘My dear master, I dislike it so much when you are not here by my side.’ On 1 September 1782, the Prince left St Petersburg to subdue the Crimea.³²

Skip Notes

* ‘Long live Great Britain and Rodney. I have just arrived, my dear Harris. Guess who is writing to you and come and see me immediately!’

17

  POTEMKIN’S PARADISE: THE CRIMEA

I now steal captives from the Persians Or at the Turks direct my arrows

Gavrili Derzhavin, ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’

The Crimea was what Potemkin called ‘the wart’ on the end of Catherine’s nose – but it was to become his own Russian ‘paradise’. The peninsula itself was not only dazzlingly and lushly beautiful but it was also a cosmopolitan gem, an ancient entrepôt that controlled the Black Sea. The Ancient Greeks, Goths, Huns, Byzantines, Khazars, Karaim Jews, Georgians, Armenians, Genoese and Tartars, who came later, were all just visitors there, trading and dealing, in a peninsula that seemed to belong to no one race. For a Classicist like the Prince, there were the ruins of Khersoneses and the mythical temple of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon. But he was most interested in the Crimea’s strategic importance and its history as the Mongol stronghold that had terrorized Russia for three centuries.

The Tartar Khanate of the Crimea, known in the West as Crim Tartary, was a state that seemed archaic even in 1782 – the last Mongol outpost. Crimea’s Giray dynasty were the second family of the Ottoman Empire because they were descended from Genghis Khan himself, which was much more distinguished a descent than the House of Othman. If Rome and Byzantium represented two of the three international traditions of imperial legitimacy, the blood of Genghis Khan was the third. The family owned estates in Anatolia, where the Ottomans conveniently imprisoned restless potential successors in a sort of Giray Cage. If ever the Ottomans became extinct, it was understood that the Genghizid Girays would succeed them. They were always more allies than subjects.

The Khanate had been founded in 1441 when Haci Giray broke away from the Golden Horde and made himself khan of the Crimea and the shores of the Black Sea. His successor Mengli Giray acknowledged the ultimate suzerainty of the Ottoman Emperor, and from then on the two states existed in a tense, respectful alliance. The Tartars guarded the Black Sea, defended Turkey’s northern borders and provided a stream of blonde Slavic slaves to sell to the fleshpots and rowing-galleys of Constantinople. Between 1601 and 1655, it has been estimated, they kidnapped over 150,000 slaves. Their armies of 50,000–100,000 horsemen had the run of the eastern steppes, raiding into Muscovy whenever they needed more slaves to fill their markets. They bore six-foot-long square-shaped bows, with arrows two feet long; muskets and round, bejewelled shields, with pistols studded with lapis and emerald. Until that century, the Genghizid khans received tribute from the tsars of Russia and kings of Poland. The Girays believed their grandeur was second to none. ‘His imperial star rose above the glorious horizon,’ one khan wrote in an inscription in the Bakhchisaray Palace, where the Khans resided in their Seraglio like miniature Great Turks, guarded by 2,100 Sekbans, Janissaries from Constantinople. ‘His beautiful Crimean throne gave brilliant illumination to the whole world.’