Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

For 300 years, Tartary had been one of the most important states of eastern Europe, its cavalry supposedly the best in Europe. It was far larger than just the Crimea: at its apogee in the sixteenth century, it had ruled from Transylvania and Poland to Astrakhan and Kazan, and halfway to Moscow. Even in Potemkin’s day, the Khanate ruled from the Kuban steppes in the east to Bessarabia in the west, from the tip of the Crimea to the Zaporogian Sech – ‘all that territory that separates the Russian Empire from the Black Sea’. Often allied with Lithuania against Muscovy, in the sixteenth century Tartar khans had even burned the suburbs of Moscow.¹ But their state was fatally flawed. The khans were not hereditary but elective. Beneath the Girays were the murzas, Tartar dynasties, also descended from the Mongols, who elected one Giray as khan and another, not necessarily his son, as his heir-apparent, the Kalgai khan. Furthermore many of the khan’s subjects were unbiddable Nogai Tartar nomads. It was only in times of war that the khan could really command.²

Baron de Tott, French adviser to the Ottomans, was seconded to the Crimea, where he rode, hawked and went greyhound coursing with the Khan, who was always accompanied by 6,000 horsemen. When the Sublime Porte declared war on Russia in 1768, Khan Kirim Giray, accompanied by Tott, galloped out of the Crimea at the head of an army of 100,000 to attack the Russian army on the Bessarabian–Polish border, where young Potemkin served. When Kirim Giray died (possibly of poisoning), the Tartars halted in Bessarabia to install the new Khan Devlet Giray, and the Baron was one of the last to witness the primitive magnificence of this Genghizid monarchy: ‘Dressed in a cap loaded with two aigrettes enriched with diamonds, his bow and quiver flung across his body, preceded by his guards and several led horses whose heads were ornamented with plumes of feathers, followed by the standard of the Prophet and accompanied by all his Court, he repaired to his Palace where in the hall of the Divan, seated on his throne, he received the homage of all the grandees.’ This noble scene of nomadic warriorship was incongruously accompanied by ‘a numerous orchestra and a troop of actors and buffoons’. When he set off to war, the Khan resided in a tent like his Mongol forefathers ‘decorated on the inside with crimson’.³

The initial raids were impressive but the Russo-Turkish War was a disaster for Crim Tartary. Devlet Giray also perished in his crimson-lined tent and was replaced with a lesser man. Tott was recalled to Constantinople, but unfortunately the Tartar army remained on the Danube with the main Ottoman armies, so that it was not there in 1771 when Vasily Dolgoruky occupied the Crimea. As we saw, Pugachev and the diplomatic conjuncture prevented the Russians keeping all their conquests in 1774. But Catherine, shrewdly advised by Potemkin, insisted in the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi that Tartary be made independent of the Sultan, who would still keep nominal religious control as caliph. This ‘independence’ brought further ruin.

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Crimea’s tragedy had a face and a name. Shagin Giray, the Kalgai Khan or, as Catherine put it, Tartar ‘Dauphin’, had led the Crimean delegation to St Petersburg in 1771. ‘A sweet character,’ she told Voltaire, ‘he writes Arabic poems…he’s going to come to my circle on Sundays after dinner when he is allowed to enter to watch the girls dance…’. Shagin was not only handsome but had been educated in Venice. Thus he became the Russian candidate for khan when the Crimeans agreed to their independence from Istanbul in the Treaty of Karasubazaar in November 1772. That year, Shagin left the capital with 20,000 roubles and a gold sword.⁴ However, the Ottomans never accepted the independence of the Crimea, despite agreeing to it in both the Treaties of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi and Ainalikawak. They handed over Kinburn on the Dnieper and two of their forts on the Sea of Azov. But they kept the powerful fortress of Ochakov from which to threaten the Russians, who occupied the land between the Dnieper and the Bug.