Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The Russians solved the problem of the momentum of the Turkish charge by using the square, which could withstand any shrieking onslaught. The Turk was both the ‘most dangerous, and most contemptible, enemy in the world’, wrote Ligne later, ‘dangerous, if they are suffered to attack; contemptible, if we are beforehand with them’. The Spahis or Tartars, ‘humming around us like wasps’, could envelop the Russian squares, ‘curveting, leaping, caracoling, displaying their horsemanship and performing their riding-house croups’ until they exhausted themselves. Then Rumiantsev’s squares, drilled with Prussian precision, protected by their Cossacks and Hussars, and linked together by Jaegers, light, sharpshooting infantry, advanced. Once broken, the Turks either fled like rabbits or fought to the death. ‘Dreadful slaughter’, said Potemkin, was the usual result. ‘The instinct of the Turks renders them dextrous and capable of all kinds of warlike employments…but they never go beyond the first idea, they are incapable of a second. When their moment of good sense…is over, they partake of the madman or the child.’²⁴

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This was what happened when Rumiantsev’s squares stormed the Turkish camp at the Battle of Larga, shrugging off the Turkish charges with stoical endurance and blasts of artillery. Seventy-two thousand Turks and Tartars were forced to evacuate their fortifications and flee. Potemkin, attached to Prince Nikolai Repnin’s corps, commanded the advance guard that attacked the camp of the Crimean Khan and was, according to Rumiantsev, ‘among the first to attack and capture its fortification’. Potemkin was again decorated, this time with the Order of St George, Third Class: he wrote to thank the Empress.²⁵

The new Grand Vizier now advanced with the main Turkish army to prevent the union of the two Russian armies of Rumiantsev and Panin. He crossed the Danube and marched up the Pruth to meet the fleeing troops from the Battle of Larga. On 21 July 1770, only slightly to the south of Larga, Rumiantsev marched his 25,000 troops towards the 150,000 men of the Grand Vizier’s massed Turkish army, which had camped behind triple fortifications near Lake Kagul. Despite the numerical inequality, he decided to attack. Using the lessons and confidence provided by Larga, he formed five squares facing the main Turkish positions. Potemkin and his cavalry defended the army’s transport against ‘the attacks of numerous Tartar hordes and prevented them from…attacking the army’s rear’. As he gave Potemkin this duty, Rumiantsev is supposed to have told him: ‘Grigory Alexandrovich, bring us our provisions, balanced on the top of your sabre.’²⁶

The Turks, who had learned nothing from Larga, were completely surprised, fought savagely for the whole day but were finally routed in scenes of desperate carnage, leaving 138 guns, 2,000 prisoners, and 20,000 dead on the field. Rumiantsev brilliantly exploited his victory by pushing down towards the lower Danube: on 26 July Potemkin helped Repnin take the fortress of Izmail, then that of Kilia on 10 August. General Panin stormed Bender on 16 September, and Rumiantsev finally closed his campaign with the taking of Brailov on 10 November.²⁷ There was one more magnificent piece of news.

Catherine had sent the Russian Baltic Fleet, proud creation of Peter the Great, across the North Sea, through the English Channel and the Straits of Gibraltar all the way to hit the Turkish rear in the eastern Mediterranean. Its admiral was Count Alexei Orlov, who had never been to sea, but its real lights were two Scottish officers, John Elphinstone and Samuel Greig. Despite Peter the Great’s brave attempts to inspire sea-legs in Russian ploughmen, only the Livonians or Estonians took to the ocean. There were few Russian officers and most of them were lamentable. When Elphinstone grumbled, Catherine replied: ‘The ignorance of the Russians is due to youth; that of the Turks to decrepitude.’²⁸ England helped the Russian expedition: London did not yet regard the Turk as a natural ally or the ‘Bear’ as a natural enemy. The ‘Eastern Question’ had not yet been asked. On the contrary, France was England’s enemy, Turkey a French ally. By the time the leaky Russian fleet reached England, 800 sailors were ill. These seasick Russian peasants must have been an incongruously pathetic sight as they re-rigged, watered and recovered in Hull and Portsmouth.