Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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CLEOPATRA

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,

Burn’d on the water, the poop was beaten gold,

Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that

The winds were lovesick with them, the oars were silver

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster,

As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,

It beggar’d all description…

William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

At midday on 22 April 1787, Catherine, Potemkin and their entourage boarded the dining barge, where a feast for fifty was laid out. At 3 p.m., the fleet moved off. The seven imperial galleys of the Prince’s sublime fleet were elegant, comfortable and majestic, painted in gold and scarlet on the outside, decorated in gold and silk inside, propelled and served by 3,000 oarsmen, crew and guards, and attended by over eighty other boats.¹ Each had its own orchestra, always on deck, which played as the guests embarked or disembarked. On Catherine’s barge, the Dnieper, the orchestra was conducted by Potemkin’s maestro, Sarti. Her boudoir had twin beds for her and Mamonov. Each barge had a communal drawing room, library, music-room and canopy on deck. The sumptuous bedroom suites were hung with Chinese silk, with beds in taffeta; the studies had mahogany writing-tables, a comfortable chintz-covered divan and even lavatories with their own water-supply, a novelty on land let alone on the Dnieper. The floating dining-hall could seat seventy.

The dazzling, almost mythical, memory of this cruise remained with all its guests for the rest of their lives. ‘A multitude of sloops and boats hovered unceasingly at the head and sides of the fleet which looked like something out of a fairy-tale,’ remembered Ségur. Onlookers gave ‘thundering acclamations as they saw the sailors of her majestic squadron rhythmically dip their painted oars into the waters of the Dnieper to the roar of the guns’. It was like ‘Cleopatra’s fleet…never was there a more brilliant and agreeable voyage’, thought Ligne. ‘It’s true’, Nassau told his wife, ‘that our gathering on this galley is one of the most unique things ever seen.’

The Prince presented a perpetual spectacle along the riverside: as they set off to cannon salvoes and symphonies, small squadrons of Cossacks manoeuvred over the plains. ‘Towns, villages, country houses and sometimes rustic huts were so wonderfully adorned and disguised with garlands of flowers and splendid architectural decorations that they seemed to be transformed before our eyes into superb cities, palaces suddenly sprang up and magically created gardens.’

Potemkin’s barge, the Bug, housed himself, his nieces, their husbands and Nassau-Siegen. The tedium of Kiev was left behind, but the malice and mischief cruised down the Dnieper with them. ‘I love being with the Prince, who really likes me,’ Nassau told his wife, ‘despite my companions who loathe me.’ Later he made friends with Branicki. The ex-lover of the Queen of Tahiti and almost-King of Ouidah drew a picture for his wife of their living quarters on the ‘big and ornate’ barge: Potemkin occupied the largest suite and no one could reach their rooms without passing through his salon. Catherine’s first rendezvous was with the King of Poland five days downriver, and Potemkin’s barge was a floating confederation of Polish intrigues. Nassau, still on his mission for Stanislas-Augustus against Branicki and trying to make his fortune, always awoke early and roused Potemkin to get him on his own.

The mornings were free. At midday, the Empress’s galley fired a cannon to announce dinner, sometimes for only ten guests, who were rowed over. Afterwards, Nassau was conveyed to the barge of Ligne and Ségur, where the former would read out his diaries. At 6 p.m., it was back to the Empress’s boat for supper. She always retired at 9 p.m. and ‘everyone goes to Prince Potemkin’s’. But, despite this unprecedented pomp, the tour was intimate. One night, Mamonov, bored with his early imperial lights-out, asked Nassau and some others to stay for a game of whist. Scarcely had they begun to play in Catherine’s salon than she entered with her hair down, holding her bed bonnet and wearing an apricot-coloured taffeta dressing gown with blue ribbons. This was a unique glimpse of how the older Catherine looked to her young lovers behind bedroom doors. ‘Having her hair uncovered makes her look younger,’ remarked Nassau. She hoped she was not disturbing them, sat down, excused her ‘déshabillé’ and was ‘very cheerful’. She retired at 10 p.m. The whist ended at 1.30 a.m.

‘The journey is truly a continual party and absolutely superb,’ Nassau reported. ‘A charming society because Ligne and Ségur make it great.’ The pair, who shared the Sejm, were to become the naughty schoolboys of the tour, always up to horseplay. Every morning, Ligne knocked on the thin partition separating their bedrooms to recite impromptu poems to Ségur and then sent over his page with letters of ‘wisdom, folly, politics, pretty speeches, military anecdotes and philosophical epigrams’. Nothing could have been stranger than this sunrise correspondence ‘between an Austrian general and a French ambassador lying side by side on the same barge, not far from the empress of the North, sailing down the Dnieper, through Cossack country, to visit the Tartars’. Ségur thought the visions of the cruise almost poetical: ‘The beautiful wealth, the magnificence of our fleet, the majesty of the river, the movement, the joy of countless spectators along the riverside, the military and Asiatic mixture of costumes of thirty different nations, finally the certainty of seeing new things each day, stirred and sharpened our imagination.’ The sheer success of these spectacles reflected on the magnificent showman: ‘The elements, seasons, nature and art all seemed to conspire to assure the triumph of this powerful favourite. ‘²

—

After three days of Cleopatran cruising, the King of Poland, Stanislas-Augustus, touched with romantic memories and political panaceas, waited at Kaniev on the Polish bank to meet the Empress. There was pathos in this meeting: when they had last met, he was a young Polish dreamer and she the oppressed wife of an imbecilic bully. Now he was a king and she an empress. He had not seen the woman he never really stopped loving for twenty-eight years and had probably indulged himself with fantasies of a reunion. ‘You can easily imagine’, the King confessed to Potemkin in an unpublished note back in February, ‘with what excitement I await the moment which should give me this joy.’ It was the sort of doomed sentimentality that would have struck a cord in Potemkin.³

Stanislas-Augustus remained handsome, sensitive, cultured, but above all he wanted to do the best that he could for Poland. Potemkin and Stanislas-Augustus shared interests in opera, architecture and literature, yet the latter could not afford to trust the former. The King’s lot was nothing but frustration and humiliation. Politically, he had been dealt the weakest imaginable hand. Personally he was no match for politicians like Potemkin. Catherine found the King’s political dilemmas irritating and inept – and his personal sincerity almost unbearable. Perhaps, having once loved him so much in the prison of her miserable marriage, the very thought of her impotent naivety in those times embarrassed her.⁴

The real purpose of the meeting was not amorous nostalgia but the survival of Poland. The sprawling chaos, feeble grandeur, stubborn liberty and labyrinthine subtleties of the Commonwealth made it the only political issue that confounded Catherine’s orderly mind. Yet these were the very conditions in which the serpentine Potemkin flourished. The plan of the King and Prince, sealed at Chwastow, to form an anti-Turkish alliance and reform the Polish constitution, might have prevented the tragedy of Poland’s destruction. But this was an occasion where personal awkwardness undermined political understanding.

The flotilla dropped anchor off Kaniev. At 11 a.m. on 25 April, Bezborodko and Prince Bariatinsky, Marshal of the Court, collected the King in a launch. ‘Gentlemen, the King of Poland has asked me to commend Count Poniatowski to your care,’ he said, assuming his original name, since kings of Poland could not leave Polish soil. When the King met the Empress, Ségur and the others formed a circle around them to witness their first words ‘in circumstances so different from those in which they first met, united by love, separated by jealousy and pursued by hatred’. But their expectations were immediately crushed. There was no spark now. The monarchs walked stiffly on deck. Probably his surging nostalgia could not resist some painful allusions to the past for, when they returned, she was strained and embarrassed, and there was a ‘certain trace of sadness’ in his eyes. Some said that she used his blandishments to make Mamonov jealous. ‘It was thirty years since I’d seen him,’ Catherine wrote afterwards, ‘and you can imagine that we found each other changed.’⁵

There was one touching moment, after Stanislas-Augustus awkwardly awarded Potemkin’s nephew, Engelhardt, the White Eagle. It was time for dinner. The King looked for his hat. Catherine handed it to him. ‘To cover my head twice,’ he quipped – the first being his crown. ‘Ah, madame, that is too much bounty and goodness.’ Stanislas-Augustus rested on another barge, then was rowed to Potemkin’s floating residence. Serenissimus tried to reconcile the King with Branicki, but the latter behaved so insolently that Stanislas-Augustus left the room. Potemkin rushed after him, apologizing. The Empress and the Prince sharply reprimanded Branicki – but he was family: their Polish creature remained in their entourage.

At 6 p.m., the King returned to Catherine’s barge for the political negotiations. He proposed the Russo-Polish alliance, strolling on deck. She promised an answer. The Prince himself nonchalantly played cards near by. Catherine was furious that he did not come to her assistance. ‘Why did Prince Potemkin and you have to leave us all the time like that?’, she berated Ligne. Stanislas-Augustus begged Catherine to come for supper in Kaniev, where he had almost bankrupted his meagre resources by laying on two days of dinners and fireworks, but Catherine snubbed him. She told Potemkin she did not care to do things in a rush as they did in Poland; ‘you yourself know any change of my intentions is unpleasant for me’. Potemkin, whether out of respect for Stanislas-Augustus or out of anger with Catherine for ruining his Polish strategy, kept playing cards and saying nothing. Catherine became angrier and quieter. The King got glummer. The courtiers fidgeted and eavesdropped. ‘Prince Potemkin didn’t say a word,’ Catherine muttered to her secretary the next day. ‘I had to talk all the time; my tongue dried up; they almost made me angry by asking me to stay.’ Catherine finally deigned to watch Poland’s costly fireworks from her barge.

The broken-hearted and humiliated King took his leave. ‘Don’t look so distressed,’ Ligne whispered to him bitchily. ‘You’re only giving pleasure to a Court which…detests you.’ Catherine remained furious with Potemkin. He sulked on the Bug. She sent him a series of notes: ‘I’m angry with you, you’re horribly maladroit today.’ The flotilla waited to watch the fireworks culminating in a simulated eruption of Vesuvius. Thus the King had, in Ligne’s inimitable description, ‘been here for three months and spent three million to see the Empress for three hours’. Stanislas-Augustus sent this pathetic note in a semi-legible scrawl to Potemkin a few days later: ‘I was pleased when I saw the Empress. I don’t know her any more, but although one is sad, I count on having Prince Potemkin as a friend.’⁶

—

Kaiser Joseph II and Tsarina Catherine II, the Caesars of the East, were getting closer. On 30 April, the flotilla rowed late into Kremenchuk, delayed by a high wind. Joseph, again in incognito as Comte de Falkenstein, waited downriver at Kaidak, bristling with military impatience.

Joseph’s despotic but rational reforms had already driven several of his provinces into rebellion. He had not wanted to come to Russia at all, but his presence was the most important for the Russians since the Austrian alliance was their main weapon against the Ottomans. ‘Perhaps one can find time’, Joseph suggested to Chancellor Kaunitz, ‘to find an excuse.’ The pompous Habsburg thought Catherine’s invitation ‘most cavalier’ so he told Kaunitz his answer would be ‘honest, short but will not refrain from letting this Catherinized Princess of Zerbst know she should put a little more consideration…in disposing of me’. He then accepted enthusiastically. He was keen to inspect Russian military forces but, in his heart, was determined to find they could not do anything properly, unlike his Austrians. He wrote ironically to Potemkin that he looked forward to seeing his ‘interesting arrangements and surprising creations’. Now the inspector-maniac consoled himself for the wait by inspecting Kherson on his own.⁷

Catherine fretted – where was Joseph? Cobenzl sent his emperor reassuring letters. Potemkin seemed to live only for the moment – though there were rumours that he was short of horses for the rest of the journey. The Empress landed at Kremenchuk and inspected an elegant palace surrounded, of course, by an ‘enchanted English garden’ of shady foliage, running water and pear trees. Potemkin had had huge oak trees, ‘as broad as himself’ joked Ligne, transported from afar and assembled into a wood. William Gould had been there. ‘Everything is in flower,’ the Empress told Grimm. Catherine then inspected 15,000 troops, including seven regiments of Potemkin’s new light cavalry, which Cobenzl acclaimed for its men and horses. After giving a ball for 800 that night, Catherine headed downriver for her imperial reunion.⁸

Just as the boats disappeared down the river, Samuel Bentham, leaving brother Jeremy to manage Krichev, sailed into view with his proudest creation: the six-link state vermicular for Catherine.^*1 Among so many wonderful sights, the young Englishman, high on a platform, barking orders through a trumpet, must have provided another. Potemkin ordered him to moor near his barge. Next morning, he inspected it and ‘was pleased, as can be’, according to Samuel. When the flotilla set off again, Bentham went too. He claimed the Empress noticed his vessels and admired them – but Potemkin was possibly consoling him for missing his moment.

Twenty five miles short of Kaidak, where they were to meet the Emperor, some of the barges ran aground. The flotilla anchored. Potemkin realized they could not go all the way by river. There was a danger that the spectacular would descend into embarrassing chaos: one Empress was grounded; one Emperor was lost; there was a shortage of horses; and the barges containing the food provisions and kitchen grounded on sandbanks. Bentham’s ‘floating worm’ saved the day.

Leaving the Empress behind, Potemkin changed boats and, to Bentham’s delight, pushed ahead in the vermicular to find the Emperor. When he got nearer Kaidak, very close to the Sech of the vanquished Zaporogians, he elected to stay on board rather than in one of his local palaces. Next morning, he went off and found Joseph II. That evening, the Emperor returned the compliment on Bentham’s vermicular. Bentham was puffed up by the praise of two Caesars and one Prince – but they were much more interested in meeting each other than in viewing ingenious English barges.^*2

Potemkin and Joseph decided that the Emperor would ‘surprise’ the Empress. Monarchs do not appreciate surprises, so Serenissimus sent a courier hotfoot to warn Catherine, and Cobenzl sent a courier back to warn Joseph that Potemkin had warned her: such are the absurdities of serving kings. On 7 May, Catherine abandoned the barges and proceeded by carriage towards this achingly unspontaneous ‘surprise’.⁹

Catherine, accompanied by Ligne, Mamonov and Alexandra Branicka, crossed a field and came ‘nose to nose’ (in her words) with Joseph, who was with Cobenzl. The two Majesties, reunited in one carriage, then headed the thirty versts to Kaidak. There Joseph was appalled to discover that the kitchens and cooks were far behind on the grounded barges. Potemkin galloped off to make arrangements and forgot to eat. Now the Tsarina and Kaiser were without any hope of food. ‘There was no one’, Joseph noted, ‘to cook or serve.’ So much for the Emperor who liked to travel without ceremony. The imperial tour threatened to subside into farce.¹⁰

Potemkin was the master of improvisation just as necessity is the father of invention. ‘Prince Potemkin himself became the chef de cuisine,’ Catherine laughingly told Grimm, ‘Prince de Nassau, the kitchen-boy, and Grand General Branicki, the pastry-maker.’ The imbroglio in the kitchen, created by a one-eyed Russian giant, an international lion-slaying paladin and a bewhiskered ‘Polish bravo’, must have been an alarming but comical glimpse of culinary Hades. Potemkin did manage to present a girandole, a revolving firework spinning round Catherine’s initial, surmounted by 4,000 rockets, and yet another exploding volcanic hill. For eighteenth-century royalty, fireworks and ersatz volcanoes must have been as boring as visits to youth centres and factories today. One wonders if it took their mind off Potemkin’s cooking: the three mad cooks had indeed spoiled the broth. Catherine thought ‘the two Majesties had never been so grandly and badly served’ but it was such fun that it was ‘as good a dinner as it was bad’. One person – the most important – did not agree.

‘The dinner was constructed of uneatable dishes,’ the unamused Emperor told Field-Marshal Lacey, but at least ‘the company is quite good’. But the Emperor of Schadenfreude was secretly delighted – ‘the confusion that reigns on this voyage is unbelievable’. He noticed there were ‘more things and people on the boats than the carriages could contain and there aren’t horses to carry them’. Joseph, twisted with German superiority over the blundering Russians, was ‘curious how it will all succeed in the end’, but, he ended with a martyred sigh, ‘This will truly be a time of penitence.’¹¹

Joseph drew Ligne aside when he got the opportunity: ‘It seems to me these people want war. Are they ready? I don’t believe so; in any case, I’m not.’ He had already seen Kherson’s ships and forts. The Russians were involved in an arms race, but he believed the whole show was ‘to throw dust in our eyes. Nothing is solid and all is done in a hurry in the most expensive way.’ Joseph could not quite bring himself to admit that he was impressed. He was right if he thought the magnificence of the tour and Potemkin’s achievements were moving Catherine towards war. ‘We can start it ourselves,’ she told her secretary.

Potemkin wanted to discuss the possibility of war with Joseph himself, so one morning he went to see the Emperor and explained Russian grievances and territorial demands against the Ottomans. Potemkin’s shyness prevented him saying all he wanted, so he asked Ligne to do it for him. ‘I didn’t know he wanted so much,’ muttered Joseph. ‘I thought taking the Crimea would suffice. But what will they do for me if I have war with Prussia one day? We’ll see…’.¹²

Two days later, the two Caesars arrived, in a grand black carriage with Catherine’s crest on the doors, a leather ceiling and red velvet seats, at the desolate foundations of Potemkin’s grandiose Ekaterinoslav.^*3 When the two Majesties laid the foundation stones for the cathedral, Joseph whispered to Ségur, ‘The Empress has laid the first stone, and I the last.’ (He was wrong.) The next day they headed across the steppes, stocked with ‘immense herds of sheep, huge numbers of horses’,¹³ towards Kherson.

On the 12th, they entered Potemkin’s first city in a ceremonial procession through an arch emblazoned with an unmistakable challenge to the Sublime Porte: ‘This is the road to Byzantium.’¹⁴ Joseph, who had already inspected the town, now had a chance to inspect Catherine’s entourage. ‘Prince Potemkin alone, mad for music, has 120 musicians with him,’ observed the Kaiser, yet ‘it took an officer whose hands were horribly burned with gunpowder four days to get help’. As for the Empress’s favourite, Joseph thought Mamonov was ‘barely intelligent…a mere child’. He liked Ségur, thought Fitzherbert was ‘clever’ though clearly bored, and praised the ‘jockey diplomatique’, who possessed of all the wit and joie de vivre the Emperor lacked: ‘Ligne is marvellous here and counts well for my interests.’ But Joseph’s peripatetic inspections and secret jealousy were not lost on the Russians. Catherine rolled her eyes at her secretary: ‘I see and hear everything but I don’t run around like the Emperor does.’ It was no wonder, she thought, he had driven the burghers of Brabant and Flanders to rebel.¹⁵

Ségur and Ligne were dazzled by Potemkin’s achievements there: ‘we could not have prevented our plain astonishment’, wrote Ségur, ‘to see such great new imposing creations’. The fortress was almost finished; there were houses for 24,000; ‘several churches of noble architecture’; there were 600 cannons in the Arsenal; 200 merchant ships in the port and two ships-of-the-line and a frigate, ready to launch. The surprise in Catherine’s entourage was due to the probably almost universal presumption in Petersburg that Potemkin’s achievements were fraudulent. Now Ségur said they all recognized the ‘talent and activity of Prince Potemkin’. Catherine herself, who had evidently been told by Potemkin’s enemies that it was all lies, told Grimm, ‘They can say all they like in St Petersburg – the attentions of Prince Potemkin have transformed this land which, at the peace [1774] was not more than a hut, into a flourishing town.’ The foreigners realized the port’s limitations – ‘they’ve built a lot at Kherson in the short time since its foundation’, wrote Joseph, ‘– and it shows.’

On the 15th, Catherine and Joseph launched the three warships from three seaside canopies decorated with ‘gauze, laces, furbelows, garlands, pearls and flowers’, which Ligne thought looked as if ‘they had just come from the milliners’ shops in the rue St Honoré’. One of the ships-of-the-line with eighty guns was named St Joseph in the Kaiser’s honour, but he thought the ‘wood is so green…the masts so bad’ that they would soon fall to pieces. They did not.¹⁶

Before they departed, there was an ominous moment when Catherine decided she wanted to visit her strategic fortress of Kinburn at the mouth of the Dnieper. But an Ottoman squadron cruised the Liman, so the Empress could not go. The Russians were more aware of Turkish eyes watching them than they let on to foreigners. The Russian Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Yakov Bulgakov, sailed from Constantinople to discuss Turkish policy. Potemkin teased Ségur about the French encouraging the Turks, who had ‘good reason to worry’.¹⁷

After Kherson, the two Caesars headed across the bare steppe towards the Crimea. When Ségur rashly joked about the deserts, Catherine snapped: ‘Why put yourself out Monsieur le Comte. If you fear the boredom of deserts, what prevents you leaving for Paris?’¹⁸

Suddenly the imperial carriage was surrounded by 3,000 Don Cossacks in full regalia, led by their Ataman, in a single row, ready to charge. Among them, there was a squadron of another of Potemkin’s favourite steppe horsemen: the ferocious Kalmyks, ‘resembling Chinese’ thought Nassau. The Cossacks charged and charged again, giving warlike whoops that thrilled Potemkin’s guests. Then they split into two halves and fought a battle. Even Joseph was impressed with their force and endurance: they could do sixty versts a day. ‘There’s no other cavalry in Europe’, said Nassau, ‘who can do it.’

At Kizikerman,^*4 seventy-five versts north-east of Kherson, they came upon a small stone house and an encampment of tents braided with silver, the carpets sprinkled with precious gems. When the Cossack officers were presented to the Empress next morning by Alexandra Branicka, the diplomats were excited by the Ataman’s women: his wife wore a long dress like a priest’s habit, made of ‘a brocade of gold and money’. She wore a sable hat with its base covered in pearls. But Nassau was most taken with the ‘four fingers of pearls’ that dangled erotically over her cheeks, all the way down to her mouth.¹⁹

At dusk, Joseph and Ségur walked out into the flat, apparently endless wasteland, nothing but grass all the way to the horizon. ‘What a peculiar land,’ said the Holy Roman Emperor. ‘And who could have expected to see me with Catherine the Second and the French and English Ambassadors wandering through a Tartar desert? What a page of history!’

‘It’s more like a page from the Arabian Nights,’ replied Ségur.

Then Joseph stopped and rubbed his eyes: ‘I don’t know if I’m awake or whether your remark about the Arabian Nights has made me dream. Look over there!’

A tall tent appeared to be moving towards them, gliding all on its own over the grass. Kaiser and Count peered at this magical sight: it was an encampment of Kalmyks who moved their tents without dismantling them. Thirty Kalmyks came out and surrounded the two men, with no idea that one of them was an emperor. Ségur went inside. Joseph preferred to wait outside. When Ségur finally emerged, Joseph joked that he was relieved the Frenchman had been released from his ‘imprisonment’.²⁰

The Caesars had no sooner passed the Perekop Lines into the Crimea than there was a roar of hooves and a cloud of dust through which galloped 1,200 Tartar cavalry. Potemkin’s ‘Tartar ambuscade’ surrounded the imperial conveyance completely, armed with jewel-encrusted pistols, engraved curved daggers, lances and bows and arrows, as if the travellers had suddenly passed backwards into Europe’s dark past.

—

‘Wouldn’t it cause uproar in Europe, my dear Ségur,’ said Ligne, ‘if the 1200 Tartars surrounding us decided to gallop us to a small port near by and there embark the noble Catherine and the great Roman Emperor and take them to Constantinople for the amusement and satisfaction of Abdul-Hamid?’ Luckily Catherine did not overhear Ligne’s musings. A guard of Tartar murzas, sporting green uniforms richly braided with golden stripes, now formed Catherine’s personal escort. Twelve Tartar boys served as her pages.²¹

The carriages and Tartar horsemen seemed to be going faster and faster. They had turned down the steep hill that led to the ancient capital of the Giray Khans: Bakhchisaray. The horses on Catherine and Joseph’s eight-seater carriage bolted down the hill. It careered off the road, veering dangerously between rocks. The Tartars galloping alongside tried to get control of it. Catherine showed no fear. The Tartars somehow managed to calm the horses, for they stopped, as suddenly as they had bolted, in the Crimean capital.²²

The Khan’s Palace was an eclectic compound of palace, harem and mosque, built by Ukrainian slaves, to the plans of Persian and Italian architects, in Moorish, Arabian, Chinese and Turkish styles, with peculiar Western touches like Gothic chimneys. Its layout was based on the Ottoman palaces of Constantinople, with their gates and courtyards leading inwards into the Khan’s residence and his harem. Its courtyards were silent and serene. Towering walls surrounded secret gardens, soothed by the trickle of elaborate fountains. The hints of Western influence and the thickness of the walls reminded Joseph of a closed Carmelite convent. Beside the khans’ mosque, with its high minarets, stood the haunting, noble graveyard of the Giray dynasty: two octagonal rotundas were built around the mausoleums of khans in a field of intricately carved gravestones. Sweet scents rose from burning candles beneath the windows. Around the Palace stood a Tartar town with its baths and minarets, in a valley wedged between two sheer cliffs of rock.^*5 Potemkin had covered these with burning lanterns so that the travellers really felt they resided in a mythical Arabian palace in the middle of an illuminated amphitheatre.²³

Catherine was staying in the Khan’s own apartments, which included the Girays’ ‘magnificent and eccentric audience chamber’ – big and richly ornamented with the defiant Giray declaration that threw down the gauntlet of supremacy to all the dynasties of the East: ‘The jealous and envious will have to admit that neither at Ishfan nor Damascus nor Istanbul will they find its equal.’ The Habsburg lived in the rooms of a khan’s brother. Potemkin, appropriately, lived in the Harem with Ligne, who was captivated by the magic of the place. So was Catherine. The delicious sweet scents of the gardens – orange trees, roses, jasmine, pomegranates – pervaded every apartment, each of which had a divan round its walls and a fountain in the middle. At Catherine’s dinners, she received the local muftis, whom she treated respectfully. She was inspired by the imams calling the faithful to prayer five times a day outside her window to write a bad, if rhyming, poem to Potemkin: ‘Isn’t this a place for paradise? My praise to you, my friend.’

After dinner, Joseph rode off to inspect the nearby Chufut Kale, home of the eighth-century Karaite Jewish sect that rejected the Talmud, believed only in the original Torah and lived in joyous isolation in abandoned castles on Crimean mountaintops. Back in Bakhchisaray, Nassau, Ségur and Ligne explored the town, like schoolboys on an exeat. Ligne, despite being twenty years older than Ségur, was the most mischievous, hoping to spot a Tartar girl without her face covered. But that alluring prospect would have to wait. Back in the Harem, Potemkin reclined to watch ‘Arab dancers’, who, according to Nassau-Siegen, ‘did disgusting dances’.²⁴ After just two nights in Bakhchisaray, the Caesars set off at 9 a.m. on 22 May, surrounded by pages, Tartars and Don Cossacks, to view Potemkin’s greatest show of all.

—

Tsarina and Kaiser were dining splendidly in a pretty palace built on the Heights of Inkerman on a spit of land that jutted out over the sea. Potemkin’s orchestra played. The hillsides swarmed with jousting and charging Tartar cavalry. Serenissimus gave a sign. The curtains were drawn back, the doors thrown open on to a balcony. As the monarchs peered out, a squadron of Tartar cavalry in mid-skirmish cantered aside to reveal ‘the magnificent sight’ that took their breath away.

The amphitheatre of mountains formed a deep and glittering bay. In the midst of it, a numerous and formidable fleet – at least twenty ships-of-the-line and frigates, thought Joseph – stood at anchor, in battle order, facing the very place where the monarchs dined. At another hidden signal from the Prince, the fleet saluted in unison with all its guns: the very sound, remembered Ségur, seemed to announce that the Russian Empire had arrived in the south and that Catherine’s ‘armies could within 30 hours…plant her flags on the walls of Constantinople’. Nassau said the moment was ‘almost magical’. This was the naval base of Sebastopol founded three years before. Potemkin had built this entire fleet in just two.

As soon as the guns were silent, Catherine was stimulated by this vision of raw Russian power to rise and offer an emotional toast to her ‘best friend’, looking at Joseph without naming him.^*6 One can imagine Joseph cringing at her passion, sneering jealously at the Russian success, itching to inspect it himself. Fitzherbert remained utterly phlegmatic.²⁵ All eyes turned to Potemkin: it was his achievement, a remarkable feat given the sloth of Russian officialdom, the breadth of his responsibilities, the lack of Russian naval expertise, and the distance from the nearest timber in faraway Poland. The Russians present must have thought of Peter the Great’s conquest of the Baltic and the foundation of the Russian fleet there. Which courtier would say it first? ‘Madam,’ said Ségur, ‘by creating Sebastopol, you have finished in the south what Peter the Great began in the north.’ Nassau embraced Potemkin and then asked to kiss the Empress’s hand. She refused. ‘It’s Prince Potemkin to whom I owe everything,’ she said again and again. ‘So you must embrace him.’ Then she turned laughingly to her dear consort. ‘I hope no one is going to say that he’s lazy any more,’ she said, warning against any hint that his achievements were not real. Potemkin kissed her hands and was so moved that his eyes filled with tears.²⁶

Serenissimus led the Tsarina and Emperor down to a landing-stage and on to a rowing-boat, which set off towards Sebastopol and the new fleet. The rest followed in a second sloop. They passed right under the bows of three sixty-six-gun ships-of-the-line, three frigates of fifty guns and ten of forty guns, which saluted the Empress in three more salvoes; sailors cheered her. They disembarked at a stone staircase that led straight up to the Admiralty, where she was staying. Around them was the new city of Sebastopol, ‘the most beautiful port I have seen’, Joseph wrote. At last, he was full of admiration: ‘150 ships were there…ready for all events of the sea.’ The port was defended by three batteries. There were houses, shops, two hospitals, and barracks. Cobenzl estimated there would soon be twelve ships-of-the-line. Even Joseph admitted they were ‘very well built’. It seemed impossible to Ségur that Potemkin had done this in such a short time. Everything was well done where only three years earlier there had been nothing. ‘One must do justice to Prince Potemkin,’ Catherine wrote that day to Grimm in Paris. ‘The Empress’, noted Joseph, ‘is totally ecstatic…Prince Potemkin is at the moment all-powerful and fêted beyond imagination.’

The Caesars and the Prince thought of war. Catherine and Potemkin felt that they could beat the Turks on the spot. The Empress asked Nassau if he thought her ships were equal to the Ottoman ones at Ochakov. Nassau replied that the Russian vessels could put the Turkish fleet in their pocket if they liked. ‘Do you think I dare?’, she smiled at Ligne with chilling flirtatiousness. Russia was ready for war, Potemkin ‘ceaselessly’ told Ligne. If it was not for France, ‘we’d begin immediately’.

‘But your cannons and munitions are so new,’ said Ligne, restraining him on behalf of his Kaiser.

‘Everything is there,’ replied Serenissimus. ‘All I have to do is say to 100,000 men – March!’

Catherine kept her head enough to order Bulgakov to send the Sultan a reassuring note. Neither she nor Potemkin were as warlike as they appeared. Nonetheless, the ‘Pocket Ministers’, the Sublime Porte and the chancelleries of Europe could have been forgiven for believing that Russia was chomping at the bit.²⁷

Catherine retired to talk alone with the overawed Emperor about the timing of war. Potemkin joined them, emphasizing his semi-royal status. Joseph urged caution, citing France and Prussia. Frederick William of Prussia (Frederick the Great had died in 1786) was ‘too mediocre’ to stop them, claimed Catherine. France will make ‘a lot of noise’, agreed Potemkin, but ‘end up taking part of the cake’. He suggested that France swallow Egypt and Candia (Crete) in the coming carve-up. Besides, added the Empress threateningly, ‘I’m strong enough, it suffices that you won’t prevent it.’ Joseph, terrified of being left out, assured them Russia could count on Austria.²⁸ Little did any of them realize that the same debate – war or peace – was simultaneously raging, beside the same sea, one day’s sailing away, in the Divan of the Sublime Porte. The canaille of Constantinople were rioting for war, as thousands of soldiers marched through the streets on their way to the fortresses of the Black Sea and the Balkans.

Joseph invited the diplomats to trot around Sebastopol to discuss the enigma of Potemkin in private. The ability of this exotic eccentric to achieve so much confounded the Emperor. Potemkin was all the more ‘extraordinary for his genius for activity’, he told Nassau. ‘In spite of his bizarreness’, Joseph declared to Ségur, ‘that unique man’ was not only ‘useful but necessary’ to control a barbaric people like the Russians. Joseph yearned to find some fault, so he suggested to Nassau, who had commanded at sea, that the ships were surely not ready to sail. ‘They are ready and entirely armed,’ replied the paladin. Joseph for once had to admit defeat: ‘The truth is that it is necessary to be here to believe what I see.’²⁹

Nassau and Ligne rode off, escorted by Cossacks and Tartars, to inspect Partheniza and Massandra, the estates given to them by the Prince. Partheniza, Ligne’s property, was supposedly the site of the Temple of Diana, where Iphigenia was sacrificed. Ligne was so moved that he wrote a poem to Potemkin. The guests visited the ruins of the ancient city of Khersoneses. Serenissimus headed for the hills for a day taking Nassau up to relax at an estate so fine he called it ‘Tempted’.³⁰

Skip Notes

*1 The whole floating worm was 252 feet long and almost 17 feet wide, propelled by 120 rowers.

*2 ‘There is no doubt’, Samuel told Jeremy Bentham, deluding himself winningly, ‘that the Emperor as well as everybody else praised the invention.’

*3 The carriage is in the Dniepropetrovsk State Historical Museum.

*4 Potemkin preferred its Greek name, Olviopol.

*5 Potemkin had Catherine’s Crimean progress marked by milestones, engraved in Russian and Turkish and placed every ten kilometres. Only three survive: one stands today outside the Khan’s Palace in Bakhchisaray. The Giray graveyard also remains intact, if somewhat overgrown.

*6 The Prince de Ligne saw a universal rule about women here: ‘The flattery made her drunk…the inconvenience of women on thrones.’