By 1788, the Prince owed Sutherland 500,000 roubles. Three weeks later, Sutherland swore that things had reached such a 'critical and worrying point' as to force him to 'come importuning to my first benefactor ... to obtain ... the sum without which I would not know how to honour my affairs'. It was
Potemkin himself who scrawled in French on the letter: Tell him he'll receive 200,000 roubles.'
Serenissimus was far from miserly - on the contrary, he was wildly generous. Saving was foreign to his nature. Only his death gave a snapshot of his fortune and even then it hardly enlightens us. Like the Empress herself, he was part of the state, and the Empire was his fortune.44
A country's enemies multiply in proportion to its successes. Russia's enemies, aroused by Potemkin's dangerous victories, did all they could to encourage the Ottomans to keep fighting. Meanwhile Russia's military activity became paralysed by the prospect of war against Prussia, Poland and England as well as Turkey and Sweden. So Potemkin spent the winter of 1789 and much of the following year trying to negotiate with the Sublime Porte. Initially, the Turks seemed sincere in their wish to make peace. Sultan Selim freed the Russian Ambassador from the Seven Towers and appointed 'the famous Algerian knight,'45 ex-Capitan-Pasha Ghazi Hassan-Pasha, as grand vizier, to talk peace.
However, Prussian diplomacy aimed to undermine Russia and fulfil the so-called Hertzberg Plan, named after the Prussian Chancellor, which was designed to secure the Polish towns of Thorn and Danzig for Prussia in return for Austria ceding Galicia to Poland and Russia returning the Danubian Principalities to Turkey. This required a coalition against Russia, so the Sultan was offered an alliance to secure the return of the Crimea. Sweden was offered Livonia with Riga. Russia's ally Austria was threatened with Prussian invasion. Russia itself was forced to withdraw from Poland, leaving the field to Prussia, which found itself in the ironic situation of having the greatest influence in a country it wanted to carve up. It was only now, when Poland was offered constitutional reform and an alliance in return for the cession of Thorn and Danzig, that the Poles realized that they had been deceived: Prussia was not just as carnivorous as Russia but more so. Yet they were forced to accept the Prussian advances and turned on the Russians. England backed Prussia in demanding that Russia and Austria make peace with the Porte on the basis of the status quo ante bellum. There was no question of any Russian military operations: Potemkin had to move a corps to cover a possible attack by Poland and Prussia. By 24 December 1789, Catherine was telling her secretary: 'Now we are in a crisis: either peace or a triple war with Prussia.'46
Potemkin's agent for the peace negotiations was a truly Levantine operator and diplomatic entrepreneur named Ivan Stepanovich Barozzi, a Greek quadruple agent for Russia, Turkey, Austria and Prussia simultaneously. After meanderingly mysterious Potemkinian conversations in Jassy, where he was shocked by the Prince's lecherous behaviour, Barozzi headed for the Vizier's headquarters, Shumla with Potemkin's terms.47 The Dniester would be the 438 the apogee
new border. Akkerman and Bender would be razed. The Principalities would be 'independent'.[100]
Barozzi reached Shumla on 26 December 1789. The Prince's accounts show the way such discussions were lubricated with a shower of baksheesh. At least sixteen rings, gold clocks, chains, snuff-boxes, were designated for different Turkish officials, specified as 'Ring with blue ruby and diamond for first secretary of Turkish ambassador Ovni Esfiru', while Barozzi himself got a 'ring with a big emerald' either to present or to wear for his discussions with the Vizier.48 Potemkin even offered to build a mosque in Moscow. However charming the brilliants, Potemkin's terms did not please the 'Algerine renegado'. Serenissimus, unimpressed with the counter-proposals, gave his new terms on 27 February 1790. 'My propositions are short,' he said, 'there is no need for a great deal of talk.' There would be no armistice - 'more the wish to gain time than make peace - from what I know of Turkish artifice'. Then came a Potemkinian phrase: 'The Turks like to take a chariot to chase a hare.' The Prince preferred to be defeated rather than tricked.49
Potemkin was right not to commit himself completely to the Barozzi talks. The Prince knew from the Austrians and his Istanbul spies that Sultan Selim regarded the Grand Vizier's peace talks as a secondary, parallel policy to his negotiations with the Prussian envoy, Dietz, in Constantinople. If the Turks could get help from Prussia and Poland, they could go on fighting. By the time Potemkin replied, the Sultan had already signed an aggressive alliance with Prussia on 20 January 1790 which committed Frederick William to help reconquer the Crimea and go to war against Catherine.
As this noose tightened around Russia, 'the health of the Emperor is the severest of all the storms which menace the political sky', Potemkin told Kaunitz that January. Joseph II was stricken, physically with tuberculosis, and politically with revolts across his Empire from Hungary to the Netherlands. He seemed to be recovering when he had to undergo an agonizing operation on an anal abcess that sapped his strength. The death scene was tragic. 'Has anyone wept over me?', he asked. He was told that Ligne was in tears. 'I did not think I was deserving of such affection,' replied the Emperor. He suggested his own epitaph: 'Here lies a prince whose intentions were pure but who had the misfortune to see all his plans collapse.' Catherine was 'sorry for my ally', who was 'dying, hated by everybody.'50 When Joseph died on 9/20 February 1790, Kaunitz supposedly muttered: 'That was very good of him.'51
It may have been good for the Habsburg Monarchy but it was another blow to Russia. On 18/29 March, Prussia tightened its ring once again and signed a military alliance with Poland. Frederick William moved 40,000 men towards Livonia in the north and another 40,000 in Silesia, mustering a 100,ooo-man reserve. The new Habsburg monarch, Leopold, King of Hungary (until he was elected emperor), was alarmed and immediately wrote to Potemkin: 'You have lost a friend in my brother His Majesty the Emperor, you have found another in me who honours more than anyone your genius and nobility.' Serenissimus and Leopold co-ordinated their defence of Galicia against the Poles - but the King of Hungary's true concern was to prevent the Prussian invasion 'in concert with Poland' and save the Habsburg Monarchy. He begged Potemkin to make a peace that had already slipped away.52
In the midst of these upheavals, the Prince learned that an admirable Englishman was dying of a fever near Kherson. John Howard was a selfless prison-reformer, who had dared to expose the misery of jails and hospitals on his travels across the world, not least in Potemkin's Viceroyalty. Serenissimus sent his doctor to tend him, but Howard died. The Duke of Leeds, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote to say that 'the British nation will never forget' such sensibilite and Potemkin replied, 'Mr Howard had every right to my attentions. He was the famous friend of Humanity and a British citizen and these, Monsieur le Due, are claims enough to acquire my esteem.' Howard became a Russian, and Soviet, hero.53