The diplomats had already heard Potemkin talking about real plans in the south. Even when discussing English fleets, Harris observed that Potemkin's 'mind is continually occupied with the idea of raising an Empire in the East' and it was he 'alone who heated and animated the Empress for this project'.41 Catherine was indeed infected with Potemkin's exciting visions. When she talked to Harris, she 'discoursed a long while ... on the ancient Greeks, of their alacrity and superiority ... and the same character being extant in the modern ones'.42 Corberon, who had heard it too, did not exaggerate when he wrote that 'romantic ideas here are adopted with a fury'.43 But the diplomats did not understand the significance of Potemkin's 'romantic ideas' - his 'Greek Project' - that so excited Catherine. Serenissimus' mind was not on London, Paris, Berlin or Philadelphia. It was on Tsargrad, the city of emperors - Constantinople. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire was to be the dominating theme of the rest of his life and the foundation of his greatness.
PART FIVE
The Colossus
1777-1783
BYZANTIUM
I was asked to a fete which Prince Potemkin gave in his orangery ... Before the door was a little temple consecrated to Friendship which contained a bust of the Empress ... Where the Empress supped was furnished in Peking, beautifully painted to resemble a tent... it only held five or six ... Another little room was furnished with a sofa for two, embroidered and stuffed by the Empress herself.
Chevalier de Corberon, 20 March 1779
When the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, took Constantinople in 1453, he rode through the streets directly to the Emperor Justinian's remarkable Church of Hagia Sophia. Before this massive tribute to Christianity, he sprinkled earth on his head to symbolize his humility before God and then entered. Inside, his sharp eyes spotted a Turkish soldier looting marble. The Sultan demanded an explanation. 'For the sake of the Faith,' replied the soldier. Mehmed slew him with his sword: 'For you the treasures and the prisoners are enough,' he decreed. 'The buildings of the city fall to me.' The Ottomans had not conquered Byzantium to lose the greatness of Constantine.
Mehmed was now able to add Kaiser-i-Rum - Caesar of Rome - to his titles of Turkish Khan, Arabic Sultan and Persian Padi-shah. To Westerners, he was not only the Grand Seigneur or the Great Turk - henceforth he was often called Emperor. From that day on, the Ottoman House embraced the prestige of Byzantium. 'No one doubts that you are the Emperor of the Romans,' George Trapezountios, the Cretan historian, told Mehmed the Conqueror in 1466. 'Whoever is legally master of the capital of the Empire is the Emperor and Constantinople is the capital of the Roman Empire ... And he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also Emperor of the whole earth.'1 It was to this prize that Potemkin and Catherine now turned their attention.
The Ottoman Empire stretched from Baghdad to Belgrade and from the Crimea to Cairo and included much of south-eastern Europe - Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia. It boasted the cream of Islam's Holy Cities from Damascus and Jerusalem to the Holy Places themselves, Mecca and Medina. The Black Sea was for centuries its 'pure and immaculate virgin', the Sultan's private lake, while even the Mediterranean shores were still dominated by his ports, from Cyprus all the way to Algiers and Tunis. So it was indeed an international empire. But it was wrongly called a Turkish one. Usually the only Turkish leader in its carefully calibrated hierarchy was the Sultan himself. Ironically, the so-called Turkish Empire was a self-consciously multinational state that was built by the renegade Orthodox Slavs of the Balkans who filled the top echelons of Court, bureaucracy and the Janissaries, the Praetorian Guards of Istanbul.
There was little concept of class: while the Western knights were tying themselves in knots of noble genealogy, the Ottoman Empire was a meritocracy which was ruled in the Sultan's name by the sons of Albanian peasants. All that mattered was that everyone, even the grand viziers themselves, were slaves of the Sultan, who was the state. Until the mid-sixteenth century, the sultans were a talented succession of ruthless, energetic leaders. But they were to be victims of their own Greek Project, for gradually the dirty business of ruling was conducted by their chief minister, the grand vizier, while they were sanctified by the suffocatingly elaborate ritual of the Byzantine emperors. Indeed when the French soldier Baron de Tott witnessed the coronation of Mustafa III in 1755, he recalled how the Sultan, surrounded by Roman plumage and even fasces, was literally dwarfed by the magnificence of his own importance. Based on the tenth-century order of ceremonies compiled by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the blessing and curse of the Byzantines was to turn the Ottoman sultans from dynamic conquerors astride steeds at the head of armies to limp-wristed fops astride odalisques at the head of phalanxes of eunuchs. This was not all the fault of the Greek tradition.
At first there was no law of succession, which often meant accessions were celebrated with royal massacres. The new emperor would cull his brothers - sometimes as many as nineteen of them - by strangulation with a bowstring, a polite despatch that shed no imperial blood. Finally a sense of royal ecology stopped this foolish waste. Instead Ottoman princes were kept, like luxurious prisoners in the Cage, half embalmed by pleasure, half educated by neglect, half dead from fear of the bowstring. When they emerged into the light, like bleary-eyed startled animals, new sultans were terrified, until reassured by the corpses of their predecessors.
The whole state became a rigidly stratified hierarchy with the grand vizier, often of Slavic origin, at the top, with a household of 2,000 and a guard of 500 Albanians. Each top official, each pasha (literally 'the Sultan's foot'), displayed his rank in terms of horse's tails, relic of House of Othman's nomadic origins. The grand vizier displayed five; lesser pashas between one and three. Viziers wore green slippers and turbans, chamberlains red, mullahs blue. The heads and feet of the Ottomans marked their rank as clearly as pips on an epaulette. Officials wore green, palace courtiers red. All the nationalities of the Empire wore the correct slippers: Greeks in black, Armenians in violet,
Jews in blue. As for hats, the powers of the Empire were celebrated atop heads in a fiesta of bonnets crested with furs and feathers.
The sultan dwelt in a palace built on the Seraglio Point, appropriately on the Byzantine Acropolis. In Turkish style, the palace was a progression of increasingly rarefied courtyards, leading into the imperial Seraglio through a series of gateways. These gates, where Turkic justice was traditionally dispensed, thus became the visible symbols of Ottoman government. That is why it was known in the West as the Sublime Porte.
The lusts of the emperors were encouraged in order to deliver a rich reservoir of male heirs. Thus if the sultans looked for quality, the logic of the Harem demanded quantity. Incidentally, the eunuchs who ran the Court were apparently capable of sexual congress, merely being bereft of the means to procreate - so that they too had the run of the Harem. Just as the Palace School, which trained imperial pages who rose to run the Empire, was filled with Albanians and Serbs, so the Harem, which produced imperial heirs to rule the Empire, was filled with blonde-haired and blue-eyed Slav girls from the slave-markets of the Crimea. Until the late seventeenth century, the lingua franca of the court was, bizarrely, Serbo-Croat.
The Ottoman Sultanate was dying by strangulation - not by bowstring, but by tradition. By Potemkin's era, the sultans were constricted not just by Byzantinism but by a religious fundamentalism imposed by the Islamic court, the ulema, and by political conservatism enforced by the vested interests of court and military.