Joseph's reply was equally sweeping: he agreed to the Project in principle. In return he wanted the fortress of Khotin, part of Wallachia, and Belgrade. Venice would cede Istria and Dalmatia to him and get Morea, Cyprus and Crete in return. All this, he added, was impossible without French help - could France have Egypt? Only war and negotiation could decide the details - but he did not reject it.27
Did Potemkin really believe that there would be a reborn Byzantine Empire ruled by Constantine, with himself as king of Dacia? The idea thrilled him, but he was always the master of the possible. The Dacian idea was realized in the creation of Rumania in the mid-nineteenth century, and Potemkin certainly planned to make that real. But he did not lose his head about it.28 During 1785 he discussed the Turks with the French Ambassador Segur and claimed that he could take Istanbul, but insisted that the new Byzantium was just a 'chimera'. It was all 'nonsense', he said. 'It's nothing.' But then he mischievously suggested that three or four Powers could drive the Turks into Asia and deliver Egypt, the Archipelago, Greece, all Europe from the Ottoman yoke. Many years later Potemkin asked his reader, who was declaiming Plutarch, if he could go to Constantinople. The reader tactfully replied it was quite possible. 'That is enough,' exclaimed Potemkin, 'if anyone should tell me I could not go thither, I would shoot myself in the head.'29 He was always flexible - it was he who suggested in September 1788 that Constantine could be made king of Sweden, a long way from Tsargrad.30 So he wished it to serve its strategic purpose and to be as real as he could make it.
Catherine the Great herself settles any argument about Potemkin's contribution to the Austrian alliance and the Greek Project. 'The system with Vienna's court', she wrote later, 'is your achievement.'31
On 7 August 1782, the Empress and Serenissimus attended the unveiling of Falconet's mammoth statue of Peter the Great - the Bronze Horseman - that still stands in Senate Square in Petersburg. It was a statement in stone of their ambitions to emulate the achievements of Peter, who had succeeded so brilliantly in the Baltic but failed in the south.
The prince ordered his nephew, Major-General Samoilov, to begin preparatory action to restore order in the Crimea, but he decided to go south himself and conduct the main part. This trip marks the end of the domestic era of Potemkin and Catherine's partnership and the beginning of his time of colossal achievement. From now on, Catherine understood that they were to be apart as much as they were together. This was his path to greatness and contentment, although, as she sweetly admitted to him while he was far away, 'My dear master, I dislike it so much when you are not here by my side.' On 1 September 1782, the Prince left St Petersburg to subdue the Crimea.32
POTEMKIN'S PARADISE: THE CRIMEA
I now steal captives from the Persians Or at the Turks direct my arrows
Gavrili Derzhavin, 'Ode to Princess Felitsa'
The Crimea was what Potemkin called 'the wart' on the end of Catherine's nose - but it was to become his own Russian 'paradise'. The peninsula itself was not only dazzlingly and lushly beautiful but it was also a cosmopolitan gem, an ancient entrepot that controlled the Black Sea. The Ancient Greeks, Goths, Huns, Byzantines, Khazars, Karaim Jews, Georgians, Armenians, Genoese and Tartars, who came later, were all just visitors there, trading and dealing, in a peninsula that seemed to belong to no one race. For a Classicist like the Prince, there were the ruins of Khersoneses and the' mythical temple of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon. But he was most interested in the Crimea's strategic importance and its history as the Mongol stronghold that had terrorized Russia for three centuries.
The Tartar Khanate of the Crimea, known in the West as Crim Tartary, was a state that seemed archaic even in 1782 - the last Mongol outpost. Crimea's Giray dynasty were the second family of the Ottoman Empire because they were descended from Genghis Khan himself, which was much more distinguished a descent than the House of Othman. If Rome and Byzantium represented two of the three international traditions of imperial legitimacy, the blood of Genghis Khan was the third. The family owned estates in Anatolia, where the Ottomans conveniently imprisoned restless potential successors in a sort of Giray Cage. If ever the Ottomans became extinct, it was understood that the Genghizid Girays would succeed them. They were always more allies than subjects.
The Khanate had been founded in 1441 when Haci Giray broke away from the Golden Horde and made himself khan of the Crimea and the shores of the Black Sea. His successor Mengli Giray acknowledged the ultimate suzerainty of the Ottoman Emperor, and from then on the two states existed in a tense, respectful alliance. The Tartars guarded the Black Sea, defended Turkey's northern borders and provided a stream of blonde Slavic slaves to sell to the fleshpots and rowing-galleys of Constantinople. Between 1601 and 165 5, it has been estimated, they kidnapped over 150,000 slaves. Their armies of 50,000-100,000 horsemen had the run of the eastern steppes, raiding into Muscovy whenever they needed more slaves to fill their markets. They bore six-foot-long square-shaped bows, with arrows two feet long; muskets and round, bejewelled shields, with pistols studded with lapis and emerald. Until that century, the Genghizid khans received tribute from the tsars of Russia and kings of Poland. The Girays believed their grandeur was second to none. 'His imperial star rose above the glorious horizon,' one khan wrote in an inscription in the Bakhchisaray Palace, where the Khans resided in their Seraglio like miniature Great Turks, guarded by 2,100 Sekbans, Janissaries from Constantinople. 'His beautiful Crimean throne gave brilliant illumination to the whole world.'
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