Frederick the Great now attempted to ruin Catherine's plans by egging on the French to stop her. Potemkin dared the old Prussian 'huckster ... to send French troops here - we'd teach them a lesson in the Russian way'. King Gustavus of Sweden, who hoped to emulate his hero Alexander the Great, insisted on visiting Catherine, looking for chances to take advantage of Russian trouble with Turkey to reclaim Sweden's lost Baltic Empire. But his visit was delayed when his horse threw him at a military parade and he broke his arm. 'What a clumsy hero,' Catherine chuckled to Potemkin. Alexander the Great never made such a fool of himself. By the time Gustavus arrived for his visit, the Crimean cake was baked and eaten.
The Comte de Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, sought out the Austrian envoy to Paris to co-ordinate a reaction to Russian plans. Joseph II, pushed to a decision by Catherine and afraid of missing out on Ottoman gains, suddenly rallied and informed the horrified Vergennes of the Russo- Austrian Treaty. Without support from its ally Austria, an exhausted France lacked the will to act. As for Britain, relieved to have escaped its American quicksand, Lord Grantham told Harris that if 'France means to be quiet about the Turks ... why should we meddle? No time to begin a fresh broil.'
Joseph's alliance proved decisive. 'Your prediction has come true, my cheerful clever friend,' the Empress told her consort. 'Appetite comes with eating.' So it looked as if the partners would get away with it.3°
Potemkin was so embroiled in his many activities that he now ceased writing his usual letters to Catherine. She fretted and wrote repeatedly throughout
May and June, snapping, 'While you complain there's no news from me, I thought it's me who had no news from you for a long time.' The two were getting irritated with each other, as they always did during political crises. She wanted to know if the Khan had left the Crimea so that the Tartars could take the oath of allegiance and she could publish her Manifesto on the annexation.
Potemkin, toiling in Kherson, was trying to manage the departure of Shagin, who was now delaying the enterprise despite his 200,000 rouble pension. The Tartars would not co-operate while the Khan was still there. Even though he sent his baggage to Petrovsk, the Khan's officers were discouraging the mullahs from trusting Russia. Pavel Potemkin and Suvorov at last reported from the distant Kuban that the Nogai nomads were ready to take the oath to Catherine. Everything had to be co-ordinated. The Prince was determined that the annexation should be bloodless and at least appear to be the will of the Crimean people. Finally at the end of May, Potemkin wrote that he was leaving Kherson for the Crimea: 'Goodbye Matushka, darling ... The Khan will be off in a trice.'
The Prince arrived in the Crimea and set up camp at Karasubazaar, ready to administer the oath on 28 June, Catherine's accession day. But it dragged on. While working frantically and exhausting himself, the Prince presented a picture of Oriental languor. 'I saw him in the Crimea,' wrote one of his officers, 'lying on a sofa surrounded by fruits and apparently oblivious of all care - yet amid all the unconcern Russia conquered the peninsula.'31
Catherine veered between longing for Potemkin and despairing of him. 'Neither I nor anyone knows where you are.' In early June, she missed him. 'I often deplore that you are there and not here because I feel helpless without you.' A month later, she was angry: 'You can imagine how anxious I must be having no news from you for more than five weeks ... I expected the occupation of the Crimea by mid-May at the latest and now it's mid-July and I know no more about it than the Pope of Rome.'32 Then she began to worry that he was dying of the plague. Presumably Potemkin had decided to wait until he could lay the entire Crimea and Kuban at Catherine's feet.
Across the ancient Crimean Khanate, the murzas and mullahs gathered in their finest robes to take the oath on the Koran to an Orthodox empress over a thousand miles away. Potemkin administered the oath himself, first to the clergy, then to the rest. The most striking sight was in the Kuban far to the east. On the fixed day, 6,000 Tartar tents of the Nogai Horde were pitched out on the Eysk steppe. Thousands of tough little Mongol horses cantered around the encampments. Russian soldiers were casually vigilant. Shagin's abdication was read to the Nogai, who then took the oath to the Empress in front of Suvorov. They returned to their Hordes, who also recited the oath. Then the feasting began: 100 cattle, 800 rams were cooked and eaten. The Nogai drank vodka - because wine was banned by the Koran. After many toasts and shouts of hurrah, the Cossacks and Nogai competed in horse races.
Then the Nogai, having lost their freedom 600 years after Genghis Khan despatched his Hordes westwards, wandered away.33
On 10 July, the Prince broke his silence to the Empress: 'In three days, I will congratulate you with the Crimea. All the notables have already sworn, now all the rest will follow.' On 20/31 July, Catherine received Potemkin's report that the Crimean Tartars and the two Nogai Hordes had taken the oath. She was so relieved and worn out by the anticipation that she replied coolly, but, as it sank in and she received Potemkin's explanation, she appreciated his achievement. 'What a lot of glorious deeds have been accomplished in a short time.' His letters were immediately filled with his ideas for towns, ports and ships, laced with Classical references to his new territories. His ebullience was always infectious. When he wrote that the cowardly rumours about the plague were spread by poltroons in 'Spa and Paris', Catherine laughed at last.34
A few days later, Serenissimus pulled another golden rabbit out of the hat: in the Caucasus, the Kingdom of Georgia accepted Russian protection. The Caucasus, the isthmus between the Black and Caspian Seas, was a moun- taineous patchwork of kingdoms and principalities, dominated by the empires around them - Russia, Turkey and Persia. In the north-west, Potemkin had just annexed the Kuban, ruled by the Crimeans. In the foothills, Russian generals struggled to control the wild Moslem mountaineers in Chechnya and Daghestan. South of the mountains, the Persian and Turkish empires divided the region among themselves. There, the two Orthodox Georgian kingdoms, Kartli-Kacheti and Imeretia, were almost mythical or Biblical in their romantic ferocity, so it was entirely appropriate that their tsars were named respectively Hercules and Solomon.
Hercules (Heraclius, or Erakle in Georgian), a remarkable empire-builder, seemed to be the last of the medieval knights alive and well in the century of Voltaire. The name suited the man. Scion of the Bagratid dynasty that provided Georgian monarchs for almost a thousand years, he was a warrior-king who owed his throne to his fighting for the Shah of Persia in India and had managed to create a mini-empire in the backyards of Persia and Turkey. Already an old man, 'of middle size, with a long face, large eyes and small beard, he had spent his youth', a traveller remarked, 'at the Court of Nadir Shah where he contracted a fondness for Persian customs ...'. Hercules was 'renowned for his courage and military skill. When on horseback he always has a pair of loaded pistols at his girdle and, if the enemy is near, a musket flying over a shoulder ...'. The other Georgian Tsar, Solomon of Imeretia, was just as striking for, repeatedly overthrown and then restored, he had 'lived like a wild man for sixteen years in caverns and holes and frequently, by his personal courage, escaped assassination'. He too lived with a musket over his shoulder.35
When the Russians went to war in 1768, Catherine had helped Hercules and Solomon but abandoned them after 1774 to the vengeance of Shah and Sultan. Potemkin was emboldened by his Austrian alliance and decided to increase the pressure on the Ottomans by talking to the Georgians. He corresponded with Hercules, inquiring if he was now at peace with Solomon: he wanted both kingdoms for Russia.