Danubia A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder

Author:Simon Winder [Winder, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Carving up the world

Being a monarch was by any conventional measure not all fun. But if one had to pinpoint the absolute summit of the fun monarchical experience, then it would undoubtedly be found on a bend of the River Dniepr in 1787. It was here that Catherine the Great embarked on her magnificent voyage to the south, eager to inspect her newly acquired territory of Crimea.

Catherine is one of that elite handful of rulers who really loved her role. A German from the micro-state of Anhalt-Zerbst, she came to Russia to marry the heir to the throne, Peter, also a German, from no less micro Holstein-Gottorp, but more importantly a grandson of Peter the Great. It was perhaps as an outsider that she came to so relish becoming a Russian, revelling in the strangeness and grandeur, joining the Orthodox Church, changing her name from Sophie to Catherine and having her husband murdered. Catherine always seems to be on some huge golden juggernaut, hauled along by representatives of the different subject nationalities, while girls throw petals over the entire ensemble and specially trained doves fly in formation overhead, holding in their beaks silk banners embroidered with positive statements in Latin. In 1787 she was living her allegorical fantasy to the full. Heaped in furs and jewels, she watched cheering crowds line the banks of the river, enormous firework displays go off and thousands of Cossacks carry out mock battles, all under the direction of her former lover Prince Potemkin. The River Dniepr, now associated more with rusting hydroelectric plants, can never have looked more glamorous. As Catherine and her guests enjoyed themselves designing triumphal arches, admiring Potemkin’s chirpy, all-girl ‘Amazon’ light cavalry troupe and chatting about which neighbouring state should be attacked next, the only fly in the ointment was a dour Habsburg visitor.

Joseph II, simply attired and travelling incognito, was just the sort of Mr Boring whom the tittering gang on the barge could not stand. Grumbling snobbishly about ‘this Catherinized Princess of Zerbst’ he did everything he could to lower the temperature. But even with Joseph on board, measuring everything, asking statistical questions and trying to find fault, it must still have been perhaps the world’s best outing. The idea of the fake ‘Potemkin villages’ put up to trick the Tsaritsa, which have been part of everyone’s consciousness ever since, was itself in fact a spiteful fabrication. Potemkin had built real palaces, real farms and real cities, albeit sometimes still in rather embryo form. What astounded Joseph as they reached the Crimea was that here was a huge new territory only just snatched from the Ottomans and already teeming with energy and glamour in a way quite beyond Habsburg power. Sebastopol had only been founded four years before and yet already had fortifications and a battle fleet. When they weren’t trying out tasty new drinks or clowning around in the former Khan of Crimea’s palace – where Joseph seems to have bought himself a Circassian slave girl, a rare but almost welcome lapse into mere hypocrisy – there was serious business to be discussed.

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