She had the strongest desire to help us; she had withheld it from reluctance to plunging her empire into fresh troubles and probably ending her reign in a state of war.… She had the highest opinion of our national strength and spirit, and did not doubt that we should overmatch the French and Spaniards. Her Imperial Majesty then discoursed on the American war, lamented at our not having been able to stop it at the beginning, and hinted at the possibility of restoring peace by our renouncing our struggle with our colonies. I asked her, if they belonged to her, and a foreign power was to propose peace on such terms, whether she would accept it. “I would rather lose my head,” she said with great vehemence.
Harris realized that Catherine was conflicted: she admired England, but she was not sorry to see the British government distracted by its new war with France. An over-powerful England was not in the interests of the Russian empire; the empress feared that England might alter its policy and oppose Russia’s continued expansion along the Black Sea. Harris did not report this to London, but he also realized that if Catherine ever led Russia into war again, it would not be against France. It would be against the Turks.
Emperor Joseph II of Austria was nurturing his own ambitions regarding the Turks. Eager to repair the damage and humiliation inflicted on his country and his mother by Frederick II’s seizure of Silesia, his goal was the acquisition of Turkish territories in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean. In an alliance of Austria and Russia, he saw the means of achieving this. In pursuit of this goal, the emperor asked to pay a personal visit to Catherine at Mogilev, a Russian town near the Austrian frontier. Catherine, understanding that in any future war with Turkey, Austria would be a far more useful ally than Prussia, instructed Potemkin to make the arrangements.
In May 1789, the two monarchs met in Mogilev. Catherine was pleased to be receiving this particular guest. Although he was traveling incognito as Count Falkenstein, Joseph was the co-ruler, with his mother, of the possessions of the ancient house of Hapsburg, and he was also the Holy Roman Emperor. His effort to come to Russia was unprecedented among foreign sovereigns; none had ever visited in Russia’s history. At Catherine’s request, the emperor accompanied her from Mogilev back to St. Petersburg, where he remained for three weeks, spending five days at Tsarskoe Selo. Because he was traveling incognito with no retinue of courtiers and attendants, and because he preferred to sleep at ordinary inns, a palace annex was transformed into an inn and servants were costumed accordingly. Catherine’s English-Hanoverian gardener, John Busch, whose first language was German, assumed the role of innkeeper. By the time Joseph left, a regular correspondence and the foundations of a military alliance had been agreed to between the emperor and the empress. The subject of their discussions was the dismemberment and partition of the European territories of the Ottoman Empire. Catherine’s vision was of the restoration of a Greek empire under her grandson Constantine, with Constantinople as its capital. Joseph coveted the Ottoman provinces in the Balkans, along with as much as possible in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean.
Joseph’s visit to Mogilev and St. Petersburg occurred in May and June 1780. In November of that year, his mother, Empress Maria Theresa, died at sixty-three, and thirty-nine-year-old Joseph became the sole ruler of Austria and the Hapsburg empire. In May 1781, Joseph signed a treaty with Catherine pledging Austria’s aid to Russia in the event of war with Turkey. The signing of this treaty marked the end of Nikita Panin’s influence on Russian foreign policy. Always an advocate of alliance with Prussia against Austria, he declared that “he could not soil his hand” by putting his name on such a treaty, and he asked permission to retire to the country. In September 1781, the aging counselor who, nineteen years before, had helped put Catherine on the throne, was dismissed.
Potemkin stepped forward in Panin’s place. The British ambassador, James Harris, still struggling to arrange a Russian alliance with England, persuaded King George III to write a warm personal letter to Catherine, but even this failed to persuade her. When Harris pressed him, Potemkin explained, “You have chosen an unlucky moment. The favorite [Lanskoy] lies dangerously ill; the cause of his illness and the uncertainty of recovery have so entirely unhinged the empress that she is incapable of employing her thoughts on any subject, and all ideas of ambition, of glory, of dignity, are absorbed in this one passion. Exhausted, she avoids everything involving activity or exertion.”
