Princess Catherine Bagration was one of the most remarkable women of her era in Russia, though not for the reasons one might expect. She was married unexpectedly to a man she did not love, and she soon found a pretext to wander across Europe and enjoy life to the fullest. Her story begins in Naples, where she was born on December 7, 1783, under the name Catherine Skavronskaya. Her father was Count Pavel Skavronsky, a Russian court official who served as a diplomat to the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, and her mother was Catherine von Engelhardt, the niece of Prince Grigory Potemkin, at one time the most powerful man in the Russian Empire after Empress Catherine the Great.
Potemkin had been romantically linked to Catherine’s mother, and it was rumored that the young Catherine may have been his illegitimate daughter. Regardless of her true parentage, she grew up among the Russian nobility and benefited greatly from the connection. The young Catherine returned to Russia shortly after her birth and was raised at the court of Catherine the Great in Saint Petersburg. These were turbulent years for Europe.
The French Revolution of 1789 had plunged much of the continent into war with France, and powers such as Austria, Britain, and Prussia suffered repeated defeats at the hands of the French throughout the 1790s. Russia, for its part, watched these conflicts from a distance. But eventually it had to take a firm stance, and when it did, the consequences reached deep into the lives of Russian nobles like Catherine. In 1800, at the age of sixteen, Catherine married Prince Peter Bagration, a member of the ancient Georgian royal Bagrationi dynasty and a man in his mid-thirties.
The marriage struck many as odd. Bagration was not handsome or charming. He was of medium height, thin, with brown hair and a hooked nose that became a source of mockery in Saint Petersburg. But he was one of the foremost military figures of his time.
He was among the few commanders who had managed to defeat one of Napoleon’s armies on the battlefield, halting the French advance toward Russia in 1807 at the end of the War of the Fourth Coalition. This earned him widespread fame in an age when many Europeans viewed Bonaparte as nearly invincible, and many Russians called him the god of the army. By the time Catherine became his wife, he had already held important military posts in Poland in the 1790s. She was marrying into a prominent political lineage at the Russian court.
Catherine, however, was opposed to the match. It is believed she loved a courtier and general, Count Peter von der Pahlen. But the marriage was arranged by senior officials of the Russian government, and she had little power to refuse. The French-born general Louis Alexandre Andrault de Langeron later remarked on the union: “Bagration married the niece of Prince Potemkin.
This rich and brilliant partner was not suited to him. Bagration was merely a soldier, behaved like a soldier, and was extremely ugly. His wife, by contrast, was white as snow, beautiful as an angel, brilliant, one of the most beautiful women in Saint Petersburg. ” It did not take long for this prediction to prove accurate.
The marriage failed, and Catherine and Peter did not spend the years of their union together. Despite her attempts to save the marriage for several years after their wedding in the autumn of 1800, they drifted further apart. In 1805, she decided to separate from him informally and left Russia to travel across Europe during the height of Napoleon’s dominance over the continent, when French rule stretched from Lisbon in the west to Poland in the east. She spent most of the following decade, and perhaps longer, traveling through Europe with a large retinue of courtiers and servants, visiting many of the continent’s major capitals.
Political conditions made her wanderings easier. Although Napoleon was at war with Russia until 1807, the Treaty of Tilsit established peace between France and Russia, and the two empires agreed to manage continental Europe between them after France had conquered Austria, Prussia, and other states. This agreement, in effect between 1807 and 1812, allowed aristocrats like Catherine to travel relatively freely between cities such as Moscow, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. After the French invasion of the Russian Empire in 1812, her movements became more restricted for a time.
During these years, as she moved between some of the most prominent royal courts of Europe, Catherine gained a reputation for her selective and unconventional personality, refusing many of the social norms of the day. Her husband spent years writing to her and trying to influence figures at the courts she visited to convince her to return to Russia and stop embarrassing him with her openly independent behavior. She refused all of it, repeatedly citing illness and the need for medical treatment available only abroad. Meanwhile, she became known in Vienna, Paris, and other major cities as “La Belle Ange Nue,” the beautiful naked angel, a reference to her tendency to wear revealing dresses and her sensual appeal.
This reputation was accompanied by numerous love affairs during her travels. One of the most controversial was a rumored relationship with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, author of Faust and the most prominent German writer of the age. More significant was her relationship with Prince Klemens von Metternich, who emerged as the Austrian ambassador in Paris and later became the leading Austrian statesman of the first half of the nineteenth century. Catherine bore Metternich their only daughter, Marie Clementine, in the autumn of 1810.
She settled for a time in Vienna, where she turned her home into a political salon that was pro-Russian and opposed to Napoleon. She constantly filled her house with wealthy and famous guests, whom she used to gather a vast amount of political secrets. She wielded this knowledge to the fullest, and Napoleon apparently found her a dangerous political opponent. As Catherine’s debts mounted, her husband grew increasingly resentful and complained to his mother-in-law about her extravagance.
Still, he was a generous man and continued to pay her bills. He did not live much longer. In 1812, Napoleon invaded the Russian Empire in the largest military campaign in modern European history to that point. As one of his country’s leading generals, Bagration played a major part in the defense of Russia, a campaign that ultimately saw the Russians abandon Moscow and burn much of the city to prevent the French from using it as a base as winter set in.
Bagration, however, did not live to see these events. He favored a strategy of confronting the French and their allies in a decisive battle before they reached Moscow. His efforts led to the Russian encounter with the French at the Battle of Borodino on September 7, 1812, near Moscow. In a battle the French won as they continued their advance toward the city, Bagration was severely wounded.
Due to a lack of proper treatment, gangrene set in his leg wound, and he died two and a half weeks later, at the age of forty-seven. Catherine became a widow and was free to remarry, though that would not happen for many years. After his death, his possessions were searched, and among his papers were found a series of letters that implicated Catherine’s reputation in an unexpected way. These letters showed that Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna, the sister of Emperor Alexander I, had been deeply infatuated with him.
Some sources claim they were lovers, and as a result, in 1800, Emperor Paul I forced Bagration to marry Princess Catherine to avoid any future relationship between Bagration and his daughter. Other sources maintain that he ignored the Grand Duchess’s advances because he adored his wife Catherine. Catherine herself became one of the most prominent female figures at one of the most important diplomatic and aristocratic gatherings of the nineteenth century, held in Vienna in 1815. The Congress of Vienna, as it is commonly known, took place at the end of the Napoleonic Wars as Bonaparte’s grip on France and Europe collapsed.
Its purpose was to redraw the map of Europe after a quarter century of French dominance over western and central Europe. But the congress also offered leading members of the continent’s royal families, governments, and aristocracies a chance to renew their connections after years of estrangement. Catherine was a central figure in the social events there, while her former lover Metternich stood out as the most important diplomat in the negotiations. As a link between the Austrian government and the Russian imperial system, she played a significant role in enabling Metternich to negotiate successfully with Russia.
Her activities in Vienna became well known, as she carried on romantic relationships with several figures while in the Austrian capital, foremost among them Tsar Alexander I. This was hardly surprising. The aristocracies and governments of Europe were not only settling the political landscape in Vienna in 1815. They were also celebrating the end of Napoleon’s dominance over Europe after fifteen years of his rule and another decade of revolutionary war with France.
Many individuals arrived in Vienna with their mistresses and entourages, and parties and banquets were held nearly every day. The Duke of Wellington, the great victor over Napoleon in the Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal and at Waterloo, arrived with a notoriously disreputable French-Italian companion, and he was not alone. In this light, Catherine’s activities there in 1815 suited the prevailing mood. In the years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, Catherine settled in a palace on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris.
There she lived a refined life in a city that would become the world’s cultural center for the next century, although her activities were monitored for years by the Russian government, which worried about her possible dealings with the authorities in Paris. She remarried on January 18, 1830, to Sir John Hobart Caradoc, a British diplomat and politician born in 1799, more than fifteen years her junior. As with her first marriage, Catherine was far too rebellious to accept her husband’s control, and she separated from him officially. Catherine lived to an advanced age in France and parts of Western Europe, spending some time in northern Italy.
Perhaps the most notable feature of her later years was the inheritance she received from her great uncle Potemkin, which included highly valuable collections of jewelry and diamonds. Catherine sold much of these possessions to fund her lifestyle in France and Italy, including numerous gems that ended up in the collections of some of the most important royal and aristocratic families of Europe. She died in Venice in the early summer of 1857 at the age of seventy-three and was buried in a cemetery on the island of San Michele, a small island in the main lagoon of the city.