The sex life of Catherine II of Russia, known to history as Catherine the Great, was a source of endless fascination for her contemporaries. As ruler of the Russian colossus, Catherine was one of the most powerful people of late-eighteenth century Europe and, in a world dominated by men, Catherine’s personal life was seen as both politically consequential and socially titillating. Indeed, the passage of just over two centuries since her death has done little to diminish our sordid appetite for tidbits regarding her most intimate affairs.

Despite contemporary beliefs to the contrary, in most cases Catherine’s relationships with various men, known in courtly parlance as “favorites”, carried little political significance. Over the 44 years of her reign, the number of her documented lovers did not exceed 12 and only one of those men ever achieved any real and lasting political power. While the dashing Gregory Orlov was instrumental in the coup that brought her to power, and the handsome Plato Zubov (almost 40 years her junior) was crucial to her emotional health in the final years of her reign, it was the mercurial personality and prodigious talents of Gregory Potemkin that won her heart most passionately.

Tall, handsome, brown-haired and strong, Potemkin was the son of a minor noble family known for loyal service to the Crown. A military officer in the Horse Guards during the coup that brought Catherine to power in 1762, he was not able to rise to the position of royal favorite until 1774. From then, until his death in 1791, Potemkin was the most powerful man in Russia and one of the greatest statesmen in the history of Imperial Russia.

Stressed by the demands of absolute power, Catherine appreciated Potemkin’s gifts as an adviser, lover and friend and fed off his well-articulated devotion to her. A great volume of their personal correspondence has survived and it paints the picture of a relationship that was tempestuous, but deeply affectionate. Money, palaces, titles, honors and offices were all his for the taking as he assumed a very active role in the policy of her realm. (Some historians even speculate that the couple was secretly married.) Though their physical relationship ended perhaps two years or so into the affair, Potemkin, alone among her favorites, maintained all of his positions until his

Colonial History Store 1777 Russian Copper 5 Kopec Coins Captain Peter Pirate Coat Captain Peter Pirate Vest Leather Tricorn Colonial Pirate Hat

death. Even when his attention as a lover was no longer needed, his skill for statecraft proved irreplaceable. When Catherine heard of Potemkin’s death she was tear-stricken for days. More than any of the men in her life, Potemkin was the intellectual and emotional equal of Catherine in a way that none could ever replicate. Her greatest confidant and collaborator was gone and she would never again find his equal.

Tags: 1762, 1774, 1777 Russian Copper 5 Kopec Coins, 1791, Captain Peter Pirate Coat, Captain Peter Pirate Vest, Catherine II of Russia, Catherine the Great, colonial history store, European History, Gregory Orlov, Gregory Potemkin, Leather Tricorn Colonial Pirate Hat, Love affairs of Catherine the Great, Plato Zubov, Russia 1700s, Russia 18th Century, Russian History, Russian Horse Guards

Though the modern archaeological record dates Glastonbury Abbey to the early seventh century, that has not stopped it from holding a place in many a set of much older mythologies.  To some it is the resting place of the Holy Grail, shepherded to England by Joseph of Arimathia following the Crucifixion.  To others it is a conduit of Earth’s natural power and lynchpin of the supposed Ley Line network crisscrossing the English countryside.   But to most, the now ruined abbey will forever be known as the final resting place of Albion’s “Once and Future King,” the legendary Arthur Pendragon.

Located in the west of England, the earliest recorded account, dating from 1090 AD, attribute the abbey at Glastonbury to St. David, patron saint of Wales.  However, half a century later, early medieval historian and Glastonbury monk, William of Malmesbury, erroneously dated its foundations to the era immediately following Christ’s death – a thread later picked up on by French Romantics in subsequent centuries and one that would indelibly link England’s own inborn Arthurian tropes with the ever-evolving Grail lore of the continent.

From there, the myth of Arthur took on a life of its own.  According to legend, Arthur was interred at a mystical island known as Avalon, following his death at the Battle of Camlann.  This detail, in particular, led dozens of legend trippers to identify Glastonbury and Avalon as one and the same; a nearby river is to this day still known as the River Cam and, in its earliest incarnation, the Abbey had been surrounded by a vast walled-in moat and/or bog, resulting in the eerie appearance of an inland island rising out the countryside.

Whether that anecdotal evidence supported such claims or not, in the era following Malmesbury’s death, the resident monks of Glastonbury decided to capitalize on the Arthurian myth’s prominent place in the English psyche.  In 1190, they claimed to have discovered the mortal remains of Arthur and his ill-fated queen, Guinevere; the bodies were supposedly identified by means a leaden cross baring the convenient inscription of “Here lies renowned King Arthur in the island of Avalon.”   Though the bodies and cross – if they ever existed to begin with – have not been located since, history does record that they were reburied in the floor beneath Glastonbury’s High Altar in 1278 before a cadre of true believers, including King Edward I.  As expected, the Abbey’s tourism trade boomed thereafter.

Later monarchs, however, did not behold the abbey at Glastonbury with the sort same reverence as their predecessors.  Following Henry VIII’s schism with the Church in 1536, he dissolved all of England’s Catholic churches and monasteries; Glastonbury’s abbot was subsequently drawn and quartered, while the abbey itself was dismantled brick by brick and its stone used to expand the homes of local loyalist nobles.

Though only the bases of the abbey’s once towering walls and columns remain atop the gigantic conical mound that is Glastonbury Tor today, Glastonbury itself is still a destination for travelers of all stripes; a site several miles away was chosen to host the United Kingdom’s largest annual concert, the Glastonbury Festival, due to the spiritual, mythical and mystical connotations the Abbey still holds for the British populace – much the same as it did for their fathers, and fathers before them, over the past thousand years.

Medieval Store King Arthur Pewter Sculpture Historical Excalibur Sword Deluxe Excalibur Sword with scabbard Guenevere Pewter Sculpture

Tags: 1090 AD, 1190 AD, 1278, 1536, Arthur Pendragon, Battle of Camlann, crucifixion of Christ, Deluxe Excalibur Sword with scabbard, English History, European History, French Romantics, Glastonbury Abbey, Glastonbury Festival, Glastonbury High Altar, Grail lore, Guenevere Pewter Sculpture, Here lies renowned King Arthur in the island of Avalon, Historical Excalibur Sword, Holy Grail, Joseph of Arimathia, king arthur, King Arthur Pewter Sculpture, King Edward I, King Henry VIII, legend of King Arthur, legend of the Holy Grail, Ley Line network, Medieval History, Medieval Myth, Medieval Store, myth of King Arthur, Once and Future King, Queen Guinevere, the Isle of Avalon, The schism, William of Malmesbury

Though he enthralled the aristocracy of Europe with tales of his supposed Oriental origins, the man known as Count Alessandro di Cagliostro actually began life under much less auspicious circumstances.

In truth, he was born Giuseppe Balsamo in the destitute Jewish quarter of Palermo, Sicily around 1743.  Little is known of his life until the age of twenty-five, when he married Lorenza Felliciani – the well-educated daughter of bankrupt noble family.  Taking for themselves, quite illegitimately, the titles of Count and Countess Cagliostro, they set out across the continent as mystics for hire.  Soon they were fetching vast sums for appearances in the courts of European nobility, where they performed the usual parlor tricks of 18th century itinerant magicians: fortune telling, alchemy, and the occasional feat of necromancy.

In doing so, the Count endeared himself to a great number of prominent figures, not all of whom accepted his “enhanced” biography wholesale; Goethe, in his Voyage in Italy, writes: “I answered that indeed, in the eyes of the public, he posed as aristocrat of high birth, but that to his friends he liked to acknowledge his humble origin.”

By the time the couple reached France in the 1770s, Cagliostro’s own reputation preceded him.  Upon appearing for the Cardinal Louis de Rohan, he supposedly engineered a diamond of tremendous size through alchemical means; the prelate’s own jeweler would later value the stone at twenty-five thousand livres.  So taken was Rohan with the magician’s perceived gifts that he would later commission a bust of the Count for his study, bearing the inscription: To Divine Cagliostro.

With his popularity in France at all-time high, it was there that Cagliostro founded the Egyptian Lodge of Freemasonry - claiming that he procured secret knowledge from a “curious manuscript” and baited his followers with promises of immortality.  In truth, his life-extending formula was little more than a blend of common mystical tropes and crude 18th century medical practices, such as the consumption of heavy metals.

Cagliostro’s penchant for influence peddling soon caught up with him, however.  He was imprisoned in the Bastille for nine months following accusations that he had collaborated in a plot to steal a necklace intended for Marie Antoinette.  The “Affair of the Necklace” ended when he was released due to insufficient evidence.  According to popular accounts of his release, ten thousand cheering Parisians greeted him at the prison gate and triumphantly carried him down him down the Boulevard Saint-Antoine.  Nonetheless, the Count and Countess still found themselves banished from France and, in 1791, moved onto Rome, where he opened a branch of his Egyptian Lodge.

The seat of Catholicism and papal authority, however, wasn’t as tolerant of occultists as libertine-era France; the Count and Countess were both arrested on charges of heresy and sorcery and sentenced to death.  Lorenza, who had chartered her own, all-female branch of the Egyptian Lodge while in Rome, was spared, after issuing a full “confession” and agreeing to live out her days in a nunnery.  Cagliostro’s own sentence was eventually commuted to life, and he died, imprisoned in the Fortress of San Leo, not long after.

For some though, Cagliostro lived on; like many other arcane hucksters of the alchemical era, he was said to have obtained immortality and revered as an “Ascended Master” by many subsequent teachers of arcane philosophy. To others, he was the very embodiment of the occult swindler. It’s a role in he has inhabited repeatedly ever since, in everything from the works of Alexandre Dumas to the films of Orson Welles, who played the Count in 1949’s Black Magic.

Colonial History Store Leather Tricorn Colonial Pirate Hat French Double Barrel Flintlock Pistol Charleville Rifle with Bayonet American Revolutionary War 18th Century Double Barrel Revolving Flintlock Pistol

Tags: 1743, 1791, 18th Century, 18th century medical practices, Affair of the Necklace, alchemism, alchemist, Alexandre Dumas, Black Magic, Cardinal Louis de Rohan, Catholicism 1780s, Catholicism 18th century, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, Count Cagliostro, Divine Caglisotro, Egyptian Lodge of Freemasonry, European History, Fortress of San Leo Marche, France 1770s, Giuseppe Balsamo, Lorenza Felliciani, magicians, Marie Antoinette, necromancy, Orson Welles, The Bastille