King Theodore's Corsica

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The Fate of Bonifacio

The Palazzo dei Podestà, seat of the Bonifacio local government​

Under Genoese rule, the city of Bonifacio enjoyed more autonomy than perhaps any other city of the Genoese domain. The podesta of the city had been replaced in 1619 with a Genoese-appointed commissario who served a two-year term, but the powers of the commissioner were strictly limited. He was responsible for public order, the enforcement of Genoese law, and the physical maintenance of the city (both its fortifications and public works). All other aspects of administration were left to a locally elected government consisting of a 25-man municipal council and a 4-man council of elders which acted as an executive board. These councilors had to be at least 30 years of age, be literate, reside within twelve miles of the city, and could not be Genoese noblemen. They were elected every year, and all actions of the elders had to be approved by a two-thirds vote of the council.

In addition to its autonomous government, Bonifacio enjoyed extensive privileges under Genoese rule. Its citizens owed neither taxes nor military service to the Republic. The council could levy its own taxes and raise its own militia as it saw fit, and appointed its own officers who collected customs duties, imposed naval quarantines, and regulated the activities of shepherds and livestock in the countryside. Although the commissioner had some judicial responsibilities, most local matters of justice were handled by the council. The Corsicans had long denounced Genoa as a tyrannical oligarchy masquerading as a republic, which had a great deal of truth to it; but in taking Bonifacio, the kingdom had conquered an actual free democratic republic.

General Cesare Petriconi had neither the experience nor the inclination to run a city himself, and thus went out of his way to preserve the existing apparatus during his tenure as military governor. He initially demanded that every councilor swear an oath of loyalty to the King of Corsica, but every one of them refused, preferring to resign rather than pledge allegiance to Theodore. The war, after all, was still ongoing; it was quite possible that Genoa would recover the city through the actions of the great powers. Petriconi yielded and settled for a lesser oath, in which the councilors merely swore not to engage in any act of insurrection, sedition, or sabotage against the Corsican military authorities. Although he suspended their authority to raise a militia and banned all tolls and customs on Corsican ships, Petriconi otherwise left local legislation alone and allowed the council to manage the city as it had done under the Genoese commissioners. He resisted pressure from his own government to squeeze the city for “contributions,” arguing that this would be a breach of the terms of surrender, although he did order the confiscation of all private weapons. Oaths could only be trusted so far.

Even before the final treaty was signed, the Council of State debated Bonifacio’s ultimate fate. The obvious parallel was the city of Calvi, whose citizens had, like the Bonifacini, maintained a strong Genoese identity even after being conquered from the Republic. Theodore had magnanimously given them the full rights of citizens, and they had repaid him by eagerly handing their city over to the French during the Second Intervention. By 1782, the “Calvi problem” was considered solved - this disloyal sentiment had been dulled by time, and diluted by a deliberate policy to attract Corsican and Jewish settlers to the city. But Bonifacio was more than twice the size of Calvi, and it was even more isolated from the rest of the island. Even if “reconciliation” was possible, it would take time, and until then one of the kingdom’s most valuable strategic points would be in the hands of its least loyal subjects. Chancellor Rostini, who favored mass deportation, made the point memorably - “Bonifacio is too important to be left in the hands of the Bonifacini.”

Rostini’s opinion was not shared by the rest of the council, and after the peace the government proceeded with plans to “regularize” its relationship with Bonifacio. Theo wanted to make the city the capital of the kingdom’s tenth lieutenancy, to include Porto Vecchio and the sparsely inhabited territory east of the Incudine range.[1] But the royal luogotenente would have no more power than the old commissario, and the city’s local government could remain in place. The government was even prepared to afford the council more autonomy on administrative and judicial affairs than was usually given to provinces, for Federico had set the precedent by granting similar privileges to Capraia. The obligation of the city to provide recruits for the provincial regiments was also indefinitely suspended. When it came to taxation, however, the government was less accommodating. Continuing Bonifacio’s blanket tax exemption would have been controversial under any circumstances, but for a government in the midst of a debt crisis it was quite unthinkable.

The Corsican government considered all this to be quite generous. Far from treating the Bonifacini like conquered enemies, they were faithfully executing their treaty obligations to grant them “all the rights and privileges” of Corsican citizens, and were even offering them special consideration in recognition of the city’s special circumstances. But this was lost on the Bonifacini, who saw only the infringement of their ancient rights and the imposition of taxes which they had never voted for. This was not generosity; this was nothing less than the death of their cherished liberty.

On November 1st, General Petriconi stepped down and handed authority to the new luogotenente, Marquis Francesco Antonio Gaffori (popularly known as “Gafforio”). The son of the famed prime minister, Gaffori had pursued a military career (first in the ceremonial Guardia Nobile, then as a provincial officer) and had served in the war as a colonel of a provincial regiment, although he had seen no action. He was also the nephew of Alerio Francesco Matra, Paoli’s defeated rival. Gaffori’s appointment was commonly regarded as merely a sinecure for a marquis (as the duties of a royal luogotenente were increasingly limited), but it may have also been a political play, either to win over Gaffori personally or to deal with the Matra faction by handing out prestigious appointments outside the center of power in Bastia.

Gaffori had been instructed to govern with a light hand, but there were certain matters that he insisted on. The pledge of loyalty was no longer optional; it was one thing to refuse to give allegiance to an occupying enemy during wartime, but no public officers in the Kingdom of Corsica could refuse an oath of allegiance to the king. An empty wooden throne, meant to signify the presence of the monarch, was set up in the council chamber. When several councilors refused to take the oath, Gaffori declared the council to be dissolved and ordered new elections, in which only candidates who had taken the oath were permitted to stand for election. Many boycotted the elections, grumbling that Gaffori had no authority to dissolve their city’s government. Meanwhile, soldiers combed systematically through the city with hammers and chisels, removing the Genoese coats of arms which had decorated many of the city’s buildings for centuries.

These symbolic acts were humiliating, but predictably it was taxation which brought matters to a head. The government had decided to temporarily delay the implementation of internal taxes like the taglia and sovvenzione, but external taxes could not wait, or else anyone who wanted to avoid Corsican tariffs would simply bring their goods into Bonifacio. These included King Federico’s protectionist tariffs on domestically produced goods like furniture and woolens - and, critically, wine. Agriculture in Bonifacio’s chalky hinterland was very limited, and the city imported most of its foodstuffs from Genoa, including wine. The imposition of this tariff regime caused wine prices to immediately spike, which was especially infuriating as the right to set their own tariffs had long been part of Bonifacio’s ancient privileges.

On December 8th, a boat carrying wine into Bonifacio had its cargo confiscated by the authorities. The owner claimed to be bringing wine from Ajaccio, but was suspected of actually having bought wine in Sardinia and thus not paying the proper tariff. Fed up with high wine prices, the loss of their liberties, and general anger against the new government, a crowd of men broke into the customs house and “liberated” the wine. Some young men in the group - possibly after partaking in the wine themselves - then stormed into the Palazzo dei Podestà, dragged Gaffori’s “empty throne” out into the street, and smashed it with clubs and axes in from of the loggia of the neighboring church as a large crowd gathered. Gaffori responded by marching into the square at the head of a column of soldiers. What happened next is disputed; Gaffori claimed he ordered his men to fire warning shots, but it was difficult to control the situation in Bonifacio’s narrow alleys. However it began, it ended with the soldiers firing into the crowd. Two citizens were killed and more than a dozen wounded, and four soldiers were also injured by blows or thrown debris.

In the rest of Corsica, the “Wine Riot” was reported as a drunken orgy of violence and vandalism in which the rioters cursed the king, burned the Corsican flag, and attacked Corsican soldiers with axes. Chancellor Paoli (who had held this office for less than a week) was not taken in by such sensational rumors, but the incident seems to have soured his opinion on the project of “reconciliation.” He lamented that the “indulgent” treatment of Bonifacio by the Genoese had left them incapable of being governed. Gaffori was instructed to deal harshly with the “insurrectionists” - not merely for the sake of punishment, but as a deliberate policy of pacifying the city by driving out as many of its inhabitants as possible. Rostini was dead, but his pessimism had carried the day: Bonifacio was indeed too important to be left to the Bonifacini.

With the government’s permission, Marquis Gaffori declared the resumption of martial law. A few who could be identified as ringleaders of the riot were deported outright, along with their families, as Gaffori reasoned that their “rebellion” against the government demonstrated their rejection of the offer of Corsican citizenship. The councilors who had resigned rather than take the loyalty oath were also deported. Many others suspected of ancillary involvement received large fines, and those who were unable to pay had their houses seized in lieu of payment and were forcibly removed from their homes. The treaty had guaranteed the chattels of emigres, but not real property, and the surest way to turn citizens into emigres was to render them homeless. To defray the cost of the enhanced military presence, Corsican troops were quartered in civilian homes and the families were required to feed them at their own expense.

This oppressive reaction had the desired effect. There had been a wave of emigration after the peace treaty, but it was relatively minor - only around 200 people out of a prewar population of 2,500. Although the Bonifacini despised their new rulers, most did not want to leave their home. General Petriconi’s even-handed rule and his refusal to levy extraordinary taxes on the occupied city had led some to believe that they might be able to retain the same sort of relationship with Corsica as they had with Genoa. The Wine Riot “massacre” and the government reprisal which followed, however, led many to the conclusion that neither life nor property was safe under Corsican rule. By the time martial law was lifted six months later, the population had fallen to under 1,400.

Now the government had to find new citizens to replace the old. The prospects for internal migration were limited, for most Corsicans were farmers and would not know what to do with themselves in Bonifacio. Some Jewish families from Ajaccio were willing to move, but most preferred to stay put - Ajaccio was a more prosperous city with a large and vibrant Jewish community, whereas in Bonifacio the Jews would presumably be a small, despised minority. The government thus turned abroad, instructing its consuls in Italy to solicit immigrants. These consuls, however, did not have much to offer. The government promised free housing to new settlers (seized from the former inhabitants), but it was not in a position to hand out generous monetary incentives. It may also have been difficult to attract people to a city which had been in the news for the past year with stories of siege, repression, martial law, and people fleeing by the hundreds. The government needed more desperate candidates.

The Ten Lieutenancies of Corsica from 1783. The islands of Capraia and Gorgona, part of the Capo Corso lieutenancy, are not shown. The route of the Via Nationale, not yet complete in 1783, is shown in brown.(Click to expand)​

Footnotes
[1] This territory had been part of the stato of Bonifacio under Genoese rule, and Theodore’s lieutenancies followed the lines of the old Genoese administrative divisions (the stati and luogotenenze) with only a few minor changes. As Bonifacio itself was left in Genoese hands, however, the rest of the stato was not a viable province; there were few habitations in this district aside from Porto Vecchio, which was largely abandoned during the summer. The territory of the old stato of Bonifacio was thus added to the lieutenancy of Sartena, although at the time this was viewed as a temporary expedient until either Porto Vecchio was made more congenial or Bonifacio was annexed to the kingdom.

 

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Telepylos​

“The Genoese say that the barbarity of the Maniots will never be so great as to not be counterbalanced by that of the Corsicans. What is certain is that, if that treaty ever succeeds, no national matchmaking shall ever prove a better choice. Their common marriages shall produce offspring which will be masterpieces of monstrosity.”

- Georges Guillet de Saint-George, 1675, regarding the arrival of the Greeks in Corsica​

In March of 1782, as the Coral War was still ongoing, the British garrison of Fort St. Philip surrendered to Bourbon forces. Having finally regained control of Minorca, Spain’s first order of business was to expel all the “foreign” peoples whom the British had settled on the island. The British authorities had purposefully introduced non-Catholic populations to the island, chiefly Greeks and Jews, to counterbalance the hostile native population. From the 1760s, however, the Jews had gravitated towards Corsica rather than Minorca, leaving the British with mainly Greeks.

The Spanish considered the Greeks to be not merely foreigners, but enemies. A British governor noted their “incredible spirit” for privateering; in just a few years between the outbreak of war and the final fall of Port Mahon, the British recorded more than 50 privateer ships based out of Minorca which captured 220 prizes worth nearly 400,000 pounds sterling in total. The number of Greeks among these privateers is not recorded, but they clearly had more relish for the enterprise than the native Minorcans, who tended to be more sympathetic to their Spanish brethren.

The Spanish authorities gave the entire population just three days to leave, and they were forced to leave all their property behind. The brothers Nicola and Cana Alexiano, probably the richest Greeks on the island, attested that they had been deprived of “estates and property in land, houses, warehouses, ships, and merchandize” worth more than 10,000 pounds sterling. The Alexianos, however, were the lucky ones - they managed to get a ticket back to England with the garrison, which had surrendered on terms, and they could still rely on some funds invested in places the Spaniards could not reach. Most of the Minorcan Greeks had neither their resources nor their influence, and were instead dropped off in Marseilles with little more than what they could carry on their backs.[A]

Ships off Port Mahon​

Don Giorgio Maria Stefanopoli, the de facto leader of the Corsican Greek community, was predictably interested in attracting some of these exiles to Ajaccio. His dwindling community had been looking down the barrel of eventual extinction prior to the Archipelago Expedition. When the Russians made peace with the Ottomans, they left the Greek rebels to their fate, and while many went into exile in Russian territory Stefanopoli had managed to induce a few hundred Greeks (mostly Moreans and Cretans) to follow him into exile. Although this had given the Greco-Corsicans a demographic reprieve, more immigrants would ensure the survival of Don Giorgio’s community - and, of course, expand his own influence and importance as the community’s foremost representative.

The Corsican government, however, was not interested - firstly, because they were in the middle of a war, and secondly, because the last thing they needed was more people in Ajaccio. The city’s population had exploded in the last twenty years thanks to Jewish immigration and the arrival of poor Corsicans from the interior Dila looking for better wages than they received as tenant farmers, but this had strained both the city’s meager water supply and its civil harmony. The native Ajaccini had been tolerant enough when the Jews were a small minority bringing the wealth of the coral industry to their city, but the rapid expansion of Jewish settlement caused unease among Ajaccio’s native upper class and resentment among those who found themselves in competition with Jewish artisans (or, at the lower end of the economic ladder, poor laborers from the countryside). Adding another thousand Greeks to this situation seemed unwise.

The cause of the Minorcan Greeks would be taken up again in the following year by Andrea Mavrachi (born Andreas Mavrakis), a former officer in the Corsican Navy. Mavrachi was a sailor from Crete who had fought for the Russians as a privateer during the Archipelago Expedition and had left the island with the Korsikanskiy legion. He had settled in Ajaccio, joined the navy as an alfiere (a junior officer rank, equivalent to a midshipman), and was fortunate enough to have been assigned to the Lacedemone, where he shared in Admiral Lorenzo’s lucrative captures of Genoese shipping. When the war ended he resigned from the navy and used his prize money to buy his own ship. He visited Bonifacio on business in the spring of 1783, and the white-cliffed city appears to have made quite an impression on him.

Mavrachi may have learned of the plight of the Minorcan Greeks from Stefanopoli, but the two were not close. “Kapetán Yiorgákis,” as the Greeks called Don Giorgio, ruled the Greek community as if it was his own personal fiefdom and favored his own Maniot clan over the new arrivals like Mavrachi. Stefanopoli wanted to bring more Greeks to Ajaccio because Ajaccio was his community; finding a home for them in Bonifacio did not serve his interests, as he would not be able to exert the same influence there. Mavrachi, however, saw Bonifacio as a chance to build a new community beyond the grasp of the Kapetán and the Stefanopoli clan. Now that he had a ship of his own, Mavrachi began visiting Marseilles and other ports to make contact with the Minorcan exiles and spread the word about this potential opportunity.

Chancellor Paoli did not immediately embrace this plan, as despite his commitment to “Theodoran liberty” he was concerned about backlash against non-Catholics, particularly from a population as volatile as that of Bonifacio. Yet he could not deny that the Greeks would be useful to the state, as Corsica’s lack of experienced seamen was a liability in both peace and war. A population grateful to their “hosts” for rescuing them from exile and poverty might be just the counterbalance to Bonifacio’s disloyal natives that Paoli was looking for. Despite the fierce opposition of Stefanopoli, who considered this whole project to be a challenge to his authority, Mavrachi was able to raise the funds to charter two ships to bring 380 Minorcan Greeks to Bonifacio in September of 1783.

Bonifacio was not exactly an idyll. The Greeks had lost everything in Minorca, and while the government offered them free homes they were given little else. They were treated with hostility by the native Bonifacini, who saw them as interlopers squatting in the houses of their departed neighbors and friends. But they did enjoy the support of the luogotenente, Marquis Francesco Antonio Gaffori, the benefits of which went beyond mere protection. When the Greeks began building their own chapel, local Catholic priests attempted to impede them by forbidding their parishioners to aid them in any way, including providing them with any labor or selling them any goods. Gaffori dispatched a company of troops to assist in building the chapel, sent a letter to the Bishop of Ajaccio demanding that he censure the local priests, and threatened to fine shop owners for “disturbing civil peace” if they refused to sell to Greeks. Gaffori had no strong attachment to the Greeks, but he had nothing but contempt for the “Ligurians” (who despised him with equal vigor) and backed any initiative which he believed would weaken and humiliate them.

More Greeks would soon follow. Some of the initial colonists may have believed that their stay on Corsica would be temporary; the French had expelled the Greek community once before, in the 1750s, only for them to return home when the island was returned to Britain at the end of the Prussian War. This time, however, Britain’s loss would be permanent, for in the Treaty of Paris of 1784 which ended the American War of Independence, Minorca was formally returned to Spanish sovereignty. Many Minorcan Greeks who had been holding out for a chance to return home now accepted the inevitable and followed their countrymen to Bonifacio. In 1785 the community reached a thousand souls, surpassing Don Giorgio’s community in Ajaccio.

The dispute over the chapel was not the last time the Greeks of Bonifacio would find themselves at the center of religious controversy. Most of the initial Greek colonists of Bonifacio were, at least formally, Catholic. While some of these people were firmly attached to the Roman faith - many Minorcan Greeks were originally from the Venetian-controlled Ionian Islands, which had a sizable Greek Catholic population - most had converted during their time in Minorca in a vain attempt to mitigate local prejudice. For the most part, these “converts” had maintained their traditional rites and practices, merely adding a nominal profession of obedience to Rome. In Bonifacio, however, such obedience no longer seemed to serve any purpose, and within a few years of the initial settlement several Orthodox priests from Ottoman Greece arrived at this new Greek colony and set about trying to “re-evangelize” the locals, urging them to return to the pristine traditions of their ancestors. As there was no legal obstacle to doing so, many “reverted” to Orthodoxy.

This created a furor among the Catholic clergy of Corsica greater than any objection to Jewish settlement. The Jews may not have been Christian, but they at least did not proselytize; no Corsican Jew was actively encouraging apostasy from the Roman religion. Theo and his government came under pressure from both the native clergy and the Spanish Jesuits to expel the “schismatic” foreign priests who were at the forefront of this movement. As these priests were non-resident foreigners, they were not protected by the Corsican constitution, and most of them were eventually deported on the rather flimsy basis that their preaching activities disturbed the peace. The government, however, had neither the legal authority nor the desire to actually mandate the observance of the Catholic faith. While some Greek Bonifacini persisted in their obedience to Rome, either out of genuine conviction or a belief that formal Catholicism would help them climb the ladder in the Corsican government or military, they were relegated to a minority within the Greek community in the city.

The final rearguard action fought by the Ligurian Bonifacini would be over the fate of their ancient government. Despite increasing numbers of Greek settlers, the native Bonifacini retained control over their local councils for some years because of the law that counselors had to be literate - specifically, literate in Italian. That requirement did not extend to voters, however, and eventually the Greeks were able to assemble a slate of better-educated Greek candidates to stand for election, including Mavrachi. In 1786 the natives responded to this threat by passing a new law which declared that candidates also had to either be born in Bonifacio or born to a Bonifacini parent, which disqualified all the Greeks.

Fortunately for the Greeks, the king himself was sympathetic to their plight. When Bonifacio had fallen to the Corsican Army during the Coral War, King Theodore II had reluctantly agreed to not make a triumphal entry into the city for the sake of his personal safety and the public peace. In 1784, however, he finally made the journey. The king toured the clifftop city and stayed at the Cattaciolo House, a residence popularly known as the Casa di Carlo V because Emperor Charles V had stayed there for three nights in 1541 after his failed expedition to Algiers. Theo’s reception by the Ligurian-Bonifacini was rather sullen and indifferent, but he was surprised by the warm reception given to him by the Greek settlers. The Greek community leaders organized performances for his entertainment, and Mavrachi played up his record as the king’s loyal soldier - in stark contrast to the Ligurians, who had recently been Theo’s enemies.

Front door and engraved lintel of the Casa di Cattaciolo, which housed both Emperor Charles V and King Theodore II​

Such pandering was not the only reason for Theo to support the Greeks, but it surely didn’t hurt. When he received a petition from Mavrachi and other Greek leaders complaining of their disenfranchisement, the king was keen to demonstrate that loyalty was rewarded. He received some pushback from Paoli and the Justice Ministry, as the government had always tried to avoid interposing itself in matters of “local presidial administration.” Instead, Theo was convinced to intervene in a more oblique manner. Rather than annulling the act of the Bonifacini council specifically, the king signed a grida which declared that “no subject of the Kingdom shall be denied the exercise of their rights… on the basis of the place of their birth, the nationality of their forebears, or the length of their residence in the Kingdom.” This edict, commonly known as the “Residence Decree,” not only broke the power of the minority government in Bonifacio but created a durable precedent that natural-born and naturalized citizens could not be treated differently in Corsican law. From 1787 the Greeks entered local government and - aided by continued emigration of the Ligurian “natives” - soon came to dominate the civic council.

The establishment of the Greek “colony” at Bonifacio created a bifurcation in the Corsican Greek community as a whole. The community of the Stefanopoli in Ajaccio, which remained predominantly Maniot, consisted of more “Corsicanized” Greeks - the Greek Ajaccini were overwhelmingly Catholic (although many still practiced the Greek rite), wore Italian fashions, and spoke Italian in public. The ennobled “Stefanopoli de Comnene” family continued to wield influence after the death of Don Giorgio in 1786 and its members remained proud of their supposed imperial Byzantine heritage, but they increasingly saw themselves as Corsican aristocrats first and foremost, and regularly intermarried with other Corsican elite families in the 19th century.

In contrast, the Greek settlers of Bonifacio tended to come from the isles (Crete, the Aegean Islands, and the Ionian Islands), were mostly Orthodox, seldom married outside their community, and were more “traditional” in their dress and habits. By the early 19th century the traditional fustanella seems to have entirely disappeared from Ajaccio but was still commonly worn by Greek men in Bonifacio. The Greco-Bonifacini also maintained ties with Greece itself, which would become relevant in the 19th century when Greek nationalist movements began to challenge Ottoman rule. Bonifacio would become a significant center of nationalist expatriate activity in the 1800s, with several prominent Greco-Bonifacini becoming involved in financing, organizing, and recruiting for the nascent Greek national struggle.[B]


Timeline Notes
[A] This expulsion occurred in IOTL, albeit in 1781. Exact numbers of the expelled population and their ethnic makeup are hard to come by. Most sources I’ve seen focus on the Jewish population, which is said to have been about 500 people at the time of the expulsion. The total number of foreign settlers (“Jews, Greeks, and Moors”) may have been around 3,000, and I have seen estimates for the Greek population ranging from 500 to 2,000. ITTL the number of Minorcan Jews is much smaller than 500 as Ajaccio is a more attractive destination for Jewish settlement than Port Mahon, and the British have made up for it by recruiting more Greeks.
[B] This update’s title is a reference to the Odyssey. Bonifacio has been identified as a possible candidate for Telepylos (“far-off port”), the home of the giant man-eating Laestrygonians in Homer’s epic. In the story, the Laestrygonians hurl rocks down upon Odysseus’s ships and destroy nearly all of them, with Odysseus escaping only because his own ship was moored outside the harbor. Homer’s description of the harbor (“about which on both sides a sheer cliff runs continuously, and projecting headlands opposite to one another stretch out at the mouth, and the entrance is narrow”) is consistent with the harbor of Bonifacio, although this is hardly determinative on its own. Perhaps more intriguing is that one of the tribes of the Corsi - the ancient inhabitants of Corsica - was known to the Romans as the Lestriconi, which sounds awfully similar to Laestrygones. In Roman times the Lestriconi dwelled in the northeastern corner of Sardinia, just across the strait from Bonifacio. Perhaps in Homer’s time they had not yet migrated across the strait.

 

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The Measure of Corsica

1734 Genoese Zecchino​

Currency

Creating a new national currency had been one of the first concerns of the newly crowned King Theodore I, but it had been a rocky start. Theodore’s first mint struck 2½ and 5 soldi coins which were notionally made of billon, a copper-silver alloy In practice, however, there was little or no silver content in these issues. The Corsicans joked that the “TR” inscribed on the coins for “Theodore Rex” actually stood for tutti rami, “all copper,” and the mint workers refused to be paid in the coins they themselves had made. They were more valuable as collectibles outside Corsica than as currency within it. A mint in Naples began churning out counterfeit coins to be sold as curios, although since these fakes had no less silver than the genuine article it’s not clear if they really ought to be considered “counterfeit.” Theodore's government also minted a 1 lira (20 soldi) coin weighing around 3.48 grams which did actually contain silver, but the fineness and weight varied considerably, with some specimens barely over .500 fineness.[A] As actual circulating currency, the revolutionary currency must be considered a failure; most royalist soldiers were paid with Genoese lire and various foreign coins smuggled into Corsica.

Corsica was not alone in its monetary woes. At the outset of the Corsican Revolution the Genoese lira contained 5.23 grams of “8/9” silver (.889 fine), for an actual fine silver content of about 4.65 grams. In 1746, however, in the face of military and financial collapse, the Genoese lira was devalued to 3.86 grams of silver. The fineness was eventually reestablished at .889 but not the size, and for the rest of the century the Genoese lira was a 4.16g coin containing 3.70 grams of silver. The Corsicans may have been directly contributing to this instability through counterfeiting in the late 1740s, as there are an unusually large number of specimens of debased and low-quality "pre-1746" lire; one must remember that Theodore's first head minter was himself an infamous counterfeiter.

The mere fact of independence did not succeed in rehabilitating the poor reputation of Corsican currency, and for most of the reign of Theodore I Genoese, Tuscan, and other foreign coins were more common than the kingdom's own currency. Increasing the silver content did not help, as few believed the coins had real value and there were by this time large numbers of worthless counterfeit "curio" copies floating about. Late in the reign of Theodore I, the Frediani-Paoli ministry proposed a fresh start - the replacement of the old, troubled lira with a completely new design to make a clean break from the past. This "lira nuova" would be the same size and fineness of the Tuscan lira, which give it the benefit of easy convertibility with the currency used at Livorno, Corsica's most important commercial partner. The result was a 4.64 gram coin with a silver content of 5/6 (.833 fine), containing 3.86 grams of silver. The lira nuova was worth about 0.86 French livres, and in the late 18th century it traded at approximately 30 to the British pound sterling.

Only a limited number of new lire were minted under Theodore I, but the overhaul was continued and expanded during the reign of Federico. The lira was not the only problem - its subdivisions, the TR billon coins, had just as bad a reputation and even the 2½-soldi piece was inadequate for small purchases. These coins were given superficial redesigns, their fineness was fixed at .012, and they were supplemented by three new copper denominations: a 1-soldo coin, a soldino (half-soldo or 6 denari), and a sestino (⅙ of a soldo or 2 denari). These coins were slow to catch on, as the memory of worthless revolutionary copper currency still lingered in Corsica.

None of these denominations were large enough for the purposes of government accounting or bulk trade. In the early years such transactions were usually calculated in “sequins” - that is, the Genoese gold zecchino - which was worth 13½ Genoese lire. Theodore was said to have handed out "a gun and a sequin" to his militiamen, which amounted to about a month's wages, but it is unlikely this ever took the form of actual gold zecchini. In part because of fluctuations in the gold-silver ratio, the zecchino was replaced as the government's de facto large unit of account during the reign of Federico and replaced with the Corsican scudo d’argento, which was defined as equal to 6 lire nuove. This unit initially existed only on paper; Federico planned to actually mint such coins but the first was not struck until after his death. The physical scudo d'argento minted under Theodore II was a 27.8 gram coin of 5/6 fineness. Containing 23.16g fine silver, it was very close to the Austrian Conventionsthaler of 23.39g fine silver. In Corsica it was known as a teone (“Big Theo”) because of its large size - nearly one ounce - and because it was struck with the image of the king, making it the first Corsican coin to feature a royal portrait. Another coin of middling value was added in the 1780s, the half-lira (10 soldi) consisting of .625 fine silver.

Exchange Table of Corsican Silver and Copper Coins c. 1785​

	1 Scudo	1 Lira	½ Lira	5 Soldi	2½ Soldi	1 Soldo	1 Soldino	1 Sestino
1 Scudo=	1	6	12	24	48	120	240	720
1 Lira=	1/6	1	2	4	8	20	40	120
½ Lira=	1/12	1/2	1	2	4	10	20	60
5 Soldi=	1/24	1/4	1/2	1	2	5	10	30
2½ Soldi=	1/48	1/8	1/4	1/2	1	2½	5	15
1 Soldo=	1/120	1/20	1/10	1/5	2/5	1	2	6
1 Soldino=	1/240	1/40	1/20	1/10	1/5	1/2	1	3
1 Sestino=	1/720	1/120	1/60	1/30	1/15	1/6	1/3	1

The Corsican government also established two gold denominations in the 1780s, the scudo d’oro and the doppia, initially defined as equal to 12 and 24 lire (2 and 4 scudi d'argento) respectively. Only the doppia was actually minted in the 18th century, while the scudo d'oro remained purely a unit of account. The Corsican doppia was a 6.74 gram coin of 11/12 (.917 fine) gold which bore a portrait of the king on one side and the great arms of the kingdom on the other. Containing 6.18g of fine gold, the Corsican doppia can be compared to other Italian doppie like those of Milan (6.21g), Parma (6.36g), and Lucca (6.90g), as well as other contemporary gold coins like the Spanish doubloon (6.04g) and the French Louis d’or (~7.45g).[1] This gold content was based on a gold-silver ratio of 15 to 1, but fluctuations in the relative value of gold eventually forced the government to revalue its gold currency and break the simple 2 to 1 convertibility between the scudo d’argento and the scudo d’oro. Although the doppia was actual legal tender which did see some limited circulation in Corsica, it was primarily useful as a means of international legitimation. Having one's portrait on a large gold coin was a nearly universal trait of "proper" European monarchs, and Theodore II was the first Corsican king who was able to join this exclusive club.

Weights and Measures

Corsica continued to use the Genoese pound (libbra genovesca) of approximately 317 grams, which was about 70% of the weight of an English pound. Also common was the rotolo of 1½ libbre (~475.5 g) which is sometimes confusingly referred to in foreign sources as the “Corsican pound” because it more closely resembled the pound measurements of England (453.6 g), Spain (460 g), and France (489.5 g).[B] Bulk goods were usually measured in cantari, with one cantaro equal to 150 libbre or 100 rotoli. The standard ratio at Ajaccio was 105 English pounds to 100 rotoli (one cantaro), which was only off by about 78 grams.

Likewise, Genoese length measurements remained in use. The most important units were the palma (“palm”, about 81.4% of the length of an English foot), the passo (“pace,” equal to 6 palmi or ~1½ meters), and the miglio (“mile,” equal to 6000 palmi or 1000 passi, about 92.5% of an English mile). Another unit, the cannella (equal to 2 passi, 12 palmi, or just under 3 meters), was preferred for ground and architectural measurement, and the cannella quadrata (about 8.86 square meters) was used for measuring area. Because the surveys of the island in the 1740s and 1750s had been performed by the French, however, the Catasto Reale also used the arpento (Paris arpent) to measure land area, which was equal to about 576 cannelle quadrate or 1.26 acres.[C]


Footnotes
[1] The Spanish doubloon was the original basis for all these coins. What we know as a “doubloon” in English was a 2-escudo gold coin - thus doblón, “double.” This in turn gave its name to the Italian doppia and inspired the minting of other similarly-sized gold coins across Europe. The French Louis d’or was originally a direct copy of the doblón.

Timeline Notes
[A] The historical Theodoran lira seems to be exceptionally rare. While the lesser "TR" coins appear on auction sites (sometimes for thousands of dollars each), I have yet to see an actual picture of a Theodoran lira, only sketches. I do not actually know what the size or fineness of this coin was, although it is universally described as "silver" so it must have had at least some silver in it, unlike the "billon" coins which had little or none. The weight and fineness figures for the Theodoran lira given above are actually those of the Paolist lira minted in the 1760s; I doubt Theodore's was the same, but we can at least know that it was possible to strike such a coin on Corsica. Paoli's republic minted 1, 2, and 4 soldi coins, as well as lire and half-lire.
[B] Rotolo comes from the Arabic rutl, a unit of measurement used in the Middle East and North Africa which itself comes from the Ancient Greek lítra, which is also the root of litre and is etymologically related to a variety of other measurements (libra, livre, etc).
[C] The next update will concern Corsica’s financial situation, and I thought it might be helpful to write a mini-update establishing what types of exchange we’re actually talking about before we dive into debt, budgets, and banking. I’ve barely mentioned currency at all since the Governance and Indifference update which was posted back in 2017, which was probably an oversight. The system above is fairly typical for this time period: Most European countries still based their silver/copper currency on the old Carolingian system of 1 libra = 20 solidi = 240 denari, differing mainly in how these units were subdivided. The scudo was less well-defined; some other Italian states had a silver scudo which was worth 6 lire, but in some places it was 8 lire instead, and in Sardinia-Piedmont a scudo was only worth 2½ lire. The pre-decimalization era must have been a confusing time to be alive.

 

[Carp]

Default

Isaac de Pinto, Dutch Sephardic banker and financial theorist​

Chancellor Pasquale Paoli’s ambitious plans for enlightened reform and national development immediately ran aground upon a crisis which had been building for decades - the insolvency of the Corsican state. By the time of his death King Federico had succeeded in bringing government revenue up to nearly 140,000 scudi per annum, but expenses had also risen.[1] The army alone consumed at least half of this sum, while the navy’s costs appear to have fluctuated between 30 and 60 thousand scudi depending on the activity of the navy’s ships and the maintenance which was undertaken. Even on a “good” year, then, military expenses may have consumed around three quarters of the country’s revenue, leaving little to spare for government salaries, infrastructure, courts, and so on.

That calculation also excludes interest. Even under Federico’s regime the government ran a deficit almost every year, and under Theodore I the state’s income had been considerably lower. In 1778 the new Minister of Finance Don Marco Maria Carli estimated that the kingdom’s debt amounted to nearly 1.2 million scudi. The interest rates on this debt were reasonably favorable, probably no more than five percent overall, thanks in part to Theodore’s own connections and Corsica’s unique relationship with (principally Jewish) international lenders. Even so, at 5% this debt would have required around 60,000 scudi per year in debt service, more than 40% of the government’s overall revenue. That was not an unreasonable figure by the standards of the time; Britain and France routinely spent between a third and half of their revenue on debt service in the 18th century. Minister Carli had reason to be worried, but despite the poverty of the Corsican government in absolute terms, one could argue that Corsica in 1778 was not facing an immediate crisis. If the government could continue to gradually raise revenue and keep a lid on military spending, there would be no reason to fear default.

Then came the war. Rosy predictions that war with Genoa would “pay for itself” with lucrative seizures of Genoese shipping were not borne out by reality. Over a year of war, the Corsican government racked up around a quarter million scudi in “extraordinary” expenses. Government revenues also fell as trade and fishing were both curtailed during wartime. By the Treaty of Poggio Imperiale, Corsica further agreed to pay another 30,000 scudi to Tuscany for the purchase of Gorgona. In October of 1782, as the Corsican consulta generale was exuberantly ratifying the treaty, Carli bemoaned that the state debt now stood at 1.6 million scudi. This amounted to about 8.2 million French livres, more than half of the seemingly insurmountable 15 million livre “Monaco Debt” which Corsica had struggled under in the 1750s.

The real problem, however, was that all this “extraordinary” debt had been contracted at much higher interest rates than the Corsican government had been accustomed to. The American War had been an excellent time to wage a war against Genoa diplomatically speaking, as the great powers were all occupied elsewhere, but it was the absolute worst time financially. Britain and France were both running massive wartime deficits and borrowing enormous amounts of money to cover them, soaking up all the credit floating around the London and Amsterdam markets. Particularly in wartime, creditors were looking for safety, and Corsica did not seem like a particularly safe bet - certainly not compared to Britain or France. Carli and his associates were only able to finance the war by taking usurious loans, and thus the state’s new debt was far more expensive than its old debt. Corsica was now on the hook for around 100,000 scudi a year in debt service. The state’s long-term debt problem was now a short-term debt problem - given the country’s current financial difficulties and the ongoing dearth of cheap credit, it was a challenge even to find lenders willing to cover the state’s immediate deficits.

Negotiations with Turin offered a temporary reprieve. Foreign Minister Giovan Francesco Cuneo d’Ornano had secured Sardinia’s under-the-table support during the Coral War for, in part, an understanding that Turin would take possession of the southern “isole intermedie” off the Sardinian coast. The Sardinians had not even waited for the war to end to land a token force on Maddalena. The French, however, had disregarded this seizure and had assigned all the isles to Corsica in the Treaty of Poggio Imperiale. Corsica did not intend to keep them; Cuneo d’Ornano considered these barren rocks to be a liability, as they had little economic value and would always be an obstacle to good relations with Turin. His informal “understanding” with the Sardinians, however, was not public knowledge, and if Corsica were to just hand them over it might seem as though Corsica had been intimidated into handing over hard-won territory for nothing.

In December, Corsican and Sardinian diplomats met at the Palace of Racconigi in Piedmont to formalize their arrangement. The diplomats drew a line down the center of the Strait of Bonifacio and agreed that this would be the permanent boundary between their countries. Most of the intermediate isles, the Isole della Maddalena, lay south of that line and would be ceded to Sardinia, but Corsica would retain the Isole di Lavezzi, a cluster of rocky islets best known for being the gravesite of the Minerva. Sardinia paid 40,000 scudi for this acquisition, which did not put a significant dent in Corsica’s overall debt but did keep the government solvent for a while longer. Apart from territorial matters, the Convention also made allowance for Corsican coral fishermen to continue working in the Maddalenas, established favorable trade terms between the two countries, and included a mutual pledge to work together against the Barbary menace. Most importantly, the agreement established a Corsican infantry regiment in Sardinian service.

Sardinia-Piedmont was a heavily militarized state whose modest population was insufficient for its geopolitical ambitions. Unlike the Genoese, the Sardinians did not consider their native population to be unsoldierly or unreliable; Piedmont’s “national regiments” were arguably the best in the army. Nevertheless, the state maintained several regiments of Swiss, Germans, French, and other foreign soldiers because there simply were not enough Piedmontese to do the job. Every foreigner in arms meant that there was another native citizen who was free to pursue taxable economic activity that benefitted the state. Corsicans had a good reputation as fighters and had fought creditably under the Sardinian flag during the War of the Austrian Succession. All the Corsicans would have to do was furnish the recruits, and Turin would pay the Corsican government one scudi per month for each man. For one full battalion of 600 men, this meant 7,200 scudi per year, and twice that for a full regiment - not enough to solve the debt crisis on its own, but certainly helpful.

Vittorio Amadeo’s interest in this arrangement was not merely military. While he was not privy to Carli’s account books, he knew that Corsica was a poor state with considerable debt. A subsidy from Turin would be very useful - so useful, in fact, that the Corsican government would be reluctant to part with it. The Corsican regiment would thus be an instrument of influence, a means of ensuring that Corsican policy and Sardinian interests remained aligned. The Corsican government was not ignorant of the link between subsidies and political dependence, and Minister Paoli had initially opposed the proposal; he had argued that Corsica’s young men ought to be helping to build Corsica rather than serving as mercenaries to a foreign government. Yet the financial situation was now so desperate that it was difficult to argue against a new source of revenue, and in truth Corsican soldiers were already serving in foreign armies. At least this way the Corsican government would get something out of it.

Although imminent disaster was averted by this injection of cash, Minister Carli knew that the crisis had only been briefly postponed. He warned that only radical fiscal solutions would prevent catastrophe, and even then a default of some kind might be inevitable. Ideas included demanding forced loans from the nation’s wealthier citizens, as well as disbanding the entire army save for the Guard Grenadiers and a few squadrons of Royal Dragoons. Yet Corsica simply did not have many wealthy citizens, and the king resisted inflicting such radical cuts on his recently-victorious forces. The regular companies were cut to a peacetime strength of 70 men (from 105) and the navy sold off the captured Rubea, but Carli knew this sort of trimming around the edges was not going to be enough.

One of the government’s few creditors who was actually privy to these internal discussions was the newly-ennobled Don Isacco Levi Sonsino, who had access to the ministers of state thanks to the crucial role he had played in facilitating arms purchases for the government during the Coral War. He was not merely a facilitator, however; Sonsino had lent the government a substantial amount of his own money, and thus stood to lose personally if the government defaulted on its debts. Sonsino held a unique position of influence, but he was not the only domestic creditor - merchants, maritime insurers, shipowners, and even middling proprietari had lent money to the government as both an investment and an act of patriotism.

Sonsino thus approached Carli with a proposal. He suggested that he and other local creditors could incorporate themselves as a joint-stock company and consolidate their outstanding government loans into one loan with a reasonably attractive rate of interest - say, four percent. In exchange, the government would give the company special exemption from any planned default. Creditors might not ordinarily consider unilaterally lowering the interest on their own loans, but if the choice was between a guaranteed 4% rate and a potential zero percent rate if the government suspended loan payments, some might choose the former. Sonsino further proposed that this company could operate as a bank, attracting investors and depositors whose money could be used to support the government with further loans.[2]

This was somewhat beyond Minister Carli’s competence. A 63 old lawyer-turned-bureaucrat, Carli was a hard worker and had proven himself to be a skilled accountant. He owed his present position to his impressive record as director of the royal saltworks, which he reorganized and restored to profitability. But Carli had no experience with banking and little familiarity with cutting-edge theories on public debt. He was suspicious of this foreign-born Jewish financier and his ulterior motives, and he resented Sonsino’s attempt to insinuate himself into government affairs. Don Isacco may have unofficially been “the most important man in the war ministry” in the words of Count Innocenzo di Mari, but this was not the war ministry, and Sonsino held no formal government position.

Chancellor Paoli, however, was more favorable. Paoli had spent several years in London as Corsica’s envoy and was a professed admirer of its political and financial system. He had his own qualms about the political power which might be exerted by a private bank holding a substantial share of the government’s debt, but he also desperately wanted a way out of the crisis and a means to raise funds for the capital improvement projects he believed were so vital to the national good. Paoli decided to convene an “emergency” committee to offer recommendations on a state bank and appointed Sonsino to chair it, which gave Don Isacco an actual government position (albeit not a salaried one). This committee went so far as to solicit an opinion from Isaac de Pinto, a Dutch banker and Sephardic Jew who was an influential theorist and writer on banking and finance. Pinto, who was well-regarded in London and served as an informal advisor to the government there, was happy to offer his musings on the proper role of a bank in Corsica and endorsed Paoli's plan, although his confidence was not so great as to prompt him to personally invest in it.

Although a charter was drawn up in April of 1783, the bank’s launch was stymied because of a lack of capital. Its largest “asset” would be the money owed to it by the government, but while this capital did generate income (in the form of interest) further capitalization was necessary for it to perform its basic functions and to issue new loans to the government. The idea of issuing bonds or consols was discussed, but it was unclear who would buy them; there was not much un-invested capital circulating around in Corsica and foreign investors would be difficult to find. It was King Theodore II himself who came to the bank’s rescue, offering to invest £5,000 of his own money (nearly 23,000 scudi) - a relatively safe investment for the king, as he did not have to worry about the government defaulting on its obligations to him because he himself controlled the government. This not only provided the bank with some startup capital (albeit quite meager by the standards of national banks) but some sense of legitimacy and safety, and on June 20th the Banco Reale d’Ajaccio was formally incorporated and held its inaugural shareholders’ meeting at the Lumbroso coffeehouse.[3]

The charter of the Royal Bank of Ajaccio allowed it to act like an ordinary bank in most respects - it could receive deposits, offer loans, and hold funds in escrow (indeed, it was granted a monopoly on escrow deposits in the kingdom). Yet it also had aspects of a “national bank” - it was intended to furnish the government with further loans (at a rate not exceeding 4%) and the government was obligated to hold its own deposits with the bank. The bank would publicly sell shares which anyone could buy, even foreigners, but only shares owned by Corsican subjects would be considered voting shares. The king himself owned around a quarter of these voting shares. Shareholders would elect a board of directors, and the bank would be managed by a “governor” who would be nominated by the Council of Finance but would have to be approved by these directors.

Despite Paoli’s hopes for this new approach to finance, the formation of the bank did not allow the government to avoid default. The kind of cuts that were necessary, including a wholesale gutting of the military, simply were not compatible with the “dignity of the state” and the king would not accept them. In June, Carli declared the government to be insolvent and announced a suspension of all interest payments on most of its debt for a period of two years (the Bank of Ajaccio excepted). Officially Carli blamed the American War, which had damaged Corsican trade because of the enforced exclusion of British ships (and the increased activity of Barbary corsairs) and had decreased the availability of credit. This was true, but these factors were rather minor in the overall scheme of things. Whatever Carli’s rationalizations, the suspension was a serious blow to the country’s financial reputation.[A]

Carli tried to encourage creditors to incorporate with the Royal Bank of Ajaccio, essentially transferring the government’s debt to them to the bank in exchange for an equivalent amount of bank shares - an action which would lower their expected interest but meant they would get at least some interest in the next two years. Most foreign lenders, however, saw this for what it was - an attempt to intimidate them into renegotiating their loans at lower rates by cutting off interest payments. There was little confidence in the bank despite its royal imprimatur. Sonsino, now seated on the board of directors, worked his connections to Jewish lenders in Livorno and Amsterdam as best he could, but Corsica’s goodwill with the Jewish community did not mean that lenders were willing to take a leap of faith on such an uncertain investment. By the end of 1783 the bank’s assets were estimated at around a relatively meagre 150,000 scudi, nearly three quarters of which were loans to the government, comprising less than 7% of the national debt. Paoli's hope that the bank could be used as an instrument to settle the state's high-interest loans and consolidate its debt in a domestically-controlled institution had foundered on the basic problem that there was simply not very much capital in Corsica - all the kingdom's wealthiest citizens combined could not provide the bank with the capital it needed to step into this role.


Footnotes
[1] All mentions of scudi in this chapter refer to the Corsican scudo d’argento, which was officially adopted as the government’s unit of account in 1774.
[2] This sort of structure was not unprecedented in Corsica. There were some businesses who operated on a joint-stock model - particularly maritime lenders, as they needed to front a lot of money to fishermen and merchants assembling an expedition (and might charge as much as 18% interest for the service). Maritime lenders and insurers were prominent among the original bank shareholders, so much so that they ensured that the bank’s charter explicitly banned it from making maritime loans so the bank would not become their competitor. Unlike the bank, shares in these interests were not publicly traded - they were, in modern parlance, “closely held” corporations.
[3] The Lumbroso family was a wealthy and prominent clan of Italo-Tunisian Jews (grana) whose members in the 18th century included a chief rabbi of Tunis and the bey’s personal doctor. The mid-century unrest in Tunis pushed many of its members to flee abroad, and one scion of the family, Samuel Lumbroso, established himself in Ajaccio and opened Corsica’s first coffeehouse. The Casa Lumbroso became an important center of news and business and was a favored gathering spot for the Constitutional Society in Ajaccio, and thus became a key center of the Enlightenment in Corsica - especially appropriate given that Lumbroso means “bright” or “luminous” in Spanish.

Timeline Notes
[A] Suspension was the most mild form of default and was the first choice of most countries when they found themselves unable to meet their obligations. France suspended payment on certain debt payments several times during the 18th century, and the new American republic defaulted on interest payments to France in 1785 and 1787. This isn’t a great sign for Corsica, but they’re in good company.

 

[Carp]

The Wages of Tolerance

Palais Itzig, Berlin, 19th century​

“In this whole country they do not have any particular burden as Jews… They give their soul to the rich manufacture of coral, which they labor in many factories with their hands, and which they produce with their capital; They have beautiful and comfortable villas; in a word they are considered as men who have two arms like others, and who can use them as they please.”
- Elia Morpurgo, Osservazioni sugli ebrei della Corsica​

In 1778 the Gradiscan Jew Elia Morpurgo boarded a small boat at Livorno, where he had been hard at work translating manuscripts, and headed for Bastia. Morpurgo was a rabbi, poet, author, translator, and silk manufacturer who corresponded with such Jewish luminaries as Moses Mendelssohn and Naphtali Wessely. Although he was quite familiar with “Theodoran liberty” - he had written a eulogy for King Theodore I - Morpurgo had never actually visited the island before, and took the opportunity to travel onwards to Ajaccio, the heart of Corsican Jewry. The result of this journey was, in 1779, the publication of Osservazioni sugli ebrei della Corsica (“Observations on the Jews of Corsica”), an account of his travels on the island and a description of the Corsican Jews and the conditions of their lives.[1]

Morpurgo related that all the Jews of Corsica lived in what he called the “three principal towns” of the island, that of Ajaccio, Bastia, and Calvi. (Evidently Corti, which he never visited, did not merit inclusion.) Ajaccio was by far the largest, with more than 900 Jews, while Bastia and Calvi possessed 200 and 30 Jews each. In absolute terms this paled in comparison to Livorno, which had between four and five thousand Jews in the 18th century, but Livorno was also a much larger city. Jews made up only 10% of the population of Livorno, but Ajaccio was around 20% Jewish at the time of Morpurgo’s visit. The Jewish population of Corsica was overwhelmingly Sephardic and Italian-speaking, although there were a small number of German-speaking Jews in Bastia who had migrated from the Austrian lands, many of them connected to the citron trade.

While the Jewish “colony” of Ajaccio had been essentially a satellite of the Livornese coral industry in the 1760s, the community underwent rapid economic diversification in the 1770s. Coral remained the primary business in Ajaccio, although even there the Jews of Ajaccio had branched out from merely trading in coral to manufacturing coral beads and other finished products. Jewish dealers were also involved in the trade of oil, grain, tobacco, textiles, and clothing. Jewish tradesmen included tailors, buttonmakers, leatherworkers, soapmakers, printers, and carpenters. Morpurgo met a handful of Jewish tobacco manufacturers in Ajaccio who had recently immigrated from Venice, a consequence of the Venetian government banning all Jews in the city from engaging in productive trades in 1777 (done at the behest of the Venetian guilds).

Notably, the vocations of “banker” and “financier” scarcely appear at all in Morpurgo’s account. Prior to the establishment of the Bank of Ajaccio the only real lending business in Ajaccio was the maritime loan business, which involved fronting money for fishing expeditions (which could last for months) which would then be paid back once the boat returned successfully - plus a premium which could reach as high as 18%. This business was dominated by old Corsican families, and they had an informal understanding with the Jewish coral merchants that they would not muscle in on each others’ turf. This did not preclude investments in maritime trade, however, and many Jewish merchants financed merchant ventures through buying shares in a ship and its cargo.

Morpurgo was especially interested in the attempts by Jews to buy land. Whereas Jewish involvement in trade and manufacturing was tolerated or even encouraged in many different countries, Jewish ownership of agricultural land was banned in much of Europe. Italian Jews could often find ways around these restrictions by way of special dispensations, but such licenses were not cheaply bought. At the time of Morpurgo’s visit Jewish rural land ownership was still rare, but purchases of agricultural land became increasingly common among Jewish merchants and manufacturers in the 1780s. For some it was about more than just investment diversification, as was the case with a Jewish cloth merchant who insisted on taking Morpurgo to a plot of land in the hills outside Ajaccio which was by all appearances little more than a fallow field. The merchant proudly informed Morpurgo that he was going to plant vines there, as it had always been his dream to own a vineyard - a dream which he had been unable to realize in his home country.

Another facet of social life newly open to Jewish participation was the military. At the time of Morpurgo’s visit, Jews in the regular army were virtually unknown. The Corsican army was dominated by interior Corsicans, with peasants filling the ranks and a mix of rural notables, noblemen, and former mercenaries comprising the officer corps. Service in the kingdom’s part-time military formations, however, was becoming increasingly popular among Jewish tradesmen. Membership in the provincial infantry was not favored as it often involved being sent to far-away posts, but the civic militias of the presidi offered a means to demonstrate patriotism, civic solidarity, and a certain military vigor which was not available to Jews elsewhere.

Particularly coveted among “middle class” Jewish artisans was membership in the companies of bombardieri, the part-time garrison artillerymen who were usually drawn from the ranks of the “practical trades” (carpenters, wheelwrights, smiths, and so on). Being an artillerist was considered more dignified for a tradesman than serving in the provincial infantry, and a bombardier’s duty seldom called him away from the city. Aside from the modest stipend and various perks, the post also offered opportunities for socialization: the bombardieri took part in civic events and maintained “bombardier halls” where off-duty company members could drink, dine, and discuss business and politics. For middle-class Jews who lacked the money and influence to break into “high society,” this was a way of building respectability and making connections with the broader (non-Jewish) urban middle class.

A curious development which Morpurgo hinted at in his work was the individual character of the relationship between the Jews and the Corsican state. In most of Europe, even in places like Livorno where there were few disabilities placed upon Jews, Jewish populations operated as a sort of “corporate nation” within the state. Jewish communities (often within ghettos) had their own systems of justice, politics, and administration, and the state government dealt with them only on a corporate basis through the parnasim, meaning “stewards” or “trustees,” leaders of the Jewish community who served as intermediaries between Jews and state agents. In some states, one specific Jew - often a Hofjude or “court factor” - spoke for all his coreligionists.

Corsican law, however, simply regarded Jewish citizens as citizens, not members of a corporate body. While this was a refreshing change for some Jewish immigrants who had chafed under the rule of deeply conservative Jewish oligarchies, the consequences were not always desirable. Many Jewish immigrants were accustomed to being able to resolve intra-community disputes internally, with Jewish courts giving opinions based on Halakhic law. In many countries this Jewish communal right to the internal administration of justice, at least for civil matters like matrimony and inheritance, was recognized by the state. Corsica, however, had no experience with such a parallel law system. Jewish Corsicans were instead subject to Corsican courts and Christian judges, whose rulings could be tainted by prejudice and who had neither knowledge of nor interest in Jewish custom. One judge memorably rejected an appeal to Jewish law regarding an inheritance dispute by declaring that it had as much relevance to the tribunal as “the edicts of the Grand Turk.” Jews could enter into private contracts which stipulated that both parties agreed to be subject to Halakhic law and would forgo any recourse to Corsican civil law, but Corsican judges rarely respected such contracts if one party defected from the agreement and brought the matter before a civil tribunal.

The lack of “corporate nationhood” also complicated the process of exerting political power. Without any officially recognized parnasim to speak for their community collectively, Jews had to seek power through Corsican institutions, but just because many Corsicans were willing to tolerate Jews did not mean that they readily admitted them to positions of formal power. Despite making up nearly a quarter of the population of Ajaccio at the end of the century, not one Jew was elected to join the anziani of Ajaccio until the 1800s. Christian families like the Peraldi, Rossi, and Buonaparte had dominated the city council for generations and had no incentive to let in new blood, let alone Jewish parvenus. In fact it took longer for a Jew to be elected to the anziani of Ajaccio than to the consulta generale, which seated its first Jewish procurator in 1789. An obvious contrast can be drawn with the status of the Catholic Church, which had dozens of reserved seats for curates, prelates, and monastic orders at the consulta and a formal line of communication to the government through the office of the Grand Almoner. “Tolerance” did not mean that the state did not play favorites, only that it inflicted no disabilities on individual citizens for their faith.[2]

As a consequence, Corsican Jews in the late 18th century had to rely on informal power which accrued to them by dint of their economic strength and their personal relationships with local officials, the ministry, and the court. Informal power could still be quite powerful, and could reach to the highest levels: Chancellor Paoli did not need to be reminded of the importance of Jewish industry and finance to the state’s bottom line, and the royal family frequently called upon the services of Jewish professionals (particularly doctors and bankers) who had opportunities to exert personal influence. The Jewish community understood the need to make the most of their economic clout and had a long tradition of gifts to the state, from cloth merchants donating the “black superfine cloth” which draped the coffin of Theodore I to coral brokers launching a subscription to purchase vessels for the Navy. This was all intended to remind the king and his government that the Corsican Jews were both loyal and useful, but a relationship based on utility is always fraught. After all, the state’s cost-benefit analysis might one day change, or those in positions of power might succumb to the temptation to abuse this relationship by demanding ever more generous “gifts” for preserving legal toleration.

Despite its fascinating portrait of Jewish society in Corsica, the Osservazioni elided most of the concerns and difficulties of the community because it was a polemic, not a work of dispassionate anthropology.[3] Morpurgo, who dedicated his work to Emperor Joseph II, used his rosy account of the Corsican Jewish community to make a case for religious tolerance and Jewish emancipation. While he did appeal to justice and sentiment, Morpurgo’s main thrust was economic - that tolerance was a rising tide that would lift all boats, including the ship of state. Moreover, Morpurgo attempted to show by the Corsican example that this economic boom came with no drawbacks - that contrary to the fears of many Christians (and some Jews), Jewish emancipation would not undermine civic harmony and would pose no danger to the faithful observance of either Christianity or Judaism.

Morpurgo’s work met with considerable success. It was highly praised by his fellow Jewish intellectuals; Mendelssohn hailed it as a masterful contribution to the “science” of tolerance. Emperor Joseph seems to have read it, or was at least aware of it, and the book is often claimed to have influenced his later edicts on religious toleration. In fact the book was considerably more influential in the German lands than in Italy - Morpurgo had published it in both languages - and the circulation of the work in Germany is associated with the relaxing of strictures against Jews by a number of German princes from the early 1780s. Many princes, statesmen, and bureaucrats in the Empire saw Corsica as an intriguing analogue to their own domains - a small state under a German prince (by breeding, if not culture), notionally sovereign yet continually menaced by larger neighbors, historically reliant on the sale of mercenaries but weighed down by an underdeveloped agrarian economy. If Jewish liberty could provide the economic boost needed to “regenerate” this backwards state, and without imperiling civic harmony, was it not an experiment worth repeating?

In 1780 the Osservazioni arrived in the Jewish community of Berlin and came into the hands of the electorate’s “Court Jew” Daniel Itzig. Itzig had made his initial fortune as a minter and thereafter expanded into banking, textiles, leather, ironworking, and mining. By 1770 he was one of the richest men in Berlin, and indeed in all of Brandenburg. Itzig was proud of his achievements and displayed his wealth magnificently: “Palais Itzig” was one of the largest and most impressive residences in all Berlin, boasting gardens, fountains, and an impressive painting collection. His real love, however, was philanthropy. Itzig himself was no philosopher and published no works, but he established a Jewish school with a modern curriculum and patronized numerous Jewish writers, scholars, and artists. He lobbied on behalf of the Jews of Brandenburg (of whom he was the official representative) to lift legal restrictions upon the community and advocated for full religious toleration. Not surprisingly, he had been a lifelong admirer of King Theodore.

Don Isacco Sonsino had tried to make the most of his contacts among the Sephardim of London and Amsterdam to raise funds for the Bank of Ajaccio, and thus far had not met with much success. Daniel Itzig, however, had contacts in the Amsterdam bullion market and it may be in this manner that he learned of Corsica’s struggle to rescue the national credit in 1783. Morpurgo’s argument had been premised on the fact that the Jews of Ajaccio had brought great economic benefits to Corsica; if the state were to suffer a fiscal collapse it would cast doubt on this achievement, even if the collapse was no fault of the Jews. Itzig realized that with one investment he could potentially “rescue” Morpurgo’s thesis, forward the cause of Jewish emancipation in his own homeland, and benefit the Corsican Jewish community. Itzig dispatched his son Isaak to Ajaccio, who arrived in October of 1783 and held meetings with Chancellor Paoli, Minister Carli, the bank directors, and even King Theodore II himself.

Itzig proposed to buy shares in the Bank of Ajaccio worth 300,000 gulden, or about 185,000 scudi, which would more than double the bank’s present assets. Although this would give Itzig a majority stake in the bank, he was a foreigner and thus any shares he purchased would be non-voting shares. Without actual influence in the bank’s governance Itzig requested certain assurances from the state, including the creation of a sinking fund which would commit specific government revenues to repaying debt principal. This infusion of cash was valuable enough on its own, but it also served as a signal to other financiers that the Bank of Ajaccio was a credible organization. If such an eminent and successful banker as Daniel Itzig had confidence in the bank there was little reason to doubt its solvency.

British 3% Consol, issued 1788​

Rather than continuing to sell shares, the bank opted to raise further capital by issuing annuities. Modeled after British “consols,” or consolidated annuities, these were bonds which paid their bearers annual interest in perpetuity, or until the government chose to redeem them. As Corsica was a riskier investment than Britain, the bank had to offer a higher interest rate than the 3% rate of British consols. 4% annuities from the Bank of Ajaccio met with only limited interest, in part because during wartime the British government sold their consols at well below par,[A] but in September of 1784 the Treaty of Paris formally ended the American War and British consols returned to par.

By early 1785 the bank’s total assets exceeded 400,000 scudi, allowing the bank to float a new loan to the government for 240,000 scudi which was used to pay off most of the government’s high interest war debt. Combined with the reduction of debt principal with the sinking fund, which was funded by the sale of mercenaries to Sardinia and a 2% increase on the coral duty, the consolidation of the debt through the sale of consols reduced the state’s annual debt service from over 100,000 scudi in 1783 to 62,000 scudi in 1786. In the same period, government revenues increased thanks to the growth of the coral, silk, and tobacco industries, the resumption of British trade, and general population growth. When the “two year suspension” on debt payments expired in 1785, Carli was able to meet the state’s obligations. The crisis had passed.

Chancellor Paoli utilized the bank not only to refinance old debts, but to fund the capital projects which he had long dreamt of. While most of the 240,000 scudi loan issued in 1784 was used to settle war debt, the chancellor retained 30,000 scudi from this sum to fund the rebuilding of Capraia and restart work on the Via Nazionale, the carriage road intended to run between Bastia and Ajaccio which would ultimately be completed in 1788. The chancellor had a long list of other projects - roads, bridges, drainage canals, mills, dock facilities - and although Corsica was still a poor country which operated under financial constraints, the stabilization of the country’s finances in the mid-1780s allowed some progress to be made on ventures which had languished as mere ideas since Paoli’s first entry into government in the 1750s.


Footnotes
[1] Morpurgo was not the first Jew to publish an account of his travels in Corsica. That distinction belongs to Haim Yosef David Azulai, a widely-traveled rabbi of Jerusalem who visited Ajaccio in 1774. Azulai’s travel diaries, however, were published only in Hebrew and never found wide circulation, nor were they intended as a political tract.
[2] The organs of state administration which did see a relatively early Jewish presence were the camere provinciali, the provincial administrative boards created by Federico to manage fiscal affairs at the regional level. Because the members of the camera were appointed by the Council of Finance, not elected, Jews were well-represented (indeed, over-represented) in the Ajaccio camera and also present in the camera of Bastia.
[3] Morpurgo did not completely omit any mention of Christian-Jewish friction, but he blamed such incidents entirely on the Jesuits. He contrasted the “productive nature” of the Jewish community with the “parasitic nature” of the Society of Jesus, and accused the Spanish Jesuits of holding the native Corsicans in contempt, contributing little to the common good, and using their positions as educators to promote bigotry and intolerance among the nation’s youth. Although this was obviously a gross exaggeration, the Spanish Jesuits were often critical of Theodoran tolerance, an attitude that would steadily drive a wedge between them and the government. Blaming the Jesuits was a convenient and effective tactic, as it allowed Morpurgo to dismiss any contraindications to his thesis as the work of foreign reactionary agitators - and since virtually every other monarch in Europe had already expelled or liquidated the Society, they presumably had nothing to worry about.

Timeline Notes
[A] A perpetual bond is a bond which does not mature (that is, it has no set expiration). If you buy a 3% consol for $10,000 from the government, the government pays you 3% interest on that bond ($300) every year in perpetuity. The government has the option of redeeming the consol at any time by paying back your $10,000 principal, but you as the bondholder cannot demand a redemption of the bond; the government pays you back when it feels like it. Formerly the British government had issued higher interest bonds to finance wars, but from the 1750s they shifted to a new system in which 3% consols were sold “below par” - that is, for less than their nominal value. If the government is selling 3% consols for 60% of par, that means I can buy a $10,000 consol by paying only $6,000, and I receive 3% interest on the face value of the bond ($10,000) - effectively making this a 5% bond. The government, of course, now has to pay me $10,000 to redeem a bond which I paid them only $6,000 to acquire, but this was originally conceived of as a selling point, as the buyer is rewarded for his faith in the British government in time of war with a handsome capital gain when peace arrives. But because the bond is perpetual, the government never actually needs to pay me back - if they want to, they can keep the bond on the books and keep paying me interest indefinitely, and in practice this is what the British government often did. Some British consols issued in the 18th century were only repaid in 2015, when the UK government decided to redeem all outstanding consols. Consols were popular as a form of government borrowing because they were flexible and could be redeemed at the government’s leisure, and were popular among buyers because they were highly liquid (there was a robust secondary market for consols, which were fully transferable) and offered a safe and reliable investment with a reasonable rate of return.

 

[Carp]

Realignment

Allegorical print of America and Britain, 1781​

The American War of Independence was a demonstration of the limits of British naval power. Undoubtedly the British Navy remained an extremely formidable force, and they had won their share of victories. Faced with a global war against the Bourbon powers and their own American subjects, however, this force was simply spread too thin. The Bourbons never seriously entertained another assault on England after the Battle of Land’s End, but that defeat had so shocked the British that they committed far more of their ships than necessary to the defense of their home waters. Even Britain’s prodigious shipbuilding capacity could not keep up with the needs of the Navy, which scrambled to defend Britain’s holdings in India, the Mediterranean, and the West Indies while simultaneously attempting to blockade the North American coast, guard the sea lanes from enemy privateers, and maintain a huge battle fleet in the Channel. It simply could not be done, and the consequence was defeat.

Yet the victors derived surprisingly little benefit from their exertions. The territories which changed hands as a consequence of the war were barely visible on a map. Spain recovered Minorca and drove the British from Belize, but failed to take Gibraltar despite a grueling siege. France and Britain returned to the status quo ante bellum in America, with Britain returning Saint-Jean (which they had captured early in the war) in exchange for the reversion of French advances in the Caribbean. France’s only actual territorial gains were the Tabarka concession and the port of Cuddalore in India, which had been captured in 1781. Of course France had not entered the war for the sake of territory, but to break Britain’s mercantilist grip on their North American colonies, which was successful: the Americans won their independence, opening their markets and manufactures to the rest of the world. If the French had expected that the political divide between Britain and the colonies would also cause an economic divide, however, they were to be disappointed. The Anglo-American trade relationship recovered quickly, and the gains realized by French merchants were limited.

Although the birth of the United States of America was the most historically significant outcome of the war, the consequences which were most immediately relevant to the Kingdom of Corsica were British cessions in the Mediterranean. The loss of Minorca was the hardest blow to British power, for while Gibraltar was clearly a more defensible position, Port Mahon had a better harbor and was superior as a naval base. Minorca was a self-sustaining community with its own population, unlike the barren rock of Gibraltar which was entirely dependent upon imports in both war and peace. Britain’s ability to project naval power into the Mediterranean was thus significantly curtailed, along with their ability to effectively blockade France’s Mediterranean coast if the two powers were to find themselves at war again.

It was the cession of Tabarka, however, which caused the most consternation in Corsica. The English had no coral fishermen, and the Barbary Company thus relied on skilled foreigners - chiefly Corsicans - to exploit the Tunisian reefs. While the Corsicans were initially required to sell all their coral to the Company at established rates, they covertly “repatriated” significant amounts of coral to sell on their own for better prices at Ajaccio and Livorno. In an effort to curtail this smuggling the Company decided to meet the corallieri halfway and consented to allow them to legally retain a portion of their catch to dispose of as they saw fit. Plans to teach Englishmen to take the place of the Corsicans and other Italian corallieri never got off the ground, leaving Corsican fishermen in control of the Tunisian reefs for the foreseeable future.

The French, however, operated quite differently. Their equivalent of the Barbary Company was the Compagnie Royale d'Afrique, which had been mostly driven out of Tunisia during the 1740s and banned from the region entirely in 1760, relegating them to operations in Algeria. Unlike the Barbary Company, the CRA had plenty of experienced Provençal coral fishermen at its disposal and had no need for the Corsicans. Some Corso-Tabarchini sought employment with the CRA, but the French monopolists were even less tolerant of smuggling than the British and had no need to offer the Corsicans concessions. If the Corsicans did not like how the CRA did business, they were easily replaced with Provençals. The Corsican population of Tabarka fell steadily after 1783 as corallieri abandoned the island.

Many Corsicans continued fishing in Tunisian waters anyway, but this was increasingly fraught with danger. French patrols were the least of their concerns, for in 1782 the new Bey of Tunis, Hammuda ibn Ali, broke off nearly half a century of cordial relations and declared war on Corsica. This was somewhat less alarming than it might seem: a “declaration of war” from a Barbary state was merely a statement of intent to plunder, formal notification that one’s ships were now fair game. “War” of this kind was the default state of affairs between the Barbary states and the Christian kingdoms, abridged only temporarily by treaties in which the Christians agreed to pay protection money. By this standard, Corsica had been “at war” with Algiers and Tripoli for the entirety of its independent existence.

The bey’s decision to abrogate the long peace between Corsica and Tunis was made in the context of the American War. With the great powers distracted, the Mediterranean was ripe for plundering. Middling naval powers like Denmark-Norway could guard their own convoys or pay tribute in exchange for peace, but anyone else faced dire peril. Hammuda knew that Corsica did not have the strength to protect its own shipping, and his corsair captains were clamoring for more targets to make the most of this piratical golden age. The bey was willing to reestablish peace if Corsica was willing to pay for it, but at the moment Corsica could not even pay its creditors. Corsican corallieri used false flags for protection, hoping that the ensign of Britain or France would make any would-be pirates think again, but such a ruse would not stand up to close scrutiny. Between 1782 and 1787 more than 300 Corsicans were captured by corsairs, chiefly Tunisians. A few fortunate individuals were able to buy their freedom, but most were poor sailors who could expect nothing better than to spend the last few years of their lives chained to a rowing bench.

Hammuda ibn Ali, Bey of Tunis​

Although the decline of “Corsican Tabarka” was entirely predictable in the event of a French victory, King Theodore II nevertheless felt betrayed. As far as Tabarka went, he had no legal leg to stand on - the island had never been Corsican territory - but as far back as 1779 he had expressed his hopes to the French envoy that Corsica, being a faithful friend of the Bourbons, might merit some consideration with respect to its interests in the Tunisian reefs. Had the French merely ignored him, that would have been bad enough, but in 1785 the CRA purchased the coral fishing rights to the Galite Isles from Genoa - the very same rights which the French had refused to give Corsica in the Treaty of Poggio Imperiale. At the time the French had argued a technicality, claiming that it was a bilateral matter between Genoa and Tunis, but it now seemed as though they had thwarted Corsica’s ambitions just so they could seize the rights for themselves. Of course the French foreign ministry and the CRA were two different entities, but to Theo it was impossible to see this as anything other than French perfidy and further proof that Corsica’s rights were not taken seriously at Versailles.

This was music to the ears of Sir Matthew Beckford, Britain’s longtime envoy in Bastia, who believed that the road to the recovery of Britain’s strength in the Mediterranean ran through Corsica. The island had several good natural harbors, and Ajaccio, Calvi, and San Fiorenzo all offered excellent bases from which to menace the coast of France and cut off French trade with the Levant. Pasquale Paoli, a known Anglophile, was now head of the Corsican government, and the king’s view of France had soured considerably. While Beckford acknowledged in his reports that the government’s policy had generally been to reject peacetime subsidies, which were always unpopular with the electorate, he noted that Corsican goodwill could be very cheaply bought and cultivating a relationship now could yield a decisive strategic advantage in the future.

The British government, however, was not presently of a mind to take advantage of this. The new ministry which took power in the wake of the Treaty of Paris set its sights on reconciliation rather than revenge, and mere months after the end of the war British diplomats were sounding out their French counterparts as to the possibility of a return to the Anglo-French alliance of the early 18th century. Their argument was that France and Britain, by wasting their strength and resources in repeated wars for limited gains, had allowed the “eastern powers” - Russia and Austria - to become unacceptably strong. With the French army working hand in glove with the British navy (and British finances), these two powers could give the law to Europe and restore the balance of power.

Britain’s concerns reflected the changing dynamics of European politics. One of the consequences of the Prussian War was the apparent division of Europe into two “systems” - a Western System, dominated by the Anglo-Bourbon rivalry, and an Eastern System, characterized by the complicated web of interests between Russia, Austria, and the Turks, with Poland, Brandenburg, and Saxony playing secondary roles. Before 1760 these theaters had been closely intertwined, but the breakup of the Anglo-Austrian alliance, the chastisement of Prussia, and France’s increasing financial constraints had greatly diminished the ability of the western powers to influence the course of events in central and eastern Europe. Britain had initially supported Russia in its war against the Ottomans, believing that the Russians might prove a useful counterbalance to France in the Mediterranean, but they had repented of this error before the war was over - Emperor Pyotr’s crushing victories over the Turks at sea, his sweeping conquests on the Black Sea littoral, and rumors of a Russian-backed “Archipelago principality” surprised and frightened them. France, for its part, had always seen Russia as a strategic opponent given France’s traditional friendship with the Turks, the Poles, and the Swedes, but Versailles simply lacked the money to continue its old policy of bolstering these states with lavish subsidies while simultaneously preparing itself for another showdown with Britain.

Austria, too, was a concern for both powers. British politicians had long clung to the idea of returning to the “old system” of the Anglo-Austrian alliance against France which had collapsed in the 50s, but it had become clear to most that this was no longer practical. The ambitions of Emperor Joseph II to expand both the influence and territory of the House of Habsburg within the Empire were quite clear: He was known to be in talks with the Elector Palatine over his possible inheritance of Bavaria, had negotiated a defensive alliance with Denmark-Norway to contain the ambitions of a presumed Russo-Brandenburg axis, and had made threatening noises about free trade and navigation against the Dutch. British diplomats warned that Joseph and Pyotr might seek to resolve the tensions between them by carving up Poland, Turkish Europe, or both. The French shared these concerns, and many French statesmen viewed the treaty with their old Habsburg enemy as a mésalliance. As long as Britain was France’s primary rival, it made sense to avoid continental entanglements and bury the hatchet with Austria, but if war with Britain was no longer anticipated then the Franco-Austrian alliance was nothing more than a license for Joseph to do as he wished in central Europe.

While the proffered Anglo-French alliance did not immediately materialize, Britain’s diplomatic posture meant that any attempt to pull Corsica into a strategic relationship would undermine their own foreign policy. A British presence on Corsica would do nothing to check the ambitions of Austria or Russia; indeed, its only possible object would be the containment of France, and this was not a signal London wished to send at a time when they were trying to assure the French of their pacific intentions. There were certainly dissenting voices in Parliament who doubted the possibility of any permanent cross-channel détente and supported the idea of shoring up Britain’s strategic position against France, but for now they were in the minority.

Corsican foreign policy was also undergoing a sea change. The fall of the Matra ministry and Chancellor Paoli’s purge of the gigliati from the cabinet had already driven the Francophile faction from power, but now the growing resentments of King Theodore - along with his wife’s pro-Spanish sympathies - had made such views unfashionable at court as well. The question before the ministers of the Council of State was no longer whether France was a threat to Corsica, but rather what should be done about the threat which they posed. “Felix respublica,” declared the foreign minister, referring to America, “to be born so far from the rapacious courts of Europe!”

Chancellor Paoli held a cautious but straightforwardly Anglophile position on foreign policy. Confident in the resilience of Britain’s financial and military structures, he argued that Britain would soon recover from this defeat, and their retention of Gibraltar meant that they still had the ability and interest to exert themselves in Corsica’s neighborhood. Far from being a slavish advocate of the English, Paoli emphasized that the kingdom should not sacrifice its sovereignty or territory to obtain Britain’s favor, and he had no desire to make an overt enemy of France. In Paoli’s estimation, however, the best hedge against French interference was friendship with France’s rival, and the only great power which had the capacity to shield Corsica against France’s navy.

The opposing view was most ably articulated by Foreign Minister Giovan Francesco Cuneo d’Ornano. Cuneo d’Ornano did not oppose establishing cordial relations with the British, but he was skeptical of the depth of their commitment to Italian affairs and viewed Britain chiefly as a commercial partner like Denmark or the Netherlands rather than a guarantor of Corsican security. Contrary to Paoli, he argued that the safest way of warding off France was not to cozy up to her enemies, but her friends. To this end, Cuneo d’Ornano prioritized the maintenance of close ties with Spain and sought to repair relations with Austria which had been strained by the Coral War. Although Emperor Joseph had chosen to remain out of the fray, Corsica’s aggression had annoyed Vienna. The Corsicans had assaulted a notional imperial subject, but more importantly they had nearly triggered a larger conflagration between Sardinia and Genoa and had given France the opportunity to insert itself as the arbiter of Italian affairs, which was not necessarily in Austria’s interest.

The difference between these views was in some sense a matter of degree, and Paoli and Cuneo d’Ornano were in agreement more often than they were opposed. Corsica’s acquisition of the British frigate Nightingale in 1785 was facilitated by Cuneo d’Ornano, while Cuneo d’Ornano’s plan to conduct “dynastic diplomacy” by convincing the king to allow his brother Carlo, the Duke of Sartena, to seek a position in the Austrian army was supported by Paoli. The British government’s failure to reciprocate Paoli’s interest in a strategic relationship, however, meant the victory of Cuneo d’Ornano’s position by default. The chancellor increasingly concentrated his attention on his plans for domestic reforms, leaving the “Maestro della Pace” with considerable latitude to direct the kingdom’s foreign relations as he saw fit - at least, as long as he retained the king’s confidence.

Relations with the new American state which emerged in 1784 were low on the minister’s list of priorities. Officially, the Kingdom of Corsica recognized the United States of America mere days after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, when the recently-appointed Corsican envoy to France Marquis Antonio Maria d’Ornano informed the American delegation in Paris that Corsican free ports were “open to the ships and commerce of the American States.” American relations, however, were not deemed important enough to merit the considerable cost of sending official representation across the Atlantic. Yet despite the great distance between them, these two revolutionary countries did share a dilemma which would eventually bring them into common cause. Just as the cession of Tabarka had stripped Corsican fishermen of the protection of the British flag, America’s independence meant they could no longer rely upon that flag to protect them against the Barbary corsairs. Neither state was able - or willing - to pay tribute in exchange for peace, and that left force as the only answer.

 

[Carp]

Royal Relations

Arms of the Duke of Sartena [1]​

Although young Theo had once entertained doubts as to his fitness to rule, especially as he reflected upon the death of his younger brother Federico, once the laurel wreath was placed on his brow he never looked back. In his mind he was destined to be here, rooted in the very soil of Corsica, ordained by fate - and God, of course - to lead the nation. Although he never would have used the term, Theo has sometimes been described as Corsica’s own Sun King, the Corsican monarch who ascended to the throne in the last flowering of the “Age of Absolutism” and conceived of himself as the central point of Corsican society around which all else circled in harmonious orbit.

The king’s family played an ambiguous role in this orrery of state. His queen, of course, had an established biological duty; above all else, royal dynasties had to propagate themselves. Beyond this, Eleanora and Elisabetta had created some precedent for the social and organizational roles which a Corsican queen might fulfill. Yet these roles had been idiosyncratic, based on the personal interests, strengths, and limitations of these two women, leaving the eighteen year old Laura Flaminia Boncompagni-Ludovisi with only a vague sense of how she fit into this foreign society. The position of Federico’s other children was even less clear, for there had never been royal siblings before. The closest thing Federico had to a royal peer was Don Giovan, whom he had ushered off to a comfortable (and permanent) exile in Germany. Lisadora was accounted for, having been married off to a Savoyard cadet who now resided in Paris, but Princess Carina and Prince Carlo each had to make their own choice: either find a way to exist within Theo’s little universe, or escape it entirely.

Adjusting to life as the Queen of Corsica had not been easy for Laura. The Palace of the Governors was cramped and squalid compared to the sumptuous Boncompagni palace at Isola di Liri or the sprawling gardens and boulevards of the Villa Ludovisi in Rome. Laura had exchanged Rome and all its wonders for Bastia, which by continental standards was scarcely a “city” at all and had no culture to speak of. There were no theaters, operas, or concerts. Her rich and fashionable social circle in Rome was replaced with a few dozen flinty and uncouth Corsican noblemen and their dour, ignorant wives. Laura admired Theo, having been quite taken with him from their first meeting, but the king seemed to have little time for her - his idea of good entertainment involved horses, guns, swords, and being anywhere except the palace.

Her only consolations were her piano, her spaniel Sofia, and the Queen Mother. Elisabetta had been devastated by her husband’s sudden death and was still in mourning when her new daughter-in-law arrived, and Laura made a special effort to comfort and befriend her. Laura was from a much higher strata of society than Elisabetta, who was merely the illegitimate daughter of a French count, but both had left behind a more “civilized” life on the continent to become a royal spouse on a remote island full of strangers. Court life in Bastia, such as it was, had practically revolved around Elisabetta until her husband’s death; Theo had clearly gotten his pleasant and outgoing nature from his mother’s side. Elisabetta never completely recovered from the loss of her husband, but she quickly warmed to her new daughter-in-law and the two women became very close. Laura kept Elisabetta company and did her best to cheer and entertain her, and Elisabetta instructed her daughter-in-law on Corsican society and the personalities of the court.

Laura also sought advice for dealing with her husband, who did not seem particularly interested in her despite concerted efforts to gain his attention. As he seemed indifferent to poetry, she wrote him music; just a month after her wedding she composed an ebullient piano bagatelle which she entitled “Pour mon Roi” (for my King). Learning of his horticultural interest, she had her family send her rose varietals from the Ludovisi gardens and gave him a rare first edition of Hesperides, a beautifully illustrated multi-volume work on citrus and orangeries by the 17th century botanist Giovanni Battista Ferrari. When she learned that Theo had kept a “mistress” in Tuscany, Laura wrote melodramatically that she was so sick she could not leave her bed. (She was assured that this affair was over and done with by Princess Carina, of all people - apparently Carina told her that if the king was still pining for some opera singer, she would know about it.) Despite all this it appears that the matter still necessitated the direct intervention of the Queen Mother, who scolded her son for “neglecting” his new wife. When it became known that Laura was pregnant in 1779 it was quietly joked that Theo had done it on his mother’s command.

A series of plates from Ferrari’s Hesperides. Although Ferrari himself was a scientist, the book featured illustrations made by some of the finest painters and engravers of his day, and was hailed for its extraordinary detail and accuracy.​

In October of 1779 the queen gave birth to a son, christened Teodoro Antonio Francesco, Prince of Corti. “Antonino,” however, would not reach adulthood - he died in May of 1781 of a “putrid throat” (likely diphtheria), only 19 months old. Laura took the loss badly and disappeared from public life for several weeks, and Theo was also very affected. Yet the short life of Antonino was not all for nothing: Becoming parents, followed by their shared experience of bereavement after their son’s death, seems to have brought Theo and Laura closer together. In October it was announced that the queen was pregnant again, and in April of 1782 she gave birth to a daughter, Vittoria Maria Elisabetta, whose name was chosen because she was born only ten days after Genoa’s evacuation of Capraia. A second daughter, Marianna Giulia Teodora, followed in September of 1783, and in March of 1785 a new Prince of Corti was announced with the birth of Arrigo Francesco Teodoro.[2]

As Laura became more confident and assured in her position, she began making an effort to bring her version of “culture” to Corsica. She arranged concerts and plays at the royal palace, and in later years helped fund and design the country’s first dedicated concert house. The queen would occasionally even hold her own recitals for the court; she was a talented pianist in her own right who stayed abreast of the latest continental pieces (and, as mentioned, occasionally made her own compositions). She became the patroness of the Accademia dei Vagabondi literary society, making her support conditional upon the society opening its membership to women, and contributed some of her own poems under various pseudonyms. As the representative of continental high fashion she was often emulated by elite women who wanted to be seen as properly “modern” (although Laura’s own tastes were relatively conservative). While the queen did not have the social charm of either her husband or her mother-in-law - her public persona was impeccably formal and reserved, even stiff - she did manage to win the respect of her adopted people.

Laura’s polar opposite (and occasional rival) was the king’s eldest sister Maria Anna Caterina Lucia, known popularly as “Carina.” By this time it was clear that Princess Carina, who celebrated her 30th birthday in 1782, would never marry. After Federico’s death she had received one more proposal from Sigismondo Chigi della Rovere, the Prince of Farnese - a widower 16 years her senior - but while Theo gave his assent, he stressed that he would not make his sister marry against her will, and Carina declined the offer. Theo may have been pleased that he didn’t have to pay a dowry, but this did mean that he would have to support his sister financially for the rest of her life. Much to her delight, Theo appointed her as the colonel-in-chief of the Royal Dragoons, which not only gave her another excuse to wear military dress (not that she needed it) but also provided her with a salary.[3]

Carina was a controversial figure, and not just for choosing to remain unmarried.[4] She is perhaps most famous for her sartorial choices, being fond of masculine (and especially military) dress and wearing breeches when out of doors, although she always appeared at court in conventional clothing for a woman of her station and was usually depicted as such.[5] She had a quick wit and was the best linguist of the family, speaking Italian, French, German, Spanish, and English quite fluently. That wit was not always used for good, as Carina was notoriously sharp-tongued and could be downright cruel. She made a sport of inventing (usually unflattering) nicknames for everyone at court and mastered the art of the cutting remark. Count Ciavaldini, a frequent hunting companion of the king, remarked that the princess did not really respect anyone except “the king, her mother, and her horses.” Queen Laura thought her petty, crass, impious, and immature. In Carina’s defense, however, her society did not really give her a chance to use her intellect for anything more than her own amusement. Theo valued her insight and often solicited her advice, but nobody considered offering the king’s sister a government post.

With few official responsibilities, the princess was mostly left to pursue her own interests. Aside from her honorary colonelcy, her only real “job” - as befitting the “Corsican Diana” - was as the de facto royal stablemaster. Technically the equerries, grooms, and other equestrian staff were supervised by the maestro di stalla, but in practice this was mostly an honorary post and Carina actually oversaw this part of the household. When not at the stables or reviewing her dragoons, Carina could usually be found riding, hunting, or reading; despite her reputation as an “outdoorswoman,” the princess was an avid reader who was particularly fond of avant-garde French philosophy. Biographers have variously described her as a freethinker, skeptic, or even an atheist. She was fond of the works of the French materialists and despised the Jesuits, remarking that her pious younger sister Lisadora had been “ruined” by her Jesuit education. She also lobbied her brother on behalf of the STB (Società Tipografica Bastiese), Bastia’s controversial printing syndicate which flourished in the 1780s and was a constant target of Jesuits and conservatives.

While Carina could be a handful, Theo’s youngest sibling presented the king with a different sort of challenge. Carlo Teodoro Maurizio, Duke of Sartena, was a young man of seventeen by the beginning of the Coral War in 1781. Although he resembled his older brother physically, there was an eight year difference between the two and they had never been particularly close. They also contrasted in disposition - unlike Theo’s generally agreeable personality, Carlo had a restless intensity to him. He was talkative and had a curious mind, but was also prickly, argumentative, impatient, and easily bored (unless something interested him, in which case he could not be pried away from it). He seemed to be a young man with something to prove, and there was no opportunity to prove himself on little Corsica.

Theo did not really know what to do with him. Carlo had asked his brother to give him a military role when war had broken out with Genoa, and when a landing force was being prepared to break the siege of Capraia the prince begged Theo to allow him to lead it. After all, their father had only been 21 years old when he had led the conquest of Capraia from the Genoese in 1747. Theo flatly refused: he was not going to entrust a serious military venture to a seventeen year old, and at that moment the Duke of Sartena was Theo’s heir presumptive and the only chance of the House of Neuhoff continuing in the male line if something were to happen to Theo. The prince was furious, particularly given that Theo himself had gone off to “lead” the siege of Bonifacio and suffered no ill consequences.

After the war, presuming that Carlo simply wanted some measure of independence - something Theo could sympathize with - the king decided to find him a bride. A dowry would give Carlo financial autonomy, and a family would give him some responsibilities of his own. Carlo, however, was totally uninterested in Theo’s proposals, which mainly involved matches with other wealthy Roman families suggested to him by the queen. Carlo instead asked to be able to seek his fortune abroad, which the queen mother resisted and Theo refused outright. He did not like the idea of a member of the royal family serving another monarch, believing it would damage his efforts to make the Neuhoffs perceived as the equals of other royal dynasties and might allow Carlo to be used as leverage against him.

Foreign Minister Giovan Francesco Cuneo d’Ornano came to Carlo’s defense. The minister pointed out that having a prince of royal blood serve a foreign monarch was not inherently disreputable, as one needed only to consider the celebrated commanders Maurice de Saxe or Eugene of Savoy (although Maurice was illegitimate and Eugene was from a cadet royal line). Moreover, if Carlo were to serve the emperor, who was superior in rank to any king, nobody could perceive it as a diminution of the status of the House of Neuhoff. Cuneo d’Ornano also shared his ulterior motive with the king, which was that sending Carlo to Vienna to offer his services to the emperor might help strengthen relations which had been strained during the Coral War. Lacking any better ideas, Theo was eventually convinced, and in 1784 the Duke of Sartena sailed from Corsica and presented himself before the imperial court in Vienna as Prinz Karl Teodor Moritz von Neuhoff, Herzog von Sartena.

Although Emperor Joseph II was willing to go along with this, the Duke of Sartena was an awkward fit. He might have had an easier time of it 50 years prior, when the upper ranks of the Habsburg army had been dominated by a clique of elite aristocrats with no formal training, but the War of the Austrian Succession had demonstrated the shortcomings of an army led by well-bred amateurs. The increasing technical and logistical complexity of warfare made education more important than ever, and well-connected generals from old aristocratic families like Lobkowitz and Neipperg had embarrassed themselves while “new men” like Browne and Lacy (both nobles, but not part of the court elite) had brought Austria victory. The Oberdirector of the Theresian military academy at Wiener Neustadt, Count Anton Colloredo (who had coincidentally commanded the imperial occupation of southern Corsica), warned his cadets that the “splendor of nobility” served only to illuminate the failings of a man who had no merits other than the “accidental advantage” of his breeding. It was truly a new age, and a twenty year old foreign prince with no military experience or training showing up at Vienna and seeking a commission was something of a throwback.

Karl Borromäus Joseph, Fürst von Liechtenstein​

Fortunately for Carlo, there was one man of station in Vienna who actually had a familial connection to the Neuhoffs: General der Cavallerie Karl Borromäus Joseph, Prince of Liechtenstein. Liechtenstein’s wife Eleonore von Oettingen-Spielberg was the niece of Queen Eleanora (the wife of Theodore I) and her father Count Johann Aloys von Oettingen-Spielberg had been the guardian of King Federico’s sisters (the youngest of whom had married Ludwig Eugen, the future Duke of Württemberg). Liechtenstein, now 54, was a distinguished general, a former Inspector-General of Cavalry, and a favorite of Emperor Joseph. Possibly on the urging of his wife, Liechtenstein offered to take on the Duke of Sartena as a Flügeladjutant (“wing-adjutant,” a junior staff officer or aide). At best, he might learn something as an assistant to a seasoned commander; at worst, an incompetent adjutant was unlikely to do much harm.

Carlo quickly made a favorable impression on the general. Although the prince had no military education, he was far from uneducated. His Jesuit tutors had managed to drill mathematics and geometry into him, and like all the Neuhoff siblings he could speak Italian, French, and German fluently (the product of being raised at an Italian court by a German father and a French mother). Liechtenstein thought him an intelligent young man and praised his work ethic in particular. Given his status and connections, Carlo could have easily avoided any real duties, but instead he pored over every report and treatise Liechtenstein could give him and dutifully observed every maneuver and evolution of Liechtenstein’s cavalry on the parade grounds. Liechtenstein may have taken Carlo on merely out of familial obligation, but he soon came to rely on Carlo as an aide.

Perhaps Carlo was industrious by nature or was just eager to prove himself worthy, but it probably helped that he did not have much else going for him in Vienna. Rather than succumbing to the allure of the big city like some stereotypical wide-eyed boy from the provinces, Carlo’s instinct was to define himself against it and make a virtue of austerity. He was famously a hater of opera, which was practically the national pastime of the Viennese elite, describing it as “dreadfully tedious” and a waste of time. Despite his connections to the court through Liechtenstein, who also initiated him into the Masonic lodge Zum heiligen Joseph, he struggled to make friends or relate to his notional peers. HIs fellow officers thought him a blue-blooded dilettante and nicknamed him der Schreiberprinz (“the clerk-prince”) as his only “military experience” was behind a writing desk, while the courtiers sneered at his ignorance of fashion and culture - what else could one expect from the family of the Lorbeerkönig? The Duke of Sartena yearned desperately for war to grant him an opportunity to prove himself worthy and shame his tormentors. He would not have to wait too long.


Footnotes
[1] The use of “cadency” in Corsican royal arms was not formalized until the reign of King Federico, who declared that the Prince of Corti would bear the royal arms with the addition of a red lambel (label) and laurel branches. Federico himself had used these arms informally in the 1760s as the Prince of Capraia and heir-designate. Yet while he established the system of creating titular dukedoms for royal cadets, Federico does not seem to have created cadenced arms for them, perhaps because none of his younger sons reached adulthood before his own death. The arms of the Duke of Sartena were actually created by the duke himself around 1788. The addition of a bordure was a common sign of cadency, and Carlo explained that he chose a gold bordure around the black-and-white royal arms as an homage to the black and gold colors of the Habsburg monarchy which he now served. King Theodore II found this acceptable and, in his capacity as the dynastic head, formally approved this design for the use of Carlo and his heirs.
[2] Arrigo, a medieval Tuscan variant of Enrico (Henry), was an unusual choice, and a product of Theo’s interest in Corsican history. Several of the Cinarchesi bore this name, most famously Arrigo della Rocca, Count of Corsica. Arrigo della Rocca held the position of Lieutenant-General of Aragon and notionally ruled Corsica on their behalf, but declared himself “sovereign prince” of Corsica in 1399, just a few years before his death. He was the uncle of Vincentello d’Istria, Theo’s direct ancestor through his mother’s side. Contemporary English-language sources often referred to Theo’s son as “Henry of Corsica,” but in modern texts the name is more often left untranslated.
[3] It was not unusual for a royal woman to be the notional commander of a regiment. The Queen of France, for instance, was the colonel of the infantry regiment La Reine. Usually this was a purely ceremonial role, and certainly no Queen of France ever wore an infantry officer’s waistcoat and breeches.
[4] Carina’s sexuality and gender identity have long been subjects of debate. She refused marriage and is not known to have had any romantic relationships with men, but nevertheless preferred male social company. In fact Carina seems to have disliked most (if not all) of the women in her life, declaring her general contempt for the ladies of court and bemoaning the “defects of our sex” in a letter to her brother. Then again, the social circle of Corsican court women was quite small, and virtually nobody within it shared Carina’s education, to say nothing of her interests or morals. Carina has often been described as a “tomboy,” but some more recent works have argued that she ought to be considered as transgender, pointing to her cross-dressing, preference for masculine hobbies and social roles, and some (admittedly rare) moments in her letters when she appears to speak of herself as a man, for instance describing herself as speaking "as one man to another” to a state minister.
[5] Despite this, the best-known portrait of Carina is also the most “masculine,” portraying her astride a rearing horse and wearing her colonel’s uniform. Aristocratic women riding astride are not unknown in 18th century portraiture, but most such female equestrian portraits from this century are part of a pair, depicting a king and queen (or duke and duchess, etc.) each on a horse. The other best-known portrait of Carina went in the opposite direction entirely: In 1786 she posed for an allegorical portrait as the goddess Diana, which was not only apt for her specifically but was a common trope in royal portraiture at the time. Typically for the genre, she wears a white gown, a leopard skin as a shawl, and a golden crescent in her loose red hair, and holds a golden bow and a sheaf of arrows. Queen Laura thought it was a flattering portrait but Carina loathed it, and it was not put on display until after her death.

 

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In the Court of the Laurel King

Villa "il Fontanone" on the hillside above Cervioni​

Theodore I had many capitals over the course of his reign. During the Revolution the king had established his chief residence at Cervioni, but subsequently moved to Vescovato, Corti, and finally Bastia over the course of the war. After 1749 the king moved between Bastia, Corti, and Ajaccio depending on his needs and whims, but the growth of the Corsican administration and his own family made this roaming less and less practical. Theodore personally preferred Ajaccio and settled permanently at the Augustinian Palace during his later years, but by this time the government and Theodore’s extended family had settled at the Palace of the Governors in Bastia, which offered the best amenities and swift communication with the Italian mainland.[1] Under King Federico Bastia’s supremacy was confirmed, and the king rarely left the city except to attend the consulta generale in Corti.

Wherever the king was, poor infrastructure and economic constraints meant that attending him in person was a significant undertaking for many Corsicans. While a few southern sgio were true rentiers, living a quasi-feudal existence on their lands worked by sharecroppers or laborers, many "elites," noble or otherwise, were little more than independent smallholders (proprietari) who could not afford to leave their lands for long periods of time. While procuratori only needed to attend one assembly a year, the members of the dieta had to “reside in the court of the sovereign” for at least 6 weeks during their annual term,[2] and a secretary or minister of state had to reside at Bastia for most of the year. These positions were all stipendiary, but still required the men who held these offices to abandon fields, orchards, families, and communal obligations for longer than many were willing to accept. This was not only a formidable obstacle to constructing a full-time national administration, but hampered the development of a “national” aristocracy of the sort that had been constituted at Versailles, the royal court par excellence which had served to concentrate the French nobility permanently under the watchful eye of le Roi Soleil.

The “court” of Bastia was not a permanent assembly of the nobility, but a seasonally rotating cast of characters who might show up for only a few months, weeks, or even days before making their way back to the provinces for the rest of the year. The court had a seasonal ebb and flow: Attendance was low during the summer harvest, then spiked in early September as many dignitaries who had already made the effort to travel to the consulta generale chose to add Bastia to their itinerary, then fell again as winter snows made travel more difficult, and finally evened out in the spring. Some nobles might not make the trip at all, or only show up every few years to remind the king of their existence. Northerners were overrepresented for reasons of simple geography, compounding their already considerable numerical advantage.

The difference in attendance between men and women was also significant. Notwithstanding the frequent presence of women in local elections, most Corsicans considered national politics to be “men’s business,” and visitors to court often left their wives at home to tend to domestic affairs and agricultural labor in their absence. Just as there were few “men of leisure” in Corsica, there were few women of leisure; there was no sense that a woman ought to be exempted from domestic chores merely because one addressed her as signora. Many considered travel to be too difficult or undignified for women, and provincial noblemen were sometimes concerned that the journey to Bastia - or the court itself - might endanger the honor and virtue of their female relations, particularly if they were expected to remain at Bastia for some time. It was always difficult for Corsican queens to find well-bred ladies-in-waiting to attend to them because very few Corsican families were willing to send young, unmarried women far away from the direct supervision of their fathers and brothers.

The court protocol of Bastia was very loosely based on that of Versailles, which was the royal court Theodore I had been most familiar with, albeit in a form so reduced and simplified as to be almost unrecognizable. The premier event of the day was the morning ceremony or lever (“to rise” in French), although after King Theodore II “Italianized” court protocol in the 1790s it became known as the alba (“dawn”). Unlike at Versailles there was no petit lever, the ceremonial intrusion into the king’s private chambers in which select members of court would witness him be dressed and groomed. Theodore I had valued his privacy, and the Corsicans would probably have found such an indiscreet display embarrassing and bizarre. After rising, dressing, and grooming with the help of his private staff, the king would usually have a light breakfast and then proceed to the antechamber, or living room.

In the antechamber the king would be attended by his “familiars:” the court marshal (maresciallo di corte), the chamberlain (gran cameriere), the high steward (gran maggiordomo), the grand chancellor, the grand almoner, the three delegati residenti (resident members of the dieta), and a few other intimates.[3] His wife would also join him at this stage; they had separate bedrooms and living rooms and would usually go through their respective morning routines separately, not seeing each other until the queen arrived at the king’s antechamber already in full court dress. For anyone else, being summoned to the antechamber along with the familiari was a rare honor. Here, the king would go over the day’s plans with his household officials, read letters, and discuss any preliminary business that was not appropriate for the general audience.

After this the king would proceed to the sala maggiore (great hall), where the rest of the court would already be gathered. A coronet of the Guardia Nobile would announce “mesdames et messieurs, le Roi” (from the 1790s, “signore e signori, il Re”) and the attendees would bow while the king took his throne. If the queen was present, she would then take her seat beside him. The chamberlain would then ring a silver bell to mark the beginning of the general audience, and the attendees were announced and presented themselves before the throne in order of precedence. Members of the royal family came first, followed by foreign envoys,[4] and then the Corsican nobility in order - knights of the Order of Redemption, marquesses, counts, hereditary knights, catenati, and finally untitled nobility (e.g. the son of a nobleman, addressed as don but not yet a knight/count/marquis).

As each dignitary was introduced, they would step before the dais, bow to the king, and exclaim “votre sérénissime majesté”/“vostra serenissima maestà” (“your most serene majesty”). If he chose, the king could take the opportunity to exchange a few words with them. Unlike his father, who rarely spoke during this procession, Theo relished the chance to “perform” as king. Each day he would read over the list of attendees prior to the audience - sometimes while still in bed - and have aides supply him with news about the individuals present so that he could ask a nobleman how his sick brother was doing, congratulate him on the marriage of his son, and otherwise make it appear as though he had a near-encyclopedic knowledge of everything that was going on in Corsica down to the most remote pieve.

Once the general audience was concluded, the king would go to the adjacent royal chapel and take mass, joined by his family, the grand almoner, and any church prelates who happened to be present. He would then come back through the sala maggiore (as the court bowed again) and withdraw to the antechamber to conduct private audiences. Those hoping for such an audience would stand outside the door, waiting to be called in, while the rest of the court would mingle and converse outside. When the king was finished, the end of the alba would be announced and the sala maggiore would be cleared.

The king would then exit the royal apartments and descend to the sala del vicariato (“Hall of the Vicariate,” which retained its name from the Genoese era when it was the office of the vice-regent), directly below the sala maggiore, where he would attend the daily meeting of the Council of State. If the king chose not to attend - which usually happened when he wanted to get an early start on hunting - it would be presided over by the Grand Chancellor in his capacity as vice-president of the council. Typically all of this business was completed by midday, after which the king ate dinner (that is, lunch) and was then free for the rest of the day to hunt, ride, or do whatever else he pleased. Unlike at Versailles there was no coucher, the evening equivalent of the morning ceremony; one was quite enough.

For those attending court, the alba lasted from well before the king made his entrance (as all were expected to be present and ready when he entered the hall) until the king’s officials declared the end of the audience and cleared the hall. At this point the court descended the horseshoe staircase to the courtyard, where they might linger and converse. Gentlemen might leave the palace grounds and proceed to a salon or coffeehouse to continue their conversations, while ladies would usually return directly to apartments or boarding houses in the city which catered to visiting notables. On some days court attendees might be invited to reconvene at the sala maggiore later in the day for a concert, play, or any other entertainment which was on offer. This was usually presided over by the queen as the king was typically out for the afternoon.

The full ceremony only played out when the monarch was actually present, which was not always the case. Federico scarcely ever left Bastia after becoming king except to attend the consulta generale, but his son was an avid traveler who enjoyed surveying the realm from horseback. Theodore I had established two other royal residences, the Augustinian Palace at Ajaccio and the Villetta Reale at Corti, but the former was in a lamentably poor state by 1780 and the latter was a glorified cottage seldom used for anything other than the royal visit to the consulta.

King Federico added only one property to this list, a block-shaped three story building just outside Cervioni which had originally been built as a watermill and became known as il Fontanone (“the Fountain”). Like the Villetta Reale in Corti, il Fontantone was intended to be a modest royal apartment for the king’s use when attending ceremonies at Cervioni and the vale of Alesani (specifically, coronations and state funerals). Theodore II used it during his coronation and visited it several times on hunting trips, but in 1781 he gave it to Princess Carina for her own personal use. The princess resided here whenever she was not attending court or on some expedition, and in her later years she lived at "the Fountain" more or less permanently. The princess renovated it to her own tastes, and it acquired a somewhat mysterious reputation - a gabled chateau secluded in the trees above Cervioni, draped in flowers and ivy, accessible only by an old Genoese bridge over a rushing torrent, inhabited by the princess, her horses, a few servants, and a very noisy colony of peacocks.

The Forest of Sorba​

For court functions there was no alternative to Bastia until the initial construction of the Reggia di Noceta. Theo enjoyed hunting in the forest of Sorba, located in central Corsica in the pieve of Rogna, and had built a modest wooden hunting lodge near the tiny village of Noceta in 1779. Despite appearing quite secluded, however, it was conveniently close to the Via Nazionale and only eight miles south of Corti, and Theo arranged for the lodge to be replaced with a two-story stone building which would serve not only as a royal residence during the king’s hunting trips but a small “summer palace” which would be more commodious than the Villetta Reale in Corti. Completed in 1787, this initial building - more would come later - had a semicircular portico with columns of green and white Restonica marble, the first example of Corsican Neoclassical architecture. The palace had a sala maggiore of its own, allowing the alba to be conducted here when the king was in residence. Although initially much smaller than the Reggia di Bastia, the Noceta palace was augmented and renovated many times during the lives of Theo and his successors and would eventually surpass the Palace of the Governors in size.

While Bastia remained the center of court life, its suitability as the kingdom’s capital was gradually coming under more and more scrutiny. Bastia owed its present distinction mainly to inertia, and there were numerous deficiencies with the site. It had a small and inadequate harbor, was bordered by malarial marshland to the south, and was poorly situated for defense either by land or by sea. During the Coral War the king had been able to watch the Grande Armamento through his bedroom window, and the possibility of the king and his family being directly threatened by a hostile fleet was not at all outside the realm of possibility. Bastia’s northern position was conveniently located for communication with Italy but was prejudiced against the participation of southerners in government and court, a problem which would only become more acute towards the end of the century.

None of this was new information, but until the 1780s there had simply been no suitable alternative. Ajaccio was too isolated from the north, which was where most Corsicans lived. Corti was centrally located but barely a city at all, with few amenities and far from the coastal presidi which were the kingdom’s gateways to the outside world. Cervioni, the kingdom’s first capital, was well-situated on the doorstep of the kingdom’s Castagniccian heartland but was even smaller than Corti and had no port. Only Bastia had an actual palace worthy of the name, and the crown’s resources had never been great enough to consider building a new one.

From the 1780s, however, Theo began to seriously consider the possibility of relocating elsewhere - specifically, to Ajaccio. The king had always favored the city since his youthful days visiting his grand-uncle at the Augustinian Palace and “holding court” there as crown prince during the 1770s. The growth of the coral industry and the foundation of the Royal Bank of Ajaccio had established the city as the commercial capital of the kingdom, and it was already on the verge of surpassing Bastia as the largest city on the island. Rather than being hemmed in by mountains and marshes, Ajaccio had some room to expand, although it did have water supply issues that needed to be addressed. Ajaccio was blessed with a fine natural harbor, and the completion of the Via Nazionale in 1788 made reaching the city much less difficult for northerners.

The growing resources of the crown also meant that replacing the Reggia di Bastia was now actually possible to imagine. The Augustinian Palace, a converted seminary, was not really suitable; not only did this coastal building share the same vulnerability as the Palace of the Governors, but it was too small, in a poor state of repair, and lacked the appropriate architecture for court functions.[5] Theo began envisioning a new residence which would actually be built for purpose, located not in the city itself but amidst the sunny and fertile land around Ajaccio where he could surround himself with gardens and orchards that could not be realized in either the urban center of Bastia or the pine forests around Noceta. In the early 19th century this vision would eventually be made reality in the form of “Cortenova,” the greatest example of Corsican Neoclassicism, which would finally replace the Reggia di Bastia as the primary seat of King Theodore II and his successors.[6][A] This was accomplished only in the face of considerable political opposition; it was in the interest of the northeastern nobility that the court remain permanently on their doorstep, to say nothing of the artisans and businessmen whose livings depended substantially on the operations of the royal household and the needs of its attending courtiers. Yet these entrenched interests were ultimately unable to hold back the wishes of a monarch who possessed both the motivation and the means to alter the political geography of the kingdom to his own purpose.


Footnotes
[1] References to the palazzo dei governatori continue to appear for years after Corsican independence even though there were no longer any “governors” there. Officially it was known as il palazzo reale di Bastia (“the royal palace of Bastia”) but was more often referred to as la reggia (also meaning “the royal [palace],” from the Latin regia, “royal”). Not until the 19th century was the term reggia used more generically to refer to any “major” residence of the king, of which there were three during the reign of Theodore II: the Reggia di Bastia, the Reggia di Noceta, and the Reggia Cortenova (or simply Cortenova).
[2] The Constitution of 1736 mandated that three members of the 24-person dieta, two northerners and one southerner, “must always reside in the Court of the Sovereign.” These men were known as delegati residenti (delegates-resident) or simply residenti. Customarily this duty was handled with a shift system, called the rota, in which the dieta was divided into eight terzine (“tercets”) of two northerners and one southerner each, and each terzina spent one-eighth of the year at court, or about 45 days. The dieta, however, could constitute itself at any time and usually did so at Bastia, so members might have to travel even outside of their scheduled rota period.
[3] One of the privileges given to Knights of the Military Order of the Redemption was the right to attend the king in his forechamber, so there might be a handful of decorated military men present as well.
[4] It was standard practice that the diplomat of a prince ought to be afforded equal precedence to the prince he represented, and thus envoys came before any of the nobility regardless of their own noble title.
[5] Theo would eventually donate the Augustinian Palace to the government, which would renovate and reopen it as the Royal Theodoran University of Ajaccio.
[6] Cortenova means “new court,” which is both a literal description of the palace’s purpose and also a direct translation of Neuhoff.

Timeline Notes
[A] We will regrettably not see Cortenova take shape ITTL, although I have some ideas about location and layout that might show up in some epilogue post. In proper modern Italian it would be Cortenuova, but “-nova” is used here as a deliberate Latinism/archaicism. The loss of the diphthong is also common among Tuscan dialects, including Corsican (in which “new” is novu).

 

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Corsican Style

A late 18th century Corsican woman in traditional clothing. Her jewelry and floral print mezzaro indicate her wealth.​

Having long languished as a colonial backwater on the periphery of Europe, Corsica had never been at the forefront of European fashion. The residents of the Genoese presidi generally followed the fashions of Liguria, where the influence of France and Spain predominated, but such trends penetrated into the interior only very slowly. In some cases the clothing styles of Corsican peasants had remained almost unchanged since the Late Middle Ages. While independence had little immediate effect on Corsican dress, the opening of Corsican ports to the outside world, the economic advancement of the middle and upper classes, the examples set by Corsica’s royalty, and the increased availability of fabrics and fashions through the immigration of Jewish tailors and cloth merchants had a visible impact on Corsican wardrobes over the second half of the 18th century, particularly among those families with the means to follow fashion.

The costume of the typical Corsican man during this period did not differ much from his counterparts on the continent: a linen undershirt, a buttoned vest (corpetto), and a jacket (mozza), and breeches. For ordinary villagers the mozza was usually made of undyed, rough brown cloth with horn buttons, while more prosperous men displayed their wealth with finer fabrics, larger lapels, and metal buttons. The preference among the wealthy was a black velvet mozza with silver or brass buttons, often trimmed or lined with another color. The jacket was worn open to display the corpetto, which could be almost any color. This was often a matter of personal preference, but there were also regional trends - In the Cortinese blue or red corpetti predominated, while green corpetti were preferred in the Castagniccia and purple in Ajaccio. Striped cloth was also used and was particularly common in the cities. Below the belt, men wore brown or black breeches and brown cloth or goatskin gaiters when outdoors. In cold or rainy weather men would wear a hooded peacoat (capotto), while shepherds and other poor rural folk wore the pilone, a hooded cape of shaggy goat hair that could also be used as a blanket.

The barretta, the distinctive cap of Corsican men, came in a variety of forms. The most common type was a peaked “phrygian” cap of black or brown with a trim or front panel of a different color, often red. Other styles had ear flaps pinned up at the sides by buttons, one or more vertical embroidered seams, or a “scalloped” trim. Many had a pom-pom or tassel on the top. The barretta was common among both the rich and poor, although wealthy men’s barrette were often made of black velvet with trim and tassels made of colored silk. Cocked hats grew increasingly common through the second half of the 18th century, particularly in the coastal towns among nobles, educated professionals, skilled tradesmen, and soldiers.

Assorted barrette​

Unusually for 18th century western Europeans, most Corsican men were bearded. The Enlightenment prejudice against facial hair made no impression in the Corsican interior, where beards continued to be important symbols of adulthood and male virility. Beards were usually worn full, but neatly trimmed. An untrimmed beard was seen as a symbol of grief or violence, as traditionally men did not trim their beards when in mourning for a relative - and, in the case of a vendetta killing, might not trim them until that relative was avenged. Over the course of the 18th century clean-shaven men became more common, particularly among the wealthy and educated classes of the presidi in the last half of the century. Many of Corsica’s most prominent statesmen shaved, including Chancellor Paoli, who was beardless throughout his career. In the interior, however, the beard continued to reign supreme.

Although Theodore I had sported a small mustache for part of his reign, Corsican kings were otherwise clean-shaven until 1785, when King Theodore II began sporting a mustache and goatee - a look which had been deeply unfashionable among the princes of Christian Europe for the last century.[1] Theo’s own reasons for this fashion choice are unclear; the popular story was that he was inspired by his visit to the army at Bonifacio during the war, which had grown rather hirsute after weeks of encampment outside the city, but if so this “inspiration” did not take effect for several years. Others have suggested it was related to the birth of his son Arrigo in 1785, as Corsicans commonly associated beards with fatherhood, but he did not do the same for the birth of his first son in 1779 (although since Theo was then only 24 years old, perhaps that was not yet an option). Whatever his reason, the king’s style of beard gained some popularity among the Corsican elite, who may have seen the style (and mustaches more generally) as a compromise by which they could project an image of modern European refinement without entirely abandoning the universal signifier of Corsican masculinity.

The typical costume of a Corsican village woman consisted of a linen chemise and an underskirt under a sleeved bodice and one or more petticoats (or a canvas apron for working women). Women with more means would add multiple petticoats of different colors and wear a more colorful and elaborate bodice. A village woman might own only a single “fancy” bodice for special events, which was often passed down from mother to daughter and repaired or altered as needed. Women of somewhat more means might wear a casaquin (cassachino), a hip-length fitted jacket. Fancy bodices and casaquins might be worn “open” to display a decorative plastron or stomacher.

Left: Lower-class woman wearing a capiddina over a plain mezzaro and a faddetta on her shoulders. Her bodice is plain and she wears a single petticoat under the faddetta. Like many peasant women, she is barefoot.
Center: Lower-class woman wearing a saccula over an underskirt.
Right: Middle-class woman wearing layered petticoats and a faddetta over her head. She wears earrings and a coral bead necklace.

Left: Middle or upper-class woman wearing a cassachino with a stomacher. She wears an “angel’s head” turban and has a rolled-up faddetta around her waist which can be pulled over her head.
Center: Upper-class woman wearing a fashionable saccula with an embroidered collar. The sleeves of her bodice with large cuffs and ribbons are visible. Her hair is worn in a scuffia with “antlers.”
Right: Upper-class woman wearing a large floral print mezzaro and layered petticoats. Court dress would be similar, but with a black silk or lace mezzaro.​

Characteristic of interior Corsica, particularly in Niolo and the Cortinese, was a long sleeveless dress called a saccula. This dress had endured since the Middle Ages with few changes and was considered to be a particularly “authentic” Corsican style, often referred to as simply abito corso (“Corsican dress”). Usually the saccula was quite plain, made of rough, undyed homespun which at most might be embellished with a bit of colored fabric around the collar. In the 18th century, however, the saccula was “rediscovered” by elite women who saw it as fashionably rustic and quaint, leading to elaborate examples of this dress made of silk or muslin and decorated with embroidery. Unlike the peasant’s wool saccula, which was everyday working wear, the wealthy woman’s saccula was usually worn indoors with friends or other casual company rather than on the street or at formal occasions.

From the 1780s upper-class Corsican women began adopting the robe à l'anglaise or “Italian gown,” which in Corsica was known as a piombinese because of its association with Queen Laura, princess of Piombino. Laura’s own court dress was the andrienne or robe à la française, a voluminous silk or muslin gown with box pleats hanging from the back and a wide skirt held up by panniers. For everyday wear, however, she preferred a more modern and practical close-bodied Italian gown with a fitted back and a “quartered bodice” which was constructed separately from the skirt (and was worn without panniers, although usually with small hoops or a “false rump”). This simpler dress was more accessible to upper class Corsican women than the enormously expensive andrienne and was widely copied by those with the means to do so.

A silk damask robe à l'anglaise from the 1770s. Confusingly, this style of gown is also known as an "Italian gown," and in Corsica as a "Piombinese."​

Corsican women of all classes covered their hair in public. This was usually done with a rectangular piece of cloth called a mezzaro (from the Arabic mizar, meaning “covering” or “hidden”) which was draped around the head and shoulders. In the mid-18th century mezzari a fioretti (“flowered veils”), made of printed fabrics imported from Persia or India and featuring floral or arboreal motifs, became very fashionable in Corsica and were widely worn by middle and upper-class women well into the 19th century. In some parts of Corsica, women wore a large over-skirt called a faddetta which was designed to be pulled up and worn as a shawl over the shoulders and head, particularly when in church. Peasant women often wore a capiddina, a round straw hat lined with black canvas, over their mezzaro when working outside. Not all women were veiled; fashionable Corsicans might wear a decorative hair net (reta) or an “angel’s head” (capangelo), a draped turban of white cloth meant to give the impression of a halo. Also popular was a colored silk cap or turban called a scuffia. This could be worn with braids wrapped on top of the scuffia and held in place with pins or ribbons, which were referred to as “antlers” (palchi).

A yellow silk scuffia with antlers (left) and a reta (right)​

All women of status wore some kind of jewelry. A middle class woman might own only a single pair of earrings - perhaps gold (or silver-gilt) hoops or coral pendants - given to her as an engagement gift. Large earrings featuring multiple coral drops or pendants on each ear were very popular among women who could afford them. Coral was popular not only because it was attractive and readily available, but because red coral was thought to have various curative and protective qualities, having long been associated in Europe with vitality, health, and fertility.[2] Coral bead necklaces were worn by practically every woman (and girl) who could afford them. Pearls were also fashionable among the wealthy.

Court fashion at Bastia was heavily influenced by Spanish and Ligurian court dress, which meant above all that the dominant color was black. Men’s court dress was essentially just a more elaborate version of their ordinary costume - a black velvet coat with silver buttons (often with a longer cut than an ordinary mozza), a white cravat of silk or muslin, black knee breeches with white silk stockings, and black leather shoes. The only place to show any personalized flair was the corpetto, which was often brightly colored and embroidered. Men at court were required to have a cocked hat, a cane, and a court sword, although they would not actually wear the hat in the king’s presence. Women were also expected to wear black dresses, and their upper body was largely obscured by a large mezzaro of black silk. By the 1780s the court mezzaro was often made of black lace, resembling the Spanish mantilla. This was partially due to Spanish cultural influence, but also because the transparency of lace allowed court women to show off their fashionable hairstyles, expensive jewelry, and elaborate bodices more effectively.

Although the 18th century was the age of the powdered wig in Europe, Corsica remained largely unaffected by this trend. The most obvious explanation for this is that most Corsican men were bearded, and wigs were considered to be aesthetically incompatible with facial hair. Theodore I and Federico had worn wigs throughout their reigns and were emulated by some nobles, statesmen, and professionals who had decided to go clean-shaven, but after Theodore II stopped wearing wigs at court in the early 1780s the few Corsicans with wigs seems to have disposed of them as well. Women with wigs were almost unheard of, perhaps because women’s hair was usually fully covered anyway. Queen Elisabetta had sometimes worn wigs at court, but Laura preferred her own natural black hair.

Aside from Theo killing off the periwig and bringing back the goatee, 18th century Corsican kings were not as influential in the world of fashion as their wives. Theodore I had attained the throne through victory in war, and both he and his successors emphasized this with a distinctly martial style. The “court dress” of Corsican kings was a military uniform - specifically, a uniform of a colonel of the Guardia Nobile consisting of a black coat with a red lining and decorated with gold embroidery, a red waistcoat, the green sash of the Order of the Redemption, and black breeches with white silk stockings. On the most formal occasions, such as presiding over the consulta generale, the king would also wear a “robe of state,” a long crimson brocade robe with a mantle of ermine fur around the shoulders which was practically identical to the state robe worn by the Doge of Genoa. Corsican kings certainly wore other outfits and Theo was especially particular about his clothes, but the primary objective was always to emphasize military vigor rather than fashion consciousness.[A]


Footnotes
[1] It appears that Theo’s only fellow bearded monarch in Christian Europe was the Prince-Bishop of Montenegro.
[2] If anything, coral was more renowned for health benefits in other countries than in Corsica itself. The British were particularly fond of it as a ward against disease for women and children, and coral necklaces, earrings, hairpins, rings, and other objects were common throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The mid-18th century British manual The Compleat Midwife went so far as to suggest hanging red coral near the “privities” of women in childbirth, a practice that has not been documented in Corsica.

Timeline Notes
[A] Most of the information on Corsican costume and all of the costume sketches in this chapter are from the work of Rennie Pecqueux-Barboni, an ethnographer with a specialty in historical Corsican dress.

 

[Carp]

The News of Corsica

In the 1760s Bastia had possessed precisely one printing press. It had been purchased by a circle of nobles and intellectuals led by the Servite friar and historian Bonfiglio Guelfucci, who began publishing the Ragguagli della Corsica (“Accounts of Corsica”), a “political and literary journal” which is often described as Corsica’s first newspaper. Although it is now considered to be an important part of Corsican cultural history, the Ragguagli was not financially successful. There was not much demand for its peculiar mix of current events, short essays, and poetry, and the press’s co-owners tried various other schemes to keep the press afloat.

To this end they turned to Giambattista Biffi, a Cremonese nobleman who lived in Bastia from 1767 to 1771. Biffi had come to Corsica to enter the service of King Theodore I and was young Prince Theo’s tutor in history and philosophy for several years, but his main interest was in the translation of various French and English philosophical works into Italian. His stay in Corsica overlapped with that of Jean-Jaques Rousseau, whom he visited on several occasions, and Biffi was the first to translate his Lettres écrites de Corse into Italian. The Bastia press began printing these works in periodic installments, which proved popular among a small but enthusiastic Corsican literate class excited to gain access to the latest works of Enlightenment philosophy.

The press owners, however, eventually fell out over the content of these works. One of Biffi’s projects was a translation of De l’esprit (“On the Mind”) by Helvétius, which was one of the most controversial books of its age. When it had been published in France a decade earlier, the book had been condemned for preaching amorality and atheism and was publicly burned. Such was the outcry that even free-thinking philosophes like Voltaire felt obliged to condemn it, and Helvétius had to issue several public retractions. Guelfucci was a man of the Enlightenment, but he was also a professor of theology at the royal university, and he drew the line at publishing the most infamous work of “atheism” of its day. The other owners were less discerning, or perhaps just greedier - De l’esprit was widely read and translated precisely because of the controversy it stirred up. Guelfucci washed his hands of the project and ended up selling his share in the press, although only after a protracted legal dispute.

It does not seem as though De l’esprit was very widely read in Corsica, but the fact of its printing presented an interesting opportunity. There was no inquisition on Corsica, nor any established law on publications at all. That did not mean there were no practical limits; it is very unlikely that openly publishing sedition or pornography would have been tolerated. Yet works of merely philosophical controversy were not considered threatening to the state, particularly if such works were intended for foreign export rather than domestic consumption. In the states of mainland Italy, where the population was generally more literate than in Corsica, many of the Enlightenment’s more controversial books were banned and bringing them across the border was a serious crime.

Bastia was well-positioned to engage in this dubious trade. It was a short distance from various entrepôts - Livorno, Genoa, Civitavecchia, Naples - into which books could be smuggled for dissemination throughout Italy. Raw materials were also close by: Genoa was one of the leading producers of paper in Europe, while ink could be manufactured from oak galls and copperas (iron sulfate), which was itself made from iron pyrites that were plentiful in nearby Elba. From the mid-1780s there was also a copperas works at Patrimonio on Capo Corso, just five miles from Bastia, which used the iron pyrite produced as a waste product of the recently reopened Farinole iron mine nearby. Skilled workers from the printing shops of Livorno were also close at hand.

The combination of an advantageous geographical position and lax local ordinances allowed Bastia to develop a very specialized printing industry. Not everything printed in late 18th century Bastia was on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, but Bastia’s printers gravitated towards such works because this was the only field in which they enjoyed a competitive advantage. The printing industries of Livorno and Lucca were already well-established, and their governments were relatively permissive; Diderot’s Encyclopédie, for instance, was freely printed in Livorno. Only by pushing beyond the limits of Tuscan censorship could the Bastiese printers find a niche of their own.

In 1781 three Corsican printers founded the Società Tipografica Bastiese (Typographical Society of Bastia), a very innocuous sounding name for what was effectively a banned book cartel. From Bastia, the STB managed a distribution network for (mostly) restricted books in northern and central Italy. The STB claimed its activities were perfectly legal - and in Corsica, they were - but the printers knew full well what kind of business they were in. They dispatched agents to the mainland to report back on which texts sold well, which “importers” were having the most success in delivering merchandise (that is, evading customs inspections), which book peddlers moved the most merchandise, and where local authorities were cracking down. Their production depended on demand and the availability of manuscripts, but the French philosophes were their bread and butter, particularly the more controversial writings of Voltaire, Helvétius, d'Holbach, and d’Alembert. Yet despite their radical content, the STB’s motivation was profit, not philosophy; they had no qualms about reporting their competition to the local authorities.

The heyday of the STB cartel was relatively brief, reaching its peak in the late 1780s, and Bastia never approached Livorno in terms of the sheer volume of their publishing. Nevertheless, the STB imprint quickly became so notorious that some joked it actually stood for Solo Testi Blasfemi (“only blasphemous texts”). It was an unusual product to be coming from such a fervently Catholic nation, and indeed the STB had few admirers in Corsica. The Jesuits were particularly outspoken in calling for the suppression of “radical printers” in Bastia, and some detractors alleged that the STB was the front for a sinister Jewish-Masonic conspiracy to undermine religion and morality. Yet the cartel continued to operate precisely because of an informal understanding with the government that their merchandise was for foreign, not domestic consumption. That did not mean sophisticated readers in the Corsican presidi could not get their hands on such works - they could, and did - but the circulation of a handful of controversial philosophical texts among the coffeehouse elite in Bastia and Ajaccio did not really trouble the government, particularly under Chancellor Paoli’s liberal regime.

Although they became best known for these works, the Bastiese presses were not all devoted to the STB’s black market book trade. As mentioned, the Ragguagli della Corsica is often described as Corsica’s first newspaper, but in a more modern sense of the word that distinction belongs to the Gazetta Nazionale. This paper began as the Gazzetta di Bastia in 1773, and involved no original writing of any kind - it was a compilation of foreign news items copied from other well-regarded papers like the Gazette d'Amsterdam, the Gazzetta di Mantova, and the Diario Ordinario of Rome. Foreign sources like the Gazette d'Amsterdam had to be translated first, but it was otherwise a cut-and-paste job with the occasional edit for the sake of formatting or to better appeal to Corsican sensibilities.

The Coral War marked a new chapter in the history of the paper, which changed its name to the Gazetta Nazionale in 1780. The paper’s first “original content” was an article on the outbreak of the Coral War and the Galite raid. This prompted something of a reversal - suddenly the Gazette d’Amsterdam was copying stories from the Gazzetta Nazionale instead of the other way around. In this era no paper had “reporters” in Corsica to tell them what was going on, so outside of diplomatic channels (which were generally confidential) the Gazzetta was the only source of news on the war from Corsica which was available to foreigners. Genoa’s effective censorship regime was useful in controlling the domestic narrative, but it also meant that foreign papers relied much more on the Gazzetta and other Corsican sources than on the trickle of censored information coming from Genoa.

Chancellor Paoli was quick to realize the usefulness of this paper, and from 1782 the Gazzetta Nazionale effectively became the kingdom’s newspaper of public record. The changes to the constitution made at the consulta of Cervioni were published in full in the Gazzetta, as were all new grida (royal decrees), the appointments of new ministers and secretaries, and the results of national elections to the dieta. The Gazzetta remained a private enterprise, but its owners were given the sole privilege of publishing government records, which meant guaranteed revenue for the printers. It also meant that the Gazzetta was unlikely to be critical of the government, but that was never really its role. While their stories on the Coral War were predictably biased in Corsica’s favor, they made no attempt to offer “opinion” as we would understand it today.

The newspaper’s rise in the early 1780s was owed not only to the Coral War, but to the American Revolution, which proved to be a topic of particular interest to its readers. There were obvious parallels between the situation of the American “Continentals” and that of the Corsicans half a century prior. The Genoese, like the British, had been frustrated by the unwillingness of their overseas subjects to pay for the administration of their own territory, while the Corsicans - like the Americans - resented being asked to pay for a military and judicial apparatus which seemed to be intended more to control them than to protect them. Like the American colonists, the Corsicans had lacked any meaningful representation in the country of their colonial master.

Yet these parallels only went so far, as the Americans had never been so oppressed and degraded as the Corsicans. The prosperous colonials protested their masters’ taxes on principle, but the immiserated Corsicans had been crushed by them. Accordingly, while the American Revolution had been driven by landed and mercantile elites who resented Parliament’s impositions, Corsica’s uprising had begun as a spontaneous lower-class revolt which caught many Corsican elites by surprise. Luigi Giafferi had foreseen what was coming and had warned the Genoese government that their heavy-handed rule would have dangerous consequences, but he can hardly be accused of fomenting rebellion. Respected potentates like Giafferi, Fabiani, and d’Ornano quickly assumed leadership over the uprising, but they had not been its instigators.

Educated Corsicans could debate these comparisons and contrasts themselves. While the average Corsican villager may not have known or cared about the latest news out of Boston, Corsica’s small but active literate class consumed news voraciously. Independence had brought Corsica closer to the rest of the world than it had ever been before, for by the 1770s Bastia and Ajaccio were regularly visited by foreign ships from as far away as Copenhagen. From the mid-1770s, American news - initially, copied verbatim from English papers - showed up regularly in the Gazzetta di Bastia, and after the outbreak of the rebellion reports from American papers began to appear as well. In 1738 the readers of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette received weekly updates on Theodore and the Corsican Revolution; forty years later, the readers of the Gazzetta Nazionale pored over the latest news of Franklin and his fellow “Patriots.”

Opinions on the “American malcontents” were varied, and did not strictly conform to old factional lines. Members of the Constitutional Society who proudly “wore the asphodel” argued with one another in coffeehouses and home salons as to whether the British or the Americans were in the right. The asfodelati tended to be Anglophiles; Britain was Corsica’s “traditional” friend, a liberal monarchy which had helped free their country from Genoa and France. Yet Britain was now engaged in the suppression of an overseas colony which had rebelled in protest over tyrannical government and exploitative taxes, a situation any true Corsican could sympathize with. Were the Americans an oppressed people breaking the chains of tyranny, or ungrateful rebels against a just and lawful government?[1] This debate was only resolved by the Treaty of Paris, for with the advent of peace it became possible for the asfodelati to be both pro-British and pro-American.

Portrait of Filippo Mazzei​

From 1785, Corso-American relations were personified by a single man, the Tuscan expatriate and political radical Filippo Mazzei. Mazzei and Paoli had met in England in the 1750s and became good friends, and after Mazzei ran afoul of the Tuscan authorities for trying to import an “immense quantity of banned books” he had taken refuge in Corsica. There he had been instrumental in the establishment of the Corsican silk industry, personally smuggling cocoons from Lucca and arranging for the purchase of English reeling machines. After the death of Theodore I and the more conservative turn of the Matra ministry he had traveled to America, where he befriended Benjamin Franklin and acquired land in Virginia. Mazzei was an ardent, nearly fanatical supporter of American independence and traveled to Europe during the war to obtain arms for the continentals at considerable risk to his own safety. Although he was naturalized as an American citizen, his attempts to find an official position after the war were unsuccessful (including an appeal to Grand Duke Karl to be named as Tuscan consul in the United States), and his experiments with Italian crops on his estate in Virginia largely failed.

Aware of Paoli’s return to power in Corsica, Mazzei decided to revisit the island in 1785. Despite some concerns about his political opinions - Mazzei was an avowed republican - the king was impressed by his knowledge of horticulture and offered him a position as director of the Royal Silk Company which he had been so instrumental in creating. A winemaker by trade, Mazzei was also eventually given authority over the royal vineyards, which the king had a personal interest in; Princess Carina jokingly referred to Mazzei as “our radical sommelier.” Aside from these agricultural responsibilities for the royal household, Mazzei became a close (albeit informal) advisor of the chancellor, and continued to publish his own works on history, political philosophy, and silk cultivation. The Italian-language version of his history of the American Revolution was first printed in Bastia, and Mazzei - a former book-smuggler himself - supported the STB and lobbied the chancellor on their behalf, a fact which did nothing to dissuade anti-Enlightenment conspiracists (as Mazzei was also a prominent Freemason). In 1787 he was accredited by the American government as their consul in Corsica - he was, after all, an American citizen - forming the first official diplomatic link between these two revolutionary states.[2][A]


Footnotes
[1] We have less information on the personal opinions of the so-called gigliati, who were less likely to frequent salons and coffee-houses or publish political essays in the Ragguagli della Corsica. The Francophiles at court seem to have been relatively unconflicted on the matter, seeing the American rebellion as a distant spat between Englishmen with little relevance to Corsica, except inasmuch as Bourbon entry into the war might afford Corsica with diplomatic opportunities.
[2] This is sometimes considered to be the first formal “Italian-American” diplomatic relationship, as Mazzei was the first American consul to be accredited in any Italian state. It was, however, not a reciprocal relationship, as Corsica did not accredit a diplomat in the United States until the 19th century.

Timeline Notes
[A] IOTL, Filippo Mazzei was indeed disappointed in his attempts to be made Tuscany’s consul in the United States and left America for the last time in 1785, after his attempts to cultivate silk in Virginia had failed. In 1788 he published Recherches historiques et politiques sur les États-Unis de l'Amérique Septentrionale, the first history of the American Revolution in the French language. He greeted the French Revolution with enthusiasm but opposed the radicalism of the Jacobins, then became involved with the Polish court and lived in Warsaw for a year until the War of the Second Partition in 1792, after which he returned to Tuscany. He had something of a falling out with President George Washington in 1796, whom he accused in a notorious letter of being part of an “Anglo-Monarchio-Aristocratic party." (The accusation of crypto-monarchism aged poorly, as in the following year Washington relinquished the presidency, immortalizing himself as the "American Cincinnatus.") Following the rise of Napoleon and the overthrow of the Directory he went into political retirement, spending the rest of his life in Pisa where he devoted himself to horticulture, the intellectual life of the local salons, and correspondence with Thomas Jefferson and his other American friends. He died in 1816 at the age of 85, having lived just long enough to see the whole arc of the French Revolution.

 

[Carp]

The Unwanted War

Prince Friedrich Heinrich von Hohenzollern

​

On March 3rd of 1786, Maximilian III, Elector of Bavaria, died at the age of 59. Having sired no children with his wife, Maria Anna Sophia of Saxony, the electorate and its territories fell to the elder Palatinate branch of the House of Wittelsbach and the person of Karl Theodor, Elector Palatine.

Although Austria’s victory in the Prussian War had seemingly confirmed Habsburg hegemony within the empire, Emperor Joseph II was increasingly concerned about threats from outside it - in particular, the rise of Russia. Emperor Pyotr III had conquered the northern Black Sea littoral from the Ottomans, reasserted Russian authority in Poland by securing the election of the “Piast” King Kazimierz V Czartoryski, and inserted himself into northern German politics through his familial claims in Holstein (even if his attempt to seize the entire Schleswig-Holstein patrimony had been unsuccessful) and his cultivation of ties with Brandenburg. Against Russia’s gains in the 1770s, Austria’s acquisition of Oltenia and Spisz was quite underwhelming. Yet while Joseph felt pressed to restore an imagined “parity” with the Russians, expansion at the expense of Austria’s usual rival, the Ottomans, was undesirable; weakening the Turks would only invite further Russian expansion into the Balkans.

The inevitable failure of the childless junior line of the Wittelsbachs was thus of considerable interest to Joseph, who possessed a rather tenuous claim to Lower Bavaria based on a concession granted in the 15th century by Emperor Sigismund in the event of a Wittelsbach succession failure. Long before 1786, the emperor had been in communication with the Elector Palatine as to Bavaria’s fate. Karl Theodor, for his part, had little interest in Bavaria; his preferred outcome was a territorial swap for the Austrian Netherlands, which would give him a more or less coherent swath of territory on the empire’s western edge. While Joseph was willing to humor this “Burgundian plan,” however, the emperor preferred a deal which was more to his advantage. Although strategically vulnerable and geographically distant, the Austrian Netherlands contributed much to the imperial coffers. Joseph preferred to compensate Karl Theodor with the much less valuable territory of Further Austria, a constellation of old Habsburg territories in southwestern Germany. As soon as Maximilian’s death was announced, Joseph moved to enact his “agreement” with the elector. As Austrian troops marched into Lower Bavaria, Karl Theodor felt he had no choice but to take what was on offer, lest Joseph seize his territory with no compensation at all.

This bold act immediately raised an outcry from the other imperial princes. As Karl Theodor was himself childless, his heir-presumptive was his cousin Karl II August, Duke of Zweibrücken, who raged against this theft of his rightful inheritance. Zweibrücken was a state of no consequence, but the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony also opposed Austria’s move. This was not the most obvious of alliances, as the two states had been foes during the Prussian War. The Saxon elector Friedrich August III, however, had his own familial claims on Bavaria and hoped that he might be able to realize them through confrontation. Elector Friedrich Wilhelm II of Brandenburg had tried to repair relations with Austria in recent years, but he shared the general concern for Austria’s further ascendance and hoped that his state too might be able to secure some compensation, perhaps in Silesia. He was also being goaded into action by his esteemed uncle Prince Heinrich, the “savior of Brandenburg,” who had so ably defended the state after his brother’s death and urged his nephew to defend the interests and honor of the House of Hohenzollern.

The most enthusiastic opponent of Austria’s bid for supremacy among the great powers turned out to be Britain. King George III, in his capacity as Elector of Hanover, was gravely concerned with Joseph’s cavalier attitude towards the constitution of the Empire, and the British government’s postwar stance of conciliation towards France and containment of the “imperial powers” strongly inclined them towards supporting the princes against Joseph. Parliament did not intend to send a British army into Germany, but fiscal support for a Hanoverian army and subsidies for other princes were certainly on the table. Some questioned whether Britain ought to be spending yet more money on a European conflict after only just concluding the American War, while others advocated a return to the “old system” of an Anglo-Austrian alliance, but they were drowned out by outrage against Joseph’s despotic ambition and the conviction that the Habsburgs would run roughshod over Europe and upset the balance of power if they were not checked.

On April 20th, Hanoverian, Brandenburger, and Saxon diplomats met at Dresden and pledged mutual support for the Imperial constitution and opposition to the “unlawful” Austrian seizure of Lower Bavaria. Known as the Dreikurfürstenbund (“Three Electors’ League”), the alliance pledged to immediately field an army of 60,000 men. For the moment, however, these forces merely assembled on the Saxon-Bohemian border, for the leaders of the Dreikurfürstenbund hoped to be able to marshal sufficient support to convince Joseph to back down without actually fighting a war.

Joseph was not intimidated by this posturing. He was confident that he could raise 300,000 men if necessary, and since he already occupied Bavaria the onus of organizing an invasion was on his enemies, not him. The longer the princes waited, vainly hoping for diplomatic efforts to bear fruit, the more time Austria had to mobilize its forces and prepare its defenses. Joseph did not want war either, believing it would be ruinous for the country’s finances, but he was sure that once they saw that he would not be moved by their bluster, the princes would soon see the impossibility of their position and accept his “deal” with Karl Theodor as a fait accompli.

Aware that the German princes alone would have difficulty intimidating Austria, the British sought to play Russia as their trump card. Emperor Pyotr had been annoyed by Vienna’s diplomatic flirtations with Denmark and the Porte and had a defensive alliance with Brandenburg, but his ministers cautioned him against rushing into war with Austria. The Austrians were still seen as important partners against the Ottomans, and the ownership of Bavaria was hardly considered to be a matter of crucial Russian national interest. Pyotr was more sanguine than his cabinet, but even he was reluctant to act unless offered some incentive to do so. It fell to Britain to try and tempt him into action with what he had long desired: a British subsidy. To be sure, the British government was just as suspicious of Russian ambitions as they were of Austrian ambitions, but the Anglo-Russian trade relationship remained important, and the Russians did not actually stand to gain any territory from a confrontation with Austria. Once Britain had coughed up the money, Pyotr ordered a 40,000 man “army of observation” to begin a transit of Poland.

Meanwhile, the forces of Austria and the Dreikurfürstenbund stared at each other across the Bohemian-Saxon border while diplomats raced back and forth across Germany. As the electors gained the support of a growing list of imperial princes, the alliance was given the more manageable and accurate name of the Fürstenbund. Aside from a few militarized northern states in the Hanoverian orbit, like Hesse-Kassel, the military value of these newcomers was insignificant, but the Fürstenbund scored a political victory by gaining the adherence of the Archbishop-Electors of Mainz and Trier, giving them a majority of the imperial college of electors.[1] The Fürstenbund could now, in theory, threaten to deny the empire to Joseph’s successor, although the actual force of this threat was questionable: it meant nothing until Joseph died, and even then it was doubtful whether the defiant princes would really choose to dethrone the Habsburgs (something Britain had fought a war to prevent in the 1740s) or be able to agree on a rival candidate.[2] Once again the alliance hoped that mere saber-rattling would obviate the need for action, and once again Joseph called their bluff.

Although the Russians were still en route, the allies finally decided to make a military demonstration in early June. The Saxon elector was the most reticent to actually resort to force, as his state would bear the brunt of any Austrian counterattack, but Friedrich August III was also interested in receiving some compensatory Austrian territory - and was concerned that if he did not act, the Hohenzollerns would benefit instead once the Russians were on the scene to aid them. The target of this foray would not be Bavaria, nor Bohemia proper, but Silesia, which would force the Austrian army assembling near Prague to abandon its defensive posture and would facilitate the eventual merger of the allied and Russian armies.

The allied army was under the overall command of the indomitable Prince Heinrich of Brandenburg, now 60 years old, who had won fame as the “savior” of Brandenburg after the death of his brother. His appointment to this position had been resisted by the Saxons but came at the insistence of the British, who viewed him as the only commander with the talent and reputation to take on this role. Prince Heinrich gained an early victory by storming Glogau, but he was cautious by nature and wary of overreach. The prince knew the Russians were on their way and had some doubts as to the effectiveness of his cobbled-together army, and there was thus no reason to seek battle unless it could be gained on the most favorable circumstances. His counterpart, Field Marshal Franz Moritz von Lacy, was not particularly eager for battle either; the emperor had communicated his hope that a mere counter-demonstration by Lacy’s larger army would be sufficient to get the electors to back down.

This time, however, it was the allies’ turn to call the emperor’s bluff, and after weeks of maneuvering and repeated clashes between raiders, screens, and foraging parties in Lower Silesia it became clear that Lacy would have to pick up the gauntlet. The Russians, after all, were still on their way, and the emperor had come to the conclusion that the best way to end this crisis before it spiraled out of control was a quick, decisive battle. The electors clearly needed to be reminded that Austrian might was real, not merely theoretical, and Pyotr would think twice about throwing his support to an already-failing alliance. One defeat would be enough to make the alliance collapse under mutual jealousy and recrimination.

Heinrich and Lacy finally came to grips with one another at the Battle of Polkowitz on July 10th. Lacy possessed the larger army, with about 80,000 men against 65,000 allies, but Heinrich had fallen back to a strong position atop the Dalkauer heights with his flanks secured by wooded hills. After a massive cannonade by the Austrian batteries, Lacy launched a series of assaults against the allied positions. The Saxons on Heinrich’s right were put into considerable distress and nearly broken by repeated attacks from the Austrian cavalry, but by the end of the day the allied army had held its ground. Lacy was forced to withdraw, and his forces were too battered and disorganized to make another attempt to drive the allies out or liberate Glogau.

The rolling foothills of the “Dalkauer Berge” (Wzgórza Dalkowskie)​

The defeat at Polkowitz hit Vienna like a thunderbolt. Would Prince Heinrich, Austria’s bête noire since 1760, take up his brother’s legacy and carry all before him, particularly now that the emperor no longer had the brilliance of Marshal Browne at his disposal? The emperor had arrogantly dismissed the idea that Austria might not win - and certainly could not afford - a war against the princes with British and Russian backing, and had expected to simply overawe his enemies. Only after Polkowitz did the real danger of Austria’s total diplomatic isolation seem to dawn upon him. Lacy, for his part, tendered his resignation; at the age of 62 and with mounting health problems, it was now clear that he was no longer the commander he had been during the Prussian War.

Panic in Vienna, however, was not matched by jubilation in the courts of the allied powers. Prince Heinrich had held the field but his bloodied army was in no condition to press on to Breslau - and the prince, just two years younger than Lacy, was not exactly bursting with youthful energy either. Despite his “defeat,” Lacy had done enough damage to stop the allied offensive in its tracks. In fact the allied army was about to fall apart anyway: The Saxons grumbled that their heavy losses were a result of Prince Heinrich purposefully leaving them unsupported, and a foray by an Austrian cavalry corps into Saxony reminded Friedrich August III that he had more to lose in this war than any of his “allies.” Austria at least had the benefit of a unified command, while allied reinforcements had to be carefully negotiated between German princes who preferred to avoid undue losses and their British backers who preferred to avoid undue expenses.

While a brisk petite guerre continued in Lower Silesia and on the Saxon-Bohemian frontier, a lull in major operations after Polkowitz provided a brief window for diplomatic maneuvering. Austrian efforts focused primarily on France, their notional ally, which had thus far observed a strict neutrality. King Louis XVI had been warned that his state simply could not afford another war, and although the Austrian alliance was still considered geopolitically useful, his cabinet was generally sympathetic to the British argument that the annexation of Bavaria would be an unwelcome aggrandizement of Habsburg power in Europe.

Britain’s decision to draw in the Russians, however, was not well-received in Versailles. Britain’s earlier insistence that both of the “imperial powers” needed to have their wings clipped seemed hollow in light of the fact that they were presently bankrolling the Russian army. Unlike the British, who were of two minds about the Russians - anxious about Pyotr’s ambitions, yet solicitous of his friendship and eager to receive his exports - the French saw Russia more straightforwardly as a threat to all of their traditional friends in the east (Sweden, Poland, and the Turks). Yet Bavaria was a traditional French ally as well, and in the summer of 1786 the French government was not yet willing to spurn the British and exert themselves on the side of Joseph’s annexationist ambitions just so they could spite the Russians.

Vienna also reached out to its enemies, making belated inquiries as to whether some sort of modest compromise might be possible after all, but it was too little and too late. Despite the steadfast insistence by all parties that war was wholly undesirable, peace eluded them that summer. The long-awaited arrival of the Russians and the reorganization of allied forces by early September instilled the allies with new confidence, and diplomatic overtures were put on hold while the coalition awaited a verdict from the battlefield which would surely compel the emperor to abandon his great design.[A]


Footnotes
[1] The merger by inheritance of Bavaria and the Palatinate reduced the number of prince-electors to eight. The Dreikurfürstenbund, of course, represented three of these electors, so with Mainz and Trier the anti-imperial alliance controlled five out of eight votes. The electoral vote of Bavaria itself was somewhat in doubt; it was no secret that Karl Theodor was chagrined by Joseph’s actions, but he seemed to have neither the resources nor the will to oppose him. Karl Theodor, however, was far older than Joseph, which meant that by the time an election would be necessary the Wittelsbach vote would almost certainly be in the hands of the Duke of Zweibrücken, a firm adherent to (and chief beneficiary of) the allied cause. The only vote the emperor could actually count on, aside from his own, was that of Cologne, the third ecclesiastical electorate - because it was held by the emperor’s brother.
[2] The only obvious alternative candidate was the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich August III, as he was the only Catholic member of the Dreikurfürstenbund. Given the historical rivalry between the Wettins and the Hohenzollerns, however, it was far from clear whether the Elector of Brandenburg would actually vote to give the imperial mantle to Saxony. Friedrich August himself clearly thought this was a longshot and was more interested in negotiating territorial “compensation” from Austria than in pursuing an illusory imperial dream.

Timeline Notes
[A] French diplomacy played an important role in resolving the Bavarian succession crisis IOTL, which resulted in a brief “war” of maneuver without major engagements. Also critical was the opposition of Maria Theresa, who was less interested in another war than her newly-crowned son. ITTL, Max’s later death means that when the crisis erupts Maria Theresa is already dead and France is no longer constrained by the American War. Moreover, ITTL victorious Austria appears more capable and threatening than she did IOTL, and the relative weakness of Brandenburg/Prussia allows the emperor to act more confidently. The result is more willingness to risk conflict in Vienna, and less desire to quash it in Paris - and, in turn, a series of failed bluffs culminating in a conflict that neither side wants but both feel obligated to undertake now that they've already come this far and put their credibility on the line.