Corsica in the Balance
Map of the Bay of Porto Vecchio, 1730
The bay of Porto Vecchio is widely described as the best natural harbor on Corsica, yet it had only been settled by the Genoese in the 16th century and never attained any great significance under their rule. Its gifts were outweighed by the two great scourges of the Corsican coast - pirates and malaria. The local marshes made the site hostile to permanent settlement, which in turn meant that the uninhabited bay was a welcome refuge for corsairs on their expeditions of plunder and slavery. That the Genoese settled there at all was due mainly to the desire to deny the pirates their safe haven on Genoese territory. The first colony at Porto Vecchio was founded in 1539 and the fort was completed two years later, but the settlement of the bay met with several false starts due to malaria outbreaks and conflict. Over a 50 year period after its construction, the fort was destroyed and rebuilt no fewer than three times owing to the attacks of Barbary corsairs and the Franco-Ottoman invasion of Corsica in 1553, during which the town became an advance base of the Ottoman fleet and was briefly the headquarters of the famous rebel Sampiero Corso. By the start of the Corsican Revolution the town numbered only about 500 inhabitants, many of whom were only seasonal residents who migrated inland during the summer. By 1742, the effects of the rebellion had caused that number to drop to 300. The town’s hinterland, despite being a potentially promising agricultural area described by one contemporary traveler as a “beautiful and very fruitful country,” was largely uninhabited.
The final form of Porto Vecchio’s defenses was a trapezoidal fort on a low hill overlooking the bay, punctuated by five bastions. It was assisted by two lightly-armed watchtowers, the tower of San Cipriano overlooking the bay's entrance and the tower of Benedetto further up the bay. The town’s walls served it well enough against the pirates - eventually - but not much work had been done on them since the 16th century. The Austrians, during their brief occupation, had surveyed the fort and contemplated upgrading the fortifications themselves, but had concluded that the walls were in such poor condition that serious repair would be too expensive for a temporary occupation force to justify. As soon as Sartena had fallen, the Austrians moved their headquarters there.
Still, even if the town was less than ideal for a permanent residence, it was potentially useful to the rebels as a port for smugglers and traders to bring in arms and supplies. The
Dila, however, had been a relatively quiet sector since the Austrian withdrawal. With fewer than a quarter of the total Genoese complement in Corsica stationed in the southern provinces of Ajaccio and Bonifacio, the Genoese commanders had no ability to occupy inland positions (save Sartena) or make expeditions into the countryside, so the interior Corsicans of the south were largely left to their own devices and had no reason to seek battle with the Genoese. Despite the radicalizing presence of
Matthias von Drost and the royalist captains of Zicavo, the only armed conflict in the south since 1741 had been a mere handful of minor skirmishes in the Rocca between “bandits” and the
filogenovesi militia of
Giacamo Maria Peretti. Furthermore, even if Zicavo or the Alta Rocca were to rise in rebellion, Porto Vecchio would be effectively shielded by Peretti and and the jurisdiction of Sartena. With their interference, the rebels could not easily mount an offensive on Porto Vecchio and would not be able to hold it even if they could.
Accordingly, despite the quality of the anchorage Porto Vecchio was not considered by the Genoese to be a point of major strategic importance and they had not committed many resources to its defense. Under the plan of Commissioner-General
Domenico Maria Spinola, only 33 regular soldiers had been assigned to the bay, of which 20 held the fort itself and the other thirteen were stationed at the tower of Benedetto. The tower of San Cipriano, at the bay’s entrance, was left unoccupied. In addition to these regulars, there were 27 “provincial soldiers” - local militia - stationed at the fort, of which around half were mounted for patrol and gendarme duties. Both the fort and the Tower of Benedetto possessed artillery, but the guns were ancient and poorly maintained.
[1] At Benedetto there was a single 8-pounder iron saker and a pair of 2-pounder falconets, although only the falconets were capable of firing inland. The fort of Porto Vecchio had half a dozen bronze sakers of various shot-weights and an assortment of smaller falconets and swivel guns which were apportioned between the five bastions.
This was nevertheless more artillery than was possessed by Colonel
Antonio Colonna-Bozzi - that is to say, none - and any hope that the fort might be taken by a sudden escalade against flat-footed defenders was lost through delay. As it was late in the day on their arrival, Colonna decided to encamp his forces and advance on the town on the following day, but their landing had been spotted by the Genoese and reported to the lieutenant in command at Porto Vecchio. The Genoese were unsure as to who exactly had landed on their shores, but had observed the British flag on the
Panther and concluded that this was probably not a landing in the republic’s favor. Aside from sending a rider to Bonifacio, however, the Genoese garrison did little with their initiative. No attempt was made to recall the garrison at Benedetto, perhaps because the presence of British ships suggested an attack by sea might be forthcoming. When Colonna began his march on the 15th of October, he detached 40 men to lay siege to the tower, which at a stroke denied the Genoese of more than a fifth of their available manpower. Completely unprepared for a siege, the tower garrison held out for only two days before surrendering.
Plan of the Fortress of Porto Vecchio
Now, however, it was Colonna’s lack of preparedness that became a problem. The secretive and rushed nature of his departure from Livorno had cut short some of his plans, and the “Free Battalion” was lacking not only in artillery but a variety of supplies, including food. In the uncultivated “desert” of Porto Vecchio there was not much foraging to be done. This had not seemed like a major obstacle initially, when Colonna had expected that the town would fall quickly as it had done six years earlier, but finding the garrison prepared for him he hesitated to throw his men against a prepared position, and now was forced to conduct a siege. For the moment, 46 men held out against 340.
The first senior Genoese official to learn of the landing was
Giovanni Francesco Franzoni, the commissioner of Bonifacio. There was not much that Franzoni could do - all the regulars in the entire jurisdiction of Bonifacio amounted to just 300 men, smaller than the force that had just landed (which was reported to Franzoni as four or five hundred). Help from Bastia was required, but Franzoni did not have much information to pass on; unhelpfully, the rider from Porto Vecchio had departed before the siege had actually started, and thus had no clear idea of who the foreign soldiers actually
were aside from the sighting of a British warship nearby. Franzoni determined that the prudent course of action would be to dispatch a ship to Bastia posthaste, which would stop by Porto Vecchio first and attempt to make contact with the garrison. 25 regulars and some supplies would be sent board on the ship to bolster the defenses there if practicable.
Colonna, too, had sent for help, dispatching several men to work their way inland and make contact with Drost and other exiles. Meanwhile, anxious to avoid a costly assault, he resorted to subterfuge. Many of his men were natives of the
Dila, and he managed to infiltrate two of them into the city in “Corsican costume” by posing as herders who had fled from the “nationals.” As it turned out, the rebels had a friend in the city, the parish priest
Napoleone Talese, whose brother had apparently been saved from Genoese imprisonment by King Theodore. With the priest’s help, one scout was able to escape the town and report on the strength of the garrison, while the other surreptitiously distributed pamphlets containing Colonna’s declaration of the liberation of Corsica and the imminent return of the king.
The garrison was growing demoralized, and it is not hard to see why. Despite the advantages of their fort and its artillery, the length of the walls was such that even if the 46-man garrison were placed evenly along the entire perimeter there would be only one man every 50 feet or so, and even that was possible only if the entire garrison was continually on patrol without rest. Although marginally better stocked for food than Colonna’s men, they could not know this, and their own supply was not very large - starved for flour in the
Diqua, keeping the larders of Porto Vecchio full on the off chance of a naval invasion had been fairly low on Spinola’s list of priorities. Although the circulation of propaganda within the walls does not appear to have caused any internal unrest, it added to the anxiety of the defenders, and the twenty regulars may have wondered how reliable the provincial troops, which made up more than half their small complement, really were.
The arrival of the felucca from Bonifacio would have considerably boosted their morale. Although 25 soldiers still would have left the garrison fearfully shorthanded, the knowledge that Genoa was exerting itself to aid them would have been welcome. The relief ship, however, never made to Porto Vecchio. Upon reaching the mouth of the bay, the ship’s crew observed the Moor’s Head flying over the tower of San Cipriano, where Colonna had placed a few men as lookouts, and when it tentatively attempted to sail further into the bay it was fired upon by the Torre Benedetto. The ship could potentially have run the gauntlet - an 8-pounder gun was of
some danger to a felucca, but there was only one gun and Colonna’s men were not exactly trained artillerists - but the crew evidently determined that the port was now in the hands of the nationals and beat their way back out to sea and on to Bastia.
On the 26th of October, the twelfth day of the siege, Colonna gained a parley with the Genoese commanding lieutenant. His numbers had recently been strengthened by the arrival of several dozen militiamen from the interior and he now had nearly four hundred men under arms, although the added numbers put further strain on his dwindling supplies. Colonna informed the lieutenant that unless the garrison surrendered at once, he would take the fortress by storm with ladders and grapnels, and if he were forced to that extremity he would give no quarter to any Genoese soldiers found within. As proof of his good faith, he produced the prisoners taken from the Tower of Benedetto, who were still alive and ambulatory. The poor lieutenant, without any orders or communication from his superiors, found himself in an impossible situation. To preserve his honor and on the off chance that the Genoese were on their way to his aid, he proposed a seven-day truce, at which point he would capitulate if no Genoese relief was forthcoming. “That will not do,” Colonna brashly replied, “as I will have buried you and your men long before then.” This bravado veiled the fact that he knew he could probably not maintain the siege for another week. But the lieutenant’s mettle was shot, and on the following day he offered the surrender of the garrison. For the second time, Colonna had captured Porto Vecchio.
Word spread quickly. It was a shocking turn of events for the Genoese; although the actual strategic importance of Porto Vecchio was limited, Spinola had hardly expected an amphibious landing by uniformed Corsican troops, and scrambled to figure out a response. But there were simply no options - his troops were fully tied down in the north, where he expected the situation to grow even more dangerous once the Corsicans learned of Colonna’s conquest. Spinola sent 40 regulars of the Bastia garrison on a ship to reinforce Franzoni, but for the moment a reconquest of Porto Vecchio was quite impossible.
Yet Colonna too found himself with few options. He had arrived in Corsica with an army and captured his objective, but where was he to go from here? Bonifacio was out of the question; it would take more than a few bronze sakers to take down a fortress of that magnitude. Aside from a few coastal towers of little significance, there was only Sartena, the sole inland Genoese position in the
Dila. Colonna, however, was still worried about his supply situation in Porto Vecchio, and was not confident in his ability to sustain an overland campaign.
Furthermore, an attack on Sartena was impractical without the support of the inland Corsicans, and to his dismay he did not seem to have it. A few dozen men had, as noted, arrived at his call, but the major clan leaders of the interior were as surprised by his arrival as the Genoese and were not rushing to his flag. Certainly they had little love for the Genoese, but the
status quo suited them rather well; the republic had left them entirely alone since the Austrian withdrawal, and what the clans of the
Dila valued above all else was their autonomy. It was not altogether clear what Colonna’s plan was, exactly, or whose interests he served; he claimed to be acting on behalf of the Kingdom of Corsica, and thus Theodore, but he was leading a Tuscan unit formerly in Austrian service which had been delivered by British vessels. Furthermore, if he was really acting in the name of Theodore, where was Theodore? Like his counterparts in the north who had been disappointed by the failure of a general uprising to materialize after their attacks on Corti and Morosaglia, Colonna too was let down by the cautious and calculating nature of the Corsicans in the wake of a long and costly war.
Paradoxically, Colonna’s conquest had a greater impact in the north, where the exiles and malcontents were inspired to further stir the pot of rebellion. Count
Gianpietro Gaffori, who had been laying low in the Castagniccia since the incident at Corti, had been trying to organize resistance in that district for months without much tangible success. The publication of the Regulation had considerably strengthened his hand, however, and he inveighed against Spinola’s decision to break up the abortive
consulta at Morosaglia. He was not yet counselling rebellion as such, but argued that the Corsicans at the very least had a right to discuss the law which would be placed upon them by Genoa. Spinola’s offer to host such a discussion at Bastia, flimsy as it was, at least promised to string out the “peace” a little longer, but in the wake of Colonna’s attack this summit was quietly tabled. Spinola suspected the Corsicans would use the excuse to be bolder in their negotiations, and even if the talks were a sham he did not want to enter them from a position of weakness and uncertainty. The rebels, in turn, denounced this as more lies and broken promises from the Genoese government.
Spinola was quite correct in his assessment. While few Corsicans in the interior were yet willing to take up arms, many Corsican leaders saw the fall of Porto Vecchio as a golden opportunity to press the Genoese for yet more concessions. What they needed was unity, and by mid-November there was considerable talk among the various chiefs and
procuratori of the interior about attempting another
consulta, this time at Orezza, to discuss and publicize their criticisms of the Regulation and formulate a negotiating position. Of course the
consulta would need to be protected to dissuade Spinola and his minions from dissolving it as they had done at Morosaglia, and so the local chieftains began to gather and arm their followers. It was clearly a tinderbox in the making. Orezza, one of the cradles of the Corsican rebellion, was a particularly restless district as well as being the “arms capital of Corsica” where all the best native gunsmiths could be found. Those gunsmiths were widely rumored to be busily expanding and repairing the clans' arsenals. Moreover, Orezza also occupied a key strategic position near the Bastia-Corti supply route, such that if it became a serious rebel base the Genoese position at Corti would likely be rendered untenable.
The fall of Porto Vecchio had at first produced panic among the Genoese, but after several weeks of inaction by Colonna, Spinola and his government had come to the conclusion that their initial assessment of Porto Vecchio’s marginal strategic value was correct and that Colonna was not the tip of the spear for some massive foreign invasion. Orezza was a far more serious threat, as a fire that started there could quickly blaze out of control and raise the whole Castagniccia in rebellion, and that would collapse Genoese control over the interior. The gathering of militia at Orezza, the continued reports of weapons production there, and new calls for a national
consulta convinced Spinola that the time for talk was over and the pieve had to be subdued with overwhelming force. He even dared to hope that the gathering of malcontents there might be an opportunity to arrest several prominent rebel leaders in one fell swoop, to say nothing of collecting a great deal of contraband weapons.
Spinola envisioned a three-pronged attack, with Colonel
Pietro Paolo Crettler leading a force of some 300 men from the north, another force of 100 Genoese and 100 Greeks advancing from Corti in the west, and Captain
Grimaldi and his company of
filogenovesi approaching Orezza from the east. Such numbers could have undoubtedly overwhelmed the militia then gathered at Orezza, which were few in number and had no coherent leadership. Genoese logistics, however, were already in a miserable enough state without having to support complex coordinated maneuvers, and this crushing blow against Orezza was repeatedly delayed by difficulties with getting enough men in position and finding enough food and supplies to sustain them. Even those reinforcements Spinola managed to get from Genoa did him little good, as they did not even keep pace his losses from desertion. As weeks passed with no offensive being launched, winter descended upon the island, which further complicated matters as the Genoese soldiers were still largely without winter clothing.
As the Genoese struggled to launch their offensive, everything began to come apart at the seams. Violence steadily increased across the interior, including arson and murder directed at both
filogenovesi and “nationals.”
Giuseppe Maria Mambilla, the commissioner of Calvi, sent worrying reports of coordination between the exiles in the Balagna and the Castagniccia, and lamented that his entire province (outside of the garrisoned towns of Calvi, Calenzana, and Algajola) was now effectively in the hands of the malcontents. The capture of Porto Vecchio, while it had not yet led to further rebel conquests, had encouraged a resumption in smuggling which the Genoese were not well-equipped to deal with now that they lacked the support of the French fleet, and Spinola's commanders on the coast were sending him constant warnings about ship sightings and alleged landings of arms, supplies, and exiles.
The weakness of the republic was further demonstrated in mid-December when three
filogenovsei militiamen on a patrol were abducted and disarmed by men of the Ciavaldini clan, which had strongly supported Theodore in the past. Spinola sent Major
Domenico de Franceschi to recover them, and Franceschi’s company was reportedly victorious in a short skirmish with “bandits” to attempted to impede their progress. Belatedly realizing the danger they were in, the Ciavaldini reached out to their allied clans, calling them to rally to their defense. This growing force gave Franceschi pause, as he did not want to be responsible for triggering another uprising. He elected not to press the attack, but instead secured the release of the militiamen in exchange for a promise of amnesty to the Ciavaldini and their men. This resolved the situation, but set a dangerous precedent that the “justice” of the republic could be neutralized with sufficient numbers of armed men.
One must compliment the resourcefulness and drive of Spinola during this difficult time, who went to extraordinary lengths to make his plans come together. He conscripted the tailors and seamstresses of Bastia to make winter coats for the soldiers and solicited loans from the Bastian citizenry to buy flour. When the Senate failed to give him the support he needed, he set himself as an example to others, contributing 10,000 lire from his own pockets to buy supplies and pay salaries in preparation for the long-delayed Orezza expedition. Meanwhile, as the Genoese navy seemed powerless to stop the arrival of ships from the mainland, he developed a plan to arm small “gondolas” armed with muskets and
spingardi[2] that could intercept small craft used by smugglers. The 76 year old retired statesman toiling away in Bastia was undoubtedly the hardest working man in the Genoese government, and a rare bright spot of competence in an otherwise dismal picture. Nevertheless, it was not until late January that the plan was actually ready to be executed, and the numbers he had gathered were still less than he had hoped for. Most troubling was the absence of the Greeks, who had refused outright to participate in the operation. Spinola reproached their captains for their disobedience, but they were unmoved; they had the support of their soldiers and experience had taught them that Spinola could not afford to lose them, which meant he had no power to punish them.
As the year 1743 opened, Corsica was a curious blend of turmoil and stasis. The exile-led “rebel” bands in the north continued their assaults on the Genoese government and their collaborators, but were unable to break through from “banditry” into conquest. Loosely allied clans and exiles gradually built a base of power in Orezza in preparation for a declaration of defiance, but the planned
consulta was continually put off by interminable debates between clan leaders and the concerns of rebel commanders like Gaffori and Rauschenburg who did not want to make the same mistake twice of declaring war when the Corsican people were not ready to follow them. In the south, a royalist army under Colonna had landed and captured a Genoese port but was frozen in place by problems of supply and the cautious passivity of the southern mountaineers. The Genoese held an enormous military advantage on paper, but were so paralyzed by shortages, desertion, disorganization, bad information, and paranoia that even high-priority military ventures were delayed by months or never carried out at all. Something more was necessary to shake the island loose from this deadlock.
Footnotes
[1] The inventory of the artillery of the Presidium of Bonifacio reads like a list of 16th century antiques, which is probably exactly what they were. They had a bewildering array of weapons - falcons, falconets, sakers, culverins, pierriers, cannons, mortars - in an even more bewildering array of arcane and obsolete calibers, ranging from two massive 54-pounder “ancient cannons” and four 46-pounder “Spanish cannons” to iron and bronze guns with shot weights of 34, 27, 13½, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8½, 8, 7, 6¾, 6½, 4½, 2, and 1½ pounds. The Genoese officer taking this inventory apparently gave up when he got to the
petrieri (pierriers), noting only that they had “ten various pierriers.” To what extent any of these guns had the correct ammunition or were in serviceable condition is unclear. One saker is specifically described in the inventory as “useless,” but no comment is made on the condition of the others.
[2]
Spingarde, or “springald,” is a rather archaic term, used originally to mean a medieval arrow-throwing engine, that at this time designated an anti-personnel gun of relatively modest size, probably a wall-gun or pintle-mounted blunderbuss only somewhat more portable than a swivel gun. In modern Italian, the term refers to a punt gun, a very large, long-barreled shotgun affixed to a small boat (a punt) to shoot whole flocks of birds. Such armaments might have been helpful against the smallest unarmed and open-decked vessels, but to call a
spingarde-armed gondola a “warship” may be too generous.
