So, the Dila is fully "liberated" except for the Genoese stronghold in Bonifacio, and in the Diqua the Genoese only hold three ports and a couple lesser coastal towns. Looks like Theodore might be winning big, though probably he can't evict the Genoese from either Bastia or Calvi on his own.
King Theodore's Corsica
- Thread starter Carp
- Start date
It's only a matter of time before Genoa gets sucked into the War of the Austrian Succession (June 1745 OTL, I believe we're currently up to late 1743) at which point if they're still holding out in the ports the gloves will come off - the Royal Navy will put the ports under close blockade, and possibly land sailors and guns to assist with the sieges. Doubtless Theodore will claim credit for this...
The rest basically amounts to just Calvi and Bonifacio however. The other Genoese positions (well, all three of them) are not fortified citadels and may be taken. Also, I am not sure that a prolonged concerted effort cannot take Bonifacio; OTOH, "prolonged concerted effort" is not something Corsicans are likely to be very good at.
Genoa's entry into the war was the result of concessions given to Sardinia in the Treaty of Worms in order to bind Sardinia into a formal alliance with Austria and Britain. The problem was that one of the territories which Austria conceded was the Maquisate of Finale, which was not theirs to give - it was Genoese.
Finale had been granted to Genoa in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. Maria Theresa seems to have held that it had merely been mortgaged to Genoa and could be redeemed at her will, and the Treaty of Worms included a provision by which Charles Emmanuel would receive 300,000 pounds from the British to "redeem" Finale. But they had never asked Genoa whether it wanted to part with Finale for 300,000 pounds, and Genoa insisted (correctly, it would seem) that they had purchased, not mortgaged Finale and that the Pragmatic Allies (Prallies?) had no legal basis to demand it from them. The irony of it all was that Maria Theresa, who had been absolutely enraged that anyone would dare try to steal a piece of her patrimony, had now blithely consented to Genoa being carved up on the basis of naked avarice. Even some British statesmen admitted the dubious nature of the Finale clause when they read the treaty (William Pitt described it as "such an act of injustice toward Genoa as must alarm all Europe").
Within weeks of the Worms treaty, word of the planned "redemption" of Finale leaked out to Genoa. They had remained neutral thus far, knowing very well that they were a weak power and would be best served by staying out of the fight. The intended cession of Finale, however, meant that they now had a vested interest in a Bourbon victory, for that was the only way by which they could avoid losing territory. It logically followed that if they were to be forced into the Bourbon camp they might as well get something out of it, and thus their diplomats been negotiating Genoa's entry into the war in exchange for the cession of some choice pieces of Piedmont.
The main reason it took them until May of 1745 to sign an alliance with the Bourbon powers was because of the credulity of France. The French spent much of the WotAS hoping against hope that they might be able to get Sardinia to switch sides, which made them easy suckers for Sardinia's brilliant diplomatic game. Obviously signing an alliance with Genoa which offered them Sardinian territory was incompatible with flipping Sardinia to Team Bourbon, so France held off on any formal arrangement with Genoa until the Spring of 1745 when the French and Spanish armies converged on Genoese territory and it no longer made sense to keep waiting for Turin to change its mind.
I don't think Genoa's position on Corsica (which was not strong IOTL either) will have much of an effect on this. Certainly a weaker Genoa won't prevent the Pragmatic Allies from signing away Finale at Worms, and once that happens it's only logical that Genoa will start gravitating towards open alliance with the Bourbons. How soon they get there depends less on Corsica than what's going on at Versailles and on the battlefields of Italy.
Bastia is going to be a problem so long as the Genoese still have 1,500+ regulars there (and perhaps more now that the Ajaccio garrison has been evacuated). That's not a force the rebels can easily match. That said, however, after the treaty of Worms the likelihood of war on the continent caused the Genoese to withdraw men from Corsica at a precipitous rate, well before they actually joined the Bourbon alliance. These are OTL figures for the number of Genoese regular troops in Corsica:
November 1743: 2,523
January 1745: 1,375
September 1745: 1,078
May 1746: 760
May 1748: 715
Such drastic troop cuts would be much more dangerous ITTL given the greater strength of Theodore and the nationals, but the Genoese don't have much of a choice. They clearly viewed the loss of Finale as a graver threat than the loss of Corsica. Corsica, after all, could always be reclaimed after the war with foreign help, but if Austria won the continental war and Sardinia took Finale the Genoese would be powerless to reclaim it. The question then becomes whether they try to hold on to Bastia, Calvi, and Bonifacio with such meager forces or whether they abandon one of their posts - presumably Bastia, but the capital's loss would be a hard blow - to try and further consolidate their remaining forces and keep their "toehold" on the island.
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John Fredrick Parker
Donor
@Carp Since I really hope we do see Genoa entering the war earlier following the Treaty of Worms, I’m hoping those events on the continent (battles in Italy, France giving up on flipping Sardinia earlier, etc) come to pass TTL.
I'm really looking forward to finding out how you can avoid this coming to pass. Theodore will need to make his government useful to more than one foreign power. It may not be feasible to offer, say, Bastia to the French while offering Ajaccio to the British, but some other kind of double-dealing / 'even-handedness to opposing powers' may be necessary.
Yep. Giuseppe Maria Buonaparte is indeed alive and well ITTL - I didn't kill him off in the siege. While historically he was important enough to be a delegate to the consulta of Corti in 1749, however, I don't know for sure whether he was on the council in 1743, so I deliberately chose to leave the exact membership of the council ambiguous in the last update. If he's not on the council right now, he almost certainly will be eventually (his ancestors had held council seats as far back as the middle 16th century). We'll definitely see him again in this story.
The Costas and Buonapartes, by the way, were indeed related. Sebastiano Costa's paternal grandmother was a certain Camilla Buonaparte, daughter of Sebastiano Buonaparte (d. 1643), great-great-great-great-grandfather of Napoleon.
Edit: And by the way, Napoleon's other grandfather Giovan Geronimo Ramolino was a Genoese officer at Ajaccio in 1743 (although since he was about 20 years old, presumably he couldn't have been very senior). He was at the siege ITTL, although I've made no determination as to his fate.
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The Napoleons are coming, the Napoleons are coming!!!!! Hide your crowns and scepters everyone!
What's even more interesting is that he has two sisters - Paola Maria (born 1710) and Maddalena (born 1712) . The most interesting of the pair is Paola Maria, who was married twice - once in 1737 and once in 1750, implied she was widowed at some point between those dates. You know, just in case there's somebody around who would benefit from making a marital connection in the late 1740's with a well connected Corsican family from the south...
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Are you sure Paola Maria is the most interesting sister? On the page you linked, did you notice who Maddalena was married to - a certain “Frederick de Drost von Moersbruck?”
This is actually a really confusing bit of Neuhoff family history. Some sources claim that Maddalena Buonaparte married this “Frederick de Drost” in 1736, but that seems unlikely for a variety of reasons, one of which is that as far as I can tell Costa doesn't seem to mention it. Additionally, the identity of “Frederick de Drost von Moersbruck” is uncertain. He’s presented in these sources as a relative of Theodore, but It’s unclear to me where “Moersbruck” even is. I don’t think it’s on any list of Neuhoff titles I’m aware of. “Frederick de Drost” sounds like it could be Frederick von Neuhoff zu Pungelscheid, whose father was sometimes called the “Baron von Drost,” but he was 11 years old in 1736 and never set foot on Corsica in his life. Matthias von Drost is another possibility - perhaps Frederick was one of his names - but he married Colonna’s sister. Maybe it was Rauschenburg, whose name was “Johann Friedrich,” but there’s no evidence he ever married or had children and he wasn’t generally known as “de/von Drost.”
Other sources claim that Maddalena married Francesco Antonio de Drost, the son of Matthias von Drost and Maria Rosa Colonna-Bozzi, which would make considerably more sense were it not for the fact that Maddalena is much older than Francesco and the date of the marriage is generally given as 1766, when Maddalena would be 54 years old (assuming that birthdate of 1712 is accurate). Francesco is an interesting figure, as he seems to tie all the strands of Corsican history together in one short lifespan - he was a relative of Theodore who married a Bonaparte and died fighting for Paoli at Ponte Novu in 1769. But this is difficult to square with Maddalena’s age. She is said to have been Francesco’s second wife, but even so it’s unclear why a man in his 20s would remarry to a woman in her 50s. It’s also been suggested that Francesco’s first wife, given as “Maria Maddalena Zicavo,” might be the same person as Maddalena Buonaparte (perhaps a clerical error?), but even his marriage to the first Maddalena is generally given as 1760, which makes the bride “only” 48.
Unfortunately none of the proffered explanations for the Bonaparte-Drost marriage make much sense to me. If you think you can unravel the mystery, you’re welcome to try...
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Napoleon having Theodore as his great-uncle... ohhhhh...
Given how far in the past the POD is from his birth odds are while a Napoleon Bonaparte may be born, he wouldn't be ours. He'd be more like an AU second or third cousin.
Well there's a Moersbach in Palatinate Zweibruecken but I suspect Moers which is in Westphalia west of Verse valley where Neuhoff is and is near a river.
Weirdly there's also a Meersburg in southern Germany where a 19thc poet "Anna Elisabeth Franziska Adolphine Wilhelmine Louise Maria, Freiin von Droste zu Hülshoff,[1] known as Annette von Droste-Hülshoff" lived. Guess what part of the country her father was a baron in. I suspect a link.
Weirdly there's also a Meersburg in southern Germany where a 19thc poet "Anna Elisabeth Franziska Adolphine Wilhelmine Louise Maria, Freiin von Droste zu Hülshoff,[1] known as Annette von Droste-Hülshoff" lived. Guess what part of the country her father was a baron in. I suspect a link.