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Transmutation
Theodore arrived on the scene just as the Corsican rebellion appeared to be ending. After an initial and unexpected series of defeats at the hands of the rebels, the imperial troops which had occupied the country by Genoa's request (and on Genoa's tab) had brought reinforcements and compelled the "malcontents" to agree to a truce and enter negotiations. The rebels ultimately agreed to lay down their arms, submit to the Republic, and hand over several of their leaders to the imperial commanders as hostages in exchange for a general amnesty and consideration of Corsican demands.
The hostages Luigi Giafferi, Andrea Ciaccaldi, Giovanni Aitelli, and Padre Carlo Raffaelli were initially held by the Austrians,[A] but the senior imperial commander Friedrich Ludwig von Württemberg-Winnental, having received orders recalling him from Corsica, decided on his own initiative to hand them over to the Genoese. Heedless of their promise of amnesty, the Senate imprisoned them at Savona and sentenced them to death. Outraged, the rebels back on Corsica threatened a new rebellion if their leaders were not freed. The emperor's representative, Wirich Philipp von Daun (then governor of Milan), castigated Württemberg for his actions, communicating to him the distinct displeasure of His Imperial Majesty Charles VI. Von Daun and Lieutenant-General Baron Karl Franz von Wachtendonck (who had preceded Württemberg as senior commander before his arrival, and regained that position after his recall) pressured the Genoese to release the prisoners. Hoping to go over their heads, the Genoese Senate sent "gifts" to Vienna in an attempt to bribe the imperial ministers into favoring their position. All waited on word from Vienna, and when it arrived in April of 1733 the emperor's order was clear: all the prisoners were to be freed at once. The Genoese reluctantly complied.
It is not known exactly what inspired this imperial decision, but Theodore would later be widely credited with a leading part. He claimed he had written a letter to Vienna which had "clarified matters," and indeed several of the hostages, once they were freed, publicly gave Theodore credit for their release. Theodore did have friends in Vienna, and was in fact a relation of General Wachtendonck (albeit a somewhat distant one). Between his arrival in Genoa and the freeing of the prisoners, he had met secretively with rebel sympathizers in Genoa, traveled to Tuscany to meet exiled rebels there, and is rumored to have even traveled briefly to Corsica in the guise of an imperial hussar; certainly his former career as a spy was serving him well. He wrote letters to imperial officials, playing off their fear that other powers, particularly Spain, might use the rebellion as an excuse to take control of the island and further increase their power in Italy.[1]
Regardless of exactly how great Theodore's role really was, it was this incident which first made his name known among the Corsicans. Taking advantage of his new notoriety, Theodore arranged meetings with Corsican leaders in Livorno. These included some of the recently freed "prisoners of Savona" as well as other Corsicans who would become key players in his reign, in particular the Genoese-educated lawyer Sebastiano Costa (the author of the 1735 Constitution), who would become Theodore's "Grand Chancellor," and the Balagnese nobleman Simone Fabiani, who would be among his finest generals.
To these rebel leaders Theodore made a case for his usefulness to their cause. The Corsicans, he argued, did not have what was necessary to win. Firstly, they needed money and arms; the 150 muskets which Costa had spent all his money on before fleeing from Genoa was not going to cut it. Theodore told them he could raise vast amounts of capital and arrange arms shipments that would allow them to fight the Genoese on an even footing. But guns alone would not give them the victory; they also needed diplomacy, and here again Theodore recommended himself. He was an exceedingly well-traveled nobleman with friends (or at least acquaintances) and contacts in nearly every court on the continent, and he regaled them with (essentially true, if embellished) stories of being a favorite of the Duchess of Orleans, of meeting Eugene of Savoy and the King and Queen of Spain, and of all the various diplomats and ministers and high nobility who knew him. At the moment he was not yet offering himself as a king, but certainly as a benefactor, a man who could make everything possible for them. Having been turned away or ignored by every foreign power whom they had asked for help, the Corsican leaders were quite receptive to his offers. It probably helped that they knew absolutely nothing about his past save what they heard from his own mouth.
Theodore has sometimes been called a trickster or con-man, but while he didn't always tell the truth and often left debts unpaid his Corsican scheme was certainly not a con. For the next three years, Theodore did exactly what he had told the Corsican leaders he would, and did it with extreme diligence and at substantial risk to his own life. One of his first and most important backers was the old and childless Gian Gastone de Medici, the last of the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany, who granted Theodore an audience and seems to have taken a liking to him immediately. The duke was allegedly a sympathizer with the Corsicans and had no love for Genoa, and was happy to divert some funds to the baron's venture. Theodore's old Jacobite friends in Rome were good for some money, too.
Gian Gastone de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, looking younger
and more vital than he probably did when Theodore met him.
Theodore was a man of unusual religious tolerance for his time. As such, it was perhaps no surprise that he would look for financial support in unorthodox places. He received funding from the Jews of Livorno, whom he promised the opportunity to settle in Corsica—specifically at Aleria, which Neuhoff many not have realized was uninhabited because it was rendered largely uninhabitable by malaria. He then sailed to Tunis to solicit funds from the "Jews of Barbary." It was there that he was reunited with his old friend and patron, Duke Johan Willem Ripperda.
Ripperda, a man whose life was nearly as incredible as Theodore's, had escaped from prison in Spain in 1727 and traveled to Britain, where he made himself modestly useful by giving information on the Spanish court to the British government. After the formal end of the Anglo-Spanish War in late 1729 he became surplus to requirements, and in 1731 he returned to his native Holland. He did not stay there long—perhaps even more than Theodore, he had a thirst for adventure. Later that year he traveled to Morocco to enter the service of Sultan Moulay Abdallah, who welcomed him warmly and made him a minister and a general. Some sources claim he converted to Islam, a charge which he personally denied. Unfortunately the number of fanciful tales told about him after his death makes it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.
Ripperda prospered in Morocco for a while, but was forced to leave the country after Abdallah was overthrown by his half-brother Ali in 1734.[2] He lived for a time in Tetouan and then came to Tunisia, where he fell ill and put himself into the care of Dr. Buongiorno, a Tuscan physician living in Tunis. As it happened, Theodore was already there, having received a letter of introduction to Buongiorno from the Grand Duke. It seems rather unlikely that this was a coincidence; Theodore and Ripperda were probably exchanging letters for some time before this "chance" meeting.
That Corsica might accept not just a benefactor but a king appears to have been Ripperda's idea, and the original plan was for Ripperda to be that king. After all, he was a duke and Theodore was a baron; Ripperda also still had a considerable fortune, while Theodore was penniless save for the funds he had recently raised for the rebels. Theodore was to be his chief general and right-hand man. After hashing out the plan, they convinced the Bey of Tunis that an independent Corsica would be good for Tunisian trade and promised commercial concessions in exchange for monetary support. Ripperda then returned to Morocco, where he still maintained a relationship with he powerful Dowager Sultana, and contacted his friends in Holland to arrange purchases of supplies and munitions. Theodore, meanwhile, traveled to Constantinople, where he solicited recognition and aid from the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud and invited him to send Turkish and Albanian settlers. His time spent there is not well documented and the settlers never materialized, but he may have procured funding or some other aid there. On a return voyage to Tunis he was apparently captured and enslaved by Algerian pirates, but managed to gain his freedom by paying a ransom.[3]
In the summer of 1735, Theodore returned to Tuscany and had more meetings with the Grand Duke and his ministers, and then visited bankers and foreign consuls in Livorno. There, however, he was briefly imprisoned when one such banker who had loaned him money discovered some rumor of his past and accused him of borrowing money under false pretenses. Certainly Theodore had done quite a bit under false pretenses—around that time he was going by the name of Syberg (again) and recruiting men whilst pretending to be raising soldiers for the Portuguese army—but as it happened, the specific accusation was that he had pretended to be a German nobleman, something he actually was. The matter was soon resolved and Theodore was released, but not before he caught typhoid in prison and nearly died. Despite securing significant funding for his venture with Ripperda, Theodore's own pockets were essentially empty, and he had to recover in a pauper's hospital. It was not until December of 1735 that he was able to resume his work.
Ripperda had in the meantime amassed muskets, cannon, and money, but he was about to lose a crown. In a letter to one of his Dutch partners, he claimed that the Dowager Sultana of Morocco, who had granted him a large sum for the enterprise, had threatened to withdraw her support if Ripperda went in person to Corsica as "she suspected that I might be disloyal to her interests." That, at least, was Ripperda's face-saving way of explaining the switch, but it is possible that the Corsicans themselves demanded it. The Baron Neuhoff was much better known to the rebel leaders than Ripperda, who had never been near Corsica and does not seem to have met any of the rebel leaders in person. For his role in freeing the "Prisoners of Savona," Neuhoff already had a positive reputation among the Corsicans. It is also possible that Ripperda's failing health made him realize that he was not up to the task; he was, among other things, plagued by gout. In his letter, written after Theodore's departure for Corsica, he writes:
Theodore gathered his cadre of followers, which included two freed Turkish slaves given to him by the Grand Duke, several Corsicans which Theodore had freed from slavery in Tunis, and other men from various nations who served as his bodyguards, advisors, confessors, and valets. All were drawn to Theodore by the sheer power of his charisma and his grand promises of his own royal future. He had even attracted the service of the younger brother of Dr. Buongiorno, in whose house Theodore had first reunited with Ripperda. In February of 1736, Ripperda's consignments from Holland arrived, and Theodore's transportation was arranged as well—the merchant ship Richard, flying under a British flag since it was captained by the Englishman Richard "Dick" Ortega. Now the would-be king at last made sail for his kingdom.
Footnotes
[1] An eminently reasonable fear, given that in the following year the Infante Charles of Parma invaded the Kingdom of Naples and snatched it from the Austrians.
[2] It was Abdallah's first overthrow, but not his last; he would be deposed four more times and return to power each time thereafter. Part of the problem was that his father, Sultan Moulay Ismail, was and remains a top contender for the title of "the man with the most children in the history of the world," allegedly siring 867 children by nine wives and numerous concubines. The number of half-brothers who could conspire to seize Abdallah's throne was considerable.
[3] It was speculated by some contemporaries that Theodore's royal coat of arms, featuring a broken chain and a Moor's head, was based on the incident of his capture and "escape" (actually ransom) from the Barbary corsairs. This is quite false; the broken chain was the traditional arms of the Neuhoff house, and the Moor's head was an old Aragonese symbol for Corsica which Theodore revived.
Timeline Notes
[A] As long as I'm rattling off some names of Corsicans, this seems like as good a moment as any to mention my policy on Corsican names. Corsican, of course, is a language (or perhaps a dialect of Italian depending on your viewpoint and the definition of "dialect"), and most Corsicans in the 18th century spoke Corsican. Because of the long history of Genoese rule, however, as well as the island's proximity to Italy, most educated, urban-dwelling, and upper-class Corsicans spoke Italian. Italian was the language of culture and class among the Corsicans, while Corsican was a peasant's language. Pasquale Paoli himself intended Italian, not Corsican, to be the island's official language, and seems to have considered Corsican a mere Italian dialect. As I consider the same preference for Italian in a governmental/courtly/cultured setting to be likely ITTL, I have chosen to render the names of most Corsicans in their Italian forms. Thus, when I speak of minister Gaffori, for instance (a character who has not yet appeared), I will call him Gianpietro rather than Ghjuvan Petru (and certainly not Jean-Pierre). I will usually do the same for place names, many of which are known by their French names today; thus we will speak of San Fiorenzo rather than either San Fiurenzu or Saint-Florent.
Transmutation
A Genoese pinque or "pink," a small, shallow-keeled cargo ship used in the Mediterranean.
The Richard, the ship which bore Theodore to Corsica, was the same type of vessel.
A Genoese pinque or "pink," a small, shallow-keeled cargo ship used in the Mediterranean.
The Richard, the ship which bore Theodore to Corsica, was the same type of vessel.
Theodore arrived on the scene just as the Corsican rebellion appeared to be ending. After an initial and unexpected series of defeats at the hands of the rebels, the imperial troops which had occupied the country by Genoa's request (and on Genoa's tab) had brought reinforcements and compelled the "malcontents" to agree to a truce and enter negotiations. The rebels ultimately agreed to lay down their arms, submit to the Republic, and hand over several of their leaders to the imperial commanders as hostages in exchange for a general amnesty and consideration of Corsican demands.
The hostages Luigi Giafferi, Andrea Ciaccaldi, Giovanni Aitelli, and Padre Carlo Raffaelli were initially held by the Austrians,[A] but the senior imperial commander Friedrich Ludwig von Württemberg-Winnental, having received orders recalling him from Corsica, decided on his own initiative to hand them over to the Genoese. Heedless of their promise of amnesty, the Senate imprisoned them at Savona and sentenced them to death. Outraged, the rebels back on Corsica threatened a new rebellion if their leaders were not freed. The emperor's representative, Wirich Philipp von Daun (then governor of Milan), castigated Württemberg for his actions, communicating to him the distinct displeasure of His Imperial Majesty Charles VI. Von Daun and Lieutenant-General Baron Karl Franz von Wachtendonck (who had preceded Württemberg as senior commander before his arrival, and regained that position after his recall) pressured the Genoese to release the prisoners. Hoping to go over their heads, the Genoese Senate sent "gifts" to Vienna in an attempt to bribe the imperial ministers into favoring their position. All waited on word from Vienna, and when it arrived in April of 1733 the emperor's order was clear: all the prisoners were to be freed at once. The Genoese reluctantly complied.
It is not known exactly what inspired this imperial decision, but Theodore would later be widely credited with a leading part. He claimed he had written a letter to Vienna which had "clarified matters," and indeed several of the hostages, once they were freed, publicly gave Theodore credit for their release. Theodore did have friends in Vienna, and was in fact a relation of General Wachtendonck (albeit a somewhat distant one). Between his arrival in Genoa and the freeing of the prisoners, he had met secretively with rebel sympathizers in Genoa, traveled to Tuscany to meet exiled rebels there, and is rumored to have even traveled briefly to Corsica in the guise of an imperial hussar; certainly his former career as a spy was serving him well. He wrote letters to imperial officials, playing off their fear that other powers, particularly Spain, might use the rebellion as an excuse to take control of the island and further increase their power in Italy.[1]
Regardless of exactly how great Theodore's role really was, it was this incident which first made his name known among the Corsicans. Taking advantage of his new notoriety, Theodore arranged meetings with Corsican leaders in Livorno. These included some of the recently freed "prisoners of Savona" as well as other Corsicans who would become key players in his reign, in particular the Genoese-educated lawyer Sebastiano Costa (the author of the 1735 Constitution), who would become Theodore's "Grand Chancellor," and the Balagnese nobleman Simone Fabiani, who would be among his finest generals.
To these rebel leaders Theodore made a case for his usefulness to their cause. The Corsicans, he argued, did not have what was necessary to win. Firstly, they needed money and arms; the 150 muskets which Costa had spent all his money on before fleeing from Genoa was not going to cut it. Theodore told them he could raise vast amounts of capital and arrange arms shipments that would allow them to fight the Genoese on an even footing. But guns alone would not give them the victory; they also needed diplomacy, and here again Theodore recommended himself. He was an exceedingly well-traveled nobleman with friends (or at least acquaintances) and contacts in nearly every court on the continent, and he regaled them with (essentially true, if embellished) stories of being a favorite of the Duchess of Orleans, of meeting Eugene of Savoy and the King and Queen of Spain, and of all the various diplomats and ministers and high nobility who knew him. At the moment he was not yet offering himself as a king, but certainly as a benefactor, a man who could make everything possible for them. Having been turned away or ignored by every foreign power whom they had asked for help, the Corsican leaders were quite receptive to his offers. It probably helped that they knew absolutely nothing about his past save what they heard from his own mouth.
Theodore has sometimes been called a trickster or con-man, but while he didn't always tell the truth and often left debts unpaid his Corsican scheme was certainly not a con. For the next three years, Theodore did exactly what he had told the Corsican leaders he would, and did it with extreme diligence and at substantial risk to his own life. One of his first and most important backers was the old and childless Gian Gastone de Medici, the last of the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany, who granted Theodore an audience and seems to have taken a liking to him immediately. The duke was allegedly a sympathizer with the Corsicans and had no love for Genoa, and was happy to divert some funds to the baron's venture. Theodore's old Jacobite friends in Rome were good for some money, too.
Gian Gastone de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, looking younger
and more vital than he probably did when Theodore met him.
Theodore was a man of unusual religious tolerance for his time. As such, it was perhaps no surprise that he would look for financial support in unorthodox places. He received funding from the Jews of Livorno, whom he promised the opportunity to settle in Corsica—specifically at Aleria, which Neuhoff many not have realized was uninhabited because it was rendered largely uninhabitable by malaria. He then sailed to Tunis to solicit funds from the "Jews of Barbary." It was there that he was reunited with his old friend and patron, Duke Johan Willem Ripperda.
Ripperda, a man whose life was nearly as incredible as Theodore's, had escaped from prison in Spain in 1727 and traveled to Britain, where he made himself modestly useful by giving information on the Spanish court to the British government. After the formal end of the Anglo-Spanish War in late 1729 he became surplus to requirements, and in 1731 he returned to his native Holland. He did not stay there long—perhaps even more than Theodore, he had a thirst for adventure. Later that year he traveled to Morocco to enter the service of Sultan Moulay Abdallah, who welcomed him warmly and made him a minister and a general. Some sources claim he converted to Islam, a charge which he personally denied. Unfortunately the number of fanciful tales told about him after his death makes it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.
Ripperda prospered in Morocco for a while, but was forced to leave the country after Abdallah was overthrown by his half-brother Ali in 1734.[2] He lived for a time in Tetouan and then came to Tunisia, where he fell ill and put himself into the care of Dr. Buongiorno, a Tuscan physician living in Tunis. As it happened, Theodore was already there, having received a letter of introduction to Buongiorno from the Grand Duke. It seems rather unlikely that this was a coincidence; Theodore and Ripperda were probably exchanging letters for some time before this "chance" meeting.
That Corsica might accept not just a benefactor but a king appears to have been Ripperda's idea, and the original plan was for Ripperda to be that king. After all, he was a duke and Theodore was a baron; Ripperda also still had a considerable fortune, while Theodore was penniless save for the funds he had recently raised for the rebels. Theodore was to be his chief general and right-hand man. After hashing out the plan, they convinced the Bey of Tunis that an independent Corsica would be good for Tunisian trade and promised commercial concessions in exchange for monetary support. Ripperda then returned to Morocco, where he still maintained a relationship with he powerful Dowager Sultana, and contacted his friends in Holland to arrange purchases of supplies and munitions. Theodore, meanwhile, traveled to Constantinople, where he solicited recognition and aid from the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud and invited him to send Turkish and Albanian settlers. His time spent there is not well documented and the settlers never materialized, but he may have procured funding or some other aid there. On a return voyage to Tunis he was apparently captured and enslaved by Algerian pirates, but managed to gain his freedom by paying a ransom.[3]
In the summer of 1735, Theodore returned to Tuscany and had more meetings with the Grand Duke and his ministers, and then visited bankers and foreign consuls in Livorno. There, however, he was briefly imprisoned when one such banker who had loaned him money discovered some rumor of his past and accused him of borrowing money under false pretenses. Certainly Theodore had done quite a bit under false pretenses—around that time he was going by the name of Syberg (again) and recruiting men whilst pretending to be raising soldiers for the Portuguese army—but as it happened, the specific accusation was that he had pretended to be a German nobleman, something he actually was. The matter was soon resolved and Theodore was released, but not before he caught typhoid in prison and nearly died. Despite securing significant funding for his venture with Ripperda, Theodore's own pockets were essentially empty, and he had to recover in a pauper's hospital. It was not until December of 1735 that he was able to resume his work.
Ripperda had in the meantime amassed muskets, cannon, and money, but he was about to lose a crown. In a letter to one of his Dutch partners, he claimed that the Dowager Sultana of Morocco, who had granted him a large sum for the enterprise, had threatened to withdraw her support if Ripperda went in person to Corsica as "she suspected that I might be disloyal to her interests." That, at least, was Ripperda's face-saving way of explaining the switch, but it is possible that the Corsicans themselves demanded it. The Baron Neuhoff was much better known to the rebel leaders than Ripperda, who had never been near Corsica and does not seem to have met any of the rebel leaders in person. For his role in freeing the "Prisoners of Savona," Neuhoff already had a positive reputation among the Corsicans. It is also possible that Ripperda's failing health made him realize that he was not up to the task; he was, among other things, plagued by gout. In his letter, written after Theodore's departure for Corsica, he writes:
Theodore gathered his cadre of followers, which included two freed Turkish slaves given to him by the Grand Duke, several Corsicans which Theodore had freed from slavery in Tunis, and other men from various nations who served as his bodyguards, advisors, confessors, and valets. All were drawn to Theodore by the sheer power of his charisma and his grand promises of his own royal future. He had even attracted the service of the younger brother of Dr. Buongiorno, in whose house Theodore had first reunited with Ripperda. In February of 1736, Ripperda's consignments from Holland arrived, and Theodore's transportation was arranged as well—the merchant ship Richard, flying under a British flag since it was captained by the Englishman Richard "Dick" Ortega. Now the would-be king at last made sail for his kingdom.
Footnotes
[1] An eminently reasonable fear, given that in the following year the Infante Charles of Parma invaded the Kingdom of Naples and snatched it from the Austrians.
[2] It was Abdallah's first overthrow, but not his last; he would be deposed four more times and return to power each time thereafter. Part of the problem was that his father, Sultan Moulay Ismail, was and remains a top contender for the title of "the man with the most children in the history of the world," allegedly siring 867 children by nine wives and numerous concubines. The number of half-brothers who could conspire to seize Abdallah's throne was considerable.
[3] It was speculated by some contemporaries that Theodore's royal coat of arms, featuring a broken chain and a Moor's head, was based on the incident of his capture and "escape" (actually ransom) from the Barbary corsairs. This is quite false; the broken chain was the traditional arms of the Neuhoff house, and the Moor's head was an old Aragonese symbol for Corsica which Theodore revived.
Timeline Notes
[A] As long as I'm rattling off some names of Corsicans, this seems like as good a moment as any to mention my policy on Corsican names. Corsican, of course, is a language (or perhaps a dialect of Italian depending on your viewpoint and the definition of "dialect"), and most Corsicans in the 18th century spoke Corsican. Because of the long history of Genoese rule, however, as well as the island's proximity to Italy, most educated, urban-dwelling, and upper-class Corsicans spoke Italian. Italian was the language of culture and class among the Corsicans, while Corsican was a peasant's language. Pasquale Paoli himself intended Italian, not Corsican, to be the island's official language, and seems to have considered Corsican a mere Italian dialect. As I consider the same preference for Italian in a governmental/courtly/cultured setting to be likely ITTL, I have chosen to render the names of most Corsicans in their Italian forms. Thus, when I speak of minister Gaffori, for instance (a character who has not yet appeared), I will call him Gianpietro rather than Ghjuvan Petru (and certainly not Jean-Pierre). I will usually do the same for place names, many of which are known by their French names today; thus we will speak of San Fiorenzo rather than either San Fiurenzu or Saint-Florent.
- Carp
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