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King Theodore had not just chosen Cervioni as his capital upon his arrival in 1736 because of its proximity to his landing site north of Aleria. It was the largest town on the eastern plain (technically on the hillside rising above the plain) between Porto Vecchio and Bastia,[A] it was the seat of the Diocese of Aleria, and it served as the gateway to the Castagniccia, the most populated region of the Corsican highland and home to many rebel leaders and soldiers. Boissieux anticipated that its capture would be a psychological blow to the Corsicans—even if the king did not actually reside there anymore—but it also appeared to be a valuable strategic point, a perfect bridgehead from which to launch attacks into the heartland of the rebellion.

It was also almost totally undefended, although amusingly it did have artillery. A few years earlier, Chancellor Sebastiano Costa had selected two of the "small pieces" which Theodore had initially brought to Corsica and were not particularly useful as siege guns to sit on either side of the entrance to Theodore's "palace," actually the former residence of the bishop, so as to give the place a more imposing feel. As these were not actually intended for use, however, there was no powder or shot for them. The local militia of Campoloro, Cervioni's pieve, numbered about 200 men under Colonel Francesco Gio Suzzoni, but they had not seen significant action since 1737 and had made no preparations for the defense of the village. When French forces approached, most of the local militiamen took to the hills or stashed their weapons under their floorboards to avoid confiscation.

Brigadier Jean-Baptiste François, Marquis de Villemur had encamped his army near the mouth of the Alesani river on the night of June 6th, and on the following morning he led three battalions of infantry and a hussar squadron towards the village of San Andrea di Cotone about a mile south of Cervione. Meeting only the most fleeting resistance, he left one battalion there and personally led the other two (plus the hussars) to Cervioni itself. The town capitulated without a fight, and Theodore's "capital" fell into the hands of the French. The town was searched for munitions, although except for Costa's display cannons not much was found, as the militia had hidden or escaped with most of the local weaponry. The town was then plundered of its food stores, which were invaluable to Villemur.

After breaking his supply lines in Fiumorbo, Villemur had counted on maritime supply to keep his army marching, but Genoese support had been spotty at best. The primitive Genoese logistical system was already severely strained by the upkeep of nearly ten thousand Frenchmen, a significantly larger force than the entire Genoese army, and the Genoese navy already had its hands full supplying the French in the Balagna as well as the troops of Brigadier Anne de Montmorency-Luxembourg, Comte de Montmorency, whose progress down the rugged Capo Corso was positively glacial compared to Villemur's swift advance northwards. Moreover, the Corsicans were actively interfering with supply attempts, as armed feluccas and other ships crewed by royalist privateers operating from Bastia and the lagoons of the eastern coast menaced Genoese shipping. The ramshackle "Corsican navy" - really just fishermen and smugglers with muskets—was no match for an actual warship, but they could certainly snap up a Genoese barque laden with stores. That required the Genoese to protect their shipments with galleys or armed feluccas of their own, but organizing such convoys only added to the time, cost, and inconvenience of supplying Villemur's column, particularly since he seldom stayed in one place for long.

Villemur enjoyed a luncheon with his officers at Theodore's table, apparently even breaking open a bottle of Theodore's treasured Rhenish wine which had been left in the cellar. One of Villemur's officers proposed that they torch the place afterwards, but the brigadier declined, and for good reason—the "palace" was the bishop's residence, and the absent bishop of Aleria was none other than Camillo de Mari, a close relation of the Genoese Commissioner-General Giovanni-Battista de Mari.

The town was secured, but soon Villemur's attention was diverted by the sound of gunfire from the south. Taking a few companies of infantry and the hussars to investigate, Villemur found his battalion at San Andrea under attack by rebel militia. The French garrison had the matter well in hand; the militia were not much more than an annoyance. There were, however, a fair number of them—one or two hundred, Villemur guessed—and they retired up the valley when pursued. Villemur ordered Colonel Charles-Claude-Joachim d’Audibert, Comte de Lussan, to take his regiment of La Sarre and a company of hussars to scout up the valley.

In that direction lay the forces of Lieutenant-General Count Andrea Ceccaldi and Count Gianpetro Gaffori, who had recently rendezvoused at the Convent of Alesani. Between them they had around 900 men. The skirmishers at San Andrea had in fact been their own scouting party, led by Captain Clemente Paoli, who had been specifically instructed not to get into any serious firefight with the French. Paoli now sent back a messenger reporting that there were at least a thousand Frenchmen there (somewhat of an overstatement; there were probably no more than 700) including cavalry, and that they were advancing up the valley. Ceccaldi did not like his chances much, but it was good terrain; the valley was heavily wooded and traversable only by narrow paths along steep slopes.

That afternoon, Lussan reached the small village of Ortale. After searching the village for arms, he reportedly found an old monk who informed him that the rebels had a stash of munitions at the convent just across the valley, only a mile away. Lussan descended into the valley floor, but cautiously, assigning the hussars to scout ahead. They encountered a few dozen militiamen and quickly dispersed them, but as they pushed ahead in pursuit the woods around Lussan's main column erupted in gunfire. The hussars, occupied in front, had not adequately screened his flanks, and he had marched straight into an ambush by Gaffori's highlanders. The hussars, meanwhile, had reached the outskirts of the village of Piazzali only a quarter mile away, and the fifty horsemen found themselves confronted by a force of nearly 300 waiting militia. The company captain - evidently the third most senior hussar officer - was mortally wounded in the opening volley, and the horsemen turned and fled. Lussan's infantry, meanwhile, were evidently made of sterner stuff; Lussan quickly organized them into lines facing outwards and the French blasted off volleys into the woods. With the rebel militia taking cover behind trees, however, it was easier for the Corsicans to hit the tightly-packed rows of white-coated Frenchmen than it was for the French soldiers to hit their targets, and being surrounded with no clear idea of how many men he faced, Lussan could not simply order an advance to flush them out with bayonets. Once the hussars appeared at his front, riding hastily in retreat, Lussan decided the best course of action was to withdraw. The French made a fighting retreat through the woods to Ortale, foiling the Corsicans' attempt to cut them off, and once he had made a defensible perimeter at the village the rebels broke off the attack. The old monk, he noted, was long gone. Ceccaldi had not destroyed Lussan's battalion as he had hoped, but he had exacted serious casualties, with nearly a hundred Frenchmen dead or wounded at slight cost to his own force. As Lussan withdrew downriver, the Corsicans returned and kept up the pressure until he finally neared San Andrea.

Upon his return, Villemur's officers clamored for revenge. Villemur was no fool; he knew perfectly well that his army was at a disadvantage in the narrow, forested valleys of the Castagniccia, and he had no information as to the size of the enemy force, which was at least considerable enough to ambush and defeat a battalion. Villemur had confidence in the superior training of his troops and considered it unlikely that the Corsicans had as many men under arms as him, but there was no guarantee that the Corsican force would stand and fight, and a venture inland would draw him away from the coast and delay his progress north. Nevertheless, he did not want to leave a major enemy force to its own devices, and he must have been acutely conscious of Rousset's overwhelming victory in the north. It would no doubt reflect poorly on him by comparison if he were to allow Lussan's ambush to go unpunished and decline battle altogether against what was qualitatively and quantitatively an inferior foe. Villemur was an intelligent and effective officer, but he also had a concern for honor and glory common among the noblesse d'épée who led the armies of France, to say nothing of a concern for his own reputation and career. At length, he decided that a punitive expedition was in order, but as it was late in the day the plan would not be executed until the morning of the 8th.

On the 8th of June, Villemur led four battalions up the valley, with the fifth remaining behind at Cervioni along with the wounded from earlier fighting. With nearly 2,000 men advancing in two columns on either side of the river, Villemur presented a difficult target for an ambush. Still significantly outnumbered, Ceccaldi withdrew up the valley as the French advanced. Villemur faced only feeble resistance; a company of militia attempted to oppose his advance at Perelli and broke immediately once the French opened fire.

The valley of Alesani was (and today remains) a classically Corsican landscape, a well-forested valley hemmed in by the mountains. While there were few fields and no large towns, the valley was nevertheless home to several thousand people, spread in dozens of small villages throughout the landscape like an archipelago in a sea of green. The secret to their survival was the forest itself, a dense woodland of cork and chestnut. The chestnut was the bread of the highland Corsicans; it was not for no reason that the region was known as Castagniccia.[B] Alesani—not only a valley, but its own small pieve—had long been a rebel stronghold, but it had not been a theater of war since the initial outbreak of the rebellion.

Now Villemur went to work. Having easily conquered the valley, his men began looting it. Admittedly the locals had little in the way of valuables, but the soldiers ransacked houses looking for munitions and raided village granaries. The chestnuts of Alesani, after all, could feed soldiers as well as they could feed peasants, and Villemur needed any supplies he could forage. Villemur's actions went beyond expediency, however; he ordered the villages of Ortali and Piazzali to be burned to the ground as retribution for Lussan's ambush. Most outrageously to the Corsicans, he commanded his soldiers to start cutting down chestnut trees, directly threatening their livelihood. It had been the Genoese themselves who, in the 16th century, had attempted to improve the food production of the island by forcing its residents to plant chestnut trees, but now the easy availability of the chestnut in the mountainous interior had caused the Genoese to consider it the "food of the rebellion," used to sustain revolutionaries and bandits in their mountain fortresses, and Villemur shared their conviction that striking at this food supply was good anti-guerrilla policy.

Ceccaldi, then on the other side of the Col d'Arcarotta in the vale of Orezza, found Villemur's actions to be a good recruiting tool. Corsica was not a large island, nor the Castagniccia a wide country, and news traveled fast. Before the day was over, there were already armed men from Moriani and Orezza streaming into his camp, both militiamen and irregular volunteers. Some, he later wrote to Costa, were just there on the chance of getting free gunpowder and shot for their old snaphaunces, but many came armed to the teeth, asking where the Frenchmen were and when they would have the opportunity to kill them. Still, Ceccaldi held back, and Villemur was allowed to occupy the valley without opposition.

For the French, it was an unsettling night. Bonfires glimmered on the mountains on all sides of the valley, and the night was pierced by the eerie trumpeting of conch horns. Late that night, companies of militia picked their way around the valley's edge, guided by local villagers. Come dawn, firefights began erupting all over the valley. Although nominally in command, Ceccaldi's role was probably minimal; he could not have had any meaningful command and control over company-sized bands of Corsicans creeping into the valley in the morning's twilight. The attack was left to the initiative of individual captains and colonels, who were instructed to hit hard where they could and retreat into the woods if opposed. He could do little else; the militia was chafing for action, and he may have decided that if he kept trying to hold them back he would lose control of the "army" entirely. Although probably apocryphal, the situation was well captured by a tale often told after the battle: when asked by one of his captains what the plan of operations was, Ceccaldi responded with "why, if you see a Frenchman, shoot him!"

The action of June 9th is not particularly well documented, but French reports are sufficient to give us the gist of it. Spread throughout the valley, quartered in villages or bivouacked in the open, the French soldiers found themselves under attack by Corsican militia emerging from the trees and seeming to come from all directions. Villemur had anticipated a morning attack and instructed his captains accordingly, but the French were caught off-guard by the degree to which the Corsicans were able, with the help of local guides, to infiltrate the valley and strike at villages and encampments well behind the expected "front" near the Col d'Arcarotta. The fighting was fierce, and the "savagery" of the Corsicans was noted by the French: a company of Villemur's own Bassigny Regiment was surrounded and annihilated near the village of Milaria, with the Corsicans allegedly falling upon the wounded with their knives and massacring them all. After this confused battle was well under way, Ceccaldi and Gaffori crested the col with about 800 men and attacked French-held villages in the north of the valley.

The day's fighting was tactically inconclusive. The French fell back from the northern valley and a number of outlying villages in an effort to regroup and face Ceccaldi. Once he felt he no longer had the advantage of French disorder, however, Ceccaldi withdrew, leaving only local militia to continue desultory skirmishing. Villemur made the decision to withdraw from Alesani entirely, although not before burning several more villages and executing a number of locals who were suspected of assisting the rebels. In the end, both sides claimed victory; Ceccaldi announced that the French had been driven out of Alesani, while Villemur recorded that the main Corsican attack against him had failed and his incursion into Alesani had met its two major objectives; to wit, to punishing the locals for their support of the rebels and foraging supplies for his army. Those objectives, however, had been dearly bought. Combined with Lussan's ambush the previous day, Villemur recorded 413 casualties (dead, wounded, and incapacitated from all causes), more than 14% of the nominal strength of his initial force.[1] Particularly worrying were the losses among the Esterhazy Hussars, his sole cavalry squadron, which suffered such losses among both men and beasts that Lieutenant-Colonel Zsigmond David reported that he could field no more than 40 horsemen. Villemur's claim to have "punished" the people of Alesani rang a bit hollow after such losses and his precipitous evacuation from the valley.

Although the rebel force in the mountains had obviously not been destroyed, Villemur still had an appointment to make, and decided there was little more he could accomplish in Campoloro. The French remained two more nights at Cervioni, and finally struck camp to resume their northwards march on the 11th. By then, however, Villemur's army was starting to suffer casualties from an enemy that was more elusive but just as deadly as the Corsicans. An increasing number of his soldiers were starting to come down with aches and fevers, common symptoms of malaria, the scourge of Corsica's eastern plain and the reason why Aleria had declined from a Roman city to a sodden ruin.[C]

Ceccaldi had also suffered losses, both from battle and desertion, as many of the soldier-for-a-day irregulars considered the day's work a resounding victory and promptly went home. By the next morning, however, he still counted at least a thousand men in his ersatz army, and morale was high. There was talk of pressing on to Cervioni and attacking the French there, but Ceccaldi felt this was unlikely to succeed, and he was concerned that Villemur would evade him and turn northwards. Instead, Ceccaldi led the army back through Orezza and down the valley of the Fiumalto towards San Pellegrino. He and Villemur would meet again very soon.


Footnotes
[1] Villemur claimed that more than 800 Corsicans were killed. Costa claimed only 200, but Costa was nowhere near the fighting at the time and was prone to exaggeration for the purpose of propaganda; he also claimed the French casualties were "at least six hundred." Ceccaldi appears to have made no official count. Since the royalist forces were in large part irregulars, it may be that an accurate count was impossible. Alternately, perhaps the Corsican casualties really were high, and Ceccaldi purposefully made no count as to allow Costa and other royalist spokesmen to give favorable figures.

Timeline Notes
[A] "Large," of course, is a relative term. I don't have population figures for most Corsican settlements in the 18th century, but in 1800 Cervioni had only a thousand residents.
[B] "Chestnut" is castagna in Italian (and castagnu in Corsican). It was estimated c. 1770, following the French conquest of Corsica, that 70% of all trees in the Castagniccia region were chestnuts.
[C] The absolute minimum incubation period for the types of malaria found on Corsica is about a week, with most cases beginning to show symptoms between 9 and 18 days after infection. Villemur's first night of camping on the coastal plain was the 29th of May, and his army was based among the lagoons of Aleria between the 31st of May and the 4th of June. It seems reasonable that by the 11th, cases would have started appearing, and it's only going to get worse from here.