(I know what you really want is a BATTLE, but here's a bio of Andrea Ceccaldi instead, since he's been at the center of the narrative recently, and some background on his mentor Luigi Giafferi. As with my previous discussion of Saviero Matra, this is based on the real facts of Ceccaldi's life but subject to my own interpretation and elaboration as best as I can manage. Fortunately a bit more is known about Andrea than Saviero.)
Count Andrea Ceccaldi: A (Partial) Life
Andrea Ceccaldi was born in 1692 in the village of Vescovato. The Ceccaldi family were important landowners in the region and had an important role in Corsican history; Andrea's relative Marcantonio Ceccaldi was perhaps the first historian of the Corsican people, a peer of the famous patriot Sampiero who acquired considerable wealth and status from his marriage into the Genoese family of Da Mare, which held the lordship of Capo Corso. Marcantonio had been a partisan of the Genoese against the French, who at that time were contesting Corsica, but his brother Gio Paolo was his political opposite, and for his opposition to the Republic his house in Vescovato was razed by the Genoese commander Stefano Doria. Andrea was Gio Paolo's direct descendant. The Ceccaldi family legend was that they were descended from the renowned Roman family of Colonna, but Marcantonio had questioned this, thinking it more likely that the family was descended from simple shepherds and the Colonna link had been invented to give the family a less embarrassing origin story.
Although wealthy and privileged (at least by Corsican standards), Andrea's early life was darkened by tragedy. In 1699, when he was seven years old, his father and grandfather were both murdered. The circumstances are unclear and the primary impetus was probably personal or familial, but even family vendettas were often tied up with politics in Corsica. Whatever the details of the matter, Andrea took up the anti-Genoese politics of his ancestor Gio Paolo early in his life and never wavered from them. He was raised by his uncle, and in 1715 married Bastiana Bagnaninchi. This was particularly notable because Bastiana's elder sister, Paola Giacinta, was the wife of Luigi Giafferi. Ceccaldi's early career would be dominated by his association with Giafferi, a man who was 24 his senior, and until Theodore's arrival the singular man of the Corsican revolution.
By the time Andrea was a young man, Giafferi was already one of the greatest personages of the island. Giafferi was a native of Talasani, just six miles south of Vescovato, and one of the Council of Twelve, the Genoese-supported body of Corsican noblemen which was allowed a modicum of limited local authority and which was famously denounced by Simone Fabiani in 1730 as "the assassins of Corsica." Giafferi was evidently elected to the position of "speaker" in 1706, the main advocate for the Corsican people (or, more cynically, the Corsican nobility) in Genoa. In this capacity he advocated for reform of the Corsican administration, particularly of the onerous tax system, but with little success.
Giafferi retained this privileged place for many years. The accession of Gerolamo Veneroso to the position of Doge of Genoa in 1726 seemed to bode well for Giafferi's cause, as Veneroso had been a well-liked governor of Corsica in 1708-1710, but Giafferi was unable to get the Senate to undertake his reforms. Veneroso's replacement in 1728 was the hard and unyielding Luca Grimaldi, under whose tenure many Corsicans perished in the famine of 1728, and who responded to the outbreak of the Corsican revolt in 1729 with violent repression. Giafferi, who had since returned to Corsica, aligned himself with the rebels early on and deserves the lion's share of the credit for developing a spontaneous rebellion against arbitrary taxation into a cohesive patriotic movement.
In 1730, Giafferi was elected to be one of the first "generals of the nation," an honor which he shared with Domenico Rafaelli and Andrea Ceccaldi. Giafferi was indisputably the most influential and powerful of the first triumvirate, and led the Corsicans in several engagements. The rebellion seemed to falter in 1732, when imperial troops arrived and broke the rebel siege of Bastia, but Ceccaldi achieved fame that year by crushingly defeating a Genoese-Imperial force at Calenzana under Lieutenant-Colonel de Vins and the Genoese governor Camillo Doria. The memory of ancestral slights was always long among the Corsicans, and Ceccaldi relished the defeat of Camillo, whose Doria ancestor had destroyed his ancestor's house centuries before. The emperor, however, would not be dissuaded by a single defeat, and after thousands more imperial troops were dispatched the Corsicans accepted Vienna's terms. Ceccaldi was among those Corsican leaders who agreed to go to Liguria as hostages and were then traitorously imprisoned in Savona and sentenced to death. It was this matter in which Theodore first entered the Corsican scene, allegedly playing a key role in gaining freedom for the prisoners of Savona.
Ceccaldi did not immediately return to Corsica. Instead, he entered the service of the newly-crowned King Charles of Naples in 1734 and was granted a colonel's commission. One wonders if the appointment was not more political than military, for in early 1735 he was back in Corsica arguing for Spanish-Neapolitan annexation, and he visited Madrid along with Orticoni to petition that his employer King Charles take the Corsican crown. Although grateful to Theodore for his role in saving him from execution, Ceccaldi was still pro-Spanish enough in 1736 to suggest during the negotiations over Theodore's coronation that the Corsicans should try once more to appeal to the Spanish, a suggestion which was famously shut down by the reply of his own brother Sebastiano that "the King of Spain thinks of Corsica as much as the Emperor of China."
Not long after besieging Bastia, Theodore dined at Ceccaldi's house, and this dinner seems to have been a pivotal point in their mutual relationship. Ceccaldi's Spanish allegiance was soon forgotten, and he became a strong partisan of King Theodore. The two men were nearly the same age—Theodore was two years younger—and got along well, and Ceccaldi had been impressed by the king's decisive leadership and his personal bravery at the Battle of Furiani. During his stay with Ceccaldi, Theodore granted him a nearby estate seized from the Genoese, and it was not long thereafter that Theodore chose Vescovato to be his new provisional capital, replacing Cervioni, ostensibly because it was closer to the action in the north. It may also be that he felt secure in Ceccaldi's home territory, demonstrating a trust that Ceccaldi never betrayed. When Colonel Marchelli invaded the Nebbio, it was Ceccaldi whom Theodore charged with stopping his progress, and he delivered the victory that crushed the last Genoese hopes of reversing Theodore's success on their own. His role in the siege of San Fiorenzo was less spectacular than his performance at Rutali, but still demonstrated his competence and ended in another important victory.
Giafferi was still the grand old man of the national cause, but his direct influence was waning. He had devoted his sizable political capital to Theodore in 1736, and is credited with ensuring the king's smooth election and convincing the powerful Matra clan to join the royalist and nationalist camp. By the time of Boissieux's conquest of the Balagna in mid-1739, however, Giafferi was 71 years old. He still had years of life ahead of him, but his physical condition no longer allowed him to endure the rigors of campaigning. Even his political sense seemed to be ebbing somewhat; his regency during Theodore's stay in Amsterdam had been idle and ineffective, and although he was formally Theodore's prime minister men like Costa and Gaffori seem to have had more influence on the king's policy. With Giafferi in his twilight and having built his own reputation as a commander, Ceccaldi was finally emerging from the shadow of his elder brother-in-law.