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In the evening of the 23rd of October, a certain Ottaviani entered the governor’s house at Corti and snuck into the room of Colonel Federico Andergossen. It may be that he had permission to be in the house and had no need to evade the guard detail. According to the Genoese report, Ottaviani came up behind the colonel as he was writing at his desk and pulled out a stiletto. Andergossen was apparently not taken entirely by surprise, as he clearly struggled with his assailant and was able to call out to his guards, but Ottaviani managed to stab him several times before fleeing the scene. This assassination attempt was evidently planned in concert with an attack on Corti itself by at least 200 rebels, allegedly with assistance from some of the locals. Initially this attack met with success; the garrison was surprised and leaderless, and no serious progress had been made on Andergossen’s proposed new fortifications. In the darkness, it was even reported by some that the Grison mercenaries opened fire on their Ligurian allies, mistaking them for Corsicans. In the end, however, the Genoese managed to rally, and with around 500 men they handily outnumbered their attackers. After an hour-long firefight, the rebels retreated.[A]

The Genoese garrison suffered 33 dead and wounded, among them Colonel Andergossen, whose wounds proved to be mortal. He died on the following day. His death was avenged, as the assassin Ottaviani was shot and killed during the attack, presumably by the colonel’s guards; nevertheless, the colonel’s loss was unwelcome news for commissioner-general Domenico Maria Spinola, who knew that the Genoese officer corps did not exactly have a deep bench of experienced battalion commanders. There were also those who blamed Spinola personally for the failure, as in the previous week he had sent 200 men of the Calvi detachment from Corti back to the Balagna in response to the plea of Commissioner Giuseppe Maria Mambilla, who was alarmed by the return of several notorious rebels to the Balagna, including Brigadier Giovanni Tommaso Giuliani di Muro, who were said to be stirring up trouble.

Genoese suspicion quickly fell on Gaffori for this appalling attack. He had conveniently absented himself from Corti two days prior, telling Andergossen that he and his wife Faustina Matra were on their way to visit their in-laws in Serra, and the assassin Ottaviani was a known associate and client of Gaffori's. Now he was nowhere to be found, and he was certainly not at Serra; rumor had it that he subsequently went to Ampugnano, where a meeting of rebel sympathizers in the Castagniccia was to be held. Major Domenico de Franceschi requested more men so he could “scour” Ampugnano, so as to confiscate weapons and arrest plotters, but his request could not be immediately fulfilled as Spinola’s first concern was to reinforce Corti lest another attack be launched against the garrison in their weakened state. Exasperated by the scarcity of his forces in the north, Spinola sent word to Bernardo Soprani, the commissioner of Ajaccio, ordering him to immediately dispatch 320 men, including the 200-strong Greek militia company under Major Micaglia Stefanopoli de Comnene,[1] to Corti.

Soprani was deeply unhappy with this command. He had already launched a protest against Spinola’s plan because it left too few troops in the south; now Spinola was depriving him of 320 of his only 800 or so reliable soldiers in the whole province (that is, the regulars and the Greeks). He could not refuse, of course, but the order presented another problem: Moving these men to Corti would require marching over the mountains and directly through the territory of Marquis Luca d’Ornano, the self-appointed Regent of Corsica. D’Ornano’s position was still somewhat in doubt - he continued to describe himself as a Tuscan officer and the Regent of Corsica (presumably for Theodore), but he had made no moves against the Genoese after the French withdrawal from Ajaccio and had been responding favorably - if vaguely - to Genoese diplomatic approaches. Still, Soprani did not want to give him advance warning, and thus the Regent learned of it only when the column entered “his” land.

D’Ornano did not care much about Corti and still less about Gaffori. He undoubtedly considered the attack on Corti premature, for while he still professed loyalty to the national cause he was not yet willing to fight the Genoese until it was clear that there was a force capable of challenging them. The Genoese advance upset him, however, not so much because he begrudged them marching through the upper Gravona valley, which was peripheral to his control anyway, but because it sent a message that he could be dictated to and trespassed upon with no consultation by the Genoese. He had no intention of attacking, but he mustered his men and issued a declaration demanding that the people of the Gravona be unmolested. Then he sent a messenger to Matthias von Drost, then at Zicavo, who might have entertained the notion of cutting off the Genoese at the pass of Vizzavona but who did not act swiftly enough to do so. With the addition of these new forces, Corti was clearly too formidable for the rebels to make another attempt at. The northern rebels, however, were not yet willing to throw in the towel.

One of the basic functions of the Genoese government on Corsica - or indeed any government - was the administration of justice. The civilian administration of the island, however, had been hollowed out by the rebellion. Of the six administrative “lieutenancies” of the island which had once handled such matters, five were vacant and had been for years. Given the hostility to Genoese officials in the countryside, the re-establishment of such an infrastructure was not contemplated. Judicial authority thus devolved to the colonels. They did not enjoy it; prior to his death, Andergossen complained in a letter to Spinola that all his time was taken up by petitioners. More serious, however, was that in their paranoia the Genoese government had ceased to be able to discern criminality from rebellion. When the houses of two filogenovesi militiamen were burned down in Fiumorbo, it was justifiably seen as a political attack against the Republic’s adherents, and a company was dispatched from Bastia to hunt down the arsonists and “inculcate the fear of justice.” In Corsica, however, murders happened all the time, and even when they targeted known filogenovesi they did not necessarily have anything to do with rebellion; the ribelli-filogenovesi divide often overlaid, or was used as an excuse for, pre-existing clan rivalries and vendettas. Fearing rebel ambushes, the Genoese made large detachments for these “judicial expeditions” which bordered on the absurd; in October, Major Giovanni Kinich (of Jost’s battalion) marched to Santa Lucia with 200 men (!) because of a single murder. Sometimes these expeditions used a murder or arson merely as an excuse to effect the disarmament of an area, but regardless the impression of the Corsicans was of heavy-handed military rule in which a vendetta killing was responded to by the deployment of hundreds of soldiers and the collective punishment of communities by confiscations of arms and interrogations of villagers. Such expeditions also exhausted the soldiers, weakened the garrisons, exasperated the officers, and led to desertion.

Some “rebel activity,” however, was indisputably not mere criminality. In October, two Bastian “dragoons” - not regular army soldiers, but Genoese militia horsemen who served the Republic as couriers and gendarmes - were found murdered near Furiani, just a short distance from Bastia itself. The murderers were never caught, but the slayings may have been the early work of Giovanni Tomaso Franzini, who in the autumn of 1741 was making a name for himself as the top guerrilla in the Castagniccia. Initially his efforts were focused on Bastia, and he was one of the key plotters in a bizarre attempt in October to infiltrate men into Bastia and abduct (or kill) Commissioner-General Spinola himself. The rebels did manage to get several dozen men into the city, but word of the plot got out somehow and several were caught and hanged. Franzini had aimed a little too high, and for his next act he attempted something a little more manageable.

A key weakness of Spinola’s plan was that the Corti garrison, though strong (particularly after its reinforcement from Ajaccio), relied upon a single overland supply route. Spinola’s garrison posts in the Castagniccia were largely positioned on that route, but in the spaces between them these convoys of food, ammunition, and money were vulnerable to attack. The first such assault was made in mid-October near Loreto by a certain Pasqualino di Rostino, who had but a few men with him and succeeded only in killing a single Genoese soldier.

Franzini, had more success, for on November 5th his band of 50 or 60 men ambushed a supply convoy near Omessa. Four Genoese soldiers were killed, and the rest driven off long enough for Franzini to make off with some of the supplies, including sacks of flour and a chest with 2,000 lire intended for the payment of salaries to the Corti garrison. Spinola ordered that the goods be recovered, and ordered Major Franceschi and his anti-guerrilla squadron to hunt down Franzini, as Franceschi still had not been granted the men he needed to launch his punitive expedition into Ampugnano. Franzini’s actions also caught the attention of Lieutenant-General Johann Friedrich von Neuhoff zu Rauschenburg, who saw a kindred spirit and knew a thing or two about evading Franceschi. The success of Franzini’s raid had already brought in new recruits, some no doubt attracted by the prospect of breaking open more Genoese treasure chests, and now Rauschenburg offered to join forces. Together, they began planning a new, more ambitious attack.

Spinola’s response was to boost the number of men escorting supply convoys, but he simply had too many commitments. He could not boost Corti’s garrison, supply Franceschi with the “expeditionary” forces he demanded, and keep the supply convoys strongly protected, while still maintaining his string of garrisons between Bastia and Corti. It did not help that his subordinates and allies often deliberately fed him false information about the nature of the threats he faced. The worst offenders were the filogenovesi and their captains (frequently local clan leaders), who knew very well that the Genoese would give them guns if the situation became dire and thus made every attempt to make it appear as dire as possible. Spinola was deluged with reports from prominent loyalists raising a cry some new raid or ambush or assassination being planned in their district, or claims that Gaffori, Drost, or Rauschenburg had been seen nearby and had a thousand men ready to march, and so on. But Spinola’s own regular officers were not immune from exaggeration either; that was, after all, how Mambilla convinced Spinola to give him back his men. Every commissioner wanted as many men as possible in his own province, while every colonel and garrison commander deemed their own forces insufficient (which they often were) and reported rumors as verified facts to make sure that Spinola knew just how bad things were. A commander who didn’t exaggerate the threat risked having his garrison diminished in order to reinforce the next commander over who ranted that the sky was falling. There was, in fact, no general uprising, but Spinola’s correspondence makes it sound as if the whole Corsican nation had turned against them.

One of Spinola’s key positions on the Bastia-Corti road was Morosaglia, where a garrison of 130 Genoese soldiers had taken up a position at the convent. A small group of monks were still in residence, however, and at least two of them were rebel sympathizers who had passed information to Franzini about the number and disposition of the garrison and their patrol routes. In the pre-dawn light of November 24th, a group of around 150 rebels under Rauschenburg, Franzini, and Giovanni Cosimo Bernardi of Ortiporio, another local guerrilla, quietly approached the convent. They managed to evade the sentries by opening a hole in the fence around the convent grounds, and then entered the building itself through a window which was opened for them from within by two monks. The garrison was taken completely by surprise; some, allegedly, were killed in their beds. A desperate and confused battle began at dawn, with men shooting at each other from across the courtyard and fighting hand to hand within the convent itself. Some Genoese soldiers were seen jumping out second story windows to try and escape. The garrison commander, Captain Lorenzo Crettler (the younger brother of Colonel Crettler), attempted to organize a defense but was wounded by a musket-ball. Some Genose in the courtyard, believing the convent had already fallen, fled early in the battle; at least a dozen took the opportunity to desert and never came back. Impressively, despite his wound Captain Crettler and what was left of his force managed to withdraw in something that resembled good order. Rauschenburg recorded 24 Genoese killed and 15 captured (most of them wounded); together with the deserters and the wounded who managed to withdraw, the garrison’s casualty rate was more than 50%.[B]

Although the attack on Corti was more sensational because of Andergossen’s assassination, the capture of Morosaglia was much more serious from a military perspective. Rauschenburg, Franzini, and Bernardi had cut Corti’s lifeline to Bastia, interrupting the flow of food, money, and communication. It was essential that Morosaglia be recaptured, whatever the cost, for the alternative was either for the Corti garrison to starve or abandon their position. Spinola ordered Colonel Pietro Paolo Crettler to assemble a force at once and take back the convent. By the 29th, he had amassed about 300 regulars, four 8-pounder guns, and an irregular company of at least a hundred men under the reliable filogenovesi captain Filippo Grimaldi at Loreto. Expecting an imminent attack, Rauschenburg sent men into the Castagniccia to disseminate a declaration calling for a general uprising. Rauschenburg denounced the Genoese reforms as nothing more than sweet words to make slavery less bitter, and as “Lieutenant-General of the King’s Armies” exhorted the “patriots” of the Castagniccia to rise to the defense of their homeland. The response, however, was less enthusiastic than hoped for, and by the time of Crettler’s arrival he had scarcely 200 men to defend Morosaglia.

Colonel Crettler besieged the convent on December 2nd and ordered a bombardment in lieu of a direct assault, hoping to dislodge the rebels with artillery alone. This got off to an inauspicious start when, on its second shot, one of the guns exploded, killing one gunner and maiming another. The other three guns fared better, but their effect upon the entrenched militia was limited. Given the religiosity of the Corsicans and, perhaps more importantly, the importance of the structure to the garrison, Crettler was reluctant to blast the convent itself full of holes despite the treachery of its monastic community. After four hours of bombardment, Crettler ordered an attack, only to be held back by fierce resistance from the dug-in defenders. Cannonades and musketry continued until the approach of dusk.

Although their defense had thus far been a success and Franzini wanted to hold, Rauschenburg urged a withdrawal. The general revolt he had attempted to provoke was clearly not happening, or at least not swiftly enough to help. The Genoese outnumbered them two to one, and more reinforcements were undoubtedly on the way. If a column arrived from Corti, where there were by now at least 700 or 800 Genoese and Greek soldiers, they could easily be cut off and completely annihilated. Grimaldi’s irregulars had tried several times to work around their flanks at Morosaglia, and were only held off with difficulty. As he could hardly continue the defense without Rauschenburg's men, Franzini gave in. The rebels loaded themselves up with all the captured arms and supplies they could carry, and anything that could not be taken away was despoiled: Bags of flour were ripped open and dumped in the mud, the hastily-erected bread ovens were smashed, and a few unburied Genoese bodies were thrown in the well. Then, along with several monks who feared retribution, they vanished into the night.

The events of October and November 1741 demonstrated some hard truths to the rebels. Despite achieving some remarkable feats, they proved unable to permanently dislodge the Genoese from any of their positions. Even taking the raids on Corti and Morosaglia together, the rebels in the interior had fielded fewer than 500 armed men in total. They had no effective support from leaders in the Dila like d’Ornano and Drost, and the hopes of Rauschenburg, Franzini, and (probably) Gaffori that their bold actions would prompt a mass uprising proved premature. They had demonstrated that the rebellion was still alive and still dangerous, but not that it had broad popular support or that it could actually win a war against the Genoese and their mercenaries.

But there were enough hard truths to go around. The episodes starkly illustrated the illusory quality of Genoese security in the interior. Spinola's forces were too few to offer robust protection to all his garrisons and all his convoys at once, and he was forced to curtail expeditions of justice and reprisal into “hostile” territory on account of insufficient men and incredibly poor logistics. Corti, which had seemed like such a critical strong point, was starting to look more like a liability given the enormous efforts required to keep the Bastia-Corti supply route open. There was always a bread crisis, and the troops’ wages fell ever deeper into arrears. By February the government’s outstanding debt to its soldiers on Corsica exceeded 70,000 lire, and the Corti garrison in particular appears to have gone unpaid for the entire winter. Unsurprisingly, desertion remained a serious problem, and since it was much easier to desert when soldiers were “in the field” this put further constraints on anti-guerrilla activities in the countryside. To boost his manpower, Spinola distributed weapons to the filogenovesi by the hundreds, but while some of these companies offered good service most could not be adequately controlled. The nature of existing clan animosities and vendettas meant that arming one pro-Genoese clan inevitably pushed their traditional rivals towards the rebel camp. The best illustration of this was in the Nebbio, where the Genoese authorized Lorenzo Luigi Piana of San Pietro to form a company of micheletti,[2] only for his rival Simone Ginestra to denounce Piana as a vittolu (a traitor to the nation) and start consorting with the returned exiles. Banditry and murder steadily escalated, and the scheme led to a gradual breakdown of peace and order.

Spinola was by all accounts a skilled diplomat and a capable administrator. Unlike his predecessor de Mari, he understood that overwhelming brutality was not the answer to every problem, and that real concessions had to be made to keep the peace. He sometimes went too far in that direction: In his efforts to demonstrate mildness and mercy he was if anything too forgiving, and many small-time bandits and rebels found that they could attack Genoese convoys or posts, surrender themselves in exchange for clemency, and then return to banditry when the next opportunity came along. Even when Spinola stiffened his policy on forgiveness and made exile a condition of clemency for some rebels, many of those who were put on a boat to Livorno were back on the island within a few days. Spinola’s biggest flaw, however, was one he shared with all Genoese commissioner-generals in Corsica: He was a civilian functionary with no military experience whatsoever. He had been Doge of Genoa and had served in many positions of importance and responsibility in the Genoese government and diplomatic corps over his long life, but he had never commanded troops nor spent more than a passing moment thinking about military strategy, tactics, training, or logistics. He approached his duties with remarkable vigor and alacrity - particularly for being 75 years old at the time - but he was incompetent in the strict sense of the word: He simply lacked the requisite skills for the task before him. In fairness, it would have been a difficult task even for a seasoned campaigner; the Senate was simply asking too much and providing too little. What they really needed was a miracle-worker, and Domenico Spinola was not that man.


Footnotes
[1] The Greek community in Corsica was made up almost entirely of members of the Maniot clan of Stephanopoulos, Italianized as “Stefanopoli.” Curiously, and without any evidence to support it, the Stefanopoli clan leaders of the mid-18th century claimed to be descended from the Byzantine imperial house of the Komnenoi and thus often added “de Comnene” to their surnames.
[2] "Miquelets," Micheletti (Italian), or Migueletes (Spanish) were originally 17th century Catalan irregular troops who were particularly adept at skirmishing and guerrilla warfare in mountainous northeastern Spain. The French later adapted the term to describe irregular infantry forces raised in Roussillon and other Pyrenees regions (one company of which served in Corsica under Boussieux and Lautrec), and it was more broadly used to refer to any irregular, mountain-oriented light infantry. The Genoese used the term to describe any "official" filogenovesi company - that is, Corsican militia bands which, though not part of the regular army, had been authorized by the commissioner-general and were at least nominally on the government's payroll.

Timeline Notes
[A] An attack on Corti and on Andergossen personally was allegedly planned, but not executed OTL.
[B] A very similar attack happened around this time IOTL, but it was not as successful. The rebels managed to enter the monastery but the attack bogged down, and the rebels retreated after a half-hour firefight. ITTL, the fact that Rauschenburg is still around with his gang contributes to the venture's success. IOTL, the monks who had aided the rebels were shot by the Genoese, who then threw their corpses out the window; the commander quipped that those who entered through the window should not leave by the door.