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By the end of March the gunpowder supply had become so low at Fort Costa that the rebel battery had to cease firing almost entirely, and the “blockade” enforced by Marquis Luca d’Ornano became rather porous. Lieutenant-General Matthias von Drost complained in a letter to Theodore that not only was d’Ornano’s conduct of the siege inexcusably lax (plausibly explained at least in part by the lack of powder), but the marquis was actively engaged in trading with the besieged citizens for his own profit, which somewhat defeated the point of a blockade.

For Commissioner Stefano Veneroso, the most critical issue in the siege thus far was Ajaccio’s water supply. Although Ajaccio existed in ancient times, the city had long been long abandoned by the time the Republic of Genoa came to possess the island. The Genoese re-founded Ajaccio in 1492, but not in its original location, as “old Ajaccio” had been located on an alluvial plain that was both militarily vulnerable and infested with malaria. As the new Ajaccio was intended merely to be a castle rather than a major metropolis, the planners prioritized defensibility over having sufficient resources to sustain a large population when selecting a site. The location they ultimately chose, and where Ajaccio’s citadel now stood, was a rocky headland projecting into the gulf. It was a commanding position, but not one with immediate access to water.[A]

That was bad enough, but shortly after the beginning of the siege Veneroso had discovered to his horror that the town’s largest cistern was completely dry, and that it had been deliberately drained. The city elders explained that this had been done as part of a routine cleaning, but Veneroso was convinced it was sabotage and suspected that the elders were either concealing their own treachery or covering for their embarrassing failure. Contributing to his suspicions were the fact that, at the same time, the apparatus of the city’s primary flour mill was found to be missing important parts.[B] While the slackening of the siege allowed Veneroso to bring in a substantial amount of flour, alleviating his food shortage and obviating the immediate need for a working flour mill, water sufficient to supply a 800-man garrison for months - let alone a small city - was difficult to bring in by ship. There were certainly rivers and springs in the city’s hinterland, but these were contested with the rebels and Veneroso made little effort to challenge the besieging forces outside the walls.

Veneroso’s solution was to drastically reduce the number of people reliant on his scant water supply. In late March, the commissioner ordered the forcible expulsion of the residents of the Borgu, Ajaccio’s “lower town” outside the walls. Water was not the only consideration - most of the Borgu’s residents were Corsicans, particularly Ajaccio’s coral divers, some of whom had or were suspected to have helped the rebels in their salvage efforts. Veneroso, seeing spies and saboteurs everywhere, considered the liquidation of the Borgu to be beneficial to security. There were, however, side effects. Chased from their homes at the point of a bayonet, a number of these residents joined the besieging rebels, including divers, carpenters, and other tradesmen who were of some utility to d’Ornano’s force. Additionally, d’Ornano’s trading contacts in the city appear to have been chiefly in the Borgu, and thus the expulsion had the unanticipated effect of cutting off the trickle of supplies to Ajaccio coming from the rebels themselves.

Veneroso had considered expelling the citizens of Ajaccio proper - the “upper town” - as well, but this was a more delicate matter because most of its residents were not Corsicans but Genoese citizens. Veneroso’s attempts to negotiate with d’Ornano for the safe passage of the Genoese population went nowhere, which may have had less to do with d’Ornano’s intransigence than the defiance of the Genoese citizens themselves, who understandably resisted the idea of being turned out of the city and delivered into the hands of the rebels. The slackening of the rebel siege in early April provided Veneroso with an opportunity to remove the citizens by ship, and he did his best to accomplish this even with the very limited naval resources the Republic could offer him.

For reasons of security, however, Veneroso refused to remove the Greek population of Ajaccio. The Greeks ostensibly fought for Genoa out of a sense of gratitude and duty to their protector, but it no doubt helped that Ajaccio was their home too, and had been ever since their settlement at Paomia had been destroyed by the rebels. Veneroso suspected that if the non-combatant Greeks (around 600 of them) were removed from the city, this would also remove a significant motivation of the Greek militia companies to fight. Additionally, the ships full of evacuees were bound for Genoa, and the Genoese government had already refused repeated requests by some of the Greek leaders to permit their emigration from Corsica on account of how necessary they believed the Greeks to be to Ajaccio’s defense (an opinion which Veneroso shared). To remove the majority of the Greek population from Corsica, even temporarily, simply did not serve the government’s interests.

The Greeks were thus forced to watch ship after ship of Genoese citizens leave besieged Ajaccio while they and their families were compelled to remain. Unsurprisingly, they did not take it well, and some members of the community began to rethink their allegiance. Major Micaglia Stefanopoli had made a secret outreach to Theodore in March, but this had come to nothing; Theodore had demanded actual betrayal in the form of the Greeks giving him gunpowder from the citadel armory, and the siege did not seem so perilous then as to merit such an act. Now, however, with the Genoese fleeing the city in shiploads, it was another story. Stefanopoli again reached out, this time to d’Ornano, to see how the situation might be salvaged. Unlike Theodore, d’Ornano had no philosophical attachment to cultural tolerance, but he was willing to strike a deal if it brought the siege to a faster resolution. D’Ornano offered safe passage to any Greek militiaman who decamped from the city so long as he consented to be disarmed, but he also demanded money. Whether Stefanopoli and his community could afford d’Ornano’s price is unclear, but the major evidently decided that he could not trust d’Ornano. Like the March negotiation, this conversation too came to nothing.

Veneroso’s efforts to evacuate the city were cut short by the arrival of the Morosaglia gunpowder at Fort Costa in mid-April (along with nearly a hundred rebel volunteers from the north). Once again Ajaccio harbor was made unsafe for shipping, a fact which was demonstrated most clearly on the 18th of April when the Fort Costa battery claimed its first victim. A Genoese felucca attempting to run the gauntlet and bring in a small shipload of supplies was struck by hot shot and burned in the harbor as the remaining population of Ajaccio watched. Veneroso, who had also received more gunpowder, had attempted to suppress the battery with a sustained long-range bombardment of Aspretto Hill by the citadel’s guns, but by this time the rebels had been fortifying for weeks and the Genoese guns had little effect (although Drost did report a few casualties). Veneroso had reduced the population of the city from about 3,200 to just over a thousand (not including the garrison), but he could not safely shed any more.

The weeks between Theodore’s departure for Corti and the arrival of the gunpowder from the north would, in retrospect, have been an ideal opportunity for a counterattack by Veneroso, or at the very least for Acting Commissioner-General Gian Benedetto Speroni to have reinforced Ajaccio with additional men. In the wake of the Battle of Morosaglia and the subsequent purging of the filogenovesi party, however, Speroni was convinced that the rebels would soon move against Bastia itself, particularly now that they possessed artillery. Although some ships with food and supplies were diverted to Ajaccio, Speroni decided to keep Bastia’s considerable garrison in place to fend off what he believed was an immanent assault. As the rebels convened at Bozio, Speroni assumed that a new rebellion was about to be declared. Even as rumors came that the national assembly had determined to try negotiation, Speroni was skeptical, for he recalled that the rebel attack at Morosaglia had come immediately after Gaffori had proposed to negotiate. Bombarded with pleas for support by Veneroso, Speroni did eventually order Giuseppe Maria Mambilla, the commissioner of Calvi, to send a company to Ajaccio. But Mambilla outright refused these orders, claiming that Marquis Simone Fabiani and the rest of the Balagnese leaders were planning a revolt. With fewer than 600 men at his disposal, he argued, the relocation of any of them to Ajaccio would mean he would no longer be able to hold Algajola. Despite this insubordination, Speroni did not press the matter further, and Mambilla was not exactly wrong to object; Speroni had more than three times the number of troops at Bastia as Mambilla did at Calvi. Thus, while Veneroso did make some good use of his reprieve to depopulate the city and gather more supplies, he neither received new soldiers nor made any use of the ones he already had.

As this drama unfolded in the south, both the Genoese and the nationals in the north seemed to be spinning their wheels to no particular end. The Corsicans empowered by the Bozio consulta to negotiate with the Genoese had communicated their intentions to Bastia within a week or two of the consulta, but there was virtually no activity on the negotiating front for the next two months. Speroni initially dismissed the offers of negotiation as a mere distraction from the attack he still feared, but the real obstacle was that he was a lame duck. Speroni, who was merely the acting commissioner-general on account of Spinola’s death in office, had been made aware that his replacement was coming in June. Any negotiations would surely drag out much longer than that. Jealous of its power, the consulta had limited its “negotiators” to the point where they were little more than messengers. Only the consulta itself could approve or reject terms, which meant that the assembly needed to be formed anew for every serious offer and counter-offer. Speroni doubted their seriousness, and understood that even in an ideal situation the process would stretch far beyond the rest of his provisional term. He was aware that his own government expected little from him but to keep the commissioner-general’s seat warm until he could be relieved, and so this is what he did. Speroni gave the national representatives assurances that Genoa was open to negotiations, but was mainly interested in running out the clock.

This was certainly discouraging to the pro-conciliation nationals, whose cause was not benefited by Genoese stonewalling, but a worse setback was yet to come. On May 20th, armed men arrived at the village of Muro in the Balagna and surprised Giovanni Tommaso Giuliani, whom they forcibly placed under house arrest. Giuliani had been active in the royalist cause in Theodore’s earlier reign and served as a brigadier in the battles of the Balagna and Ponte Novu, but his reaction to Theodore’s return had been distinctly tepid and he had long nursed a grudge against Marquis Simone Fabiani. For several months, Fabiani had suspected Giuliani of filogenovese tendencies and confided to Theodore that he believed Giuliani was seeking to undermine the national movement. Now he had decided to act. Why Fabiani chose this particular time to strike is unclear; perhaps it was because Theodore had recently returned to Corti from Isola Rossa, which allowed the king to plausibly (and perhaps accurately) claim he had nothing to do with the arrest.

Reaction to this outrage was swift. Giuliani’s family was influential and his allies significant, and there were immediate threats of retaliation against Fabiani and sporadic acts of violence against his supporters. Provoking this intemperate response, however, was precisely Fabiani’s aim. Declaring Giuliani’s supporters to be in rebellion against the Kingdom, Fabiani ordered his forces - including not only local militia, but the new tax-funded “flying squadrons” authorized by the consulta, which in the Balagna were totally under Fabiani’s control - to neutralize the threat. Royalist forces swept through the province, kicking in doors and confiscating the weapons not only of known Giuliani supporters and alleged crypto-filogenovesi, but pro-reconciliation persons in general, and more generally anyone else Fabiani and his allies deemed to be troublesome. Compared to the violent destruction of the filogenovesi in the interior in recent months, it was relatively bloodless; Fabiani’s men were after muskets, not vengeance. There were some shootings, but Giuliani’s supporters had been caught off-guard and most appear to have been cornered and forced to disarm before they could gather or mount any kind of organized resistance.

In a matter of days Fabiani had gained effective control over almost the entire Balagna outside of those areas directly held by the Genoese. The effect was not only the neutralization of Giuliani’s faction but the dismantlement of the organized “moderate” party in the Balagna altogether. The other significant chiefs of the Balagnese nationals, Nicolo Poletti and Gio Ambrogio Quilici, had either acquiesced to Fabiani’s coup or simply realized after the fact that there was no sense siding with losers. Fabiani, in his capacity as Captain-General of the royal army, made them both colonels.

The dismantling of the pro-reconciliation forces in the Balagna was a damaging blow to the moderates more generally, for the authority of the consulta and its representatives to gain terms from the Genoese was left in some doubt if they could not even claim to speak for the Balagna, the north’s richest province. Fabiani argued that he was simply dealing with suspected traitors and restoring order to the province, but even if the moderates found this specious it was difficult to imagine how they might reasonably combat this defiance of the consulta’s will. The consulta was not presently convened, and even the pro-reconciliation forces were hesitant to call a new one when Speroni’s policy of stalling meant that they had nothing to show for nearly two months of attempted negotiations. Furthermore, given the effective autonomy of the Balagna and Fabiani’s power there it was not clear that the assembly would have any more power over the Balagnesi than it did over d’Ornano’s army at Ajaccio.

On June 9th Genoa’s new commissioner-general arrived at Bastia: Pier Maria Giustiniani, the Bishop of Ventimiglia. As a clergyman, he represented a notable departure from the usual practice of selecting distinguished elder statesmen and retired diplomats for the post. His family was the very distinguished house of Giustiniani whose fame had been won in the East. A Giustiniani captain had commanded the Genoese contingent which was present at the fall of Constantinople (and had died in the city’s vain defense), while other members of the family administered the Greek island of Chios under Genoese rule. Although Chios had fallen to the Ottomans in 1566, many Genoese families stayed on and maintained links to the republic, including a branch of the Giustiniani to which Pier Maria belonged. Born on Chios, Pier Maria traveled to Italy for an ecclesiastical education and joined the Benedictine Order. He served for some years as the Dean of the Congregation of the revered monastery of Monte Cassino.

In 1726, Pier Maria was appointed as the Bishop of Sagone in Corsica.[1] He showed himself to be a faithful agent of the Republic, but his methods reflected his vocation. The bishop met with leaders of the nationals, invited the people of his diocese to submit their grievances, and advocated for a general pardon for rebels who earnestly wished to reconcile with the Republic. Although he was not exactly an opponent of the republic’s more forceful means to bring the Corsicans back to obedience, his own approach was to win over the people and their leaders by playing the conciliator. In 1736, just a few weeks after Theodore’s coronation, the bishop was forced to leave the island for health reasons and because the rebel confiscation of Church property and assets had left him without means of support. In the following year, now residing in Genoa, he (anonymously) published the so-called Anticurzio, a political tract countering the arguments of pro-independence Corsican intellectuals and written specifically as a response to Giulio Matteo Natali’s landmark Disinganno intorno alla guerra di Corsica.[2] In 1741, Bishop Giustiniani was transferred to the diocese of Ventimiglia in mainland Liguria.


During his term of office in Sagone, Giustiniani acquired a mixed reputation both in Corsica and Genoa. Although popular among some Corsicans for his reasonableness, the more committed nationals despised him for working to undermine the national movement and acting as Genoa’s chief propagandist. His own government had welcomed his writings against the rebels, but at that time had preferred the harsher methods of men like Commissioner-General Mari over the bishop’s “softer” approach, which had become discredited by the reinvigoration of the rebellion following Theodore’s arrival. Since then, however, the government had come gradually to see the value in mildness. After Spinola’s death, Giustiniani seemed to be the perfect man to replace him given the obvious futility of a military solution and the need to find a suitable compromise with the Corsicans. The bishop was articulate, tactful, and a skilled writer and mediator.[3] After serving in Corsica for 15 years, he was already well-acquainted with the island and the leaders of the national movement.

Speroni was relieved as acting commissioner-general and was probably glad of it, but his trials were not over yet. Dissatisfied with the performance of Commissioner Veneroso, the Genoese government decided to recall him from Ajaccio and send Speroni as his replacement. As the city was presently under siege, this was not the simplest of matters; the galiot which carried Speroni to the city had to anchor well outside the harbor, while the commissioner waited for night to be rowed by ship’s boat to a beach west of the citadel.

The situation that he found there was dispiriting. Although the garrison was considerable in number, they were nearly useless as a fighting unit. Over the past few months feckless leadership, slack discipline, and a lack of military supplies had taken a severe toll on their fighting ability and general morale. Notwithstanding the supply ships which had reached the city in early April, Speroni noted soldiers without boots and muskets with flints worn down to the nub. Perhaps in part because of the effect of the water shortage on hygiene, disease was spreading and more than a hundred soldiers were invalids. The Greeks, amounting to more than a quarter of the garrison’s force, were in a nearly mutinous state and refused to follow orders. The Genoese officers seemed to expect that they would be evacuated at any moment, and their defeatism was infectious.

Now in command, Speroni did what he could to salvage the military situation. He doubted that the siege could actually be broken with the forces he had available, but he could at least try to gain control of the surrounding territory so as to exploit springs in the nearby hills and ease the water crisis. Speroni ordered new inventories of the arsenal, initiated regular inspections of the soldiers’ equipment, and demanded drills from his officers to shake the men out of their glassy-eyed stupor. His measures, however, were only partly successful at lifting the general malaise; there was a palpable feeling, manifested in every street now silent and devoid of residents, that the city was doomed. When Speroni attempted to organize an expedition outside the walls most of the Greeks simply refused to participate, demanding an evacuation of their families that Speroni could not provide even if he had wanted to.

Speroni did eventually make a series of forays, and with some success; the Grisons soldiers in particular acquitted themselves well, and after months of inactivity the Corsicans besieging the city had grown just as lax as the garrison. Indeed, every time the Genoese sallied forth they easily drove away the Corsican pickets around the city, and on several occasions they were able collect some water or plunder Corsican supplies to lug back to the garrison. Upon realizing the aim of the Genoese, however, the Corsicans began fouling springs and laying ambushes for the foraging parties. Speroni must have bitterly regretted not reinforcing Ajaccio when he had the chance, as his lack of troops was crippling. Between disease and the disobedience of the Greeks, he had fewer than 500 fit and reliable soldiers (the term “reliable” being used loosely), and since the Greeks obviously could not be left in sole command of the citadel he could really only spare two or three hundred men at most to venture outside the walls at any one time. This was enough to defeat the Corsicans in skirmishes, but the diminished and demoralized garrison simply could not keep the Corsicans permanently at bay, let alone drive them from their position atop Aspretto Hill.

Finally realizing the true gravity of the situation, the Genoese senate appealed to the French for aid. France had an interest in maintaining Ajaccio as a friendly port; indeed, in 1741 they had proposed to install a garrison there as the price of continuing their occupation, though the Genoese had turned them down (a decision which the Senate was now undoubtedly regretting). The French fleet in the Mediterranean, however, was quite busy preparing for a war with Britain which seemed to be lurching ever closer. The British, who kept a close watch on Toulon, reported that the French fleet was refitting its ships and putting its sailors through exercises all through the spring and summer. At this moment the fleet was not yet ready, and if war should suddenly arrive while a French ship or detachment was away at Ajaccio it might well suffer the same fate as the San Isidro and weaken the Franco-Spanish squadron as a consequence. This time the French would not be rushing to Genoa’s rescue, or at least not quickly enough to matter.




Footnotes
[1] Corsica’s dioceses are sometimes a source of confusion. Because of population shifts over the centuries and the ruin or abandonment of villages over Corsica’s history, several of the island’s dioceses were by the 18th century named after settlements that no longer existed. The “Bishop of Aleria” lived in Cervioni, the “Bishop of Mariana” lived in Bastia, and the “Bishop of Sagone” lived in Vico, as Aleria, Mariana, and Sagone were all long-abandoned ruins by the 18th century. Only the bishops of Ajaccio and the Nebbio (at San Fiorenzo) actually resided in the locales their dioceses were named for.
[2] "Anticurzio" was not the actual title of the booklet, but it was commonly known as this because Natali's original broadside was written under the pseudonym of “Curzio Tulliano Corso” (Curtius Tullius of Corsica). Although Giustiniani published the pamphlet anonymously, his authorship was not secret, and he was so strongly associated with the work that he received the nickname "L'Anticurzio."
[3] He was also a good deal younger than his predecessor and in considerably better health. Spinola had been appointed as commissioner-general in 1740 at the age of 74, while Giustiniani was appointed at the relatively tender age of 50.

Timeline Notes
[A] Ajaccio’s water supply issue was first addressed in the years of the First French Empire by the diversion of several springs in nearby hills, and more fully solved by the Gravona Canal which was built on the orders of Napoleon III.
[B] This really happened. Was it sabotage? Who can say? I must admit, though, that late winter/early spring - when presumably the cistern is full, or nearly so - seems like a strange time to drain it for routine cleaning.