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Peace and Justice
As this pointless affair dragged on in Bastia, King Theodore was trying to run a government. By the end of the summer he had filled several key vacancies. The vacant post of Prime Minister was returned to its original holder Marquis Luigi Giafferi, the “grand old man of the Revolution,” who in August resigned his colonelcy in the army of Naples and returned to Corsica. Giafferi, now 75 years old, still had the mental clarity to be of some use as an advisor, but his greatest utility was as a propaganda asset. Upon his return and reinstatement to Theodore’s government, Giafferi launched a blistering attack on the Concessioni, dencouncing even Genoa’s generous terms as an insult to the nation and claiming (correctly) that the Genoese had no intention of accepting Corsican demands and were merely dragging their feet.
The post of chancellor, vacant since the death of Sebastiano Costa, was given to the former secretary to the chancellery Father Giulio Natali, one of the best-known authors in support of Corsican independence, while Natali’s previous position was filled by Carlo Rostini, a 33-year old Jesuit-educated priest with a doctorate in Theology who had previously served as one of the royalist government’s agents abroad.
To serve as his minister of justice, Theodore selected Pietro Simone Ginestra, a 73 year old lawyer from Oletta. Coincidentally, many years before Ginestra had been the diocesan chancellor of the Bishop of Sagone, the very same man who was presently Corsica’s commissioner-general. Nevertheless there was no doubt as to his loyalty. A skilled writer and poet, Ginestra was best for the pro-revolutionary history Ragguagli degli ultimi tumulti seguiti nell'Isola di Corsica sino al presente written under the pseudonym of “Orazio Buttafuoco.” He too had publicly denounced the Concessioni. Scarcely younger than Giafferi, Ginestra was perhaps not the most energetic choice for the position, but Theodore had a political motivation: the Ginestra family was among the most prominent clans in the Nebbio region. His eldest son, Simone Ginestra, had fought for Theodore during his campaign against the Genoese at San Fiorenzo, and his youngest son Giuseppe Ginestra was a former officer in the Neapolitan army.[1] Although the Ginestra clan was already “national” in its sympathies, Ginestra’s appointment bound them more tightly to the king and allowed the royal government to extend its influence into the Nebbio district.
From his capital at Corti - he had moved back into the Corti government house that had been in headquarters prior to the French conquest - Theodore sought to consolidate his control over the Diqua. His foremost preoccupation was judicial. The withdrawal of the Genoese from the interior had left most of Corsica as a vast, ungoverned space, and violence rose sharply. Some of this violence, of course, took the form of politically-motivated attacks against filogenovesi, but without any possibility of government reprisal it was an ideal time for men to act upon grievances of all kinds. Theodore renewed his criminalization of the vendetta as well as the acts of offense which often caused it, the rimbeccu [2] and the attacar.[3] To simply declare something illegal, however, was not enough, a fact which was amply demonstrated by the fact that the vendetta and its associated ills had been criminalized under Genoese law for decades. If justice was to be brought to Corsica, it would require more than just signed edicts.
The first step was to gain control over the “flying companies” established by the consulta of Bozio, which were sustained by a 1 lira hearth tax. Owing to poor enforcement and organization, the yield of this tax was not particularly great; the number of men that it could support was scarcely more than a hundred over the entire Diqua (save the Balagna, where Marquis Simone Fabiani had his own company and collected his own tax). The consulta had attempted to keep these forces out of Theodore’s hands by appointing local captains to lead them, but Theodore appointed the auditors who collected and disbursed the moneys, and in the end the first loyalty of the flying companies and their commanders turned out to be their paymaster. By October at the latest, this force was Theodore’s police in all but name.
Lacking the money to establish any sort of complex judiciary, Theodore sought to economize by targeting the most serious of offenses with a single court. In September, the king signed an edict creating an extraordinary tribunal of three magistrates appointed by the Minister of Justice. The tribunal was to be sort of traveling courthouse, moving from place to place with its own law enforcement in tow (a detachment of the “flying companies”). The tribunal, however, was not an all-purpose court. It concerned itself only with a handful of capital crimes, most of them concerning the practice of the vendetta, which Theodore believed could be crushed only with extreme measures. Its jurisdiction was very narrowly defined to the following offenses:
The threat of execution was not as significant as it might seem. As a general rule, murderers already lived under the threat of violent retribution from the family of the victim under the reciprocal logic of the vendetta. To address this problem, the Marcia was also vested with extraordinary powers of punishment. If a wanted man became a fugitive, the tribunal could levy fines against a fugitive’s family and relatives or seize their property. In the case of a vendetta transversa killing, which was held to be especially heinous,[4] the tribunal’s men would burn down the murderer’s house, and if such a man was killed he was prohibited from being buried in consecrated ground or receiving funeral rites, an extreme sanction indeed in such a religious and superstitious society.
Although the Marcia only concerned itself with nominally capital crimes, its sentences were not always capital. Murder always merited a death sentence, but if man wanted for another crime surrendered himself to the tribunal voluntarily the magistrates were authorized to pursue other “remedies” in consultation with the leaders of the pieve. The attacar, for instance, could sometimes be remedied by marriage (either to the perpetrator himself or another, typically a relative, who agreed to “overlook” the loss of the maiden’s honor), although in such cases the perpetrator would still be fined. To provide an incentive for cooperation, those who were accessories to murder or gave succor to a fugitive were not punished if they assisted in the murderer’s capture. Female criminals were only executed in the case of murder, which was exceedingly rare; those who gave succor to a fugitive or committed incitement were usually fined. A difficult case was that of the provocative voceru, a funeral dirge traditionally composed and performed by women, which often called for bloody vengeance in explicit terms. The tribunal occasionally charged offenders under the charge of incitement, but the magistrates were clearly more comfortable with executing murderers than punishing bereaved women for their lamentations.
The Marcia certainly had its faults. As it did little “investigating” and relied almost entirely on the testimony of local witnesses, it was susceptible to being misled if a criminal had broad support in the community or if the community generally considered a killing to be justified. Its sentences were harsh and its procedures were, by modern standards, nowhere near a fair trial; the magistrates seem to have made up their minds largely from the initial witness testimony before the accused even made an appearance, no objection was made against hearsay, and once captured the actual “trial” was exceedingly brief. Nevertheless, in some concrete ways it was an improvement over Genoese justice. It was, in the first place, a Corsican-run court, and its magistrates understood custom very well even if it was to some degree their purpose to fight against it. Honest efforts were made to confer, where possible, with local leaders, and the tribunal seems to have had more success with enlisting local cooperation than the Genoese had ever gotten.
Theodore’s justice relied not only on courts, but on Corsica’s religious community. Although the Church hierarchy was against him, support for the revolt in general and the king in particular was widespread among the island’s native clergy and the mendicant orders (the Franciscans were particularly supportive of the Naziunali). Theodore urged the priests to preach against the vendetta and to withhold the sacraments from those involved. He further called for clergymen to volunteer as paceri (“men of peace”), or mediators, who were intended to arbitrate disputes in the hope of addressing grievances before they caused bloodshed.[A]
The effect of these reforms should not be overstated. Little reliable evidence exists to support any sudden drop in the murder rate. Theodore’s instructions to the clergy, while clearly followed by some, were not mandatory. While the Marcia acquired a formidable reputation, a single roving court could only handle so many cases at one time, and by no means did the thinly-spread “flying companies” always get their man. Ultimately the vendetta was a cultural phenomenon which could not be stamped out overnight with the small amount of force Theodore was capable of applying. Nevertheless, both the Marcia and Theodore’s gendarmes were surprisingly efficient, catching more murderers and bandits than Spinola’s “judicial expeditions” had been able to. It was helpful that the flying columns were composed of Corsicans, who knew the terrain and had a light logistical footprint compared to companies of Genoese regulars.
Not all the king’s attention was on justice. He commanded the minting of new coins to bolster the legitimacy of his rule, but profit was not out of the question; Theodore may well have been aware that his brief 1736-37 issuance of coins had become collector’s items, which were reported to sell for as much as two silver sequins, or approximately 80 times the face value of Theodore’s 5-soldi billon coins. A proposed mint at Corti evidently did not mint much, and may not have produced anything at all; more success was had at Isola Rossa, where there was more money changing hands. Although they remained crude in form, the 1743 issue did see some increase in fineness relative to the first issue, with the 5-soldi pieces hovering around 12-15% silver compared to the old pieces which were virtually all copper. As the old coins were in complete discredit among the Corsicans themselves (and in any case the old dies had apparently been lost), new dies were made which replaced the prosaic “Pro Bono Publico” with the more martial “Vincere Tyrannis” (“to conquer tyranny”) on the 2 and 5 soldi pieces. The 20-soldi (1 lira) silver pieces remained largely unaltered.
Theodore’s budget remained slim at first, but windfalls were soon to come his way. The king appears to have enjoyed virtually no profit from Ajaccio, which probably had less to do with corruption than with the fact that Count Antonio Colonna-Bozzi had to pay what remained of his battalion (whose salary was, by the time of Ajaccio’s fall, several months in arrears). With the consulta’s capitation going entirely to the gendarmes, this left only port fees at Isola Rossa (minus Fabiani’s “expenses”), some rather spotty collection of the tithe, and the occasional seizure or sale of filogenovese property. Much of this went to pay the salaries of officers, secretaries, and magistrates. In October, however, the king was informed that his Jewish backers had agreed to loan him an additional 3,000 sequins, somewhat lower than his initial loan but nevertheless welcome. Theodore dispatched his nephew Matthias von Drost to Livorno to buy goods on this credit (and withdraw some as cash). The supplies were almost invariably military - muskets, flints, lead, gunpowder, and sulfur to produce more gunpowder - as well as cloth, iron, and leather for clothing, tents, tools, and shoes. There were also the occasional remittances from Hamet, stationed in Tunis, usually in the form of arms but including small amounts of cash and specie.
To say that the peace endured through the remainder of 1743 does not mean that there was no fighting. Throughout the autumn there were frequent clashes in the Nebbio, where naziunali and filogenovesi clan leaders skirmished with one another while the Genoese garrison remained shut up within San Fiorenzo. The most serious fighting was in the east between naziunali militias and the followers of Giacomo Filippo Martinetti of Fiumorbo, one of the few filogenovesi captains who had resisted expulsion owing to the general pro-Genoese sentiment of his pieve and the considerable size of his following (claimed by the Genoese in 1742 to be as many as 300 men). Martinetti held out and his men even raided neighboring pieves; in contrast, the loyalist movement in the Nebbio crumbled, and following the major withdrawal of Genoese troops in October the naziunali gained nearly complete control of the pieve outside San Fiorenzo itself. In the northwest, Fabiani and his comrades seized control of Calenzana against the wishes of most of its population, who at times resisted with force. The garrison of Calvi, however, was too timid to sally forth and oppose them, and lost the ability entirely following the withdrawal.
The peace was not without occasional disruptions. Theodore could easily keep his promise to forgo violence against the Genoese as he had few forces to command, but he could not stop occasional attacks by Corsican militia and “bandits” against Genoese patrols south of Bastia, where the Genoese sought to retain control of Mariana and Casinca (and thus the approach to Bastia and its suburbs). A more direct violation of the truce occured in October, when a Genoese galliot caught sight of a smuggler’s ship off the coast of Tavagna and gave chase. A coastal tower nearby, manned by naziunali, saw the smuggler being pursued into the shallows and fired upon the Genoese ship. The galliot was unharmed but broke off its pursuit, and it was considered a serious enough incident to be reported to the Senate by Giustiniani.
Such breaches of the peace were not altogether one-sided. Giustiniani’s forces did not dare patrol far outside their citadels, but the would-be reconciler was not averse to employing the dirty tactics which the Genoese had often used against the rebels. While traveling near Bozio, an attempt was made to assassinate Theodore by luring him into an ambush, as the Genoese had paid off some of the local militia. The king, however, left the village of Mazzola at nearly the crack of dawn before his would-be murderers were in place. Such tales only fuelled what the Corsicans had long been whispering, that the king was shielded from harm by divine providence. The king himself encouraged these rumors, claiming that his latest escape from death was due to a warning given him in a dream by Saint Devota herself. That was both powerful and credible in the land of the mazzeri, sometimes (albeit somewhat inaccurately) called the shamans of Corsica, who hunted beasts in their dreams and were said to be able to predict impending deaths.[B]
Not all the nationals enjoyed divine protection. Giovanni Tomaso Franzini, an ambitious “bandit” leader who had fought alongside Johann Freidrich von Neuhoff zu Rauschenburg in 1741, was ambushed and murdered in November, and the Balagnese national leader Gio Ambrogio Quilici was wounded by a would-be assassin’s bullet near his home in Speloncato. But the king’s providence did appear to extend to Marquis Fabiani, who was the target of at least two failed plots in these months, one to murder him and the other to abduct his wife and son. For the latter plot there is direct evidence that Giustiniani himself had given the order. Yet the naziunali were not averse to stooping to the same tactics. The filogenovese captain Domenico Paganelli of Moriani narrowly escaped assassination in August. When Marco Pasqualini, a captain of the Rostino militia who had been named in the Good Friday Plot (and had vanished before he could be questioned) returned from exile, he did not even make it to his home pieve before he was gunned down in Ampugnani by unnamed assailants. His treason to the national cause had never been proved, but it may be notable that the Marcia made no inquest into his murder.
Footnotes
[1] His middle son, Salvadore, was a naturalist and a professor of botany at the University of Pisa.
[2] The rimbeccu (from Italian rimbeccare, to retort or reply) was an allegation of unfulfilled revenge. In Corsica the vendetta was not merely an option, but a social obligation; a family which suffered a murder was expected to reply with murder. To give the rimbeccu was to publicly taunt a person by claiming that they had not fulfilled their duty of vengeance. The rimbeccu was considered deeply humiliating, tantamount to an accusation of cowardice and dishonoring one’s family, and the insult was itself a frequent cause of violence and an invitation to vendetta. The Genoese had already criminalized the giving of the rimbeccu before the Revolution, but to little effect.
[3] The attacar (literally “strike,” probably from Italian attaccare, to attack) was a physical act in which a man asserted possession of an unmarried woman by pulling off her headscarf or touching her hands or face. In Corsican society, a woman was expected to not only be a virgin but literally untouched by men if she wished to maintain her honor and be considered eligible for marriage. Despite being a “mere” touch or removal of the headscarf, the attacar was a symbolic rape which rendered the woman impure and thus unmarriageable. Unless the man who had performed the attacar subsequently married his victim, it was a grave affront which provoked a vendetta. While there were occasions when the attacar was done to force a marriage against the will of the woman’s family (either to a willing or unwilling bride), the attacar was primarily inflicted by men with no intention of marriage as a means to deliberately and publicly dishonor a rival family. Some considered it to be the primary cause of murder on Corsica in the early 18th century. Like the rimbeccu, the attacar had been made a criminal act by the Genoese, but they had failed to eliminate it.
[4] A “transverse vendetta” killing occurred when the relation of a murder victim, unable to revenge himself upon the murderer, instead targeted a relation of the murderer (usually a brother or cousin) for a reprisal killing.
Timeline Notes
[A] The term paceri has a number of different connotations in Corsican history. It did indeed mean a traditional mediator, a role which was often filled by priests, but it was also used as an alternate title in 1745 for the “protectors” Venturini, Matra, and Gaffori, who together led the national movement. In more modern times it has apparently been used to indicate a high-ranking member of the Corsican mafia.
[B] For more on the mazzeri, who are quite frankly weird as hell, I recommend Dorothy Carrington’s classic book The Dream-Hunters of Corsica. My local public library had a copy.
Peace and Justice
Artist's interpretation of women performing a voceru over the body of a murdered kinsman.
Despite Genoa’s disinterest in engaging with the Corsicans’ demands, the negotiations between the representatives of the consulta and Commissioner-General Pier Maria Giustiniani, Bishop of Ventimiglia, continued for months. It was a long exercise in futility. The rebel negotiators pressed Giustiniani for an ever lower tax burden, while the bishop pointed out that the Republic at the very least needed enough money to actually administer the island. Growing exasperated at one point, he declared that Genoa could indeed ask the Corsicans for no money at all, but the Corsicans would receive nothing in return, and even their own consulta had instituted a poll tax to try and enforce some form of justice. The Corsican representatives, however, remained frustratingly obdurate. The whole argument was of dubious worth, for neither Giustiniani nor the Corsican delegates were actually empowered by their respective governments to approve any concession or agreement. The commissioner-general eventually came to the conclusion that neither side was acting in good faith. The Genoese were interested only in using the negotiations to buy time, while Giustiniani believed the Corsicans were knowingly making impossible demands to try to bait the Genoese into refusing and thus placing the blame for their rebellion on the Republic.
Artist's interpretation of women performing a voceru over the body of a murdered kinsman.
As this pointless affair dragged on in Bastia, King Theodore was trying to run a government. By the end of the summer he had filled several key vacancies. The vacant post of Prime Minister was returned to its original holder Marquis Luigi Giafferi, the “grand old man of the Revolution,” who in August resigned his colonelcy in the army of Naples and returned to Corsica. Giafferi, now 75 years old, still had the mental clarity to be of some use as an advisor, but his greatest utility was as a propaganda asset. Upon his return and reinstatement to Theodore’s government, Giafferi launched a blistering attack on the Concessioni, dencouncing even Genoa’s generous terms as an insult to the nation and claiming (correctly) that the Genoese had no intention of accepting Corsican demands and were merely dragging their feet.
The post of chancellor, vacant since the death of Sebastiano Costa, was given to the former secretary to the chancellery Father Giulio Natali, one of the best-known authors in support of Corsican independence, while Natali’s previous position was filled by Carlo Rostini, a 33-year old Jesuit-educated priest with a doctorate in Theology who had previously served as one of the royalist government’s agents abroad.
To serve as his minister of justice, Theodore selected Pietro Simone Ginestra, a 73 year old lawyer from Oletta. Coincidentally, many years before Ginestra had been the diocesan chancellor of the Bishop of Sagone, the very same man who was presently Corsica’s commissioner-general. Nevertheless there was no doubt as to his loyalty. A skilled writer and poet, Ginestra was best for the pro-revolutionary history Ragguagli degli ultimi tumulti seguiti nell'Isola di Corsica sino al presente written under the pseudonym of “Orazio Buttafuoco.” He too had publicly denounced the Concessioni. Scarcely younger than Giafferi, Ginestra was perhaps not the most energetic choice for the position, but Theodore had a political motivation: the Ginestra family was among the most prominent clans in the Nebbio region. His eldest son, Simone Ginestra, had fought for Theodore during his campaign against the Genoese at San Fiorenzo, and his youngest son Giuseppe Ginestra was a former officer in the Neapolitan army.[1] Although the Ginestra clan was already “national” in its sympathies, Ginestra’s appointment bound them more tightly to the king and allowed the royal government to extend its influence into the Nebbio district.
From his capital at Corti - he had moved back into the Corti government house that had been in headquarters prior to the French conquest - Theodore sought to consolidate his control over the Diqua. His foremost preoccupation was judicial. The withdrawal of the Genoese from the interior had left most of Corsica as a vast, ungoverned space, and violence rose sharply. Some of this violence, of course, took the form of politically-motivated attacks against filogenovesi, but without any possibility of government reprisal it was an ideal time for men to act upon grievances of all kinds. Theodore renewed his criminalization of the vendetta as well as the acts of offense which often caused it, the rimbeccu [2] and the attacar.[3] To simply declare something illegal, however, was not enough, a fact which was amply demonstrated by the fact that the vendetta and its associated ills had been criminalized under Genoese law for decades. If justice was to be brought to Corsica, it would require more than just signed edicts.
The first step was to gain control over the “flying companies” established by the consulta of Bozio, which were sustained by a 1 lira hearth tax. Owing to poor enforcement and organization, the yield of this tax was not particularly great; the number of men that it could support was scarcely more than a hundred over the entire Diqua (save the Balagna, where Marquis Simone Fabiani had his own company and collected his own tax). The consulta had attempted to keep these forces out of Theodore’s hands by appointing local captains to lead them, but Theodore appointed the auditors who collected and disbursed the moneys, and in the end the first loyalty of the flying companies and their commanders turned out to be their paymaster. By October at the latest, this force was Theodore’s police in all but name.
Lacking the money to establish any sort of complex judiciary, Theodore sought to economize by targeting the most serious of offenses with a single court. In September, the king signed an edict creating an extraordinary tribunal of three magistrates appointed by the Minister of Justice. The tribunal was to be sort of traveling courthouse, moving from place to place with its own law enforcement in tow (a detachment of the “flying companies”). The tribunal, however, was not an all-purpose court. It concerned itself only with a handful of capital crimes, most of them concerning the practice of the vendetta, which Theodore believed could be crushed only with extreme measures. Its jurisdiction was very narrowly defined to the following offenses:
- Commiting murder or being an accessory to murder
- Public incitement to murder
- Laying a hand on a maiden so as to cause her dishonor
- Sheltering or giving succor to a fugitive from the tribunal
The threat of execution was not as significant as it might seem. As a general rule, murderers already lived under the threat of violent retribution from the family of the victim under the reciprocal logic of the vendetta. To address this problem, the Marcia was also vested with extraordinary powers of punishment. If a wanted man became a fugitive, the tribunal could levy fines against a fugitive’s family and relatives or seize their property. In the case of a vendetta transversa killing, which was held to be especially heinous,[4] the tribunal’s men would burn down the murderer’s house, and if such a man was killed he was prohibited from being buried in consecrated ground or receiving funeral rites, an extreme sanction indeed in such a religious and superstitious society.
Although the Marcia only concerned itself with nominally capital crimes, its sentences were not always capital. Murder always merited a death sentence, but if man wanted for another crime surrendered himself to the tribunal voluntarily the magistrates were authorized to pursue other “remedies” in consultation with the leaders of the pieve. The attacar, for instance, could sometimes be remedied by marriage (either to the perpetrator himself or another, typically a relative, who agreed to “overlook” the loss of the maiden’s honor), although in such cases the perpetrator would still be fined. To provide an incentive for cooperation, those who were accessories to murder or gave succor to a fugitive were not punished if they assisted in the murderer’s capture. Female criminals were only executed in the case of murder, which was exceedingly rare; those who gave succor to a fugitive or committed incitement were usually fined. A difficult case was that of the provocative voceru, a funeral dirge traditionally composed and performed by women, which often called for bloody vengeance in explicit terms. The tribunal occasionally charged offenders under the charge of incitement, but the magistrates were clearly more comfortable with executing murderers than punishing bereaved women for their lamentations.
The Marcia certainly had its faults. As it did little “investigating” and relied almost entirely on the testimony of local witnesses, it was susceptible to being misled if a criminal had broad support in the community or if the community generally considered a killing to be justified. Its sentences were harsh and its procedures were, by modern standards, nowhere near a fair trial; the magistrates seem to have made up their minds largely from the initial witness testimony before the accused even made an appearance, no objection was made against hearsay, and once captured the actual “trial” was exceedingly brief. Nevertheless, in some concrete ways it was an improvement over Genoese justice. It was, in the first place, a Corsican-run court, and its magistrates understood custom very well even if it was to some degree their purpose to fight against it. Honest efforts were made to confer, where possible, with local leaders, and the tribunal seems to have had more success with enlisting local cooperation than the Genoese had ever gotten.
Theodore’s justice relied not only on courts, but on Corsica’s religious community. Although the Church hierarchy was against him, support for the revolt in general and the king in particular was widespread among the island’s native clergy and the mendicant orders (the Franciscans were particularly supportive of the Naziunali). Theodore urged the priests to preach against the vendetta and to withhold the sacraments from those involved. He further called for clergymen to volunteer as paceri (“men of peace”), or mediators, who were intended to arbitrate disputes in the hope of addressing grievances before they caused bloodshed.[A]
The effect of these reforms should not be overstated. Little reliable evidence exists to support any sudden drop in the murder rate. Theodore’s instructions to the clergy, while clearly followed by some, were not mandatory. While the Marcia acquired a formidable reputation, a single roving court could only handle so many cases at one time, and by no means did the thinly-spread “flying companies” always get their man. Ultimately the vendetta was a cultural phenomenon which could not be stamped out overnight with the small amount of force Theodore was capable of applying. Nevertheless, both the Marcia and Theodore’s gendarmes were surprisingly efficient, catching more murderers and bandits than Spinola’s “judicial expeditions” had been able to. It was helpful that the flying columns were composed of Corsicans, who knew the terrain and had a light logistical footprint compared to companies of Genoese regulars.
Not all the king’s attention was on justice. He commanded the minting of new coins to bolster the legitimacy of his rule, but profit was not out of the question; Theodore may well have been aware that his brief 1736-37 issuance of coins had become collector’s items, which were reported to sell for as much as two silver sequins, or approximately 80 times the face value of Theodore’s 5-soldi billon coins. A proposed mint at Corti evidently did not mint much, and may not have produced anything at all; more success was had at Isola Rossa, where there was more money changing hands. Although they remained crude in form, the 1743 issue did see some increase in fineness relative to the first issue, with the 5-soldi pieces hovering around 12-15% silver compared to the old pieces which were virtually all copper. As the old coins were in complete discredit among the Corsicans themselves (and in any case the old dies had apparently been lost), new dies were made which replaced the prosaic “Pro Bono Publico” with the more martial “Vincere Tyrannis” (“to conquer tyranny”) on the 2 and 5 soldi pieces. The 20-soldi (1 lira) silver pieces remained largely unaltered.
Theodore’s budget remained slim at first, but windfalls were soon to come his way. The king appears to have enjoyed virtually no profit from Ajaccio, which probably had less to do with corruption than with the fact that Count Antonio Colonna-Bozzi had to pay what remained of his battalion (whose salary was, by the time of Ajaccio’s fall, several months in arrears). With the consulta’s capitation going entirely to the gendarmes, this left only port fees at Isola Rossa (minus Fabiani’s “expenses”), some rather spotty collection of the tithe, and the occasional seizure or sale of filogenovese property. Much of this went to pay the salaries of officers, secretaries, and magistrates. In October, however, the king was informed that his Jewish backers had agreed to loan him an additional 3,000 sequins, somewhat lower than his initial loan but nevertheless welcome. Theodore dispatched his nephew Matthias von Drost to Livorno to buy goods on this credit (and withdraw some as cash). The supplies were almost invariably military - muskets, flints, lead, gunpowder, and sulfur to produce more gunpowder - as well as cloth, iron, and leather for clothing, tents, tools, and shoes. There were also the occasional remittances from Hamet, stationed in Tunis, usually in the form of arms but including small amounts of cash and specie.
To say that the peace endured through the remainder of 1743 does not mean that there was no fighting. Throughout the autumn there were frequent clashes in the Nebbio, where naziunali and filogenovesi clan leaders skirmished with one another while the Genoese garrison remained shut up within San Fiorenzo. The most serious fighting was in the east between naziunali militias and the followers of Giacomo Filippo Martinetti of Fiumorbo, one of the few filogenovesi captains who had resisted expulsion owing to the general pro-Genoese sentiment of his pieve and the considerable size of his following (claimed by the Genoese in 1742 to be as many as 300 men). Martinetti held out and his men even raided neighboring pieves; in contrast, the loyalist movement in the Nebbio crumbled, and following the major withdrawal of Genoese troops in October the naziunali gained nearly complete control of the pieve outside San Fiorenzo itself. In the northwest, Fabiani and his comrades seized control of Calenzana against the wishes of most of its population, who at times resisted with force. The garrison of Calvi, however, was too timid to sally forth and oppose them, and lost the ability entirely following the withdrawal.
The peace was not without occasional disruptions. Theodore could easily keep his promise to forgo violence against the Genoese as he had few forces to command, but he could not stop occasional attacks by Corsican militia and “bandits” against Genoese patrols south of Bastia, where the Genoese sought to retain control of Mariana and Casinca (and thus the approach to Bastia and its suburbs). A more direct violation of the truce occured in October, when a Genoese galliot caught sight of a smuggler’s ship off the coast of Tavagna and gave chase. A coastal tower nearby, manned by naziunali, saw the smuggler being pursued into the shallows and fired upon the Genoese ship. The galliot was unharmed but broke off its pursuit, and it was considered a serious enough incident to be reported to the Senate by Giustiniani.
Such breaches of the peace were not altogether one-sided. Giustiniani’s forces did not dare patrol far outside their citadels, but the would-be reconciler was not averse to employing the dirty tactics which the Genoese had often used against the rebels. While traveling near Bozio, an attempt was made to assassinate Theodore by luring him into an ambush, as the Genoese had paid off some of the local militia. The king, however, left the village of Mazzola at nearly the crack of dawn before his would-be murderers were in place. Such tales only fuelled what the Corsicans had long been whispering, that the king was shielded from harm by divine providence. The king himself encouraged these rumors, claiming that his latest escape from death was due to a warning given him in a dream by Saint Devota herself. That was both powerful and credible in the land of the mazzeri, sometimes (albeit somewhat inaccurately) called the shamans of Corsica, who hunted beasts in their dreams and were said to be able to predict impending deaths.[B]
Not all the nationals enjoyed divine protection. Giovanni Tomaso Franzini, an ambitious “bandit” leader who had fought alongside Johann Freidrich von Neuhoff zu Rauschenburg in 1741, was ambushed and murdered in November, and the Balagnese national leader Gio Ambrogio Quilici was wounded by a would-be assassin’s bullet near his home in Speloncato. But the king’s providence did appear to extend to Marquis Fabiani, who was the target of at least two failed plots in these months, one to murder him and the other to abduct his wife and son. For the latter plot there is direct evidence that Giustiniani himself had given the order. Yet the naziunali were not averse to stooping to the same tactics. The filogenovese captain Domenico Paganelli of Moriani narrowly escaped assassination in August. When Marco Pasqualini, a captain of the Rostino militia who had been named in the Good Friday Plot (and had vanished before he could be questioned) returned from exile, he did not even make it to his home pieve before he was gunned down in Ampugnani by unnamed assailants. His treason to the national cause had never been proved, but it may be notable that the Marcia made no inquest into his murder.
Footnotes
[1] His middle son, Salvadore, was a naturalist and a professor of botany at the University of Pisa.
[2] The rimbeccu (from Italian rimbeccare, to retort or reply) was an allegation of unfulfilled revenge. In Corsica the vendetta was not merely an option, but a social obligation; a family which suffered a murder was expected to reply with murder. To give the rimbeccu was to publicly taunt a person by claiming that they had not fulfilled their duty of vengeance. The rimbeccu was considered deeply humiliating, tantamount to an accusation of cowardice and dishonoring one’s family, and the insult was itself a frequent cause of violence and an invitation to vendetta. The Genoese had already criminalized the giving of the rimbeccu before the Revolution, but to little effect.
[3] The attacar (literally “strike,” probably from Italian attaccare, to attack) was a physical act in which a man asserted possession of an unmarried woman by pulling off her headscarf or touching her hands or face. In Corsican society, a woman was expected to not only be a virgin but literally untouched by men if she wished to maintain her honor and be considered eligible for marriage. Despite being a “mere” touch or removal of the headscarf, the attacar was a symbolic rape which rendered the woman impure and thus unmarriageable. Unless the man who had performed the attacar subsequently married his victim, it was a grave affront which provoked a vendetta. While there were occasions when the attacar was done to force a marriage against the will of the woman’s family (either to a willing or unwilling bride), the attacar was primarily inflicted by men with no intention of marriage as a means to deliberately and publicly dishonor a rival family. Some considered it to be the primary cause of murder on Corsica in the early 18th century. Like the rimbeccu, the attacar had been made a criminal act by the Genoese, but they had failed to eliminate it.
[4] A “transverse vendetta” killing occurred when the relation of a murder victim, unable to revenge himself upon the murderer, instead targeted a relation of the murderer (usually a brother or cousin) for a reprisal killing.
Timeline Notes
[A] The term paceri has a number of different connotations in Corsican history. It did indeed mean a traditional mediator, a role which was often filled by priests, but it was also used as an alternate title in 1745 for the “protectors” Venturini, Matra, and Gaffori, who together led the national movement. In more modern times it has apparently been used to indicate a high-ranking member of the Corsican mafia.
[B] For more on the mazzeri, who are quite frankly weird as hell, I recommend Dorothy Carrington’s classic book The Dream-Hunters of Corsica. My local public library had a copy.
- Carp
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