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Among the earliest foreign policy challenges of the new Corsican state was its relationship with Rome. Despite the thoroughly Catholic convictions of the Corsican people, the twenty year Revolution had seriously disrupted the Corsican church. While Theodore desired the domestic legitimacy that good relations with the Supreme Pontiff could bring, he also desired to keep the Corsican church on a tight leash, which would inevitably stir up conflict with the Roman court and its ruler, Pope Benedict XIV.

The island of Corsica was divided into five dioceses: Mariana and Accia, with its seat at Bastia; Nebbio, with its seat at San Fiorenzo; Sagone, with its seat at Sagone; Ajaccio, with its seat at Ajaccio; and Aleria, with its seat at Cervioni. As a consequence of its medieval history as a bone of contention between Pisa and Genoa, the island was split between two ecclesiastical provinces: The dioceses of Nebbio and Mariana-Accia were suffragans of the Archbishop of Genoa, while the dioceses of Sagone, Aleria, and Ajaccio were suffragans of the Archbishop of Pisa. Nevertheless, as the Republic of Genoa had controlled the whole island since the late Middle Ages, by common agreement with Rome the Pope selected bishops for all five sees based on recommendations from the Genoese government.

Up to the 1740s, Corsica’s bishops had invariably been Genoese citizens, often of powerful families. While some tried to act as mediators between the “malcontents” and the state during the Revolution, all were loyal to the Republic and considered their duty to be quelling dissent as much as caring for souls. Not surprisingly, this made the bishops the enemies of the naziunali as well as much of the Corsican clergy, which was drawn from the local population and tended to sympathize with the national movement. In 1741, the Genoese attempted to placate the Corsicans by reversing this long-standing policy of exclusion and appointing two Corsican natives, Romualdo Massei and Paulo Maria Mariotti, to the sees of Nebbio and Sagone. Although applauded by the locals, the change was too little and too late to make much of a difference. Both men fled their dioceses as rebel forces advanced. The last prelate remaining on Corsica, Bishop Agostino Saluzzo of Mariana and Accia, was expelled from the country after Bastia’s fall along with commissioner-general Pier Maria Giustiniani, the former bishop of Sagone.

The Treaty of Monaco had not brought these prelates back to their sees, for Theodore flatly refused to admit them. As Genoese citizens, he pointed out, they were constitutionally ineligible to reside in the kingdom (with the possible exception of Massei and Mariotti), and to accept “hostile agents” of a foreign power back into positions of authority would be intolerable and deleterious to both civil government and religion. But the king also held the rather more radical position that all five of them were inherently illegitimate. Theodore considered the Kingdom of Corsica to have existed de jure since 1736, the year of his election and coronation, and since all the bishops had been appointed after that date without his consent, none could be considered lawfully appointed.

The appointment of bishops was not the only point of contention between Theodore and Rome. While the percentage of ecclesiastical land on Corsica was fairly low, given the perception of the bishops as agents of colonial oppression there were few who stood up to defend their property rights.[1] As a consequence, Theodore had confiscated all their lands. Worse than this, the king had even presumed to steal the tithe, thus stripping the Church of its major source of income. Although he had promised to divert one third of the tithe money to the upkeep of churches and monasteries and another third to charity,[2] he refused to relinquish control of the tithe and simply pocketed the last third (originally the bishops’ take).

A further issue, though long dormant, regarded the papal claim to Corsica itself. The Church had long claimed suzerainty over the islands of Italy, Corsica included, through the forged “Donation of Constantine.” This document was by the 18th century largely known to be fraudulent, but it had been supported in the 11th century by the Corsicans and their clergy, who had welcomed Rome’s claim as a means to protect the island from feudal anarchy. Genoa and Pisa had both recognized the island as a Papal fief. Rome’s rights, however, were badly eroded when Pope Boniface VIII had awarded the island to the King of Aragon in 1298 as part of the newly-made “Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica.” The Aragonese never succeeded in making good on this claim, and the Corsican people supported Genoese suzerainty in opposition to the Papal-Aragonese claim. Since that time Rome’s claim had lay dormant, but the Papacy was now especially sensitive to abrogations of its territorial rights in Italy. The 18th century thus far had seen the transfer of various lands the Pope claimed as his own - Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, Parma, and Mantua - with no consideration being given to Rome. The Treaty of Monaco, too, had been negotiated and signed without the slightest attention being paid to papal claims.[3]

In July of 1750, matters came to a head on account of the death of Girolamo Curlo, the exiled Bishop of Aleria. The Genoese, pursuant to their established right, sent instructions to their envoy at Rome regarding the appointment of a new (Genoese) candidate. The Corsican envoy, Erasmo Orticoni, informed the Curia that under no circumstances would His Serene Majesty accept a Genoese appointee for the post. It was the position of the Corsican government, he declared, that Corsica had “inherited” the Genoese right to recommend bishops to Corsican sees, and any bishop who lacked such a recommendation would never set foot on Corsican soil. Orticoni already had a counter-recommendation of his own: Giovan Paolo Gaffori, the cousin of Marquis Gianpietro Gaffori, who currently served as the chapter vicar of Aleria.

Pope Benedict conceded privately that the Corsicans had justice and common sense on their side. Centuries-old custom notwithstanding, as of 1750 Genoa had neither civil nor ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the see of Aleria (as technically it was a Pisan diocese). Nevertheless, he hesitated to confirm Gaffori. Some blamed the influence of the “Genoese party” in the Curia, but Benedict had plenty of his own reasons to take issue with Theodore. The king had angered the Pope by his unceremonious expulsion of Leonardo da Porto Maurizio, one of Benedict’s favorites, after Leonardo had refused to cease his sermons urging submission to the Genoese government. Theodore was said to be a Freemason, was rumored to have been the same man as the notorious Baron von Syberg who had been on the run from the Inquisition in Bavaria, and had declared absolute religious tolerance in Corsica contrary to Catholic teaching.



Benedict expressed his willingness to accept the king’s right to nominate bishops, but wanted the reinstatement of the exiled bishops as well as the return of ecclesiastical land and tithe money. Theodore “conceded” in a way that really conceded nothing at all: He declared that the bishops were now welcome to return, but so as to comply with the constitution demanded that they first renounce their Genoese citizenship and liquidate all their estates and properties within the republic. Certainly he knew that this was a dealbreaker. Only one, the Corsican native Paolo Maria Marotti, returned to his see, but he died less than a year after his return.[4] Once again without bishops after Marotti’s death and frustrated at Benedict’s delays in consecrating Gaffori, Theodore convened an “ecclesiastical council” of the Corsican clergy in April of 1751. The clergy, obedient to the king, effectively revolted against their prelates, declaring that since the bishops had failed to return they had abdicated their sees and thus were no longer owed any obedience. Benedict denounced this “council” as canonically illegitimate.

Benedict was concerned by this deteriorating situation and not averse to finding some compromise. He was an advocate of reconciliation with secular princes, and was also pressed by Louis-Jules Mancini-Mazarin, duc de Nevers, the French ambassador in Rome, to end the dispute. In August 1751, Benedict appointed Cardinal Carlo Alberto Cavalchini as an “apostolic visitor” to Corsica. His task would be to evaluate the state of the Church in Corsica, restore the clergy to obedience, negotiate directly with King Theodore, and - until the situation was normalized - function as an interim administrator for the vacant Corsican sees.

To his dismay, Cavalchini soon found that the religious life of the people had slipped into, as he put it, “absolute depravity.” It was not a new observation, for Genoese ecclesiastics had long bemoaned the moral state of the islanders. In 1652, a monk dispatched by Pope Clement XII to write a report on religion in Corsica observed that many inland communities practiced none of the sacraments and observed a particularly degraded “Christianity” which was adulterated with divination,[5] a belief in the Evil Eye, and various other superstitions. Not much help could be expected from the Corsican clergy, which was of shockingly poor quality. In 1711, Bishop Ambrogio Spinola observed that Corsican priests did not teach the catechism, lived openly with concubines, and baptized children despite the fact that “the godfathers and godmothers ignored all the mysteries of the faith and knew not the Pater, nor the Creed, nor the Commandments.” Cavalchini could hardly differ, and in a letter to the Pope he painted a distressing picture of the Corsican clergy as a morally scandalous horde of illiterate cretins who had never set foot in a seminary (for Corsica had none), scarcely knew the tenets of their own faith, and understood clerical celibacy to mean that they simply could not marry the women they slept with.




Insofar as the Church cared about the cure of souls, Corsica presented an urgent problem: a Catholic country which lay but a short distance from Rome which had no bishops, no seminaries, a degenerate priesthood, and a half-pagan population. Addressing this problem required Theodore’s cooperation, which gave Benedict an incentive to offer him some concessions. Moreover, reconciliation with secular princes was a hallmark of Benedict’s overall foreign policy. In a departure from the policy of his predecessors, Benedict believed firmly that the Church needed to end old feuds and concede worldly matters to secular rulers so as to gain a stronger hand in spiritual matters. Benedict’s willingness to compromise bore immediate fruit, as Theodore also seemed amenable to a solution; the king supported Cavalchini’s efforts to found a seminary at Bastia and secured a plot of land for its construction, gave his assent to efforts to strengthen discipline among the clergy, and signaled his willingness to compromise on ecclesiastical property. In turn, Benedict consecrated Gaffori as Bishop of Aleria and opened negotiations with Theodore’s government.

The Concordat of 1753, the result of these negotiations, was quite favorable to Theodore. His right to nominate bishops was confirmed and ecclesiastical territories were agreed to be fully liable to taxation. In keeping with Theodore’s belief that the island simply had too many bishops, Benedict reworked the ecclesiastical map: The old territory of Accia was split from Mariana and combined with Aleria, the Diocese of Nebbio was merged with Mariana, and the territory of Sagone was split between Ajaccio and Mariana, reducing the overall number of bishops from five to three.[A] Theodore accepted the Genoese bishops as legitimate, but was spared from having to welcome them to Corsica, as the pope laterally “promoted” them to other dioceses to free their positions for Corsican appointees. Benedict even gave his approval to the Order of Redemption after receiving assurances that it had nothing whatsoever to do with Freemasonry, which was officially prohibited. In return, Theodore promised to return most (but not all) ecclesiastical lands and committed to supporting Cavalchini's reforms and the Bastia seminary. Cavalchini's mission continued until 1755, and while he did not revolutionize the Corsican church he was credited with restoring some level of regularity to the diocesan institutions, reigning in some of the most egregious breaches of canon law within the priesthood, and putting the Bastiese seminary on a firm footing.

Although the Concordat of 1753 appeared to resolve matters, it proved to be only a temporary truce. Benedict was criticized even within his own Curia for being too lenient, a response which his policy of reconciliation often evoked. Theodore seemed to be the "winner," but he too was dissatisfied with the results. The king wanted Corsica to be given its own archdiocese; it was intolerable, he argued, that Corsica should be subject to foreign archbishops while the neighboring isle of Sardinia boasted three archbishops of its own. But this proposal foundered in the Curia on the opposition of the Genoese and Tuscans, who stood to lose by such an arrangement. Feeling that he had been wronged by Rome’s failure to grant him an archbishop, the king would eventually renege on the territorial provisions in the concordat and returned only a fraction of the properties he had promised. Other key matters were unresolved and left to fester. The question of Papal suzerainty over Corsica was dropped under pressure from the French, but Benedict did not renounce his claim. Nor was the “Jewish matter” addressed, for despite Theodore’s policy of tolerance the country’s Jewish population in 1753 was still very small.

In the years ahead Theodore would make ever bolder assertions of “regalism.” Challenges to the Church’s power abroad encouraged him to take strong action at home. When the Republic of Venice declared that government permission was required for the promulgation and execution of papal bulls in its territory in 1754, Theodore quickly followed suit. Although he was forced to put off further reforms in the late 1750s by tensions with France and the outbreak of war, he would return to religious matters by the end of the decade. By the mid-1760s he had claimed the revenues of all vacant sees and offices for the crown; forcibly closed monasteries which he deemed to have too few monks to be viable; declared marriage to be a civil contract; banned all communication between the Corsican clergy and Rome without royal approval; defied the papal ban on Freemasonry; and, declaring that the “excess” of clergy on Corsica “retarded the natural increase of the population,” placed a cap on the number of priests and monks in the kingdom and forbade women from taking the vows before the age of forty.

Theodore’s escalating attacks on the Church and his uncompromising support for religious liberty would make him a hero of the secularist and anticlerical Enlightenment, and would even esteem him in the eyes of some fellow Catholic monarchs who favored similar regalist and “absolutist” approaches to reigning in the religious establishment. It would also, under a new pontificate, lead inexorably to an open breach with Rome and Theodore’s own excommunication.

Footnotes
[1] Monastic properties were even less significant. Corsica had no wealthy monasteries, and most possessed little more than a garden and a private vineyard. Corsica’s monks also tended to be pro-naziunali, especially the Franciscans. There was no popular desire to confiscate the meager properties of these humble and generally well-regarded establishments, and Theodore had not attempted it.
[2] “Promised” being the key word. It seems highly unlikely that Theodore actually used two-thirds of the tithe money collected during the Revolution to repair churches and give alms to the poor.
[3] Theodore was well aware of this history, and early in his rule he had urged the Papacy to exercise its ancient claim. He had written the pope personally and proposed to serve as his vassal if the pontiff would only recognize his rule. Rome never sent a response, however, and had generally sided with Genoa over the course of the Revolution. By the 1750s, papal recognition was no longer of much value to Theodore, and he declared that his crown was owed only to God and the Corsican nation - not to the Roman pontiff, who by his inaction during the Revolution had abdicated any faint claim to Corsica he might once have enjoyed.
[4] Marotti was one of the Genoese-appointed “Corsican bishops” of 1741. Although he had fled to Genoa after the collapse of Genoese authority in the interior, Mariotti had subsequently been scapegoated and imprisoned by the Genoese government on the charge that he had conspired with the rebels.
[5] It was, for instance, the habit of Corsican shepherds to predict the future by use of a goat’s scapula which they would hold up to the sun. Omens could be read in the patterns of the light shining through the translucent, freshly-removed bone.

Timeline Notes
[A] IOTL, all the dioceses of Corsica were suppressed during the French Revolution and replaced with a single "Diocese of Corsica," headquartered at Bastia. The Concordat of 1801 abolished this revolutionary diocese and replaced it with the revived Diocese of Ajaccio, but did not revive the other dioceses; Ajaccio would cover the whole island, as it still does to this day. The other Corsican dioceses still exist today, but only as "titular sees" which comprise no territory.