King Theodore's Corsica

[Dunois]

Good to see the TL continuing, I have Corsican ancestry and was born in Corsica so it always makes me think about how different things could have been.

I think the educational impact of the Jesuits would be interesting, it could well be that Corsica is in one of the best positions in Catholic Europe to benefit from the industrial revolution which is in the brewing.

A side effect of Corsican independence and of the Corsican monarchy fairly liberal approach, is that Corsican culture and mentality will be different TTL. It will be far more open-minded, innovative and outward looking than OTL.
However, Corsica will still face vast challenges to build-up its economic potential and make the most of the industrial revolution:
- There are no native energy sources other than the island's rivers.
- The mineral potential of the island is very limited. There is a bit of iron ore and only minuscule quantities of coal.
- Building infrastructure will be costly. I would actually love to hear more from @Carp as to what the state of Corsican roads is so far and any developments there.
- A lot of land could be released for agriculture near Aleria but will need to be drained and improved first.

The only way for Corsica to achieve a measure of economic prosperity is to focus on agriculture, coral manufacture and trade between various Mediterranean countries.
Some protectionism could help mining and metalworking
Perhaps a clever Jesuit could stumble on the potential of solar energy using polished mirrors?

 

[GoukaRyuu]

Yay! I'm so happy to see this back.

 

[Hoyahoo9]

Carp . . . I appreciate and admire the elegant, three-dimensional depth of the world that you've brought to life. Seriously, man . . . you paint vividly detailed mental pictures.

 

[Orko]

It's back! 😍

I do wonder how long it would take for the relatively conservative and insular (no pun intended) average Corsican to warm up to the Neuhoffs' more liberal and cosmopolitan approach.

 

[Sarthak]

Dan how did I miss this to before. It's awesome!

 

[Icedaemon]

It lives! Good to see this continue.

Federico I seems to be trying to chart something of a middle-of-the-road course in a lot of respects. It does make sense in terms of practicalities - he is not the legendary founder-king and it's in his long-term interestis to ruffle as few feathers as possible at this time to cement the monarchy.

I could be mistaken, but I think that in this sentence, you wrote Benedictines when you meant Franciscans.

It was no wonder, then, that the Franciscans were not entirely pleased to see hundreds of foreign Jesuits washing up on their shores. On an individual level, Jesuits and Benedictines competed for educational positions, including in the royal household where the education of the Neuhoff princes was contested between Franciscan instructors and the new Jesuit tutors promoted by Theodore. More broadly, it was a question of royal favor and social supremacy, as the Order’s status as the island’s dominant and most favored religious society now seemed less secure. Xenophobia was also a factor, as the Franciscans were mostly natives. So too was class, as while the Jesuits were favored by the literate and socially aspirational notabili the Franciscans retained the trust and favor of the rural population. The rivalry between the Society and the Order must not be overestimated - they were not universally hostile, and many Franciscan convents welcomed Jesuit refugees with a spirit of Christian charity - but the Franciscans, particularly their leadership, pressed Federico to restrict their numbers and activities.

 

[Carp]

- Building infrastructure will be costly. I would actually love to hear more from @Carp as to what the state of Corsican roads is so far and any developments there.

The main accomplishment in this area is the completion of the carriage road between Bastia and Corti, which was finished in Theodore's final years. IOTL this happened in the 1770s shortly after the French annexation; ITTL, it was started in the early 1750s under the supervision of French engineers and work continued intermittently until the late 1760s. The road proceeds south from Bastia to Borgo, where it turns inland and follows the course of the Golo into central Corsica. Aside from the economic value, this road was prioritized because it allows the king and his entourage to travel easily between the current royal residence at Bastia and the annual consulta at Corti.

The original plans for this road envisioned it continuing all the way to Ajaccio, but cutting a road over the Pass of Vizzavona and down the upper Gravona valley is difficult and expensive. At this point in the TL, only a very small portion from Corti to Venaco is completed, and Federico put the whole project on hold because of cost concerns (and because Federico, unlike Theodore, has never maintained a residence at Ajaccio). At the moment, travel between the Diqua and the Dila is still only possible by foot, horse, mule, or ship. No carriage or wagon can make the journey.

There is also a good (albeit short) road from San Fiorenzo to Oletta, mainly to facilitate exports from the royal estates in the Nebbio, but a plan to extend this road through the Bevinco Gorge to reach Bastia is currently shelved because of cost. The French built a number of other small, local roads throughout the country, both as occupiers during the Revolution and "overseers" during the 1750s. These were mainly built for military or logging purposes and are not real carriage roads, and some have already fallen into disrepair. For the vast majority of Corsicans, the everyday experience of transportation and travel has not changed and is still reliant on ancient mule tracks.

I could be mistaken, but I think that in this sentence, you wrote Benedictines when you meant Franciscans.

Fixed.

 

[Dunois]

The main accomplishment in this area is the completion of the carriage road between Bastia and Corti, which was finished in Theodore's final years. IOTL this happened in the 1770s shortly after the French annexation; ITTL, it was started in the early 1750s under the supervision of French engineers and work continued intermittently until the late 1760s. The road proceeds south from Bastia to Borgo, where it turns inland and follows the course of the Golo into central Corsica. Aside from the economic value, this road was prioritized because it allows the king and his entourage to travel easily between the current royal residence at Bastia and the annual consulta at Corti.

The original plans for this road envisioned it continuing all the way to Ajaccio, but cutting a road over the Pass of Vizzavona and down the upper Gravona valley is difficult and expensive. At this point in the TL, only a very small portion from Corti to Venaco is completed, and Federico put the whole project on hold because of cost concerns (and because Federico, unlike Theodore, has never maintained a residence at Ajaccio). At the moment, travel between the Diqua and the Dila is still only possible by foot, horse, mule, or ship. No carriage or wagon can make the journey.

There is also a good (albeit short) road from San Fiorenzo to Oletta, mainly to facilitate exports from the royal estates in the Nebbio, but a plan to extend this road through the Bevinco Gorge to reach Bastia is currently shelved because of cost. The French built a number of other small, local roads throughout the country, both as occupiers during the Revolution and "overseers" during the 1750s. These were mainly built for military or logging purposes and are not real carriage roads, and some have already fallen into disrepair. For the vast majority of Corsicans, the everyday experience of transportation and travel has not changed and is still reliant on ancient mule tracks.

It looks like the route of the modern RN193 is now operational from Bastia to Venaco then. This is not a bad start but the easiest portion has been built.
Building a road between Oletta and Bastia via the Bevinco Gorge is illogical because of the conditions there. The gorge is simply too steep. I know it well as my dad used to drive through it on holidays and it was scary to see abandoned wrecks of crashed cars down the gorge ...
The easiest route for a road between San Fiorenzo and Bastia is to follow the current D81, or the D38 from Oletta to Teghime pass and then down to Bastia.

There could be a case for developing a civil engineering school as part of the University of Corti, with a focus on road building and land improvement in mountainous conditions.

Let me know if you need any help with translating or looking at sources in French @Carp and I'll be happy to assist. I don't speak any Corsican unfortunately but with hindsight I wish that my grandfather had taught me a bit of it.

 

[Al-numbers]

Chiming in with hurrahs for the new update!

And I see a foreshadowing conflict between the royalty and the clergy. Interesting...

 

[Carp]

Building a road between Oletta and Bastia via the Bevinco Gorge is illogical because of the conditions there. The gorge is simply too steep. I know it well as my dad used to drive through it on holidays and it was scary to see abandoned wrecks of crashed cars down the gorge ...
The easiest route for a road between San Fiorenzo and Bastia is to follow the current D81, or the D38 from Oletta to Teghime pass and then down to Bastia.

Interesting to hear a firsthand account! I was aware that building a carriage road through the Pass of Santo Stefano/Defile of Lancone/Bevinco Gorge (this pass seems to have a lot of names) would be difficult, but most of the 18th and 19th century maps of Corsica I've come across (or at least, the ones with roads) show a road on the left bank of the Lancone defile. Most of those also show a road over Teghime, but don't give any suggestion that it was "better" or more commonly used. It may be that, while suitable as a mule track, Lancone isn't suited for a real carriage road given 18th century technology, which would indeed leave Teghime as the only option.

Let me know if you need any help with translating or looking at sources in French @Carp and I'll be happy to assist. I don't speak any Corsican unfortunately but with hindsight I wish that my grandfather had taught me a bit of it.

A knowledge of Corsican would actually not be very useful to this project, as virtually all the non-English historical literature on Corsica is in French or Italian, not Corsican. As for French, I appreciate the offer - I don't want to give you a book to read or anything, but if I run across a shorter source in French that might be useful to me, I'll let you know. For a lot of online sources Google Translate is sufficient to get the gist of it, but not everything is translatable in that manner (and sometimes Translate makes a real dog's breakfast of it).

 

[Salvador79]

I personally find DeepL to work a lot better than GoogleTranslate.

Another great chapter! The potential political frontlines / dividing lines in Corsica are moving once again, as is natural. I love how this all flows logically, and yet I would not have anticipated it.

 

[Dunois]

Interesting to hear a firsthand account! I was aware that building a carriage road through the Pass of Santo Stefano/Defile of Lancone/Bevinco Gorge (this pass seems to have a lot of names) would be difficult, but most of the 18th and 19th century maps of Corsica I've come across (or at least, the ones with roads) show a road on the left bank of the Lancone defile. Most of those also show a road over Teghime, but don't give any suggestion that it was "better" or more commonly used. It may be that, while suitable as a mule track, Lancone isn't suited for a real carriage road given 18th century technology, which would indeed leave Teghime as the only option.

Google Street View provides a good idea of what the real life road conditions are like. Its not the same as driving through of course but it gives a good idea nevertheless.
A road between San Fiorenzu and Bastia via Teghime will be easier to build and serve communities like Patrimoniu (that's where my ancestors come from) en-route, but this isn't to say that it will be easy either. The road was refurbished and modernised about twenty years ago, and a slide killed one worker once which forced a closure for weeks as well as extensive stabilisation works.

The bottom line is that investing in Corsican infrastructure will be costly and time-consuming. What would help is a larger population than OTL, especially in the centre of the island. Most people left villages from the 19th century onwards towards coastal cities, Algeria or mainland France.
Corte could easily grow to be much larger than OTL, Ponte Leccia could be significantly larger too.

 

[Carp]

Corte could easily grow to be much larger than OTL, Ponte Leccia could be significantly larger too.

This is actually something I've been thinking about for a while. Ponte Leccia has always struck me as a great "what-if" site for a Corsican city. It occupies one of the wider parts of the Golo Valley, it's a transport junction between the Balagna and the Bastia-Corti road, and it's got a nice Genoese bridge. It's also the location of one of the island's few significant mineral deposits - specifically, copper - and although the Ponte Leccia copper mine wasn't operational until 1861 IOTL, there are other deposits in the region that were definitely known before the 18th century. At least from a geographic perspective, if I was going to put another "city" in the interior Diqua it would be at Ponte Leccia, yet historically it seems to have been little more than a tiny village overshadowed by Morosaglia.

 

[Sieje]

With regards to potential city locations for a more populous Corsica, is Porto Vecchio an option? I recall that the area has problems with malaria that weren't resolved until the 20th century OTL and prevented significant settlement. Is this something that could be combated in this time period with sufficient investment, like by draining nearby marshes, that just wouldn't have been a priority for the Genoese or later the French? Or is it simply too big of an issue to be dealt with without more modern technology? It just seems a bit of a shame that the islands best natural harbour was so underutilised for much of its history.

Also I just wanted to say that this is an absolutely fantastic story, I've reread it a couple of times now and am always thrilled whenever I see there's an update. The effort you've put into it is amazing and makes the world and characters feel so alive to me. I also enjoy how, unlike many alternate history scenarios, it's mainly confined to a small area and I always find myself following along on Google Maps, looking at each village and valley as the characters move through them.

 

[Carp]

With regards to potential city locations for a more populous Corsica, is Porto Vecchio an option? I recall that the area has problems with malaria that weren't resolved until the 20th century OTL and prevented significant settlement. Is this something that could be combated in this time period with sufficient investment, like by draining nearby marshes, that just wouldn't have been a priority for the Genoese or later the French? Or is it simply too big of an issue to be dealt with without more modern technology? It just seems a bit of a shame that the islands best natural harbour was so underutilised for much of its history.

Porto Vecchio and its hinterland becoming habitable would be a huge boon for the country, but it's unclear whether it was even possible before the modern era. Land reclamation and malaria eradication seems to have been a difficult endeavor even for relatively wealthy states. Under Grand Duke Leopold there were serious attempts to drain and reclaim the Maremma marshes in Tuscany, but the immediate improvements were marginal and malaria wasn't eradicated there until the 1950s. The popes had been trying to drain the Pontine Marshes since at least the 16th century and never succeeded. It's hard for me to say how the draining of Corsica's marshes would compare to others in terms of complexity, but the record of success here is not good.

The Plan Terrier, the post-conquest revitalization plan for Corsica that was never actually implemented because of the Revolution, was more optimistic about the prospect of reclaiming eastern Corsica. It envisioned a massive infrastructure program - roads, drainage canals, irrigation works, farming colonies, agricultural schools - taking place over two decades. The Plan estimated that the drainage of the Porto Vecchio marshes would cost about 400,000 livres (coincidentally, about the same as TTL's Corsican state's entire revenue in 1769). But the Plan was also wildly optimistic about everything; the authors predicted, for instance, that the population of the island would rise to 600,000 (for reference, it's about 340,000 today). I am thus rather skeptical of the accuracy of their cost estimates.

On the plus side, it's quite possible that Corsica will soon attract the attention of one of the greatest hydrologists of the 18th century: Leonardo Ximenes, a Sicilian Jesuit, who by this time IOTL was a professor of hydraulic engineering in Florence and an extremely well-regarded engineer who masterminded many road and drainage projects under Grand Duke Leopold. IOTL, he published his treatise on reclamation in the Maremma in 1769, and if you read Italian and want to tell me what he's talking about you're welcome to it.


Oh, by the way, I checked an article on the Plan Terrier, and guess what?

Apparently the French thought the best road route between Bastia and San Fiorenzo was indeed the Bevinco Gorge. (Of course, that doesn't mean they were right. Like I said, the Plan is optimistic...)

Also I just wanted to say that this is an absolutely fantastic story, I've reread it a couple of times now and am always thrilled whenever I see there's an update. The effort you've put into it is amazing and makes the world and characters feel so alive to me. I also enjoy how, unlike many alternate history scenarios, it's mainly confined to a small area and I always find myself following along on Google Maps, looking at each village and valley as the characters move through them.

Thank you! I'm glad someone is actually following along on a map. I assumed most people would just sort of gloss over the name of various Corsican villages...

 

[Icedaemon]

But the Plan was also wildly optimistic about everything; the authors predicted, for instance, that the population of the island would rise to 600,000 (for reference, it's about 340,000 today). I am thus rather skeptical of the accuracy of their cost estimates.

What would the modern population of an independent Corsica be? Being a nation with it's own centre and prestige, one would think there would be far less emigration and any infrastructure projects would be more well thought-out - not quite as great as the French Plan Terrier, but far more realistic and actually implemented.

I would think that a population around a million in the modern day is not out of the question. Corsica is a small country with a very mountainous interior, but if the port cities remain hubs of trade for one reason or another and Corti remains the official capitol, several settlements with six figure populations does not seem impossible.

 

[Falecius]

What would the modern population of an independent Corsica be? Being a nation with it's own centre and prestige, one would think there would be far less emigration and any infrastructure projects would be more well thought-out - not quite as great as the French Plan Terrier, but far more realistic and actually implemented.

I would think that a population around a million in the modern day is not out of the question. Corsica is a small country with a very mountainous interior, but if the port cities remain hubs of trade for one reason or another and Corti remains the official capitol, several settlements with six figure populations does not seem impossible.

I mean, freakin' Malta has more people than Corsica in the modern day IOTL.

 

[Jürgen]

What would the modern population of an independent Corsica be? Being a nation with it's own centre and prestige, one would think there would be far less emigration and any infrastructure projects would be more well thought-out - not quite as great as the French Plan Terrier, but far more realistic and actually implemented.

I would think that a population around a million in the modern day is not out of the question. Corsica is a small country with a very mountainous interior, but if the port cities remain hubs of trade for one reason or another and Corti remains the official capitol, several settlements with six figure populations does not seem impossible.

A good hand rule is a modern population of five times the population in 1800 for a country in Western Europe, if there’s no other factors which cause greater or lesser increase.

 

[Orko]

A good hand rule is a modern population of five times the population in 1800 for a country in Western Europe, if there’s no other factors which cause greater or lesser increase.

Is this something that’s accepted generally or just something you came up with?

by that rule the modern population of Corsica would indeed be around ~600,000.

 

[SenatorErnesto]

A good hand rule is a modern population of five times the population in 1800 for a country in Western Europe, if there’s no other factors which cause greater or lesser increase.

Is this a good hand rule though? I was trying to use a population tracker for many of the major nations this doesn’t seem to be the case. However for medium countries/powers it does seem at least close to the value.
Examples would be great of where this is the case!