King Theodore's Corsica
- Thread starter Carp
- Start date
Will Corsico become Europe's land of the free and attrackt more minority and persecuted groups of all kinds over time?
Interesting that Corsica will continue to have a sizable Greek minority. Admittedly, when you talked about Corsica having a presence in the narrative of Greek's War for Independence it made me think you were partnering up with @Earl Marshal given his timeline's area of interest.
Nope, this was all @Carp. I did provide a little insight into the Orlov Revolt a couple posts back though. I'm not sure what Carp's plans are going forward, but if he'd like my input for ttl's analog of the Greek War of Independence I'd be more than happy to help.
Yay its back! I've been following your posts on the other forum and its been fun rereading it again but I've been looking forward to updates here.
Its probably out of the scope of this TL but Carp would probably broach the subject in the epilogue
Correct. As this purports to be an in-universe work of history, it will at some points mention events beyond the scope of the TL itself. There will be no Greek Revolution by 1790, which is approximately when this TL will end, but it seemed to me that a few thousand Greek expatriates in Bonifacio - most of them sailors, merchants, shipowners, and so on - would probably play some role in an eventual Greek national struggle in the 19th century.
As someone who liked this timeline, I am sad that it will end that quickly.
I was hoping for it to be continued till modern day.
Though, perhaps, you can do some after the end chapters on topics you made your mind on what will happen next?
The thing is no Napoleon Bonaparte utterly and completely scrambles so much history that Carp would have do an incredibly huge amount of writing to put Corsica into the context of an alien Europe, at that point it would be less and less a TL about Corsica as much as I'd love to read it that would be a lot to bite off...
Clearly the next step is a sequel TL in the ASB forum, where a modern version of Carp's Corsica replaces the modern, OTL, IRL, version of Corsica.
Alternatively, Carp can go back further in time, and start a Corsican timeline from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire!
Tbf writing a tl where an independent Corsica leads to an earlier unification of a different Italian unification would be very interesting. Seeing the French and Germans have different trajectories would be very interesting too. Perhaps we see a federal monarchical HRE centralise it's power instead of otl.
Now that we are getting to the spicy times of 1790s what is going on with the bounaparté family
I have a very good auto biography(Adam Zamoyski 2018) of napoleon which goes in depth into his youth in the French military but also his time trying desperately to be an ally to Paoli.
Would Napoleone be a corsican officer now?
Maybe he becomes the backbone general of the Fredericoan military?
I have a very good auto biography(Adam Zamoyski 2018) of napoleon which goes in depth into his youth in the French military but also his time trying desperately to be an ally to Paoli.
Would Napoleone be a corsican officer now?
Maybe he becomes the backbone general of the Fredericoan military?
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Given the general tendencies of the time, I would think that Corsica would rent out its military to other powers, such as Sardinia, Spain, England, or France. TTL's "Buonaparte" (who would be a very different person, as I recall his grandparents were contemporary with the PoD) could well end up in continental service as a mercenary captain.
I mean, this TL was started in 2017, so we've covered less than 50 TL years in 6 IRL years. At that speed it would take me at least another quarter-century to bring it up to 2023.
There will be some epilogue chapters on future prospects for TTL's Corsica. Some of them are already written.
The assumption of this TL is that since not only is Napoleon born after the POD, but his parents too, that the man we know as Napoleon does not exist. There's good reason for this besides just random butterflies - Giovanni Ramolino, Napoleon's maternal grandfather, was a Genoese officer in the Ajaccio garrison and got married to Angela Maria Pietrasanta, Napoleon's maternal grandmother, in late 1743. But ITTL, Ajaccio fell to the rebels in the spring of 1743, resulting in the garrison being evacuated to Genoa. So it's debatable whether Giovanni, now in Liguria, would have still married into the Pietrasanta family. Even if that marriage somehow took place, the conditions of their lives are probably different enough that we can't really expect that Maria Letizia would be born in 1750, let alone that she would then marry Carlo Maria Buonaparte in 1764. That marriage is somewhat unlikely because those two families are, post-independence, no longer at the same social level - ITTL, the Buonapartes switched sides after the fall of Ajaccio in 1743 and were made cavalieri by Theodore, while the Ramolino family (if they indeed ever came back to Corsica; many filogenovesi in Genoese service did not) would not have been ennobled. Having all these marriages and births happen exactly on schedule and resulting in the same people despite the considerable turmoil these families have been thrown into by the Theodoran revolution just seems too extraordinary to be credible.
ITTL, the Buonaparte family is doing quite well for themselves as one of the leading families of Ajaccio. Historically the Buonapartes were on good terms with the leading members of the Stefanopoli clan, to the point where Demetrio Stefanopoli was Napoleon's sponsor at the École de Brienne, so perhaps they're one of the Corsican families that Don Giorgio's family intermarries with. One or more Buonapartes may have a cameo in upcoming chapters, but they will probably be "original characters" and not historical persons.
I've noted in the past--there will probably be a Napoleone Buonaparte because that was a family name but he's not going to be OTL's Napoleon, having at best a roughly similar father and nothing else even remotely in common.
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The Measure of Corsica
The Measure of Corsica
1734 Genoese Zecchino
1734 Genoese Zecchino
Currency
Creating a new national currency had been one of the first concerns of the newly crowned King Theodore I, but it had been a rocky start. Theodore’s first mint struck 2½ and 5 soldi coins which were notionally made of billon, a copper-silver alloy In practice, however, there was little or no silver content in these issues. The Corsicans joked that the “TR” inscribed on the coins for “Theodore Rex” actually stood for tutti rami, “all copper,” and the mint workers refused to be paid in the coins they themselves had made. They were more valuable as collectibles outside Corsica than as currency within it. A mint in Naples began churning out counterfeit coins to be sold as curios, although since these fakes had no less silver than the genuine article it’s not clear if they really ought to be considered “counterfeit.” Theodore's government also minted a 1 lira (20 soldi) coin weighing around 3.48 grams which did actually contain silver, but the fineness and weight varied considerably, with some specimens barely over .500 fineness.[A] As actual circulating currency, the revolutionary currency must be considered a failure; most royalist soldiers were paid with Genoese lire and various foreign coins smuggled into Corsica.
Corsica was not alone in its monetary woes. At the outset of the Corsican Revolution the Genoese lira contained 5.23 grams of “8/9” silver (.889 fine), for an actual fine silver content of about 4.65 grams. In 1746, however, in the face of military and financial collapse, the Genoese lira was devalued to 3.86 grams of silver. The fineness was eventually reestablished at .889 but not the size, and for the rest of the century the Genoese lira was a 4.16g coin containing 3.70 grams of silver. The Corsicans may have been directly contributing to this instability through counterfeiting in the late 1740s, as there are an unusually large number of specimens of debased and low-quality "pre-1746" lire; one must remember that Theodore's first head minter was himself an infamous counterfeiter.
The mere fact of independence did not succeed in rehabilitating the poor reputation of Corsican currency, and for most of the reign of Theodore I Genoese, Tuscan, and other foreign coins were more common than the kingdom's own currency. Increasing the silver content did not help, as few believed the coins had real value and there were by this time large numbers of worthless counterfeit "curio" copies floating about. Late in the reign of Theodore I, the Frediani-Paoli ministry proposed a fresh start - the replacement of the old, troubled lira with a completely new design to make a clean break from the past. This "lira nuova" would be the same size and fineness of the Tuscan lira, which give it the benefit of easy convertibility with the currency used at Livorno, Corsica's most important commercial partner. The result was a 4.64 gram coin with a silver content of 5/6 (.833 fine), containing 3.86 grams of silver. The lira nuova was worth about 0.86 French livres, and in the late 18th century it traded at approximately 30 to the British pound sterling.
Only a limited number of new lire were minted under Theodore I, but the overhaul was continued and expanded during the reign of Federico. The lira was not the only problem - its subdivisions, the TR billon coins, had just as bad a reputation and even the 2½-soldi piece was inadequate for small purchases. These coins were given superficial redesigns, their fineness was fixed at .012, and they were supplemented by three new copper denominations: a 1-soldo coin, a soldino (half-soldo or 6 denari), and a sestino (⅙ of a soldo or 2 denari). These coins were slow to catch on, as the memory of worthless revolutionary copper currency still lingered in Corsica.
None of these denominations were large enough for the purposes of government accounting or bulk trade. In the early years such transactions were usually calculated in “sequins” - that is, the Genoese gold zecchino - which was worth 13½ Genoese lire. Theodore was said to have handed out "a gun and a sequin" to his militiamen, which amounted to about a month's wages, but it is unlikely this ever took the form of actual gold zecchini. In part because of fluctuations in the gold-silver ratio, the zecchino was replaced as the government's de facto large unit of account during the reign of Federico and replaced with the Corsican scudo d’argento, which was defined as equal to 6 lire nuove. This unit initially existed only on paper; Federico planned to actually mint such coins but the first was not struck until after his death. The physical scudo d'argento minted under Theodore II was a 27.8 gram coin of 5/6 fineness. Containing 23.16g fine silver, it was very close to the Austrian Conventionsthaler of 23.39g fine silver. In Corsica it was known as a teone (“Big Theo”) because of its large size - nearly one ounce - and because it was struck with the image of the king, making it the first Corsican coin to feature a royal portrait. Another coin of middling value was added in the 1780s, the half-lira (10 soldi) consisting of .625 fine silver.
Exchange Table of Corsican Silver and Copper Coins c. 1785
| 1 Scudo | 1 Lira | ½ Lira | 5 Soldi | 2½ Soldi | 1 Soldo | 1 Soldino | 1 Sestino | |
| 1 Scudo= | 1 | 6 | 12 | 24 | 48 | 120 | 240 | 720 |
| 1 Lira= | 1/6 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 20 | 40 | 120 |
| ½ Lira= | 1/12 | 1/2 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 10 | 20 | 60 |
| 5 Soldi= | 1/24 | 1/4 | 1/2 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 10 | 30 |
| 2½ Soldi= | 1/48 | 1/8 | 1/4 | 1/2 | 1 | 2½ | 5 | 15 |
| 1 Soldo= | 1/120 | 1/20 | 1/10 | 1/5 | 2/5 | 1 | 2 | 6 |
| 1 Soldino= | 1/240 | 1/40 | 1/20 | 1/10 | 1/5 | 1/2 | 1 | 3 |
| 1 Sestino= | 1/720 | 1/120 | 1/60 | 1/30 | 1/15 | 1/6 | 1/3 | 1 |
The Corsican government also established two gold denominations in the 1780s, the scudo d’oro and the doppia, initially defined as equal to 12 and 24 lire (2 and 4 scudi d'argento) respectively. Only the doppia was actually minted in the 18th century, while the scudo d'oro remained purely a unit of account. The Corsican doppia was a 6.74 gram coin of 11/12 (.917 fine) gold which bore a portrait of the king on one side and the great arms of the kingdom on the other. Containing 6.18g of fine gold, the Corsican doppia can be compared to other Italian doppie like those of Milan (6.21g), Parma (6.36g), and Lucca (6.90g), as well as other contemporary gold coins like the Spanish doubloon (6.04g) and the French Louis d’or (~7.45g).[1] This gold content was based on a gold-silver ratio of 15 to 1, but fluctuations in the relative value of gold eventually forced the government to revalue its gold currency and break the simple 2 to 1 convertibility between the scudo d’argento and the scudo d’oro. Although the doppia was actual legal tender which did see some limited circulation in Corsica, it was primarily useful as a means of international legitimation. Having one's portrait on a large gold coin was a nearly universal trait of "proper" European monarchs, and Theodore II was the first Corsican king who was able to join this exclusive club.
Weights and Measures
Corsica continued to use the Genoese pound (libbra genovesca) of approximately 317 grams, which was about 70% of the weight of an English pound. Also common was the rotolo of 1½ libbre (~475.5 g) which is sometimes confusingly referred to in foreign sources as the “Corsican pound” because it more closely resembled the pound measurements of England (453.6 g), Spain (460 g), and France (489.5 g).[B] Bulk goods were usually measured in cantari, with one cantaro equal to 150 libbre or 100 rotoli. The standard ratio at Ajaccio was 105 English pounds to 100 rotoli (one cantaro), which was only off by about 78 grams.
Likewise, Genoese length measurements remained in use. The most important units were the palma (“palm”, about 81.4% of the length of an English foot), the passo (“pace,” equal to 6 palmi or ~1½ meters), and the miglio (“mile,” equal to 6000 palmi or 1000 passi, about 92.5% of an English mile). Another unit, the cannella (equal to 2 passi, 12 palmi, or just under 3 meters), was preferred for ground and architectural measurement, and the cannella quadrata (about 8.86 square meters) was used for measuring area. Because the surveys of the island in the 1740s and 1750s had been performed by the French, however, the Catasto Reale also used the arpento (Paris arpent) to measure land area, which was equal to about 576 cannelle quadrate or 1.26 acres.[C]
Footnotes
[1] The Spanish doubloon was the original basis for all these coins. What we know as a “doubloon” in English was a 2-escudo gold coin - thus doblón, “double.” This in turn gave its name to the Italian doppia and inspired the minting of other similarly-sized gold coins across Europe. The French Louis d’or was originally a direct copy of the doblón.
Timeline Notes
[A] The historical Theodoran lira seems to be exceptionally rare. While the lesser "TR" coins appear on auction sites (sometimes for thousands of dollars each), I have yet to see an actual picture of a Theodoran lira, only sketches. I do not actually know what the size or fineness of this coin was, although it is universally described as "silver" so it must have had at least some silver in it, unlike the "billon" coins which had little or none. The weight and fineness figures for the Theodoran lira given above are actually those of the Paolist lira minted in the 1760s; I doubt Theodore's was the same, but we can at least know that it was possible to strike such a coin on Corsica. Paoli's republic minted 1, 2, and 4 soldi coins, as well as lire and half-lire.
[B] Rotolo comes from the Arabic rutl, a unit of measurement used in the Middle East and North Africa which itself comes from the Ancient Greek lítra, which is also the root of litre and is etymologically related to a variety of other measurements (libra, livre, etc).
[C] The next update will concern Corsica’s financial situation, and I thought it might be helpful to write a mini-update establishing what types of exchange we’re actually talking about before we dive into debt, budgets, and banking. I’ve barely mentioned currency at all since the Governance and Indifference update which was posted back in 2017, which was probably an oversight. The system above is fairly typical for this time period: Most European countries still based their silver/copper currency on the old Carolingian system of 1 libra = 20 solidi = 240 denari, differing mainly in how these units were subdivided. The scudo was less well-defined; some other Italian states had a silver scudo which was worth 6 lire, but in some places it was 8 lire instead, and in Sardinia-Piedmont a scudo was only worth 2½ lire. The pre-decimalization era must have been a confusing time to be alive.
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Always love these types of updates! Especially the ones on Numismatics.
Could it be possible that the 2½s coins refers to the average content value rather than the intended value of the coin? It seems unlikely to mint a coin with a higher content value, but it would make it a more desirable among merchants.
While I'm not familiar with the area, or your sources & will concede to your expertise, given what I know about French & French colonial coinage from this time period, a 2½ coin wouldn't be surprising.
Could it be possible that the 2½s coins refers to the average content value rather than the intended value of the coin? It seems unlikely to mint a coin with a higher content value, but it would make it a more desirable among merchants.
While I'm not familiar with the area, or your sources & will concede to your expertise, given what I know about French & French colonial coinage from this time period, a 2½ coin wouldn't be surprising.