In the Court of the Laurel King
In the Court of the Laurel King
Villa "il Fontanone" on the hillside above Cervioni
Villa "il Fontanone" on the hillside above Cervioni
Theodore I had many capitals over the course of his reign. During the Revolution the king had established his chief residence at Cervioni, but subsequently moved to Vescovato, Corti, and finally Bastia over the course of the war. After 1749 the king moved between Bastia, Corti, and Ajaccio depending on his needs and whims, but the growth of the Corsican administration and his own family made this roaming less and less practical. Theodore personally preferred Ajaccio and settled permanently at the Augustinian Palace during his later years, but by this time the government and Theodore’s extended family had settled at the Palace of the Governors in Bastia, which offered the best amenities and swift communication with the Italian mainland.[1] Under King Federico Bastia’s supremacy was confirmed, and the king rarely left the city except to attend the consulta generale in Corti.
Wherever the king was, poor infrastructure and economic constraints meant that attending him in person was a significant undertaking for many Corsicans. While a few southern sgio were true rentiers, living a quasi-feudal existence on their lands worked by sharecroppers or laborers, many "elites," noble or otherwise, were little more than independent smallholders (proprietari) who could not afford to leave their lands for long periods of time. While procuratori only needed to attend one assembly a year, the members of the dieta had to “reside in the court of the sovereign” for at least 6 weeks during their annual term,[2] and a secretary or minister of state had to reside at Bastia for most of the year. These positions were all stipendiary, but still required the men who held these offices to abandon fields, orchards, families, and communal obligations for longer than many were willing to accept. This was not only a formidable obstacle to constructing a full-time national administration, but hampered the development of a “national” aristocracy of the sort that had been constituted at Versailles, the royal court par excellence which had served to concentrate the French nobility permanently under the watchful eye of le Roi Soleil.
The “court” of Bastia was not a permanent assembly of the nobility, but a seasonally rotating cast of characters who might show up for only a few months, weeks, or even days before making their way back to the provinces for the rest of the year. The court had a seasonal ebb and flow: Attendance was low during the summer harvest, then spiked in early September as many dignitaries who had already made the effort to travel to the consulta generale chose to add Bastia to their itinerary, then fell again as winter snows made travel more difficult, and finally evened out in the spring. Some nobles might not make the trip at all, or only show up every few years to remind the king of their existence. Northerners were overrepresented for reasons of simple geography, compounding their already considerable numerical advantage.
The difference in attendance between men and women was also significant. Notwithstanding the frequent presence of women in local elections, most Corsicans considered national politics to be “men’s business,” and visitors to court often left their wives at home to tend to domestic affairs and agricultural labor in their absence. Just as there were few “men of leisure” in Corsica, there were few women of leisure; there was no sense that a woman ought to be exempted from domestic chores merely because one addressed her as signora. Many considered travel to be too difficult or undignified for women, and provincial noblemen were sometimes concerned that the journey to Bastia - or the court itself - might endanger the honor and virtue of their female relations, particularly if they were expected to remain at Bastia for some time. It was always difficult for Corsican queens to find well-bred ladies-in-waiting to attend to them because very few Corsican families were willing to send young, unmarried women far away from the direct supervision of their fathers and brothers.
The court protocol of Bastia was very loosely based on that of Versailles, which was the royal court Theodore I had been most familiar with, albeit in a form so reduced and simplified as to be almost unrecognizable. The premier event of the day was the morning ceremony or lever (“to rise” in French), although after King Theodore II “Italianized” court protocol in the 1790s it became known as the alba (“dawn”). Unlike at Versailles there was no petit lever, the ceremonial intrusion into the king’s private chambers in which select members of court would witness him be dressed and groomed. Theodore I had valued his privacy, and the Corsicans would probably have found such an indiscreet display embarrassing and bizarre. After rising, dressing, and grooming with the help of his private staff, the king would usually have a light breakfast and then proceed to the antechamber, or living room.
In the antechamber the king would be attended by his “familiars:” the court marshal (maresciallo di corte), the chamberlain (gran cameriere), the high steward (gran maggiordomo), the grand chancellor, the grand almoner, the three delegati residenti (resident members of the dieta), and a few other intimates.[3] His wife would also join him at this stage; they had separate bedrooms and living rooms and would usually go through their respective morning routines separately, not seeing each other until the queen arrived at the king’s antechamber already in full court dress. For anyone else, being summoned to the antechamber along with the familiari was a rare honor. Here, the king would go over the day’s plans with his household officials, read letters, and discuss any preliminary business that was not appropriate for the general audience.
After this the king would proceed to the sala maggiore (great hall), where the rest of the court would already be gathered. A coronet of the Guardia Nobile would announce “mesdames et messieurs, le Roi” (from the 1790s, “signore e signori, il Re”) and the attendees would bow while the king took his throne. If the queen was present, she would then take her seat beside him. The chamberlain would then ring a silver bell to mark the beginning of the general audience, and the attendees were announced and presented themselves before the throne in order of precedence. Members of the royal family came first, followed by foreign envoys,[4] and then the Corsican nobility in order - knights of the Order of Redemption, marquesses, counts, hereditary knights, catenati, and finally untitled nobility (e.g. the son of a nobleman, addressed as don but not yet a knight/count/marquis).
As each dignitary was introduced, they would step before the dais, bow to the king, and exclaim “votre sérénissime majesté”/“vostra serenissima maestà” (“your most serene majesty”). If he chose, the king could take the opportunity to exchange a few words with them. Unlike his father, who rarely spoke during this procession, Theo relished the chance to “perform” as king. Each day he would read over the list of attendees prior to the audience - sometimes while still in bed - and have aides supply him with news about the individuals present so that he could ask a nobleman how his sick brother was doing, congratulate him on the marriage of his son, and otherwise make it appear as though he had a near-encyclopedic knowledge of everything that was going on in Corsica down to the most remote pieve.
Once the general audience was concluded, the king would go to the adjacent royal chapel and take mass, joined by his family, the grand almoner, and any church prelates who happened to be present. He would then come back through the sala maggiore (as the court bowed again) and withdraw to the antechamber to conduct private audiences. Those hoping for such an audience would stand outside the door, waiting to be called in, while the rest of the court would mingle and converse outside. When the king was finished, the end of the alba would be announced and the sala maggiore would be cleared.
The king would then exit the royal apartments and descend to the sala del vicariato (“Hall of the Vicariate,” which retained its name from the Genoese era when it was the office of the vice-regent), directly below the sala maggiore, where he would attend the daily meeting of the Council of State. If the king chose not to attend - which usually happened when he wanted to get an early start on hunting - it would be presided over by the Grand Chancellor in his capacity as vice-president of the council. Typically all of this business was completed by midday, after which the king ate dinner (that is, lunch) and was then free for the rest of the day to hunt, ride, or do whatever else he pleased. Unlike at Versailles there was no coucher, the evening equivalent of the morning ceremony; one was quite enough.
For those attending court, the alba lasted from well before the king made his entrance (as all were expected to be present and ready when he entered the hall) until the king’s officials declared the end of the audience and cleared the hall. At this point the court descended the horseshoe staircase to the courtyard, where they might linger and converse. Gentlemen might leave the palace grounds and proceed to a salon or coffeehouse to continue their conversations, while ladies would usually return directly to apartments or boarding houses in the city which catered to visiting notables. On some days court attendees might be invited to reconvene at the sala maggiore later in the day for a concert, play, or any other entertainment which was on offer. This was usually presided over by the queen as the king was typically out for the afternoon.
The full ceremony only played out when the monarch was actually present, which was not always the case. Federico scarcely ever left Bastia after becoming king except to attend the consulta generale, but his son was an avid traveler who enjoyed surveying the realm from horseback. Theodore I had established two other royal residences, the Augustinian Palace at Ajaccio and the Villetta Reale at Corti, but the former was in a lamentably poor state by 1780 and the latter was a glorified cottage seldom used for anything other than the royal visit to the consulta.
King Federico added only one property to this list, a block-shaped three story building just outside Cervioni which had originally been built as a watermill and became known as il Fontanone (“the Fountain”). Like the Villetta Reale in Corti, il Fontantone was intended to be a modest royal apartment for the king’s use when attending ceremonies at Cervioni and the vale of Alesani (specifically, coronations and state funerals). Theodore II used it during his coronation and visited it several times on hunting trips, but in 1781 he gave it to Princess Carina for her own personal use. The princess resided here whenever she was not attending court or on some expedition, and in her later years she lived at "the Fountain" more or less permanently. The princess renovated it to her own tastes, and it acquired a somewhat mysterious reputation - a gabled chateau secluded in the trees above Cervioni, draped in flowers and ivy, accessible only by an old Genoese bridge over a rushing torrent, inhabited by the princess, her horses, a few servants, and a very noisy colony of peacocks.
The Forest of Sorba
For court functions there was no alternative to Bastia until the initial construction of the Reggia di Noceta. Theo enjoyed hunting in the forest of Sorba, located in central Corsica in the pieve of Rogna, and had built a modest wooden hunting lodge near the tiny village of Noceta in 1779. Despite appearing quite secluded, however, it was conveniently close to the Via Nazionale and only eight miles south of Corti, and Theo arranged for the lodge to be replaced with a two-story stone building which would serve not only as a royal residence during the king’s hunting trips but a small “summer palace” which would be more commodious than the Villetta Reale in Corti. Completed in 1787, this initial building - more would come later - had a semicircular portico with columns of green and white Restonica marble, the first example of Corsican Neoclassical architecture. The palace had a sala maggiore of its own, allowing the alba to be conducted here when the king was in residence. Although initially much smaller than the Reggia di Bastia, the Noceta palace was augmented and renovated many times during the lives of Theo and his successors and would eventually surpass the Palace of the Governors in size.
While Bastia remained the center of court life, its suitability as the kingdom’s capital was gradually coming under more and more scrutiny. Bastia owed its present distinction mainly to inertia, and there were numerous deficiencies with the site. It had a small and inadequate harbor, was bordered by malarial marshland to the south, and was poorly situated for defense either by land or by sea. During the Coral War the king had been able to watch the Grande Armamento through his bedroom window, and the possibility of the king and his family being directly threatened by a hostile fleet was not at all outside the realm of possibility. Bastia’s northern position was conveniently located for communication with Italy but was prejudiced against the participation of southerners in government and court, a problem which would only become more acute towards the end of the century.
None of this was new information, but until the 1780s there had simply been no suitable alternative. Ajaccio was too isolated from the north, which was where most Corsicans lived. Corti was centrally located but barely a city at all, with few amenities and far from the coastal presidi which were the kingdom’s gateways to the outside world. Cervioni, the kingdom’s first capital, was well-situated on the doorstep of the kingdom’s Castagniccian heartland but was even smaller than Corti and had no port. Only Bastia had an actual palace worthy of the name, and the crown’s resources had never been great enough to consider building a new one.
From the 1780s, however, Theo began to seriously consider the possibility of relocating elsewhere - specifically, to Ajaccio. The king had always favored the city since his youthful days visiting his grand-uncle at the Augustinian Palace and “holding court” there as crown prince during the 1770s. The growth of the coral industry and the foundation of the Royal Bank of Ajaccio had established the city as the commercial capital of the kingdom, and it was already on the verge of surpassing Bastia as the largest city on the island. Rather than being hemmed in by mountains and marshes, Ajaccio had some room to expand, although it did have water supply issues that needed to be addressed. Ajaccio was blessed with a fine natural harbor, and the completion of the Via Nazionale in 1788 made reaching the city much less difficult for northerners.
The growing resources of the crown also meant that replacing the Reggia di Bastia was now actually possible to imagine. The Augustinian Palace, a converted seminary, was not really suitable; not only did this coastal building share the same vulnerability as the Palace of the Governors, but it was too small, in a poor state of repair, and lacked the appropriate architecture for court functions.[5] Theo began envisioning a new residence which would actually be built for purpose, located not in the city itself but amidst the sunny and fertile land around Ajaccio where he could surround himself with gardens and orchards that could not be realized in either the urban center of Bastia or the pine forests around Noceta. In the early 19th century this vision would eventually be made reality in the form of “Cortenova,” the greatest example of Corsican Neoclassicism, which would finally replace the Reggia di Bastia as the primary seat of King Theodore II and his successors.[6][A] This was accomplished only in the face of considerable political opposition; it was in the interest of the northeastern nobility that the court remain permanently on their doorstep, to say nothing of the artisans and businessmen whose livings depended substantially on the operations of the royal household and the needs of its attending courtiers. Yet these entrenched interests were ultimately unable to hold back the wishes of a monarch who possessed both the motivation and the means to alter the political geography of the kingdom to his own purpose.
Footnotes
[1] References to the palazzo dei governatori continue to appear for years after Corsican independence even though there were no longer any “governors” there. Officially it was known as il palazzo reale di Bastia (“the royal palace of Bastia”) but was more often referred to as la reggia (also meaning “the royal [palace],” from the Latin regia, “royal”). Not until the 19th century was the term reggia used more generically to refer to any “major” residence of the king, of which there were three during the reign of Theodore II: the Reggia di Bastia, the Reggia di Noceta, and the Reggia Cortenova (or simply Cortenova).
[2] The Constitution of 1736 mandated that three members of the 24-person dieta, two northerners and one southerner, “must always reside in the Court of the Sovereign.” These men were known as delegati residenti (delegates-resident) or simply residenti. Customarily this duty was handled with a shift system, called the rota, in which the dieta was divided into eight terzine (“tercets”) of two northerners and one southerner each, and each terzina spent one-eighth of the year at court, or about 45 days. The dieta, however, could constitute itself at any time and usually did so at Bastia, so members might have to travel even outside of their scheduled rota period.
[3] One of the privileges given to Knights of the Military Order of the Redemption was the right to attend the king in his forechamber, so there might be a handful of decorated military men present as well.
[4] It was standard practice that the diplomat of a prince ought to be afforded equal precedence to the prince he represented, and thus envoys came before any of the nobility regardless of their own noble title.
[5] Theo would eventually donate the Augustinian Palace to the government, which would renovate and reopen it as the Royal Theodoran University of Ajaccio.
[6] Cortenova means “new court,” which is both a literal description of the palace’s purpose and also a direct translation of Neuhoff.
Timeline Notes
[A] We will regrettably not see Cortenova take shape ITTL, although I have some ideas about location and layout that might show up in some epilogue post. In proper modern Italian it would be Cortenuova, but “-nova” is used here as a deliberate Latinism/archaicism. The loss of the diphthong is also common among Tuscan dialects, including Corsican (in which “new” is novu).
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