Aid and Comfort
Aid and Comfort
The Port of Livorno, late 18th century
The leaders of the rebellion who had been exiled by the French did not merely vanish. Some, particularly a few of the more military-minded ones, went to Naples. King Carlos VII of Naples[1] had an interest in expanding the fledgling Neapolitan army with regiments of “warlike” foreigners; a few years previously he had authorized the creation of a “Royal Macedonian Regiment” of Greeks and Albanians, and following the collapse of the Corsican rebellion he decided to constitute a Corsican regiment as well. Despite their recent defeat, the famous victories of the Corsicans against the French at Madonna della Serra, San Pellegrino, Borgo, and Ponte Novu had reinforced their already-existing reputation for martial vigor. The new colonel of this regiment was none other than Theodore’s former prime minister and “general of the nation” Luigi Giafferi. At 72 years old he was not the most energetic commander, but the king was less interested in his military capabilities than the recruitment potential of his famous name, which still carried great weight among the Corsicans. Several other prominent leaders, including the brothers Clemente and Pasquale Paoli, followed him to Naples and gained positions in the new regiment.[A]
The Port of Livorno, late 18th century
The majority of the Corsican exiles, however, came to Livorno in Tuscany. Livorno had been a center of Corsican expatriate activity and smuggling to and from the island since the very beginning of the rebellion. The city was inclined to it by nature; the Genoese and Livornesi were commercial rivals, and any venture which promised to both turn a profit and humiliate Genoa was attractive to the merchants of Livorno. That would not have mattered, however, if the government was not also favorable. Gian Gastone, the last Medici grand duke, had favored Theodore and helped fund his venture. When he died in 1737, the Genoese had hoped for a crackdown from the new government, a viceroyalty ruling in the name of Franz Stefan, formerly the Duke of Lorraine. Franz Stefan, however, had interests of his own in Corsica, and his viceroy was the Grand Duke’s friend and former tutor Marc de Beauvau, Prince de Craon, an affable dullard whom Horace Walpole summarized as “a good-natured simple old man, poor and extravagant, loves piquet, the Princess, and baubles.” The Genoese did not get much use out of him.
The man who actually ran the show in Livorno was Feldmarschall-Lieutenant Karl Franz, Freiherr von Wachtendonk, the initial commander of the first Austrian intervention in Corsica (1731-2) and a distant relation of Theodore. Wachtendonk’s position was politically and legally ambiguous. He commanded the garrison in a Tuscan city, but he was an imperial army officer who reported not to Craon’s viceregal court in Florence but to the Hofkreigsrat (the Aulic War Council) in Vienna. His charge was in theory an army, not a city, but because of the strategic importance of Livorno and the difficulty of separating civic and military matters he exercised a quasi-gubernatorial authority. The result, as the Genoese found, was that he was totally unaccountable. Craon had neither the authority nor the force of will to compel Wachtendonk to do anything, while distant Vienna was of no more help. Appeals directly to Wachtendonk were either ignored or answered with vague promises which never materialized. While not personally invested in the Corsican struggle, Wachtendonk was apparently all too ready to turn a blind eye to the exiles, and even to smugglers, so long as it pleased the Grand Duke.[2] The Genoese were appalled, and their consul complained to his government that Livorno was full of Corsicans “accustomed to all sorts of crimes.”
This protection encouraged some of the rebellion's leading figures to take shelter there. Fabiani, Ceccaldi, and Giappiconi were all present, and were supported financially by the pre-existing "royalist" network in Livorno and Theodore's loyal henchman Francesco dell'Agata, the Florentine merchant who handed much of the rebellion's financial dealings in Tuscany. The rebel leaders were alleged to have met regularly not only with one another, but with various foreign agents, merchants with syndicate affiliations, Wachtendonk himself, and ambassador Horace Mann, the long-serving British minister to the Grand Duchy. Their position was not without danger, for the Genoese were well known employers of assassins and kidnappers, and Genoese spies were constantly trying to keep tabs on the rebels and their foreign contacts. As long as the Corsicans kept their dealings discreet, however, the local authorities (that is, soldiers of the Austrian garrison on police duty) left them alone. Wild rumors of the fruits of their conspiracies abounded—in June, a Genoese diplomat wrote of a widespread rumor in Florence that a shipment of "fifteen thousand muskets" was being prepared for the rebels in Germany.
All this might sound like the ferment of an ingenious conspiracy by the Grand Duke and his minions; the Genoese and French certainly began to suspect as much. With Franz Stefan, however, there was always less than met the eye. The problem was that despite his interest in a royal crown, the Grand Duke was insufficiently committed to the cause. As an absentee monarch who only ever visited Tuscany once at the inauguration of his reign, Franz Stefan acted exclusively through agents to whom he gave little direction and few resources. His earlier use of the hapless Humbert de Beaujeu, a sort of counterfeit-Theodore presently languishing in a Viennese prison, was a case in point—the Grand Duke had recruited this unsavory character in secret, promised him a lifelong viceroyalty of the island, and instructed him to raise the island in rebellion with the aid of a considerable stipend which was nevertheless wholly inadequate to the task at hand. His diplomatic schemes went nowhere—tentative offers to buy the island from Genoa appear to have failed because the Genoese did not trust his credit, and even if they had it is unlikely he would have followed through, as another proposal to trade Corsica for Tuscan Lunigiana appears to have collapsed because the Grand Duke was not willing to sacrifice anything of real value for what he wanted. The penniless Theodore had delivered muskets, gunpowder, shoes, food, and even artillery to Corsica by the shipload, but the Grand Duke of Tuscany and son-in-law of the emperor was seemingly unwilling to send anything more than promises, platitudes, and dubious agents on a shoestring budget. The Grand Duke now wooed Corsican elites by making a modestly comfortable exile for them in Livorno, and even took an interest in d'Ornano, whom he imagined could be turned into a loyal partisan by indulging his requests, but he had no concrete plan to turn the goodwill of particular Corsicans into a pro-Lorrainer revolution. He seems to have been convinced that if the Corsicans only liked him enough they would spontaneously rise up, overthrow the Genoese, and call in one voice for Francesco Stephano di Lorena to be their king.[3]
Theodore, who was no stranger to confidence games, knew a mark when he saw one. Although details of their correspondence are somewhat thin, we know that by this time the baron and the grand duke had been in occasional contact for at least a year, and possibly quite a bit longer. Franz Stefan had originally seen Theodore as a rival, a minor nuisance who needed to be brushed out of the way before the rebellion could be turned to his own advantage, which was why Humbert de Beaujeu had been dispatched after Theodore's flight to Amsterdam. Theodore, however, was not a man to stand on pride, and eventually appealed to the Grand Duke by implying that he would be ready to lay down the mantle of king in exchange for a high position, perhaps as viceroy, the same grand promise which the Grand Duke had been quite willing to make to Beaujeu. The Grand Duke soon warmed to him, and it is plausible, although not definitely proven, that Theodore himself had a hand in the Austrian intervention by privately pressing Franz Stefan to use his influence in Vienna to make it happen.
Both Theodore and Franz Stefan believed they were using the other. Theodore, however, was clearly the more clever of the two. According to Theodore's private secretary Denis Richard, d'Ornano's outreach to the Austrians was no secret to Theodore because Franz Stefan himself, or at least his intermediary, had told Theodore about it—since Theodore was already presumed to be in the Grand Duke's camp, there was no harm in telling him about a new conspirator won over to the cause. Desiring to keep his Corsican dealings a secret and allergic to large expenditures of his own money, the Grand Duke would not be sending great shiploads of arms to Corsica, but he does appear to have channeled some funds to dell'Agata and other sympathetic financiers which was used to support the rebel exiles in Livorno and probably found its way into the smuggling business as well. He also gifted Theodore with his rather facile advice, advising him to "maintain the confidence of his men" and suggesting that he seek British aid, as if a renegade baron had better diplomatic contacts than the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Such advice was no help to Theodore, who had been trying to attract British aid for years, but it did give him an idea. In a letter to the Grand Duke, he praised his "inspired" notion of appealing to the British and made a proposal: if he could be smuggled out of the country with the Grand Duke's aid, he could make his way to London and prevail upon the government of that country to support the Corsicans more directly. He mentioned his many contacts in Amsterdam and London, and even suggested that he had a ready means of gaining a royal audience through Amalie von Wallmoden, the favored mistress of King George II, who was in fact Theodore's cousin. This was Franz Stefan's favorite kind of scheme—that is to say, inexpensive and designed by others—and he readily agreed to arrange for Theodore's transport. At last, the king had found his exit strategy.
Despite growing Genoese alarm at the complicity of the Grand Duke's government in Corsican schemes, the Republic did not yet have much to complain about with regards to Austrian activity on Corsica. The Sartena expedition of Feldmarschall-Lieutenant Otto Anton, Graf von Walsegg had been a clear success, and the rebels were on the run. Next Walsegg asserted his control over the valley of the Rizzanese, forcing Lieutenant-General Michele Durazzo to retreat into the Alta Rocca. Once there, however, the relatively small number of Walsegg's forces began to tell. With only about 2,000 men in the theater divided between garrisons in Porto Vecchio, Sartena, Propriano, Carbini, and other strategic points, holding Alta Rocca was troublesome, and Durazzo could be reinforced and resupplied from Zicavo over the Pass of La Vaccia. A confrontation near Livia inflicted a few dozen casualties on each side, and the Austrians were forced to pull back from an overly ambitious march against Zonza when confronted by a numerically superior royalist force. Then there was an uprising in Istria, northwest of Propriano, in which the rebels seized Olmeto on a hill just across the bay and had to be driven out by a concerted Austro-Genoese offensive. Walsegg wrote to his superiors asking for more troops, as the Hofkriegsrat had so far dispatched only about half of the 5,000 troops which the Genoese and Austrians had agreed to.
Walsegg, deciding to try and make some use of d'Ornano, requested the support of his militiamen in Istria. After some delay, d'Ornano obliged him, but did not actually fight his fellow Corsicans—he merely assumed control of the pieve and allowed the royalist forces to withdraw up the valley, leaving it still unclear if he was actually an Austrian client or merely playing one. The result was to Walsegg's advantage, as the attacks from this direction now stopped, but very quickly he was met by the outrage of the Genoese who were scandalized by the notion that Walsegg was treating a notorious rebel as an imperial auxiliary, even an ally. The general was compelled to officially disavow any arrangement with the marquis, despite the fact that he knew d'Ornano to be in communication with the Grand Duke's men, and demanded that he vacate Istria after requesting his occupation of it only days before. Confident in the proffered protection of the Grand Duke, d'Ornano gave empty assurances to the general but remained right where he was, and made no serious attempt to interdict the movement of royalist soldiers or supplies through the region. For the moment, there was nothing Walsegg could do to force him out.
Lake Nino on the Camputile Plateau
The situation in the north was considerably more grim. In June, the last rebel activity in the Castagniccia finally ended—the surrender of Ceccaldi had ended organized resistance, but a few small bands had continued the fight as outlaws in true Corsican tradition—and the conquest of the western valleys meant that General Rauschenburg was totally encircled in the Niolo. On July 8th, two battalions under Brigadier Jean de Saignard, Sieur de Sasselange stormed the Pass of Vergio despite heavy resistance, breaching Rauschenburg's mountain fortress. Once more Rauschenburg and his dwindling band of men were forced to flee, this time over the Plateau of Camputile, a treeless alpine shelf 6,000 feet above sea level. Sporadic resistance continued for a few days in the eastern Niolo at Albertacce, but the French quickly took the wind out of the sails of the remaining malcontents by harsh reprisals, including summarily hanging suspected rebels from the boughs of their chestnut trees. Rauschenburg was not yet defeated, but he was forced to retreat to the nearly uninhabited gorges of the upper Tavignano and Restonico, where hunger was a more pressing enemy than the French.
Theodore was not about to slink off in the night. Some may fault him for breaking his promise to remain until the last extremity, and perhaps some Corsicans did. He was not, however, abandoning the struggle. At certain points during the rebellion—before the French arrival, after the Syndicate fleet's arrival, after Ponte Novu—it seemed possible to think that the Corsicans might just win their independence on their own. In the present circumstances, however, it was clear to him that his quest was impossible without stronger foreign support, and his chances of gaining that support while residing in Zicavo were negligible. He was arguably more useful to the rebellion on the continent—or, better yet, in England—than on Corsica, where he remained largely idle while men like Drost and Colonna fought delaying actions on his behalf.
With the Grand Duke's letters in hand, therefore, he announced his plan to his remaining ministers and advisors. They were dismayed to hear it, but according to Sebastiano Costa most saw the wisdom in his words. No doubt those words were embellished somewhat for their benefit, sprinkled liberally with claims of the Grand Duke's support, generous estimations of how much cash and arms the Syndicate was prepared to send back with him to renew the fight, and assurances that his royal audience in London was already a done deal. A modern reader might question whether the Corsicans believed any of this, but it scarcely mattered. Whom else would they put their faith in, if not Theodore?
Situation in Mid-July 1740
Green: Royalist nationals
Red: Genoese
Blue: Franco-Genoese
Yellow: Austro-Genoese
Dark Green: "Ornanist" nationals
White: Neutral or Unknown
Blue: Franco-Genoese
Yellow: Austro-Genoese
Dark Green: "Ornanist" nationals
White: Neutral or Unknown
Footnotes
[1] Confusingly, because Sicily and Naples were for a time separate kingdoms, Carlos was technically Carlos VII of Naples but only Carlos V of Sicily.
[2] Some have conjectured that Wachtendonk’s toleration was due to his alleged kinship with Theodore. This alone seems insufficient, as they were not particularly closely related, but certainly it would have given Theodore an opening to approach Wachtendonk. It has been theorized, but not actually proven, that Theodore and Wachtendonk were in communication in 1732 during the Prisoners of Savona affair, which was a personal humiliation to Wachtendonk and something that may have turned him against the Genoese. Alternatively, the general may simply have acted in the way he did because the Grand Duke encouraged it, and Wachtendonk lost nothing (and perhaps stood to benefit his career) by humoring the man who would eventually be king-consort and probably emperor. These explanations, of course, are not mutually exclusive.
[3] Had Franz Stefan actually become their king, one expects they would have come to regret it. The incompetence and arrogance of his viceregal administration in Tuscany was already well known in 1739, when a French traveler opined that "the Tuscans would give two-thirds of their property to have the Medici back, and the other third to get rid of the Lorrainers. They hate them as the Milanese hate the Piedmontese. The Lorrainers ill-use, and what is worse, despise them." But this mattered not at all to Franz Stefan, who thought nothing of Tuscany and would have concerned himself even less with Corsica. Having acquired its crown, it seems not too much of an exaggeration to say that he would not have been greatly troubled if the island sank into the sea thereafter.
Timeline Notes
[A] As OTL, although slightly later than OTL. Giafferi did indeed receive the colonelcy of the new Neapolitan regiment of Corsicans and the Paoli family (which included Giacinto Paoli, their father, who died in 1736 ITTL) served as officers in this unit.
Just hold on a little longer Corsica, King Theodore, or the War of Austrian Succession, will save the day!
