The Abettors
The Port of Livorno, early 18th century
The debate over which state was backing Theodore was mostly idle; he had not attained his position with the direct assistance of any of the great powers. Still, there was one state, seldom discussed, which certainly was in his corner: the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.
The Grand Duke of Tuscany
Gian Gastone de Medici probably knew Theodore through mutual acquaintances for more than a decade. His sister,
Anna Maria Luisa de Medici, had been married to the Elector-Palatine
Johann Wilhelm von Wittelsbach (d. 1716) and moved back to Florence after her husband's death.
Philipp von Stosch, the Prussian antiquarian who had been secretly spying on the Stuart court in Rome and who had been befriended by Theodore (unaware that he was a spy
for the Pretender at the time), wrote that Neuhoff was well known at Anna's court in Florence in the early 1720s. When Theodore came to Tuscany in 1732 to begin crafting his plans for aiding the Corsicans, he was clearly already known to Gian Gastone, and indeed it is possible he was actually employed by the Grand Duke in some capacity during that time. They seem to have gotten along well, perhaps in part because of their shared philosophical views. Both were unusually progressive and religiously tolerant rulers for their time; Gian Gastone repealed his father's onerous legislation against the Jews, encouraged the teaching of the sciences, and commissioned a statue of Galileo Galilei in Florence.
[1]
The most striking difference between them was that while Neuhoff was to be the first of a royal house, Gian Gastone was to be the last. He was the only son of the previous grand duke, Cosimo III, and his unhappy marriage with
Anna Maria of Saxe-Lauenburg resulted in no children.
[2] Depressive, boorish, alcoholic, and chronically ill, Gian Gastone had not made a public appearance since 1729 and was almost perpetually bedridden. As early as 1718, the
infante Charles of Spain was proposed by the Bourbons as his successor (Charles was only two years old at the time), but this did not gain wide acceptance until the Treaty of Vienna in 1731, in which Charles received the Duchy of Parma through the inheritance of his mother
Elisabeth Farnese, the Queen of Spain. As it happened, Gian Gastone quite liked the young Charles; he adopted him as his ward, named him his successor, and introduced him to court life in Florence, where the boy was well-received. In 1734, however, during the War of Polish Succession, Charles conquered Naples, and by the preliminary agreements made between the powers in 1735 Charles was compelled to give up both Parma and his position as Gian Gastone's heir in exchange for being recognized as King of Naples. The powers agreed that Tuscany should go to Duke
Francis III of Lorraine, who wed the Habsburg heiress
Maria Theresa in January of 1736 and would eventually become Holy Roman Emperor. Gian Gastone was furious and despondent; none of the powers had ever for a moment consulted him about his own desires for his duchy.
The Grand Duke was helpless—and, as it would soon become clear, dying. Yet his misfortune was to be Theodore's good fortune. Faced with the inevitable loss of his duchy and his own swiftly approaching mortality, destined to bequeath all he had built and maintained to rapacious foreigners, demeaned and ignored by the crowned heads of Europe, the Grand Duke was truly a man with nothing to lose—and despite his physical infirmity and the presence of Spanish troops in Livorno and Portoferraio, he still held the levers of power in his arthritic hands.
Tuscany, it must be said, was far weaker and poorer than even Genoa. The state's fiscal health was dire; Gian Gastone had ordered reforms which had improved the situation relative to that during his father's reign, but by the Grand Duke's death in 1737 the state debt still stood at 14 million scudi, compared to a gross annual revenue of around 8.6 million. Around 13% of that revenue was devoted to paying for the Spanish garrisons which were maintained in Tuscany against the will of the Grand Duke. Militarily, the state was a non-entity. The army was less than 3,000 strong and considered quite useless, little more than a drain on the treasury. The navy consisted of three galleys which spent much of their time acting as cargo transports for raw silk as a means to defray their expense. The Military Order of Saint Stephen, the Tuscan equivalent of the Knights of Malta which had at one point fielded its own naval flotilla and fought the Ottomans and Barbary corsairs, had been converted into an educational foundation.
This was not a state which was going to come to Theodore's rescue. Nevertheless, while Gian Gastone had no intention of bankrupting his country he knew very well that neither he nor his (non-existent) children would ever have to pay Tuscany's debts. (In fact all his debts would be "inherited" by Francis of Lorraine, though Francis tried unsuccessfully to get out of the obligations.) The Grand Duke had laid out some funds for Theodore's original venture to Corsica and may well have continued to send him funding afterwards. The Grand Duke's greatest contribution to Theodore's cause, however, was as a facilitator. He was more than willing to turn a blind eye to and even abet the schemes of agents, smugglers, and bankers involved in the Corsican cause, and the Genoese envoys found him entirely unresponsive to their demands that he crack down on these rebels and criminals. The Genoese complained to the great powers, too, of the "permissiveness" of the Grand Duke; but everyone could see the Grand Duke would not live much longer, and the Austrians simply did not care enough to make anything more than a token protest which Gian Gastone did not pay the slightest attention to.
Grand Duke Gian Gastone de Medici, in the dress of a Knight of Saint Stephen
Livorno itself, as well as its lord, was friendly to Theodore's cause. That city had seen its fortunes fall significantly in recent years. This was partly due to the mismanagement of Cosimo and the falling demand for Florentine silk in the north, but it also had much to do with competition from Genoa. Livorno had gained much of its prosperity from its status as a free port in a neutral country, but Genoa had since also been designated as a free port, and Tuscany's neutral status was now in considerable doubt given the state's planned acquisition by the Lorrainers (and thus the Austrians) and the presence of foreign troops in its maritime posts, including Livorno itself. Traffic declined, profits fell, and the outlook for the future seemed grim.
Desperate for new financial opportunities, Livornesi merchants turned to a nearby emerging market: Corsica. Naturally, any trade with Corsica was smuggling (at least in the eyes of the Genoese) and carried considerable additional risk of loss at the hands of Genoese patrol ships. Yet even legitimate trade could be interdicted, as the Barbary corsairs demonstrated regularly, and there was significant profit to be made on Corsica. The Livornesi noted that Corsican olive oil was just as good as Neapolitan oil and could be acquired for much less. Furthermore, because Livorno was a free port and Theodore imposed only a nominal duty at Bastia, the trade was nearly tax-free. If profit could be made while confounding their Genoese rivals, so much the better.
Even illicit trade, however, required finance, and Theodore had a number of contacts in the world of banking. Most important were the two bankers
Bertoletti and
Huigens, who were based in Livorno and managed the payroll and budget of the Spanish garrison force in Tuscany to the tune of 1,120,827 scudi in 1737 alone (as mentioned, around 13% of the Grand Duchy's annual income). While their business with Theodore is not well documented, they may have been involved in financing smugglers and certainly acted as Theodore's bank in Livorno, by which means Theodore's agents could receive payments, access funds, and use them to buy munitions on the continent without actual specie traveling over Genoese waters. The Genoese consul also reported rumors that Bertoletti and Huigens had sent 30,000 silver piastres to Theodore, which if true suggests that they were not merely acting as merchant bankers but were effectively managing payroll for the Corsican rebels, as Theodore had little other need for coins on Corsica than to pay his soldiers. It would come as little surprise, as the bankers were already performing the same service for the several thousand Spanish troops in the Grand Duchy.
While Livorno was a thus vital to the supply and financing of the rebellion, neither the Livornesi nor the Grand Duke could furnish Theodore with all he required, not merely to win the war but to prove to his "subjects" that he had secured the support of a foreign power as he had promised. The pool of capital was relatively small, and the Livornesi did not have access to a ready or inexpensive supply of arms. There was one power, however, which had all this and more, and whose citizens had already been deeply involved in Theodore's venture beginning with Theodore's original co-conspirator,
Johan Willem Ripperda. Ripperda was a Dutchman, and had stowed most of his fortune in Dutch banks before journeying to the Mediterranean to enter the service of Morocco. It was Ripperda who had coordinated the arms shipments which Theodore originally brought with him to Corsica, also Dutch in origin, and without his capital and connections the Corsican expedition could have never succeeded.
Ripperda's health was poor, and he was presently mired in Moroccan intrigues. His old master
Moulay Abdallah, after being overthrown by his half-brother
Ali in 1734, had returned to the throne in February of 1736 only to be overthrown again that August by another half-brother
Mohammad II. The assistance of the Bey of Tunis, arranged by Ripperda and Theodore together, was also in doubt because of domestic turmoil there. Bey
Hussein of Tunis had provided Theodore with gold and agreed to a 20-year truce with the new "Kingdom of Corsica" in exchange for good trading terms and assurances that Corsican trade would be good for Tunis.
[3] Hussein, however, had been overthrown by his nephew
Ali Pasha later that year, and while Hussein would withstand a siege at Kairouan for five years it would ultimately end in his defeat and death. For Theodore, it was a shame to lose him; Hussein had not only been a patron of Theodore's cause, but his two sons, whom he had been grooming as heirs until his overthrow, were half-Corsican on account of their mother, a Corsican concubine. One of these sons would one day rise to the throne, but not until years after the revolution had already been won.
Ripperda would contribute little more to the Corsican cause until his death little more than a year later, but Theodore had since established his own connections with Amsterdam and no longer needed Ripperda as a go-between. He exchanged letters with certain Dutch bankers by way of
Thomas Blackwell, an English merchant who was a friend and business partner of the British consul in Tunis
Richard Lawrence, father of the late Captain Ortega. Theodore's Jewish backers also had contacts there; one of his principal Jewish investors in Tunis,
Mordecai Senega, had a brother,
Nehemiah, who was a merchant in Amsterdam and was already involved in the Corsican venture.
Like the Livornesi, the merchants of Amsterdam were always out for new opportunities. Amsterdam, however, was a global financial hub and had a vastly deeper pool of private capital from which to draw. It was also a major manufacturing and export center of munitions: In the early 18th century Dutch merchants exported tens of thousands of muskets and 30,000 tons of gunpowder annually to West Africa alone as part of the slave trade, against which Theodore's 1,000 Dutch muskets in the hold of the
Richard was practically a rounding error. Corsica, too, had something to offer Amsterdam. While the Dutch were not terrific connoisseurs of olive oil, olive oil
soap was used in an industrial capacity by the Dutch textile industry for fulling wool and felt-making. Because of its utility to an important domestic industry, the import of olive oil into the United Provinces had been declared duty-free.
At the end of the summer of 1736, this relationship was still in its very early stages. Yet the Dutch had now been reading about Theodore's success in their newspapers for months, and their merchants were conversing with local bankers involved with the scheme and hearing rumors of the brisk (albeit illegal) trade between Corsica and Livorno. While the Livornesi could really only afford to concern themselves with today's profits, the deep-pocketed merchants and investors of Amsterdam were able to look further into the future. With high labor costs and high taxes at home, Dutch investors in the early 18th century found domestic investments less attractive than they once had been. The answer was to find investment opportunities abroad, and the Dutch became pioneers in the field of "foreign direct investment." To merely trade guns for oil in Corsica might be profitable, albeit risky; but the real profit lay in independence, for if an investor could get in on the ground floor and set up business relationship with the new regime, he might reap the rewards for years to come.
Footnotes
[1] Although Gian Gastone's persecution of Freemasonry may not have agreed with Theodore, who is often thought to have been a Mason and certainly had many close friends who were.
[2] It was not merely unhappy, but not much of a marriage at all. From the start, the newlyweds had utterly detested each other, and Anna Maria had refused to leave Bohemia. After departing for Tuscany in 1709, Gian Gastone never saw his wife again, although she was still quite alive in 1736.
[3] The Beylik of Tunis thus is often given the distinction of being the first state to formally recognize the Kingdom of Corsica. Whether it really "counts," however, is questionable; Hussein Bey granted his recognition about a year before Theodore's election and coronation, and by the time of Theodore's landing in Corsica Hussein had already been replaced in Tunis by Ali Pasha, who made no effort to grant recognition to the Kingdom of Corsica nor behaved as if it had already been granted.
