Part #196: A Fairytale Beginning
“Some have attributed the failings of humanity, war most obvious among them, to our emotional nature. I would argue that this is short-sighted, and that cold rationalism is just as capable of monstrous acts precisely because it fails to give life its true value: the activities of men like Lisieux prove this. However, it is also certainly true that much blood has been shed because men and women allowed their emotions to get the better of them. Not merely because of the more obvious and ‘negative’-seeming feelings such as rage or hatred, but thanks to others as well, ones which we may feel more hesitant to condemn...”
–Pablo Sanchez, Unity Through Society (1841)
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From: “Democracy on the Line: The European Wars of the Mid-Nineteenth Century” by Pawel Gieszczykiewicz (1977, authorised English translation 1981)—
The Patrimonial War was a surprisingly small and inconclusive affair considering the greatness of the question that prompted it. Nothing had caused more conflict both within the Catholic communion, and indeed in what had led the Protestants to break away in the first place, than the consideration of the dual place the Pope occupied as head of the Roman Catholic Church yet also functioning as a secular prince over the Patrimony of St Peter. For over one thousand years after the decline of Byzantine power in Italy in the eighth century, the Pope was the master of a swathe of territory cutting across the Italian Peninsula and based in the city that had given birth to what many still regard as the single greatest Empire the world will ever see.[1] For the vast majority of this period, the boundaries of the States of the Church remained almost static, a calming constant amid the chaos of Italy as republics swallowed one another up, became duchies and kingdoms, and were pawns in the great games of the French Bourbons and the Austro-Spanish Hapsburgs.
But nothing lasts forever. When the muted anticlericalism of the eighteenth century was replaced with the violent anti-religious character of the Jacobins at its end, it was only a matter of time before the comfortable place above the affairs of nations that the Papal States had enjoyed would be challenged. And of course it would be challenged in the most brutal and horrific way imaginable in the Rape of Rome. The desolation of Hoche[2] was only stopped by the intervention of what was then the Kingdom of Naples in personal union with the Kingdom of Sicily. As those two kingdoms rose in power and modernised throughout the start of the nineteenth century, their ruling Bourbon house would also acquire Aragon—later reduced to merely Catalonia plus the Balearic Islands—and be given the nickname (eventually official name) of ‘Kingdom of the Three Sicilies’, being Sicily itself, peninsular Naples and Catalonia. This apparently unwieldy combination, strengthened and consolidated under the rule of Kings Gennaro and Luigi, had grown to be one of two powers dominating the Italian Peninsula, with the many small states of the past being largely absorbed during both the Jacobin Wars and the Popular Wars. The Papal States were worn down both geographically, with two rounds of direct territorial losses to the Neapolitans, and also in terms of their independence, with the papacy increasingly under the thumb of the King in Naples.
The other power of the two, of course, was the Hapsburg state calling itself the Kingdom of Italy, but which is generally referred to as the Kingdom of North Italy in histories dealing with this period to avoid confusion. North Italy possessed considerable advantages of economic power and industry, but the Hapsburgs had initially struggled to impose their will across their large new domain, in particular ever-rebellious Venice, and the Three Sicilies had taken the upper hand as a consequence. A particular humiliation was that Tuscany, ruled by a separate Hapsburg line, had been directly absorbed into the Three Sicilies as they had crushed the Etrurian Republic revolt there against the young and inexperienced Duke Carlo III.[3] Carlo had instead been made Duke of Barcelona and Viceroy of Catalonia by King Luigi, and had proved to be a much more capable ruler in that setting, successfully playing off the powers against one another to ensure that Catalonia would not return to being part of Spain after the Second Spanish Revolution, though he did have to accept more French influence than he would have liked.
As far as the Hapsburgs of North Italy—led by King Leopold from 1819 onwards—this insult could not stand. North Italy had come out of the Popular Wars bruised and battered: Leopold had ultimately failed to prevent the involvement of Empress Henrietta Eugénie in the regency of her son in Vienna, crushed the Venetian Commune, and then had to lead the country in the bitter and futile struggle that was the Nightmare War with France, the world’s first glimpse of true industrialised warfare and all the misery that came with it. In the aftermath of the Popular Wars, he was forced to focus on maintaining his own position and that of his house, using the split with Vienna to deliberately define his house against the Austrian Hapsburgs and ‘go native’ as an Italian. He was able to secure his regime against a sometimes resentful populace with the use of careful and measured reforms, including the introduction of an indirectly elected body named the
Consiglio Rappresentante or Representative Council. In 1843 he belatedly copied the example of his enemy Charles X of France by giving the vote for this assembly (or rather for the electoral college that chose its members) to all veterans of the army regardless of station. These lukewarm measures were sufficient to secure enough popular support to keep Leopold in power, and allowed him to focus on resolving what he euphemistically referred to as ‘the Neopolitan Problem’.
Despite their position as rivals, Hapsburg North Italy and the Bourbon Three Sicilies in the south had rarely clashed directly, always being more consumed with foes external and revolts internal. Throughout the brief moment of peace that was the Democratic Experiment, the two powers now sized one another up like two prize fighters who had defeated all other rivals and now seemed evenly matched. North Italy retained superior industry and a better-trained and –equipped army, despite the efforts of the Neapolitan chief minister Leonardo Nelson, son of the great English Admiral, to modernise the south. The Three Sicilies nonetheless had a larger population base to draw upon than the North Italians and what was generally considered to be a superior navy, the North Italians’ own efforts in that field having suffered from the revolt and destruction in Venice. All that was needed was a spark to set the powder keg alight. Leopold had no intention of being the one to strike it, knowing that he would gain more popular support if the people regarded the other side as being the instigator. Luigi of the Three Sicilies was ambitious and not satisfied with his house’s present conquests. It would only be a matter of time before he pushed his luck.
In fact the cause came not directly from Luigi himself, but from Pope Innocent XIV taking the radical decision to divorce himself from any temporal power in the hope of a renewal in the Catholic Church. Despite many assassination attempts (largely foiled by the Pope’s brother), his plan went through and the entirety of the Papal States save Rome and its port Civitavecchia were delivered to the Neapolitans along with a stark promise that the papacy would tolerate no more direct temporal interference in its affairs. Innocent had wanted to give away Rome as well, but its people objected and instead a new Roman Republic was created.[4] For both genuine ideological reasons concerning the role of the Papacy, and taking the excuse to begin the conflict long-prepared for, Leopold declared war to remove Innocent from the Papacy and reverse the Benevento Settlement (as the secularisation of the Church lands was known).
Italy thus fought its own little war, largely separate from the other conflicts in Europe and the Americas but contemporaneous with them, from 1849 to 1852. Away from the propaganda blasts for and against the
Incorruptibilis papal bull and Benevento, the war was as much an act of the two rivals gauging one another’s strength as anything. King Leopold did not realistically believe that he could prevent or reverse Benevento. He set his major goal as retaking Tuscany, which was a vulnerable spur of Neapolitan territory, and thus setting the scene for a peace settlement in which North Italy was recognised as the rising power of the Italian Peninsula. To that end, he—or rather his eldest son and heir Fernando Francisco, Prince of Milan—engineered a plan to match an attack from without with an uprising from within. The Tuscan people remained somewhat resentful of being reduced to a mere northern province of the Neapolitan realm, now lacking a Grand Duke of their own. Their trade had suffered due to lack of direct influence at court and they were ripe for rebellion. The Neapolitans were at least somewhat aware of this, but believed that there was no form any such revolt could take that could be exploited by the Hapsburgs. The most obvious move would be a restoration of Carlo III, but he remained satisfied and loyal to the Neapolitans in his position in Catalonia, and the Hapsburgs made no attempt either to kidnap him or his heirs or declare him illegitimate and find another relation. An alternative form a Tuscan rebellion might take would be a restoration of the Etrurian Republic, but clearly the strongly monarchist Hapsburgs would have no desire to see the swastika fly over the Palazzo Vecchio once again.[5] The Neapolitans failed to foresee that there was a third, unexpected option.
The Hapsburgs had originally acquired Tuscany in the first place in 1737 following the death of Gian Gastone de’ Medici, last scion of the family that had ruled Tuscany for three centuries as first powerful bankers within the Florentine Republic and then as titular Dukes of Milan and Grand Dukes of Tuscany. The Medicis had a fairly mixed record of governance good and bad, but absence makes the heart grow fonder and the Medici period was increasingly romanticised in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as it faded from living memory. The Medici nostalgia mostly came from the working classes, whereas the middle classes were more enthused about the Etrurian craze sweeping Italy that eventually produced the Etrurian Republic. It was after the latter was crushed and Hapsburg rule was ended that Medici nostalgia became the dominant force among those classes discontented with Neapolitan rule. To a certain extent the Etrurian idea was allied and alloyed to it: both ultimately stemmed from the resentment that Italy was being fought over by two dynasties, one of which was Austrian[6] and the other French. The idea of native-born rulers was a powerful one among angry young men (and women).
But all of this was irrelevant, it seems: Gian Gastone had been the last of the Medicis. The family had struggled with failures to produce heirs for generations, martial discontent, sterility, venereal disease and other factors all playing their part in ensuring that every branch of the family ended without issue. So the Medicis had died out, a great deal of diplomatic wheeler-dealing had placed the distantly related Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor Francis I on the throne as Francesco II Stefano, and the rest, quite literally, was history.
At the time, nobody had seriously tried to trace a Medici heir: it would have required going many, many generations back and several of the European powers had more interest in getting their own man on the throne given the tenuousness of any such claim. Now, however, things were different. Fernando Francisco’s men hunted back and back through genealogies to the seventeenth century and eventually found a possible line of succession, albeit through an illegitimate heir. Inevitably with a sprinkling of the dramatic comedy that Italy was known for, the heir had been produced by the only Medici who
hadn’t been supposed to be trying for one—Cardinal Giano Carlo (1611-1663) with one of his many dalliances with mistresses. The line was patiently traced through the generations by the Prince’s detectives and, so they claimed, they found a surprising result: not only was an heir alive in that time, but it was a name already known to many: the great Florentine wit and poet Giovanni Tressino, whose wry and often controversial commentary on European politics had shocked many across Europe over the years—and delighted many more, some of them the very crowned (and capped) heads that he deprecated.[7] It remains a matter of debate whether Fernando Francisco’s researchers really did prove a connection or whether they creatively adjusted the genealogies to make a connection they had wanted.
Regardless, when Tressino was informed of the connection, he was—in his own words—“struck dumb for perhaps the first time in my life”. Tressino was fifty-six years old in 1849, the wild days of his youth at university and his travels now past him, and he was writing more serious treatises on his ideas of government (while, of course, simultaneously continuing to mock the wider political events around him). He had escaped prison and worse over the years by a position of absolute neutrality. Now, however, the Hapsburgs wanted him to abandon that and become Gonfaloniere of a restored Florentine Republic under their overlordship and influence: there would be no need to consider the weakness of his blood connection to the Medicis if he would not be taking the hereditary office of Grand Duke, but merely being elected Gonfaloniere by the (wealthier) people of Florence. It took Tressino some time to decide, for it seemed to go against much of his beliefs. In the end though he agreed to the plan. He justified his actions in private letters by stating that Tuscany would be a battlefield anyway, and at least this way he could try to bring good governance to a neglected region afterwards—as well as perhaps trying to play the Neapolitans and North Italians off one another to produce a neutral buffer state in the mode of Victor Felix’s Bavaria.
Fernando Francisco’s plan worked very well. The Neapolitans failed to see it coming and, after what initially seemed to be a reasonably successful repulsion of North Italian forces from a direct assault on Tuscany, in the winter of 1849-50 the people revolted under a gonfalone banner defaced with Tressino’s personal sigil, the ‘GT’ logo recognised by educated people throughout Europe. In many ways it was a return to the paternal politics of old, far removed from the radical Etrurianism that had set Tuscany alight a generation before. That was, of course, what the Hapsburgs had hoped: the apparently nonsensical decision to restore an old oligarchic Italian republic would help confuse and blur the issue of monarchists and republicans that had dominated European discourse since the Jacobin Wars. And, of course, there was always the possibility of a direct re-annexation of Tuscany later on, for Tressino was an unmarried bachelor and not occupying an office that was formally hereditary (though it often had been in practice) in any case.
The Neapolitans were caught offguard by the plan and were in full retreat throughout early 1850, almost conceding the whole (former) Grand Duchy to the North Italians, but then were rallied under King Luigi’s brother Carlo Gennaro, Duke of Syracuse. A general worthy of his title through merit alone and not merely royal blood, Carlo Gennaro held back the North Italians and consolidated Neapolitan control over Grosseto, keeping a foothold in Tuscany. The tide started to turn in 1851 when Carlo Gennaro retook Siena and it seemed as though all the Hapsburgs’ plans might come to nought. It was clear to both sides that the war moved far more slowly than some might have hoped, with the stalemate of the Nightmare War once more rearing its ugly head. The war was not so bloody as that conflict for the simple reason that both sides’ generals were rather cautious about engaging the other. Many of them were veterans of the Nightmare War or (on the Neapolitan side) had at least learned its lessons, and were leery of the idea of throwing away hundreds of their men to gain a few miles of land that would probably be abandoned the next day in any case. Thus the war in Tuscany was more of a ‘military cheshy-dance’ in which the partners seemed reluctant to touch each other, in the sarcastic commentary of Fernando Francisco.[8] His younger brother, Leopoldo Rudolfo, Duke of Venice, made it his mission to try to break this stalemate. He was young, charismatic—and brash and hot-headed. He disappeared while leading a charge at a skirmish near Montepulciano: when no news emerged after a week, his father sadly began to confront the idea that he had lost his son. It brought home the cost of the war to him and he became determined to end it as soon as possible.
The result was an audacious plan that saw North Italian forces, utilising new steam-guns and tactics from the Saxon school, driving west from Perugia to the sea and pocketing Duke Carlo Gennaro’s army in Grosseto. The Neapolitans tried desperately to use their superior navy to rescue the army—mirroring tactics used in America at the same time—but this was blocked by the North Italians, who fought them in the Battle of Follonica Bay. The Neapolitans predictably emerged victorious and sent most of the North Italian fleet to the bottom of the Mediterranean, but were damaged enough in the process to prevent the rescue operation. Surrounded and besieged, Carlo Gennaro reluctantly surrendered in April 1852. The resulting peace settlement, the Treaty of Cagliari (negotiated and signed in the neutral Sardinian Republic) saw the Hapsburgs recognise the Benevento Settlement but with Tuscany torn from the Neapolitans’ grasp as a titular independent republic, in practice strongly under Hapsburg influence. The fact that the Hapsburgs so readily went along with Innocent’s decisions after loudly condemning them and his own legitimacy as Pope in their earlier propaganda blasts led to much contempt being levelled at them for such cold politicking, and was specifically commented on by Pablo Sanchez, despite the latter’s particular focus on events in the Americas at the time. Tressino’s decision to become directly involved in the conflict was also written about by many, and Sanchez was not the only one to express disappointment that the neutral wit had abased himself in such a way. But Tuscany did prosper under his rule, with the damage of the war swiftly healed for the most part.
The Patrimonial War would therefore have been nothing more than a footnote in the history of Italy, despite the import of its ultimate cause, had it not been for one more minor thing. Tressino himself, once again, described it best when writing in retrospect on his deathbed in 1869: “It was then that the most poisonous, destructive force in the world came upon my country, the force which monarchies fear more than any bomb-throwing Robespierre or charismatic Diamant. It was then that Italy was afflicted with True Love...”
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From: “A Biographical Dictionary of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” by Jacques DeDerrault (1956, authorised English translation):
King Luigi of the Three Sicilies had only two children before the death of his wife, Amalia Theodora of Belgium, died in a boating accident on a visit to the Balearics. The king was shocked and saddened by this and as he was already sufficiently equipped with an heir, he elected not to marry again, though it did not stop him from keeping mistresses. His two children were a girl, HRH Carlotta Dorotea, Princess of Naples, Sicily and Catalonia, and a boy, HRH Don Paolo Luigi, Hereditary Prince of Naples and Duke of Calabria. At the time of the outbreak of the Patrimonial War in 1849 they were aged seventeen and fourteen respectively. Luigi and his chief minister Leonardo Nelson had begun to consider what marriage match should be made for Carlotta Dorotea. The European situation was chaotic enough that they had already delayed the question, with the matter of Spain in particular being a worry: should they attempt to make a match that would help secure Catalonia against its potential enemies? As it transpired, those enemies shifted rapidly enough to make such an attempt futile. What, then?
As for Carlotta Dorotea herself, she was a smart, vivacious girl who loved all the usual royal feminine pursuits such as music and horses, but had a rarely-glimpsed hard core of resilience beneath the apparent superficiality that led many to dismiss her. Her younger brother was if anything the opposite, a dour boy consumed with his future as King of the country, close to his uncle General Carlo Gennaro and occasionally showing signs of weakness or vapidity that concerned his father. Both children were closely interested in the war, which Luigi regarded as encouraging, though he forbade Paolo from following his uncle to war. The boy sulked but obeyed. Carlotta meanwhile pointed out that ‘Father never said anything about me, did he?’ and vanished.
She did not, as Paolo initially assumed and told his father (only to be embarrassed later about it) actually cross-dress and sign up as a soldier, as a few women did in those days. Rather she simply travelled under an assumed name to the border fortress city of Ancona, then called in favours with the daughters of local aristocrats so that she could observe the war from close-up – though still a safe distance, for she was less foolhardy than many her age. Ancona had been used to define the old border between the two great Italian powers and was now the front line. The city had been protected with many fortresses ever since it was an independent republic, and many of these had been modernised to nineteenth-century standards. Carlotta wrote in her diary of both the glory and the brutality she witnessed, the contrast between the soldiers on guard duty with their clean uniforms and shining brass buttons to the mud and bloody misery when the North Italian foe tried to attack the Ancona castles. This came rarely, though, for the North Italian generals were aware that Ancona was too tough a nut to crack with their current capabilities and did not come into their ruler’s plans for Tuscany. Their only role was to keep up the pressure and prevent the Neapolitans from striking northwards into Romagna, in which they were largely successful.
While observing all this, and writing the occasional enigmatic letter to her distressed father, Carlotta discovered something odd, and she had the kind of mind that cannot leave something odd alone, but must study it in great detail. Italy had always been more progressive than many European nations when it came to the role of women in education, with universities admitting (albeit very few) female students and even the occasional female lecturer from the seventeenth century onwards. Carlotta herself had been tutored by one such lecturer, Dr Elena Devoto of the University of Bologna—despite Leonardo Nelson’s best efforts, the Three Sicilies still lagged behind the North with their own higher education institutions—and later cited her as a major inspiration. Devoto’s lessons had included the sciences as well as philosophy and it was Carlotta’s critical thinking that led her to realise that there was something wrong about the pattern of the garrisons in Ancona. Most of the troops were stationed either at the border fortresses with a few in the city itself to keep order and repel any seaborne invasion. But there were also a small number of elite soldiers at the Varano fortress, which had fallen into disrepair and would not be able to actually repel a modern army. This was not important as it lay behind other fortresses, but then why were there soldiers stationed there. Against the misgivings of her friends, who helped smuggle her in (one was the daughter of one of the commanders of the other fortresses), Carlotta was keen to investigate.
It became clear that the fortress was being used as a prison. But not the type of prison she had already glimpsed from a distance, a prisoner-of-war camp filled with miserable captives. There was only one prisoner here, and he must be very important. His very existence was never mentioned in the Optel messages sent by the tower on Varano, which Carlotta intercepted and broke the overly simple code of. Indeed the messages implied that the situation in Varano was very different to what it was, suggesting it was merely a skeleton crew occupying a largely strategically useless castle. The supplies they ordered in from the army would not have fed the troops they had, so someone wealthy must be supplementing them from his own personal account. Carlotta and her friends uncovered that this someone was none other than Prospero Barberini, one of that great family who had fallen on hard times compared to their height centuries ago and whose major influence now rested on the status quo in Rome—which was therefore now threatened by the Benevento Settlement.
Whileinvestigating the area around the castle and dodging the Barberini soldiers, Carlotta heard a voice from the castle’s tallest tower—the one she had never managed to get near in her attempted infiltration disguised as a washerwoman. A male voice, singing sad songs that were more beautiful than anything she had ever heard before. Entranced, she halted and listened until he came to one that she knew. And then she sang along with him.
Of course she almost immediately attracted the attention of the troops and only just escaped with her liberty, but she came back many nights afterwards and, in softer tones, the two would harmonise in their music even as they attempted to pass notes back and forth by means of a bottle on a rope that only just fitted through the narrow windows of the tower. Initially the prisoner was reluctant to reveal his identity, but stated that he was desperate that his father should know he was alive. Some of the original notes were preserved and later put on display in 1953, despite the heirs of the family’s attempts to suppress them, and it is very visible how despite the seriousness of the situation, a note of a different emotion beyond mere desperation comes out in the words. These were love letters, love letters between two young people who had been mere yards from one another but had never seen each others’ faces.
In the end events came to a head when the prisoner reported that he had overheard the guards saying that Barberini was to move him. He finally said he was ready to reveal his identity so that his father could at least be told, but Carlotta went one better, organising a rescue mission with the help of her friends that neutralised the guards by means of drugged wine. The voice behind the door was astonished as she tried one key after another to get it open. “This princess isn’t going to another castle and starting all over again to find you,” she replied, and finally it opened.
It hadn’t merely been the prisoner who had been cagey about his identity. Carlotta had naturally tactfully never mentioned that she was the eldest child of the King of the Three Sicilies. So it was a shock for both when she finally met her prisoner, a bit worse the wear for his imprisonment but intact and healthy, and learned that she had rescued the second son of her father’s worst enemy. It was none other than Leopoldo Rudolfo, Duke of Venice, who had
not died in his rather foolish cavalry charge in an age when those were becoming obsolete, but had been taken prisoner by Barberini, who had plotted to use him as a bargaining chip to manipulate both sides into preserving the Barberini privileges in Rome.
The two escaped together and hid out under assumed names in the countryside for a while, avoiding Barberini’s searchers, until finally they reached the front line. There, Carlotta smuggled Leopoldo across the border so that her father would not imprison him in turn, and finally returned to face the music on her own. Needless to say, she was ‘in more hot water than all the steam engines of Europe could produce’ in the words of Tressino; but though her father learned from her (when he was finally in a mood to listen) that she had learned that Barberini was plotting against him and took action accordingly, he did not learn of Carlotta’s new connection to Barberini’s erstwhile prisoner. Suffice to say, however, that once the war was over, the Optel lines between Turin and Naples buzzed with a far more intricate code than the one Barberini’s men had used, encrypting words that would have set the Peninsula alight in more ways than one if they had ever been interpreted...
[1] In terms of its overall geopolitical and cultural impact and its ability to still stir the hearts of modern people, the writer means. In terms of territorial size or relative military power, there have of course been greater ones.
[2] The writer is slightly unfairly blaming it on Hoche when he certainly did not support most of the activities of the Sans-Culottes he was foisted with.
[3] As described in part #130.
[4] As seen in part #167.
[5] For why the swastika is considered a symbol of the Etruscans in TTL, see part #130 again.
[6] Well, Swiss if one goes back far enough.
[7] The phrase ‘capped heads of Europe’ is sometimes used to describe republican leaders in TTL in contrast to ‘crowned heads of Europe’ –itself a reference to the Phrygian cap that is a symbol of republicanism.
[8] He is referring to a style of Eastern European folk dance that was becoming popular in Western Europe at the time and was known (in English) as ‘the cheshy-dance’, itself a corruption of how the word ‘Czech’ is rendered via Polish. This is similar, though not quite the same, as the polka that swept Europe around this time in OTL and whose name comes from the Czech word for a Polish woman.
Excellent! Yeah, well done, man. It's pretty incredibly how good you are at shaping alternate worlds, even for places as specific (and new) as California. Hell, with a POD as far back as you have it, California could be entirely different. It's great to see a mix of alien and familiar.
