An assembly of the chiefs of the Terra di Comune now decided to offer the government of the island to the Company or Bank of San Giorgio, a powerful commercial corporation established at Genoa in the 14th century.[1] The bank The Bank of San Giorgio. accepted; the Spaniards were driven from the country; and a government was organized. But the bank soon fell foul of the barons, and began a war of extermination against them. Their resistance was finally broken in 1460, when the survivors took refuge in Tuscany. But order had scarcely been established when the Genoese Tommasinoda Campo Fregoso, whose mother was a Corsican, revived the claims of his family and succeeded in mastering the interior of the island (1462). Two years later the duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza, overthrew the power of the Fregoso family at Genoa, and promptly proceeded to lay claim to Corsica. His lieutenant had no difficulty in making the island accept the overlordship of the duke of Milan; but when, in 1466, Francesco Sforza died, a quarrel broke out, and Milanese suzerainty became purely Milanese intervention. nominal save in the coast towns. Finally, in 1484, Tommasino da Campo Fregoso persuaded the duke to grant him the government of the island. The strong places were handed over to him; he entered into marriage relations with Gian Paolo da Leca, the most powerful of the barons, and was soon supreme in the island.
Within three years the Corsicans were up in arms again. A descendant of the Malaspinas who had once ruled in Corsica, Jacopo IV. (d’Appiano), was now prince of Piombino, and to him the malcontents applied. His brother Gherardo, count of Montagnano, accepted the call, proclaimed himself count of Corsica, and, landing in the island, captured Biguglia and San Fiorenzo; whereupon Tommasino da Campo Fregoso discreetly sold his rights to the bank of San Giorgio. No sooner, however, had the bank—with the assistance of the count of Leca—beaten Count Gherardo than the Fregoso family tried to repudiate their bargain. Their claims were supported by the count of Leca, and it cost the agents of the bank some hard fighting before the turbulent baron was beaten and exiled to Sardinia. Twice he returned, and he was not finally expelled from the country till 1501; it was not till 1511 that the other barons were crushed and that the bank could consider itself in secure possession of the island.
If the character of the Corsicans has been distinguished in modern times for a certain wild intractableness and ferocity, the cause lies in their unhappy past, and not least in the character of the rule established by the bank of San Giorgio. The power which the bank had won by ruthless cruelty, it exercised in the spirit of the narrowest and most short-sighted selfishness. Only a shadow of the native institutions was suffered to survive, and no adequate system of administration was set up in the place of that which had been suppressed. In the absence of justice the blood-feud or vendetta grew and took root in Corsica just at the time when, elsewhere in Europe, the progress of civilization was making an end of private war. The agents of the bank, so far from discouraging these internecine quarrels, looked on them as the surest means for preventing a general rising. Concerned, moreover, only with squeezing taxes out of a recalcitrant population, they neglected the defence of the coast, along which the Barbary pirates harried and looted at will; and to all these woes were added, in the 16th century, pestilences and disastrous floods, which tended still further to impoverish and barbarize the country.
In these circumstances King Henry II. of France conceived the project of conquering the island. From Corsican mercenaries in French service, men embittered by wrongs suffered at the hands of the Genoese, he obtained all the necessary First French Intervention, 1553. information; by a treaty of alliance concluded at Constantinople (February 1, 1553) with Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent he secured the co-operation of the Turkish fleet. The combined forces attacked the island the same year; the citadel of Bastia fell almost without a blow, and siege was at once laid simultaneously to all the other fortresses. The capitulation of Bonifacio to the Turks, after an obstinate resistance, was followed by the treacherous massacre of the garrison; soon, of all the strong places, the Genoese held Calvi alone. At this juncture the emperor Charles V. intervened; a strong force of imperial troops and Genoese was poured into the island, and the tide of war turned. The details of the struggle that followed, in which the Corsican national hero Sampiero da Bastelica gained his first laurels, are of little general importance. Fortresses were captured and recaptured; and for three years French, Germans, Spaniards, Genoese and Corsicans indulged in a carnival of mutual slaughter and outrage. The outcome of all this was a futile reversion to the status quo. In 1556, indeed, the conclusion of a truce left Corsica—with the exception of Bastia—in the hands of the French, who proceeded to set up a tolerable government; but in 1559, by the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, the island was restored to the bank of San Giorgio, from which it was at once taken over by the Genoese republic.
Trouble at once began again. The Genoese attempted to levy a tax which the Corsicans refused to pay; in violation of the terms of the treaty, which had stipulated for a universal amnesty, they confiscated the property of Sampiero da Bastelica. Sampiero da Bastelica. Hereupon Sampiero again put himself at the head of the national movement. The suzerainty of the Turk seemed preferable to that of Genoa, and, armed with letters from the king of France, he went to Constantinople to ask the aid of a fleet for the purpose of reducing Corsica to the status of an Ottoman province.[2] All his efforts to secure foreign help were, however, vain; he determined to act alone, and in June 1564 landed at Valinco with only fifty followers. His success was at first extraordinary, and he was soon at the head of 8000 men; but ultimate victory was rendered impossible by the indiscipline among the Corsicans and by the internecine feuds of which the Genoese well knew how to take advantage. For over two years a war was waged in which quarter was given on neither side; but after the assassination of Sampiero in 1567 the spirit of the insurgents was broken. In 1568 an honourable peace, including a general amnesty, was arranged with the Genoese commander Giorgio Doria by Sampiero’s son Alphonso d’Ornano, who with 300 of his friends emigrated to France, where he rose to be a marshal under Henry IV.
From this time until 1729 Corsica remained at peace under the government of Genoa. It was, however, a peace due to lassitude and despair rather than contentment. The settlement of 1568 had reserved a large measure of autonomy to the Corsicans; during the years that followed this was withdrawn piecemeal, until, disarmed and powerless, they were excluded from every office in the administration. Nor did the Genoese substitute any efficient system for that which they had destroyed. In the absence of an effective judiciary the vendetta increased; in the absence of effective protection the sea-board was exposed to the ravages of the Barbary pirates, so that the coast villages and towns were abandoned and the inhabitants withdrew into the interior, leaving the most fertile part of the country to fall into the condition of a malarious waste. To add to all this, in 1576 the population had been decimated by a pestilence. Emigration en masse continued, and an attempt to remedy this by introducing a colony of Greeks in 1688 only added one more element of discord to the luckless island. To the Genoese Corsica continued to be merely an area to be exploited for their profit; they monopolized its trade; they taxed it up to and beyond its capacity; they made the issue of licences to carry firearms a source of revenue, and studiously avoided interfering with the custom of the vendetta which made their fiscal expedient so profitable.[3]
In 1729 the Corsicans, irritated by a new hearth-tax known as the due seini, rose in revolt, their leaders being Andrea Colonna Ceccaldi and Luigi Giafferi. As usual, the Genoese were soon confined to a few coast towns; but the Revolt of 1729. intervention of the emperor Charles VI. and the despatch of a large force of German mercenaries turned the tide of war, and in 1732 the authority of Genoa was re-established. Two years later, however, Giacinto Paoli once more raised the standard of revolt; and in 1735 an assembly at Corte proclaimed the independence of Corsica, set up a constitution, and entrusted the supreme leadership to Giafferi, Paoli and Ceccaldi. Though the Genoese were again driven into the fortresses, lack of arms and provisions made any decisive success of the insurgents impossible, and when, on the 12th of March 1736, the German adventurer Baron Theodor von Neuhof arrived with a shipload of King Theodore of Corsica. muskets and stores and the assurance of further help to come, leaders and people were glad to accept his aid on his own conditions, namely that he should be acknowledged as king of Corsica. On the 15th of April, at Alesani, an assembly of clergy and of representatives of the communes, solemnly proclaimed Corsica an independent kingdom under the sovereignty of Theodore “I.” and his heirs. The new king’s reign was not fated to last long. The opéra bouffe nature of his entry on the stage—he was clad in a scarlet caftan, Turkish trousers and a Spanish hat and feather, and girt with a scimitar—did not, indeed, offend the unsophisticated islanders; they were even ready to take seriously his lavish bestowal of titles and his knightly order “della Liberazione”; they appreciated his personal bravery; and the fact that the Genoese government denounced him as an impostor and set a price on his head could only confirm him in their affection. But it was otherwise when the European help that he had promised failed to arrive, and, still worse, the governments with which he had boasted his influence disclaimed him. In November he thought it expedient to proceed to the continent, ostensibly in search of aid, leaving Giafferi, Paoli and Luca d’Ornano as regents. In spite of several attempts, he never succeeded in returning to the island. The Corsicans, weary of the war, opened negotiations with the Genoese; but the refusal of the latter to regard the islanders as other than rebels made a mutual agreement impossible. Finally the republic decided to seek the aid of France, and in July 1737 a treaty was signed by which the French king bound himself to reduce the Corsicans to order.
The object of the French in assisting the Genoese was not the acquisition of the island for themselves so much as to obviate the danger, of which they had long been aware, of its falling into the hands of another power, notably Great Intervention of France, 1738. Britain. The Corsicans, on the other hand, though ready enough to come to terms with the French king, refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of Genoa even when backed by the power of France. A powerful French force, under the comte de Boissieux, arrived in the spring of 1738, and for some months negotiations proceeded. But the effect of the French guarantee of Corsican liberties was nullified by the demand that the islanders should surrender their arms, and the attempt of Boissieux to enforce the order for disarmament was followed, in the winter of 1738-39, by his defeat at the hands of the Corsicans and by the cutting up of several isolated French detachments. In February 1739 Boissieux died. His successor, the marquis de Maillebois, arrived in March with strong reinforcements, and by a combination of severity and conciliation soon reduced the island to order. Its maintenance, however, depended on the presence of the French troops, and in October 1740 the death of the emperor Charles VI. and the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession necessitated their withdrawal. Genoese and Corsicans were once more left face to face, and the perennial struggle began anew.
In 1743 “King Theodore,” supported by a British squadron, made a descent on the island, but finding that he no longer possessed a following, departed never to return. The Corsicans, assembled in diet at Casinca, now elected Sardinian and British Intervention, 1746. Giampietro Gaffori and Alerio Matra as generals and “protectors of the fatherland” (protettori della patria), and began a vigorous onslaught on the Genoese strongholds. They were helped now by the sympathy and active aid of European powers, and in 1746 Count Domenico Rivarola, a Corsican in Sardinian service, succeeded in capturing Bastia and San Fiorenzo with the aid of a British squadron and Sardinian troops. The factious spirit of the Corsicans themselves was, however, their worst enemy. The British commander judged it inexpedient to intervene in the affairs of a country of which the leaders were at loggerheads; Rivarola, left to himself, was unable to hold Bastia—a place of Genoese sympathies—and in spite of the collapse of Genoa itself, now in Austrian hands, the Genoese governor succeeded in maintaining himself in the island. By the time of the signature of the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, the situation of the island had again changed. Rivarola and Matra had departed, and Gaffori was left nominally supreme over a people torn by intestine feuds. Genoa, too, had expelled the Austrians with French aid, and, owing to a report that the king of Sardinia was meditating a fresh attempt to conquer the island, a strong French expedition under the marquis de Cursay had, at the request of the republic, occupied Calvi, Bonifacio, Ajaccio and Bastia. By the terms of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Renewed French Intervention. Corsica was once more assigned to Genoa, but the French garrison remained, pending a settlement between the republic and the islanders. In view of the intractable temper of the two parties no agreement could be reached; but Cursay’s personal popularity served to preserve the peace for a while. His withdrawal in 1752, however, was the signal for a general rising, and once more, at a diet held at Orezza, Gaffori was elected general and protector. In October of the following year, however, he fell victim to a vendetta and the nation was once more leaderless. His place was taken for a while by Clemente Paoli, son of Giacinto, who for a year or two succeeded, with the aid of other lieutenants of Gaffori, in holding the Genoese at bay. He was, however, by temperament unfitted to lead a turbulent and undisciplined people in time of stress, and in 1755, at his suggestion, his brother Pasquale was invited to come from Naples and assume the command.