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.[1] 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.[2]
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.
