Monthly Archives: May 2024

by Joel | 29 May 2024 · 3:36 pm

Sicily’s Quarantotto

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 273-275:

WHEN, ON WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, 1848—the thirty-eighth birthday of Ferdinand II—the people of Palermo rose up against their Bourbon masters, they could have had no idea of what they were starting. As we have seen, risings in the kingdom were nothing new, but they had all been relatively easily dealt with. What happened in 1848—the quarantotto, as Italy remembers it—was something else. It was a revolution, and by the end of the year it had been followed by many other revolutions. In Italy alone, they occurred in Naples, Rome, Venice, Florence, Lucca, Parma, Modena and Milan; in northern and central Europe there were also those in Paris, Vienna, Cracow, Warsaw and Budapest.

Already, as the year opened, student riots had prompted the authorities to close the University of Palermo; several eminent citizens known for their liberal views had been arrested, and an unsigned manifesto was circulated calling on everyone to rise up on the King’s birthday. When that day dawned and the demonstrations began, the streets emptied, shops closed, houses were barricaded. A large number of the insurgents were mountain brigands or simple peasants, few of whom probably had much idea of what they were fighting for; but they were thrilled to be able to break down the customs barriers and give themselves over to looting to their hearts’ content. Many of the smaller villages and towns were devastated, as was much of the countryside.

The Bourbons had some 7,000 troops in the Palermo garrison, but they proved almost useless. Communications were atrocious, the roads execrable, and they could not be everywhere at once. In despair they decided to bombard the city—a decision which they soon had cause to regret, especially when a shell destroyed the municipal pawnbrokers, on which many families depended, aristocratic and plebeian alike. The infuriated mob fell on the royal palace, sacked it—sparing, thank heaven, the Palatine Chapel—and set fire to the state records and archives. Meanwhile, hundreds of prisoners were released from jail. The garrison retreated, and soon returned to Naples. In the following days a committee of government was formed under the presidency of the seventy-year-old Sicilian patriot (and former Neapolitan Minister of Marine) Ruggiero Settimo; meanwhile, the revolt spread to all the main cities—except Messina, which held back through jealousy of Palermo—and well over a hundred villages, where the support of the peasantry had by now been assured with lavish promises of land. It encountered no opposition worthy of the name.

…

By the end of the month the island was virtually free of royal troops, and on February 5 Settimo announced that “the evils of war had ceased, and that thenceforth an era of happiness had begun for Sicily.” He failed to mention that the citadel of Messina was still in Bourbon hands; nonetheless, it was clear to King Ferdinand that he had his back to the wall. Owing to the almost continuous demonstrations in Naples on the Sicilian model, on January 29 he offered a liberal constitution to both parts of his kingdom, providing for a bicameral legislature and a modest degree of franchise. “The game is up,” wrote the horrified Austrian ambassador, Prince Schwarzenberg, to Metternich; “the King and his ministers have completely lost their heads.” Metternich simply scribbled in the margin, “I defy the ministers to lose what they have never possessed.”

…

Sicily was now truly independent. The difficulty was that it lacked any machinery for self-government. Without an experienced hand at the helm, the old chaos and confusion grew worse than ever. Trade plummeted, unemployment soared, the legal system virtually collapsed. Toward the end of August, Ferdinand sent a combined military and naval force of some 20,000 under Field Marshal Prince Carlo Filangieri to restore comparative order on the island; and September saw a concerted land and sea attack on Messina. It was then that the city suffered heavy bombardment for eight hours—after it had already surrendered. The rebels fought back, and the age-old hatred between Neapolitans and Sicilians give rise to atrocities on both sides—to the point where the British and French admirals in Sicilian waters, revolted by the bloodshed and brutality, persuaded Ferdinand to grant a six-month armistice. Here, one might have thought, was an opportunity to end the stalemate, but every offer of settlement was rejected by the rebels out of hand. Had they been prepared to negotiate, they might have saved something from the wreckage; since they refused, more and more of their erstwhile supporters—for reasons of sheer self-preservation—turned back to the Bourbons. As a result, Filangieri was able to capture Taormina on April 2, 1849, and Catania five days later. On May 15, without any difficulty, he entered Palermo.

By their inefficiency, their lack of unity and their refusal to compromise, the Sicilians had perfectly demonstrated how a revolution should not be run.

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by Joel | 27 May 2024 · 3:03 pm

Two Sicilies and the Carbonari

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 258-260:

The final return of the King to Naples allowed him to turn his attention to his own title. He had been Ferdinand III of Sicily but Ferdinand IV of Naples, which people found complicated and confusing. On December 8, 1816, he formally assumed the title of Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies. There was, as we have seen, nothing new in this concept, which originally came about owing to Charles of Anjou’s insistence on continuing to claim the title of King of Sicily, even after the island had been lost to the Kingdom of Aragon after the War of the Sicilian Vespers. It had, moreover, been decided by the Congress of Vienna that the Two Sicilies should continue as a single kingdom. In Sicily itself, however, the decree could not fail to be unpopular. It meant the end, after only four years, of both its constitution and its theoretical independence; and it condemned it in future to be—not for the first time—little more than a province of Naples. Financially too the departure of the court from Palermo dealt the island a heavy blow. Trade had been expanding in both directions, while foreign businesses—the vast majority of them British—had been steadily increasing in numbers; many of these now relocated to the mainland. British commercial influence henceforth survived principally in only two key industries: the wine trade in western Sicily, based on the town of Marsala, and the mining of sulfur, which was becoming ever more important as the Industrial Revolution took its course.

…

At this point there appears in the story the figure of an immense Calabrian general named Guglielmo Pepe. Born in 1783, Pepe had first fought against the Sanfedisti of Cardinal Ruffo in 1800. Captured and exiled to France, he had joined Napoleon’s army and subsequently shown himself to be a Bonapartist through and through, fighting for both Joseph Bonaparte and Joachim Murat and commanding a Neapolitan brigade during the Peninsular War in Spain. He had fought bravely for Murat at Tolentino and had reluctantly accepted the Treaty of Casalanza, by the terms of which he had retained his army rank. But he had spent his entire life fighting the Bourbons, and it was too late to transfer his loyalty. He now devoted himself, while ostensibly campaigning against brigands in the Capitanata, to rallying the somewhat inchoate mass of dissatisfied Italians known as the carbonari—“the charcoal-burners”—and welding them into a national militia.

The carbonari were organized—insofar as they were organized at all—on the lines of Freemasons, split up into small, covert cells scattered across the peninsula. Even their objectives were far from identical: some were out-and-out republicans, others preferred constitutional monarchy; what they all hated was absolutism, the Bourbons, the Austrians and the Papacy. And they dreamed, almost all of them, of an independent, liberal, united Italy. In 1814 they had fought for the Sicilian constitution and had been outlawed by the Pope for their pains; in 1817 they had inspired risings in the Papal States. According to Pepe’s memoirs—which may not be totally reliable—he had planned to take advantage of a military review of 5,000 men, to be held in the Emperor’s honor at Avellino, to seize the imperial and royal party and hold it to ransom. What would have been the result of such a coup, if it had successfully taken place, is hard to imagine; fortunately, the Emperor and the King were warned at the last moment—not of the conspiracy, but simply that the Avellino road was in execrable condition and might well prove impassable. They thereupon gave up all idea of attending the review and returned to Naples. For some time the carbonari had been rapidly increasing in numbers; according to Pepe, there were now over a quarter of a million in Italy alone, and we can be pretty sure that Sicily—with its long history of subversion and brigandage—would have contributed its full share. There was a general feeling of anticlimax after the Napoleonic Wars. The armies in particular were bored; they had little to do and promotion was slow. No wonder that so many drifted toward carbonari lodges. Gradually too the movement became more focused, its aims grew a little clearer; and the first of these aims was to force the King to grant a constitution.

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by Joel | 26 May 2024 · 4:26 pm

Bentinck Restores Bourbons in Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 250-253:

HAVING EFFECTIVELY DEALT WITH both the King and the Queen and given Sicily its admirable new constitution, Bentinck—who never forgot that he was also a soldier—decided to obey a recent summons to go and join Wellington’s army in Catalonia. His brief campaign there was not a success; it certainly did nothing to enhance his military reputation. On September 12, 1813, he was soundly defeated by an army under Napoleon’s Marshal Suchet, and was soon afterward obliged to resign his command and return to Sicily, where he arrived on October 3. He soon realized that he should never have left.

…

He found the island once again in chaos. There were, for a start, violent arguments about the constitution, the full text of which had not yet been published. Belmonte, whom he had once described as “the main hope of his country,” had broken with his uncle and erstwhile colleague the Prince of Castelnuovo and caused a great rift which had split their party in two. In parliament, meanwhile, ham-fisted attempts to control prices were arousing such storms of protest as to lead to riots in Palermo and elsewhere. Fortunately the resident British troops were able to restore order; two of the ringleaders were hanged. To make matters worse, the plague had broken out in Malta and dark rumors were being spread that the British intended deliberately to introduce it into Sicily.

Bentinck saw that he had no choice but to resume dictatorial powers. He held no brief for despotism, he announced, but it was preferable to anarchy. He prorogued parliament, which the Prince Vicar obediently dissolved, formed a new ministry and issued a proclamation that all “disturbers of the public peace, assassins and other foes of the Constitution” would be summarily punished by martial law. He then set out on an extended tour of the island—his first—visiting all the larger cities and towns and explaining the immense benefits that the constitution would bring in its train. Finally he crossed to the mainland, the better to consider the problem of Joachim Murat.

…

Whether it was because he loathed the idea of an Austrian presence in Italy or whether he simply despised Murat for his disloyalty, Bentinck made no secret of his contempt for the agreement. It was lamentable, he wrote, “to see such advantages given to a man whose whole life had been a crime, who had been the active accomplice of Bonaparte for years, and who now deserted his benefactor through his own ambition and under the pressure of necessity.” But Castlereagh ordered him to negotiate an armistice between Sicily and Naples, and he had no course but to comply—though he was careful to avoid any formula which might be taken as recognition of Joachim Murat as King. In fact Murat probably cared little whether he did so or not; his sights were by now set a good deal higher—to make himself ruler of the entire Italian peninsula. As he marched north with his army to join the other allies, he and his soldiers scattered leaflets in all the villages through which they passed, calling on the Italian people to rally to his flag. Meanwhile Queen Caroline, who had remained behind as Regent, showed herself considerably more anti-French than her husband. He was already carefully avoiding any active engagements with the French army; she, on the other hand, expelled all French officials from the kingdom and closed Neapolitan ports to all French shipping.

At this point Bentinck seriously forgot himself. Abandoning every pretense of diplomacy, he decided to support the cause of Italian independence, landed with a considerable Anglo-Sicilian force at Livorno and there delivered a proclamation urging all Italians to vindicate their rights to be free. On March 15 he actually confronted Murat at Reggio Emilia. If, he threatened, Murat did not instantly withdraw his troops from Tuscany, he—Bentinck—would drive them out himself, restore the legitimate Grand Duke Ferdinand III and invade Naples under the Bourbon flag. Leaving Murat no time to answer, he marched his army up the coast to Genoa, where the French garrison immediately surrendered. According to his own account, he restored the old republic; according to the Genoese, they did so themselves; in any event, another corner of the Napoleonic empire crumbled away.

By now things were moving quickly. On March 31 the Allies entered Paris; April 2 saw the Acte de déchéance de l’Empereur, which declared Napoleon deposed. On that same day he abdicated in favor of his infant son, with Marie Louise as Regent; this, however, the Allies refused to accept; an unconditional abdication followed two days later….

Louis-Philippe then hurried on to tell his father-in-law. Ferdinand burst into tears of joy and gratitude. Already he began to feel that he was back in Naples. It was Belmonte who had suggested that with the fall of Napoleon there was no longer any reason why the King should not return to the throne. Aware that only the year before he had promised not to do so without British consent, Ferdinand made great play of asking Bentinck’s permission. Bentinck personally absolved him from his promise and on July 4 he returned to his capital, as always amid cheering crowds. Lord William Bentinck was not among them. His conduct in recent months had not gone unnoticed by the British government. Just twelve days later he left Sicily forever.

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by Joel | 24 May 2024 · 4:46 pm

Sicily Under Bentinck, 1811

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 244-247:

At this point it becomes hard to believe that Maria Carolina was still completely sane. Both the Duke of Orléans and Maria Amalia pleaded with her to be more moderate and not to condemn as Jacobins all those who dared disagree with her, but as always she refused to listen. In July 1811 five of the leading barons, including their principal spokesman the Prince of Belmonte, were arrested and deported to various small islands “for preparing to disturb the public peace.” Louis-Philippe was summoned to the palace but, fearing to suffer a similar fate, refused to go. His horse stood ready saddled in case he had to take refuge in the country, though this fortunately proved unnecessary.

But now at last the Queen met her match. Lord William Bentinck had arrived in Palermo four days after the arrest of the barons, as both ambassador to the Sicilian court and commander in chief of the British forces on the island. The son of that third Duke of Portland who was twice Prime Minister, he had been Governor of Madras at twenty-nine and had then returned to Europe to fight in the Peninsular War, having been promoted to the rank of lieutenant general at thirty-four after the Battle of Corunna. He was now thirty-six. He had been thoroughly briefed by Amherst and others, and—determined not to take any nonsense from Maria Carolina—he began as he meant to continue. But even he seems to have been surprised by the strength of her opposition to everything he proposed. Within a month of his arrival he had returned to London to obtain yet wider powers.

On September 16, while he was still away, the Queen suffered an apoplectic stroke. Any other woman of her age would have sought peace and quiet for a gentle convalescence; she, as soon as she was able, was back at her desk, plunged once more into the fray. She was desperately weak, befuddled by opium and no longer able to face Bentinck—who returned on December 7—with quite the energy that she had formerly shown; but her determination was undiminished, and he decided to waste no more time. He now spelled out his demands, making it clear that the annual subsidy being paid by the British would be suspended until all of them were satisfied. First and most important was the supreme command of Neapolitan-Sicilian forces, which he himself proposed to assume; among the rest were the return of Belmonte and his colleagues from exile and the formation of a new ministry under the Prince of Cassaro. Neither the King nor the Queen were to be involved in the administration. Should there be any objections, Bentinck declared that he would not hesitate to ship off both of them—and if necessary the Hereditary Prince as well—to Malta, putting the Prince’s two-year-old son on the throne under the Regency of the Duke of Orléans. Fortunately, this last threat had its effect; but Bentinck had already sent orders to the British detachments in Messina, Milazzo and Trapani to march on Palermo when, on January 16, 1812, the King formally transferred his authority to his son.

The new ruler was far from ideal. He was neat, methodical and bureaucratic, a conscientious husband and father, and would doubtless have made a moderately competent manager of a local bank; but of political understanding, let alone of courage or charisma, he possessed not a shred. His instinctive caution, timidity and “littleness of mind” frequently drove Bentinck to distraction; but—at least for the moment—he served his purpose.

ONE OF THE FIRST actions of the Prince Vicar—as the Hereditary Prince was now called, since he was standing in for his father—was to recall the exiled barons, three of whom were immediately appointed to serve in the new government, the Prince of Belmonte as Minister of Foreign Affairs. The most important task before them, as Bentinck emphasized, was to draft the new constitution, based on the British model and abolishing the feudalism that had for so long been the bane of Sicilian life. The next was to get rid of the Queen. Her health was now rapidly deteriorating, but she was intriguing with all her old determination against the new ministry. She was also developing persecution mania. “The French government murdered my sister,” she said to the British consul, Robert Fagan, “and I am convinced that your government intends to do the same to me—probably in England.” Perhaps for this reason, she was fighting like a tiger to remain in Palermo, and her husband and son took her side—not because they did not deplore her behavior as much as anyone but simply because they had always deferred to her and found the habit difficult, if not impossible, to break.

At one moment Bentinck decided to request an audience with Ferdinand, in the hope of persuading him to reason with his wife and to explain to her the harm she was doing; he was simply refused an audience. The only channel of communication open to him was through the royal confessor, Father Caccamo, who was happy to reveal Ferdinand’s true feelings about his wife. His Majesty was, he said, forever writing to her “andate via, andate via!”*2 and had described his marriage of forty-four years as a “martyrdom.” But, as he put it, “he had not the heart or the courage to force his wife out of the island.” His son the Prince Vicar felt much the same way.

Not that the Prince’s relations with his mother were in any way friendly; rather the reverse. She had never forgiven him for accepting the Regency; she had called him a revolutionary and a traitor; and when on the evening of September 26, 1812, he fell suddenly and seriously ill, her first reaction—before worrying about his health—was that he must immediately resign. The symptoms, as Bentinck reported to the British Foreign Minister Lord Castlereagh, were suggestive of poison, and “general suspicion was fixed on the Queen”—a suspicion fully shared by the Prince himself. When Bentinck suggested to his doctor that the illness might be due to the unwonted heat, the patient, trembling with fever, cried out, “Ce n’est pas la chaleur, c’est ma mère, ma mère!” It turned out not to have been deliberate poisoning after all, but the Prince never altogether recovered; his illness left him prematurely aged—bent, gray-faced and shuffling.

Meanwhile, in July 1812, the new constitution had been drafted and duly promulgated. Its fifteen articles granted the people of Sicily an autonomy that they had never before enjoyed. Executive and legislative powers were rigidly separated, and the feudal practices that had been observed for some seven hundred years were finally abolished. All this proved, however, surprisingly good news for the Bourbons, at least in Naples. There was increasing anti-French feeling in the city, where Murat was effectively a dictator, while Ferdinand—hard as it may be to believe—was seen as an enlightened constitutional monarch. In the country, by contrast, the constitution was a good deal less popular; the people seemed simply unable to take it in. Many of the barons too who had actually voted for it were horrified to find their former powers and privileges gone forever.

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by Joel | 22 May 2024 · 6:11 am

Parthenopean Republic of Naples, 1799

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 210, 215:

When the French troops under General Jean-Etienne Championnet arrived in Naples in mid-January 1799, they found the populace a good deal more spirited than the army. The mob—the lazzaroni—was prepared to attack the invaders tooth and nail, and for three days there was bitter house-to-house fighting. In the end the lazzaroni had of course to give in, but not before they had stormed and gutted the royal palace. They had done so with a clear—or almost clear—conscience. Was their King [Ferdinand I] not known as il re lazzarone, in other words one of themselves? And even if he had abandoned them, would he not have preferred his treasures to go to his own subjects rather than to his French enemies? When at last peace was restored, a French officer remarked that if Bonaparte had been there in person he would probably have left not one stone of the city standing on another; it was fortunate indeed that Championnet was a moderate and humane man. Quietly and diplomatically he established what was known as the Parthenopean Republic, on the French revolutionary model. It was officially proclaimed on January 23, and acquired a number of loyal Italian adherents—though it was perfectly obvious to all that it had been the result of conquest, and that the French army of occupation was its only support.

…

By the end of the month [July 1799] the last of the rebels had surrendered. The French were returned to Toulon; the Neapolitans were put in irons to await their trial. Cardinal Ruffo had received little gratitude for having saved the monarchy—all the credit had somehow been given to Nelson—but in recognition of his past services he was now appointed Lieutenant and Captain-General of the Realm. There were those who believed that after the repudiation of his solemn treaty he should not have accepted the post; but he remained as loyal as ever to his monarch, and had no desire to stand on his honor if he could still prove useful. His appointment meant in practice that he was president of what was known as the Suprema Giunta, the Supreme Committee. Under this were two other committees of judges, one to try the military, the other the civilians. Much has been written about the deliberations of these committees, to demonstrate the cruelty and inhumanity of the Bourbons. In the event, their deliberations seem to have been remarkably merciful. Out of some 8,000 political prisoners, 105 were condemned to death (6 were later reprieved), 222 were condemned to life imprisonment, 322 to shorter terms, 288 to deportation, and 67 to exile, from which many were to return. The rest were set free. And that was the end of the flatulently named Parthenopean Republic. It had sought to inflict, by means of conquest, a form of government that the country and people did not want and which was already largely discredited even in France. Had it survived, it could have retained power only through violence or the threat of violence. The resulting police state would have been far worse than anything created by the Bourbons.

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by Joel | 19 May 2024 · 3:23 am

Sicily After Utrecht, 1715

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 178-180:

What is generally known as the Treaty of Utrecht, negotiations for which began in 1712, was in fact a whole series of treaties through which the European powers attempted once again to regulate their mutual relations. Only one of the many agreements concerns us here: the decision to transfer Sicily to the Spanish King Philip V’s father-in-law, Duke Victor Amadeus of Savoy. The idea had been accepted largely on the insistence of the British, who were uneasy at the thought of Sicily joining Naples in Austrian hands and who argued that the Duke had deserved a reward by changing sides during the war. The only objection was raised, somewhat unexpectedly, by Queen Anne, who disliked seeing countries being shuffled around without their consultation or consent; but her ministers quickly overruled her.

Victor Amadeus was of course delighted. He arrived in Palermo on a British ship in October 1713, and was shortly afterward crowned King of Sicily—and, somewhat improbably, of Jerusalem—in the cathedral. Over Jerusalem he had of course no power at all; even in Sicily he controlled only nine-tenths of the island, the powers at Utrecht having deliberately left King Philip all his personal estates, which were administered by Spanish officials and exempt from both taxation and Sicilian law. Nonetheless, Victor Amadeus was the first royal presence on the island since 1535. The Sicilian nobility welcomed their new monarch, expecting as they did so that he would settle in the city and set up a proper court there. The people in general received him with their usual apathy. They had had so many rulers over the centuries; this one would probably be no better and no worse than the rest.

He actually made a serious effort to be better. He stayed on the island for a year, traveled fairly widely—though not into the impenetrably deep interior—and tried hard to understand the character and customs of his subjects. He reopened the University of Catania and introduced new industries wherever he could, establishing factories for paper and glass, doing his best to revive agriculture and shipbuilding. But it was no use: he had to contend not only with the rich, who continued to set their faces against any innovations that might adversely affect their privileges, but also—and far worse—with the universal corruption, idleness and lack of initiative that were the result of four centuries of foreign domination. There was also the perennial grievance: just as in former centuries the Sicilians had grumbled about the sudden influxes of Spaniards or Frenchmen who would take over the senior offices of government, so now they protested at the flood of Piedmontese civil servants and accountants whom the King had introduced in an attempt to restore order to the chaotic national finances.

Such protests, Victor Amadeus knew, were inevitable; he could take them in his stride. But he knew too that the Sicilians had rebelled twice in the previous century, and were perfectly capable, if pressed too far, of doing so again. Wisely, he treated the barons in particular with extreme caution. So long as they continued to enjoy their traditional immunities and privileges, they would give no trouble; if, on the other hand, these were in any way threatened, the consequences could be serious indeed. When the time came for him to return to Piedmont, he must have felt that the Sicilian cause was hopeless. Family vendettas were as many and frequent as ever; banditry was everywhere. The people were essentially ungovernable.

Moreover, he had failed utterly to gain their affection. The Sicilians loved color and display; they had long been accustomed to the pomp and splendor surrounding the Spanish Viceroys, representing—as only Viceroys could—one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world. Victor Amadeus was not a man for finery. A natural puritan, he hated ceremonial and dressed more like a man of the people than a monarch, preferring a walking stick to a sword. He was also distressingly parsimonious; gone were the ostentatious parades and the lavish receptions which had been such a feature of life for the aristocracy of Palermo. No wonder that children a hundred years later were still throwing stones at dummies bearing his name.

Soon after his return to Turin, he received another humiliation, this time from the Pope. The origins of the quarrel with Clement XI go back to the old Spanish times and need not concern us here; but the consequence was that in 1715 a papal bull entitled Romanus Pontifex put an end to the six-hundred-year tradition whereby the Kings of Sicily were also automatically the Papal Legates. The Pope also instructed all Sicilian clergy to refuse taxation. Many obeyed, only to be punished by exile or imprisonment and confiscation of their property. Churches were closed, bishoprics left vacant, and all good Christians adjured to defy royal authority. The more sensible naturally ignored the ban; the monks of a monastery near Agrigento, on the other hand, prepared to defend themselves against the King’s representatives with the well-tried weapon of boiling oil, employed for the first time since the Middle Ages. The Sicilians, who had always been proud of their status as Papal Legates, tended to blame the trouble on the House of Savoy rather than the Papacy. To them, it was just another nail in the Piedmontese coffin. To Victor Amadeus, it was just another nail in theirs.

By this time, he was bitterly regretting that he had ever accepted the Sicilian crown; fortunately it soon proved remarkably easy to surrender. In 1715 the recently widowed King Philip of Spain took as his second wife Elisabeth Farnese, the twenty-two-year-old niece and stepdaughter of the Duke of Parma. The new Queen was undistinguished by beauty, education or experience, but she had a will of iron and she knew what she wanted. Instantly, all French influence vanished from the Spanish court; it became Italian through and through. Determined to recover all Italian-speaking territories for Spain, Elisabeth moved first against Sardinia, part of the empire. In August 1717 she sent her fleet out from Barcelona and by the end of November the island was hers. Then, emboldened by this easy success, she directed the ships straight on to Sicily. On July 1, 1718, Spanish troops were landed near Palermo, where—simply because they were not Piedmontese—they received a warm welcome.

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by Joel | 16 May 2024 · 5:20 am

Sicily Under Spain, from 1479

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 148-149, 152-153:

The accession of [Aragon’s King John II]’s son Ferdinand in 1479 was of immense historic importance, since Ferdinand was already married to Queen Isabella of Castile. This marriage united the two kingdoms and created a third—that of Spain itself. Sicily thus suffered a further loss of importance. But a worse misfortune lay ahead. In 1487 there arrived the first members of the dreaded Spanish Inquisition. This had been established by Ferdinand and Isabella as early as 1481—with the blessing of Pope Sixtus IV—and remained under their direct control. It was intended principally to ensure the orthodoxy of those who had recently been persuaded to convert to Christianity from Judaism or Islam; and after the royal decrees of 1492 and 1501—which ordered Jews and Muslims to convert or leave the country—it substantially tightened its grip. Few converts slept soundly in their beds for fear of accusations that they were secretly observing the old customs, the punishment for which was burning at the stake.

Both the Inquisition and the expulsion decrees struck Sicily hard. The Muslim population, which had once been a majority in the island, was now relatively small, but the Jews were many; in the cities and towns they may well have constituted more than a tenth of the population. And Sicily needed them: they were active as merchants, as metalworkers and weavers, and especially as doctors and of course moneylenders. Doctors tend to be popular among the people; but moneylenders are less so and there were, after the middle of the century when interest rates climbed above ten percent, occasional outbreaks of anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, the citizens of Palermo appealed to Spain on behalf of their native Jews, protesting that they were doing no harm and begging that they might be allowed to remain. Their request went unheeded.

History shows us all too many cases of Jewish persecution, and in every case the persecuting country ends up impoverished. Spain and Sicily were no exception. We do not know the numbers involved—how many Jews decided to emigrate rather than deny their faith and how many “converted”—although the converts too lost much of their property, and even then were never safe from the Inquisition. But whatever the proportions, there can be no doubt that Sicily—like Nazi Germany in more recent years—lost a vast number of her most skilled, talented and intelligent citizens. And her economy suffered accordingly.

Another somewhat unsettling trend made itself evident during the sixteenth century’s opening decade: a steady increase in royal authority. For well over two centuries the barons had had things very much their own way. Thanks to corruption, carelessness on the part of the authorities, or quite often simply the passage of time, many of them held estates that were technically crown property, or had long since been allowed to forget their feudal obligations. But those days were over. With every passing year it became more evident that King Ferdinand was gradually tightening his grip. This was confirmed in 1509, with the appointment as Viceroy of a general named Ugo Moncada, who was bent on the conquest of North Africa and saw Sicily as the obvious springboard. From the beginning the barons hated him. Not only did he show them no respect; on his arrival he instituted searching inquiries as to their legal positions—in many cases with extremely embarrassing results. Arrests were made, frequently leading to imprisonment; fiefs were confiscated, including several that had been formally claimed by the Church. Meanwhile, the Inquisition was making its presence increasingly felt, particularly after it began burning its victims alive in the public squares.

…

The events of the last decade of the fifteenth century had changed the civilized world. On April 17, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella had given their formal approval to Christopher Columbus for his voyage, putting at his disposal three tiny caravels—the largest of them little more than a hundred feet long. Moreover, just four years before the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María set sail, the Portuguese Bartholomew Diaz had rounded the Cape of Storms (renamed by John II of Portugal the Cape of Good Hope); just six years afterward, on May 20 1498, his compatriot Vasco da Gama had dropped anchor at Calicut on the Malabar coast. Not only had he found a continuous sea route to India; he had proved that Portuguese ships were capable—just—of getting there and back.

The stories of these three great adventurers are not ours; what is important to us is the effect they had on the fortunes of the Mediterranean. Henceforth the writing was on the wall. Until now, even if the Turks did not make trouble—as they usually did—all cargoes bound for the further east had to be unloaded in Alexandria or some Levantine port. Thence they would be either transported overland to the pirate-infested Red Sea or consigned to some shambling camel caravan across central Asia which might take three or four years to reach its destination. Now, merchants could look forward to a time when they could sail from Lisbon—or London—and arrive in India or Cathay in the same vessel. Meanwhile, thanks to Columbus and those who followed him, the New World was proving infinitely more profitable than the Old, possessed as it was of fabulous wealth, the lion’s share of which went to Spain—and legally too. Within only seven months of Columbus’s first landfall, the Borgia Pope Alexander VI—himself a Spaniard—had issued the first of his five bulls settling the competing claims of Spain and Portugal over the newly discovered territories; within twenty-five years the galleons were regularly returning to their homeland loaded to the gunwales with loot. No wonder the successors of Ferdinand and Isabella had their eyes fixed so firmly on the west.

It was not immediately apparent that this sudden opening up of the oceans on both sides had dealt trade in the Mediterranean what would prove to be a paralyzing blow. Gradually, however, men realized that, at least from the commercial point of view, the Middle Sea had become a backwater. East of the Adriatic the Turks now allowed passage to western ships reluctantly or not at all. To the west, it was still indispensable to Italy; but France was nowadays finding her northern ports on the English Channel a good deal more useful than Marseille or Toulon, while Spain, now entering her years of greatness, had other, tastier fish to fry. Not for another three centuries, until the building of the Suez Canal, would the Mediterranean regain its old importance as a world thoroughfare.

And Sicily, as always, was the loser.

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by Joel | 15 May 2024 · 5:56 am

Sicilians vs. Anjevins, 1292

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 124-125:

For those who detested the House of Anjou and all it stood for, there was after the death of Conradin one rallying point: the court of King Peter III of Aragon. In 1262 Peter had married Manfred’s daughter Constance, who was now the sole representative in the south of the Hohenstaufen cause; and increasing numbers of refugees from Sicily and the Regno were finding their way to his court at Barcelona. Among them was one of the great conspirators of his age. His name was John of Procida. He had studied medicine in his native city of Salerno and, as the Emperor’s personal physician, had attended Frederick on his deathbed. Later he had entered the service of Manfred. He had fought with Conradin at Tagliacozzo, after which he had traveled to Germany with the intention of persuading another of Frederick II’s grandsons to invade Italy and restore the Hohenstaufen line. Only when this plan failed did he move with his two sons to Barcelona. Constance, he believed, was the one last hope. King Peter gave him a warm welcome and made him Chancellor of the kingdom, in which capacity he could concentrate on a great conspiracy to secure the Angevin downfall.

There is a remarkable legend, which appears in the works of both Petrarch and Boccaccio, to the effect that John then traveled in disguise around the courts of Europe to gain support for his cause, visiting the Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus in Constantinople and returning with vast quantities of Byzantine gold. It is almost certainly untrue: by this time he was nearly seventy, and in both the years in question, 1279 and 1280, his signature regularly appears on documents issuing from the Aragonese chancery. It may well be, however, that someone else—perhaps one of his sons—made the journeys in his name. There was certainly some contact between Barcelona and Constantinople, where Michael was aware that Charles of Anjou was at that very moment preparing a major expedition against his empire. He was consequently eager to take the immediate offensive, before that expedition could be launched. Peter, on the other hand, naturally advocated waiting until it was well on its way.

In fact the timing was in the hands of neither King nor Emperor, but of the Sicilians themselves. By 1282 the Angevins had made themselves cordially detested throughout the Regno, both for the severity of their taxation and for the arrogance of their conduct; and when on the evening of Easter Monday, March 30, 1282, a drunken French sergeant began importuning a Sicilian woman outside the church of Santo Spirito just as the bells were ringing for vespers, her countrymen’s anger boiled over. The sergeant was set upon by her husband and killed; the murder led to a riot, the riot to a massacre; 2,000 Frenchmen were dead by morning.

The rising spread like wildfire. On August 30 King Peter and his army landed at Trapani, arriving in Palermo three days later. The formal coronation for which he had hoped proved impossible: the Archbishop of Palermo was dead, the pro-Angevin Archbishop of Monreale had most sensibly disappeared; Peter had to be content with a simple proclamation of his kingship. This he acknowledged with a public promise to observe the rights and liberties of his new subjects, calling upon all the able-bodied men of Palermo and its surroundings to march with him to Messina, where the French were still holding out. The response, we are told, was immediate and enthusiastic. For all good Palermitans—who detested the Messinans and the French in equal measure—the opportunity was too good to resist.

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by Joel | 14 May 2024 · 6:02 am

Sicily Gets the Boot (of Italy)

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 83-84:

When the news was brought to the Byzantine headquarters that the Sicilians, led by the King himself, were advancing in formidable numbers and strength, the Greeks saw their fellow fighters fall away. The mercenaries chose, as mercenaries will, the moment of supreme crisis to demand impossible increases in their pay; meeting with a refusal, they disappeared en masse. Robert of Loritello deserted, followed by his own men and most of his compatriots. The Sicilian fleet arrived first; then, a day or two later, the army appeared in the west. The battle that followed was short and bloody; the Greek defeat was total. The Sicilian ships effectively prevented any possibility of escape by sea. On that one day, May 28, 1156, all that the Byzantines had achieved in Italy over the past year was wiped out as completely as if they had never come.

William [the Bad] treated his Greek prisoners according to the recognized canons of war; but to his own rebellious subjects he was pitiless. This was a lesson he had learned from his father. Treason, particularly in Apulia where it was endemic, was the one crime that could never be forgiven. Of those erstwhile insurgents who fell into his hands, only the luckiest were imprisoned. The rest were hanged, blinded or tied about with heavy weights and hurled into the sea. From Brindisi he moved to Bari. Less than a year before, the Bariots had readily thrown in their lot with the Byzantines; now they too were to pay the price for their disloyalty. As they prostrated themselves before their King to implore his mercy, William pointed to the pile of rubble where until recently the citadel had stood. “Just as you had no pity on my house,” he said, “so now I shall have no pity on yours.” He gave them two clear days in which to salvage their belongings; on the third day Bari was destroyed. Only the cathedral, the great church of St. Nicholas and a few smaller religious buildings were left intact.

One lonely figure remained to face the coming storm. All Pope Hadrian’s allies were gone. Michael Palaeologus was dead and his army annihilated; the Norman barons were either in prison or in hiding. Hadrian himself was all too well aware that, if he were to save anything from the disaster, he would have to come to terms with the King of Sicily. The two met in the papal city of Benevento, and on June 18, 1156, an agreement was concluded. In return for an annual tribute, the Pope agreed to recognize William’s kingship not only over Sicily, Apulia, Calabria and the former principality of Capua, together with Naples, Salerno, Amalfi and all that pertained to them; it was now formally extended across the whole region of the northern Abruzzi and the Marches. William, negotiating as he was from a position of strength, obtained more than had ever been granted to his father or grandfather. He was now one of the most powerful princes of Europe.

Thus, in the three years separating the Treaty of Benevento from the death of Pope Hadrian [the only English Pope ever] on September 1, 1159, a curious change occurs in the relative positions of the three principal protagonists. Alignments were shifting. The Papacy, brought to its knees at Benevento, rediscovered a fact that its history over the past hundred years should have made self-evident—that its only hope of survival as a potent political force lay in close alliance with its neighbor, Norman Sicily. The German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, impressed despite himself by the speed and completeness of William’s victories over the Byzantines in Apulia, looked upon him with undiminished hatred but a new respect, and decided on the indefinite postponement of the punitive expedition to the south that he had long been planning. Instead, he resolved on a campaign against the Lombard towns and cities of north Italy which, though technically part of his imperial dominions, had recently been showing a quite unacceptable tendency toward republicanism and independence. The result was the supreme paradox: the Lombard towns began to see the Sicilian monarchy—more absolutist by far than any other state in western Europe—as the stalwart defender of their republican ideals, hailing its King as a champion of civic liberty almost before the dust had settled on the ruins of Bari. And in the end they were victorious: on May 29, 1176, Frederick’s German knights were routed at Legnano by the forces of the Lombard League. It was the end of his ambitions in Lombardy. In Venice in the following year he publicly kissed Pope Alexander’s foot before the central door of St. Mark’s, and six years later, at Constance, the truce became a treaty. Though imperial suzerainty was technically preserved, the cities of Lombardy (and to some extent Tuscany also) were henceforth free to manage their own affairs.

William returned to Sicily with his international standing higher than it had ever been; but the last years of his reign were anything but happy. His Emir of Emirs—the title given to the Chief Minister of the kingdom—a certain Maio of Bari, was assassinated in 1160; and the following year saw a palace revolution in which the King’s young son and heir, Roger, was killed and William himself was lucky to escape with his life. The disorder spread through much of Sicily and into Apulia and Calabria, the King as always leading his army in person, captured rebels being punished with hideous brutality. Worst of all, when he returned to Sicily in 1162, he found Christians and Muslims at each other’s throats; the interreligious harmony which the two Rogers had worked so hard to achieve had been destroyed forever.

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by Joel | 13 May 2024 · 5:38 am

Chinese in Colonial Vietnam

From The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, by Tran Khanh (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993), pp. 21-25:

Two major factors converged to cause an upsurge in Chinese migration to Vietnam in the second half of the nineteenth century. A push factor was the political upheavals in China, which led to its people seeking better conditions overseas. A pull factor was French colonization and the policy of the colonial government to recruit Chinese labour for Vietnam.

After the Treaty of Nanking in AD 1842 forced the Manchu court in Beijing to cede Hong Kong to the British and open five treaty ports to Western powers, it was no longer possible for the Chinese authority to control the movement of their nationals in and out of the country. At that time, the Chinese Government had officially banned travelling beyond the shores of China. Thus China became an increasingly stable source of manpower for labour-hungry Western colonies in Southeast Asia and Latin America. By AD 1860, articles within the Treaty of Peking signed between China and both Britain and France literally compelled the Manchu authorities to recognize the right of Chinese workers to seek a livelihood abroad under contracts they themselves could freely enter into. Dovetailing with this relaxation of laws on emigration was the political turmoil of the times which contributed to the urge to leave. During AD 1850-61 there was a large-scale uprising in the form of the Taiping Revolution. Added to that were the intermittent wars fought with Western powers. The majority of migrants in this exodus were the usual land-deprived peasants and impoverished city dwellers. But there was also a sizeable number of small and middle-scale business men, intellectuals, and military personnel.

France colonized six provinces of southern Vietnam (Nam Ky), which constituted Cochinchina, in AD 1867 and established protectorates in central and northern Vietnam by AD 1884. The two protectorates were named Annam and Tonkin, respectively. From the start, the French colonial administration took measures to regulate Chinese immigration with a mixture of control and encouragement. In AD 1874 a special Immigration Bureau was established in Saigon which allowed Chinese immigrants into the country but only if they belonged to dialect groups already existing in the country and if the groups would provide sponsorship for their own kind. The Bureau was very active, and as early as AD 1897 it had a department that could arbitrarily decide on the suitability of a Chinese immigrant for work; this aroused such an angry protest from the Chinese community that the administration was forced to close it down. After this, streams of Chinese immigrants could cross freely into Vietnam, and they congregated mainly in big cities.

The French colonial administration allowed the Chinese to deal freely in rice, opium, and alcohol. Other legal rights included the right to own land, to travel without restriction within the Indochinese Federation, to establish commercial organizations, to return to China for a visit, and to transfer their wealth out of the country. Such favourable conditions continued to attract Chinese migrants as in the days of the Nguyen dynasty. Within a ten-year span, the number of Chinese in Cochinchina shot up from 44,000 in 1873 to 56,000 in 1889, concentrating mainly in big cities. Cholon in the year 1889 had a population of nearly 16,000 Chinese; Saigon, over 7,000; and Gia Dinh, nearly 3,000. In Tonkin and Annam, the Chinese migrants also gathered in Haiphong, Hanoi, Danang, and the Quang Ninh province, which bordered China. The Chines here were involved mostly in commerce and service.

Chinese immigrants during the period of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also consisted of labourers contracted by the French to work in Vietnam. They were sent to excavate mines, specifically in Quang Ninh province, to build the railway linking Vietnam to the southern provinces of China or to tap rubber in plantations. By the 1920s, Chinese workers accounted for 7 per cent of the total number of miners and 17 per cent of the total number of industrial workers in Vietnam. The influx of Chinese labourers contributed not only to the country’s manpower but also to the emergence of a working class in Vietnam.

This rapid influx of Chinese migrants continued up till the middle of the twentieth century. Data published during the period AD 1912-22 give their number as 158,000. Between 1923 and 1933, nearly 600,000 arrived from China. Another set of data estimates the number to be 1.2 million between 1923 and 1951, which was a record at any given period of time during the whole history of Chinese emigration. But the traffic was prone to ebb and flow. The figures were high in the years 1925-30, 1936-38, and 1946-48, correlating with the security situation in China. China was experiencing civil wars during the periods 1924-27 and 1946-49. The years 1936-38 saw the beginnings of Japanese military encroachment on China. Going by official statistics, the figure for the Chinese population in Vietnam in the years just before the French left in 1954 would range from 600,000 to 750,000. Variations of this figure for different years are shown in Table 1, estimated to be 2 per cent of Vietnam’s population.

The distribution of population also shows Chinese preference for urban centres and the southern part of the country. Before 1945, some 90 per cent of the Chinese community were residing in Cochinchina, where they made up 7 per cent of the population. The proportions of Chinese in Tonkin and Annam were minimal, 0.5 per cent and 0.2 per cent, respectively. Table 2 illustrates the urban characteristic of the Chinese population in Vietnam.

In 1952 the Chinese population in Saigon-Cholon constituted about 34 per cent of the total population of the city. Their proportions in Hanoi and Haiphong were 4 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively. Besides these three big cities, the Chinese were also found in sizeable numbers in other cities of the South. As mentioned earlier, the border province of Quang Ning in the North also had concentrations of Chinese, as in Cam Pha, Ti Yen, Quang Ha, and Mong Cai. With towns where large numbers of Chinese reside, they would also gather in particular quarters or streets. For example, in Saigon, they are to be found in districts 5, 6, 10, and 11. District 5 is Cholon, where before 1975, 80 per cent of the residents were Chinese. In Hanoi, they were gathered at the Hang Buom and Ma May quarters.

With the division of the country into two halves in 1954, complete integrated statistics were not available for the whole of Vietnam. The South became the Republic of Vietnam (ROV) while the North was the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and it was not till 1976 that they were united under the name of the Social Republic of Vietnam (SRV). By Tsai Maw Kuey’s data, the Chinese population in the ROV in 1968 reached 1,035,000. The French magazine Le Monde puts it at 1,200,000 in the ROV and 208,000 in the DRV in 1970. Wu Yuan-Li and Wu Chun-Hsi’s figures are 2 million for the South and 175,000 for the North at the collapse of the ROV. According to official figures for 1976, the year of reunification, the Chinese population in Vietnam was 1,236,000, which was about 2.6 per cent of the total population. Summing up these various estimates, it can be concluded that the Chinese population in Vietnam in the middle of the 1970s was around 1,500,000, of which 85 per cent lived in the South. The Chinese community made up 3 per cent of the total population of Vietnam.

The problems of estimating the Chinese population in Vietnam continued after 1975 because of large-scale population movement caused by political changes. When the Saigon regime collapsed in April 1975, some 150,000 people left the country, among whom were high-ranking government and military officials of the old regime as well as Chinese businessmen. Shortly after, beginning in 1978, another exodus of Chinese residents took place, with 230,000 leaving for China and another 220,000 leaving for Southeast Asia by boat. This was the result of the socialist transformation of private capitalist industry and trade in the newly liberated South and tense relations with China. The latter arose because of differences over Cambodia, and Beijing exploited the issue of the Chinese community in Vietnam to complicate matters. From a population of 1,236,000, the ethnic Chinese population shrank to 935,000 on 1 October 1979. By the time of the census in April 1989, the Chinese population had increased to 961,702 but its proportion of the total population had dropped to 1.5 percent. The distribution of this community across Vietnam is given in Table 3. In some areas, the proportion of ethnic Chinese had dropped very significantly. For example, before 1978, ethnic Chinese residents in Quang Ninh province numbered about 160,000, or 22 per cent, of the provincial population. This was about 60-80 per cent of the total ethnic Chinese population in North Vietnam. In the 1980s, Quang Ninh’s ethnic Chinese population dropped to 5,000, or 0.6 per cent, of the provincial population.