Category Archives: war

by Joel | 11 June 2024 · 12:10 pm

Evacuating Cambodian Cities

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 45-46:

I dash into the house and call out, “Dad! Mom! They’re forcing everyone out of the city!” But my neighbors and family are busy celebrating peace and the end of the war and the spoils of victory at the hands of the Organization; they are not interested in what I have to say.

I have just spent a day filled with worry and fear. My family has just spent a day celebrating with a happiness that they haven’t seen for five years. Everything that I had just imagined to myself was all wrong—especially the reaction of my parents. In fact, my parents haven’t worried a bit about my absence. They feel that everything is going wonderfully. They have figured that I was gone all day tasting the joy of the birth of a new Khmer society.

The neighbors who have been going back and forth to gather loot from the Chamkar Mon warehouses know perfectly well that people are being evacuated from the city. But they assume that this matter does not affect them, that they won’t be ordered out by the Organization, because the Organization has allowed them to take freely from the warehouses.

Almost every family goes out to collect loot and stockpiles it in their house. My younger brothers procure three sacks of rice, several cases of beer, two or three mattresses, and large amounts of salt, fish sauce, soy sauce, and soft drinks, and pile them all over the house.

A French proverb says that “a single swallow does not herald the arrival of Spring.” I am but a lone swallow, the one person who desires to instill fear and an awareness of what will come. But no one believes me! They only believe in what is plain: that they have become wealthy without the necessity of effort. Let the neighbors refuse to believe, but I must win over my own family. My mother doesn’t matter; my father is the one who controls the power in the family.

I attempt to speak with my father about what is on my mind, but he objects, saying, “A-Moeun! You aren’t thinking straight. If they have just taken the city, what is the point of forcing us out? Do you remember what happened last year? People in Steung Mean Chey and Boeng Tumpun fell prey to propaganda that they would be forced out, and they fled in the middle of the night all the way to the riverfront by the palace. When they went back home, all of their stuff was gone.”

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by Joel | 10 June 2024 · 6:10 am

Cambodia, April 1975

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 11-12:

Cambodia is a small Southeast Asian kingdom, bordered by Vietnam on the east, Thailand on the west and north, and Laos to the north. Its primary religion is Theravada Buddhism. Its main ethnic majority are referred to as Khmers, and the national language is Khmer. The capital city, sitting at the confluence of the Mekong and Sap rivers, is called Phnom Penh.

The kingdom was colonized by France for nearly a century, from 1863 until 1953 when it secured full independence from France under the leadership of King Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk abdicated the throne a year later to take a leading role in Cambodian electoral politics, which he dominated for the next fifteen years as a popular and powerful head of state.

On 18 March 1970, Sihanouk was deposed in a parliamentary coup by his prime minister, General Lon Nol. This seminal event broke Sihanouk’s long and carefully maintained neutrality that had kept Cambodia out of the Vietnam War raging next door, as Lon Nol immediately aligned with the United States against the communists, causing the conflict to spill over into Cambodia.

Thus began a bloody civil war, as Lon Nol founded the Khmer Republic, notoriously corrupt and heavily funded by United States military aid; and the embittered Sihanouk, with Chinese support, publicly allied himself with the Cambodian faction of communists, dubbed (by him) the “Khmer Rouge,” in an armed resistance against the new government. Hoping for a return to power, Sihanouk allowed himself to be made the nominal figurehead of this armed resistance, and because he was highly revered by many Cambodians, especially in the countryside, this decision lent tremendous influence and strength to the Khmer Rouge in recruiting large-scale support from the Cambodian populace.

Five years of violent conflict and devastating national division led, ultimately, to an imminent Khmer Rouge victory in mid-April 1975. As Khmer Rouge forces surrounded Phnom Penh for the final battle against disintegrating government forces and prepared to capture the city, the city’s population eagerly awaited the end of the war and the return of peace.

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Filed under Cambodia, China, France, military, religion, U.S., Vietnam, war

by Joel | 8 June 2024 · 9:35 am

U.S. Enlists Mafia to Invade Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 316-317:

When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Mussolini declared his support for Hitler, with whom he had concluded the so-called Pact of Steel four months before. He did not immediately declare war—the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, having warned him that Italy simply did not have enough tanks, armored cars and aircraft. To get involved in the European conflict at this point would, said Badoglio, be tantamount to suicide. Nine months later, however, the situation had changed dramatically. Norway, Belgium and Holland had been invaded; France was falling. On June 10 Italy declared war. Mussolini had hoped to help himself to Savoy, Nice, Corsica, Tunisia and Algeria from the French, but to his disgust Germany signed an armistice establishing the collaborationist government under Marshal Pétain at Vichy, which retained control over southern France and all its colonies.

So far as North Africa was concerned, only Egypt was left; and in September 1940 the Duce sent a large Italian force across the Libyan border. The British troops stationed in Egypt were at first hopelessly outnumbered; their counterattack, however, proved far more successful than expected and resulted in massive numbers of prisoners. So decisive was the Italian defeat that Hitler was obliged to send out his Afrikakorps, under the command of General Erwin Rommel. Only then did the British lose the initiative, ultimately to regain it at the Battle of El Alamein in October–November 1942.

The story of the Desert War is not ours, but it exemplifies the several successive humiliations suffered by Italy between 1940 and 1943. Mussolini’s invasion of Greece in October 1940 once again forced Hitler to send troops to his rescue; and by the beginning of 1943 disaster threatened him from every side. Half the Italian troops serving in Russia had been annihilated; both his North African and his Balkan adventures had been dismal failures. The Italians had had enough. Then, in July 1943, the Allies launched an operation which, as well as giving them a foothold in Europe, promised to remove Mussolini from the scene for good. They invaded Sicily.

For Sicily, hitherto, the war had been disastrous. As an island, it had suffered even more acutely than the rest of Italy. The ferryboats to the mainland were disrupted; the export market largely disappeared, while imports became irregular and uncertain; sometimes the Sicilians had found themselves with virtually nothing to eat but their own oranges. The rationing system was a bad joke; the black market reigned supreme. For the Mafia, on the other hand, conditions could hardly have been better. With a good deal of help from its branches in New York and Chicago, in the last years of peace it had already begun a swift recovery from the Mori reign of terror; and by 1943, whatever Mussolini might have said or believed, it was flourishing.

American intelligence officers, somewhat better informed than the Duce, understood that for the projected invasion to be successful it was vitally important to have the Mafia firmly on the Allied side. They therefore made careful approaches to the dominant boss of gangland crime in the United States, a Sicilian named Salvatore “Lucky” Luciano. He had in fact been in prison since 1936 on compulsory prostitution charges, but was still very much in command. In late 1942, after long discussions, the two sides struck a deal. Luciano would have his sentence commuted; in return, he made two promises. The first was that his friend Albert Anastasia, who ran the notorious Murder Inc. and who also controlled the American docks, would protect the waterfront and prevent dockworker strikes for the duration of hostilities. The second was that he, Luciano, would contact other friends in Sicily, who would in turn ensure that the invasion would run as smoothly as possible.

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Filed under Africa, Germany, Italy, Mediterranean, migration, nationalism, U.S., war

by Joel | 5 June 2024 · 11:47 am

Sicily’s 1908 Earthquake and WW1

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 308-310:

At 5:20 A.M. on December 28, 1908, Messina had suffered the deadliest natural disaster in European history: an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale, followed by a forty-foot tsunami along the nearby coasts. More than ninety percent of its buildings were destroyed, between 70,000 and 100,000 people killed. Hundreds more were buried alive, often for a week or more, since all terrestrial lines of communication were shattered; it was several days before the Red Cross and other relief organizations could reach the city. Nearly all the municipal archives were lost—which is why so much of modern Sicilian history has to be told from the frequently misleading point of view of Palermo.

The Messina earthquake resulted in a huge increase in the rate of emigration. Sicilians were already leaving their homeland in greater numbers than any other people in Europe. In the early days many of them had made the relatively short journey to Tunisia, then a French protectorate; but by 1900—though Argentina and Brazil were also popular—the vast majority were traveling to the United States. By the beginning of the First World War, the number of emigrants totaled not less than a million and a half. Some villages, having lost virtually all their male population, simply disappeared off the map. Here indeed was a terrible indictment of the way the island had for so long been governed; on the other hand, many of those emigrants who prospered made regular remissions to the families they had left behind, and reports of their prosperity gave the younger generation new ambitions toward education and literacy. Moreover, the increasing shortage of labor led to a huge increase in agricultural wages.

The war itself created new problems. Sicily’s export markets, on which the island depended, were virtually cut off for its duration. War industries, of the kind which were established elsewhere in Italy, were clearly not indicated in a region in which there was no skilled labor and no efficient transport. The government, desperately needing cheap food, fixed unrealistically low prices for flour; officially declared wheat production consequently declined by about thirty percent over the war years. Black market prices rocketed. As for the Mafia, it had never had it so good. Here the villain was the notorious Don Calogero Vizzini, who somehow escaped military service and made vast sums out of wartime shortages. In 1917 it proved necessary to pass a law against the stealing of animals; thanks to high prices and government controls, whole flocks would disappear overnight. True, there were occasional compensations: men who went to fight in the north would return with new skills and new aspirations—but also with new political ideas. During the years of war, Sicily moved steadily to the left.

Finally, during the postwar years, more and more emigrants were returning in retirement to their old homes, often with considerable savings, and bringing with them all their experience of the New World. Some, admittedly, also imported the latest techniques of gangsterism, but these were only a small minority; perhaps the most important result of the years spent abroad was a new self-respect, and with it an inability any longer to accept the old cap-in-hand approach to the large landowners. Gradually, the people of Sicily were learning to look their masters in the face.

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by Joel | 1 June 2024 · 5:14 pm

Bismarck Unites Italy

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 297-298:

In 1866 the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck found Austria to be a serious obstacle to the realization of his dream of uniting all the German states into a single empire. He therefore forged an alliance with the new kingdom of Italy: the two would attack Austria simultaneously on two fronts. In the event of victory, Italy’s reward would be Venice and the Veneto. A single battle was enough. It was fought on July 3 at Sadowa—also known by its German name of Königgrätz—some sixty-five miles northeast of Prague, and it engaged the greatest number of troops—some 330,000—ever assembled on a European battlefield. The Prussian victory was total. It bankrupted the military resources of the Emperor Franz Josef and opened the way to Vienna. The ensuing armistice duly resulted in the cession of the promised territory. Venice was no longer the independent republic that she had once been, but she was at least an Italian city rather than an Austrian one; and Italy could boast a new and economically invaluable port on the northern Adriatic.

The unity of Italy, however, could not be achieved without Rome; and Rome too was acquired by courtesy of Bismarck, who had cunningly drawn France into a war by his threat to place a prince of the ruling Prussian House of Hohenzollern on the throne of Spain—a proposal clearly unacceptable to the French, who would have then found themselves completely surrounded by Germany. War was therefore declared—by France, not Prussia—on July 15, 1870. It was to prove a bitter struggle; Napoleon III was going to need every soldier he had for the fighting that lay ahead. Thus, by the end of August, not one French soldier remained in Rome. Pope Pius IX was left defenseless. Napoleon’s defeat at Sedan on September 1 spelled the end of the Second Empire; and on September 20 the Italian army entered the Holy City. The Pope withdrew inside the walls of the Vatican, where he remained for the last eight years of his life. The plebiscite that was held shortly afterward registered 133,681 votes in favor of the incorporation of Rome into the new kingdom and 1,507 against. Rome was now part of Italy, not by right of conquest but by the will of its people; and the kingdom of Italy, under its sovereign King Victor Emmanuel II, finally took its place among the nations of Europe.

As the voting figures showed, the Sicilians were as happy as their new compatriots. They were, after all, a good deal more Italian than Spanish, and even though their King was a Piedmontese—a man of the mountains rather than of the sea, and hailing from as far from Sicily as it was possible to go while remaining an Italian—there seemed a fair chance that they would be allowed to play a larger part in their own affairs than they had in the past. They hoped so, anyway.

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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 | 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 | 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.