The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (66 page)

Elba had had a chequered history. In antiquity it was known principally for its iron ore, which was mined first by the Etruscans and then by the Romans. During the early Middle Ages it was subject to Pisa, but in 1290 it passed to Genoa and in 1399 to the Dukes of Piombino, who ceded it in 1548 to Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence. Since then it had been ruled by Spain, and later by Naples; only in 1802 was it ceded to France. On the arrival of Napoleon it became an independent principality, with himself as its ruler.
²¹⁵
He landed on 4 May 1814, and the whole island was instantly galvanised. ‘I have never seen a man,’ wrote the British Commissioner, Sir Neil Campbell, ‘in any situation in life with so much activity and restless perseverance.’ Napoleon took Elba seriously, seeing the island not as a prison but as a state to be governed. He set its population of some 112,000 to work building new roads and bridges, even establishing a miniature court–with the strict etiquette on which he always insisted–and hoisting over his palace at Portoferraio a new standard, emblazoned with his imperial bees. His mother and his sister Pauline arrived in July; soon, too, there arrived his Polish mistress, Maria Walewska, with their little son. So far as he was concerned there was only one absentee: his second wife, Marie Louise–the eldest daughter of the Austrian Emperor Francis I–whom he genuinely loved, desperately missed and for whom he had carefully prepared the country palace of San Martino; but her parents were determined to keep her in Vienna. He was never to see her again.

Meanwhile, he watched and waited. There were plenty of encouraging signs. Most of his army remained loyal; in Paris, the arch-reactionary Louis XVIII was making himself more and more unpopular; the Congress of Vienna had reached a deadlock. In Elba, on the other hand, his finances were dwindling, and his mother was constantly encouraging him to ‘fulfil his destiny’. And so, in February 1815, Napoleon made up his mind. The day after Campbell had left on a visit to Italy he ordered his only ship, the brig
Inconstant
, to be made ready. On the 26th he sailed, landing on 1 March without opposition at Golfe-Juan, between Fréjus and Antibes. The most straightforward route to Paris would have been up the Rhône valley, but Provence was fanatically royalist and had greeted him with hostile demonstrations on his way south the previous year. Besides, it was obviously the route that would be taken by any royalist army sent to oppose him. He therefore chose instead the mountain road that leads through Digne, Sisteron and Grenoble, known ever since as the
Route Napoléon
. That road, which took the Emperor back to Paris–and, after the Hundred Days, to Waterloo–takes him also out of our story.

Only then could the Bourbons return to Naples; Queen Maria Carolina, however, was not among them. Effectively abandoned by her miserable husband–who at the time of her deportation by Bentinck had not lifted a finger to help her–she had returned to her native Austria; it was there, in the castle of Hötzendorf just outside Vienna, that her dead body was found on the morning of 8 September 1814. She had been a woman of spirit, even of courage; but she was consistently wrong-headed, and it was very largely to her that the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples owed its decline and its eventual collapse.

Little more than a week before Waterloo, on 9 June 1815, the Congress of Vienna held its last session. It had opened the previous September, five months after Napoleon’s abdication, and had suffered an awkward moment when the news arrived of his escape from Elba; but it had continued to sit–casting all the time a wary eye to the west–and its final settlement was to prove the most comprehensive treaty that Europe had ever seen. Tsar Alexander I was there in person to defend the interests of Russia; the Austrian Emperor Francis II was represented by his First Minister, Prince von Metternich, the King of Prussia by Prince von Hardenberg, and King George III of England by Lord Castlereagh. The later admission of Bourbon France to the Congress brought to Vienna the most brilliant of them all, Prince Talleyrand.
²¹⁶
Spain, Portugal and Sweden were also represented, and the numbers were supplemented by countless European noblemen and their ladies, all come to enjoy the most brilliant social season that the continent had to offer.

The majority of the decisions reached in Vienna affected the northern states of Europe and need not detain us. Where the Mediterranean was concerned, Venice–together with Lombardy and the Veneto–found herself once more in Austrian hands; Genoa was absorbed into Piedmont; Tuscany and Modena went to an Austrian archduke, while Parma was given to another Austrian, the Empress Marie Louise–she who had been ill-advised enough to marry Napoleon just five years before. The Papal States–which in 1798–99 had formed part of the Cisalpine and Roman Republics and in 1808–09 of the Kingdom of Italy–were generously restored to the Pope.

There remained a certain amount of tidying-up to be done, notably with the seven Ionian Islands off the west coast of Greece. The respective histories of these islands vary to some degree, but the basic pattern remains very much the same: first Byzantine, then Norman Sicilian (conquered by Robert Guiscard), then Venetian after the Fourth Crusade, then Turkish (except Corfu and Paxos, which remained Venetian till 1797). After Napoleon’s occupation of Venice in that year, one of his first actions was to send 2,000 men to the islands, possession of which he believed to be essential to his eastern–and, in particular, to his Egyptian–plans. By August they were all in French hands, and two months later the French rule was legalised at Campo Formio. As in Venice, the Golden Books of the local nobilities were systematically burned, the lions of St Mark chiselled off the gateways; but the French soon made themselves hated, first by their anticlericalism and then by their insistence on granting the Jews equal status with the Orthodox Christians. So it was that when Russia and Turkey joined the Second Coalition against Napoleon in 1798 and–taking advantage of the French defeat at the Battle of the Nile–despatched a joint fleet under Admiral Feodor Ushakov to recover the islands, the Orthodox Russians (if not the Turks) were greeted as liberators. Only on Corfu did the French have a big enough garrison to put up a fight, but after several months of siege that too was forced to surrender.

Under the terms of a Russo-Turkish convention of May 1800 the islands now became an independent federal republic, under the protection of the Tsar and paying annual tribute to the Sublime Porte; when war was resumed between Britain and France in 1803 it seemed at first as if their independence would be respected. But Napoleon still remained obsessed by Corfu, and by an annex to the Treaty of Tilsit–signed with the Tsar on a raft in the middle of the river Niemen in July 1807–the islands were transferred from Russian to French protection. A year later came a further setback to British
amour-propre
, when the French captured Capri; the Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, Lord Collingwood, having heard from a number of Cefalonian and Zantiot merchants that the islanders were eager to regain their independence, decided to retaliate by taking as many of the Ionian Islands as he could. The considerable force that sailed from Sicily in 1809 easily recovered Cefalonia and Zante, Ithaca and Cythera, but Corfu was too strongly defended for direct assault. The only alternative was a blockade, which in fact proved little better than a farce: it was maintained by only two small frigates, and as soon as these were out of sight the French boats would run out across the straits to Albania and return with all the food they needed. Thus for the next six years the military representatives of the two powers–at daggers drawn in Europe–pursued similar peaceful policies on islands often within sight of each other.

Neither side found the islanders easy to govern. Blood feuds were part of the normal way of life, murder was an everyday occurrence, ignorance and superstition were everywhere. An English traveller reported that when the governor of Cephalonia attempted to introduce the potato to the island, ‘some of the priests laboured to convince the peasants that this was the very apple with which the serpent seduced Adam and Eve in Paradise’. Gradually, however, they were won over, and by March 1811 a Major Richard Church had succeeded in raising on Zante what he called the 1st Regiment, Duke of York’s Greek Light Infantry. A second regiment, raised on Cephalonia and officered almost entirely by Greeks, took part in the capture of Paxos in February 1814. Though both regiments were disbanded at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, many of their Greek officers and men were later to turn their experience to good use as leaders in the Greek War of Independence–notably the great Theodore Kolokotronis, nearly all of whose portraits and statues show him inseparable from his British helmet.

In November 1815 it was jointly agreed by the plenipotentiaries of Britain, Prussia, Russia and Austria that the Ionian Islands should henceforward be an independent state, under British protection and governed by a British High Commissioner. A month later there arrived to take up this post the then Governor of Malta, Sir Thomas Maitland. Sir Charles Napier, who served under him, describes him as ‘a rough old despot…insufferably rude and abrupt’, ‘particularly dirty in his person’ and ‘constantly drunk and surrounded by sycophants’. Despite these failings, however, and a Scottish accent that rendered him almost incomprehensible to Corfiots and compatriots alike, ‘King Tom’ was to rule the islands for the next ten years with a firm but surprisingly enlightened hand.

Meanwhile, across the straits on the Albanian mainland, a far more portentous drama was beginning to unfold. It was unleashed because of the ambitions of the nominal Turkish governor in the city of Iannina, a certain Ali Pasha. When Byron visited him in 1809, he wrote:

His Highness is sixty years old, very fat and not tall, but with a fine face, light blue eyes & a white beard, his manner is very kind & at the same time he possesses that dignity which I find universal among the Turks…He has the appearance of any thing but his real character, for he is a remorseless tyrant, guilty of the most horrible cruelties, very brave & so good a general, that they call him the Mahometan Buonaparte.

Ali had started life as a brigand, which is essentially what he remained. In his youth, he and his followers had instituted something like a reign of terror in Albania and Epirus. The Ottoman authorities had done their best to crush him, but time and again he had outwitted or outfought them, until at last in despair they had decided to bribe him with high imperial office. He had become governor of Iannina as early as 1787, and from this power base he and his family had extended their authority over virtually all Greece and Albania, apart from Attica and Athens itself. He had also transformed his capital. Iannina had always been beautiful, set in a spectacular setting of lake and mountains. He improved its roads, instituted two trade fairs a year, built caravanserais for the merchants and even dug a ship canal. His sumptuous palace contained the largest Gobelins tapestry ever made, which had previously hung at Versailles.

The changing fortunes of the Ionian Islands were always of interest to Ali, and sometimes of concern. During the years of Venetian rule, Venice had also controlled the four chief coastal towns on the mainland opposite: Butrint (now in Albania), directly across the strait from Corfu; Preveza and Vonitsa, flanking the entrance to the Gulf of Arta; and Parga, opposite Paxos. When in 1807 the islands became French, Ali had seized the first three before anyone could stop him, but the Russians, who maintained a strong garrison at Parga, had handed it over to France as agreed. The local population, who had no love for the French, at first had little option but to put up with them as best they could, but when the Napoleonic star began to sink they hoisted the Union Jack and appealed to the British to support them. Thus it was that on 22 March 1814 a small British military force took possession of the town. All now should have been well; unfortunately, when in the following year the Congress of Vienna made the Ionian Islands a British protectorate, the mainland towns were specifically excluded and passed instead to the Turks, with the proviso that any inhabitant of Parga who wished to cross to the islands should be allowed to do so.

Had the Congress left it at that, most of the Pargiots would probably have remained where they were, but it went further, stipulating that all emigrants should be compensated by the Ottoman government for the mainland property that they had abandoned. As a result, every single citizen chose to leave, and the Turks, faced with huge compensation payments, offered Parga to Ali. The amount of compensation was finally fixed at £150,000, which in due course Ali paid; and on Good Friday 1819 some 3,000 Pargiots, with their icons, their holy relics and in some cases even the bones of their ancestors, crossed the straits to Corfu, where the money was divided among them. They were, we are told, inconsolable, and their story was to become one of the great legends of Greek suffering under Turkish rule. The point is less often made that they left their homes voluntarily and were compensated for them, and that by remaining in Parga they would have fared no worse than the populations of the neighbouring towns, who were denied all chances of leaving.