The Shortest History of Italy by Ross King

Author:Ross King
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781891011467
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2024-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Italy inevitably became involved in the decade-long French Revolutionary Wars that broke out in 1792 and pitted France against a coalition comprising powers such as the British, Austrians, Prussians, and Russians. In 1792, the French invaded and annexed Savoy, in part to thwart an Austrian invasion from the southeast and in part because they regarded Savoy as lying within their natural boundaries. Trouble truly arrived for Italy in the spring of 1796 when France’s Army of Italy crossed the Alps with, at its head, the twenty-six-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte. He was determined to destroy the Austrians by defeating them on Italian soil—which he proceeded to do in short order, trouncing them in a series of battles in northern Italy that culminated at Rivoli, 15 miles (24 km) northwest of Verona, in January 1797.

Napoleon left Italy at the end of 1797 (he was about to invade Egypt) but by then he had taken a wrecking ball to the peninsula’s borders and political institutions. The Republic of Genoa was dissolved, becoming the Ligurian Republic, a client state of France, while the Duchy of Milan became the Transpadane Republic before it was merged with the Cispadane Republic (consisting of territories in northern Italy such as the Duchy of Modena and Reggio) to become the Cisalpine Republic (with its capital in Milan), likewise a French vassal. Also included in the Cisalpine Republic were the Papal States. The French invaded the Romagna in February 1797 and quickly captured papal domains, despite a wave of “miracles” such as a portrait of the Madonna in Ancona that—thanks to a clever illusion produced by its glass case—wept crystalline tears. By such means had Pope Pius VI and his clergy tried to incite the rural masses to rise against these new barbarians.

As Napoleon’s troops descended on Rome, Pope Pius was forced to negotiate terms, becoming the first pontiff in history to surrender his dominions—the lands given to the popes by Pepin the Short more than a thousand years earlier. The Treaty of Tolentino handed the Papal States to the French, who also took, in an unabashed looting spree, hundreds of artistic treasures from the Vatican together with five hundred manuscripts from its library. The Roman Republic was proclaimed in the ancient Forum and Pius forced into exile, first in Siena and then in a monastery outside Florence. After the French occupied the Grand Duchy of Tuscany—which in due time, with a wave of the Napoleonic wand, became the Kingdom of Etruria—the eighty-two-year-old pope was sent off to France, where he died in 1799 following a rigorous Alpine crossing.

Another venerable Italian political entity was destroyed by the irresistible pressure of Napoleon’s army. The Venetians in their labyrinth of lagoons had withstood the advances and sieges of numerous enemies, from Charlemagne’s son Pepin (whose ships they burned and whose soldiers—to prove the rich resources of their grain stores and the futility of a siege—they pelted with loaves of bread) to King Louis XII of France, who randomly fired six hundred cannons in

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