The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (65 page)

Mohammed Ali was born in 1769 at Kavalla in eastern Macedonia. After his father’s death he was brought up by the governor of the town. At eighteen he married one of the governor’s relations, who was to bear him five children. (An assortment of other ladies was responsible for the other ninety.) The lucrative tobacco trade seems to have engaged him for some years; he then joined the Ottoman army–in which, having attained a relatively senior rank, he in due course found himself under the command of the Grand Vizir, fighting the French. For as long as the Europeans remained on Egyptian soil he fought bravely enough, but after their departure his Albanian regiment, commanded by a certain Tahir Pasha and just about the only disciplined unit in the Turkish army, broke out in open mutiny.

There is no reason to believe that Mohammed Ali had personally engineered the mutiny–such risings of unpaid soldiery were frequent enough in Ottoman history–but after the murder of Tahir he quickly assumed control, and by dint of various intrigues was appointed in 1805 the Sultan’s viceroy in Egypt. For the next forty-four years he ruled the land as a virtual dictator, eliminating the last vestiges of Mameluke rule, expropriating the property of the old landowning classes and ruthlessly crushing successive insurrections. By 1815 nearly all agricultural land along the banks of the Nile and in the delta had been nationalised, profits from agriculture going directly into his own coffers. He vastly improved the all-important irrigation system and introduced various new crops–notably cotton–which promised high returns. He also built up a fleet and a considerable army, conscripted from the peasantry but commanded by Turks and other foreigners. These he used at first on the Sultan’s behalf, suppressing revolts in Arabia and in Greece; later, in his own interests, he invaded the Sudan with similar success.

He was to live until 1849; but for the moment a far greater man once again claims our attention.

CHAPTER XXIV

The Settlement of Europe

Napoleon Bonaparte had failed in Egypt; in Europe, on the other hand, he was going from strength to strength. In December 1804, in the presence of Pope Pius VII, he had laid the imperial crown on his own head in Paris; five months later, in May 1805, he had staged a second self-coronation, this time–his pettifogging little Italian republics now forgotten–as King of Italy in Milan cathedral. His decision to use for the ceremony the ancient iron crown of Lombardy, for centuries the property of the Holy Roman Empire, gave mortal offence to the Austrian Emperor Francis, who thereupon joined the alliance formed by Britain and Russia a week or two before.

Having thus consolidated his past conquests, Napoleon now embarked on a new campaign against Austria, and there was much rejoicing in the
Grande Armée
when, on 20 October 1805, an Austrian army of 33,000 capitulated at Ulm. It was ironic that, on the very day following, Nelson smashed a combined Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar, he himself being mortally wounded at the moment of victory; but even such a disaster as this would not have remained long on the Emperor’s mind since only six weeks later, on 2 December, his army of 68,000 triumphed over a combined force of 90,000 Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz in Moravia. On the day after Christmas, by the terms of a treaty signed at Pressburg (now Bratislava), Austria was obliged to return to France,
inter alia
, all the Venetian territories she had acquired in 1797 at Campo Formio–to constitute, with the coasts of Istria and Dalmatia, part of the new Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy.

The Emperor had refused to admit into the Treaty of Pressburg any stipulations on behalf of the Neapolitan Bourbons; indeed, on the day the treaty was signed he had declared his intention to ‘hurl from the throne that criminal woman who has so shamelessly violated everything that is sacred among men’. This verdict on Maria Carolina may seem a little harsh; it must, however, be admitted that his conclusion of a treaty of neutrality with Naples earlier in the year had not prevented her from appealing to her allies for assistance, and towards the end of November 1805 no fewer than 13,000 Russians, accompanied by 7,000 British troops from Malta, had disembarked in the Bay of Naples. They were joined by a few thousand Neapolitans, and by mid-December the combined army had advanced to the papal frontier. But then there arrived the news of Austerlitz, and the whole expedition came to an abrupt and premature end. It had been a bad idea from the beginning, since in sending it the Queen had played straight into the Emperor’s hands. In his subsequent proclamation to his army he was able to say: ‘Shall we trust again a court without loyalty, without honour, without sense? No, no! The dynasty of Naples has ceased to reign: its existence is incompatible with the peace of Europe and the honour of my crown.’

The dynasty had not of course ceased to reign, nor would it finally do so for another half-century; but it could not stand up to the French army of 40,000 men who now marched through the Papal States
²¹⁰
into south Italy under Marshal Masséna, with Joseph Bonaparte as the Emperor’s personal representative. On 11 February 1806 the royal family fled, for the second time, to face the winter miseries of Palermo; and on the 14th, in drenching rain, a French division under General Partouneaux entered Naples. There was no resistance; whereas seven years previously the
lazzaroni
had fought like tigers and caused appalling carnage, this time they were listless and apathetic, making no protest when Joseph Bonaparte staged his own procession on the following day and took up his residence in the royal palace. Later that year, by imperial decree, Joseph was proclaimed king.

‘Naples captured, everything will fall,’ Napoleon had written to Joseph soon after the second flight of the royal family. Not for the first time, however, he had underestimated his enemy. Calabria proved a very much harder nut to crack. On 1 July 1806 a British force from Palermo under General Sir John Stuart, consisting of 4,800 infantry and sixteen guns, disembarked on the west coast of Calabria; three days later it attacked a French force near the village of Maida, and after a savage bayonet assault routed it. The victory was welcomed with enthusiasm, not only locally but also in England, where the battlefield is still remembered in the name of Maida Vale.
²¹¹
Unfortunately the fall–after a heroic resistance–of the city of Gaeta, together with Masséna’s decision to concentrate far greater forces against him, obliged Stuart to re-embark his troops in September. This meant that guerrilla warfare now took over, with the usual atrocities perpetrated on both sides. The Calabrians had no deep love for the Spanish Bourbons, but they vastly preferred them to the French invaders; besides, had not the Pope refused to recognise Joseph Bonaparte as their king? They were of peasant stock, and when the fighting began they pulled no punches.

As for Sicily, an island ruled solely by King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina would probably have presented Masséna with few problems. Nelson was dead, and the royal family had had a far cooler reception on their arrival than on their previous visit. The Sicilians by now knew their sovereigns all too well, and were fully conscious of the fact that the King saw their island as nothing more than a hunting reserve and an occasional funkhole. In the Palatine Chapel in Palermo
²¹²
he had even destroyed a number of the superb twelfth-century mosaics simply to give himself more convenient access to the building. Moreover, all the principal administrative posts were taken over by Neapolitans, and many Sicilians–including in particular the younger sons of the nobility–found themselves unemployed. In such circumstances, a French invasion might have met with little enough resistance.

But the true situation was very different. First of all, Ferdinand had invited the British to take over the defence of the island–which was just as well, as they would have done so anyway–and the Straits of Messina were now constantly patrolled by British gunboats. Secondly, the British had taken over a good deal more than Sicily’s defence; in all but name, they were now masters of the island itself, with more than 17,000 soldiers and some thirty consuls or vice-consuls stationed there. Sicily also enjoyed a direct subsidy from Britain, to say nothing of a number of sizable loans and a good deal of private investment; the impact on the formerly sluggish Sicilian economy can well be imagined.
²¹³

British influence grew still greater after 1811, when the Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, Lord William Cavendish-Bentinck, was additionally appointed envoy to the court of the Two Sicilies. Though Bentinck was still only thirty-seven, he had already served as Governor of Madras and had subsequently fought in the Peninsular War. Able and energetic, he soon made himself effective governor of the island, embarking on a number of sweeping constitutional changes. In that same year the King had arrested and deported five of his leading opponents in the Sicilian assembly; by threatening to withdraw his army and suspend the subsidy, Bentinck now forced Ferdinand to reinstate them and to replace his largely Neapolitan ministry with a more liberal one which actually included three of the deportees. In 1812 he introduced a liberal constitution on British lines, and soon afterwards he went still further: Queen Maria Carolina, who had rendered his task infinitely more difficult by thwarting him in every way she could, suddenly found herself exiled. No wonder she called him a wild animal–
una bestia feroce
.

Though not permitted to perform the ceremony, Pope Pius VII had been invited to attend Napoleon’s coronation in Paris–an invitation which, much as he might have wished to, he could not have refused. In the years immediately following, however, relations between Pope and Emperor grew worse and worse. Napoleon seized the all-important ports of Civitavecchia and Ostia, and by the beginning of 1808–by which time the Papal States were French in all but name–the imperial army entered Rome itself and occupied the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Finally, on 17 May 1809, from the castle of Schönbrunn in Vienna, the Emperor issued a decree announcing his annexation of Rome. ‘
Consummatum est
,’ the Pope is said to have murmured when he heard the news. On 10 June the papal standard which normally flew above the castle was replaced by the tricolour–and the despoilers of the Holy City were formally excommunicated.

The Pope was careful not to mention the Emperor by name; even so, it was a brave step for him to take, and retribution was not long in coming. On the night of 5 July he was arrested and carried off, by a strangely roundabout route that took him through Grenoble, Valence and Nice, to Savona. There he was to remain for three years, until–while suffering a fever so severe that he received the last unction–he was transported, more dead than alive, in a locked carriage to Fontainebleau. Unlike his predecessor, who had died in his French exile, he was to return to Rome in May 1814. He lived on until 1823, by which time Christendom had assumed a complexion very different from that which he had known in the early years of his pontificate.

In the autumn of 1807, when the Portuguese had refused to close their ports to British shipping, Napoleon had despatched General Junot – whom we last met in Venice ten years before–with an army of 30,000 men across Spain and into Portugal. The Portuguese royal family instantly fled to Brazil, leaving the French in possession of the country. Much of the invading army then moved into northern Spain. Meanwhile, Napoleon had sent his brother-in-law, the brilliant cavalry general Joachim Murat,
²¹⁴
to occupy Madrid and to bring the Spanish King Charles IV and his son Ferdinand to meet him at Bayonne. There, on 5 May 1808, they both abdicated their rights to the throne, Napoleon promising in exchange that Spain should remain Roman Catholic and independent, under a ruler whom he would shortly name. Soon afterwards, he did so: and the name was that of his brother Joseph. But Joseph’s reign was doomed before it had even begun. On 2 May, the people of Madrid had risen against the invader.

Joseph Bonaparte had started well enough in Naples. On his brother’s orders he had initiated a programme of dismantling the vast feudal estates in the kingdom; he had reformed the monastic orders and done his best to regularise the financial, educational and judicial systems. But he had never been happy there, and when Napoleon offered him the crown of Spain he was only too glad to accept. The Emperor replaced him in Naples with Joachim Murat. Murat indulged himself with an expensive, extravagant and slightly ridiculous court, but he continued the work that Joseph had begun, carrying out a number of important social reforms, breaking up the vast landed estates and replacing the old, somewhat slap-happy laws of Naples with the Code Napoléon. He was to remain in Naples until his departure in 1812 on the Russian campaign, during which he once more distinguished himself by his bravery at Borodino; but having been left by Napoleon in charge of the shattered
Grande Armée
during the retreat, he in his turn abandoned it in an effort to save his Neapolitan kingdom. When the news of the Emperor’s escape from Elba reached Italy Murat, back in Naples, was one of the first to declare for him, immediately putting himself at the head of an Italian army; but on 3 May 1815, in defiance of the Emperor’s instructions, he was foolish enough to challenge a large Austrian contingent and was soundly beaten at Tolentino. He sought refuge in Corsica, and in October made a last attempt to recover Naples, but by then the Neapolitans had enough. They took him prisoner and shot him.

The Madrid rising was quickly and brutally suppressed, but other provincial insurrections sprang up all over Spain, whose people as always showed their superb capacity for guerrilla warfare. The French were driven back from Valencia, and General Pierre Dupont, who had advanced into Andalusia, was ultimately forced to surrender with his entire army at Bailén on 23 July. The rebels now advanced on Madrid and expelled Joseph a few weeks later. By this time the British had joined the fray, British forces under Arthur Wellesley–the future Duke of Wellington–having landed in Portugal on 1 August. It was largely thanks to them that the massive French counter-attack the following winter failed to crush the revolt altogether.

The Peninsular War was to continue until 1814, through Portugal and northwestern Spain–but although Spain is a Mediterranean country, the war was in no sense a Mediterranean war, nor was Napoleon Bonaparte directly involved in it. His history, after his departure from Egypt in 1799, has not indeed greatly concerned us; he had moved his theatre of operations back to northern and central Europe, where it was to remain for the next fifteen years. During most of those years his star continued to rise; but in 1812 came the disastrous Russian campaign, after which little went right for him. The allies were now drawing the net ever closer, and in October 1813 the Emperor’s defeat at Leipzig sealed his fate. There was one more last, hopeless campaign, but on 30 March 1814 Marshal Marmont was obliged to surrender Paris to the allies. Less than a fortnight later Napoleon formally announced his abdication, and soon afterwards began his period of exile on the island of Elba.