Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (73 page)

The Count rode first to Moudon, where he seized the lower town. Fearing the projectiles of his
engins
, the defenders of the Great Tower and of the upper town surrendered… He then made for Romont, where the inhabitants refused to capitulate. But the Savoyards hurled such a huge number of stones that the walls crumbled. Having made his entry, he ordered the construction of a small castle at Morat, between the lakes… The capture of Yverdon was much more difficult. The defenders were well supplied with artillery, which caused heavy losses in his army… So the Count ordered his prisoners to be brought from Chillon, and demanded of the Duke that all the barons and knights of the Vaud be permitted to pay him homage. If the Duke refused, he would be put to death… The Duke saw that no other solution was possible… The Vaudois paid homage to the Count… And the Duke returned freely to his duchy in Germany.
¹²

At the time, the Pays de Vaud formed part of the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy; Switzerland had not been invented. The Kingdom of France, which watched the expansion of Savoy with suspicion, was still confined to the west of the Rhône. Thanks to a common rivalry with France, however, Sabaudia developed a special relationship with England and in 1236, Count Pierre II travelled to London with his niece Eleanor of Provence, for her marriage to King Henry III. Known in England as the earl of Richmond, the count became one of the king’s favourites and leader of an influential court faction. In 1246 Henry III granted the Savoyards a manor on the banks of the Thames, halfway between the City of London and Westminster. This Savoy Manor gave rise to a thriving district, graced in due course by the Savoy Palace, the Savoy Chapel and the Savoy Hotel.
¹³

Count Amadeus VIII (r. 1391–1440) is celebrated on many scores. On coming of age, he formulated the statutes of his dynasty’s premier order of chivalry, the Order of the Collar, modelled (like the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece) on England’s Order of the Garter. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the Order was repeatedly to change its name, but never to drop its enigmatic motto of ‘
fert
’.
*
In 1416, the count moved up a rank in the medieval hierarchy by obtaining the title of ‘duke’ from the emperor, together with formal recognition of his independence. Shortly afterwards, he took possession of Torino (Turin), henceforth the richest item in his portfolio. He and his heirs would doggedly exploit their position as lords of the joint state of Piedmont-Savoy, ruling over lands stretching from the environs of Lyon to the source of the Rhône near Andermatt, and from the Lake of Neuchâtel to the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Nonetheless, it could be said that the greatest achievement of Amadeus VIII, now Duke Amadeus, was to be elected pope, or at least anti-pope. After the deaths of his wife and eldest son, he had retired to the Château de Ripaille on the shores of Lake Leman, where he was living as the master of an order of knights-hermit. Fame of his saintliness spread, and in 1439 he found that an irregular conclave of cardinals, appointed by the Church Council of Basle, had raised him to the throne of St Peter. Taking the papal name of Felix V, he failed to exert his authority and resigned a decade later, accepting a cardinal’s hat in consolation.
¹⁴
His position as duke, meantime, had been assumed by his second son, Louis (r. 1440–65), who raised the family’s status still higher by gaining possession of the wonder-working Shroud of Turin.
¹⁵

From the time of the duke-pope, the succession to the ducal title passed smoothly by hereditary right through fourteen generations. (The only serious difficulty arose in 1496 when the direct line became extinct; it was solved by the accession of Philippe de Bresse, lord of Bugey, the late duke’s great-uncle.) None of the dukes was more resplendent or more successful than Emanuele-Filiberto (r. 1553–80), who made Turin his permanent capital in 1563 and who greatly strengthened Italian influence throughout his dominions. Nonetheless, the devastation caused by the Franco-Imperial Habsburg wars of the sixteenth century was colossal – at the start of his reign the whole of the duchy had been occupied by the French. The Venetian ambassador to Turin reported desperate conditions:

Uncultivated, no citizens in the cities, neither man nor beast in the fields, all the land forest-clad and wild: one sees no houses for most of them are burnt, and of nearly all the castles, only the walls are visible; and of the inhabitants once so numerous, some have died of the plague or of hunger, some by the sword, and some have fled elsewhere, preferring to beg their bread abroad.
¹⁶

The delicacy of the duke’s predicament can be judged by the fact that he served as an imperial general while married to the sister of the French king. His fortunes were restored by his victory at the head of Spanish forces at Saint-Quentin in August 1557; the full restitution of his lands following the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) permitted him to dispense with income granted by the duchy’s Estates and to rule as an absolute monarch. By skilful diplomacy, he persuaded the French to vacate the fortress of Pinerolo, the Spaniards to leave Asti, and, at the cost of abandoning the Vaud, the Bernese to restore Gex, the Chablais and the Genevois. A form of Italian now became the main language of administration and education, and the ruling house identified ever more strongly with its Italian name of
Casa Savoia
.

In the early seventeenth century a Francophile and Francophone reaction grew in strength in the duchy’s Savoyard districts. The
Académie Florimontane
, founded at Annecy in 1606, served as an inspiration for the Académie Française founded in Paris twenty-nine years later by Cardinal Richelieu, and served as a counterbalance to official, Italianate influence. Conflicts between Catholics and Protestants also arose. St Francis de Sales (1567–1622), born in the Château de Thorens near Annecy, made his saintly name by calming religious passions. Originally a pupil of the Jesuits, he studied in both Paris and Padua before returning
to Annecy and devoting himself to ‘the devout life’. His sermons were spellbinding, his books beautifully written and his peaceable methods of evangelism inspired numerous Catholic Orders, including the Sisters of the Visitation of Holy Mary, the Missionaries of St Francis and the Salesians of Don Bosco. In due course he became bishop of Geneva, although based in Annecy because the city of Geneva remained in Calvinist hands. He was named patron of the deaf on account of his invention of a sign language.
¹⁷

Despite de Sales’ example, religion continued to be the source of major conflict. A non-Catholic Christian community, the
Valdenses
or Vaudois, that long antedated the Protestant Reformation, had taken deep root in the Alpine valleys. In the sixteenth century the Valdenses joined forces with the Calvinists, and probably represented a majority of Christian believers in the duchy’s Alpine districts. The Counter-Reformation authorities were determined to eradicate them. In 1535 they had been extirpated in French-ruled Provence, and long awaited a similar fate in Switzerland. It was eventually inflicted upon them by Duke Carlo Emanuele II in 1655. The duke’s army took up positions, and drove its victims to the heads of the valleys, then, at 4 a.m. on 24 April, proceeded to a general massacre. It was a bloodbath such as Europe had not seen since the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve eighty years before. Protestant Europe was outraged. Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the British Isles, threatened to intervene; Cromwell’s Latin secretary, John Milton, composed a sonnet, ‘On the late Massacher in
Piemont
’:

Avenge O Lord thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bones

  Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold,

  Ev’n them who kept thy truth so pure of old

  When all our Fathers worship’t Stocks and Stones,

Forget not: in thy book record their groanes

  Who were thy Sheep in their antient Fold

  Slayn by the bloody
Piemontese
that roll’d

  Mother with infant down the Rocks. Their moans

The Vales redoubl’d to the Hills, and they

  To Heav’n. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sow

  O’re all th’
Italian
fields where still doth sway

The triple Tyrant: that from there may grow

  A hunder’d-fold, who having learnt their way

  Early may fly the
Babylonian
wo.

Astonishingly, no general amnesty was granted to the Vaudois until 1848.

Nothing seemed to bring any serious interruption to the onward march of the
Casa Savoia
. From 1630 the dukes had assumed the additional title of ‘princes of Carignano’, a lowly Piedmontese village, and henceforth as self-styled ‘prince-dukes’ were buried in a purpose-built mausoleum within the cathedral complex in Turin. The widowed queen-regent, Marie-Christine de France (d. 1663), ‘
Madama Reale
’, was a dominant figure in the mid-seventeenth century. It was for her that the ducal palace in Turin was misleadingly named the ‘Palazzo Reale’. The domed San Sidone chapel (1694) was constructed to provide a suitable setting for the Shroud. The dynasty’s sense of self-importance was plain to see.

Madama Reale’s son, Carlo Emanuele II (r. 1638–75), extirpator of the Vaudois, also set his heart on strengthening access to the Mediterranean seaboard. Thwarted in a war with Genoa, he chose instead to develop the port of Nizza/Nice, to which he built a transalpine road over the Col de Tende.
¹⁸
The three different parts of the duchy – Savoy, ‘New Provence’ (Nice) and Piedmont – were heading towards economic as well as political integration. Their borders had stabilized, and when Switzerland gained international recognition at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the House of Savoy resigned all thoughts of recovering any parts of the new state that it had once possessed. Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736), the greatest military commander of the early eighteenth century, was one of Carlo Emanuele’s grandsons.
¹⁹

It was Prince-Duke Vittorio Amadeo II/Victor Amadeus II (r. 1675–1730) who finally secured a royal throne, by manoeuvring astutely during the War of the Spanish Succession. At the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), he was among the beneficiaries, being rewarded with the ex-Spanish Kingdom of Sicily – hardly the most convenient of acquisitions, but newly anointed monarchs cannot afford to look a
cavallo di presente
in the mouth. The obvious policy was to accept the gift graciously, to bask in the title of ‘king of Sicily’ and to bide one’s time.

An excellent opportunity arrived only five years later. The
Casa Savoia
was not alone in its dissatisfaction with its gains from Utrecht, and during the territorial redistribution that took place during preparations for the Treaty of The Hague (1720), it proved possible to do business with the Austrians, specifically to swap Sicily for Sardinia. The arrangement was still not ideal, but it made the dynasty’s territorial agglomeration slightly more cohesive, while preserving the monarch’s all-important royal status. For the next eighty years, as ‘kings of Sardinia’, the heirs of Vittorio Amadeo II could enjoy the uninterrupted fruits of their second kingdom in the curious configuration of Piedmont-Savoy-Nice and Sardinia.
²⁰