The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  With the departure of both the Knights and the French, the Maltese found themselves under the authority of a British Civil Commissioner until such time as their long-term future could be settled. In 1802 the Treaty of Amiens–which declared peace between Britain and France, although Napoleon intended to observe it only for as long as it suited him196 –provided for the return of the island to the Order of St John; the Maltese, however, who had no more love for the Knights than they had for the French, let it be known that their own strong preference was for the security afforded by the British Crown–which, by the Peace of Paris in 1814, they were finally to obtain.

  On the night of 1 July 1798, nearly two weeks after its departure from Malta, the French fleet dropped anchor off Marabout, some seven miles west of Alexandria. The landing of so many men, and so much equipment, in the small boats which were all that was available was a long and complicated task. It began only in the late afternoon, when a storm was already brewing. The vice-admiral, François-Paul Brueys d’Aigaïlliers, had advised delaying the operation until the following morning, but Napoleon had refused to listen. He himself did not reach the shore until shortly before midnight. Fortunately for him, there was no resistance until the army reached Alexandria, and even there the crumbling walls and the tiny garrison could do little to delay the inevitable. The whole city proved to be in a state of advanced decay, its population reduced from the 300,000 that it had boasted in Roman times to a sad and apathetic 6,000. Apart from ‘Pompey’s Pillar’ (which had nothing to do with Pompey) and ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’ (which had no association with Cleopatra),197 there was nothing to evoke its days of glory.

  To the French army, therefore, the capture of Alexandria came as an anticlimax. The July heat was demoralising enough, but men who had expected a rich and magnificent city–with commensurate opportunities for pillage–and who had found only a heap of pestiferous hovels felt not only disappointed but betrayed. Napoleon saw that they must be given no time to brood, but must march at once on Cairo. Advancing along the western side of the Nile delta, they captured Rosetta without a struggle and on 21 July met the main body of the Mameluke army at Embabeh, just below Gezira Island. Napoleon’s exhortation to his troops, ‘Think, my soldiers, from the tops of these pyramids forty centuries look down upon you!’ has gone down in history, but was hardly necessary: the Battle of the Pyramids was a walkover. Mameluke swords, however valiantly wielded, were no match for French musketry. The following day he entered Cairo–to his men a slight improvement on Alexandria, but scarcely a vaut-le-voyage.

  Nelson, meanwhile, had been pursuing the French ships across the Mediterranean. Misled by information from a Genoese vessel that Bonaparte had left Malta on 16 June–three days earlier than he actually did–he had hastened to Alexandria; then, finding to his astonishment no trace of the French fleet, he had sailed again on 29 June to search for it along the coast of Syria. As a result of this confusion, it was only around 2.30 p.m. on 1 August that he returned to Egypt, to find thirteen French men-of-war–he himself had fourteen–and four frigates anchored in a two-mile line in Aboukir Bay, one of the mouths of the Nile. But they were still nine miles away; it would take another two hours to reach them, and a lot longer still to draw up his own ships in a regular line of battle. Night encounters in those days were hazardous things; there was a danger of running aground in unknown waters, and a worse one of firing into one’s fellows by mistake. Most admirals, in such circumstances, would have elected to wait until morning; Nelson, however, seeing that the French were unprepared and that there was a favourable northwest wind running, decided on an immediate attack. He began by sending four ships inshore along one side of the French line, while he himself in his flagship, the Vanguard, led a parallel attack down the offshore side. Each enemy vessel was thus subjected to a simultaneous cannonade from both sides. That was at about six o’clock; the ensuing battle lasted through the night. By dawn all the French ships but four had been destroyed or captured, including their flagship, L’Orient, on which Admiral Brueys had been killed by a cannon shot. The vessel still lies beneath the waters of Aboukir Bay, together with all the treasure looted from the palaces and churches of Malta.

  The Battle of the Nile, as it was called, was one of the greatest victories of Nelson’s career.198 At a stroke he had not only destroyed the French fleet; he had severed Napoleon’s line of communication with France, leaving him marooned and frustrating all his plans of conquest in the Middle East. His victory also had a serious effect on French morale–though not, apparently, on Bonaparte’s. Almost before the ships’ guns had cooled, Napoleon was at work transforming Egypt into a strategic base. What the British were attempting to achieve little by little in India, he set himself to complete in a few months. He devised new and more efficient systems of administration and taxation; he established land registries; he gave orders for hospitals, improved sanitation and even street lighting. The scientists and engineers whom he had brought with him were put to work on such problems as the purification of the Nile water and the local manufacture of gunpowder.

  Where he failed, unsurprisingly, was in his attempts to win the trust and support of the Egyptians. He did his best, taking every opportunity to stress his admiration for Islam; he even issued a ‘Proclamation to the People of Egypt’, in which he seemed to go still further:

  I, more than any Mameluke, worship God, glory be to Him, and respect His Prophet and the Great Koran…

  O you sheikhs, judges, imams, tell your nation that the French are also sincere Muslims…

  The fact remained, however, that his men were living off the country and behaving as if they owned it. Small-scale revolts were constantly breaking out, with attacks on isolated French garrisons or individual Frenchmen in the street. A more serious uprising in October was put down with brutal efficiency; over 3,000 Egyptians were killed and the entire al-Azhar quarter sacked, including its mosque. From that day forward Napoleon decreed that any Egyptian found carrying a firearm was to be beheaded and his body thrown into the Nile. It was no wonder that the longer the occupation continued, the more detested it became.

  Beyond the Egyptian frontiers, too, enemies were gathering. On 2 September 1798 the Ottoman Sultan Selim III declared war on France, and the Turkish governor of Syria, Djezzar (‘the Butcher’) Pasha, began to raise an army. This could easily march south, then turn across the Sinai peninsula and invade Egypt from the east; worse still, it could be carried by English ships straight to the Nile delta. Rather than risk such an eventuality, Napoleon decided to act first: to destroy Djezzar’s army even before it was fully formed. In early February 1799 he marched his men across the deserts of Sinai and up into Palestine. On 7 March Jedda fell; 2,000 Turks and Palestinians were put to the sword, another 2,000 taken down to the sea and shot. In an effort to improve his image after these atrocities, the Commander-in-Chief visited a plague hospital and, we are told, was ill-advised enough personally to carry a plague victim out to his grave. He was not infected; otherwise, this exercise in public relations does not seem to have been outstandingly successful.

  Acre was his next objective; but Acre was well defended and well garrisoned, the Turkish commander having enlisted additional support from the British navy under the swashbuckling Commodore Sir Sidney Smith, famous for having escaped from the Temple prison in Paris during the revolution. Smith had brought with him his friend Colonel Phélippeaux, a military engineer who had been at the Ecole Militaire with Bonaparte and who was able to contribute invaluable expertise to the defence of the town. For two months the French army besieged the city; fortunately, however, Smith had succeeded in capturing the eight gunboats carrying their siege artillery, stores and ammunition. Napoleon had only his field guns, and it was not until 25 April that he was able to bring up six heavy cannon from Jaffa. On 10 May he launched his final assault. Like its predecessors, it was thrown back with heavy losses, and he had no course but retreat. By this time plague had taken hold in the army; he himself advocated killin
g all the patients with overdoses of opium, but his chief medical officer refused outright. The hundreds of stretchers carrying the sick and wounded considerably slowed the return journey; it was a miserable body of men that finally limped back into Cairo.

  As always, Bonaparte did his best to dress up defeat as victory. Turkish prisoners were paraded, captured Turkish flags proudly displayed. What was left of the army, cleaned up as far as possible, staged a triumphal march through the city and, on 25 July, made short work of a Turkish force which, with British assistance, had been landed at Aboukir. But no one, least of all the Egyptians, was fooled. The Middle Eastern expedition had been a failure, and had done little for Napoleon’s reputation. He was alarmed, too, by reports reaching Cairo that Europe was once again at war, that the Italian Cisalpine Republic which he had established two years before was now under Austrian occupation, that the Russian army was on the march and that the domestic situation in France itself was once again critical. For the first time in his career–but not the last–he left his army to get home as best it could and, at five o’clock in the morning of 22 August 1799, slipped stealthily from his camp and sailed for France. Not even his successor in command, General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, knew of his departure until he was safely away.

  In Paris, the coup d’état of 30 prairial (18 June) 1799 had expelled the moderates from the Directory and brought in men who were generally considered to be Jacobin extremists, but confusion continued to reign and one of the new Directors, Emmanuel Sieyès, declared that only a military dictatorship could now prevent a return of the monarchy. ‘Je cherche un sabre,’ he said–‘I am looking for a sabre.’ That sabre was soon to hand, and from the moment Napoleon arrived in Paris on 14 October–having almost miraculously escaped the British fleet–he and Sieyès started planning a coup of their own. It took place on 18–19 brumaire (November 9–10), abolished the Directory and established a new government, the Consulate. There were technically three consuls, but effectively only one: the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, was henceforth master of France.

  He spent the winter reorganising his army, and–Russia having by now withdrawn from the anti-French coalition–preparing for a campaign against his principal remaining enemy, Austria. At that moment the Austrians were besieging Genoa, capital of one of his more ephemeral creations, the Ligurian Republic. A lesser general would have marched south from Paris and down the valley of the Rhône; Napoleon turned east at the Alps and took his men over the Great St Bernard Pass before the snow had melted, appearing in Italy behind the Austrian army and taking it entirely by surprise. The Austrian general Michael von Melas had no course but to leave Genoa and regroup, concentrating all his forces on Alessandria. Napoleon followed them, and on the evening of 13 June 1800 reached the village–it was in fact little more than a farm–of Marengo, some two and a half miles southeast of the town.

  The encounter that followed might have spelled the end of Napoleon’s career. Melas did not wait to be attacked; the following morning, with a force of some 31,000, he lashed out at the 23,000 French, pounding them remorselessly with his eighty guns for over five hours. In the early afternoon their line began to give way; they were forced to retreat nearly four miles to the village of San Giuliano. The Austrians’ victory seemed certain; strangely enough, however–perhaps because the seventy-one-year-old Melas now retired to Alessandria, leaving the command to some relatively incapable subordinate–their pursuit was slow and half-hearted, giving Napoleon time to regroup and to welcome substantial reinforcements under General Louis Desaix which just then providentially arrived from the southeast. As evening drew on he launched a counter-attack. Desaix was killed almost immediately, but his 6,000 men, fresh and rested, gave new spirit to their fellows, and by nightfall the Austrians were in full retreat. When the battle ended they had lost 9,500 men, the French less than 6,000.199

  Melas now had no choice but to come to terms, withdrawing all his troops east of the river Mincio and north of the Po, giving the French complete control of the Po valley as far as the Adige. Napoleon, his reputation unstained despite the narrowness of his victory, returned to Paris, where he took over both the military and the civil authority. In 1801 Austria was forced to sign the Treaty of Lunéville, whereby France regained the old frontiers that Julius Caesar had given to Gaul: the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees.

  Napoleon’s star was now high in the sky–and was still rising.

  CHAPTER XXII

  Neapolitan Interlude

  The news of Nelson’s victory on the Nile was received with jubilation in England–but still more so, perhaps, in Naples. Its king, Ferdinand IV,200 had come to the throne in 1759 at the age of eight. He and his queen, Maria Carolina–daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and elder sister of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette–were an ill-assorted couple. Ferdinand–‘the scoundrel king’, as he was universally known, ‘il rè lazzarone’–was a childish boor who loved only hunting and horseplay, possessed not a shred of natural dignity and boasted of never having read a book. The Queen was comparatively intellectual, acutely conscious of her rank yet surprisingly tolerant of her insufferable husband,201 to whom she was to bear eighteen children; though herself only sixteen years old at the time of her marriage, it was not long before she was effectively running the kingdom, her foreign policy being dictated by her understandable detestation of the French Revolution and all it stood for.

  Ever since 1797, to Maria Carolina, to her subjects and even to King Ferdinand, French intentions in south Italy had been only too clear. In Rome on 22 December of that year, the local Jacobins staged an armed demonstration against the Pope, in the course of which a twenty-seven-year-old French officer named Léonard Duphot was shot by a papal corporal. The French ambassador, Napoleon’s elder brother Joseph, refused to listen to the Vatican’s explanations and reported to the Directory that one of his country’s most brilliant young generals had been murdered by the priests. As a result General Louis Berthier was ordered to march on Rome. He met with no opposition and on 10 February 1798 occupied the city. Five days later the new republic was proclaimed in the Forum. Pope Pius VI, aged eighty, was abominably treated–his rings were torn forcibly from his fingers–and was carried off to France, where he was to die miserably at Valence in August 1799.202

  What was Naples to do? The French were now on its very doorstep; what was to prevent them from crossing the frontier, and who could stop them if they did? With Napoleon’s seizure of Malta in June 1798 the threat loomed still larger. No wonder that the Neapolitans rejoiced at the news of the Battle of the Nile, or that when Nelson himself arrived on his flagship Vanguard towards the end of September he was accorded a hero’s welcome–with, on the 29th, a magnificent fortieth-birthday banquet for 1,800 guests, given at Palazzo Sessa by the British Minister, Sir William Hamilton, and his wife, Emma. But the party, as far as Nelson was concerned, was not a success. On the following morning he wrote to Lord St Vincent:

  I trust, my Lord, in a week we shall all be at sea. I am very unwell, and the miserable conduct of this Court is not likely to cool my irritable temper. It is a country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels. I am, etc.

  Indeed, the next three months were a nightmare. The Austrian field marshal Baron Karl Mack von Leiberich arrived in early October to assume command of the Neapolitan army of 50,000 men, who duly marched north, a quivering King among them. Needless to say, they proved quite incapable of stopping the French advance, and by early December more and more of them, officers and men alike, had shed their uniforms and returned to their homes. The Queen–her sister’s dreadful fate always in her mind–wrote several times to Lady Hamilton deploring their cowardice, but when her husband deserted in his turn there were no more letters on the subject. On 18 December there arrived a despatch from an utterly demoralised Mack, confessing that his army–which had not yet fought a single battle–was now in full retreat and imploring Their Majesties to leave while there was still time. ‘I do not know,’ wrot
e Nelson to the Minister at Constantinople, ‘that the whole Royal Family, with 3,000 Neapolitan émigrés, will not be under the protection of the King’s flag this night.’

  And indeed it was, though thanks to atrocious weather and the usual Neapolitan confusion, the Vanguard did not leave Naples until the evening of the 23rd. On Christmas Eve Nelson recorded that ‘it blew harder than I have ever experienced since I have been at sea’. On board, there was general panic. Of the distinguished passengers, only Emma Hamilton kept her head; Sir William was found in his cabin with a loaded pistol in each hand–since, he explained to his wife, he was determined not to perish with ‘the guggle-guggle-guggle of salt water in his throat’. Little Prince Albert, aged six, died of exhaustion in Emma’s arms; but at two in the morning on the 26th the vessel finally dropped anchor in the harbour of Palermo, and a few hours later His Sicilian Majesty made a formal entry into his kingdom’s second capital.