The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean
Page 82
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240 ‘Release Manin and Tommaseo!’
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241 ‘God doesn’t grant amnesties,’ growled Metternich, ‘God pardons.’
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242 Antonelli was largely responsible for enabling the Papacy to cling to its temporal power for as long as it did. He was a brilliant politician with immense charm and–as his countless bastards attested–an extremely mouvementé sex life. ‘When he stops in a salon near a pretty woman, when he stands close to speak to her, stroking her shoulders and looking deeply into her corsage, you recognise the man of the woods and you tremble as you think of post-chaises overturned at the roadside.’ (Edmond About, La question romaine, quoted by Holt, Risorgimento, p. 139.)
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243 At this time it comprised not only the traditional territory of the ancient Dukes of Savoy, with its capital at Turin; there was also the island of Sardinia, the County of Nice and, since 1815, the city of Genoa.
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244 Notorious even in England. On 4 September 1850, with two friends, Haynau visited Barclay’s Brewery in London. He was soon recognised by his grotesquely long moustaches and attacked by the employees, who threw buckets of dirt all over him. He fled down Bankside and, pursued now by a large mob, took refuge at the George Inn, where he was finally rescued by the police.
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245 The area of Rome lying to the west of the Tiber.
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246 ‘Wherever we are, there shall be Rome.’
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247 San Marino, with its area of 23.5 square miles, is still an independent republic. It is completely surrounded by Italy, with the Romagna on the west and the Marche on the east. It remains the last relic of the self-governing city-states of the middle ages and Renaissance.
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248 Prince Louis Napoleon had taken advantage of the fall of King Louis-Philippe in 1848, and in December of that year had been elected President of the Second Republic of France. In 1852 he had been confirmed as the Emperor Napoleon III.
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249 ‘Alpine hunters’.
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250 There was no mention of Romagna, Parma or Piacenza, for which neither emperor was directly responsible.
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251 He had never quite forgiven Cavour for his hard words after Villafranca, nor for having successfully opposed–after the death of Queen Maria Adelaide in 1855 at the age of only thirty-three–his marriage to his long-time mistress.
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252 He is described in the Enciclopedia Italiana as ‘serious, taciturn, melancholic, timid, awkward, eternally doubtful of himself and everyone else’.
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253 It is something of a miracle that the church of S. Angelo was not destroyed. It is the grandest monument in all Campania, its interior walls covered in eleventh-century frescos in a quite astonishing state of preservation.
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254 ‘Italy is made; now we have to make the Italians.’
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255 The Pope had summoned it in 1868 to discuss a wide range of subjects, both theological and administrative.
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256 Mazzini addressed the 700 bishops who attended: ‘Science goes forward, regardless of your doctrines, caring nothing for your denunciations and your councils, tearing up, with every new discovery, another page of the book that you call infallible.’
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257 See Chapter XXIV.
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258 The constitution of 1812–known as the Constitution of Cadiz–considerably restricted the powers of the monarchy, instituted a single-chamber parliament (with no special representation for the nobility or the Church) and introduced a modern system of administration based on provinces and municipalities.
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259 After the death of Maria Francisca in 1834 he had married his Portuguese sister-in-law, the Princess of Beira.
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260 Soon after–or perhaps before–Ferdinand’s death she had taken a lover: a corporal in the Guards named Fernando Muñoz. The two were secretly married on 27 December 1833, after which she named him Groom of the Bedchamber. Although they were to have four children, the marriage was not publicly admitted until 1845, when Muñoz was created Duke of Riánsares.
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261 According to the French Prime Minister François Guizot, who knew her well, ‘there were not six spoons left.’
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262 ‘The Queen has been nubile for two hours.’
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263Asís is Assisi in Spanish.
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264 During his youth in London he had been engaged to Miss Adeline de Horsey, who subsequently became the second wife of the Earl of Cardigan, leader of the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava.
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265 Who first accepted it, then refused. Had he turned it down at once, the Franco-Prussian War–which was fought entirely because Napoleon III was not prepared to contemplate a dynastic alliance between Prussia and Spain–would never have taken place. See Chapter XXVIII.
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266 A less happy consequence was that Indian army officers were obliged to put away their native wives and bring their memsahibs out from Britain–often with disastrous results to British-Indian relations.
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267 A rather more surprising reaction was that of the Crown Prince of Prussia, later Kaiser Wilhelm II: ‘How jolly!’
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268 See Chapter XXIV.
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269 Leucas (Lefkas) is the only one of the Ionian Islands that was for any length of time under Turkish rule.
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270 For this section and those immediately following, I must record my thanks to Mr Alan Palmer, on whose compulsively readable history, The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire, I have shamelessly drawn.
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271 His opinion may perhaps have been affected by the Sultan’s decision to confer upon Lady Salisbury–who had accompanied him–the Order of Chastity (Third Class).
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272 As it happened, Prince Louis of Battenberg was serving on the appropriately named HMS Sultan, while his brother Prince Alexander was a staff captain in the army of the Grand Duke. Alexander was given a warm welcome aboard the Sultan by its commanding officer, who chanced to be none other than Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, second son of Queen Victoria and husband of the Tsar’s only surviving daughter.
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273 It will be remembered that the Orthodox Patriarch Grigorios had suffered a similar fate in Constantinople at much the same time (See Chapter XXV), as had hundreds, if not thousands, of Greeks, secular and priestly, throughout the Ottoman Empire.
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274 By which individual entrepreneurs purchased from the government the right to levy taxes, and then bled the local populations.
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275 Europe had also been profoundly shocked by the recent appalling massacres of the Sultan’s Armenian subjects. These had begun in 1894 and are believed to have accounted for at least 30,000 by the end of the following year.
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276 Poor Abdul-Hamid was hurried with his family on board the German steamship Lorelei and returned to Istanbul, to spend his six remaining years in the Beylerbey Palace on the Bosphorus.
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277 Alan Moorehead tells us that one of these was ‘subsequently torpedoed by a U-boat off Malta, and must have occasioned some surprise to the Germans. As the ship settled, her wooden turrets and her twelve-inch guns floated away on the tide.’
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278 There is a superb accoun
t of the evacuation in Chapter XVII of Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli, to which for this all too brief account of the campaign I am hugely indebted.
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279 The official British historian went further still: ‘Seldom in history,’ he wrote, ‘can the exertions of a single divisional commander have exercised, on three separate occasions, so profound an influence not only on the course of a battle but, perhaps, on the fate of a campaign and even the destiny of a nation.’
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280 ‘One Colonel of the Royal Engineers was sick on the floor outside Allenby’s office after an interview; another officer had to be actually carried out of Allenby’s room, having collapsed on the floor before his desk.’ (Brian Gardner, Allenby, p. 177).
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281 Not many British officers during the Boer War, one suspects, would have written from South Africa asking to be sent a copy of A. N. Majestrat’s L’Art du Croire, ou Préparation Philosophique à la Foi Chrétienne.
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282 A statement made on 2 November 1917 by Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, in a letter to Lionel, 2nd Baron Rothschild, a leader of British Jewry, informing him of British support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, provided that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.
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283 How this promise accorded with the Sykes–Picot Agreement–or, later, with the Balfour Declaration–was never made entirely clear.
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FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2007
Copyright © 2007 by John Julius Norwich
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Norwich, John Julius, 1929–
The Middle Sea : a history of the Mediterranean / John Julius Norwich.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Mediterranean Region—History. I. Title.
DE80.N67 2007
909'.09822—dc22 2006026071
www.vintagebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-38772-1
v3.0
Table of Contents
Title Page
List of Maps
List of Illustrations
Introduction
I Beginnings
II Ancient Greece
III Rome: The Republic
IV Rome: The Early Empire
V Islam
VI Medieval Italy
VII The Christian Counter-Attack
VIII The Two Diasporas
IX Stupor Mundi
X The End of Outremer
XI The Close of the Middle Ages
XII The Fall of Constantinople
XIII The Catholic Kings and the Italian Adventure
XIV The King, the Emperor and the Sultan
XV Barbary and the Barbarossas
XVI Malta and Cyprus
XVII Lepanto and the Spanish Conspiracy
XVIII Crete and the Peloponnese
XIX The Wars of Succession
XX The Siege of Gibraltar
XXI The Young Napoleon
XXII Neapolitan Interlude
XXIII Egypt After Napoleon
XXIV The Settlement of Europe
XXV Freedom for Greece
XXVI Mohammed Ali and North Africa
XXVII The Quarantotto
XXVIII Risorgimento
XXIX The Queens and the Carlists
XXX Egypt and the Canal
XXXI The Balkan Wars
XXXII The Great War
XXXIII The Peace
Bibliography
Family Trees
Maps
By the Same Author
Copyright