Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  * So-called by historians to distinguish them from the Crusades in the Holy Land, in Languedoc or in Iberia.

  * The Livlandische Reimchronik, composed in Low German by anonymous authors and intended to be read aloud to the Knights during their mealtimes, covers the years 1180–1290.

  * The Gothic Myth among Germans and the Sarmatian Myth among Poles propagated the idea that the modern descendants of ancient Goths and Sarmatians inherited their forebears’ inborn love of freedom.

  * Together with the kings of Bohemia, the counts palatine of the Rhine and the dukes of Saxony, the margraves of Brandenburg served as one of the Holy Roman Empire’s four secular and hereditary electors, participating in imperial elections and enjoying the prestigious title of Kurfurst or ‘Prince-Elector’.

  * Junker, literally Jung Herr or ‘Young Lord’ and originally a colloquial phrase, came to denote a whole social class. Its members often had roots in Germany’s medieval aristocracy, the Uradel, but in early modern times, as the ‘Ostelbien nobility’, they were concentated in Brandenburg-Prussia, whence they later migrated into all the Hohenzollern provinces. Their surnames were usually preceded by von or zu.

  * Das Königreich in Preussen as distinct from Das Königreich Preussen from 1772.

  * From 1795 to 1806, following the Third Partition of Poland.

  * Hindenburg’s attack on 29 August 1914 centred on the 2th Russian Army, which was surrounded near the village of Frogenau. Tannenberg, nearly 20 miles away, did not feature until a report was written that evening.

  * The Dolchstosslegende, traced to a conversation between General Ludendorff and Sir Neil Malcolm in 1919, gained wide currency by claiming that the German military had been betrayed by politicians.

  * The Soviet assault of April 1945 is the second event which features in the Amber Room mystery. A recent study claims that the treasure was destroyed on 9–11 April by high explosives and fire, but this assumes that no attempt had been made to crate the treasure up or remove it to safety in the previous five months, and that six tons of amber could evaporate in heat without leaving even microscopic chemical traces. So the hunt continues. One theory holds that the Amber Room sank with the Wilhelm Gustloff; a second that it was buried with Nazi gold in a Saxon mine; a third that it lies beneath a Lithuanian lagoon; and a fourth that it forms part of the undeclared loot in Moscow’s Trophy Archive. The word on the street in Kaliningrad is that it was drowned in the concrete foundations of the Dom Sovietov.100

  * Thanks to the work of the French scholar Pierre Nora, in Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–92), ‘memory site’ now forms part of the established vocabulary of studies on collective memory. It refers to places, objects and buildings that are deliberately selected and promoted over others to preserve the memory of people or events.

  8

  Sabaudia

  The House that Humbert Built

  (1033–1946)

  I

  Rome, 2 June. Italy’s Day of the Republic, the Festa della Repubblica, is celebrated on the same date every year. The president comes down from the Quirinale Palace, lays a crown of laurels on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and gives the signal for a grand military parade. RAI news, the Italian news agency, issues the usual bulletin: ‘The celebrations of the anniversary of the Republic were initiated today by the President… Escorted by the cuirassiers of the guard of the Corps of Carabinieri, he laid the Crown on the Altar of the Fatherland, and sent the parade on its way from the Imperial Forum…’1 Italian commentators liken their republican Festa to Bastille Day in France or to Independence Day in the United States. A similar event will be staged on 4 November, la Giornata dell’Unità, to mark Italy’s annual Armed Forces Day.

  In 2010 Giorgio Napolitano (b. 1925), Italy’s eleventh president, had reached the fifth year of his seven-year term. Trained as a lawyer, he used to be an activist of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), until it was dissolved in 1992; he then served as a member of the European Parliament. His nicknames include Il Principe Rosso, ‘The Red Prince’, and Il Re Umberto, ‘King Umberto’. His personal contribution to the national day was to invite the public into the house and gardens of the Quirinale.2 He has been characterized as Italy’s ‘enduring president’,3 a pillar of stability in an unstable country.

  The tomb of Italy’s Unknown Soldier, the Milite Ignoto, stands beside the Altar of the Fatherland at the centrepoint of the monumental complex on the Piazza Venezia – the Vittoriano. It dates from 1911, and is surrounded by an array of patriotic symbols – including the columns of Winged Victory, the four-horse chariot, the Quadrighe, and the Fountain of the Two Seas.4 On the steps of the altar, the president of state is awaited by the presidents of the Senate, of the chamber of deputies, of the constitutional court and of the council of ministers. After laying the crown of laurels, he reviews the guard of honour, presents a short address, then leaves the square with the minister of defence and the chief of the defence staff.

  The military parade presents a stunning show made up from all branches of the Italian armed forces and police. The crowds applaud, listening to the bands of the Esercito (army), the Marina Militare (navy), the Aeronautica (air force), the Arma dei Carabinieri, the Polizia di Stato (state police), and other formations. The traditional Corsa degli Bersaglieri raises a special cheer: the ‘Sharpshooters Regiment’ (including its musicians) does not march past the stands, but runs. The soldiers step out most willingly to the strains of the ‘Canzone del Piave’, the ‘Song of the Piave’, a popular melody from the First World War. Warplanes scream overhead, releasing jetstreams of green, white and red. (In 2008 heavy rain was falling, and no planes flew.)

  The symbols of the Italian Republic are displayed everywhere. The national flag, the green-white-red tricolour, dates from the Cispadane Republic of 1797. The Republic’s emblem consists of a five-pointed red star surmounting the toothed wheel of labour, encircled by garlands of oak and olive. It rests on the gold letters of ‘REPUBBLICA ITALIANA’ on a red field. The national anthem, ‘Il Canto degli Italiani’, is popularly known after its author as ‘Mamalli’s Song’. Composed in Genoa in 1847, it was always sung by republicans in defiance of their monarchist rivals:

  Fratelli d’Italia!

  L’Italia s’è desta;

  Dell’elmo di Scipio

  S’è cinta la testa.

  Dov’è la Vittoria?

  Le porga la chioma,

  Ché schiava di Roma;

  Iddio la creò.

  Stringiamci a coorte

  Siam pronti alla morte

  L’Italia chiamò.

  (‘Brothers of Italy! / Our land has awoken. / Her head is ringed / by Scipio’s Helmet. / Where’s our Victory? / The roll-call summons you, / once the slave of Rome. / God has created Her. / Let’s line up in our cohorts, / we’re ready for death. / Italy has called.’)5

  The foul weather of 2008 matched a tense political situation. The leaders of the Lega Nord, the ‘Northern League’, Italy’s most bumptious party, were boycotting the parades; they do not believe in the permanence of the present political order. When pressed by a reporter, the president issued a stark warning: ‘Basta ribellioni contro lo stato’, ‘Enough rebellions against the state!’ Before the parade finished, an incident occurred on the Fori Imperiali. The president’s open-topped limousine had already passed. When Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s car appeared, a girl ran forward calling ‘Presidente, presidente, una foto…’ (In Italian usage, as president of the council of ministers, the premier enjoys the same form of address as the president of the Republic.) The cavalcade halted. The crowd started chanting: ‘Silvio! Silvio!’ Berlusconi obliged. Leaping out of his car, he strolled the full length of the Fori surrounded by his admirers. A voice in the crush shouted ‘Silvio santo subito’* in mock blasphemy; ‘Ci proverò,’ he promised, ‘I’ll show you; I’ll solve all the problems.’ The press reported widely on the ‘Berlusconi show’ and the bagno di follia, ‘the forty minutes of delirium’. The Day of the Repu
blic, ran the headline, ‘has been turned into the Festa di Silvio’.6

  *

  The annual Festa della Repubblica is staged to remember one of the closest-run political events in Italy’s history. On 2 June 1946 Italians were asked to vote in an ‘institutional referendum’ to decide whether their country should remain a kingdom or become a republic. The result was announced next day. The monarchy received 10,719,284 valid votes – 46 per cent; the republic 12,717,923 – a victorious 54 per cent. The country was geographically divided. The north supported the republic; the poor, less populous Mezzogiorno favoured the monarchy. Ravenna voted 91.2 per cent for the republic; Messina 85.4 per cent for the king.7

  The last king of Italy, Umberto II (1904–83) was forty-two years old when, from his point of view, the referendum was lost. Having mounted the throne a month earlier as a result of his father’s abdication, he had reigned for only thirty-three days, and thereby earned the unkind sobriquet of Il re di maggio, ‘The king of May’. In the three preceding years he had served with some acumen as ‘royal lieutenant’, putting his compromised father into the background and easing the country’s transition from Mussolini’s Fascism. In this respect, his role was not dissimilar to that of his Spanish relative, Juan Carlos, during the aftermath of Franco.8

  Post-war Italy, however, was less forgiving than post-Franco Spain. Italy’s royals had worked with Mussolini over two decades, and the wounds of dictatorship, defeat, foreign occupation and civil war were still festering. The anti-clerical and anti-monarchist Left, urged on by the Communists, was rampant. Umberto’s father had been slow to adapt. By clinging to his throne for as long as he did, he had lessened the chances of the monarchy’s survival.

  The consequences of the referendum were swift and stark. The constituent assembly resolved that the monarchy was abolished, that the monarchy’s symbols were illegal, that the royal family’s property was to be confiscated and that the king and his close male relatives were to be banished. The king’s home, the Quirinale Palace, was to be handed to an acting head of state, Alcide de Gasperi. The royal standard, with its eagle and four crowns, was to be hauled down, and the shield of the House of Savoy was to be torn from the central section of the national tricolour. The anthem of the ‘Marcia Reale’, the ‘Royal March’, already suspended, was to be permanently silenced. All the signs and symbols associated with the Italian state since its birth in 1861 were to disappear. The kingdom was ordered to dissolve; the date was set for 18 June.

  The king hesitated for over a week, ceasing only when riots in Naples were suppressed by bloody violence and civil war loomed. He formally put an end to his brief reign on 12 June 1946, setting aside the royal insignia, consigning the royal jewels to the Banca d’Italia and signing away his birthright. The next day he drove to Ciampino Airport, whence he flew into exile f0r life. His first port of call was his elderly father, who had left after the abdication a month earlier and had taken up residence in Egyptian Alexandria under the name of the count of Pollenzo. At the invitation of King Farouk, his Belgian-born queen, Marie-José, and their four children would shortly arrive to join him. As his plane soared out over the Tyrrhenian Sea, the last Umberto and his kingdom vanished over the horizon. He took with him the legacy of the first Umberto, nearly a thousand years old.

  II

  Humbertus or Hupertus I (c. 980–1047), otherwise Humbert of the Whitehand, was the first count of Sabaudia. Since he lived at a time when all written sources were in Latin, the vernacular versions of his name and his county can only be guessed. But later records refer to him either as ‘Humbert aux Mains Blanches’ (in French) or as ‘Umberto Biancamano’ (in Italian), and to his county either as Savoie or Savoia. His possessions in the upper reaches of the Two Burgundies (see pp. 115ff) stretched from the shores of Lake Leman to the Alpine fastnesses round Mont Blanc. He and his court would have spoken an old form of Franco-Provençal, a predecessor of the language now known as Savoyard. He was a direct progenitor of the king of Italy who was dethroned by the referendum of June 1946.

  Like all self-respecting medieval rulers, Humbertus boasted a very long genealogical tree. Copied uncritically on numerous modern websites, it starts in AD 390 with a Roman senator called Ferreolus. Verifiable accuracy is never a characteristic of such productions. Any such claims made on behalf of Humbertus by his descendants were certainly not taken up by a historically minded Victorian travel-writer who visited the region at a time when it was achieving international fame and who confined himself to its medieval connections:

  Next day I reached St Jean de Maurienne. We seem to know nothing of [its] early history except that it was governed by bishops before… Humbert of the White Hands… obtained his investiture from the Emperor Conrad the Salic, towards the commencement of the eleventh century. The Christian world had just recovered from the abject fears of the year 1000… and its princes had [returned to] fighting and murdering one another…

  The Bishops of Savoy… [had] declared themselves independent… Humbert, who… had raised himself by his personal merit to be a Marquis, or Lieutenant of the Emperor… fought the Bishop, defeated him, razed his city to the ground; and thus caused himself to be named Sovereign Count of that wild district.9

  The intrepid author of these words, Bayle St John, walked the length and breadth of that ‘wild district’ in 1856, when it was fast becoming one of Europe’s most unstable trouble spots. He was a well-read Francophile, fascinated by political developments in the region, and it would have been out of character if he had not been familiar with a learned history of Savoy recently published in Annecy. Its author, like St John, gave no credence to any rumours of Humbert’s exotic ancestry, but provided more details of the county’s rise to prominence:

  In 1033, the Emperor Conrad the Salic was absent in Hungary, and Eudes, Count of Champagne, benefited from his absence to take possession of Cisjuran Burgundy… The Emperor then returned… and marched against the rebels. One of his lieutenants, meanwhile, a descendant of Boso… laid siege to [the episcopal town of ] St Jean de Maurienne, leaving the Emperor to deal with Geneva. The siege was long: the sorties numerous and bloody: the Bishop sought every means to free himself… In the end, taken by storm and razed, the town of St Jean was left completely deserted… The lieutenant of whom we have spoken, was called Humbert, commander of the March of Maurienne. Conrad created a sovereign county for him – comes in agro Savojense.10

  Henceforth, the counts of Sabaudia were both subjects of the Holy Roman Empire and for practical purposes lords of all they surveyed. They flourished by the usual medieval strategies of exploiting their vassals, fighting their neighbours, expanding their territories and marrying well. Since their immediate neighbours to the west, the counts of Vienne, were increasingly drawn into the growing French sphere, they themselves concentrated their efforts on control of the Alpine passes, and on links with the eastern (Italian) side of the Alps in the Piemonte, the ‘Foot of the Mountains’. As a result, the heartland of Sabaudia soon consisted of a clutch of ‘provinces’ which surrounded the meeting point of the modern frontiers of France, Switzerland and Italy: namely, Savoy proper (its chef-lieu Chambéry), the Genevois (Annecy), the Chablais (Thonon), Faucigny (Bonneville), the Tarentaise (Moûtiers), the Maurienne (St Jean) and the Val d’Aosta (Courmayeur). The administrative centre was moved from St Jean to Camberiaco (Chambéry) in 1232, but the counts’ favourite residences were at Avigliana (Viana, Veillane) near Susa, and later at Aiguebelle (Acqua, Aigue) in the Maurienne. Their prize assets, however, were the mountain trails leading across the high ridge of the western Alps, namely the Great St Bernard, the Little St Bernard, the Mont Cenis and, further south, the Col de Maddalena (Largentières). The counts adopted the sobriquet of gardien des cols, ‘guardian of the Alpine passes’.

  The list of the early Sabaudian counts is filled with colourful characters. Otto/Oddon I (r. 1051–60), by marrying Adalina da Susa, carried the family’s fortunes into Piedmont. Amadeus III (r. 1103–48) died in Rho
des during the Second Crusade. Pierre II (r. 1263–8), known as ‘the little Charlemagne’, was a warrior who greatly expanded his territories. Amadeus VI (r. 1343–83), the Green Count, died of the plague at the end of a long military career.11 His son, Amadeus VII (r. 1383–91), the Red Count, died from poison, but not before gaining control of the Paese Nizzardo (Pays de Nice) to the south. Almost all of them were buried beside the Lac du Bourget in the crypt of the Abbey of Hautecombe, whose chantries would not be silenced until the arrival of French revolutionary troops in 1796.

  The rise of the medieval counts is known in some considerable detail thanks to a French chronicle compiled in the early fifteenth century by Jean d’Orville, also known by his surname of ‘Cabaret’. The text, which exists in thirty copies but which has only been recently translated from Latin into French, is full of adventures, curiosities and, as might be expected, obsequious flattery. Much space is devoted to the conquests of the ninth count, Pierre II, who led his knights over the Great St Bernard pass in 1263 to confront the duke of Zähringen. Having captured the castle of Chillon on Lake Leman by surprise attack, Count Pierre took the duke prisoner, and set out to conquer the whole of the Pays de Vaud:

  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