Chapter 52: "A strange and Wondrous Succession of Changes", 1645-1650
The Seventeenth Century was a time of rapid and extreme change. New goods flowed across an ever more interconnected world. Ships from Italy and Spain and Britain plied the waters of the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. As an example of the state of global interconnectedness, by mid century, approximately two thirds of all the silver in Ming China originated in the Viceroyalty of Peru or French Mexico. Goods and food from across the globe became commonplace in European homes. Above it all, influencing the current of history in ways large and small, was the epoch-defining climatic event known as the Little Ice Age.
An examination of the Little Ice Age is necessary in order to understand what happened in the tumultuous 1600s. Sometime in the early years of the century, “a strange and wondrous succession of changes in the weather,” began around the globe. These would continue for almost a hundred years. Right around the middle of the century was when the Little Ice Age reached its coldest point. Though they did not conceive of it in such scientific terms, there was a perception by the people of the time that something was different. Northern Europe, and Germany, Scandinavia, and the eastern steppes in particular, were hit hard, and the century saw significant population loss in those areas. The lands around the Mediterranean felt the effects of the Little Ice Age as well, though they were much reduced. In 1621, the Bosporus froze over, cutting off ship transit between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. In 1641, the Nile fell to the lowest level ever recorded while the narrow growth rings laid down by trees in Anatolia reveal another disastrous drought. Alpine glaciers advanced far below their previous (and present) limits, obliterating farms, churches, and villages in Switzerland and France. Frequent cold winters and cool, wet summers led to crop failures and famines over much of northern and central Europe.
The coldest period of the Little Ice Age
Italy was perhaps the luckiest country in Europe regarding the climactic effects of the era. The Little Ice Age and its erratic el niño/la niña cycles still inflicted greater hardship on the Italian population relative to earlier periods, but nowhere near what other regions felt. Crop failures and food shortages occurred, by they were rarely peninsula-wide, thus allowing the authorities to redirect food shipments from areas with a glut to those with more need for it. King Alberto I had determined during his reign that having starvation within the kingdom was unbecoming a state and a monarch who considered themselves a great power. Thus, on several occasions, and thanks to surplus crop production elsewhere in his realm, the king ordered the government to divert food to areas affected by shortages while the monarchy footed the bill. Typical of Alberto’s policy initiatives, this one was as pragmatic as it was magnanimous. It often wildly enriched the merchants who sold and/or shipped the food while the government allowed them to bill the treasury at extortionate rates. With the Italian coffers full of gold from the kingdom’s trade empire, this expense proved worth the cost. For Alberto, it was also a method for keeping the loyalty and support of the merchants, and gave him a carrot to wield to reward loyal or helpful behavior. Politics and economics aside, the policy saved countless lives in an era when food scarcity was a potent killer. Alberto’s nephew and heir, despite being an otherwise vain and self-obsessed ruler, nevertheless kept his predecessor’s policy in place, going so far as to proclaim “great joy” in feeding the hungry. By the late 1640s, this model of government-sponsored famine-prevention was in place in France, Great Britain (or, at least, within England), and, in a much more limited form, Poland.
Numerous historians have commented on the extent that climate played in the rise and decline of states during this period. There is little doubt that the relative climactic stability and warmth compared to much of the rest of the continent helped Italy. This streak of luck was particularly pronounced in light of the fact that the most densely populated areas suffered the greatest hardships. As the most urbanized state in Europe, Italy’s city-dwelling population could have been ravaged had the effects felt by some other European states been visited upon them.
In densely populated parts of the early modern world, whether sub-boreal, temperate, or tropical, most people relied on a single crop, high in bulk and in carbohydrates, known as a “staple”. Cereals (wheat, barley, and oats) formed the principal staples in Italy and its European territories (with some minor exceptions such as the Lower Po Valley, where rice was also common), while maize and millet predominated in the American colonies and West Africa respectively. The economic allure of staple crops was almost irresistible for farmers. An acre under cereals fed between ten and twenty times as many people as an acre devoted to animal husbandry. Furthermore, the same amount of money usually bought 10 pounds of bread but only one pound of meat. It was the only way for the lower classes to feed themselves and survive.
Cereal grain seeds clockwise from top-left: wheat, spelt, oat, barley.
Arborio rice, typical of the Po Valley
However, there were also significant risks. Cereal-dependence conditioned every phase of social life. Grain was the pilot sector of the economy; beyond its determinant role in agriculture, directly and indirectly grain shaped the development of commerce and industry, regulated employment, and provided a major source of revenue for the state, the Church, the nobility, and large segments of the commons. Because most people were poor, the quest for subsistence preoccupied them relentlessly. No issue was more urgent, more pervasively felt, and more difficult to resolve than the matter of grain provisioning. The dread of shortage and hunger haunted society.
In a normal year, an average European farmer sowed 50 acres with grain and harvested 10 bushels per acre, for a total of 500 bushels. Of this, he needed 175 bushels for animal fodder and seed corn and 75 bushels to feed himself and his family – a total of 250 bushels, leaving 250 for market. If bad weather reduced crops by 30 percent, the harvest would produce only 350 bushels yet the farmer still needed 250 of them for his immediate use, leaving just 100 bushels available for the market, a loss of 60 percent. If bad weather reduced crops by 50 percent, the harvest would produce only about 250 bushels, all of them needed by the farmer, leaving virtually nothing for market. This non-linear correlation explains why a 30 percent reduction in the grain harvest often doubled the price of bread, whereas a 50 percent reduction quintupled it. Thus, if the harvest failed for two or more consecutive years, starvation became almost inevitable.
All of those effects do not even take into account the large portion of peasants who were sharecroppers. Despite an ever-increasing array of rights previously denied them, anywhere between one fourth and one third of farmers in northern Italy, and between one third and one half in the south, fell into this category. This meant that, depending on the arrangement with the landlord, up to half or two thirds of the “market share” of the crops went directly to the landlord. The above-mentioned shortages rendered his situation even direr, up to including homelessness and destitution in addition to hunger.
In the middle of the century, a string of cold winters, late springs, and wet summers reduced the agricultural output of most of the Holy Roman Empire. In south Germany, in May 1626, hailstones the size of walnuts combined with a heavy frost that killed many crops; while the following year, according to the diary kept by Hans Heberle, “a great snow fell” just after New Year and covered the ground until Easter Day. “It was so harsh a winter that no-one could remember another like it,” and “only after Easter could the peasants go to their fields and begin to farm.” The autumn also saw heavy precipitation, and in 1628 some Alpine villages experienced snowfalls, sometimes heavy, every month. It proved to be the first “year without a summer,” to afflict Europe in the Seventeenth Century, but it would not be the last. In many areas, neither grain nor grapes ever ripened. Many sought scapegoats for this extreme weather: an unparalleled spate of witchcraft trials occurred, some involving the execution of hundreds of suspects at a time. Others, reverting to an ancient and dark European tradition, blamed the Jews. A popular print from mid-century Germany showed a Jew who has secured a monopoly of the wine harvest, with a series of political and extreme weather events in the background.
“The Wine Jew”, an anti-Semitic poster from mid-Seventeenth Century Germany. This poster features the devil guiding a Jewish merchant to hell.
France’s efforts to dominate Europe failed in part because extreme climatic events produced repeated economic crises. A sequence of unusually wet winters and summers between 1641 and 1647 (including a “year without a summer” in 1644) either reduced or destroyed crops, culminating in a famine that coincided with a plague epidemic. Lyon, France’s second city, lost half its population, and hundreds of thousands died in the countryside. The catastrophe also reduced the demand for industrial goods and paralyzed trade, making it far harder to mobilize the necessary human and material resources for war. This did not only affect the number of men available to the King of France, but their very height and appearance. The record cards (fiches) compiled for each of the thousands of men who enlisted in the French army in the middle decades of the century (circa 1640-70) reveal an average height of only 160 centimeters (five feet, three inches).
Thus, Italy’s continued and steady population growth and its long string of successful harvests gave her an advantage over rival and ally alike. It even lent the government of Gian Gastone I a steadier political climate at home. In a pleasant inverse of the usual adage that poor weather and harvests leads the populace to question whether their ruler had somehow offended God, the Italian population of this time was more likely to think their sovereign had somehow won the affection of Almighty. It seemed a reasonable explanation for their own good luck in light of a steady stream of reports of drought in Spain, poor harvests in France, and famine in Germany. Thus, the burden of taxes to fund the king’s armies and fleets did not cause the same level of hardship to the peasants of the Val Padana as they did to their cousins in Andalusia, the Vendee, or the Ruhr.
The King of Italy sat atop of large and complex pyramid of social classes, disjointed political processes, and profitable economic arrangements. At the bottom, and forming the bulk of the population, was the peasantry. Despite Italy’s high levels of urbanization, the peasants nevertheless remained the dominant class in terms of sheer numbers.
The peasantry were not, any more than the bourgeois or nobility, a homogenous class, but rather a hierarchy of sub-groups. For example, in the small village of Novellara in Emilia, the peasantry consisted of one or two contadini grossi, or large farmers; five or six medium laborers; twenty or so smaller peasants owning small parcels of land, renting some more, and doing industrial work of some kind; and twenty to fifty families of of lavoratori, often wool or linen weavers. This ratio was typical of most rural towns in Italy.
To begin at the top, the contadino grosso owned at least two horses and a plough; in other words, he could plough his own fields. On average, he owned about twenty-five acres and leased another farm of about the same size; and he probably would not possess more than eight cattle, five pigs, and thirty sheep. Some of the poorer contadini grossi took on a second occupation, such as butchery or haulage. On the other hand, a minority of them grew wealthy by becoming landlords, that is to say, by leasing properties of 200, 300, or 400 acres from noble or ecclesiastical landowners. An even smaller number grew extremely rich by becoming raccoglitori di tasse (tax and duty collectors) for the government.
While such wealthy contadini grossi might be difficult to distinguish from the nascent bourgeoisie, the poorer ones were difficult to sift from the medium-level peasants. The better off families in this lower group owned perhaps ten acres and rented ten more. Possessing no horses, they perhaps owned a mule, three or four cattle, two or three pigs, and ten or so sheep. Only in good years could they properly feed their families, while a mediocre or bad harvest brought indebtedness or starvation. For half the year, they had to make ends meet by weaving, tailoring, carpentering, and so on. The family of General Alessandro di Ferrari, for example, came from such an economic background.
Not counting the paupers and vagabonds, the poorest people in the village were the lavoratori, or laborers. These people possessed (or shared with another family) a one-roomed cottage with a loft, a little garden, and maybe two and a half acres of land, and leased about the same amount. They owned no livestock except a starved cow that grazed along the edges of their lands, four or five chickens, perhaps a pig, and usually three or four sheep. Depending on the region of Italy, when a peasant leased land additional to his own, he either rented it or became a sharecropper. This latter arrangement was especially prevalent in the Mezzogiorno, where the tenants gave half or a third of their harvest to the landlord.
This group, particularly in less bountiful years, also formed a sort of rural proto-proletariat. They were a general and often mobile labor force, hedging and ditching, carting, harvesting, grape-picking, hay-making, threshing, and generally performing the menial tasks for the contadini grossi or the aristocracy. It was a rare lavoratore who was not in debt to a contadino grosso who had ploughed his lot for him, lent him seed, wood, and so on; and the lavoratore paid his debts by hard work.
Above the peasant class was the bourgeoisie, or borghesia in Italian. The early borghesia was a miscellaneous collection of social groups and to give them all one name is probably misleading. Highest in status were the great bankers and financiers of Florence, Milan, Genoa, and Venice. They lent money to kings and states; funded the construction and maintenance of fleets; insured ships and shipments against loss; and generally lubricated the economic engines of Italy and Europe by managing its money. They were followed by the ship-owners and merchants of the great port cities and then the manufacturers of the Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, and the Veneto. After this strata came the ufficiali di governo (“government officers”, to distinguish them from military officers) who had not yet become members of the nobility. Close behind these were the members of the professions: lawyers, doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries, along with writers, painters, and architects, not to mention master-craftsmen of the guilds and corporations. Among them should be included not only the great farmers of the villages, who leased estates of three to four hundred acres from noble or ecclesiastical landlords and employed small armies of men to do the bulk of the manual labor, but also the main body of the clergy and the whole gamut of the piccola borghesia (petit-bourgeoisie). This last group included the holders of small offices in local government and the masters of the smaller workshops, which typically employed perhaps one or two journeymen and two to four apprentices. Taken together, the borghesia was a huge reservoir of talent and industry. Steadily fed at one end by constant streams of successful peasantry, it produced at the other end the statesmen and businessmen, the philosophers and artists, who made Italy into one of the greatest and most influential countries in the world. This strata of society was one of Italy’s great strengths, and historically also the Medici’s most solid bedrock of support.
At the base of the socio-economic pyramid lay the majority of the population: the vast army of artisans, laborers, and domestic servants in the towns and cities, and the numberless peasants of the countryside. At times, it was difficult to distinguish between those two groups. The streets of the towns were often filled with starving peasants, on the one hand, while, on the other, manufacturers in such centers as Milan, Lucca, Modena, and Bologna were using putout systems to turn hordes of small farmers into a semi-industrial proletariat. The relations between the working masses and their king were of the utmost simplicity. Aside from the rare case of desperate rebellion, the minds of the peasants and workers were exclusively concerned with the struggle for existence, for they were chronically in debt, permanently under-nourished, and now and then decimated by famine (though for most Italians, at least, large-scale famines became almost unheard of by the second half of the century). Still, despite consistent efforts by a number of Medici kings, the monarchy was unable to stamp out (and, indeed, often completely ignored) the terrible exploitation which the masses suffered at the hands of nature and their social superiors.
All of these hardships were visited even more harshly on women. In addition to working in the fields or workshops, women were expected to take the lead on maintaining the household. They of course also bore children, something that was both exhausting and very dangerous. An estimate of maternal mortality using death certificates and baptismal records indicated a maternal death rate between 24 and 30 per 1,000 baptisms. Childbirth, like everything else in society, was heavily influenced by social class. The upper classes were encouraged to reproduce as much as possible, and a woman who was pregnant or recovering from childbirth took time to rest while servants took care of her and the child. The lower classes worked right up to and soon following birth, as they had to work to eat.
In Seventeenth Century Italy, most women were married between the ages of 21 and 23 and often had five to ten children, depending on whether they survived childbirth. Childbirth was so dangerous that a woman would make out her will as soon as she found out she was pregnant. Poorer women, who were responsible for the nutrition of their own children, had an age-old method of birth control: breastfeeding. In addition to feeding the child, breastfeeding women were less likely to become pregnant and thus childbirth was spaced out in a more manageable way. However, among the upper classes, breastfeeding was left to wet nurses, which meant that the mother could soon be pregnant again.
Motherhood was even more frightening for those people who were enslaved. Infant mortality among African slaves in the Americas during the Seventeenth Century ranged between 28 and 50 percent, and mortality in children under ten was 40 to 50 percent, due to maternal malnutrition, overwork, disease, and lack of medical access. Slave owners blamed the mothers for infant deaths, and there is evidence that some babies were deliberately smothered by their parents to spare the child a life of slavery, but other factors contributed greatly to the infant death rate as well.
For the women of the time, an alternative to a life of toil and bearing children was the life of a nun. In Italy, by 1650, perhaps 70,000 women lived in nunneries, most of them in towns. Nunneries housed eight percent of the total female population of Bologna, nine percent in Ferrara, eleven percent in Florence, and twelve percent in Siena. Many nuns took the veil through a religious vocation; others did so because some disability placed them at a disadvantage in the outside world; others still sought temporary refuge in the cloisters from abusive husbands or while their husbands were away. A few, no doubt, felt attracted by the lavish lifestyle of certain convents, where servants and slaves made up half the population and in some nunneries even outnumbered the nuns. But a considerable number of young women in the Seventeenth Century entered convents against their will. Cassandra Ruffo, daughter of a Veronese patriarch, was one of them.
Her father sent her to a nunnery at age 13, claiming that, because of the economic depression, he lacked the money for appropriate dowry. Then she wrote several books—with titles like Innocence undone or the father’s tyranny and The nun’s hell—lamenting her lot. “Consider it a fact,” she thundered in one of them, “that more than one-third of nuns, confined against their will, find their senses opposing their reason, and subject themselves unwillingly and out of fear to the outrageous misfortune cruelly created for them by their fathers.”
Many convents also accepted foundlings. Indeed, some institutions installed a special “wheel of fortune” to make it easier for mothers to abandon their unwanted offspring: they could place their babies on the wheel outside anonymously and then rotate it inwards for collection within. At the Foundling Hospital of Milan, where desperate mothers left some 400 babies a year, use of the “wheel of fortune” (scaffetta) followed the fluctuations in grain prices with sickening regularity: in a year of food scarcity four or five infants might be placed on the wheel in a single night.
Most of those who entered a Foundling Hospital died there—for the simple reason that almost half of all foundlings were abandoned within their first week, and at that vulnerable age, without the immediate intervention of a wet nurse, they would die. Moreover, since “mortality tends to increase with admissions”, life expectations fell as admissions rose: in the Ospedale degli Innocenti (Hospital of the Innocents) in Florence, one-third of the 700 foundlings abandoned in the famine year of 1614 died on their first day; half died within a week; and almost two-thirds died within a month.
The wheel outside the Ospedale degli Innocenti upon which parents could deposit their babies
Even for most of the rest of the population, disease and death were always a threat. In many cases, want was the precursor to death by plague. The people of Florence, like those of other cities, followed with trepidation the news of the spread of disease in other places. Fear spread as the disease approached closer and closer and, despite the precautions, always arrived. When the epidemic exploded, victims died in the hundreds per day. And, for the most part, it was the “small people” who filled the communal graves. Malnourished and physically compromised by the backbreaking nature of their work, they were essentially pre-destined to die in cases of disease outbreak. It was not as if the plague made social distinctions, but the wealthy, who were better fed and lived above (often literally) the squalor of the commoners, to include the possibility of retreat to country villas, were better able to defend themselves.
Atop this pyramid, sat the king. Half a decade into his reign, Gian Gastone I was proving to be an enigma. He loved the luxurious lifestyle of the Florentine court but he also felt at home in the field with his army, as demonstrated during campaigns in Cyprus and Piedmont. He embraced the enslavement of Africans while also showing a genuine admiration for the natives of North America. He was a womanizer who kept a well-populated stable of mistresses, yet he also listened to the counsel of women he deemed capable and would go on to promote several of them to unprecedented positions of governmental power.
In 1647, Gian Gastone sponsored the founding of the justly celebrated Academia del Cimento (the Test), whose motto was Provando e Riprovando and whose emblem was a furnace with three crucibles. Their first meeting place was right at the Palazzo Pitti. It would go on to make important contributions to scientific knowledge and contribute heavily to the Europe-wide “Republic of Letters”. Gian Gastone, long fascinated with Galileo, took a real interest in the proceedings, composing its quarrels, signing its correspondence, and following closely the work of Evangelista Torricelli da Modigliana, inventor of the barometer. The men of the academia experimented with telescopic lenses and all manner of scientific instruments, and commissioning those thermometers, astrolabes, quadrants, hydrometers, calorimeters, and other ingenious mechanical devices, which visitors to the Pitti Palace saw displayed in great numbers. A little over a decade after its founding, two of the Academia’s leading scientists, Vincenzo Viviani and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, conducted an experiment to test the speed of sound. They timed the difference between seeing the shot from a cannon and hearing the sound. Their calculated value of 350 meters per second was more accurate than that of 478 meters per second previously obtained by Pierre Gassendi. Successful experiments such as these greatly added to the Academia’s prestige and notoriety on the continent.
The great scientists Evangelista Torricelli (above) and Vincenzo Viviani (below)
The Academia del Cimento began meeting in the Palazzo Pitti
One of the great minds brought to the forefront under Gian Gastone’s reign belonged to Elena Cornaro Piscopia. Lady Elena was born in the Palazzo Loredan in Venice on 11 December 1616. She was the third child of Gianbattista Cornaro-Piscopia and his mistress Zanetta Boni. Her mother was a peasant and her parents were not married at the time of her birth. Lady Elena was therefore not technically a member of the Cornaro family by birth, as Venetian law barred illegitimate children of nobles from noble privilege, even if recognized by the noble parent. Worse for Zanetta's case, she was from an extremely poor peasant family. She had likely fled to Venice in order to escape devastation brought to Italy during the War of the League of Sevilla, and soon found herself the mistress of a member of one of the most powerful noble dynasties in the Republic. Gianbattista and Zanetta married officially in 1624, but their children were barred from noble privilege, which angered him.
As a young girl, Cornaro was considered a prodigy. Giovanni Fabris, a priest and friend of the family, recommended she begin classical education. She studied Latin and Greek under distinguished instructors, and became proficient in these languages, as well as French and Spanish, by the age of seven. She also mastered Hebrew and Arabic, earning the title of Oraculum Septilingue ("Seven-language Oracle"). Her later studies included mathematics, philosophy and theology. Coincidentally, she briefly met King Alberto I during a trip to Florence with other children of patrician Venetian families. They were there to present a gift to the King of Italy to honor the occasion of him being “elected” Doge of Venice.
Cornaro also became an expert musician, mastering harpsichord, clavichord, harp, and violin. In her late teens and early twenties, she became interested in physics, astronomy, and linguistics. Carlo Rinaldini, her tutor in philosophy, and at that point the Chairman of Philosophy at the University of Padua, published a book on geometry in 1638 and dedicated it to a twenty-two year old Elena. After the death of her old mentor, Fabris, she became even closer to Rinaldini, who took over her studies.
In 1639, she translated the Colloquy of Christ by the Carthusian monk Lanspergius from Spanish into Italian. The translation was dedicated to Gian Paolo Oliva, her close friend and confessor. The volume was picked up by the Medici Press, which issued in five editions between 1639 and 1642. She was invited to be a part of many scholarly societies when her fame spread and in 1640 she became president of the Venetian society Accademia dei Pacifici.
With the support and encouragement of Rinaldini, as well as Felice Rotondi, she applied to pursue a degree in theology from the University of Padua. She was initially met with resistance from Cardinal Gregorio Barbarigo, bishop of Padua, on the grounds that she was a woman. At the time, the bishop of the city was free to veto any appointments or degrees handed out at the university, guarding the theology department particularly closely. However, he eventually relented after meeting Cornaro in person, with one condition. Rather than receive the degree in theology, she pursued one in philosophy instead. After a brilliant course of study, the degree was awarded on 25 June 1646, in a ceremony in the Padua Cathedral. The University authorities, the professors of all the faculties, the students, and most of the nobility of the city, together with many invited guests from the Universities of Bologna, Perugia, Rome and Naples were present for the event. Lady Elena spoke for an hour in Classical Latin, explaining difficult passages selected at random from the works of Aristotle: one from the Posterior Analytics and the other from the Physics. The assembled crowd listened with great attention and when she finished, she received a loud applause as Professor Rinaldini proceeded to award her the insignia of the laurea: a book of philosophy, a laurel wreath on her head, a ring on her finger, and an ermine mozzetta over her shoulders. She was proclaimed Magistra et Doctrix Philosophiae (“teacher and doctor in philosophy” thus becoming one of the first women to receive an academic degree from a university, and the first ever to receive a doctoral degree in any field.
Elena Cornaro Piscopia was one of the great intellectual and scientific minds of her era
With her fame and success she had already earned, Cornaro soon found a place in the Gian Gastone’s inner circle. Lady Elena was accepted into the Academia in Florence and within several months, the king approached her with an offer to serve as his Minister of the Interior. At only 31 years old, Lady Elena became one of the youngest ministers to serve on the king’s council and also one of the most powerful women in Italy.
The king had a taste for fine and elaborate furnishings and decorations as well. Accordingly, scores of craftsmen were kept busily at work in this intricate manufacture, assembling ornaments and bas-reliefs and elaborately decorating furniture in marble, ivory, crystal, gold, brightly colored minerals, and semi-precious stones. To contain these works, and the family’s ever-increasing collection of paintings and sculptures, Gian Gastone was obliged to make extensive alterations to the Pitti Palace to provide it with suitable galleries. He adorned these with murals by some of the most accomplished artists of his time: Cirro Ferri, Francesco Furini, Pietro da Cortona, Giovanni da San Giovanni, and Baldassare Franceschini, better known as Il Volterrano. In the galleries thus decorated, visitors were able to inspect the latest additions to the royal collection.
Whatever his faults, Gian Gastone I and his council kept Italy in a position of relative stability. This was a stark contrast to the kingdom’s neighbor and ally to the northeast: the Archduchy of Austria. Archduchess Maria Theresa I had ruled her lands capably since 1593, but as she approached the final years of her reign, a series of religious, political, and dynastic disputes roiled the Habsburg monarchy and nearly toppled it.
A revolt of Protestant peasants in inner Austria broke out over the winter of 1645-46. The rebels had been hit hard by successive years of bad harvests and were outraged at reports that they were purposely being denied by from the Catholic monarchy. Led by a minor aristocrat and army veteran named Benno Steiger, they marched on Innsbruck but were met by a combined Austro-Italian army on 10 February 1646. They were quickly routed and the revolt was crushed.
An Austro-Italian army decisively defeated the Lutheran Revolt
On 1 April 1649, after reigning for 55 years, 8 months, and 30 days, Maria Theresa I of Austria died at the age of 70. The Archduchess had led Austria capably and effectively and restored Habsburg prestige following the family’s loss of the title of Holy Roman Empire following the War of the Religious Leagues. Though she had never married and died without issue, Maria Theresa had even worked to secure a stable succession. She had named her cousin and longtime governor of the Austrian Netherlands, Johann von Habsburg, Duke of Styria, as her heir. However, Johann died only four months before Maria Theresa, leaving his son, the 55-year-old Matthias von Habsburg, as the successor in theory. However, Matthias was never “officially” declared an heir to the throne. Thus, upon the Archduchess’s death, the door was left open for a potential pretender to step through.
The death of Archduchess Maria Theresa I after a 55-year reign marked the end of an era for Austria
This challenge to the succession came in the form of Viktor von Guttenburg, Duke of Tirol and son of the Archduchess’s younger sister, Maria Amalia. Though Matthias bore the Habsburg name, he was a more distant relation to the deceased Maria Theresa than Guttenburg was. The latter was the son of a sibling, the former the son of a cousin. Thus, the familial proximity added to Guttenburg’s legitimacy. Furthermore, his well-known support for policies of religious tolerance earned him strong support among Austria’s Lutheran and Calvinist minorities. However, this also earned him the nickname “Heretic Usurper” in pro-Matthias propaganda leaflets, despite the fact that Guttenburg was, and remained, a Roman Catholic.
Matthias was quickly crowned Archduke Matthias II in the Hofburg on 8 April. Meanwhile, Guttenburg gathered his supporters in Lienz, though by the end of April, he had yet to make any claim to the throne. Still, with more than 10,000 men assembled in the Drava Valley, Vienna could not help but take notice. Matthias sent a series of urgent messages to Florence, depicting Guttenburg and his supporters as a nascent Protestant rebellion similar to the one the two states jointly crushed in 1646. Gian Gastone I was only too happy to oblige and once again sent his army over the Alps. With the reassurance of Italian support, Matthias then declared Guttenburg and all of his followers to be rebels and heretics and issued warrants for their arrests.
When this news reached Lienz, Guttenburg was shocked. He had yet to make any declaration or claim to the throne. However, with Vienna prepared to destroy him preemptively, he quickly moved to have himself crowned. In a ceremony at Bruck Castle on 21 May 1649, he was crowned Archduke Viktor I by a gathering of his supporters. However, his time as a pretender would prove to be quite brief.
Bruck Castle outside Lienz, site of the coronation of Viktor von Guttenburg
By the beginning of June, a Habsburg army was closing in from the east as an Italian one approached from the west. The Austrians were led by the veteran commander Benno Steiger and under orders to give no quarter. With both enemy armies approaching along the south bank of the Drava, Guttenburg and his followers fled from Bruck Castle and the surrounding area and crossed the river to the north bank. While this bought them some time and an opportunity to defend the river crossings, it did allow the Italians and Austrians to join forces at Lienz. With a combined force of 76,000 men facing off against Guttenburg’s 11,000, Steiger could afford to take his time. He used his Italian allies to cut off retreat routes to the rebel army while his assault force would consist primarily of Austrians. By 10 June, Lienz and its environs were completely surrounded and Steiger decided to attack the following morning. Under heavy cover fire from their artillery, the loyalist infantry crossed the Drava in force. They quickly overwhelmed the determined but largely inexperienced rebel army. Within a few hours, Guttenburg’s followers were fleeing into the hills, only to be intercepted and cut down by Italian mounted patrols.
Guttenburg surrendered by late morning and asked Steiger to spare the rest of his men. The loyalist commander promptly rejected any pleas for mercy, and the wholesale slaughter of the pretender’s supporters continued for most of the day. Guttenburg was then brought back to Vienna in chains for a trial and execution. Matthias had his cousin beheaded and his limbs sent on road trips around the Habsburg lands to dissuade any further talk of supplanting the new Archduke’s rule. Fortunately for Matthias, he was spared any further need for kin slaying because Guttenburg’s two surviving children were both daughters. The two girls as well as Guttenburg’s grieving widow were promptly married off to Habsburg loyalists. This ended Guttenburg’s Rebellion, the most serious internal challenge to Austrian power since the late 1500s.
The pretender Viktor von Guttenburg was destroyed at the Battle of Lienz
In West Africa, another horrific drama was playing out. The formation of the Compagnia Africana represented the true beginning of the Italian slave trade. Andrew Cavalcanti, Count of Macerata and Governor-General of the Bonny Colony, was the leader of the endeavor, but countless well-to-do Italians would make their fortunes in the capture, purchase, and sale of human beings. Any and all anti-slavery sentiment in Italy, whether from priests and bishops or from noblemen who considered the business dishonorable, were quickly drowned in a flood of gold.
The first slave ship of the Compagnia della Guinea departed on 1 October 1646
Over the centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, around 12.4 million people were loaded onto slave ships and carried through a “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic to hundreds of delivery points stretched out over thousands of miles. By the mid-Seventeenth Century the horror and drama of this massed, forced human migration was already very well evident. Along the dreadful way, 1.8 million of them died, their bodies cast overboard to the sharks that followed the ships. Most of the 10.6 million who survived were thrown into the bloody maw of a killing plantation system, which they would in turn resist in all ways imaginable.
Yet even these extraordinary numbers do not convey they magnitude of the drama. Many people captured in Africa died as they marched in bands and coffles (human trains) to the slave ships, although lack of records makes it impossible to know their numbers. Depending on time and place, anywhere between one tenth and one half of captives perished between the point of enslavement and the boarding of the slave ship. Another fifteen percent, again dependent on time and place, would die within their first year of laboring life in the New World. From stage to stage—expropriation in Africa, the Middle Passage, initial exploitation in the Americas—roughly 5 million men, women, and children died.
Throughout this period, none of the victims of the slave trade stopped resisting. In some cases, this meant fighting against their captors and masters, in others it meant taking one’s own life, not only to end the suffering, but to deprive the perpetrators of their profits. However, once a person had been chained, their methods of resistance became weaker, nearly futile. Those who were still free, on the other hand, could resist more effectively.
In Bonny, a leader named Opuamakuba, formed a grand coalition of Ibibio, Ijaw, Efik, and Igbo-speaking clans to challenge the Compagnie della Guinea’s stranglehold on the lower Niger Delta. By early 1647, he had assembled a force of approximately 4,000 men. The Italians had 3,000 men in the Delta split between two locations. About 2,000 soldiers were in the recently formed settlement of Città Giardino, which despite its pleasant-sounding name (“Garden City”), was a massive slave depot. The remaining thousand were further downriver, at a fortress on the island of Bonny designed to control access up and down the river.
Faced with harsh treatment, kidnapping, and enslavement of the Cavalcanti regime, a coalition of Niger Delta groups revolted against Italian rule
Opuamakuba proved to be a capable commander, ambushing small Italian patrols and evading the main body of the colonial force sent out to capture him and his men. They outmaneuvered the Italians and reached the coast, where they sacked the coastal settlement of La Perla killing and burning everyone and everything they found. However, their good luck would soon run out. Moving in three separate columns, the Italians cornered the rebels on a peninsula just across a channel from Bonny Island. With nowhere to escape, the Africans mounted a desperate stand. Despite a determined effort to hold the line, Italian firepower won the day. What followed was a massacre horrific in scale. All of the revolt’s leaders, including Opuamakuba, were disemboweled and castrated while still alive and then left to die in the sun. The rest of his men were put in chains, marched to the coast, and quickly loaded onto waiting slave ships and sent across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. The defeat was a disaster for the coalition, but it was not the last time the local people would seek to throw off the yoke of their oppressors.
Late in 1649, a second revolt erupted in Bonny. This time, most of those taking up arms had no illusions for victory. In the three years since Opuamakuba Revolt, the Compagnie della Guinea’s grip on the region had tightened significantly. This revolt was intended to kill as many of the enemy as possible and to die with honor. They were all in agreement to give no quarter, to show no mercy to any Italians they encountered; they expected none in return. Unlike Opuamakuba, the new revolt’s leader, Awusa, had no pretensions to kingship or independence. His was a campaign for vengeance and a dignified death as an alternative to submission to slavery.
The second major revolt in Ibani in four years
The rebels ambushed a few Italian patrols but most of the foreign population was now living within the protective walls of the Italian trade posts. Thus, their ability to actually inflict casualties on the Italians was limited. The garrison marched out once again and, upon finding the rebel host, fell upon them and killed them in great numbers. The captured rebels suffered the same grisly fates as their predecessors two years earlier. The defeat of the 1649 revolt cowed much of the remaining population for a long time going forward. The profits of the Italian slave trade continued to swell the pockets of merchants and kept the Italian treasury well filled even as its victims continued to die on ships and in the Caribbean plantations.
Back in Italy, Gian Gastone set his sights on another sort of conquest. The Duchy of Savoy remained as an independent state in the mountainous northwest corner of Italy. For some time, the state had survived as a buffer between Italy and France. This continued existence had more to do with both major powers hoping to avoid a massive war over control of Torino than it did anything else. However, with France experiencing a series of crises, both economic and dynastic in nature, the occasion was ripe for Italy. Furthermore, the long-reigning Duke Tomasso III was ill and feeble. After making the requisite diplomatic overtures toward Paris, Florence got the assurance from their ally that there would be no issue with an annexation of the Savoy lands.
Italian diplomatic skill was in full display during the Savoy Question
Still, the Italians needed a good pretext for invasion. They were rewarded when Duke Tomasso died on 5 December 1646, leaving his seventeen year old grandson, Girolamo, as the new ruler. Young and inexperienced, the new duke was the perfect victim for the King of Italy’s ambitions.
The Armata Reale marched into Piedmont on 12 January 1647, with the king leading the vanguard force. Gian Gastone’s desire for a “splendid little war,” was quickly fulfilled. On 26 January, the Savoyard army came out to meet him at Chieri. After a brief bout of fighting in the morning between the Piedmontese army and the King of Italy’s cavalry, the main body of Italians arrived and the former quickly surrendered. The king’s charge on the field at Chieri was even immortalized by the poet Mutatesia Leonelli in his poem, La Carica Reale. The road to Torino was open and the rest of the war was merely a formality.
The surrender of the Savoyard army ended the brief fighting of the Annexation of Piedmont
The Italians invested Torino and sat there. They made little effort to shell the city or tunnel under it. With the whole province other than the capital under de facto Italian control, there was little reason to delay the inevitable. With no hope of relief, Duke Girolamo I and his garrison surrendered on 13 April 1647. The garrison was allowed to depart peacefully under terms of a ceasefire agreement. One condition was that the Duke of Savoy travel immediately downstream along the Po to Pavia under the guard of a joint Italian-Savoyard escort. Gian Gastone instead stayed in Torino for six days, enjoying the fruits of his newest conquest. The city suffered relatively little physical damage during the siege and the King of Italy enjoyed making the rounds of the Torinese aristocrats’ palaces. He then took a leisurely ride down to Pavia on horseback, arriving there on 27 April.
The surrender of Torino marked the end of the Duchy of Savoy as a sovereign state
At Pavia Duke Girolamo signed the peace treaty, thus handing over his lands to Medici overlordship. In a reprisal of earlier Medici conquests in Italy, the House of Savoy was allowed to retain its ducal title, albeit as vassals of the King of Italy rather than sovereigns in their own right. Still, it was better than they could have reasonably expected. Still, the preservation of his ancestral title did not come cheap for Duke Girolamo.
The Kingdom of Italy annexed the Duchy of Savoy in the Treaty of Pavia. Duke Girolamo was nevertheless allowed to retain his title
There was a dark side to the Italian conquest of Piedmont, one that would prove dire for adherents of the Waldensian faith. Prior to the annexation, the House of Savoy’s embrace of Waldensianism had protected the people of that faith. The Piedmontese population was evenly split between Catholics and their Reformed fellow subjects, though the majority of the duke’s subjects coexisted peacefully. The Waldensian population had enjoyed tolerance and freedom of belief and conscience for centuries, with these provisions written down in several documents. The annexation radically transformed that.
Duke Girolamo and the rest of his family were forced to convert to Catholicism following the Treaty of Pavia. Only two months later, due to constant pressure exerted by Italy and the Church in Rome, the duke was compelled to issue the Edict of Suppression from his enforced exile in Florence. This was, for all intents and purposes, a religious expulsion order. It read that:
“Every head of a family, with the individuals of that family, of the reformed religion, of what rank, degree, or condition whatsoever, none excepted, inhabiting and possessing estates in the Duchy of Piedmont, should, within three days after the publication thereof, withdraw and depart, and be withdrawn out of the said places, and translated into the places and limits tolerated by his highness during his pleasure. And all this to be done on pain of death, and confiscation of house and goods, unless within the limited time they turned Roman Catholics.”
It is unknown how complicit Duke Girolamo was in going along with his new master’s demands or if he had means to resist such an order. Even the origin of the Edict of Suppression remains unclear. While Gian Gastone could have decided the Waldensians were a threat to his new conquest, as he later claimed, he had never shown much enthusiasm for suppressing religious minorities in his own lands. Most Waldensian refused to obey the Edict of Suppression, thus causing the government to send troops to plunder and burn their houses, and to station over 10,000 soldiers in their valleys. The Savoyard army consisted of local Piedmontese soldiers, as well as Italians under the command of the Duke of Urbino. These troops were of low quality, poorly disciplined, and led by an inexperienced commander.
On 21 April 1647, Easter Sunday, the atrocity that came to be known as “Piedmontese Easter” commenced: a massacre of thousands of Waldensian civilians (4,000 to 6,000 depending on the estimate) committed by ducal and Italian troops. The motivation behind such a harsh crackdown on a religious group that had been largely quiet in recent years remains a mystery. Some contemporaries believed that King Gian Gastone feared that any disunity within newly acquired Piedmont could tempt either the French or the Swiss to intervene there. Others were of the opinion that it was all a test of the Duke of Piedmont’s loyalty to his new liege.
Italian troops torture and murder a Waldensian woman, allegedly Anna Charboniere, during Piedmontese Easter.
Regardless of reason, the massacre caused an exodus of Waldensian refugees to the Valley of Perosa, and led to the formation of rebel groups under the leadership of Joshua Janavel, Jean Léger, and Bartolomeo Jahier. Several states, including Nassau and the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, attempted to intervene diplomatically and offered sanctuary to anyone who could reach their borders. Reports of the massacres spread quickly throughout Protestant Europe sparking outrage, especially in Britain. King Oliver Cromwell threatened Italy with war but London backed off after Vienna and Paris pledged their support to Florence. The English poet John Milton was inspired to write the sonnet “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”. Within Italy’s government, the massacre led to the resignation of Gian Gastone’s Calvinist Foreign Minister, Boncompagni. While he did stay on as Lord High Admiral of the Navy, the Duke of Caserta’s departure from the foreign ministry opened the door for the more warlike Gioachino Gori to take over, shifting Italy’s priorities from peace and cooperation to war and profit in the coming decade.
Gori was a business partner and friend of Andrea Cavalcanti and a major investor in the budding slave trade. He financed the building of most of the Cavalcanti slaver fleet and was eager to use his new power to increase revenues for himself and his friends. Despite being openly in the job for his own profit, Gori proved a capable, if tough negotiator and kept the king happy by keeping trade as gainful as his predecessor but without troubling his master with Boncomagni’s moral qualms. He was a skilled trade negotiator with deep connections in the Italian mercantile community and helped increase Italy’s trade profits even more.
Gioachino Gori replaced Enzo Boncompagni as the king’s new foreign minister
Competitive Merchants increased Italian trade power
On 16 June, Duke Girolamo issued the Declaration of Mercy, which constituted a peace treaty between him and the Waldensians. This largely led to the subsidence of both internal and international tensions. The massacre of 1647 was the last major persecution of the Waldensians and over the coming decade, several of the major restrictions on their freedoms were relaxed.
The four-month long conquest of Savoy was the only time the Kingdom of Italy was at war with a foreign power through the decade of the 1640s. Italy, as a whole, remained largely peaceful and prosperous throughout this period. This did not mean, however, that the Italian army was not active. In addition to suppressing revolts in Genoa and Cyprus in the years 1643-44, a portion of the army was sent east to support the Kingdom of Poland in its “grand campaign” against the Ottoman Empire.
King Jan III of Poland desired to expel the Ottomans from the Balkans and felt that they were weakened enough to falter in the face of a determined Christian invasion. To boost his numbers he asked for support from the Italians without Italy actually entering the war on Poland’s side. This was perfectly acceptable to Gian Gastone, who wanted the glory of sending troops to fight the Turks while also limiting the negative impacts the war would have on Italian commerce.
The King of Poland personally requested Alessandro di Ferrari lead the expeditionary force. Gian Gastone agreed despite, or perhaps because of, the general’s spectacular defeat in Cyprus four years earlier. It was well known that the king despised his most senior military commander and, prior to the Polish request for support, was still considering sending Ferrari into exile. This opportunity saved the old general and gave him a chance to redeem himself after the humiliation of the Battle of St. Hillarion. For the king, this was an opportunity to get a commander he openly disliked out of Italy.
The Italian Expeditionary Force began assembling at Treviso in the spring of 1647. Italy did not send its best troops east. The elite regiments stayed home while the ones that did go were poorly equipped and trained or from the more heavily Protestant parts of the country. Thus, Ferrari had no Florentine units at his disposal, but had two full regiments each from the Protestant provinces of Ferrara, Cremona, and Brescia. Still, by the time the newly formed army was ready to march, Ferrari commanded 20,000 men broken into ten regiments of infantry, four of cavalry, and six of artillery. This was far from the full power Italy’s army could bring to bear against a foe, but it was nothing to ignore either. Only a fraction of the men had any combat experience and that number dropped even further if the brief and lopsided skirmish between the Italian and Savoyard armies in January 1647 was excluded. Considering the poor quality of the troops, Ferrari and his subordinate commanders did an admirable job whipping them into fighting shape.
The Italian Expeditionary Force under Alessandro di Ferrari joined the Poles in their war against the Turks
The army departed Treviso 5 December 1647 and slowly made its way through Austrian lands and into the Balkans. Meeting little resistance, they advanced along the Adriatic coast and took the strategic pot of Ragusa on 14 January 1648. Late in 1647, the Poles had suffered a number of key defeats and had been pushed back nearly to their own border. However, the arrival of the Italians as well as a force from Polish ally Circassia helped stabilize the front and put the allies back on the offensive footing. As the Christian advance continued, the Turks sought to stabilize their front along a line running from Salonika in the south on the Aegean coast and then north up to the Danube.
On 1 March, the Italians rendezvoused with Polish and Circassian forces to try to break through the Turkish line. Ferrari had overall command and he quickly prepared his newly reinforced army for battle. In a demonstration that his tactical and troop leading skills had not degraded, the Count of Maranello led his combined army to a series of spectacular victories that boosted Christian confidence and renewed the push toward Istanbul. On 7 March, they defeated a Turkish army led by the sultan’s son and heir, Prince Mahmut. Despite the defeat, the prince led his troops’ withdrawal in good order and prepared to try and stop the Italians again. However, instead of advancing east toward Istanbul, Ferrari pivoted his army and headed north. Moving quickly, they attacked another Turkish force commanded by Grand Vizier Ramazan Bali Pasha at Nikopol on the Danube. Ferrari mitigated his nearly two to one shortfall in infantry vis-à-vis his foe with expert placement of his artillery. The Christian guns effectively covered their infantry’s advance and repelled all Turkish efforts to force their own line. With that victory, the allies had turned both ends of the Turkish defensive line and then followed it up with subsequent wins over smaller Turkish forces at Kirkkilise on 6 May and at Silistra on 22 May. Over a period of 76 days, the allied army had won four decisive victories over their Turkish foes while covering a distance of over 1,250 kilometers.
Alessandro di Ferrari led the combined allied army to victory in several key battles
After Silistra, the Polish command, with Ferrari’s grudging consent, decided to split the army for the final advance on Istanbul. The Circassians, bolstered by Polish troops, would advance from the east along the Aegean coast, the Poles would advance in the center, and the Italians from the north along the Black Sea coast. Since the Italians were already located at their point of advance, they had to wait for the other two parts of the army to reach their start points. This overly complex plan, made worse by poor communication, would prove disastrous. The Italians departed much sooner than their allies and thus were nearing Istanbul while their comrades were still just starting out. The Turks, eager to avenge their previous defeats, threw their strongest army against Ferrari and the Italians. By mid-September, the general realized he was far ahead of his allies and decided to stop at Kırklareli. He sent scouts out ahead and tried to fortify his position. On 19 September, an advanced scouting party sighted the spires of Istanbul in the distance. This would be the furthest the Italians would advance in the war. These same scouts brought back reports of a massive Turkish army closing in on their position. On 22 September, it appeared and made camp south of the allied position. The next day, in a brutal, bloody battle, the Turkish army under Prince Mahmut inflicted a devastating defeat on the Italians. For the Turkish prince, the victory saved him in the eyes of the sultan, his father, and prevented his removal from the line of succession. Ferrari was badly wounded midway through the fighting and despite the heroic actions of several of his officers, the sheer weight of numbers and firepower rendered any hope of victory hopeless. By the end of the day, the Italians left behind over 9,000 dead on the field and were in full retreat. Only Mahmut’s cautiousness and limited pursuit saved the Italians from utter annihilation. In the first days after the battle, the once mighty Italian Expeditionary Force remained little more than a rabble.
The Italian Expeditionary Force got to within X miles of Constantinople as the vanguard of the allied army
Cardinal Angelo Battista, accompanying the Italians as a representative of Paul IV, wrote back to the Pope that, "the Italians had the advantage in skill, speed, grit, and guile, but in the end, only sheer numbers mattered." Granted, Cardinal Battista’s account was biased toward the Catholic side. It is difficult to doubt the valor of the janissary companies that hurled themselves into the center of a determined Italian defense in order to break the line, or that of the sipahi cavalrymen who charged uphill into a hail of cannon fire to capture Italian guns on high ground. Still, regardless of the immediate result of the battle, on a deep level, battles like Kirkkilise boosted the morale and resolve of the Christians all while chipping away at the confidence of the Ottomans. The latter, more used to facing Christians who broke and ran before them, now faced men who fought like demons, constantly pushing forward, sometimes firing in unison, sometimes picking individual targets. The Ottomans despised those who lacked the courage to fight like them, but these were soldiers who would close with them, driven it seemed by a divine anger, shouting and screaming “Gesù” and “Maria”, against the Ottoman cries of “Allah, Allah”.
The war, from a political and strategic perspective, would prove inconclusive and largely resulted in a return to the status quo ante bellum. From a psychological perspective, it was a net positive for Christendom, despite the battlefield setbacks. For the first time, they went head to head with the Turks and matched them blow for blow. It would be another generation before the Catholic powers of Europe would win a decisive victory against their Muslim rival, but the seeds of later success were planted during King Jan’s War.
In the moment, however, it was difficult to ignore the magnitude of the defeat at Kirkkilise. The Italian Expeditionary Force could no longer sustain its operations. The damage done to the army's supply wagons by Ottoman looting after the battle was almost as harmful to the future of the campaign as the casualties. Italian logistics in the Balkans practically ceased to exist. Thus began a bleak, frigid, and miserable slog back to Italy in the middle of winter. The remaining 11,000 men were barely a cohesive force and attrition hit them hard in the coming months.
For most of the journey, Ferrari was a general in name only. Bedridden and forced to travel in the back of a rickety wagon due to a leg wound, he drifted in and out of fever dreams as he tried to recover from his battle injuries. Still, a rough sense of loyalty kept the various regiments in line to prevent the force from disintegrating entirely. If a hostile opposing force had confronted them, they almost certainly would have collapsed instantly, but the discipline and training among the men that remained was at least enough to complete a semi-orderly withdrawal. Unlike the king and court, who sneered at Ferrari's low birth and total lack of social graces, the common soldiers of the Italian Expeditionary Force had a dogged, albeit sometimes grudging, admiration and respect for their commander. To them, the nickname "General Peasant" was not an insult, but an honorific. On more than one occasion, a clique of officers plotted to mutiny but were thwarted by their troops' refusal to cooperate. Carlo Grimaldi, a Florentine nobleman and the descendant of a long and proud line of military men, was Ferrari’s staunchest supporter. During the periods when his superior was too ill or injured to do so, Grimaldi became the de facto commander of the army. The thirty five year old officer commanded a new volunteer regiment formed specifically for the Balkans campaign. Grimaldi had distinguished himself years earlier during the fight against the Cypriot rebels and had won further accolades when he and his men turned the Ottoman flank at Salonika. He was also well connected: his father Maurizio commanded the Grimaldi’s Raiders. This gave him the basis from which he defended his commander and, likely, ensured that Ferrari returned to Italy alive.
Gian Gastone I was determined to not be welcoming or celebratory toward the returning army. Despite having full knowledge that men were suffering and dying during the retreat from the Balkans, the king refused several overtures from Admiral Enzo Boncompagni to dispatch an Italian fleet to pick up the expeditionary force from Ragusa or Split and ferry them back across the Adriatic. Ferrari and his men were in an impossible position with their sovereign. If they had been too successful, the king would have feared Ferrari upstaging him. With defeat, he instead heaped insults, scorn, and humiliation against “General Peasant” and the men who fought, suffered, and died under his command for the cause of Christendom.
When the army finally crossed back into Italy on 25 February 1649, they were ordered to Milan to be sorted back into the regular force. Ferrari, Grimaldi, and a number of the other officers were summoned to Florence to answer for their “offenses”. The king and his minister of war humiliated Ferrari before the whole court, listing his many “failures” and repeatedly mentioning his peasant birth. The general, still unable to stand without the use of a cane, took it all in defiant silence. The king concluded by summarily dismissing him from military service and banished him forever from Florence.
The fifty seven year old Count of Maranello promptly departed without protest. He returned to his ancestral lands in the Val Padana to take up farming once again, though this time as an aristocratic landowner instead of a peasant toiling in the fields. However, after being there for only a few months, he found a new opportunity. Most likely to spite her husband, Queen Carlota Luisa offered Ferrari a well-paid job as military tutor to her seven year old son, Crown Prince Francesco. Ferrari would be the first of a series of skilled and experienced military officers to shape and sharpen the military mind of the future Francesco II. Even at his tender age, the Prince of Naples showed a keen interest in military strategy and history and had a knack for grasping concepts beyond those typically intelligible for a child his age. Ferrari was so content with his new pupil that he went so far as to abdicate his title of Count of Maranello to his eldest son, Carlo, so that he could remain in Naples. His wife and one of his daughters joined him there and the stubborn old commander was perhaps truly happy for the first time in his life. Ferrari remained military tutor to the Crown Prince until his death on 5 April 1652 at the age of sixty.
Carlo Grimaldi was stripped of his regimental command as well. In the words of Minister of War Giovanni Pietro Carnesecchi, he had “defied the advice of more sober and intelligent officers in order to protect a drunken and inept commander.” As a result, Grimaldi was forced to accept a position as a battalion commander back in his father’s regiment, a humiliating setback for an officer with his level of promise and ambition. Several of the other officers who had supported Ferrari through the Balkans retreat suffered similar fates while those who had attempted mutinies were praised and promoted.
Back in the Balkans, the long, bloody war between the King of Poland and the Ottoman Sultan finally came to an end. After a number of defeats, it looked as if the Turks were back to their old ways, driving back the Christians’ invasion and preparing to mount one of their own. Then, on 6 August 1649, Mariusz Korycki led 56,000 Polish troops against Prince Mahmut and his 50,000 strong army. They met east of the village of Dăbuleni, between where the rivers Jiu and Olt meet the Danube. Korycki’s hussars goaded the overeager prince into an attack by charging and withdrawing before the Ottoman center. The Turks and their commander feel for a tactic their own ancestors had successfully employed against Christians for centuries. Instead of waiting horse archers, however, the Turkish troops marched into the teeth of the Polish artillery’s kill zone. Losses were heavy on both sides, but the Ottomans bore the brunt and they were forced back across the Danube. This marked the last time the Turks would pass north of the mighty river for the remainder of the war. After the Battle of Dăbuleni, both sides were ready for peace.
The decisive Polish victory at Dăbuleni halted the Ottoman counter-offensive and caused both sides to favor a peace agreement
Back in the west, a new major conflict was brewing in the Mediterranean. The Spanish-Italian rivalry that first exploded in the War of the League of Sevilla in 1607-15, was about to heat up again. The two powers competed for preeminence from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean and a second bloody war was all but inevitable. From the Florentine perspective, the Spanish were in decline, struggling with internal issues, and stretched too thin. Gian Gastone I was convinced that he could be the king to finally destroy such a hated enemy. As the 1640s gave way to the 1650s, a new war was about to be unleashed on Europe.