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We swear and promise to defend, with our blood
if need be, God, the Supreme Pontiff Pius, Francis II,
King of the Two Sicilies, and our column commander.
Sergeant Pasquale Romano
ON 13 FEBRUARY 1861, King Francis sailed into exile. Gaeta, his last stronghold, surrendered to the Piedmontese besiegers and the Borbone army was disbanded. It was the end of the seven hundred year old Regno.
The Piedmontese tried to win over the Borbone officers, giving over 2,000 of them commissions in the new Italian army or paying pensions to those who preferred to retire, but in March Constantino Nigra, a senior Piedmontese official at Naples, reported they were angry and resentful. As for the other ranks, “we have a horde of Borbone soldiers, disbanded without work or food, who will take to the mountains when spring comes.” He adds that the clergy are hostile and the aristocracy “in mourning for the Borboni.” Farini, governor of ‘The Neapolitan Provinces’, openly admitted that not even a hundred Southerners wanted a united Italy.
Even if the Southern leaders who now emerged were peasants and sometimes criminals, what the Piedmontese called ‘The Brigands’ War’ was none the less a genuine civil war. For a decade 120,000 Piedmontese troops were needed to hold down Southern Italy. Between April 1861 and April 1863 nearly 2,500 “brigands” were killed in combat, over 1,000 shot after surrendering and another 5,500 taken prisoner. These figures are for the Mezzogiorno as a whole – no breakdown is available for Apulia alone – and does not include casualties among the handful of die-hards who went on fighting.
Some of the leaders were former Borbone NCOs, discharged without pensions unlike their officers. Their sole hope was Francis II’s return and they were fighting for his restoration. Large numbers took an oath of loyalty to him, some men continuing to wear the Borbone army’s blue tunic and red trousers, others using as a badge a silver piastre coin with the king’s head. Afraid of losing their pensions, Borbone officers dared not join them openly, but instead organised committees at Trieste, Marseilles and Malta to smuggle guns. Money and more guns came from Rome, where King Francis had established a government in exile, since the Two Sicilies was still recognised by the Papacy and Austria. Papal officials turned a blind eye to gun-running over their frontier and frequently gave shelter to brigands who were pursued by Piedmontese troops.
Bases were set up in the hills or in the Apulian ravines, where self-appointed leaders recruited ex-soldiers returning penniless to their villages. Mounted and flying the Borbone flag, they ambushed enemy troops or, after cutting the telegraph wires, galloped into isolated cities to shoot the sindaco and his officials. They were aided by landowners and former Borbone officials, by priests and peasants. In the opinion of the Peasants, Hare noted, “brigands were always poveretti [poor things], to be pitied and sympathised with.”
In April 1861 Carmine Donatello Crocco, a huge man with a black beard down to his waist, made a triumphant entry into Venosa at the head of a brigand army. On hearing the news, nearby Melfi, led by its most respected citizens, promptly hoisted the Borbone flag. Three days later, however, General Crocco hastily retreated at the approach of Piedmontese troops.
Throughout the summer the Capitanata was terrorised by bands like Crocco’s, all flying the old royal flag. The governor of Foggia reported that masserie were being raided daily, their owners or managers abducted and held to ransom.
When in July Luigi Palumbo seized Vieste with 400 men, welcomed by shouts of “Viva Francesco II!” the new Italy’s supporters were rounded up and shot, their masserie sacked, their corn and wine shared out among the peasants. Warned that an enemy force was on its way, Palumbo rode off to occupy Vico del Gargano, where he had a Te Deum sung to celebrate the restoration of Borbone authority. When the Piedmontese arrived, he and his men took refuge in the Foresta Umbra.
All over Apulia brigands were entering large towns with impunity, buying food and medical supplies. They had spies every-where, including a group of ex-officers at Bari, together with agents and depots. Persuaded that the entire South was going to rise for him, in early autumn 1861 King Francis sent a veteran Carlist general, José Borjès, to Calabria to take command. Unfortunately, as a Spaniard, Borjès found it impossible to assert his authority over the Calabrians and moved to Apulia, where for a time he joined Crocco in the western Murgia. Towards the end of 1861, however, after two months spent hiding in woods and caves, he despaired and with his small Spanish staff and a few brigands made for the Papal States. “On their being surrounded just before reaching the frontier, they surrendered without a fight, in the confident belief that their lives would be spared”, writes Ulloa, prime minister of the Borbone government in exile: “Otherwise they would have fought to the death. But they were at once disarmed, and sent before a firing squad.”
By then, in Apulia and indeed all over the South, it had started to look as if the Piedmontese troops were winning the war. A bitter winter set in. Disheartened by the cold and damp of their miserable lairs in the ravines, many Apulian brigands gave up what had become a merciless conflict.
Among those who lost hope in the ‘Brigands’ War’ was General Crocco, who fled to Rome, abandoning his mistress, Maria Giovanna of Ruvo. His career was extraordinary yet far from untypical. Although he had deserted from King Ferdinand’s army in 1851, after killing a fellow soldier, at the Risorgimento he had become the brigands’ leader in western Apulia and Basilicata. In 1872 he would make the mistake of returning to Basilicata, to be caught and sentenced to life imprisonment.
At the close of 1861, the journalist Count Maffei, an enthusiastic supporter of the new Italy, was genuinely convinced that the brigands were beaten, “reduced to a few wretched wanderers, hunted like wild beasts.” He was wrong. The war had only just begun and, despite its initial successes, the Piedmontese army would suffer more casualties then it had during all the battles of the entire Risorgimento, many of them killed in Apulia.