Corsicans has been distinguished in modern times
for a certain wild intractableness and ferocity, the cause lies in their
unhappy past, and not least in the character of the rule established by
the bank of San Giorgio. The power which the bank had won by ruthless
cruelty, it exercised in the spirit of the narrowest and most
short-sighted selfishness. Only a shadow of the native institutions was
suffered to survive, and no adequate system of administration was set up
in the place of that which had been suppressed. In the absence of
justice the blood-feud or _vendetta_ grew and took root in Corsica just
at the time when, elsewhere in Europe, the progress of civilization was
making an end of private war. The agents of the bank, so far from
discouraging these internecine quarrels, looked on them as the surest
means for preventing a general rising. Concerned, moreover, only with
squeezing taxes out of a recalcitrant population, they neglected the
defence of the coast, along which the Barbary pirates harried and looted
at will; and to all these woes were added, in the 16th century,
pestilences and disastrous floods, which tended still further to
impoverish and barbarize the country.

First French Intervention, 1553.

In these circumstances King Henry II. of France conceived the project of
conquering the island. From Corsican mercenaries in French service, men
embittered by wrongs suffered at the hands of the Genoese, he obtained
all the necessary information; by a treaty of alliance concluded at
Constantinople (February 1, 1553) with Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent
he secured the co-operation of the Turkish fleet. The combined forces
attacked the island the same year; the citadel of Bastia fell almost
without a blow, and siege was at once laid simultaneously to all the
other fortresses. The capitulation of Bonifacio to the Turks, after an
obstinate resistance, was followed by the treacherous massacre of the
garrison; soon, of all the strong places, the Genoese held Calvi alone.
At this juncture the emperor Charles V. intervened; a strong force of
imperial troops and Genoese was poured into the island, and the tide of
war turned. The details of the struggle that followed, in which the
Corsican national hero Sampiero da Bastelica gained his first laurels,
are of little general importance. Fortresses were captured and
recaptured; and for three years French, Germans, Spaniards, Genoese and
Corsicans indulged in a carnival o