From the dawn of the Roman Empire to the rise of the merchant republics, “Italy” was large, stretching along the Mediterranean shores. But what happened to those prosperous cities where Italian was the local language? At the time even in Albanian cities Italian was spoken.
Something unredeemed is something unreleased. The irredentist Italy were those territories that, even without being in the Italian state, were part of their nation (or so it seemed to them). Currently the closest idea of Italian irredentism that we have comes from the expansionist policies launched by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini before and during World War II. But its creation and start-up came almost fifty years before with the unification of the Italian peninsula in 1870, its precedent reaching even the beginnings of Romanticism and the Risorgimento.
The Italian Unification
Romanticism was an ideological and artistic movement that emerged at the end of the 18th century that would end up spreading throughout Europe. It came as a rebellion against the rationalism and accuracy of the Enlightenment, dominating in this revolutionary movement feelings and the abstract over reason. This, in turn, promoted the idea of nationalism throughout Europe, emerging new and reborn old; as was the case of Greek nationalism that culminated in the Greek War of Independence (1821 – 1830) in which romantics from all over Europe participated, such as the Englishman Lord Byron. The fact is that Romanticism (from the French “Roman”, novel) did not fall on deaf ears when arriving in Italy, and aroused nationalist sentiments that appealed to the Empire itself, in which the peninsula was one, these were later baptized as the “Risorgimento Italian”
But the unionists were divided as there were three positions, that of the majority of the Sardinians who wanted an Italy under the yoke of their king, the monarchists; that of the Republicans and Democrats united in the “Young Italy” group, whose greatest exponent was Garibaldi and that of the conservatives who wanted an Italian federation that revolved around the papacy, led by Minister Cavour. Finally, the first prevailed.
After the Napoleonic Wars there were several revolutionary waves in Europe, in which the rebels hailed nationalism to recover the advances made by Bonapartist France. One of the broadsides that most directly affected Italy was that of the Revolutions of 1848. In which the Sardinian king Carlos Alberto declared war on the Austrians in the First Italian War of Independence. But the imperial army was led by the famed Marshal Radetsky, under whose discipline the disorganized Austrian army succeeded in overcoming the Sardinians at Custoza and Novara, defeating them and their allies and restoring “order” once again to an Italy under full imperial influence. .
But just one year after the Marshal’s death, in 1859, a new conflict broke out. Victor Emmanuel II inherited the Kingdom of Sardinia after the abdication of his father in 1849 and a decade later he returned to declare war on the Austrian Empire, although there was a change in the situation, the Second French Empire, of Napoleon III, supported him . In this way the French made sure to annex Savoy and Nice as payment for their aid and not cede Corsica. After which they defeated the Austrians in Magenta and Solferino, achieving the annexation of Lombardy by the Armistice of Villafranca and the conquest of the small Italian states to the north of the Papal States, of Austrian influence such as Parma or Tuscany for the Kingdom of Sardinia.
But there was still Italy to “liberate” and after negotiations with the Sardinian minister, the Count of Cavour, the revolutionary Garibaldi embarked with his Red Shirts (his followers) on the Expedition of the Thousand, towards the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies of Fernando II, in 1860. Soon conquering Sicily and going to the mainland, where popular support was great for his reformist promises in a state little more than feudal. The Kingdom was annexed by the Sardinians through a plebiscite, although after its incorporation there were repeated revolts for not fulfilling its promises of agrarian reforms.
For this new conquest Victor Manuel II declared himself King of Italy. And he soon allied himself with Bismarck’s Prussians in 1866, who in turn wanted to unify Germany, thus forcing the Austro-Prussian War. In this war, the Prussians stood out, who totally defeated the Austrians in Sadowa, obtaining Veneto for Italy, until then under imperial regency. Only the French Empire, protector of the Papal States, which were easily annexed after the collapse of the Empire of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War, conveniently occurred, was now opposed to the unification.
History of the Unrepentant Earth
It was at this point that the so-called “Irredenta Italy” was born, which is going to be discussed, explaining the reason for its denomination as Italian lands and its evolution over time.
There is some controversy about which territories were considered “unredeemed”, since many do not see the difference between the dream of the fascist “Great Italy” and the monarchical “Irredent Italy”, encompassing the first colonies such as Libya or all of Greece.
Italia Irredenta can be grouped into two separate groups:
In the first place those with reasons, more or less historical, to be able to be Italian like the former territories of the Republic of Venice together with its colonies; Corsica, ceded by the Republic of Genoa to France in 1768; the territories of Nice and Savoy, ceded to France by the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Swiss canton of Ticino, conquered by the confederation in the 16th century.
And secondly, those territories that, although they had not been Italian, did correspond to their geographical borders or in which they had a large Italian-speaking population, such as the Austrian Trentino in the Alps or the island of Malta.
Regarding the Venetian territories, they correspond to the Irredenta Italy parts of what they occupied as their “State of the Sea” the Istrian peninsula, whose population until the 20th century was typically Italian-speaking; great part of Dalmatia, including important cities like Zadar or Ragusa, today Dubrovnik in Croatia; numerous enclaves on Montenegrin or Albanian coasts such as Cattaro, today Kotor, or Durazzo, today Dürres; the entire Ionian Islands with its largest enclaves in Corfu and Kefalonia and the island of Crete.
If we can know the Serenissima Republic of Venice for something today, it is none other than its extreme commercial desire, and on this it exclusively based its expansion throughout its existence, only focusing on the Domain of Terraferma (its territories in the Italian peninsula) after progressively losing its maritime commercial power. This expansion first consisted of the subjugation of the Adriatic ports such as Zara so as not to have competition and to have their own sea, a Venetian lake that they would take care of populating with settlers. For later, and with the defunct Roman Empire as a victim, to have numerous Mediterranean enclaves with which to obtain safe ports in which to refuel their galleys during their commercial trips, such as Corfu or Crete.
In these territories, miscegenation was never sought, the inclusion of natives, whether Greek or Slav, in the public life of the city was never encouraged. The Venetians were always an elite that had to be preserved, coming to legislate with the prohibition of marriage between Venetians and non-Venetians to preserve “the purity of the blood” or the prohibition of conversion to the Orthodox faith in the Greek islands. Citizens of “Italian” origin used to be a wealthy minority in the unsettled territories. And it is that in regions like Dalmatia, where there was more Italian presence, they never reached more than 30%, all of them settlers; its citizens, a Slavic majority, were never integrated into the Republic.
All these territories (with the exception of Durazzo, lost to the Ottomans in 1501 and Crete, by the same in 1715) were not lost until the Republic itself fell into French hands by the Treaty of Campo Formio, signed in 1797. , in which all these territories were split between the Austrian Empire and France from the territories acclaimed as Italian for having belonged to the Republic of Genoa, we can point directly to Corsica. This island from the time of the Roman Empire itself belonged to the Italian demarcation, even Napoleon himself admitted “Corsica, which geographically belongs to Italy”. Historically, the island was always linked in one way or another to the peninsula, either because it was the territory of the Republic of Pisa or of Genoa, from which it ended up rebelling. But even though the Corsicans were rebels by nature against their occupants (and often against themselves), they always had one thing clear, that these were Italians, as proof of this we have the speeches of the Corsican patriotic leader Pasquale Paoli:
“We Corsicans are Italian by birth and feelings, but first of all we feel Italian by language, customs and traditions… And all Italians are brothers before History and before God”
Leader who went on to create an independent state de facto Regarding the Republic of Genoa, which ended up ceding the island to France, which subjected it to blood and fire. It is ironic to think that the father of the well-known Napoleon Bonaparte, Carlo Buonaparte (with his surname in its original Italian, without Frenchification), was at the time the leader of the Corsican Republic (in the absence of Paoli) against the French occupation, but that ended up changing sides.
Be that as it may, it ended up being ceded by Genoa to France in 1768 by the Treaty of Versailles, not beginning its adaptation to French culture until almost a century later, between revolutions and uprisings.
Belonging to the Kingdom of Sardinia were the Duchy of Savoy and the County of Nice, which, as we saw earlier, were ceded to the Second French Empire in exchange for aid against Austria by the Treaty of Turin in 1860. Both domains are historically linked to Italy (although Savoy had belonged to Burgundy). It should be noted that the Italian leader Garibaldi was from Nice, and that a war was almost unleashed for the same city, since its inhabitants at that time were completely Italian-speaking.
Finally we have the canton of Ticino, a territory that until the 16th century belonged to the Duchy of Milan and that even today maintains Italian as the official language spoken by the vast majority of its inhabitants.
While on the other hand we would have the “unredeemed” territories whose historical affiliation to an Italian state is doubtful. Such as Malta, whose affiliation can be summed up as having always been territorially connected with Sicily, even without ever having had a majority of Italian speakers, since Maltese, a language of Arabic origin, is the most widely spoken language. What does happen is that the local nobility, or…