and sea. Here, again, we have new inundations of various tribes, and a motley mixture of nations, languages, and customs, as in the earliest period.

Germans, Byzantine Greeks, Moors, Romanized races appear successively in Corsica. But the Romanic stamp, impressed by the Romans and strengthened by bands of fugitive Italians, has already taken its place as an indelible and leading trait in Corsican character. The Vandals came to Corsica under Genseric, and maintained themselves in the island a long time, till they were expelled by Belisarius. After the Goths and Longobards had in their turn invaded the island and been its masters, it fell, along with Sardinia, into the hands of the Byzantines, and remained in their possession nearly two hundred years. It was during this period that numerous Greek names and roots, still to be met with throughout the country and in the language, originated.

The Greek rule was of the Turkish kind. They appeared to look upon the Corsicans as a horde of savages; they loaded them with impossible exactions, and compelled them to sell their very children in order to raise the enormous tribute. A period of incessant fighting now begins for Corsica, and the history of the nation consists for centuries in one uninterrupted struggle for existence and freedom.

The first irruption of the Saracens occurred in 713. Ever since Spain had become Moorish, the Mahommedans had been scouring the Mediterranean, robbing and plundering in all the islands, and founding in many places a dominion of protracted duration. The Greek Emperors, whose hands were full in the East, totally abandoned the West, which found new protectors in the Franks. That Charlemagne had to do with Corsica or with the Moors there, appears from his historian Eginhard, who states that the Emperor sent out a fleet under Count Burkhard, to defend Corsica against the Saracens. His son Charles gave them a defeat at Mariana. These struggles with the Moors are still largely preserved in the traditions of the Corsican people. The Roman noble, Hugo Colonna, a rebel against Pope Stephen IV., who sent him to Corsica with a view to rid himself of him and his two associates, Guido Savelli and Amondo Nasica, figures prominently in the Moorish wars. Colonna's first achievement was the taking of Aleria, after a triple combat of a romantic character, between three chivalrous paladins and as many Moorish knights. He then defeated the Moorish prince Nugalon, near Mariana, and forced all the heathenish people in the island to submit to the rite of baptism. The comrade of this Hugo Colonna was, according to the Corsican chronicler, a nephew of Ganelon of Mayence, also named Ganelon, who had come to Corsica to wipe off the disgrace of his house in Moorish blood.

The Tuscan margrave, Bonifacius, after a great naval victory over the Saracens on the coast of Africa, near Utica, is now said to have landed at the southern extremity of Corsica on his return home, and to have built a fortress on the chalk cliffs there, which received from its founder the name of Bonifazio. This took place in the year 833. Louis the Pious granted him the feudal lordship of Corsica. Etruria thus acquires supremacy over the neighbouring island a second time, and it is certain that the Tuscan margraves continued to govern Corsica till the death of Lambert, the last of their line, in 951.

Berengarius, and after him Adalbert of Friuli, were the next masters of the island; then the Emperor Otto II. gave it to his adherent, the Margrave Hugo of Toscana. No further historical details can be arrived at with any degree of precision till the period when the city of Pisa obtained supremacy in Corsica.

In these times, and up till the beginning of the eleventh century, a fierce and turbulent nobility had been forming in Corsica, as in Italy—the various families of which held sway throughout the island. This aristocracy was only in a very limited degree of native origin. Italian magnates who had fled from the barbarians, Longobard, Gothic, Greek or Frankish vassals, soldiers who had earned for themselves land and feudal title by their exertions in the wars against the Moors, gradually founded houses and hereditary seigniories. The Corsican chronicler makes all the seigniors spring from the Roman knight Hugo Colonna and his companions. He makes him Count of Corsica, and traces to his son Cinarco the origin of the most celebrated family of the old Corsican nobility, the Cinarchesi; to another son, Bianco, that of the Biancolacci; to Pino, a son of Savelli's, the Pinaschi; and in the same way we have Amondaschi, Rollandini, descendants of Ganelon and others. In later times various families emerged into distinction from this confusion of petty tyrants, the Gentili, and Signori da Mare on Cape Corso; beyond the mountains, the seigniors of Leca, of Istria, and Rocca, and those of Ornans and of Bozio.

CHAPTER V.

FEUDALISM IN CORSICA—THE LEGISLATOR SAMBUCUCCIO.

For a long period the history of the Corsicans presents nothing but a bloody picture of the tyranny of the barons over the lower orders, and the quarrels of these nobles with each other. The coasts became desolate, the old cities of Aleria and Mariana were gradually forsaken; the inhabitants of the maritime districts fled from the Saracens higher up into the hills, where they built villages, strengthened by nature and art so as to resist the corsairs and the barons. In few countries can the feudal nobility have been so fierce and cruel as in Corsica. In the midst of a half barbarous and quite poor population, Nature around them savage as themselves, unchecked by any counterpoise of social morality or activity, unbridled by the Church, cut off from the world and civilizing intercourse—let the reader imagine these nobles lording it in their rocky fastnesses, and, giving the rein to their restless and unsettled natures in sensuality and violence. In other countries all that was humanizing, submissive to law, positive and not destructive in tendency, collected itself in the cities, organized itself into guilds and corporate bodies, and uniting in a civic league, made head against the aristocracy. But it was extremely difficult to accomplish anything like this in Corsica, where trade and manufactures were unknown, where there were neither cities nor a commercial middle-class. All the more note-worthy is the phenomenon, that a nation of rude peasants should, in a manner reminding us of patriarchal times, have succeeded in forming itself into a democracy of a marked and distinctive character.

The barons of the country, engaged in continual wars with the oppressed population of the villages, and fighting with each other for sole supremacy, had submitted at the beginning of the eleventh century to one of their own number, the lord of Cinarca, who aimed at making himself tyrant of the whole island. Scanty as our materials for drawing a conclusion are, we must infer from what we know, that the Corsicans of the interior had hitherto maintained a desperate resistance to the barons. In danger of being crushed by Cinarca, the people assembled to a general council. It is the first Parliament of the Corsican Commons of which we hear in their history, and it was held in Morosaglia. On this occasion they chose a brave and able man to be their leader, Sambucuccio of Alando, with whom begins the long series of Corsican patriots, who have earned renown by their love of country and heroic courage.

Sambucuccio gained a victory over Cinarca, and compelled him to retire within his own domains. As a means of securing and extending the advantage thus gained, he organized a confederacy, as was done in Switzerland under similar circumstances, though somewhat