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The new 66-year-old viceroy finally turned up in Palermo on 14 October 1781, more than a year after his initial appointment. He was sent there by a government in Naples seeking a change of policy, a balance to Prime Minister Sambuca’s influence from Naples. He was preceded by a reputation for having dangerous libertine friendships in France and he went with considerable reluctance, but also with very clear ideas about what his life’s experience commanded him to do. Very soon his much-loved Parisian bonhomie disintegrated into apprehension, irritation and anger.
The ceremony upon his arrival was described in some detail by the diarist Marquis Villabianca.1 Caracciolo’s ship arrived in port on the evening of Sunday 14 October, but he was obliged by etiquette to stay on board until the next morning so that he could be greeted by a ‘congratulatory ambassadorial group’ sent out in a special felucca by the senate of Palermo. When he managed to reach the shore shortly afterwards he was met by an imposing array of officials and conducted to an interim house, where he was obliged to put up for the next three days for a grinding round of receptions and presentations, all conducted with immense pomp and circumstance. The day of his possesso (i.e. his official instalment) had been fixed, no doubt by the local authorities, for 17 October and on that day he was conducted in great ceremony, escorted by cavalry and other military, with flashing unsheathed swords to the Casa Professa church where, among other things, he was required to swear to uphold the privileges of the city of Palermo with gloves and those of the Kingdom of Sicily without gloves. He was then conducted to the palace where he was to reside officially as viceroy. In the evening there was a gala theatre performance. It is almost certain that, of all the things that occurred in those four days, this is the only one that he would have tolerated.
This fairly full description of his arrival has been given for two reasons, in the first place because it reveals the absolute importance of the outward demonstration of tradition for Sicilian society of the time, and secondly because it was written by the Marquis of Villabianca. The above description is in fact a short resumé of several pages in Villabianca’s diary. What emerges is that the writer felt proud that these traditional ceremonies were being bestowed on the neo-viceroy. The Marquis of Villabianca is considered by many Italian historians to be the epitome of the Sicilian baronial thought at that time; he wrote 22 volumes of diaries, among many other works, and came to hate Caracciolo’s reforms. It is significant that in that very first entry in his diary he describes Caracciolo thus:
He was born of the same excellent Caracciolo family of the Princes of Avellino … from the now dominant city of Naples, from the branch of the Dukes of Santa Teodora, being a cadet of that house, which in effect not having much financial substance, he was obliged in his home country to exercise the profession of a minor lawyer as a young man … but on account of his talent, today one can say with the poet: He is not a Prince among us because of his ancestors, but because of his virtue and because of his merit.
That might sound like a compliment, but from Villabianca, who was a rabid aristocrat, one suspects it was not. Also significant is the reference to the fact that Naples was now the dominant city. Not only was Caracciolo not perhaps a true-blue aristocrat at heart, but he was also an outsider.
Although under no delusions about the enormity of the task facing him, the new viceroy was buoyed up by the knowledge, the absolute conviction, that the rational changes he intended to introduce must inevitably succeed not only because they were ethically right, but also because they were rationally correct and had been demonstrated to work successfully elsewhere in Europe. This conviction meant that in introducing his reforms, despite his background in diplomacy, he was completely lacking in tact – and it could be said he dashed at them. A certain amount of this energy was stoked by his genuine dislike of barons in general, which has been already noted, and the Sicilian barons in particular, given his Neapolitan background. His desire to strip them of their privileges and the church of its, and his wholehearted acceptance of his brief to restore the monarchy to its authority on the island, should be understood as he saw it – as a means to alleviate the poor, dismantle abuses, reform the law and the administration, introduce a proper catasto (land survey) so that equitable taxes could be levied, encourage trade, improve revenues for the royal exchequer and ‘liquidate the inheritance of the past’.2 His ideas were crystal clear and consistent, and had been forming quite consciously in his correspondence ever since his days in Turin, but despite the reputation that he had gained in Paris for lethargy (he and Galiani had been famous for their laziness) his first two and a half months in Palermo, practically from the day he was installed, were marked by a frenzy of administrative activity that would have left his Parisian friends quite speechless. It must be remembered that he had no experience at all in administration or government of any kind.
His first task, then, was to impose the authority of the king through his own viceregal person. A circolare was issued on 29 November 1781 (and confirmed on 16 December of the same year) that re-issued in no uncertain terms a royal order of 1737 requiring all representatives of tribunals, courts, ministries and other bodies – be they secular, ecclesiastical, military or political – with the right to present any sort of petition to the court or the government in Naples to do so via the viceroy. This was to stamp on the habit of wholesale rejection of the ‘normal’ channels when the personal interests of privileged people or institutions were involved. All representations were to be submitted to the viceroy with the seal still unfixed before being sent on to the king. To underline the point, another despatch was issued on 17 December 1781 to the president of the Gran Corte (Airoldi, whom we have seen at this time being described to Galiani as the barbarous pope of the Sicilian legal scene), the court that had surreptitiously taken over charge of censorship from the viceroys: the despatch allowed the court to continue publishing all printed papers, edicts, prints, bands and so on, but only after the viceroy had seen and approved a copy.
Caracciolo’s next move concerned the army, with which his predecessors had played a very deferential role. From the very first he made it clear that he, as viceroy, was the military as well as political chief on the island, and this not only for reasons of re-establishment of monarchical authority, but also because the army was not well controlled and therefore a source of social disruption. The commander-in-chief was summoned and informed that the viceroy enjoyed all jurisdiction and authority in both political and military spheres, that the king’s orders were to be transmitted via the viceroy to the commander, and that the latter had to use the viceroy to communicate with the secretary for war: ‘[F]urthermore the Viceroy himself could give orders to all the commanders and military units in the Kingdom’, as the wording of the final despatch has it.3
In the meantime, the fearful problem of the price of bread had again reared its head. On 20 November 1781 there were threats of public uprisings and surprisingly, in Villabianca’s words,
A great deal was achieved to quieten down these public resentments by the repeated visits made by the new Viceroy to the public ovens and market squares, denouncing those responsible for producing bad bread and threatening them with personal and pecuniary punishment.4
It must have been quite clear by this time that the new viceroy was no passalettere – the eminent figurehead that just shuffled papers around in the intervals between receptions – which the barons had been used to up to Caracciolo’s arrival. The inevitable reactions were soon to be heard.
In a society where appearances were everything, Caracciolo took pleasure in making it clear that he was not on the side of the Establishment. When, for instance, he appeared solemnly for the first time in public at the cathedral in Palermo during a pontifical mass, sitting on a throne representing the papal legacy conferred on the Sicilian kings by Urban II in 1098, he pointedly did not cover his head when the priest offered incense. The scandal was enormous because this act flouted the traditional prerogatives of the Sicilian kings.5 In the same spirit, he insisted on reading himself the opening speech of the first Parlamento in 1782, rather than leave this to the Protonotaro, as tradition required.6 And to be quite sure everybody understood his position, when the time came to be formally sworn in for his second term of office in 1784, instead of being embroiled in the usual complicated ceremonial rigmarole, which everyone looked forward to, he arrived unaccompanied and informally attired at the cathedral in a hired coach.7 He also frequented the singer Marina Balducci, whom he had known in Paris, which was noted with some distress by Palermo society. He wrote of her to Galiani that
Only Balducci seems to be a female of the species of which I am a male. On the other hand one must play with these cards because I value the society of women as a hedge against too intimate a society with men, who are here too intent either à tirer le vers du nez or in distorting the things one says.8
While on the island she was entertained at Caracciolo’s table and receptions in an atmosphere of joking and great informality, wholly at odds with what most (though perhaps not everybody) in prevailing society thought fit. Villabianca stuck into his diary a four-sided printed pamphlet containing a heartfelt cry of despair in very poor verse at the departure of Marina Balducci by Signor Giuseppe Gazzaniga, the celebrated Veronese Maestro di Capella.9
In his first recorded letter to Minister Acton in Naples, on 12 June 1782, Caracciolo talks of ‘complaints and accusations against me’, which had been conveyed secretly to the king, concerning
omissions during ecclesiastical functions and the occasional imprudence in my private life, nothing at all that has anything to do with the public good, equity, justice, honour, and above all service to the King … There are three methods that the Sicilians use to frighten those that govern them … the first is the fear of the people, the second is the fear of satire, the third is accusations to the King concerning customs and religion. The first two have not been successful against me; they have therefore had recourse to attack me personally, but they are mistaken because I am inflexible: they can break me but never bend me.10
Meanwhile, the viceroy was moving ahead on other fronts. One of the first things he did was issue a despatch (18 December 1781) to the Capitano di Giustizia, the Marquis di Santa Croce, ordering him to choose 60 lawyers, ‘that is to say fifteen from each part of the city, so that one of them every night should take a commanding role in the night rounds’, for the greater public peace (the current ones were corrupt, and recognised as such). On the face of it, this would seem a rather harmless, idealistic act, but there were various complicated aspects concerning it. First of all the night round, or ‘Rondo’, was the prerogative of the craftsmen’s guilds and as such needed attention and, eventually, reform, given the role they had played in the riots that had led to the overthrow of Viceroy Fogliani in 1773. Secondly, the lawyers were a privileged class. In Villabianca’s words, they were
extremely respectable, destined for the service and command of the republic in the affairs of State and of prime importance, and not less privileged and worthy than persons of noble and feudal families.11
The Spanish had had the lawyers excused from all public duties and they were furious at having this lowly job thrust on them, and at night no less. They immediately set about protesting, and the next year, as early as February, the lawyers were released from their unpleasant new duty. Caracciolo also asked the Giunta dei Presidenti e Consultori, in November 1781, to study ‘the ways by which a public burial ground may be opened, where bodies may better be taken care of and the air is not contaminated by the smell’. Again, this directive may seem harmless and idealistic, but burial was a problem, as nobody wanted to be interred outside a church, and Caracciolo had to fight hard for his new cemetery, as we shall see later. The same Giunta was asked to consider ‘if it is possible to establish in the capital and in nearby towns a public market for all types of foodstuffs, in what days of the week and with what privileges and exemptions’ (23 and 25 November 1781).12 On 7 November 1781 Caracciolo sent a despatch to the Deputazione delle Strade, the body that was supposed to look after the roads, saying that he was displeased ‘that so far the 1752 plan for paving the main streets of this capital has not been executed’, for which reason ‘not only is it not convenient for the citizens but neither is it for the salubrity of the air’, and enjoined the deputation ‘to examine as soon as possible the projects already made, and propose others if it considers them more expedient and easier’. However, nobody seemed to be moving fast enough, because on 31 December 1781 Caracciolo ordered the poor Deputazione delle Strade to get on with paving the main streets of Palermo, as set out in the original 1752 plan, as well as urging the implementation of a 1778 parliamentary resolution for the building of provincial roads. He had also ordered the magistrate in charge of commerce (decree of 18 December 1781) to issue bands inviting commercial ships to gather in the port of Trapani at the end of February and the beginning of March, where ‘they will be received under the escort of royal ships of war’ in convoy to be protected from the attacks of the North African corsairs, who were a very real threat.
While all this was going on, Caracciolo had the time to ban the exaction by the parishes of all funeral dues (7 November 1781) and to abolish the fixed price and weight of bread (13 November 1781), both these measures being designed to help the poor, and to issue a curiously uncharacteristic despatch on 26 December 1781 to the citizens of Palermo urging them to display a greater sense of seriousness in life, prohibiting them, in fact, masques in the coming carnival season, the use of which ‘offends the public decorum and the respect due to the Magistrature’.
Ecclesiastical reforms were not as strenuous as might have been expected, perhaps because the church was less involved in Sicilian politics than it had been on the mainland. Caracciolo revised the statutes of the confraternities in some detail (even to the extent of the standards they bore in processions), reformed some of them and dissolved others (devolving their patrimonies either to charities or to the new cemetery); he organised clerical alms collections and marriage provisions on sound bases; severe limits were laid down against excesses in the initiation rites for monks and nuns (the numbers of cakes and candles etc.); he suppressed various White Benedictine convents and had monastic chapter affairs subjected to viceregal visits. He also tried to prevent church authorities on the island communicating with their superiors elsewhere, complained to the Archbishop of Palermo that his clergy were lazy and frivolous, and encouraged them to open schools in their cloisters. Caracciolo also tried to curb the right of asylum and to interfere with the ecclesiastical courts.13 Early on he had decreed that bishops should be disallowed from citing people in a court of law, let alone imprisoning them without producing documentary evidence for viceregal inspection and approval and the guarantee of a defence lawyer,14 and later on he was to abolish the Parlamento’s Ecclesiastical chamber’s right to ask the pope’s permission for voting new taxes.15
On the purely moral front he was equally active in his reforms, and he began straight away. The ban against the use of indecent masques in the carnival season has already been mentioned – this was issued at the end of 1781. From that time onwards, at various stages of his administration provisions were taken against the following malpractices16: betting; anonymous letters and denouncements; inflammatory or alarming notices; the explosion of firecrackers or other fireworks against private houses; the use of drums at night; certain dangerous popular sports, such as the running of cows and heifers to resemble the Spanish corrida; excessively luxurious funerals; prostitutes; criminals and the frequency of certain crimes; urban rubbish; the slaking of linen within domestic walls; vaccination; burials in churches and, where not possible, the obligation to build communal cemeteries; provisions in favour of prisons; hospitals and houses of redemption for lost women and houses of correction for wayward boys; schools, which he wanted to institute in every corner of the island.
Caracciolo’s attention was, given his background, very much concerned with legal matters right from the start. In a series of early despatches he tackled head on the continuous clashes that existed between the various jurisdictions and the artificial procedural delays that proliferated, both of which resulted in his office being submerged with appeals. He defined the jurisdictional boundaries better and rescued from oblivion certain opportune norms, which he imposed with rigour; he abolished certain privileged courts; he deprived the president of the Gran Corte Criminale e Civile of certain attributes he had usurped from the viceregal office, and stamped on other autonomous claims that this magistrate was making vis à vis the viceroy.17 He ordered – presumably it was necessary – the avvocato fiscale of the Gran Corte to make sure that the order for the liberation of prisoners was actually carried out once their term had been served (6 December 1781). In terms of local justice, he formally warned the giurati (locally elected magistrates) of both the baronial and demesnial towns against interfering in any way with the administration of civil or criminal justice, which was the legal competence of the capitanali courts, and threatened them with punishments if they strayed from their own jurisdiction, which was limited to food supply.18
Narrowing his aim a little, he began the battle against the barons. On 28 December 1781 he issued a series of injunctions that hit closer to this particular mark. The first was an indirect attack, as it affected daughters: it recalled a circolare that the Gran Corte had promulgated in 1775, requiring a ‘reform in the useless expenditure that one is wont to make when young girls put on the nuns habit’ and spelled out a simpler and much less luxurious ceremony. This would certainly have annoyed many a noble family, some of whose daughters would be destined for the convent, and all of whom were interested in ceremony. Less ceremonial, however, was the injunction that the barons were not to deny their vassals their liberty or the cultivation of land outside their territory until they had finished cultivating their lord’s, requiring them furthermore to honour exactly the laws of the kingdom that conceded greater liberty to the peasants.19 And on 29 December 1781 he issued a despatch for the punishment of
anyone connected with the Tribunal of the Sant’Ufizio [the Inquisition] found carrying a carbine and any other sort of arms without the authorisation of the Gran Corte, unless he is carrying out his duties for the said Tribunal.
This was the beginning of Caracciolo’s attack on the Inquisition, but it must be noted that the main reason for this was not so much that the Inquisition was a threat to society, but that it was a shame on society, and had to go for this reason, as well as – and more importantly – the fact that it was a hotbed of baronial privilege.
This flurry of reform, this stirring up of things, did not go down at all well. Sicily had not seen two and a half months like this for centuries. Although it had been known that Caracciolo had been the friend of dangerous people in France, the Sicilians had been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt at the beginning. Even Villabianca in the early days was not against him, but the diarist’s tone was changing: ‘[T]he customs honoured by Sicily were very different from those of France, among which the Viceroy had lived’20 he wrote at the time, and from this point on he voiced the outrage of the barons at the atrocities that Caracciolo was to attempt on Sicily.
As Caracciolo wrote in the first surviving letter to his minister of referral in Naples, Sir John Acton, the minister of marine affairs, on 12 June 1782:
My zeal for the reform of abuses, for the observance of the laws and for some newly established institution or that evidently needs to be established are Caracciolo’s offence; these are my true crimes; the government of Prince Corsini [Viceroy 1737–47] was liked by the Sicilians, because he limited himself to a simple passalettere, a shuffler of letters. That is how the Sicilians want their Viceroys.21
It has already been mentioned that Caracciolo came to Sicily with absolutely no experience in government and it must be added that there was no semblance of a reform party on the island as there was, to some extent, on the mainland, so he was intellectually and physically isolated. He therefore relied very heavily on his two professional advisors, neither of whom was Sicilian. His secretary was the Neapolitan Giuseppe Gargano, a shy, hard-working, honest man of wide views, but not those to be expected in one so close to the centre of radical reforms. His top legal advisor, the consultore, Saverio Simonetti, though born in Calabria, had been educated in Naples. His was a first-rate legal brain able to cut through the thick undergrowth of Sicilian legal vegetation and reduce it to order from the point of view of the monarchy and the treasury. Simonetti was also rigid, severe and somewhat pedantic, but both he and Gargano were seen as ‘Neapolitan’, which was much worse. Caracciolo himself also erred very decidedly on the side of authoritarianism, even if, as in everything, there was a theoretical reason for doing so. As he wrote to Acton:
This craze for committees in our times is well known; it is also a certainty that … a great work can never be born of a committee, that is to say of many heads, because the great and the sublime work is formed by a single mould and not of separate bits and pieces stuck together later … And if then committees have the advantage that no single person has authority in them, they have the equal disadvantage that nobody is responsible for any bad that results.22
This is a pupil of Tanucci talking about Enlightened despotism, but Tanucci’s time was over. Not only that: what Caracciolo never fully understood was that, theoretically speaking, even if he had had the king’s undying backing, he could never legally have been a despot in Sicily because he was only the king’s minister, and, anyway, subject to that kingdom’s constitution, as was the king himself.23 It was not surprising that baronial backs rose the moment Caracciolo put pen to paper – phrases such as ‘subversive innovations’, ‘abuse of power and harshness of government’ and ‘absolute power and tyranny’ abound in the archives of the time,24 the diaries of Villabianca record the horror of conservative Sicily at his every move, and even the less-privileged classes were put out by some of Caracciolo’s moves, moves such as banning masques in carnival, not to mention other later even less subtly thought-out measures.
Tact was not one of Caracciolo’s virtues. Nor did he help himself as time went on by insisting on governing the island through just Simonetti, his consultore, and Gargano, his secretary, whom the Sicilians mistrusted: Neapolitans were apparently flouting the Sicilian constitution, and he himself limited his contact with the king through Acton, whom the king did not particularly like.