The Pope's Soldiers

A Military History of the Modern Vatican

David Alvarez

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780700617708, 9780700617708
• eBook ISBN: 9780700622887
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

Most students of history assume that the age of the “warlord popes” ended with the Renaissance, but, long after the victory of Catholic powers at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Papacy continued to entangle itself in martial affairs. The Vatican participated in six major military campaigns between 1796 and 1870, flew the papal flag over a warship as late as 1878, and during the Second World War mobilized more than 2,000 of its own troops to defend the Pope.

David Alvarez now opens up this little-known aspect of the Papacy in the first general history of the papal armed forces. His is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive chronicle of the modern Vatican's military and security forces from 1796, when the armies of revolutionary France invaded the Papal States, through the wars for unification, to the present-day deployment of modern weapons, technology, and skills to protect the Holy Father and the Vatican from terrorists and assassins.

Most papal histories make little reference to military affairs, while the few that address them do so only in passing or focus narrowly on particular units or campaigns. Alvarez’s history expands our understanding of the Papacy's military through the exceptional research he has done as the first American scholar to gain access to the archive of the Pontifical Swiss Guard and the modern military records in the Vatican Secret Archive. He is also the first historian of any nationality to use the records of the Vatican Gendarmeria.

Alvarez chronicles the exploits of the Vatican’s military leaders and soldiers in their campaigns and battles, focusing on how those units under the Pope’s authority—including the Vatican navy—engaged in actual military operations. He also deals extensively with the Vatican Gendarmeria as well as the Pope’s Noble Guards, Palatine Guards, and Swiss Guards, describing their distinctive responsibilities and revealing the competition and internal tensions that sometimes undermined the morale, preparedness, and cohesion of the Pope’s guards.

Filled with information that will surprise scholars of the Papacy and military historians alike, Alvarez’s highly original work illuminates a shadowy corner of Vatican history and will fascinate all readers interested in the role of the church in the broader world.

CHAPTER 1

The Worst Army in Europe

In 1796 Pope Pius VI may have had the worst army in Europe. He wasn’t particularly distressed by that deficiency, but many of his predecessors would have been scandalized by his neglect of martial affairs. The papacy had once been a significant military power in Europe. In addition to their spiritual authority over the Catholic faithful, popes, beginning with the demise of the Roman Empire, had gradually accumulated secular power over territories and populations. As secular lords they often acted as military leaders, constructing great fortifications, establishing arsenals, levying war taxes, raising armies, launching war galleys, and occasionally leading those armies and galleys into battle to defend the church and the territories that the church had accumulated over the centuries against religious and secular foes. At the end of the sixth century Pope Gregory I raised and provisioned troops and made dispositions for the defense of Rome in the face of a threat from the Lombards. In the ninth century Leo IV led an armed force of Romans to the mouth of the Tiber River to repel Muslim pirates; he also fortified with walls and bastions the area adjacent to Saint Peter’s Basilica. Fifty years later John VIII contributed additional fortifications to the Eternal City and assumed personal command of a galley in a campaign against pirates who were ravaging the southern coasts of the Italian peninsula. In 915 John X led an expeditionary force to battle corsairs on the Garigliano River, later boasting to the archbishop of Cologne that he had twice entered the fray.¹

By the Middle Ages pontiffs were less inclined to lead men personally into battle, but they did not hesitate to send other churchmen—cardinals and archbishops—to command in their place. In 1247, for example, Cardinal Gregory of Montelungo defeated the army of Emperor Frederick II near Parma and captured imperial fortresses and supply camps. Enraged and embarrassed by the military presumption of this prelate and the pope he represented, Frederick complained, “These priests of ours wear cuirasses instead of liturgical vestments [and] bear lances instead of a pastoral staff.”² In a throwback to earlier times, Pope Julius II considered war a matter too important to delegate; between 1506 and 1511 he campaigned at the head of his troops in defense of the papacy up and down the Italian peninsula. By this time a political entity known as the States of the Church or the Papal States had emerged in central Italy, and like any other political entity, this state had political, economic, and security interests that had to be defended.

Julius was the last of the warlord pontiffs, and his pontificate represented the apogee of the militaristic papacy. Although his immediate successors kept the papacy at the forefront of military affairs and innovation (the first example of what would be called the trace italienne, the “modern” fortification that replaced the high walls and towers of the medieval castle, appeared at the papal port of Civitavecchia in 1519, and the papal army of the late sixteenth century was second only to Venice in moving to adopt a common uniform for its soldiers), there was a gradual lessening in the bellicosity of popes. The Papal States might be drawn unwittingly into the wars of larger powers, such as Spain and France, which used the Italian peninsula as a battleground for their ambitions, and sometimes the consequences of these conflicts, such as the sack of Rome by the imperial army of Charles V in 1527, were calamitous, but by the seventeenth century popes rarely sought out trouble. In coalition with other European powers they occasionally participated in joint expeditions against the Muslims. In 1571 Pius V contributed 12 war galleys and 1,600 naval infantry to the Christian fleet that broke the Turkish navy at the Battle of Lepanto. Between 1645 and 1669 Innocent X, Alexander VII, and Clement IX sent funds and naval vessels during each campaigning season to support Venice’s efforts to keep the island of Crete from Muslim hands. Innocent XI was the last pope to participate in such a venture when, in 1684, he contributed several warships to the fleet of Venetian admiral Francesco Morosini, which swept Turkish vessels from the central Mediterranean in the First Morea War.³ Even less frequently there was conflict with other Italian states, such as the war against the Duchy of Parma in 1642–1644. The waning of Muslim power after the failure of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and the emergence in the early eighteenth century of a relatively stable political order in central Italy (based on several small kingdoms and duchies that had few ambitions for territorial or political aggrandizement at the expense of the Papal States) greatly reduced the immediate threat for eighteenth-century popes and lessened the need for an active military posture and a significant military organization. Great powers, such as France, Spain, or Austria, might still use the Italian peninsula as a battlefield or a military highway, and their military adventures occasionally spilled over into the Papal States, but such powers no longer had much interest in deposing popes or annexing papal territory. Even if they did, it was apparent by the late seventeenth century that the papacy lacked the human, financial, and material resources to mobilize a serious military response against a major power. In short, powers the papacy could match militarily, such as the duchies of Modena and Tuscany, posed little threat, whereas countries that were potentially a serious threat, such as France and Austria, were so beyond the military capabilities of the papacy that there was little sense in even trying to prepare and maintain a military response. Moreover, the issues that complicated Rome’s relations with other governments in the eighteenth century—such as the suppression of the Jesuits and the independence of national churches—were not the sort usually settled by recourse to arms. Diplomacy and the spiritual authority of the Holy Father, not regiments and warships, were now the principal instruments of papal policy, and popes no longer resorted to war. Soldiers were kept to lend color and display to ceremonies and to maintain order and security in the towns and provinces of the Papal States, but no one expected them to face battle. Pius VI, therefore, did not care that his army might be the worst in Europe because he never expected to use it. Of course, he did not anticipate the French Revolution. And no one could have anticipated Napoléon Bonaparte.

Asserting the primacy of reason over faith; change over tradition; the people over established elites; and the popular will over legitimacy, custom, and revelation, the French Revolution probably could not have avoided a collision with the papacy, which by contrast cherished such values as faith, tradition, and legitimacy. Beginning in August 1789 the Constituent Assembly in Paris embarked upon a sustained program of ecclesiastical reform that eventually included the elimination of tithes and annates, the nationalization of church property, the termination of ecclesiastical immunities from taxation, the abolition of most religious orders, and the refusal to recognize Catholicism as the state religion. By threatening the wealth, status, and authority of the church, such acts would have caught the full attention of any pope, but the assembly assured the enmity of Pius VI when it passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which unilaterally reduced the number of dioceses and parishes in France; made bishops and priests employees of the state; required the election of bishops and priests by the people they served, including non-Catholics; and affirmed the dissolution of religious orders except for those engaged in education. The Constituent Assembly further decreed that all clergy would have to swear an oath to accept and support the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and that those who refused would be removed from their positions. Despite the explicit threat of sanctions, less than one-third of the priests in France and only 7 of the 160 bishops took the oath. The oath takers were known as the Constitutional Church and openly collaborated with the republican regime. Many of the dissenters sought refuge in other countries, and those who stayed formed what was effectively an underground church.⁴

As early as March 1790 Pius began to denounce what he considered the French assembly’s illegal and unwarranted interference in ecclesiastical affairs. His protests culminated in April 1791 when he issued an encyclical, titled Caritas quae, in which he condemned the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as sacrilegious and schismatic, denounced the Constitutional Church, and suspended all clergy who had sworn the constitutional oath unless they retracted in forty days.⁵ Caritas quae had no impact on the revolutionary leaders in Paris except to accelerate what was becoming an outright persecution of clergy outside the Constitutional Church. In the years immediately following the encyclical, relations between Paris and Rome continued to deteriorate, with each side hardening its position. In the French capital the papacy was increasingly seen as one of the traditionalist regimes that were, by definition, the natural enemies of the revolution. This perception sharpened in June 1792 when Pius sent an émigré French archbishop, Jean-Sifrein Maury, who had fled to Rome to escape the wrath of the revolution, to represent him at the Diet of Frankfort, a conference of several European powers to discuss measures to restrain if not chastise France. In Frankfort Maury, perhaps exceeding his authority, encouraged representatives of the other powers to believe that the Holy Father was prepared to enlist in an anti-French alliance. In fact, when invited in the fall of 1792 to join the so-called First Coalition, a grouping that would eventually include Austria, Britain, the Netherlands, Prussia, Sardinia, and Spain, in a war against France, Pius declined on the grounds that he had neither troops nor money to contribute to the effort. However, his refusal did little to assuage suspicions in Paris.⁶

For his part, Pius had little reason to adjust his opinion of the revolutionary regime. Political and religious refugees, including relatives of King Louis XVI (executed in January 1793) and hundreds of bishops and priests who had refused the oath of allegiance, poured into the Papal States with hair-raising tales of political fanaticism and anticlerical excesses in France. The antics of the revolution’s few partisans in the Eternal City only contributed to the growing hostility. French students in Rome, particularly those affiliated with the French Academy, eagerly embraced the revolution and delighted in the ostentatious display of tricolored cockades, vocal proclamation of republican sentiments, and public manifestations of solidarity with their countrymen in France. These activities offended many Romans who tended to hold rather traditional attitudes concerning politics, religion, and social order. The arrival in Rome of Nicholas Hugo de Basseville, sometime journalist and full-time propagandist, who then held the nominal position of secretary in the French embassy to the Kingdom of Naples, exacerbated the offense. Basseville’s pretensions, arrogance, and self-promotion irritated other diplomats in the Eternal City and practically everyone else he met. Papal authorities were particularly annoyed by his demands for the release of several French students who had been arrested for disorderly conduct and by his insistence on the immediate replacement of monarchical symbols on the French embassy with symbols of the new republic. Both of these demands were refused. The lack of official permission did not deter the representative of the revolution. In January 1793 Basseville hosted a banquet at which he announced that the hated symbols should be replaced forthwith. Republican enthusiasts from the French Academy accepted the charge; overnight they cobbled together a revolutionary coat of arms and set it up at the embassy. The next morning a Roman crowd tore down and destroyed the display. Exhibiting the imprudence that made his name a byword in Rome for arrogance and buffoonery, Basseville decided to demonstrate his disdain for the opinions of the people of Rome. Joined by his wife and by Charles de la Flotte, a visiting French naval officer, the impetuous young diplomat decorated his carriage with revolutionary cockades and insignia and drove down the Corso, the main street of the city. When their appearance was met by a hail of stones and curses, Basseville ordered his driver to seek shelter in a nearby courtyard. Unfortunately, the crowd followed and assaulted the coach. In the tumult Basseville received a mortal knife wound, and la Flotte barely escaped through a nearby house. Madame de Basseville was not physically harmed.

The murder of Basseville enraged authorities in Paris and further enflamed French-papal relations. The French government demanded a formal apology, the arrest and punishment of the killer, the immediate placement of republican symbols on the French embassy, the expulsion of all French émigrés from Rome, and the payment of an indemnity. The pope refused to consider these demands. Distracted by more pressing matters, such as a war of national survival against the armies of the First Coalition, authorities in Paris did not pursue the protest, but they considered the Basseville affair an affront to France that confirmed the papacy as an enemy of the revolution and the republic. They would bide their time, and when conditions were more opportune and the appropriate means available they would deal with that enemy. Three years later both the opportunity and the means were at hand.

Despite some early successes, the First Coalition had foundered in its effort against France. Calling the nation to arms to protect the revolution, the National Convention (successor to the Constituent Assembly) had expelled the invaders from France and then carried the war into other nations’ territories. By the spring of 1796 only Austria, Britain, and the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont were still fighting. The first of these allies controlled large parts of northern Italy, particularly the region of Lombardy. To open a southern front and force the diversion of Austrian troops from the central front along the Rhine, the convention sent a young general, Napoléon Bonaparte, to command the republic’s Army of Italy, a neglected and rather ragtag force that had been covering the French-Piedmontese border. Within four weeks of entering Italy, Bonaparte had defeated Austrian and Sardinian armies, forced Sardinia from the war with the Armistice of Cherasco, captured Milan, and pushed the Austrians back into the fortress city of Mantua. With the Austrians and Sardinians neutralized, the northern provinces of the Papal States, the so-called Legations centered in the region of the Romagna, were exposed and threatened. Although the papacy was not at war with France, the convention saw an opportunity to strike at an ideological enemy, revenge the death of Nicholas Hugo de Basseville, and refresh the finances of the Army of Italy and the republic by plundering the wealth of the papacy. As early as February 1796 the Directory (which had superseded the convention as the executive arm of the French government) had suggested to the commander of the Army of Italy that he should march on Rome. From his headquarters in Milan, General Bonaparte, on May 21, 1796, issued a proclamation that revealed that he was looking south after vanquishing the Austrians and Piedmontese. “We are friends of all the people,” he announced, “especially the descendants of Brutus and the Scipios. We want to renew the Campidoglio . . . and liberate the Roman people from their long servitude.”⁷ These words were not intended to reassure the pope and his government. Perhaps the general’s words were nothing but revolutionary rhetoric, but if they were more than mere bluster, then for the first time in the memory of any pontifical official the Papal States faced the prospect of war—a prospect for which the papacy was entirely unprepared.

In the spring of 1796 the pontifical army was struggling to emerge from decades of neglect by embracing, albeit rather fitfully, reforms intended to rationalize its organization and improve its capabilities. Since the late seventeenth century the force levels of the regular army had hovered around 5,000 men, although occasionally the numbers would fall as low as 3,000.⁸ Supporting this small force was a citizen militia that, in theory, could mobilize 80,000–90,000 men in an emergency. For reasons lost in the mists of time and the dusty shelves of archival cabinets, control over the regular army was divided among three authorities, each of which jealously protected its prerogatives. The Commissioner of Arms always commanded the bulk of the officers and men, but depending on the historical period as much as a quarter of the total force, particularly garrisons beyond Rome and the Guardie di Finanza (customs guards), was under the authority of the Treasurer General, and the Secretary of the Consulta always controlled a few hundred personnel. A fourth authority, the master of the Apostolic Palace, directed the pope’s palace guard, which was not considered part of the army. These household troops included the famous Guardia Svizzera (Swiss Guard), which in this period numbered between 100 and 130 men, and two mounted units, the Lance Spezzate (approximately 20 men) and the Corpi dei Cavalleggeri (approximately 80 men).⁹ This division of authority reflected a division of functions. By the late eighteenth century the papal army was performing a variety of roles, including ceremonial honor guard, fortress garrison, border patrol, customs police, coastal surveillance, and urban and rural law enforcement. Administrative responsibility for these tasks was divided among different offices in the papal bureaucracy.

The regular troops were scattered across the Papal States in small garrisons and detachments. In 1792 the largest concentration of soldiers, 930 men, was at Civitavecchia, the main port on the west coast of the country, but most of the posts had fewer than 500 soldiers, and many had fewer than 100. The garrisons of the 34 fortified towers constructed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to protect the coastlines from North African corsairs rarely numbered more than a half-dozen men, and even major fortresses, such as the citadels at Perugia, San Leo, and Pesaro, mustered fewer than 30 soldiers.¹⁰ Whatever their post, the troops were inexperienced, ill-trained, and ill-equipped. With the exception of a handful of officers recruited from foreign armies, the army had no experience of warfare. The last time papal soldiers had marched to battle was 1739, when the cardinal legate (governor) of the Romagna region mobilized a force of 500 militiamen and attacked the tiny republic of San Marino in a brief dispute over legal immunities and privileges. Regular soldiers received little training, rarely practicing with their muskets and never operating in units larger than a battalion. Most units performed few military functions beyond guard duty at barracks, public buildings, and city gates; ceremonial service at public and religious celebrations; and support for police and customs authorities. Except for elements of the Reggimento delle Guardie di Nostro Signore (Guards Regiment of Our Lord) that every summer embarked on papal naval vessels for antipiracy patrols, few units went into the field often enough to...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Worst Army in Europe
• 2. A Cause Worth Fighting For
• 3. A War Too Soon
• 4. Red Shirts and Brigands
• 5. The Last Stand of the Papal Army
• 6. An Army without a State
• 7. Armed Neutrality
• 8. Guardian Angels
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover