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The conditions which favour brigandage have been more prevalent, and for longer, in Italy than elsewhere in western Europe, with the standing exception of Corsica, which is Italian in all but political allegiance. Until the middle of the 19th century Italy was divided into small states, so that the brigand who was closely pursued in one could flee to another. Thus it was that Marco Sciarra of the Abruzzi, when hard pressed by the Spanish viceroy of Naples?just before and after 1600?could cross the border of the papal states and return on a favourable opportunity. When pope and viceroy combined against him he took service with Venice, from whence he could communicate with his friends at home, and pay them occasional visits. On one such visit he was led into a trap and slain. Marco Sciarra had terrorized the country far and wide at the head of 600 men. He was the follower and imitator of Benedetto Mangone, of whom it is recorded that, having stopped a party of travellers which included Torquato Tasso, he allowed them to pass unharmed out of his reverence for poets and poetry. Mangone was finally taken, and beaten to death with hammers at Naples. He and his like are the heroes of much popular verse, written in ottava rima, and beginning with the traditional epic invocation to the muse. A fine example is "The most beautiful history of the life and death of Pietro Mancino, chief of Banditti," which has remained popular with the people of southern Italy. It begins:?
"Io canto li ricatti, e il fiero ardire
Del gran Pietro Mancino fuoruscito"
(Pietro Mancino that great outlawed man
I sing, and all his rage.)
In Naples the number of competing codes and jurisdictions, the survival of the feudal power of the nobles, who sheltered banditti, just as a Highland chief gave refuge to "caterans" in Scotland, and the helplessness of the peasantry, made brigandage chronic, and the same conditions obtained in Sicily. The Bourbon dynasty reduced brigandage very much, and secured order on the main high-roads. But it was not extinguished, and it revived during the French invasion. This was the flourishing time of the notorious Fra Diavolo, who began as brigand and blossomed into a patriot. Fra Diavolo was captured and executed by the French. When Ferdinand was restored on the fall of Napoleon he employed an English officer, General Sir Richard Church, to suppress the brigands. General Church, who kept good order among his soldiers, and who made them pay for everything, gained the confidence of the peasantry, and restored a fair measure of security. It was he who finally brought to justice the villainous Don Ciro Anicchiarico?priest and brigand?who declared at his trial with offhand indifference that he supposed he had murdered about seventy people first and last. When a brother priest was sent to give him the consolations of religion, Ciro cut him short, saying, "Stop that chatter, we are two of a trade: we need not play the fool to one another" (Lasciate queste chiacchiere, siamo dell' istessa professione: non ci burliamo fra noi). Every successive revolutionary disturbance in Naples saw a recrudescence of brigandage down to the unification of 1860-1861, and then it was years before the Italian government rooted it out. The source of the trouble was the support the brigands received from various kinds of "manuténgoli" (maintainers)?great men, corrupt officials, political parties, and the peasants who were terrorized, or who profited by selling the brigands food and clothes. In Sicily brigandage has been endemic. In 1866 two English travellers, Mr E.J.C. Moens and the Rev. J.C. Murray Aynesley, were captured and held to ransom. Mr Moens found that the "manuténgoli" of the brigands among the peasants charged famine prices for food, and extortionate prices for clothes and cartridges. What is true of Naples and Sicily is true of other parts of Italy mutatis mutandis. In Tuscany, Piedmont and Lombardy the open country has been orderly, but the borders infested with brigands. The worst district outside Calabria has been the papal states. The Austrian general, Frimont, did, however, partly clear the Romagna about 1820, though at a heavy cost of life to his soldiers?mostly Bohemian Jägers?from the malaria.
The history of brigandage in Spain is very similar. It may be said to have been endemic in and south of the Sierra Morena. In the north it has flourished when government was weak, and after foreign invasion
