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| Cardinal Fabrizio Dionigi Ruffo leading the Sanfedisti under the protection of St. Anthony of Padua |
See, Part I, Part II, Part IV
The Reconquest: Ruffo, Altamura, and the Fall of the Republic
Following the flight of the Neapolitan court to Palermo, Cardinal Fabrizio Dionigi Ruffo was appointed Vicar General of the mainland kingdom and tasked with restoring royal authority.
Born on September 16, 1744, in San Lucido, Calabria, into a prominent noble family of the Kingdom of Naples, Ruffo was educated in Rome. He entered the service of the Papal States and in 1785 was appointed Treasurer General of the Apostolic Camera under Pope Pius VI, overseeing papal finances during a period of increasing fiscal and political strain. Although he was made a cardinal in 1791, he was never ordained a priest—something not uncommon in the eighteenth century.
Ruffo was not a professional soldier and lacked formal military training. Before 1799, his experience was primarily administrative and political rather than martial. After withdrawing to Calabria during the upheavals that followed the French invasion of the Papal States, he later joined the royal court in Sicily.
Acting under royal mandate, Ruffo crossed from Sicily to Calabria in early February 1799 with only a small following—sources vary, citing seven or eight companions—and a single banner bearing the royal arms on one side and the Holy Cross on the other. He landed at Punta del Mezzo near Reggio Calabria on February 8th.
From the outset, Ruffo’s campaign combined political legitimacy, religious authority, and practical organization. Issuing a pastoral call to clergy and magistrates, he ordered the preaching of a crusade to defend faith, restore lawful sovereignty, and expel foreign rule. The response was rapid. Men from across Calabria—peasants, artisans, former soldiers of the disbanded Bourbon army, and local nobility—joined his ranks. Within weeks, the Armata della Santa Fede had grown into a force estimated at between twenty and twenty-five thousand men.
The expansion of Ruffo’s army reflected the weakness of republican control outside Naples. With French forces withdrawing northward and the Parthenopean Republic increasingly isolated, the countryside slipped beyond Jacobin authority. Armed bands, some disciplined and others irregular, rose throughout the provinces. While criminal elements inevitably exploited the disorder, the predominant motivation was defensive and political: the protection of local communities and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.
As Ruffo advanced northward, resistance to his army was uneven. In many towns, republican administrations collapsed without serious fighting. In others, particularly those where Jacobin influence was strongest, resistance was determined and violent. The most significant of these confrontations occurred at Altamura in Puglia.
Altamura had established itself as a Jacobin stronghold and refused repeated offers of clemency. Ruffo proposed a pardon on condition that the inhabitants renounce the republic and submit to royal authority. Encouraged by republican leaders and falsely assured that French reinforcements were imminent, the city rejected these terms. During negotiations for the release of two captured engineers, an envoy sent by Ruffo failed to return. The prisoners were likewise not released.
When Ruffo attacked, the fighting lasted a full day. By nightfall, the defenders had exhausted their ammunition. Seeking to limit further bloodshed, Ruffo deliberately left one side of the city unblocked, allowing civilians and defenders to flee under the cover of darkness, reportedly through Porta Bari. Before abandoning the city, however, the “gentle patriots,” truly embracing the beau idéal of the French Revolution, carried out a final act of violence and left the victors a grisly parting gift: forty-eight captured royalists, including Ruffo’s envoy, were bound, shot, and sealed inside a church crypt. When Ruffo’s forces entered Altamura without further resistance, they discovered the victims dead or dying. Only three survived. [15]
Subsequent historiography has often portrayed the sack of Altamura as an unprovoked massacre. Contemporary research complicates this narrative. Francesco M. de Robertis, writing in Archivio Storico Pugliese, concluded that the events commonly described as a “Jacobin holocaust” or “massacre of the innocents” were, in fact, reprisals following the murder of Bourbon loyalists. De Robertis further noted that the number of royalists killed in the convent of San Francesco may have reached 150. [16]
Even Vincenzo Cuoco, a sympathetic chronicler of the Neapolitan Republic, acknowledged that Ruffo had exercised “apparent moderation in all his victories” prior to Altamura. Cuoco nonetheless framed the sack of the city as an act of calculated terror, attributing it to the defenders’ “noble obstinacy” rather than to the preceding murders. His account conspicuously avoids specifying whose blood was shed, while transforming executed collaborators into martyrs of liberty. [17]
This selective framing persists in modern commemorations. In Altamura, a monument erected in 1899 honors the “martyrs” of the revolution without reference to the Bourbon loyalists who were murdered. Artistic representations, such as Michele Cammarano’s Massacre of Altamura (1881), similarly present a one-sided depiction of the events, reinforcing the revolutionary narrative while excluding its victims.
Comparable scrutiny is rarely applied to republican violence elsewhere. French General Guillaume Philibert Duhesme burned and sacked towns across Avellino, Salerno, and Basilicata, imposing heavy financial exactions and leaving widespread ruin. General Jean-Baptiste Broussier ordered the destruction of Andria and Trani, where contemporary accounts estimate thousands of deaths. Ettore Carafa, commander of the Republican Legion, openly boasted of the devastation inflicted. Harold Acton observed that republican forces were often more methodical than Ruffo’s irregulars, leaving anarchy and ruin behind them. [18]
Acton further noted the inconsistency of Jacobin moral outrage. Republican correspondents justified the burning of cities and execution of clergy as legitimate measures against rebellion. General Macdonald’s orders prescribed death for clergy deemed responsible for resistance and authorized the destruction of entire districts. These policies were implemented without hesitation, yet later commentators reserved their indignation almost exclusively for the actions of the Sanfedisti. [19]
By contrast, Acton concluded that Ruffo himself acted with restraint amid extreme circumstances. Though some may have joined his army seeking plunder, Ruffo consistently advocated moderation and amnesty. He converted wavering republicans, restrained excess where possible, and urged clemency upon the crown—recommendations the king and queen would later reject. [20]
By early June, the Parthenopean Republic was in terminal decline. French protection had evaporated, provincial resistance had overwhelmed republican administrations, and Ruffo’s army stood poised outside Naples, its advance reinforced by the arrival of foreign allies, including a Russo-Ottoman expeditionary force led by the French émigré Cavalier Antoine Micheroux. The reconquest was no longer a question of possibility, but of timing.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli
Footnotes:
[15] Acton, Harold, The Bourbons of Naples, Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1957.
[16] de Robertis, Francesco M., “Altamura 1799: puro olocausto giacobino o strage a ritorsione di precedente strage?” pp. 7-10, Archivio Storico Pugliese, LV 2002, Società di Storia Patria per la Puglia, Bari, Palazzo dell’Ateneo.
[17] Cuoco, Vincenzo, Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, University of Toronto Press, 2014.
[18] Acton, Harold, The Bourbons of Naples, Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1957.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
