Naples was a third-rate power in a quiet corner of Europe that would one day be part of the unified nation of Italy. Ruled by Bourbon King Ferdinand IV, it had no colonial holdings and only tentative control over its outlying provinces. Its most problematic province was the rough and tumble region known as Calabria, the “toe” in the “boot” of modern-day Italy. This poor, rural, isolated corner of Europe was a land of banditry and superstition. The peasants struggled to scrape together a meager existence while fending off the brigands that mercilessly preyed upon them. The people knew nothing of the outside world except what they heard from their local priests, who themselves knew little of the world outside of Calabria.

After the battle of Austerlitz, the French flooded into Naples. King Ferdinand IV fled to Sicily, under the protection of the British, but was forced to abdicate when the Neapolitan army crumbled in Calabria under the weight of the 10,000-man French Armée de Naples. Napoleon placed his brother Joseph on the throne as Naples’ new king.

Though the Neapolitan resistance had shattered, the French had not “taken” Calabria. In fact, they found the province as hard to subdue as had King Ferdinand IV and his many predecessors. Soon, the French were under attack seemingly across the province, both by villagers angry at French demands on their scarce supplies and by brigands seeking loot. Smelling blood, the British patched together an invasion force and attacked the beleaguered French army at Maida. The French were routed and began a grueling retreat across the hostile, mountainous countryside of Calabria, hounded by brigands as they fled.

The tide turned just as rapidly with the arrival of French reinforcements in Calabria. The British, outnumbered, were forced to retreat back to Sicily. Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, replaced Joseph Bonaparte–ironically called to serve as king of equally troubled Spain. Murat oversaw the brutal subjugation of the province by means that can only accurately be described as terrorism. In the end, Calabrian civilians feared the French more than the brigands. The insurgency slowly withered and died.

The Spanish Ulcer
The Kingdom of Spain, which had vaulted itself into preeminence with its head start in the colonization of the new world in the sixteenth century, was by 1808 a fading world power. Losses in the Thirty Years’ War and the rise of Britain as a naval superpower had eroded both its colonial holdings and its military might. Napoleon’s dominance of continental Europe after the War of the Third Coalition put Spanish King Charles IV in a precarious position. Napoleon was attempting to starve British trade by imposing his “Continental System” on his new empire, forbidding client states to trade with the Kingdom of Great Britain. Spain, trapped between these two leviathans, was obliged to side with the closer threat on its northern border.

Tiny Portugal also had a choice to make. It had remained neutral throughout the early Napoleonic wars, though it had a treaty with Britain and had already suffered invasion by Spain (secretly backed by the French). Portugal chose to side with its ally, Britain, but the tiny nation was no match for the combined might of the French and Spanish army. This combined army overwhelmed Portugal in only a month in late 1807. The Portuguese royal family escaped to Brazil and established a government in exile.

The campaign turned out to be as disastrous for Spain as it had been for Portugal. Under the pretense of reinforcing his garrison in Portugal, Napoleon began flooding Spain with French troops. Then the French began occupying Spanish forts for the “protection” of the Spanish people. Days later, the French seized power. In a rapid succession of French coups, Napoleon forced Charles IV to abdicate to his son, Ferdinand VII, and then to Napoleon’s brother, Joseph. While the Spanish establishment, the clergy and the aristocracy, quickly lined up behind the new monarch, what happened next shocked Napoleon to his core.

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