Soldier Emperor:
The Pope’s Divisions, Part Two
By Mike Bennighof, PhD
February 2025

Our story began in Part One.

By March 1796, when Napoleon began his Italian campaign, the army of Pius VI numbered 8,600 men. The French invaded the Papal States on 17 June, and the pope’s army promptly fell apart. The French quickly captured Forte Urbano, a large “star fortress” guarding the pope’s northern border. The garrisons of Ferrara and Bologna put up even less resistance, and at the cost of no casualties to either side, the French also seized 164 cannon and 8,000 muskets. By June the pope had accepted an armistice that allowed the French to occupy those cities, gave them free passage through the Papal States, and yielded 21 million lire plus 100 works of art and 500 ancient documents out of the Vatican archives.

Papal negotiators traveled to Paris to iron out a permanent peace treaty, where they strung out the talks. Meanwhile the pope’s government slow-walked payment of the indemnity and shipment of the promised art. Pius VI ordered his army doubled in size and established a new centralized military authority to oversee the expansion. He also fired the peace-loving Zelada as Cardinal Secretary of State, and dispatched his more militant replacement Ignazio Busca to Vienna to arrange cooperation with the Austrian offensive in northern Italy that began in July 1796, initially pushing the French back.

The papal nobility opened their purses to recruit troops, with noblemen handed officer commissions based on the number of men they mustered and equipped. That brought in several thousand men, but it also meant that their officers had little to no qualifications for their posts, other than a fat purse and devotion to the pope. But the numbers brought confidence to Pius VI and his advisors. In August, they suspended payments of the French indemnity, and in October they announced that they would not be sending any more cash, artwork, or historical documents.

Michael Colli accepts command of the papal army from Pius VI. Not the best career move.

This turned out to be unfortunate timing. The initial success of the Austrian advance in July 1796 soon petered out. The pope had hoped that his army could march into the northern territories lost in June behind the advancing Austrians, and not have to risk battle with the French. But by early August the Austrian achievements had proved a mirage and they were in full retreat.

Col. Carlo Ancajani, noble sponsor and commander of the Regiment of the Romagna, moved his command to Faenza south-east of Bologna in November. He had two infantry battalions, one cavalry squadron and ten cannon, a total of 2,141 men. And there he remained; Austrian failures meant there would be no triumphant march into Bologna and Ferrara, but Ancajari failed with withdraw, most likely because no one issued such orders.

The Austrians had promised to provide an experienced commander for the pope’s forces, and 10,000 of their own troops. Only the commander actually arrived, 58-year-old Michael Colli, just returned from his leadership of the Sardinian army against Napoleon. Colli had been defeated, though not disastrously so, and had earned a reputation for personal bravery in Austria’s most recent war with the Turks. He landed at Ancona, the major port on the Adriatic coast of the Papal States, on 12 January 1797 with one aide and 3,000 muskets, but no troops.

Colli left his aide in Ancona to re-organize the port’s defenses, and rode to Rome with a stop to visit Ancajani’s outpost. He arrived at the Vatican on 20 January, and after two days of meetings with Pius VI and his senior military officers and advisors, the pope named him to command the papal army. While Colli expressed a great deal of needed determination and energy, he had never fully recovered from wounds suffered at the Siege of Belgrade in 1789. He at times had to be carried on a stretcher, limiting his command effectiveness.

Colli would have little opportunity to exercise command. On 14 January, the French defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Rivoli. On 2 February, the crucial Austrian-held fortress of Mantova, under siege since late August, surrendered with 16,000 men (with roughly the same number dead from battle or disease during the siege).

Papal cavalry encounter a lone Frenchman. February 1797.

While the Austrians reeled, Napoleon settled things with the pope. On 1 February he rejected the armistice, citing Pius VI’s failure to heed it terms (which was more or less true), and ordered Gen. Claude Victory-Perrin to invade the Papal States at the head of 9,000 men. Ancajani took the initiative to move his command from Faenza to the banks of the river Sesio to await Victor’s advance. Overnight, a fair proportion - numbers are uncertain, given what happened next - deserted.

A few sources take the claim made by Napoleon in his report to the Directory at face value: that Colli commanded in person, and the papal forces numbered 7,000 men. Neither of these are true. Ancajari went to the Sesio with 2,000 men, not all of whom stuck around the face the French.

The papalini prepared to defend the bridge over the Sesio, but Victor sent a column to demonstrate in front of the bridge while two others forded the river on either side of the bridge. The papal artillery (14 modern guns) opened fire with some accuracy, Lt. Col. Colli’s reforms showing their worth, but the papal troops panicked when the French crossed the river. Ordered to switch to grapeshot as the range closed, at least one flustered gun crew apparently loaded a sack of dried beans instead.

“The cannons on the bridge fired,” wrote papal noble Monaldo Leopardi, then a 21-year-old just-appointed officer, “and some Frenchmen died. Soon, however, the enemy prepared to ford the river; and when the troops saw that the French were not afraid of getting their feet wet, they shouted, ‘Every man for himself!’”

Ancajani’s command quickly fell apart. Ordered to screen the retreat, his cavalry squadron turned and fled at the gallop. Their commander followed. Numbers vary, but apparently about 600 of his 2,000 men became casualties (killed, wounded, and captured) and the remainder ran away. Forty of Victor’s men were killed and sixty wounded; most of these occurred in the initial papal cannonade.

The French bombard the games of Faenza, 2 February 1797.

Colli learned of the disaster four days later, during a meeting with Busca, the Cardinal State Secretary. Ancona fell to the French on the 8th, with the French walking through an open gate left undefended when Major Antonio Borosini’s battalion of Romagnese militia fled along with their commander. The Austrians did manage to retrieve their shipment of muskets along with a great deal of powder and shot, and eight cannon. The French disarmed the papal garrison without a shot being fired, and took 3,000 muskets and 120 cannon.

Colli desperately tried to rally the papal forces to defend the road across the Apennines to Rome, but even troops not present on the Sesio deserted or fled. Having dispersed the pope’s battalions, Napoleon decided not to march on Rome but to force a new peace on Pius VI to allow the French to return to their campaign against the Austrians. The Treaty of Tolentino, signed on 19 February, brought the war to an ignominious end.

This time, the French would occupy the Papal States (other than Latium, the area around Rome) until the indemnity had been paid: 10 million lire in cash and five million in diamonds, payable immediately, plus another 15 million cash in two installments due in March and April 1797. The French would have free passage through the pope’s territory, and French officials would oversee the transfer of 500 words of art including famed ancient sculptures like the Belvedere Apollo and the bust of Marcus Junius Brutus, and Renaissance paintings like Raphael’s Transfiguration. Many of these were returned in 1816, but some of the loot is still displayed in the Louvre more than two centuries later.

Spoils of war. Raphael’s Transfiguration.

The pope lost the territories occupied in 1796, plus Romagna. He also formally acquiesced to the French annexation of Avignon and its surrounding enclave. Napoleon added the Italian territories to his newly-established Cisalpine Republic, but eschewed an occupation. “This ancient mechanism,” he wrote to the Directory, regarding the Papal States, “will self-destruct.”

Colli, who was not present at the Sesio, received all blame and was dismissed from papal service. He accepted an offer from another Austrian general, Karl Mack, to help Mack reform the King of Naples’ crapulent army. Pius VI ordered the remnants of his army re-organized into two legions, both garrisoned in Rome. Ancajani and Borosini, as papal nobles, escaped all responsibility despite their cowardice. Ancanjani would command the legion stationed in Rome, and Borosini that in Marche.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his Iron Dog, Leopold.

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