by Gideon Defoe
Things got serious when, after putting up with more than a year of this kind of roguery, an Italian warship parked in the bay shelled D’Annunzio’s palace. He had a decision to make. Showing all the profound, grown-up sense of responsibility he was famous for, he flipped a coin: it came up tails, and so he called it a day. His Fiume Endeavour (‘Impresa di Fiume’) died on a coin toss.
While the newly rechristened Free State of Fiume carried on for another three years without him,* D’Annunzio retired to his spectacularly creepy house overlooking Lake Garda, where he was showered with gifts by Mussolini in order to keep him out of trouble (Mussolini was operating on the principle that ‘either you pull the tooth, or you fill it with gold’). In 1938 he died of a brain haemorrhage at his desk. Or possibly he was poisoned by his girlfriend, a Nazi spy planted to keep tabs on him – as with most of D’Annunzio’s life, the truth is murky.†
* After D’Annunzio, Fiume didn’t get a lot of rest: first carved up by Italy and Yugoslavia, then occupied by the Germans, then finding itself back in Yugoslavia, and currently part of Croatia (in Croatian it is called Rijeka).
† Probably lies: D’Annunzio enjoyed spreading a lot of myths about himself. He’d have dinner parties and comment that children tasted like lamb, but he almost certainly didn’t eat children.
The Kingdom of Sedang
1888–90
Population: unknown
Capital: Kon Tum
Languages: Sedang, French
Cause of death: a king who was too shady by half
Today: part of Vietnam
///wistfulness.toothbrush.bidding
There’s a strangely consistent psychological profile that fits Guys Who Set Up Countries. Dead dad, raised by a doting mum, serially unfaithful, stint in the army or navy, writer or journalist, can’t be trusted with money, fantasist – these could all more or less describe D’Annunzio in Fiume, or Harden-Hickey in Trinidad, or Theodore von Neuhoff in Corsica, or Exhibit D: Marie-Charles David de Mayréna.
Growing up in France, where he was awarded the Legion of Honour for bravery during the Franco-Prussian War, in 1883 de Mayréna was accused of ‘swindling’. He fled to Holland, and then to the Dutch East Indies, from which he was forcibly repatriated. Undeterred, he was soon heading out east again, having somehow been entrusted with 30,000 francs to lead an expedition to unexplored Java, even though he was the last person anyone should have been entrusting 30,000 francs to. He only made it as far as Saigon, where he lived it up in cafés, told tall tales and spent all the expedition money. The local police kept a file on him.
Over the next few years, he undertook a number of forays into the interior of Indochina, supposedly to negotiate with the natives on behalf of the French. In 1888, he landed on the coast of Quinton, in modern-day Vietnam. There the indigenous tribes practised a basic form of agriculture and lived in villages built around rongs, houses on stilts with huge, pointed thatched roofs. In one of these, de Mayréna signed a treaty with a collection of the local chiefs, unifying the disparate groups into a confederation – but rather than a confederation proclaiming loyalty to France, it was one that proclaimed loyalty to Marie the First, King of Sedang. Exactly how and why this happened is unclear, but some put it down to ‘his skill at prestidigitation’ (i.e., he was good at doing magic tricks). He came up with a national anthem (based on the can-can music) and declared Catholicism the state religion, though he himself adopted Islam because it allowed him to take multiple wives.
King Marie travelled to Hong Kong to swank about and raise more funds. Initially, the local press lapped him up, impressed by his charm and very swish outfits. But rumours soon started to circulate. Local tailors dogged him for payment of outstanding bills for his cartoonish uniforms. His reputation suffering, he headed back to Paris where – another common theme, this – he tried to bestow honours in exchange for cash. At various points he tried to sell his entire kingdom to France,* Prussia and the British, but none of them were interested. Finally, he found a credulous sap: a rich Belgian industrialist who was obsessed with titles, which Marie was happy to shower him with. This funded his return to Indochina, but when he stopped off in Singapore he learned that the French now claimed Sedang and the surrounding region as their own, and had blockaded the port. Fearing they would try to extradite him (both on account of the earlier ‘swindling’ and the questionable, self-aggrandising way in which he had performed his ‘negotiations’) he headed for home. But he never quite got that far, instead finishing up on the island of Tioman, in the South China Sea. And that’s where he spent the rest of his life, in a shack with a man who made a living collecting bird nests, becoming increasingly paranoid about threats to his life – until one day, when out taking his French poodle, Auguste,† for a walk, he was bitten by a deadly snake.‡
* To be exact, he tried to blackmail France into buying Sedang by threatening to otherwise sell it to the Brits, which did little to help his popularity with either of them.
† ‘… the natives of the place will point out to you a number of strange-looking quadrupeds, half-pariah, half-poodle, and with pride will inform you that these are French Dogs; and these uncouth descendants of the well-beloved and redoubtable Auguste are the only traces left upon this little fairy island marking it as the erstwhile refuge of Marie David de Mayrena, King of the Sedangs.’ – Sir Hugh Clifford, Heroes of Exile (1906).
‡ Conflicting reports at the time suggest that Marie’s death might alternatively have been the result of either a duel or poisoning, so it’s possible he wasn’t as paranoid as he seemed.
Mistakes & Micronations
The Republic of Cospaia
1440–1826
Population: circa 300
Language: Italian
Cause of death: too much of a good thing
Today: part of Italy
///firmer.imperialism.delays
Things were going badly for Pope Eugene IV. Years of ugly Church politics, accusations of corruption and favouritism, competing claims about who even counted as the real pope in the first place – it had all led to a lot of senior Catholics adopting Father Ted’s favourite get-out line when presented with a difficult question: ‘That would be an ecumenical matter.’ By which they meant that the buck should stop not with the pope, but with an ecumenical council of ‘experts’. Eugene, who enjoyed being the undisputed word of God, felt differently.
Bitter ecclesiastical power struggles are expensive, and Eugene needed funds, so he did what anyone would do when they’re skint: he went to the fifteenth-century equivalent of a pawn shop, the Medici family, and put down a chunk of papal territory as collateral for 25,000 gold florins. Armed with this war chest, Eugene eventually got his way, but – unable to repay the loan – he signed over the promised real estate to his creditors. And then the man who had just won an argument about how extremely infallible he was screwed up. They agreed a border on a river. Neither side seemed to notice that the river was one of two tributaries, and so each drew their respective border at the nearest bank – of different bits of river. This left a small chunk of land, occupied by the hitherto unremarkable village of Cospaia, stranded in the middle, unclaimed by anyone. Not for the last time, a nation was formed by cartographical accident.
Cospaians were quick to pick up on the salient point of this: free from taxes and papal law, they proclaimed themselves an independent republic. They set about the fun part – designing a flag and coat of arms – but didn’t get as far as dealing with the duller business of electing a government. Instead, they continued with the vague, unofficial ‘council of elders’ common to most isolated Italian villages back then.
A hundred years later, still ignored by everyone, Cospaia properly hit its stride with the arrival of tobacco in Europe.* The Catholic Church didn’t approve, because not approving of things was kind of its whole deal, and threatened to excommunicate anybody who produced the stuff. Cospaia, outside of papal
jurisdiction and with the perfect climate for growing the tobacco plant, suddenly found itself with a near-monopoly in the region. It was the start of a 250-year-long boom time.
Throughout history, the unwritten rule of micronations is that you keep your head down, stay off the radar and hope that the bigger kids will leave you alone. But Cospaia’s thriving free-for-all started to niggle. By the nineteenth century it had supposedly become ‘a haven for draft dodgers and other undesirables’. Then Pope Leo XI and the neighbouring Grand Duke Leopold II started up territorial negotiations again. The Cospaians, wise to their own predicament, didn’t attempt to go out in a blaze of glory but instead opted for a blaze of fags: they agreed to be reabsorbed, but with a special dispensation to keep growing their tobacco.
The unforeseen legacy of the Pope’s mistake is that now, 500 years later, irritating teen anarchist-types clog up the internet telling people that ‘actually anarchy is really good, look at the Republic of Cospaia, they survived for 400 years without a government so I don’t see why I should tidy my room’.
* Initially thought to have medicinal properties when first imported into Europe, it was, in 1563, a Swiss doctor who noted that ‘the tobacco leaf also has a wonderful power of producing a kind of peaceful drunkenness’.
New Caledonia
1698–1700
Population: 1,200 (but not for long)
Capital: New Edinburgh
Currency: combs
Cause of death: bad planning, mosquitoes, Sassenachs
Today: part of Panama
///doves.unstained.musicians
It’s comforting to feel smug about the past. We laugh at our disasters and our haircuts and our computers the size of a bus. ‘Look at those olden-days idiots! How could they be so incredibly lame? Not like me, living in the glorious now, knowing all the things I know. This housing market is never going to crash!’ With the benefit of hindsight, Scotland’s attempt to establish New Caledonia seems so obviously doomed it’s risible – but the scheme wasn’t quite the straight-up bit of stupidity it’s usually portrayed as.
As usual, the English were definitely partly to blame. Scotland’s economy was in a bad way, and one of the reasons was that England, and the ever-rapacious East India Company, refused to allow it any bite of the international trading pie. The Company of Scotland was an attempt to fight back. It planned to raise funds in order to kick-start a new Scottish empire. That in itself wasn’t a bad idea. But the next issue was ‘where’, and this is the point things started to unravel.
Bad luck would have it that Lionel Wafer, a Welsh explorer, had returned from what is now Panama some years previously and made it sound amazing: green jungle, clear streams, delicious wild hogs, giant rabbits, fat bees, grassy meadows, prickly pears and pineapples as big as your head. For people stuck in rainy, impoverished Edinburgh, it sounded like a literal paradise. The Company decided it had found the perfect place to set up its trading colony, and the Darien scheme was born. Nobody stopped to ask why, if this Darien place was as great as all that, the Spanish hadn’t already taken it over the way they had the rest of the Americas.
The plan instantly hit a snag when England banned the Company of Scotland from seeking investors in either London or the Netherlands. So, it had to turn to its countrymen: thousands of small investors who enthusiastically backed the project to the tune of 400,000 pounds, which was a staggering amount, equivalent to an entire fifth of the country’s economy. Boats were purchased and colonists were recruited – and it seemed, for a moment, that the English wouldn’t have it all their own way for once.
The stuff they packed appears absurd now but would have struck your average seventeenth-century Scot as essential. Combs to exchange with the indigenous tribes, loads of Bibles, bonnets galore and a massive amount of whisky. In 1698, five ships set out, carrying a total of 1,200 people. The journey was difficult, and things got worse when they arrived. The locals weren’t that interested in the combs. The settlers couldn’t locate a source of fresh water. The swampy location they’d chosen wasn’t much like Wafer’s description, and several billion mosquitoes meant malaria was rife. The death rate ran at about ten a day. The only upside was that it was 300 years too early for Bear Grylls to show up.
The sailors, refusing to leave their boats, didn’t trust the colonists and vice versa. The local Kuna people proved friendly enough – like the Scots, they hated the Spanish – but there was a limit as to what they could do to help. Everybody got very drunk – though given the prevalence of waterborne diseases, sticking to booze wasn’t the dumbest strategy in the world.
After only a year, with the population down to 300, the colonists abandoned New Edinburgh and sailed for New York. Unfortunately, news was slow in 1699, and an initial flurry of positive letters sent out as a PR campaign – suspiciously, in retrospect, featuring the recurring phrase ‘one of the fruitfullest spots of ground on the face of the Earth!’ – had already led to a second batch of settlers striking out for the new country. Upon arrival, one of their boats caught fire. The colony was besieged by the Spanish. The Scots abandoned it once again in 1700.* Back home the Company collapsed in ignominy. As a result, New Caledonia wasn’t the only nation to officially come unstuck – Scotland would, before the decade was out, find itself having to sign the Act of Union, at least in part because the Darien scheme had left it bankrupt.
Today you can drive 19,000 miles along the Pan-American Highway all the way from Alaska to the tip of Argentina … except for the Darién Gap, still too much of a swampy challenge even for the smart, nowadays version of us.
* The Company of Scotland tried to recoup its losses after that by launching two more ships, the crews of which promptly palled about with some pirates, then did a deal to lend the pirates their boats, then backed out of the deal, then had their boats nicked by the pirates anyway.
The Principality of Elba
1814–15
Population: 12,000
Capital: Portoferraio
Languages: Italian, French
Currency: francs
Cause of death: boredom
Today: part of Italy
///cookies.swan.judges
It had been a rough few years and, like desperate parents sticking an iPad in front of their difficult toddler, the great powers of Europe decided to give the recently vanquished Emperor Napoleon a little country of his own to play with. ‘It’ll keep him out of trouble,’ went the slightly flawed reasoning. ‘He’ll grow some marrows and settle down and it’ll all be fine. He probably just had too much sugar.’
So began the short-lived life of Elba as a sovereign nation. Measuring 18 miles from tip-to-tip, it was 1/4,000 the size of Napoleon’s previous place. The underwhelming capital, Portoferraio, lacked the glamour of nineteenth-century Paris, but when Napoleon stepped off his boat, he did his best to look impressed at the bountiful natural resources of ‘some cabbages’ and ‘some dust’. In a welcoming ceremony, the local mayor gave him the keys to the town – though in fact they were the mayor’s cellar keys, painted gold, because the actual ceremonial keys had gotten lost. This pretty much set the tone.*
Instead of having a sulk about what a comedown it all was, Napoleon, to his credit, threw himself into making the place less terrible. He started a drive to grow more potatoes and radishes, and built anti-pirate fortifications. He erected schools and laid proper streets and even announced that, from now on, ‘no more than five people should have to share a bed’.
Despite this initial enthusiasm, it turned out that putting up new lampposts and digging in his garden weren’t as stimulating as invading Russia.† Napoleon fell into a funk. He ate a lot of biscuits. He played cards with his mum. A steady stream of spies dropped by to keep tabs on him and he pretended not to notice them. Meanwhile, back in Paris, the government planted a load of scandalous stories in the press about how the former emperor was not only riddled with various disea
ses but was also sleeping with his own sister. The smear campaign was supposed to turn the public against him. It didn’t work – all it did was make Napoleon feel more aggrieved. Who were these moral pygmies to disrespect a man of his giant (if entirely metaphorical) stature?
So, he painted a boat with the English colours, had a final dinner with his mum and sister, and escaped back to France, where he started up his oversized game of Risk again. After Waterloo, where he came unstuck for the second time, the European powers learned their lesson and put his new naughty step in the middle of the Atlantic, on the bleak windswept speck that was St Helena, which they made very clear he wasn’t a king of. This is where Napoleon would see out his days – thinking wistfully about how maybe Elba wasn’t that bad after all – until his death, which was possibly caused by arsenic in his wallpaper.‡
* Probably lies: Napoleon’s first words upon arriving on the island were not ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba’ – he did not speak in confusing English palindromes, because he was not a panellist on a twee Radio 4 light-entertainment show.
† In a sign that he was possibly not a completely reformed character, Napoleon instantly annexed the nearby island of Pianosa, where he planned to grow wheat.
‡ Becoming part of the newly unified Italy in 1860, today Elba has a flourishing population of mouflon, a type of horned sheep introduced in the 1970s, which some locals now want to cull because they mess up the olive groves.
