La congiura di Macchia

Many accounts of the transition from Habsburg to Bourbon Spain (and of the fate of Spain’s Italian dependencies) mention the abortive Macchia conspiracy of 22–23 September 1701 in Naples which failed to wrest that city—and the kingdom of Naples, the jewel in the crown of Spanish Italy—from Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip of Anjou (Philip V) and secure it for the Austrian Habsburgs. However, few of those accounts give much detail concerning the abortive coup—after all, it was brief and in the short term unsuccessful. In this excellent new study, Francesca Fausta Gallo reveals that there was far more to the episode than this neglect allows; she also uses it to explore the political culture of the early eighteenth century. The book opens with a brief historiographical survey, demonstrating how various Italian historians (including some inspired by the Risorgimento, Croce and others) have sought to locate the episode within differing interpretations of the development of Neapolitan culture, politics and society in the early modern era; the author also questions simplistic explanations of the episode as pitting doomed backward feudal barons against forward-looking middling-sort lawyers. Thereafter, the book approaches its subject in three parts, which deal in turn with the conspiracy and its immediate aftermath, the way those events were reported at the time, and later accounts of them

Art · Humanities · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History