cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 39

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Last post, along with the usual 18th-century suspects, included the Ottonians; changing ideas of conception and women's sexual pleasure; Isabella of Parma (the one who fell in love, and vice versa, with her husband's sister); Henry IV and Bertha (and Henry's second wife divorcing him for "unspeakable sexual acts"). (Okay, Isabella of Parma was 18th century.)

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

FS: *shrugs* I made money, I liked that more anyway. Though honestly you'd think that someone who actually made money would be more memorable...

Welp. I just ran across this episode in FS's life in which he doesn't exactly shine.

It all starts when some Tuscans want free trade for grain, which FS doesn't give them. He lifts a couple restrictions, but mostly leaves things in place, which is why Leopold still has to deal with them decades later. Then:

Unfortunately, the grand duke came up at the same time with what he thought to be a still better plan. Flattered by petitions from some of his former subjects and misled by a somewhat racist notion that Northerners were more industrious than Mediterraneans, he brought in two thousand colonists from Lorraine and settled them on plots of abandoned land near Massa and Sorano. When it came to providing them with cattle, tools, capital, and accessible markets, however, he remembered that his wife had a war on her hands; and guns, in the unenlightened eighteenth century, took precedence over plows. In spite of the heroic but unbudgeted efforts of the Florentine superintendent, and in spite of the pleas of the local bishops, the colonists were left to die of starvation and malaria. By 1766 only ninety-four of them were still there.

Now, Cochrane's attitude toward footnotes, as laid out in the preface, is that most readers won't care, and those who do can write to him at his University of Chicago address, where he will be happy to tell you his source for any given claim...until his death in 1985. So I have no sources on the veracity of this episode.

That said, I have never encountered anyone saying anything positive about FS's treatment of Tuscany in all my time in salon, so it's entirely possible that he did something not great here.

Either way, I'm starting to feel sorry for 18th century European colonists, I have to say.

From:

luzula

Now, Cochrane's attitude toward footnotes, as laid out in the preface, is that most readers won't care, and those who do can write to him at his University of Chicago address, where he will be happy to tell you his source for any given claim...until his death in 1985. So I have no sources on the veracity of this episode.

OMG, what a frustrating attitude!!!