On June 28, 1808, Cristina Trivulzio was born in Lombardy to parents Jerome and Victoria Trivulzio, a family of Italian aristocracy. Her family had roots in Lombardy since the twelfth century and her parents had been titled Count and Countess by Napoleon III before her birth.[1] Her father died in 1812, when Cristina was four years old, and her mother quickly married the Marchese Alessandro Visconti d’Aragona.
In 1815, the Congress of Vienna returned Lombardy to Austrian jurisdiction and absolutist Prince Metternich forbade all technological change in Italy and outlawed all nationalist movements. Despite this regulation, many secret societies were organized and deployed. The Federazione was one of the most active in the goal to free Italy from foreign domination and establish an Italian prince as ruler. Cristina’s stepfather was politically active as a leader of this liberal party in Lombardy.[2]
Cristina grew up with the benefit of an excellent education for a girl of the early nineteenth century that focused on ethics, the arts, politics, Classicism, and Romanticism. Biographer Henry Remsen Whitehouse states that “her education was entrusted to men conspicuous not only for their learning but for the broadness of their views and political creeds.”[3] She was afforded the benefits of free-thinking and self-expression through this education which ensured her later interest in politics and revolution. Her parents seemed to have wished her to become an active participant in the world around her.
When she was fifteen years old, she fell in love with twenty-three year old Prince Emilio Barbiano di Belgiojoso d’Este and was married the next year on September 15, 1824.[4] However, Emilio was known to live to excess in all areas including women, drinking, and gambling. It was rumored that he married her for her money to escape gambling debts.[5] They also had very little in common besides politics, and even that connection was weak as she was much more enthusiastic than he.[6] They separated three years later.
Throughout her early life she was very active in Italian politics. She was a member of the Giardiniere[7] whose objective was to force the Austrians out of Italy and unite the country under a democratic King. To help the cause, she stirred up support in the working class as well as the middle and upper class in Milan, Genoa, Rome, Naples, Leghorn, and Florence. Consequently, the government began to notice her actions and record her activities.[8] When she traveled to Switzerland to celebrate the new democratic constitution brought about by the defeat of the government, Prince Metternich ordered her return to Milan. When she refused and a warrant was issued for her arrest, she fled to France,[9] “the Mecca of the revolutionary exile.”[10]
After her escape, a decree was issued in Milan ordering her to return within three months and surrender to officials or she would be declared civilly dead and her property and sources of income would be sequestered.[11] With returning to Italy out of the question, she decided to paint fans and portraits for a living as well as contribute political articles to local French newspapers.[12] During her time in Paris she hosted a popular Paris salon and worked to convert leading Frenchmen to the cause of Italian independence, received and helped fellow exiles, and was elected the President of the Academy of Women in France. Also at this time, she was reunited very briefly with her husband and gave birth to a daughter, Maria, on December 23, 1838.[13]
When Italian cities under Austrian jurisdiction began to revolt, she decided to get involved. In 1848, she recruited and commanded a troop of two hundred men to help fight in Milan against Austria and her army was the first to reach the fighting zone.[15] In 1849 she was asked by the Assembly in Rome to organize and direct the military hospitals. She accepted and created the first voluntary corps of military nurses in history and twelve hospitals were fully prepared by her in forty-eight hours.[16]
The revolution did not succeed and the Austrian government fined the Italian nobility massive sums of money and began to investigate those who had helped the revolution.[17] It is at this time Cristina decided to travel to the Orient. Biographer Whitehouse states, “Exiled alike from home and adopted country, the Princess yearned for complete dissociation from the scenes and interests which during the last twenty years had witnessed and incited unavailing material sacrifice and intellectual effort.”[18] She felt physically and mentally exhausted and left the West with high hopes for a new life.
Cristina left Rome on August 3, 1849 for the Orient and purchased a large amount of land in Turkey to reside on with her daughter and other refugees. She lived in Asia Minor for four years during which she traveled to Jerusalem. In 1853 she decided to make her peace with the Austrians so that her daughter would be financially stable on the family estates later in life. However, the Austrians would not concede to her negotiations due to the level of revolt with which she had been involved.[19]
She returned to Paris until the Austrian government finally proclaimed a general amnesty for exiled Italians and the restoration of confiscated estates in December 1855.[20] She moved back to Locate but did not stop her political involvement for a united Italy and continued to contribute money and support to the cause. At last, on February 18, 1861, Italy was officially unified under a King and in 1870 French troops withdrew from Rome. On July 5, 1871 at sixty-three years old, Cristina died in Milan due to illness. She had lived long enough to see her life’s goals realized. She was buried at Locate and left her villa for the use of the community. In 1971, Charles Neilson Gattey reported that her villa was currently divided into apartments and occupied by over twenty families,[21] showing Cristina’s continuing dedication to help the working class.
Cristina was no stranger to writing. During her lifetime she published numerous books and articles about subjects such as the Catholic Church, the history of Lombardy and the House of Savoy, the social condition of women, and the political condition of Italy and France. She also founded and financed numerous new journals and newspapers. Her work on her travels in the Orient was initially motivated by monetary needs but fits in well with her social and political interests.
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[1] Charles Neilson Gattey, A Bird of Curious Plumage: Princess Cristina di Belgiojoso, 1808-1871 (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1971), 1.
[2] Gattey, A Bird of Curious Plumage, 2-3
[3] Henry Remsen Whitehouse, A Revolutionary Princess, Cristina Belgiojoso-Trivulzioi, Her Life and Times, 1808-1871 (London: T.F. Unwin, 1906), 33-34.
[4] Whitehouse, A Revolutionary Princess, 46.
[5] Gattey, A Bird of Curious Plumage, 4.
[6] Whitehouse, A Revolutionary Princess, 47-48.
[7] The Giardiniere were women supporters of the Carbonari.
[8] Gattey, A Bird of Curious Plumage, 5-7. These activity reports are still located in the archives of the government of Milan.
[9] Gattey, A Bird of Curious Plumage, 10-11.
[10] Whitehouse, A Revolutionary Princess, 66.
[11] Gattey, A Bird of Curious Plumage, 15.
[12] Gattey, A Bird of Curious Plumage, 18-19, Whitehouse, A Revolutionary Princess, 68.
[13] Ibid., 73.
[14] Ibid., 82-3.
[15] Ibid., 103-4.
[16] Ibid., 133.
[17] Ibid., 142.
[18] Whitehouse, A Revolutionary Princess, 233.
[19] Gattey, A Bird of Curious Plumage, 193-4.
[20] Ibid., 196-7.
[21] Ibid., 213-216.
Brief Itinerary:
Motivated by a desire to flee the political situation in Italy and her criminal label and arrest warrant, Cristina left the West. She embarked on the ship “Mentor” in Rome in 1849 and traveled to Malta. She left Rome with her ten year old daughter Maria and her trusted friend and servant Mrs. Parker. After a brief stay in Malta, she arrived in Athens but did not have a pleasant stay. She felt that Greece would be a perfect place for the settlement of Italian refugees but was discouraged by the Greek government. She published her cynical thoughts in the French newspaper, the National. She wrote, “We have here nearly 1700 Italian refugees literally dying from hunger, for whom I am trying to do what I can. I cannot get them settled here. Perhaps the Turkish government will be more Christian.”[1] After the publishing of the article, the Greeks turned hostile so she continued her journey and arrived in Constantinople. In Constantinople she rented a house and discovered the sultan was generously inclined towards all political exiles from the West and was encouraging them to reside in Turkey.[2] In July 1850, she purchased land in the Ciaq-Maq-Oglou valley in Turkey, near Angora, to set up a settlement for Italian refugees. She related the initial local opinion of her in her journal,
A Frank lady, driven from her country by war, and come to pass her exile in Turkey, was what rumor reported of me to the holders of real estate in the vicinity of Constantinople…[they] said to themselves that a foreigner, landing in Turkey under such circumstances, presented a very good chance for a bargain – and they were by no means wrong.[3]
For a year and a half she lived peacefully on the land harvesting wheat and healing the local inhabitants with her medical skills. She enjoyed the climate and tranquility of the valley.[4]
To dispel her frustration at the political events in the West, she decided to embark on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in January 1852. She took her daughter and a very small group of guides on horseback to the Christian Orient. She traveled from her farm in the Ciaq-Maq-Oglou valley in Turkey to the town of Angora and through the Taurus Mountains, arriving at the Syrian Gulf six weeks from setting out. She then traveled through Syria and Lebanon stopping at the towns of Latakieh, Beyrout, Sidon, and Sur. She finally entered Israel passing the mountains of Galilee and arriving in Nazareth on the Tuesday of Holy Week. She achieved her goal to reach Jerusalem by Easter by passing through the city gates on Saturday night.
She stayed in Jerusalem for one month visiting monuments and shrines before beginning her return journey. She took a slightly different route on the return trip. She began by traveling backwards through Israel the same way she came, however she veered off at the city of Tiberias to enter Syria. In Syria she traveled through the Anti-Lebanon Mountains entering Lebanon briefly to see the infamous Cedars of Lebanon before returning to Syria and passing the towns of Homs, Hama, and Aleppo. Passing the Syrian Sea again, she returned to Turkey and traveled again through the Taurus Mountains. She finally returned to her farm near Angora in November, eleven months after she had begun her journey. On her return, she decided to publish the journal for money as she was left destitute after the Austrian emperor’s edict of February 18, 1853 which seized the property of all Italians living out of the country and expelled them from Italy for life.[5]
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[1] Gattey, A Bird of Curious Plumage, 145.
[2] Ibid., 145.
[3] Cristina Belgiojoso, Oriental Harems and Scenery (New York: Carleton, 1862), 22.
[4] Gattey, A Bird of Curious Plumage, 148-54.
[5] Ibid., 183.
Brief History of the Text:
Her book entitled Oriental Harems and Scenery was first published as a series of articles in the French journal Revue des Deux Mondes. It was later reproduced and translated in American newspapers and finally published in book form in 1862 in New York by Carleton Publishing Company, ten years after it had been written. Two other similar works dealing with Cristina’s trip to the Orient were published in 1858 in Paris by publisher Michel Levy freres entitled, Asie Mineure et Syrie: Souvenirs de Voyages, and Scenes de la vie Turque. Both of these works were never translated into English and are only available in French.
