Meteorology as a military and political factor: the decision-making process by the French administrators of Corsica (1553-1559)

Abstract

On the basis of archival and unpublished documents from the collection of Guillaume de Lamoignon, the official correspondence between the French court and its diplomatic agents and foreign correspondents and other documents of the French conquest of Corsica in the 1550s, which is kept in Moscow, the political history of the French administration of the island is seen through the prism of natural phenomena. In the context of the end of the Italian Wars, the French crown and its administrative officials in Corsica have had to face difficult problems, because they did not have experience of the defence of the vast territory of the island against the Republic of Genoa. One of the main problems, underlined in this article, lay in the access by sea, which depended on the season, weather conditions and sea state.