On 18 September 1860, in the hills near Loreto on Italy's Adriatic coast, the Piedmontese army of General Enrico Cialdini routed the papal army of General Christophe de Lamoricière at Castelfidardo. The battle broke the Pope's army in a single day, left most of the Papal States open to the kingdom of Victor Emmanuel II, and cleared the way south toward Naples, where Garibaldi had just arrived.
An ultimatum to the Pope
On 7 September 1860, the day Garibaldi's volunteers entered Naples, the Piedmontese prime minister, Count Cavour, sent the Pope an ultimatum demanding that he dismiss his foreign troops, and on 11 September Piedmontese columns crossed into the Papal States. The papal army, about 15,000 men, was commanded by Lamoricière, a retired French general, and included foreign volunteers, among them Irish and German-speaking units.1
Lamoricière tried to march his field army to the fortified port of Ancona. Cialdini, advancing down the coast, moved inland to block him, and the two armies came face to face across the Musone River below Castelfidardo, Cialdini on the hills to the north and Lamoricière at Loreto to the south.2
The battle at the Musone
Only part of each army fought. John Rickard of History of War gives Cialdini about 16,500 men, most of them never engaged, and Lamoricière 6,500 to 8,000; the Enciclopedia Italiana counts about 4,800 Piedmontese with 14 guns actually in action against about 6,800 papal troops with 16 guns in two brigades.3
On the morning of 18 September General Georges de Pimodan led the papal vanguard across the Musone and up toward the Piedmontese positions on the hills. Bersaglieri held up the attack, a Piedmontese counterattack threw the papal troops into confusion, and Pimodan fell; Rickard records him killed, the Enciclopedia Italiana carried wounded from the field to the Catena farmhouse. The second papal column came under artillery fire from the hills and broke before it could join the fight.4
Among the units that held their ground was a company of about 105 Irish volunteers under Captain Martin Kirwan, which, according to the historian Robert Doyle, fought around two farmhouses and dragged away guns abandoned by their crews; Kirwan reported 32 men killed, captured or missing.5
Rout and surrender
With the battle lost, Lamoricière handed command to Colonel de Coudenhove and rode for Ancona with a small cavalry escort; Rickard says only 45 men reached the city with him. About half the papal army surrendered at Loreto later the same day, and most of the rest was rounded up over the following days. The Enciclopedia Italiana puts the cost at 60 Piedmontese killed, including six officers, and 88 papal soldiers killed and 600 taken prisoner.6
Cialdini followed Lamoricière to Ancona, which surrendered on 29 September. The Enciclopedia Italiana judges that the victory made the defense of Ancona hopeless and opened the road to Naples through papal territory. A national monument by the sculptor Vito Pardo now stands on the battlefield.7
Also on this day
- 324: Battle of Chrysopolis. At Chrysopolis on the Asian shore of the Bosporus, facing Byzantium, Emperor Constantine I fought his rival Licinius in the decisive battle of their civil war.
