Medieval Corsica

The history of Corsica in the medieval period begins with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the invasions of various Germanic peoples in the fifth century AD, and ends with the complete subjection of the island to the authority of the Bank of San Giorgio in 1511.

In the early decades of the fifth century, effective Roman authority all but vanished from Corsica. The island became disputed between the Ostrogoths, Roman foederati who were settled in the lands along the Riviera, and the Vandals, who had established a kingdom in Tunisia. Both groups were sometimes allies, sometimes enemies of the Romans and both followed a pattern of taking over Roman legal forms and structures and maintaining nominal deference to the empire while de facto creating autonomous kingdoms within its former borders. In 469 AD, Gaiseric, the Vandal king, finally completed the subjugation of the isle. For the next 65 years the Vandals maintained their domination, the valuable Corsican forests supplying the wood for their pirate fleets.

After the Vandal state in Africa crumbled in the early sixth century under the onslaught of the Roman general Belisaurius, his lieutenant Cyril restored imperial rule of Corsica in 534 AD, and the island was placed under the government of the newly organized Praetorian prefecture of Africa. However, the exarchate was not able to protect the island from the raiding by the Ostrogoths and the Lombards, who moved down into Italy from the north beginning in 568 AD. After the loss of the African mainland territories of the exarchate to the Umayyad dynasty in 709 AD, the empire's power in the West deteriorated further. Saracen raiders began to prey on Corsica, leading Liutprand the Lombard to invade circa 725 AD to preempt Saracen designs.

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