Why did the other kings take up the cause of the king of France? What was the cause of the reign of terror? Chapter IX. The Little Man from the Common People The young Corsican.—The war in Italy.—Italy a battlefield for centuries.—The victories of Bonaparte.—The first consul.—The empire.—The French sweep over Europe.—Kings and emperors beaten and deposed.—The fatal Russian campaign.—The first abdication.—The return from Elba.—The battle of Waterloo.—The feudal lords once more triumphant. And now there came to the front one of the most remarkable characters in all history. This was Napoleon Bonaparte, a little man from the island of Corsica, of Italian parentage, but a French citizen, for the island had been forcibly The annexed to France shortly before his birth. As a young lieutenant in the army, he had seen the storming of the Bastille. Later on, being in charge of the cannon which defended the House of Parliament, he had saved one of the numerous governments set up during this period. A Paris mob was trying to storm this building, as they had the castle of the king. As a reward, he had been put in charge of the French army in Italy, which was engaged in fighting the Austrians. In order to understand the situation it is necessity at this point to devote some attention to the past history of the Italian peninsula. Italy had not been a united country since the days of the Roman Empire. The southern part of the peninsula had formed, with Sicily, a small nation called the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The northern part had belonged to the Ostrogoths, the Lombards, the Franks, and the Holy Roman Empire in turn. The Italian people wanted to become one nation, but they were divided up among many little princes, each with his separate dominions. The cities of Genoa and Venice had each formed a republic, which was strong on the sea only, for both cities had large navies and had acquired practically all their wealth by their trade with Constantinople, Egypt, and the far East. In 1796 the Hapsburg family held the control of northern Italy except the lands around the city of Venice and the county of Piedmont. The latter formed a separate kingdom with the island of Sardinia, much as Sicily was joined with the southern end of the peninsula.