All writers who have treated of this period in Corsican history, agree in saying that of all the countries in the world, she was at that time the most unhappy. Prostrate under famine, pestilence, and the ravages of war; unceasingly harassed by the Moors; robbed of her rights and her liberty by the Genoese; oppressed, plundered; the courts of justice venal; torn by the factions of the Blacks and Reds; bleeding at a thousand places from family feuds and the Vendetta; the entire land one wound--such is the picture of Corsica in those days--an island blessed by nature with all the requisites for prosperity. Filippini counted sixty-one fertile districts which now lay desolate and forsaken--house and church still standing--a sight, as he says, to make one weep. Destitute of any other pervading principle of social cohesion, the Corsican people must have utterly broken up, and scattered into mere hordes, unless it had been penetrated by the sentiment of patriotism, to an extent so universal and with a force so intense. The virtue of patriotism shows itself here in a grandeur almost inconceivable, if we consider what a howling wilderness it was to which the Corsicans clung with hearts so tender and true; a wilderness, but drenched with their blood, with the blood of their fathers, of their brothers, and of their children, and therefore dear. The Corsican historian says, in the eleventh book of his history, "If patriotism has ever been known at any time, and in any country of the world, to exercise power over men, truly we may say that in the island of Corsica it has been mightier than anywhere else; for I am altogether amazed and astounded that the love of the inhabitants of this island for their country has been so great, as at all times to prevent them from coming to a firm and voluntary determination to emigrate. For if we pursue the course of their history, from the earliest inhabitants down to the present time, we see that throughout so many centuries this people has never had peace and quiet for so much as a hundred years together; and that, nevertheless, they have never resolved to quit their native island, and so avoid the unspeakable ruin that has followed so many and so cruel wars, that were accompanied with dearth, with conflagration, with feuds, with murders, with inward dissensions, with tyrannous exercise of power by so many different nations, with plundering of their goods, with frequent attacks of those cruel barbarians--the corsairs, and with endless miseries besides, that it would be tedious to reckon up." Within a period of thirty years, twenty-eight thousand assassinations were committed in Corsica.