Garum Sommosse/Moses

The Garum Sommosse were a series of bad riots (Sommosse is Italian for riots, inevitably perhaps smoothed out in the lingua franca to the ‘garum moses’) towards the end of Year One, before the changes wrought by the Vague Revolution could become established. With so many old trades and common work abandoned, a shortage of garum, and especially what is now called doxy, led to the sort of discontent that the still influential agitators that had been cast aside were able to make use of. Especially in the case of Cesare Verri and Lavoratore, who along with many of the Italians that had brewed the Vague Revolution had been put aside by the French under the still dominant Nicolas Drouais.

Though rivals in philosophy, Verri and Lavoratore made enough of a truce to ensure that their otherwise hostile pandy, keeping apart from one another, did not fall into the usual habits of the agitator in waging greater war on one another than they did against that they so vehemently opposed. Still a time of disturbance, growing hunger, and simmering discord, whilst those the pair inflamed were doubtless true to their grievances it seems difficult today to understand how fish sauce can lead to the destruction that itself far outdid the relatively swift Vague Revolution itself.

The Delves suffered first, partially from the violence that turned inward, but mostly when Drouais sent the wavering picaroons to where his information suggested, rightly, black powder was being concocted anew. It is argued that had Drouais not reacted so forcefully thereafter then the garum moses would not have flared as they did, with the picaroons reacting badly when assaulted, killing a good dozen before fighting their way back to the Looms. Lavoratore, ever being a woman for whom violence was the first and possibly only recourse, used her pandy to form a mob that first avenged itself upon her rivals in the Delves, on the pretence of them being noses for the new villain Drouais.

Before two days were out the moses had taken to the Looms, breaking into the houses there in an orgy of looting that had little, if anything to do with garum at all. Verri began talks with Drouais, but which were denounced by Lavoratore so that as ever the mob turned upon itself. The picaroon never ones to enforce order fell into and joined the mob, something that forced Drouais shortly thereafter to allow the milicio, that he had so forcefully suppressed, to reform.

The Garum Sommosse looked set to see the Vague Revolution as only the first of many such, as rival agitators fought one another, and if not for the damage done to the Campana Peritus it might well have been. A mob (variously claimed by every agitator to have been the pandy of a rival) broke in, killed three of the Troges and were only stopped when after much destruction they tried, and as ever, failed to set the place afire. In the accusation and counter-accusation that followed all real drive for the moses dwindled. The Looms saw the sight of great huddled mobs drunk, half or miss-dressed, for the most part sleeping off their excesses and reacting with hostility to the agitators that tried to rouse them. Into this the Troges took a rare hand, setting forth by their own means a cacophony of conjured noise that drove the Looms clear.

Drouais more circumspectly had Verri seized and Lavoratore killed in the days that followed. But rather than have Verri tried and rightly given (as the citizens would have wanted) a theatrical tour of execution he instead had Verri declared guilty in some secretive session of the Comite and quietly done away with, his head produced and displayed as what was seen as a warning to the mob. Such incensed the picaroon that were no longer his strong arm, and certainly contributed to Drouais’ later fall when the Troges made their possibly first, and certainly last, intercession in the politics and rule of Parquet.