Republic of Genoa

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Republic of Genoa earned four nicknames over its long life: la Superba, la Dominante, la Dominante dei mari, and la Repubblica dei magnifici. That last one translates to the Republic of the Magnificents, and it was not an idle boast. For nearly seven centuries, from 1099 to 1797, this city-state on the northwestern coast of Italy built an empire not through armies alone but through contracts, counting houses, and the sheer audacity of its merchant families. At its height, Genoese bankers were quietly financing the Spanish crown, managing silver from the Americas, and controlling the first port on the Pacific Ocean. The historian Fernand Braudel called the years 1557 to 1627 the age of the Genoese, describing their dominance as so discreet and sophisticated that historians failed to notice it for a long time. That invisibility was by design. How did a city on a narrow strip of Ligurian coastline come to hold this kind of reach? The answer runs through crusades and slave markets, plague years and naval battles, banking crises and colonial revolts, all the way to the day Napoleon's representatives arrived to end the republic for good.

• 2. From Fishing Village to Sea Power

  ›

  In 934-35, a Fatimid fleet under Ya'qub ibn Ishaq al-Tamimi thoroughly sacked and burned Genoa. Scholars still debate whether the city that was attacked was little more than a fishing village or a vibrant trading town worth the effort. That ambiguity itself says something: even in its earliest centuries, Genoa was already building the merchant fleet that would transform the Western Mediterranean. A diploma from Berengar II of Italy in 958 gave the city full legal freedom and secure title to its surrounding lands. By the end of the 11th century, the city had adopted a constitution drawn up by its trade associations, called compagnie, together with the lords of the nearby valleys and coasts. The new entity was named a Compagna Communis, and the membership of its ruling council was still being tracked by compagnia affiliation as late as 1382. The decisive early move came during the First Crusade. In July 1097, twelve galleys, one ship, and 1,200 soldiers set sail from Genoa, led by noblemen named de Insula and Avvocato. Genoese crossbowmen under Guglielmo Embriaco fought in the siege of Jerusalem in 1099. After the capture of Antioch on the 3rd of May 1098, Genoa sealed an alliance with Bohemond of Taranto, who became ruler of the Principality of Antioch and gave the republic a headquarters, the church of San Giovanni, and 30 houses in the city. On the 6th of May 1098, part of the Genoese army carried home the relics of Saint John the Baptist as part of their reward. Those relics were not the only cargo coming west: the crusades opened a long chain of commercial treaties that would give Genoese merchants access to the Byzantine Empire, Cilician Armenia, Egypt, and the trade routes of the entire eastern Mediterranean.

• 3. The Naval Empire

  ›

  On the 5th of August 1284, the Genoese fleet met the fleet of Pisa at the Battle of Meloria. The Genoese force numbered 93 ships and was led by Oberto Doria and Benedetto I Zaccaria. The Pisans brought 72 ships under Albertino Morosini and Ugolino della Gherardesca. When the battle ended, Genoa had captured 30 Pisan ships and sunk seven more. About 8,000 Pisans were killed, more than half of the Pisan force of roughly 14,000 men. Pisa never fully recovered as a maritime competitor, and Genoa absorbed control of Corsica's commerce. That victory was preceded by a war of preparations in 1283 during which Genoa built 120 galleys, with 60 belonging to the republic and 60 rented to private individuals. More than 15,000 mercenaries were hired as oarsmen and soldiers. The coat of arms of the Genoese navy still appears in the flag of the Italian Navy today. Genoa's other great naval rival was Venice, and the two fought across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for dominance in the eastern Mediterranean. The struggle culminated in the War of Chioggia, which ran from 1379 to 1381. The decisive battle of Chioggia in 1380 ended in Genoese defeat, stripping the republic of the naval supremacy that had underpinned its position in northern Italy and pushing it out of eastern Mediterranean markets. The Ottoman Empire's expansion simultaneously cut into Genoese outposts in the Aegean and reduced the Black Sea trade that had been one of the republic's main arteries.

• 4. Colonies Across Two Seas

  ›

  In 1255, Genoa established the colony of Caffa in Crimea, and in the following years added Soldaia, Cherco, and Cembalo along the same southern Crimean coast. The republic held these Black Sea colonies until 1475, when the Ottoman Empire took them. Between 1316 and 1332, Genoa established the Black Sea colonies of La Tana, at the site of present-day Azov, and Samsun in Anatolia. The islands of Chios and Lesbos became Genoese commercial stations after the alliance with the restored Byzantine Empire in 1261; Chios remained in Genoese hands until 1566, when its loss to the Ottomans struck, in the source's words, a severe blow to the republic's trade network. Corsica was formally annexed in 1347 and held until 1768. Monaco passed to the Grimaldi family when the republic sold it in the 15th century. From about 1520 the Genoese controlled the Spanish port of Panama, described as the first port on the Pacific, founded through the conquest of the Americas. The concession was held mainly for the slave trade of the New World on the Pacific side, and it lasted until the sacking and destruction of the original city in 1671. The scholar Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and others have argued that practices Genoa developed in the Mediterranean, including chattel slavery, were crucial to the exploration and exploitation of the New World. By the time the last Mediterranean colony, the island fortress of Tabarka, fell to the Bey of Tunis in 1742, the republic had already lost the reach needed to hold what remained.

• 5. The Age of Genoese Bankers

  ›

  The state bankruptcy of Philip II of Spain in 1557 threw the German banking houses into chaos and ended the reign of the Fuggers as the Spanish crown's financiers. Into that vacuum stepped the Genoese. Their banking consortium provided the Habsburg system with what the source describes as fluid credit and a dependably regular income. In return, the less predictable shipments of American silver were rapidly transferred from Seville to Genoa to provide capital for further ventures. Two of the earliest banks in the world were Genoese institutions: the Bank of Saint George, founded in 1407, which became the oldest state deposit bank in the world and operated until its closure in 1805; and the mount of piety of Genoa, founded in 1483, which still exists. The Genoese banker Ambrogio Spinola, Marquess of Los Balbases, raised and led an army that fought in the Eighty Years' War in the Netherlands in the early 17th century, illustrating how thoroughly financial and military power had merged. The modern visitor walking along Genoa's Strada Nova, now called Via Garibaldi, or along Via Balbi cannot miss the brilliant Mannerist and Baroque palazzo facades. Historian Fernand Braudel observed that this conspicuous wealth was actually concentrated in the hands of a tightly knit circle of banker-financiers, true venture capitalists in his framing, rather than representing the wealth of Genoa as a city. At the peak of the 16th century, Genoa drew artists including Rubens, Caravaggio, and van Dyck. The architect Galeazzo Alessi, who lived from 1512 to 1572, designed many of the city's splendid palazzi, and Bartolomeo Bianco, who lived from 1590 to 1657, designed the centrepieces of the University of Genoa in the following half century.

• 6. The Oligarchy Within

  ›

  Beneath the republic's merchant glory sat a government that Genoese called democratic but which operated, in practice, as an oligarchy. Power moved through five constitutional stages: elected consuls ran the city from the 11th century until 1191; a podesta system followed until 1256; then a capitano del popolo until 1339; then a doge elected for life until 1528; and finally, after Andrea Doria's reforms, a doge elected for two-year terms until the republic's end in 1797. The historian Caffaro di Caschifellone, himself a municipal consul, began recording this history in the Annales ianuenses at the end of the 11th century. After the 1528 reform, among the 79 biennial doges who took power, the Grimaldi and Spinola families each produced eleven, the Durazzo family produced eight, and the De Franchi, Giustiniani, and Lomellini families each produced seven. By custom, prelates in Genoa were barred from public office. Outside the doge's seat, certain families carried weight in other registers: the Fieschi produced two popes, Innocent IV and Adrian V; the Embriaco family were lords of Gibeletto for almost 200 years and important figures in the Crusader states; the Zaccaria family produced the admiral Benedetto I Zaccaria and ruled several polities in Latin-ruled Greece. By 1396, internal unrest had grown serious enough that Doge Antoniotto Adorno made Charles VI of France the defender of the municipality, marking the first time in the republic's history that Genoa was dominated by a foreign power.

• 7. Corsica and the Long Decline

  ›

  A plague in 1656-57 killed as many as half the inhabitants of Genoa. That loss came in the middle of a century that also saw French bombardment in 1684 as punishment for Genoa's alliance with Spain during the War of the Reunions. The republic's grip on its colonies weakened in tandem with its population and treasury. On the island of Corsica, law and order had collapsed to the point that the murder rate ran at nearly 900 per 100,000 people annually from 1701 to 1733. The republic by then had only 2,000 soldiers spread across fortifications in Liguria for a mainland population of about half a million; attempts to ban private firearm ownership on Corsica failed entirely. The revolt of 1729 was the first real rupture between the island and Genoa: to suppress it, the republic paid Charles VI a lump sum of 60,000 florins plus 100 scudi for each dead soldier, in exchange for 10,000 German infantry. Guerrilla conflict continued until Genoa sold Corsica to France in the 1768 Treaty of Versailles. The following year, the person who would end the republic was born on the island the Genoese had just surrendered. Napoleon Bonaparte, native of Corsica, led the French army that defeated Austria and Piedmont in 1796, gaining control of the Ligurian region. In May 1797, Genoese Jacobins aided by French volunteers moved to overthrow Doge Giacomo Maria Brignole. On the 14th of June 1797, Napoleon's representatives proclaimed the Ligurian Republic. In 1805 it was annexed by France. A brief restoration in 1814 lasted less than a year before the Congress of Vienna assigned all Genoese territories to the Kingdom of Sardinia under the House of Savoy.