Republic of Genoa

The other one

formationDrafted from Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (1996)

Genoa and Venice were founded on the same problem and answered it the same way. Both are ports with almost no agricultural hinterland — Liguria is a strip of coast under a mountain wall, which is a different kind of nothing from a lagoon and is equally unfarmable. Both lived by carrying other people's goods. Both ended in 1797 at the hands of the same French general.

Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (1996) · Lr Photographie · CC BY 3.0

Everything between the beginning and the end is different.

The Compagna

Venice's constitution is a machine and Genoa's is a series of attempts.

The Genoese commune begins in 1099 as the Compagna Communis, a sworn association of the city's men formed for a term of years and renewed — the oath of a group of merchants to act together, with elected consuls, which is an arrangement for a voyage applied to a city. It was renewed, altered, allowed to lapse and reconstituted repeatedly over the following century.

There is no founder to name. There was a meeting, and an oath, and a renewal date.

Four families

What the Compagna did not do was resolve who ran it, and Epstein's book is unusually willing to say that the Genoese constitution did not work.

The Doria, Spinola, Fieschi and Grimaldi — with a longer list behind them — were clans holding towers, quarters of the city, client networks and their own armed followings, and Genoese politics from the twelfth century to the sixteenth is those families in combination against each other. The constitutional record is a sequence of devices for containing them: elected consuls, then a podestà imported from another city on a one-year contract precisely because he was not Genoese, then capitani del popolo, then in 1339 a doge elected for life, then in 1528 a doge elected for two years.

None of them held. Genoa spent long stretches of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries under the lordship of Milan or of the king of France, in every case because one faction had invited them in against another.

The same paperwork, opposite results

Both republics elected their heads of state by documented constitutional procedure, in writing, with the qualifications and the method set out. One of them was never taken over from inside in five hundred years. The other spent a good part of two centuries governed by foreigners because its leading families kept fetching them.

The difference is not in the constitution. Genoa's arrangements were often ingenious — importing a chief magistrate from another city specifically so that he would have no relatives in this one is a serious idea, seriously implemented. What Genoa did not have was a body of people who preferred the constitution to their own faction, and no amount of drafting supplies that.

It is worth holding onto, because the reverse assumption is very natural: that the republic which lasted must have had the better machinery. Venice's machinery was better. It was not better enough to explain the difference, and Genoa is the control case that shows it.

The companies

expansionDrafted from Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (1996)

The Genoese overseas empire was not, for the most part, acquired by the Genoese state. It was acquired by companies of investors who financed an expedition and were repaid with the revenue of whatever it took.

The instrument was the maona. A group of creditors advanced the money for a fleet; the republic granted them the conquest to exploit until the debt was discharged; the debt was rarely discharged. The Maona of Chios held that island from 1346 until the Ottomans took it in 1566 — two hundred and twenty years of a shareholders' company governing a territory, its members adopting a common surname, Giustiniani, to hold the shares in.

The same shape covers Phocaea on the Anatolian coast, whose alum works were the principal European source of the mordant without which cloth cannot be dyed, and Caffa in the Crimea, the terminus of the routes out of central Asia and one of the great slave markets of the medieval world.

Who was actually doing it

The ordinary questions to ask about a state are what its army rested on and where its income came from. Both of them assume a state that raises armies and collects income, and for long stretches Genoa did neither.

The wars were licensed to syndicates. The colonies were administered by the people who had financed them. The republic supplied a flag, a charter and a legal personality, and took a share. It is a genuinely unusual way to run an overseas empire and it is the reason Genoa could hold territory from the Aegean to the Crimea while its own government was collapsing every couple of years at home.

Nymphaion

The single most profitable thing Genoa ever did was pick the right side in 1261.

The Nicaean government in exile needed a fleet to take Constantinople back from the Latins and the Venetians. Genoa provided one, in exchange for exemption from Byzantine customs, quarters in every significant port, and the trade of the Black Sea. Constantinople fell to a Nicaean scouting party weeks later, before the Genoese fleet had done much of anything, and the privileges were honoured anyway.

What Genoa got out of it was Pera, later Galata, the walled suburb across the Golden Horn from Constantinople. By the 1340s the customs revenue of that colony was reportedly several times the emperor's own, taken from ships using the same waterway, and Byzantium fought a naval war to recover the difference and lost.

Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (1996) · Mohemedşebir Farook · CC BY-SA 4.0

It is the mirror image of the customs exemption Venice had extracted from a Byzantine emperor in 1082, and between them the two documents are most of the explanation for why the eastern empire had no money in its last two centuries. A Greek emperor bought a fleet with his own customs revenue, twice, from two different republics, and neither purchase was reversible.

What came back from Caffa

expansionDrafted from Gasquet, The Great Pestilence (A.D. 1348-9), Now Commonly Known as the Black Death (1893)

Genoa's empire was a chain of trading stations at the far end of other people's routes, and the furthest and most profitable of them was Caffa in the Crimea, where the roads out of central Asia met the sea. In 1346 a Tartar army besieged it. What sailed home from that siege is the reason the fourteenth century is remembered for something other than trade.

Gasquet, The Great Pestilence (A.D. 1348-9), Now Commonly Known as the Black Death (1893) · Bestalex · CC BY-SA 4.0

The account everybody quotes was written by Gabriele de' Mussi, a notary of Piacenza. It is the source of the single most famous image in the history of epidemic disease, and the man was not there.

The siege

De' Mussi's narrative begins in 1346, when an immense number of Tartars and Saracens in the East fell victim to a mysterious and sudden death, and whole provinces and cities were depopulated in a brief space. Tana, on the sea of Azov, where Italian merchants much resorted, was besieged and taken; the Christian merchants expelled from it were received for the protection of their persons and property inside the walls of Caffa, which the Genoese had built in that country.

The Tartars followed them and besieged Caffa in turn. The inhabitants, completely encircled, could hardly obtain the necessaries of life, and their only hope lay in the fleet that brought them provisions. Then the death broke out in the Tartar host, and thousands were daily carried off, as if arrows from heaven were striking at them and beating down their pride.

At first the Tartars were paralysed with fear at the ravages of the disease, and at the prospect that sooner or later all must fall victims to it. Then they turned their vengeance on the besieged, and in the hope of communicating the infection to their Christian enemies, by the aid of the engines of war, they projected the bodies of the dead over the walls into the city.

The defenders held their ground and committed as many of the bodies as they could to the sea. The air became tainted and the wells poisoned, and the disease spread so fast in the city that few of the inhabitants had strength enough to fly from it.

The ships

Some of the ships that got out of Caffa were bound for Genoa, some for Venice, some for other parts of the Christian world, and a few of the sailors were already infected. What de' Mussi wrote about the arrival is not a chronicle entry. It is an address:

Tell, O Sicily, and ye, the many islands of the sea, the judgments of God. Confess, O Genoa, what thou hast done, since we of Genoa and Venice are compelled to make a chastisement manifest. Alas! our ships enter the port, but of a thousand sailors hardly ten are spared. We reach our homes; our kindred and our neighbours come from all parts to visit us. Woe to us for we cast at them the darts of death! Whilst we spoke to them, whilst they embraced us and kissed us, we scattered the poison from our lips.

Three plague ships put into Genoa in January 1348, and by another account a fourth carried the contagion to Venice at the same time. From those two harbours it went over the whole of Italy and then over Europe.

Palermo, Italy · Gasquet, The Great Pestilence (A.D. 1348-9), Now Commonly Known as the Black Death (1893) · Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo · Public domain

He adds the detail people believed and acted on: that the clothes and effects of the dead carried it. Four soldiers near Genoa took a woollen bed-covering from a house at Rivarolo on the coast, where the sickness had killed everybody; they slept under it that night and in the morning all four were dead.

The witness who was not there

Gasquet, translating all this in 1893, introduces de' Mussi as an eyewitness who came home on one of the ships. Then, at the bottom of the same page, he prints the footnote that demolishes his own sentence: a scholar named Tononi had shown that de' Mussi acted as a notary at Piacenza throughout those years, and that his statement that the siege lasted three years is a mistake of the kind a man who had been present would not make.

So the founding scene of the Black Death in Europe — the corpses lobbed over the walls of a Genoese colony by a besieging army — comes from a lawyer several thousand miles away, writing up what returning sailors told him, in the rhetorical mode of a prophet denouncing a city. It may be substantially true. Caffa was besieged, the plague was in the Tartar army, and the ships did come home. Whether anybody loaded a trebuchet with a body is a claim resting on one man's second-hand report.

What it says about the empire

The story survived because it is a perfect description of what this republic actually was.

Genoa had built a walled town at the end of the caravan routes in order to stand where Asia met the sea, and had made itself the shortest line between the inland of one continent and the ports of another. That was the whole business model: speed, distance, and a chain of harbours nobody else could reach so quickly. The plague used the same line, at the same speed, in the same hulls. A trading republic organised to move goods from the furthest place to the nearest one had no mechanism at all for not moving this.

Chioggia

peakDrafted from Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (1996)

The two republics fought four wars. The fourth, from 1378, is the one that settled it, and Genoa came closer to destroying Venice than any power ever did.

A Genoese fleet under Pietro Doria took Chioggia, at the southern entrance to the Venetian lagoon, in August 1379. Venice was blockaded from the sea and attacked on land by Padua and Hungary at the same time. It offered terms; Doria's reply, as the Venetian chroniclers have it, was that he would come and bridle the horses of Saint Mark himself.

Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (1996) · Miha Peče · CC BY 4.0

Venice armed everything, raised money by promising membership of the Great Council to thirty families who paid — the only breach of the Serrata in five hundred years — and instead of fighting the Genoese fleet, sank hulks in the channels behind it and blockaded the blockaders. The Genoese in Chioggia spent the winter cut off, and in June 1380 the survivors surrendered.

Which one won

Both fleets were destroyed and both republics were bankrupt. The peace, mediated at Turin in 1381, went formally against Venice, which gave up Dalmatian claims and the island of Tenedos.

What happened afterwards is the answer. Venice recovered, took the Italian mainland within twenty-five years, and held the Levant trade for another two centuries. Genoa did not seriously contest the eastern Mediterranean again, and spent the following decades under French and then Milanese lordship.

The difference is not naval. It is that Venice had a government capable of requisitioning the wealth of its citizens in an emergency and Genoa had four families who would not.

After 1380

Genoa's centre of gravity moved from shipping to money, and it moved completely.

The Genoese did not stop trading, but the thing they became indispensable at was finance: bills of exchange, the fairs at Besançon and later Piacenza where much of Europe's debt was cleared, and eventually the business of lending to the crown of Spain against silver that had not yet arrived from America.

A merchant republic that loses a trade war and turns into a banking centre is a recognisable modern story, and this is a very early full version of it. What makes it worth watching is that Genoa got richer doing it. The century after Genoa stopped being a naval power was the century in which Genoese houses were the most important lenders in Europe — which is a warning against reading a lost war as the beginning of decline, and against reading wealth as strength.

A bank with colonies

contractionDrafted from Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (1996)

In 1407 the republic's creditors were consolidated. The various funded debts, each secured on a particular tax, were merged into a single chartered institution — the Casa di San Giorgio — whose shareholders were the state's creditors and to whom the taxes servicing the debt were assigned directly.

The republic then went on failing to pay, and the Casa went on taking. By the later fifteenth century it was administering most of Genoa's indirect taxes, and because a colony that could not pay its garrison was a defaulting asset, it took the colonies too: Corsica for long stretches, Caffa and the Black Sea stations, and various Ligurian towns. A public bank owned by bondholders governed territory, appointed its officials, kept its accounts and fought its wars, on behalf of its shareholders, for most of two centuries.

Machiavelli, who noticed, wrote that Genoa was a state within a state and that if the Casa ever acquired the whole of it the republic would be more remarkable than Venice.

Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (1996) · Basilicofresco · CC BY-SA 4.0

What the Casa actually was

It is easy to say bank and let the word do work it cannot do.

The Casa di San Giorgio did not lend to the republic; it was the republic's debt, reorganised into shares that traded. Its shareholders were people who had lent to the state and who now, collectively, employed the tax collectors, kept the books, appointed the governors of overseas possessions, garrisoned them, and went to law and occasionally to war on their own account. Its accounts were better kept than the government's. Its credit was better than the government's. When Corsica revolted, it was the Casa's problem.

A joint-stock company administering territory on behalf of shareholders, with its own revenue and its own troops, is the Dutch and English East India companies three hundred years early. The difference is that those companies were chartered to go out and acquire things, and this one acquired an empire by foreclosing on one.

The families, still

None of this stopped the politics.

Genoa in the fifteenth century changed government roughly every two years, alternated between French and Milanese lordship, and was sacked by its own factions more than once. The doges elected for life after 1339 averaged something closer to three years in office than a life, and several were overthrown by the family that had put them in.

What is worth holding onto is that the commerce did not stop while this happened. The Genoese abroad — in Seville, in Lisbon, in Chios, in Caffa, in Bruges — went on operating, because the network was a network of families and contracts rather than a state, and it did not need the city to be governed. Epstein's point is that Genoa was strong roughly in inverse proportion to how much its government mattered.

That is the opposite of what the neighbouring republic demonstrates, from an almost identical starting position, and it is the reason the pair is worth thinking about together. Venice's strength was its state. Genoa's strength was everything the state had subcontracted, delegated or lost hold of — and for about four hundred years it worked.

The men who left

contractionDrafted from Bent, Genoa: How the Republic Rose and Fell (1881)

The most consequential thing Genoa produced was not a fleet or a bank. It was sailors, and most of them worked for somebody else.

In 1291 two brothers named Vadini fitted out two galleys; Tedisio D'Oria and Ugolino Vivaldi joined them; and together they passed the Pillars of Hercules and sailed out into the Atlantic. The Genoese registers for that year list two ships belonging to D'Oria, the S. Antonio and the Allegrancia. They did not come back.

Bent, Genoa: How the Republic Rose and Fell (1881) · University of Minnesota · Public domain

The Genoese have claimed the Canaries on the strength of it ever since, and the argument is a pleasing piece of onomastics: one of the islands is called Allegranza, and another is Lanzarote, which the French assign to a countryman of theirs — while a Genoese cartographer in 1455 drew a Genoese flag at the Canaries and wrote under it Maroxello Lanzerotto, and a Marocello family with a member named Lanzerotto was living in Genoa when D'Oria sailed. Bent's own verdict on the claim is that it is probably one of those points that will never be satisfactorily proved.

The man on the Gambia

A hundred and sixty-three years later a Genoese named Antonio Uso di Mare turned up on the west coast of Africa. He was of a consular family and, Bent notes with satisfaction, a spendthrift travelling to escape his creditors, which is why his letters home survive alongside his journal.

In 1454 he met a Venetian, Cadamosto, at the Cape Verde Islands, and the two agreed to push down the African coast together looking for a route to India — the year after Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, with the Genoese trembling for their Black Sea colonies and needing another way to the east. Two men from the rival republics, on the far side of Africa, jointly looking for the road that would eventually put both of them out of business.

They were shot at with poisoned arrows on the Gambia and moved on to the territory of a local ruler, who gave Uso di Mare thirty-one slaves, elephant tusks, parrots and some civets, and lent him a secretary to smooth things over upriver. And there Uso di Mare reported meeting five men from the country of Prester John, one of whom said he was of Genoese descent — the last of the line of a Vivaldi wrecked on the coast of Guinea a hundred and sixty years earlier.

Bent prints it and then says the sensible thing: marvellous indeed, if true. It is exactly the sort of story a man writes home to creditors. It is also exactly the sort of thing the Genoese did.

1477

The pattern is a republic that produced navigators and then had no use for them. Genoese seamen and merchants went in crowds to the Portuguese court and sailed under the Pessagno family's direction on the voyages down Africa; Antonio di Noli, a Genoese, is credited with the Cape Verde Islands. And then the case that makes the pattern impossible to miss.

Christopher Columbus was the son of Domenico Colombo, a Genoese woolstapler — not a poor man, Bent is careful to say, but a trader with a house outside the Porta S. Andrea, a business along the Riviera, and full eligibility for the honours of the republic. When Columbus had matured his plans, in 1477, he laid them before the Genoese government before going anywhere else.

Genoa turned him down. Bent's explanation is a description of the city's ordinary condition: the treasury was empty, the Adorni and the Fregosi were tearing the government apart, one of them backed by Milan and the other stirring revolt in Corsica, and the people of the two Rivieras were in complaint over taxes. The republic that had sent galleys past the Pillars of Hercules in 1291 could not find the money in 1477, because its factions had spent it fighting each other.

He went to Castile. Bent adds the part that is usually left out: being Genoese, which had given Columbus his training in the best school of navigation in Europe, told against him for the rest of his life. The Aragonese had fought the Genoese over Corsica and Sardinia for generations, and had had their king taken prisoner by a Genoese fleet at Ponza in 1435. He owed everything to Isabella of Castile, including the ships, and was resented by her husband's people from first to last.

What that adds up to

Genoa's overseas empire was run by syndicates, its public debt was run by a shareholders' bank, its wars were fought by admirals under contract to foreign kings, and its greatest navigator sailed for Spain. There is a temptation to read all of that as failure, and Bent gives in to it.

It is better read as the same thing described four ways. This was a republic that never succeeded in being a state, and never needed to. What it had was capital, ships and men, all of them for hire, and it exported all three to whoever could pay — including, in the end, the monarchy that used them to take a hemisphere Genoa had been offered first and could not afford.

Doria and the silver

contractionDrafted from Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (1996)

Andrea Doria was an admiral with a fleet under contract, first to the pope, then to France. In 1528, unpaid and unhappy, he took the fleet and the city out of French service, put both under the protection of Charles V, and rewrote the constitution.

Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (1996) · Bronzino · Public domain

The new arrangement had a doge elected for two years and ineligible immediately afterwards, a Great and a Lesser Council, and — the decisive part — the old clans dissolved and their members redistributed into twenty-eight artificial alberghi, each an association of families required to take a common surname. The factions were abolished by administrative fiat and reassembled in shapes that cut across the old alignments.

It held for two hundred and sixty-nine years, which is longer than anything else Genoa tried.

What it cost

Independence, more or less, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than treating 1528 as a restoration.

Genoa after Doria was in the Spanish system: the fleet served the Habsburgs, the republic followed Spanish foreign policy, and Genoese banking houses became the principal financiers of the Spanish crown. The silver from Potosí and Zacatecas was landed at Seville and disbursed across Europe through Genoese bills of exchange, and Spanish armies in Flanders were paid with money Genoese houses advanced against fleets that had not yet arrived.

It made a period historians call the Genoese century, from roughly 1557 to 1627, in which the city was probably the richest place in Europe per head and had almost no political weight of its own. Then Spain defaulted, repeatedly, and the houses that had lent to it did not recover.

The man who would not be doge

Doria never held the office his constitution created. He was offered the dogeship and refused it, and directed the republic for the next thirty years as a private citizen with a fleet under contract to a foreign king.

That is not modesty. A doge was elected for two years, bound by the constitution he had just written, and replaceable. An admiral whose ships the emperor needed was neither. Doria arranged Genoa so that nobody could dominate it through its offices, and then dominated it from outside them, and the arrangement held for as long as he lived and for two and a half centuries after he died.

It is the most Genoese arrangement in four hundred years of them. The republic's decisive figure held no post in it, and the constitution that saved the city was written by a man under contract to the Habsburgs.

What surprised you most

contractionDrafted from Bent, Genoa: How the Republic Rose and Fell (1881)

The Genoese century Doria's constitution had built collapsed with Spain's own repeated defaults, and what followed was a hundred and seventy years in which the Republic's independence survived mostly because nobody found it worth the trouble of finishing off - until Louis XIV decided otherwise.

Thirteen thousand bombs in two days

Louis had said for years that whoever held Genoa held the keys to Italy, and by the 1680s he had assembled reasons to act on it: Genoese loyalty to Spain, a refused French demand over ship salutes, exiled Fieschi conspirators clamoring for restored property at his own court. In 1684 he sent an ambassador with an ultimatum - abandon Spain, salute the French flag on demand, open a salt depot at Savona, restore the Fieschi estates - backed by a fleet of a hundred and sixty ships and eight thousand soldiers. The Genoese senate refused. On 17 and 18 May the French admiral Seignelay bombarded the city until his supply of bombs was exhausted - some thirteen thousand three hundred shells, by contemporary count, reducing whole streets of palaces to rubble while the government relocated to the Albergo dei Poveri for safety. Rumors spread of an infernal machine set to finish the city in one blow; residents wept in the streets and had to be restrained from massacring French prisoners once the fleet, out of ammunition, withdrew without warning.

Bent, Genoa: How the Republic Rose and Fell (1881) · unidentified seventeenth-century painter · Public domain

A doge who found himself at Versailles

With no help forthcoming from an exhausted Spain, a distracted Germany, or an indifferent England, the senate accepted Louis's terms through papal mediation: the Spanish alliance abandoned, indemnities paid, and the doge himself sent to Versailles in person to apologize - a condition no doge had ever been required to meet, since Genoese law forbade the office-holder from leaving the Republic's territory at all. Francesco Maria Lercaro made the journey with a hundred attendants, was received by Louis with an embrace and a state banquet, and was asked by the king, touring him through the palace gardens, what had surprised him most of everything he had seen there. "To see myself here," the doge replied. He returned to Genoa by night, and no one spoke publicly of the humiliation.

A rebellion Genoa could not put down, and an island sold instead

The Republic's Corsican possession, restless for generations, rose in open rebellion under Pasquale Paoli in the 1750s and 60s, and Paoli's militia and administrative reforms - a university at Corte, a representative assembly, a law code that outlawed the vendetta - built something close to a functioning independent state faster than Genoese arms could dislodge it. When Genoese envoys offered Corsica near-total autonomy in exchange for keeping only the two loyal garrison towns of Bonifacio and Calvi, Paoli refused any settlement short of complete Genoese withdrawal, gambling that France - already courting him - would back full independence instead. He gambled wrong. With her treasury exhausted and Austria eyeing the island as well, Genoa concluded in 1768 that the wiser course was to sell her claim to Corsica outright to the French crown, the terms drawn up at Versailles between the Duc de Choiseul and the Genoese envoy Domenico Sorba. France's own conquest of Paoli's Corsica followed within a year - and Genoa entered its final three decades as a republic that had bought a little more time by giving away the one overseas possession that had outlasted its medieval trading empire.

The book of gold

endDrafted from Bent, Genoa: How the Republic Rose and Fell (1881)

Genoa and Venice both tried to stay neutral in the wars of the French Revolution, and neutrality turned out to be the one position neither side would allow.

The English consul in Genoa, Drake, demanded that the republic expel the French minister, ally itself with Britain, and open its harbour to George III's ships, and said that if it refused it would be treated as an enemy. Admiral Hood was in the Mediterranean with a dozen vessels to make the point. Two English ships seized a French vessel inside Genoese neutral waters, and the French then demanded compensation for the loss — so the Genoese government paid the French claim out of its own members' pockets, to preserve a neutrality that was already being violated by both parties.

In the spring Drake went to the council hall, demanded the expulsion of every French agent in the city, was quietly and firmly refused by the doge, declared Genoa at war with England, and left for Leghorn.

Nelson

The incident that finished it belongs to a more famous officer.

On 11 September 1796 the French were unloading a ship full of arms just outside Genoa. Nelson was in the harbour at the time, under the neutral flag. He sailed out as though putting to sea, went a mile or so, turned sharply round, seized the French ship and made off with it.

That was the end of the neutrality. The French minister in the city made the most of it, and the Genoese government, seeing no way left to stand aside, sent an agent to Paris to get what terms he could. The terms were: close the ports to the English, give no help to France's enemies, and hand over two million francs from the bank as indemnity, with another two million to be advanced as a loan by the republic's wealthy citizens. In exchange France would protect Genoa if Britain attacked it, and would respect Ligurian territory.

A republic that had spent five hundred years being difficult to govern was manoeuvred into an alliance nobody in it wanted, by two navies, over a period of about eighteen months.

The rising

What the alliance brought was French revolutionary agitators, working openly under the protection of the French legation, and by the following spring the city was ready to go off.

On the night before, according to Bent, every square and alley of Genoa was full of stump orators and drunken audiences under torchlight. At dawn on 22 May the insurgents came out with tricolour tassels in their caps, opened the prisons and the dockyard, armed the criminals and the galley slaves, and set about overthrowing the government. The senate sat in the council hall and did nothing at all, when — as events proved within the day — it still had the strength to stop them.

Bent, Genoa: How the Republic Rose and Fell (1881) · Zairon · CC BY-SA 4.0

What stopped them instead was the other half of the city. Artisans, porters and coal-heavers, who regarded the whole business as an attack on their religion, tied small images of the Madonna to their caps, seized the arsenal, and came out better armed and with most of the regular soldiers behind them. Napoleon called them Genoese priests. They won: the rising was beaten in a day of street fighting, its leader was killed, and his corpse was kicked through the town.

Bent tells one story about that day and hedges it himself. A Turkish galley slave had been let out of the prison hulks on condition that he go about shouting Viva il popolo. He did, until he met a band of the other faction, who beat him and released him on condition that he shout Viva Maria instead. He did that too, until he met some revolutionaries, who beat him until he could not stand. Lying on the pavement, he is supposed to have said: the Christians must be mad.

The bonfire

Winning the street fight did not help.

Napoleon complained that Frenchmen had been killed in the disturbance, passing over the detail that they had been killed taking part in a sedition, and that the government had used the Madonna men to assassinate them. He demanded the release of every prisoner, which meant turning loose everyone who had tried to overthrow the state, and the disarming of the men who had defended it. The senate complied. Then it sent a deputation to his headquarters at Montebello to accept whatever constitution he cared to impose.

The terms came back on 14 June. The privileges of the nobility abolished; a doge and council representing the whole body of citizens; a further large indemnity; and, in exchange, French recognition of Genoese independence. Bent's printed dates for these events read 1796, which the surrounding narrative contradicts; the year is 1797.

The city celebrated. The crowd went to the palace, brought out the Libro d'Oro — the book of gold, the register in which the noble families of Genoa had been entered since Andrea Doria's constitution of 1528 — carried it to the Piazza d'Acquaverde, and burned it. Ballot boxes went on the fire, and ducal chairs, and coats of arms, while a crowd danced round the embers turning the leaves of the book over with their bayonets. Doria's statues were pulled down and their heads kicked through the town.

Napoleon, at Montebello, called the Genoese foolish idiots.

Six hundred and ninety-eight years after a group of merchants swore an oath to act together, the thing that ended the Republic of Genoa was a bonfire of its own membership list, lit by its own citizens, on terms dictated by a general who despised them.

No longer of our days

afterlifeDrafted from Bent, Genoa: How the Republic Rose and Fell (1881)

The Ligurian Republic lasted eight years and was annexed to France in 1805. Then Napoleon fell, and for a few months in 1814 it looked as though Genoa would simply be put back.

Lord William Bentinck entered the city to loud cheering, talked a great deal about restoring the old regime, and went as far as appointing a provisional government on the republican model while he waited for instructions from London. The instructions, when they came, were that Genoa had already been disposed of.

Vienna

The annexation of Genoa to the house of Savoy was a British plan. Pitt had wanted a strengthened Piedmont as a counterweight to French influence in Italy; Castlereagh carried the policy forward; Metternich agreed with it. It was settled before the Genoese were consulted, and the consultation never really happened.

They sent Pareto to Paris and Brignole to Vienna to argue for their independence — the name is the same as that of the republic's last doge — and got nowhere. Metternich told a Genoese lady in Paris that in his estimate scarcely one Genoese in ten sincerely wanted the old republic back. The emperor Francis put it to Brignole more directly: the republic is no longer of our days.

They were not simply being brushed off. The people of the two Rivieras, from Savona to Spezia, disliked Genoa and had centuries of reason to; the countryside had been governed as a subject territory and behaved like one. There was talk of making the city a sort of Hanseatic town with no territory outside its walls, and talk of a principality on the same footing, and none of it survived contact with what the allies actually wanted.

On 27 December 1814 the British commander publicly notified the Genoese of the orders received from Vienna. The republic that had held colonies from the Pillars of Hercules to the Black Sea was enrolled among the dominions of the house of Savoy as a duchy. The doge Bentinck had temporarily set up resigned his post and knelt before Victor Emmanuel I.

Bent's verdict, and the objection to it

Bent, writing in 1881, thinks this was for the best and says so with a Victorian flourish: better this than dragging on as a factious, querulous republic when that form of government was superannuated in Italy. He goes further and says that all hope of Genoa's past glory had faded when Columbus set foot in America, and that it would have been better for her if the last three centuries could be struck from her history and she had died while her honours lay thick around her.

The first half of that is a judgement and the second half is nonsense. The three centuries Bent wants deleted are the centuries in which Genoese houses financed the Spanish empire and the city was, per head, probably the richest place in Europe. What offends him is that it was rich without being important, which is a complaint about glory rather than about Genoa.

He is also wrong about what the city had left in it, and he says so himself two paragraphs later.

What was still there

Giuseppe Mazzini was born in Genoa in 1805, in the year the Ligurian Republic was absorbed into France, and is buried in the city's cemetery. Genoa under the Sardinian crown became the kingdom's principal port and its commerce recovered. And in 1860 Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily — the one that made Italy — sailed from Genoa.

Bent, Genoa: How the Republic Rose and Fell (1881) · Library of Congress · Public domain

That is a strange and rather exact afterlife for this particular republic. Genoa spent seven hundred years as the place where somebody else's projects were financed, crewed and shipped: the Byzantine reconquest of Constantinople, the Spanish silver system, the Atlantic voyages of a Genoese sailor working for Castile. It ended as a duchy, and then supplied the harbour, the ships and the propagandist for the unification of the country it had spent those seven centuries refusing to be part of.

The city did not become important again. It went on being the place things left from.