Republic of Pisa

A floating republic

formationDrafted from Heywood, A History of Pisa: Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1921)

Pisa's own communal government did not begin with a charter or a single founding act. It grew, slowly and almost by accident, out of an existing association of shipowners and merchant families - the armatori - who ran their fleets, punished their own crews, made their own private treaties with foreign powers, and fought their own private wars in Sardinia and along the Tuscan coast, long before any magistracy existed to represent them collectively. Until the Empire recognized the Commune's existence, that association was, strictly speaking, illegal; it survived only because the Bishop of Pisa and the Marquises of Tuscany tolerated it, and because its own members were, in practice, the only people capable of directing the ambitions of their fellow citizens.

Pisa, Italy · Heywood, A History of Pisa: Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1921) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

An insult that had to be avenged

In 1004 a Muslim fleet sailed up the Arno and sacked a quarter of the city itself - the first clearly attested episode in two centuries of Pisan naval warfare. The following year the Pisans struck back at Reggio and won, and for the next decade their merchant adventurers and those of Genoa kept the western Mediterranean's Saracen raiders at bay largely through opportunistic strikes rather than any settled campaign.

Mogahid's fortress of living men

That changed in 1015, when a Saracen warlord named Mogahid, freshly installed as ruler of a puppet caliphate on the Balearic Islands, landed in Sardinia with a thousand horse and more than a hundred ships and overran the island from its coasts to its mountain interior. Pisan and Genoese fleets sailed to Sardinia's relief, and when Mogahid withdrew before them he returned the next year with reinforcements and a vicious answer for the islanders who had failed to stop him: he forced them to build him a fortress and then walled the labourers alive into its own masonry. His men, however, had grown weary of a war that paid no plunder, and when the combined Pisan and Genoese fleets reappeared in May 1016 he chose to evacuate rather than fight again. The Italians caught his ships as they embarked; a storm finished what the battle had begun; his brother, his son and, by some accounts, a favourite wife were taken prisoner, and though Mogahid himself escaped to Spain, he never again set foot in Sardinia.

Magistrates with a name at last

Formal communal government took another eighty years to harden into something with a name. An imperial diploma of 1081 still describes Pisan self-government only as an assembly summoned "by the sound of bells," with no consuls mentioned at all; a Concordia negotiated by Bishop Daibert around 1090 shows a council of "wise men" advising him but still no consulate. It was Daibert's own second Concordia, in 1094, that at last named sitting consuls and appealed to their authority directly - the first solid evidence that authority in Pisa had passed from the bishop's own feudal officials to magistrates the associated merchant families chose among themselves.

A crusade for the Tyrrhenian Sea

expansionDrafted from Heywood, A History of Pisa: Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1921)

A century after Mogahid's expulsion, Saracen corsairs still held the Balearic Islands, raiding the coasts of Catalonia and southern France and holding Majorca so full of Christian captives that, by 1113, Pisan commerce in the western Mediterranean had become intolerable. The Pisans resolved to end it, and found allies in the Counts of Barcelona and Montpellier and the Viscount of Narbonne; because their enemies were also enemies of the Cross, the enterprise received the Pope's own blessing.

An archbishop who led the fleet in person

On Easter Sunday, Archbishop Pietro Moriconi climbed into the pulpit of the Pisan Duomo and preached the crusade himself, promising to lead the Republic's own fleet as his predecessor Daibert had once threatened to do.

Twelve consuls were elected for the campaign alone, and the Archbishop travelled to Rome to receive the cross directly from Pope Paschal II, who gave the expedition a red banner - the origin of the white-cross-on-red arms Pisa carries to this day. That a churchman, rather than any lay magistrate, headed the embassy and commanded the fleet says as much about the young Commune's own government as it does about the crusade: the Archbishop was still, by feudal right as much as by holy orders, the foremost lord in Pisa, and the noblest consular families of the city were still formally his vassals.

Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Pisa · Heywood, A History of Pisa: Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1921) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY 3.0

Fifty days at the walls of Palma

The campaign dragged into 1114 and 1115, culminating in a siege of the Balearic capital. When the besieged offered generous terms - the freeing of every captive, an enormous indemnity - the allied counts were ready to accept, but the Pisans, backed by the bishops and clergy who had sailed with them, refused to leave a nest of pirates standing and pressed the siege through the winter. The outer walls fell in February 1115, the second circuit weeks later, and the citadel itself on the third of April. More than fifty thousand of the defenders are said to have been killed and some thirty thousand Christian captives freed; the plunder included gold and silver church ornaments looted years earlier from Spain and Provence, and the ruler who had held the island died during the siege, his successor carried off to Pisa in chains along with his own family.

A city that had led, not merely fought

The victory did more than clear the sea lanes: it left Pisa, for a season, at the head of a genuinely international Christian coalition, commanding counts and bishops from three different lands in a campaign its own Archbishop had preached and led. Within a few years Pisan colonies and trading quarters stretched from Sardinia and Corsica to the Crusader ports of the Levant, and the city's merchants counted themselves, without much exaggeration, among the wealthiest in Italy.

A government invented as it went

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Heywood, A History of Pisa: Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1921)

Pisa's consulate was never designed; it accumulated. Its most direct ancestor was the Visconte, a hereditary deputy of the Countess Matilda who shared the city's government with the Bishop and whose office, like so many in early medieval Italy, was eventually adopted by its holders as their own family name. Beneath and alongside him stood a Commune Consilium of "wise men" advising the Bishop, and a general Colloquium Civitatis in which the whole citizen body could, in theory, be summoned by the ringing of the cathedral bells - the ancestor of what would later become a formal Parlamentum.

Pisa, Italy · Heywood, A History of Pisa: Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1921) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 2.0

A commission that never quite stopped being temporary

Even the consulship itself began as nothing grander than a balia: a short-term commission appointed for one specific task, most often to command a fleet, and dissolved once that task was done. Only after a long series of such ad hoc appointments did the office harden into something permanent. The associated merchant families who filled it were not, in any strict sense, elected representatives of the wider population; they were the same armatori who had always run the city's trade and shipping, and the mass of ordinary Pisans no more expected a voice in choosing consuls than they expected a voice in the maritime ventures of the individual shipowners who employed them. Private enterprise and public authority were, for most of the twelfth century, barely distinguishable: even the fleets that sailed on the great crusading expeditions were largely fitted out and crewed by private citizens acting, in the eyes of outsiders, as though they represented the Commune itself.

A cathedral standing in for a constitution

What held this improvised structure together was not any single office but the cathedral itself - described by contemporaries as the true home and fortress of the Pisan people, the place where spoils of victory were dedicated, where the consuls heard citizens' grievances, and where, each year on the Vigil of the Assumption, the towns of Pisa's own contado sent wax candles in token of their subjection. The city's unity, in other words, was expressed in stone and ritual well before it was expressed in any settled office of state - a fitting emblem for a republic that spent its first century governing itself without ever quite deciding, in writing, how.

Lords of Sardinia and Corsica

peakDrafted from Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (1909)

By the middle years of the thirteenth century Pisa stood, on paper, at the height of everything its own crusading fleets had built. The Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, no friend to Pisa, could still write that in 1282 "there were more powerful and rich citizens in Pisa than in any other city in Italy": judges from the Sardinian giudicati of Gallura and Arborea kept court there, the Pisans were "lords of Sardinia, of Corsica, and of Elba," their fleets held command of the sea, and in the Crusader port of Acre they counted among the most powerful of all the Italian trading nations.

Pisa, Italy · Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (1909) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY 2.0

A rivalry that had never really cooled

That wealth had never gone unchallenged. The struggle with Genoa that would eventually break Pisa had opened as far back as 1119, in a dispute over a papal privilege, and had never really been resolved since: the Tyrrhenian Sea, Pisan and Genoese writers alike understood, was too narrow a stage for two mistresses. In Acre itself Pisan merchants used their influence among the city's own burghers to drive out their Genoese rivals by fire and sword in the early 1280s, and when the Genoese retaliated with a raiding fleet the Pisans answered with open contempt, sailing to the mouth of Genoa's own harbour to jeer at ships they considered too cowardly to fight.

A greatness resting on no natural foundation

What Pisa's own wealth concealed was a structural weakness Genoa did not share. Genoa's harbour and its mountain-locked hinterland left its own citizens no livelihood but the sea and no choice but unity of purpose in defending it; a whole seafaring population, from one end of the Ligurian coast to the other, stood ready to man new fleets the moment old ones were lost. Pisa had no such natural anchor. Its own port lay on a silting river mouth, its hinterland pulled it constantly into land wars with Lucca and Florence, and its maritime power had always been, in effect, an artificial creation - immensely profitable while ships and sailors held out, but with no deep reserve behind it if they were ever lost all at once.

The Battle of Meloria

contractionDrafted from Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (1909)

In August 1282 a Pisan fleet sailed insolently to the mouth of Genoa's own harbour, taunting the Genoese to come out and fight; the Genoese, their ships not ready, made excuses and let them go. The Pisans took the refusal as cowardice. Two years later, in 1284, they armed seventy galleys and repeated the insult, then withdrew to their own port to wait, daring the Genoese to follow. This time Genoa answered. Under the command of Oberto Doria, a Genoese fleet the chroniclers put at over a hundred sail entered Pisan waters that August, and the Pisans, some eighty-three galleys in all, put out under their own Podestà, Alberto Morosini, and their admiral, Ugolino della Gherardesca, to meet them off a rock in sight of their own harbour called Meloria.

Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (1909) · Lodovico Pogliaghi · Public domain

An omen no one heeded

Contemporary writers record that as the fleet's standard was blessed before departure, its cross and ball fell from the mast - an evil omen the Pisans chose to ignore as they sailed out shouting for battle. The fight that followed off Meloria was long and hard-fought, and by its end the Genoese had won completely. Villani, writing in Florence, put the Pisan losses at sixteen thousand dead or captured and forty galleys taken; Sismondi's own tally, drawn from other chroniclers, gives five thousand dead, eleven thousand prisoners and twenty-eight ships lost. The two counts do not agree, and no reconciling them would be honest - what both agree on is that the loss was total, and that there was scarcely a house in Pisa that had not lost a son, husband or father either to the sea or to a Genoese prison. From that defeat, contemporaries said, Pisa never recovered her former power; the proverb that followed put it more bluntly still - "he who would see Pisa must go to Genoa."

An admiral who did not go down with his fleet

Blame settled quickly on Ugolino della Gherardesca himself, who was said to have fled once the Podestà's own galley was captured and to have been the first to bring the news of the disaster home. Yet the same Council that might have condemned him instead named him Podestà and Captain of the Forces within days, apparently gambling that his standing at Florence and Lucca might keep Pisa's guelph neighbours from combining against a city that could no longer defend itself at sea.

The Tower of Hunger

contractionDrafted from Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (1909)

Ugolino della Gherardesca's rehabilitation after Meloria did not last. Ruling jointly with his nephew Nino Visconti, he drove the city's chief ghibelline families into exile, ceded castles to Florence and Viareggio to Lucca in a bid to buy off Pisa's guelph enemies, and made himself, in the process, nearly as hated as the defeat he had been blamed for. When Visconti went to Sardinia and returned to find himself barred from power, civil war broke out between the two men, and Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini seized the opening: he lured Ugolino out of the city, summoned the ghibelline leaders in his absence, and had himself proclaimed Podestà and Captain of the People in Ugolino's place.

A palace stormed, a family imprisoned

Ugolino tried to fight his way back with a small force under an ally, Tieri da Bientina, but after a day and a night of street fighting the palace fell and Ugolino, two of his sons and two of his grandsons were taken prisoner; a bastard son and another grandson had already been killed in the assault. The Archbishop had the five survivors shut into a tower on the Piazza degli Anziani, and once the new government was installed the keys of the prison door were thrown into the Arno. No priest was allowed near the tower to hear a confession; within days all five had starved to death. Contemporaries across Italy condemned the cruelty - not, most said, for Ugolino's own sake, whose earlier treacheries seemed to many to have earned him some reckoning, but for the two grandsons and youngest son who had done nothing to deserve it. The tower has been known ever since as the Tower of Hunger, and Dante would later place Ugolino in the depths of his own Inferno for it.

Pisa, Italy · Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (1909) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY 2.0

A government that had run out of legitimate hands

What Meloria had begun, the Tower of Hunger confirmed: Pisa's own governing class, having lost the fleet that had made the city's wealth and prestige possible, spent the years after 1284 devouring itself in exactly the factional violence a strong maritime republic had once been able to suppress. No single family or office would command the same unquestioned authority again before the Republic's own end.

A city sold twice over

contractionDrafted from Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (1909)

The fourteenth century gave Pisa one genuine respite in Piero Gambacorti, elected Captain and Defender of the Commune and the People in 1369 after years of factional exile and imperial interference. A capable and popular ruler, Gambacorti tried to use his own standing to broker a federation among the Italian states themselves - an attempt to settle disputes between them by arbitration rather than by the wandering mercenary companies that had come to infest the peninsula. Delegates from across Italy actually met in Pisa in October 1388 to discuss it.

A trusted secretary who was not to be trusted

That peace conference was also Gambacorti's undoing. Giovan Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, bribed Gambacorti's own long-trusted secretary, old Jacopo d'Appiano, through d'Appiano's son, who was already in Visconti's service. When the son arrived in Pisa at the head of Lombard cavalry, the father dropped all pretence: he had one of Gambacorti's closest friends murdered, and when Gambacorti himself came out to help restore order he was struck down along with his two sons. Jacopo d'Appiano made himself Lord of Pisa in the same stroke that killed the man who had trusted him longest.

Sold for two hundred thousand florins

D'Appiano's own rule did not outlive him by much. His son Gherardo, succeeding him in 1398, buckled under a mixture of threats and bribes from the same Gian Galeazzo Visconti his father had once outmanoeuvred, and sold the city of Pisa outright to the Duke of Milan for two hundred thousand golden florins - keeping only Piombino, a scatter of castles, and the island of Elba for himself. Pisans who begged to be allowed to buy back their own city at a higher price were flatly refused; the sale stood. When Gian Galeazzo died in 1402 he left Pisa to an illegitimate son, Gabriello Maria Visconti, whose own unpopularity and financial desperation would, within three years, put the city up for sale a second time - this time to Florence.

Pisa, Italy · Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (1909) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

Bought, then besieged

endDrafted from Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (1909)

Gabriello Maria Visconti, unpopular and short of money, agreed in September 1405 to sell the citadel of Pisa and two outlying castles to Florence for 206,000 golden florins. On September 12 the Florentine envoy Gino Capponi took formal possession of the citadel - only for the Pisans themselves to rise as one, storm it back from the Florentine garrison, and send an imperious demand to Florence for the return of the castles they had already been promised in exchange. Florence refused. What followed was not a negotiation but a siege: from March 1406 a Florentine army lay before the city, blockading it by land while a chain of forts along the Arno kept Sicilian grain ships from reaching Pisa's own port.

Pisa, Italy · Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (1909) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 3.0

A city that turned to Milan, Naples and Burgundy in turn

Facing starvation, the Pisans offered their city outright to King Ladislaus of Naples, who refused it; appealed to the King of France, whose envoy told Florence to leave "his city of Pisa" alone and was informed in reply that Florence had already bought it and fair; and, as a last resort, appealed to the Duke of Burgundy, whose own messenger's arrogant demand that the siege be lifted ended with the Florentines throwing him in the river. None of it changed anything outside the walls. Inside them, the city's two ruling factions - the ghibelline Agnello and the guelph Gambacorti - had briefly set aside years of exile and feuding at the Elders' own insistence, only for Giovanni Gambacorti to have his rival murdered within days of being recalled and seize personal lordship of the city in the run-up to the siege itself.

Terms bought with someone else's hunger

It was Gambacorti who, in the end, opened secret talks with Gino Capponi. His own price was generous: fifty thousand florins, the islands of Giglio and Capraia, Florentine citizenship and tax exemption for himself and his heirs, a castle for his brother, an archbishopric for his cousin - along with an assurance that the Elders would keep their nominal authority over Pisa's own finances and that no citizen would be robbed or insulted. Florence agreed. On October 9, 1406, the Florentines entered a city so reduced by famine that soldiers who tossed bread to onlookers reportedly watched some of them die from eating too much, too fast, after months without it. The Republic's own flag went up in place of Pisa's, three centuries of independent government ended in an afternoon, and Pisa's own harbours at Leghorn had already, months earlier, passed into the hands of a French garrison at Genoa - cutting the fallen Republic off from the sea that had made it.

The dead republic wakes

endDrafted from Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (1909)

Florentine rule brought Pisa little but decline. Cut off from its own port and shipping trade, its chief citizens periodically ordered into supervised exile after a plot to hand the city to a mercenary captain was uncovered, Pisa within forty years had lost much of its population to abandoned fields and marsh fever. When a French army under Charles VIII of France marched through the city on its way to Naples in 1494, an orator named Orlandi caught the King's own mantle and begged him to restore Pisa's liberty - and the single word "liberty," the only one the watching crowd could make out of his petition, was enough. Florence's lions and lilies were torn down from the public buildings within hours; by one contemporary's account, a dead republic woke to life in a moment.

Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (1909) · Niccolò Fiorentino · CC0

A liberty three different powers tried to sell out from under it

Charles's own commanders had no real interest in Pisan freedom for its own sake - keeping Pisa and Leghorn out of Florentine hands made Charles, in effect, master of the coast from Marseilles to Naples, and only the Pisans' own tearful pleading, and the bribes of soldiers left unpaid, kept him from formally handing the city back at all. When he finally did sign away Pisa's citadel to Florence at Asti in 1495, its own garrison commander defied the order and sold it to the Pisans directly for cash instead, most of it quietly supplied by Milan, Venice and Genoa - each of which wanted Pisa for its own reasons and none of which, once they fell to quarrelling among themselves, was willing to actually defend it.

Fifteen years, three sieges, and a river that would not be moved

Left to fend for itself, the revived Republic withstood three separate Florentine sieges over the next decade and a half. During one of them, in 1503, Florence tried to starve the city out for good by digging two great canals meant to divert the Arno away from Pisa entirely; Leonardo da Vinci himself inspected the works, which employed some eight thousand labourers, before a flood washed the central dam away and the scheme was abandoned. Florence turned instead to blockade: fortified camps at the mouths of the Arno, the Serchio and the Fiume Morto choked off what little still reached the city by water. Hunger did what the canals could not. On June 8, 1509, the Florentines re-entered Pisa, and this time there was no third revival to follow: the city's own independent government, first attested in a bishop's charter four centuries earlier, did not return until Italy itself was unified.