Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528

Steven A. Epstein

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807861288
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia italiana

Set in the middle of the Italian Riviera, Genoa is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. But Genoa was also one of medieval Europe's major centers of trade and commerce. In Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528, Steven Epstein has written the first comprehensive history of the city that traces its transformation from an obscure port into the capital of a small but thriving republic with an extensive overseas empire. In a series of chronological chapters, Epstein bridges six centuries of medieval and Renaissance history by skillfully interweaving the four threads of political events, economic trends, social conditions, and cultural accomplishments. He provides considerable new evidence on social themes and also examines other subjects important to Genoa's development, such as religion, the Crusades, the city's long and combative relations with the Muslim world, the environment, and epidemic disease, giving this book a scope that encompasses the entire Mediterranean. Along with the nobles and merchants who governed the city, Epstein profiles the ordinary men and women of Genoa. Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 displays the full richness and eclectic nature of the Genoese people during their most vibrant centuries. Sixteenth Century Journal "A learned and intriguing book.... It is necessary reading for anyone interested in getting a better view of the historical evolution of the European economy and polity.-- Journal of Economic History "Genoa's history is notoriously intricate, but Steven Epstein has produced order out of chaos; this is a work of lasting value, thoughtful, scholarly, and also readable.--David Abulafia, Cambridge University "Genoa and the Genoese holds the promise of becoming the history of medieval Genoa in the foreseeable future.--Benjamin Z. Kedar, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem In this comprehensive history of Genoa, Steven Epstein traces the city's transformation from an obscure port into the capital of a small but thriving republic with an extensive overseas empire. His story bridges six centuries of medieval and Renaissance history, interweaving political events, economic trends, social conditions, and cultural accomplishments. Profiling the ordinary men and women of Genoa as well as the nobles and merchants who governed the city, Epstein captures the full richness and eclectic nature of the Genoese people during their most vibrant centuries. -->

1 From Practically Nothing to Something, 958–1154

At the beginning there was the land and the sea, and whatever Genoa was to become, it would owe to its position on the shore at a spot where systems of transport must change. With the northwestern stretch of the Apennines descending steeply to the sea, the most remarkable feature of the land is how little flat space exists (see Map 2). Stunning rugged cliffs and rocky beaches have entranced generations of travelers to the Rivieras —the Levante to the east and the Ponente to the west. It was never easy to live off poor mountain soils with the few flat areas revealingly named islands, places of refuge in a sea of stone. These mountains have a narrow watershed facing the sea; to the north, east, and west, what water there was tended to find its way into the great Po valley to the north. Torrents or creeks, the Bisagno to the east of Genoa and to the west the Polcevera, were unnavigable and were not always reliable sources of fresh water. Genoa was at the mouth of nothing on a sea where some of the great ports sat; there, significant rivers like the Po, Rhone, Arno, and Nile offered access to a hinterland. Beyond the Giovi, the local pass at 472 meters (1,548 feet) through the mountains, the Genoese could reach the upper Po valley and Piedmont, but usually by mules on tough mountain trails or by the admirable Roman Via Postumia, which branched off from the coastal Via Aurelia at Genoa and found its way to Tortona, Piacenza, and beyond.¹

THE ENVIRONMENT

The natural world, with its opportunities for transport, shaped the ways in which the Genoese entered the rest of the Mediterranean world.² What did nature and the Romans leave them? Nature supplied a mountain city on the sea, a fair port on a harsh coast, probably the best port between Barcelona and La Spezia, though the Genoese were always improving the harbor, making it increasingly an artificial one requiring upkeep. Genoa’s advantages as a harbor derive from its northern displacement. Although the way to the interior from Genoa through the Giovi pass and the Scrivia valley is not easy, it is at least shorter and so Genoa is the natural port of the upper Po valley. Some flat land around Genoa provided food, at least as important as the shelter its harbor gave ships. The coast from Cap Ferrat to around Varazze is fairly dry, receiving today about 1,000 cubic centimeters of rain a year, whereas Genoa gets about 1,400 cubic centimeters (55 inches) and the eastern Riviera even more. The humid winds out of the southeast bump into the mountains of the Riviera Levante and cause this pattern of rainfall.³ Genoa had supplies of fresh water —needed by any ships and galleys putting into the harbor. The weak coastal current runs to the southwest while the prevailing winds in the sailing seasons come out of the northwest, providing clear sailing south and east, just the directions the Genoese wanted to take. The famous Mediterranean winds, the Saharan scirocco from the southeast and the libeccio from the southwest, sometimes helped the Genoese to get home.⁴ The Genoese thus had that other basic requirement of a good port—it was usually easy to get in and out of the harbor.

Liguria is today one of the smallest regions of Italy, 5,405 square kilometers or about 2,087 square miles, just a bit bigger than Delaware but in an even more elongated form. This modern region is not medieval Liguria; Genoa then controlled parts of the Lombard plain now in Lombardy or Piedmont. But the coast itself, the 331 kilometers from just west of Ventimiglia to La Spezia, represents more or less the medieval confines of the Genoese state, except for the loss of Monaco in the west. The highest mountain in Liguria, Monte Saccarello at 2,200 meters or 7,218 feet, stands out among a number of peaks that circumscribed Liguria in a narrow arc of coastline. Dramatic changes in altitude in this small region produce five zones of vegetation and climate within a small ecosystem.⁵ From the sea to 500 meters, the classic Mediterranean zone, characterized by scrub coastal pines and other trees, flowering bushes, and a rich variety of flowers, provides the most memorable impression of the region, though we must edit out some of the more modern additions like eucalyptus, cedar, and palm if we want to imagine medieval Liguria. The submontal zone, from 500 to 800 meters, in the Middle Ages contained vast tracts of chestnut forests and a range of plant life, particularly in the well-watered eastern foothills. As one ascends to the true mountainous zone, from 800 to 1,500 meters, the beech tree displaces the chestnut, but the terraced landscapes were still fertile ground for vineyards and olive groves. Above 1,500 meters the subalpine and alpine (over 2,000 meters) provided some vivid scenery but not much economic benefit to the Genoese. These heights, however, are so close to the coast that they determine several important geographic features. Liguria has no natural lakes except for a few glacial ones; the reasonably abundant water simply falls downward too quickly.⁶ Hence malaria was not a local problem. The main rivers of the region, the Roia in the extreme west and the Entella, which enters the sea at Chiavari, are small because of the limited, vertical watershed. The most sizable river in the area, the Trebbia, heads northeast for the Po.

All of these natural advantages, however, existed alongside some real problems, mostly concerning the lack of natural resources in Liguria. After all, notable seafarers like the Greeks never settled any closer than Monaco and the Phoenicians gave Liguria a wide berth. Liguria had no mineral resources worth tapping, and its mountainous and coastal soils are generally poor and shallow. Some good marble was quarried at Capo Fari and up in the mountains at Carignano and Albaro; Passano yielded particularly fine red and green marbles, and nearby Lavagna supplied useful slate for roofs.⁷ There was a fair amount and mix of timbers, but no real rivers existed to move the logs to the coast. Hence shipbuilding in Liguria would always be spread out in dozens of coves close to local supplies of good wood. When it was possible to bring wood by sea to Genoa, shipwrights worked there, but more typically the entrepreneurs in the business also constructed ships up and down the coast.

Local agriculture was never going to be very prosperous. For centuries the Genoese peasants in the valleys ate when necessary a bread made of chestnut flour, and they learned to like it. Their animals sometimes more cheerfully subsisted on an exotic fodder—chestnut leaves. Managing the chestnut forests required many traditional skills now being lost in modern Italy.⁸ Fruit trees, olive groves, and vineyards helped to vary the local diet, but cereal farming was difficult for the usual reasons—too little flat land and not enough water to irrigate thin soils. Even pastoralism did not thrive in this environment, and Liguria never became a noted center for producing wool, cheese, and leather. Liguria’s mountains provided a fragile ecological region, easily damaged by fire or imprudent agriculture and slow to recover from abuse, natural or manmade. Yet it would be wrong to portray Liguria as a desert or a hostile environment; the entire northern shore of the Mediterranean offered only a few places better than Liguria and some worse. But nothing much there explains how a great port developed in the middle of Liguria. Even the local fishing left a lot to be desired; as the seabed dropped sharply right off the coast, these deep waters were unfavorable to fishing. Obviously, the region produced a tough people, the Ligurians, with the Celts, Romans, and Lombards adding to the local heritage. Yet Liguria was an isolated place, a relatively poor and unpromising territory.

ANCIENT AND EARLY MEDIEVAL LEGACIES

To the Romans Liguria was on the way to provinces worth having, and thus they put good roads through the place, originally and primarily for military reasons. The great Via Aemelia, under the empire called the Via Julia Augusta, the coastal road to Provence and Spain, connected Rome to these important western possessions. But this road was on land, and few of Genoa’s modest natural advantages mattered. Genoa was nothing much under Rome, and towns like Ventimiglia, Albenga, and Vado were more important way stations. At least one major road in the region completely bypassed Genoa by cutting across country from Vado to Piacenza. The classical Genua left few traces in the Latin sources and hence ample opportunity in the centuries of the city’s greatness for local patriots to invent suitably Trojan origins and specious ancient significance. Archeology reveals the truth—a modest castrum overlooking the Roman road. The medieval neighborhood of Castello preserved the name and some street patterns of the old Roman city. To the north Turin, Milan, and Pavia could be proud of their classical past; Genoa had no place in that company.

No imposing Roman buildings of any kind survive in Genoa, so the city’s classical inheritance reveals itself in other ways. Roman Genoa was a small, bowl-shaped city, almost like a steep amphitheater, situated on a hill that sloped down to the crescent harbor. This ancient harbor and its hilly city remained Genoa’s core in all subsequent periods. Nearby Ticinum (Pavia) and Milan needed an outlet to the sea, and as these two cities grew in importance in the late empire, Genoa presumably thrived because of its geographic setting and was more vital than the available sources indicate. A maritime legacy from the ancient world to the early Middle Ages guaranteed that a knowledge of ships and how to build them survived in Genoa.

The late Roman Empire also saw a durable Christian community establish itself in Genoa. The fourth-century bishop and miracle worker San Siro gave his name to the original cathedral, located outside the earliest city walls. His relics at this site, as well as some from San Lorenzo at his church (the future cathedral), forged Genoa’s closest ties to late antiquity’s cult of the saints.⁹ As no spectacular martyrdoms occurred in Roman Genoa, its spiritual centers mainly depended on imported relics. The Genoese never forgot the Roman roots of their Christianity, but they were reluctant to embellish them. Only at the time of the First Crusade did new and powerful relics arrive in the city. So Genoa experienced no dramatic conversions, nor did it contribute much edifying material for pious future generations to contemplate. Instead, it was becoming what it would always be—a city of strong if conventional Christianity with no interest in heretical beliefs. The Genoese were remarkably impervious to all forms of heterodoxy; there are almost no signs in the ancient and medieval periods of any local religious dissent. This steadfastness to tradition may have owed something to classical values.

The fall of the Roman Empire in the west, a great historical drama in which Genoa played no part, had the dull but important consequence of eliminating the power that had maintained the roads and controlled the seas. But as land communications became more difficult, the sea counted for more. During a brief season of Ostrogothic rule, a Jewish community and synagogue existed in Genoa, probably a sign that it was still a trading center with ties to the east.¹⁰ Genoa was in Byzantine hands for a century, from 537 to about 642, when King Rothari of the Lombards conquered what was by then not much more than a sleepy fishing village on a crumbling road.¹¹ Unfortunately, almost nothing is known about this period of Greek rule, and the hard centuries that followed have effaced nearly all traces of it.¹² Some curious local survivals of Latinized Greek words like stolus for fleet and cintracus, a city official from kentarchos, attest to some linguistic heritage.¹³ Well into the twelfth century some Genoese still claimed to be living by Roman or Lombard law, and this hardy survival of old customs may point to important local differences between the indigenous population and the powerful newcomers.

Under the Lombards (642–774) and later the Carolingians, what little is known about Genoa concerns the church or the sea. Local churches, like San Ambrogio, Saints Vittore and Sabina, and Saints Nazario and Celso, reveal the importance of the church of Milan, whose archbishops spent about seventy years in Genoa as exiles whom the Byzantines protected during the early years of Lombard rule in Italy.¹⁴ The oldest churches and monasteries of Genoa, most notably San Giorgio and Santo Stefano, have their origins in this early period as well. Later, in 711, refugees from Spain brought the relics of San Fruttuoso to the Ligurian coast, where they built a new monastery at Capodimonte, east of the city, in an isolated area that eventually became a Doria family stronghold. Genoa was not much more than a big village at the time of the Carolingians, whose major naval base in the area was near Lucca, and the local count had responsibilities that stretched to Sardinia and Corsica.¹⁵

Muslim raiders in nearby Fraxinetum (active ca. 889–ca. 973) mostly left Liguria alone, probably because they lacked sea power.¹⁶ But Muslims from North Africa thoroughly sacked Genoa in 934–35, and the site was probably abandoned for a few years.¹⁷ A recently uncovered Arabic source on this sack suggests that Genoa may have been a substantial town, with linen thread and cloth, as well as raw silk, worth looting. These trade goods, and the attack itself, may indicate a role for Genoa in the poorly documented trade of the early tenth century.¹⁸ Whatever Genoa’s actual significance in 934, this sack left it a shadow of its former self. No local records survived the destruction, so we will never be clear about early medieval Genoa’s history. By the late thirteenth century the Genoese historian and archbishop Jacopo da Voragine implausibly suggested that Genoa’s fleet was away when the Saracens attacked, sacked the city, and captured the women and children. When the fleet returned, it quickly pursued the Saracens and rescued the captives. The sack itself is one of the two or three secure facts Jacopo knew about Genoa before the First Crusade, so it must have been severe enough to rupture local memories as well as destroy the documents.¹⁹ In the disordered years of the mid-tenth century people reestablished themselves in Genoa; they emerge into the world of documents in a famous charter that the kings Berengar and Adalbert granted them in 958.

Before turning to the charter, the beginning of this history of Genoa, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider just what the city might have been like around the year 950. Whatever it was, Genoa was not necessarily the dominant place in Liguria; other survivors from Nice to Portovenere were still contenders for that distinction. Traffic by land and sea was probably as close to nonexistent as it had been since the republic of the Romans. It is hard to envision much trade except on the most local level and in staples like olive oil and chestnuts. Yet by 1016 the city recovered sufficiently to launch a naval offensive, along with Pisa, against Muslims in Sardinia. Land transport probably depended on mules and fishing boats of modest proportions. But to someone from up in the mountains, even a refounded small town would be impressive in local terms, and one important theme here is how Genoa absorbed the really small places in Liguria.

For Genoa in 950, little of “central place theory” would predict the city’s coming greatness.²⁰ But the theory suggests that we keep a sharp eye on the systems of transport—here, most importantly, by sea. If the routes of the medieval galley stood out in the Mediterranean world in the same way that railroads did in the nineteenth century, then the traffic through Genoa, its place on those routes, and what these galleys carried all would have been fundamental to Genoa’s rise as a central place. The other key factor to note is the contemporary rise of competitors, both major and minor ones, and their fates. In the tenth century the wealth of the Mediterranean was south and east. When did the Genoese start going there, and, perhaps more significantly, for how long did people west and north of Genoa not go east but depend instead on Genoese shipping? These points need to be raised now for several reasons. First, the century 950–1050 witnessed such rapid and profound change that we will run the risk of seeing Genoa’s history as the inevitable rise to greatness that it was not. Second, some will always argue in favor of a continuous if low-level historical development to 950, that is, some historians still see what Genoa subsequently accomplished as the fruit of what ...