Introduction

The republic of Genoa was renowned for its political instability, and its reputation was justified. Between 1300 and 1528, when the constitution was radically reformed under the aegis of the great Genoese naval commander, Andrea Doria, it has been calculated, there were seventy-two rebellions and changes of regime. Several of those regime changes were the submission of the republic to an external lord, generally either the king of France or the duke of Milan, or rebellions in which the Genoese shook off their subordination and recovered their independence. The city of Genoa did not have an extensive territory in mainland Italy, and its government had considerable difficulty in asserting control over what there was. But for all its political turmoil and its weakness as a territorial power within the Italian state system, Genoa was a major commercial power in the Mediterranean and beyond, and had colonies in the eastern Mediterranean and on the Black Sea coast until the advance of the Ottoman Turks in the middle of the fifteenth century. In the Casa (or Banco) di San Giorgio, the city had one of the most stable and trusted public financial institutions in Renaissance Italy.

‘The absence of the state’

It has been Genoese commerce, the activities of Genoese mariners and merchants, rather than the Genoese state, that has been the favoured subject of historians of Genoa. The state has been dismissed as weak and chaotic, barely worthy of the name. ‘The absence of the state’ is ‘the primary characteristic of Genoese history’ according to a standard modern account of the history of Genoa in the Middle Ages. The most authoritative historian of the Genoese colonies, Roberto Lopez, described the medieval Genoese republic ‘as never quite emerging from the cocoon’ to develop the form of ‘a permanent state, transcending individuals’. In his monumental study of the economic and social history of Genoa in the fifteenth century, Jacques Heers attributed the chronic instability of Genoese political life to ‘a striking divorce between an archaic constitution and a different social reality’; he blamed it on the power of the landed nobles, responsible for ‘this republic of businessmen’, being nothing more than ‘a city-state, and a weakened state’.