The Republic of Genoa and Its Maritime Empire

chapter 6 The Republic of Genoa and Its Maritime Empire

Thomas Kirk

The long history of the Republic of Genoa can be seen as an immensely rich laboratory of unfinished experiments. Precocious among Italian city-states in acquiring a territorial state, Genoa struggled for centuries to provide its Riviere with a homogeneous governing structure. Militarily and commercially aggres- sive from its infancy, at the height of its power few if any would have seen its far-flung collection of enclaves, entrepôts and islands as an empire. Pioneers in projecting power at sea and bending naval strength to the ends of commercial gain, Genoa eventually withdrew from the activities that had created its success in order to pursue a sort of financial dominion over much of the early modern world. All the while the city, La Superba, was racked by social upheav- al, civil wars and power struggles involving every level of society. A stunning variety of social, political and economic experiments were the result of this nearly incessant conflict. Given the radical ebb and flow of political power structures and the extreme- ly variegated nature of the entity known, for lack of a better term, as the Geno- ese Empire, the recent historiographical shift towards conceptualizing empires as both a network of individuals and polities, and as a negotiated enterprise allows for a much-needed new perspective on the Italian city-state’s historical experience. In this chapter, we will discuss the relative merits of several ways of conceptualizing the Genoese pre-modern empire prior to chronologically walking through the creation of a Genoese state, dominion and assortment of colonial outposts. This will provide an opportunity to examine the degree to which patterns of Genoese expansion coincided with pre-existing networks and patterns of trade. Following an overview of the phases of expansion, atten- tion will be shifted to the topics of sovereignty and degrees of political control, and finally to the system’s ultimate fifteenth-century decline. The term “Empire” is so commonly used that far too little ink is spilled in providing a usefully precise definition of the term. Most commonly used in reference to transnational, multi-ethnic states, “empire” implies sovereignty, which in turn implies some sort of state structure. This is clearly not always the case with the maritime empires discussed in this volume; the earliest iterations of the English or Dutch empires in the Indian Ocean region, or even the collection of territories administered by the Genoese companies, the maone, or the

Casa di San Giorgio were certainly not states. In each case a private company drove the creation of such structures and was responsible for their mainte- nance. And while each of these companies exercised some form of sovereignty, it was of limited geographical scope and subject to interference on the part of the states – England, the United Provinces and the Republic of Genoa – where the companies were domiciled. A common corrective is to apply the term “commercial empire,” which, however, suffers from terminal vagueness. Applying the term “empire” to a commercial network or system of networks implies either a monopoly or a state of dominance; the economic equivalent to state sovereignty. While this was usually a goal of both merchants and state actors, results were far from uniform. Throughout the centuries of Genoa’s greatest economic power the republic and its merchants never attained a singularly dominant position save in a handful of specific trades or circumscribed areas. Venice in particular was always in a position to rival the Genoese, but there were several other signif- icant competitors: Pisa, Barcelona, Marseilles, and later the English and the Dutch. Naturally, “commercial empire” could also be interpreted as a system connotated by a large degree of coercive power stemming from economic in- fluence, which is more fitting of the Genoese case. Framing our historical enquiry in terms of networks rather than empire sidesteps some of the thornier questions of definitions, while raising a different set of analytical challenges. Networks exist on many different levels and in many different forms. Limiting examination to the economic sphere, there are long-distance trading networks specializing in the acquisition and redistribution of high-value finished products throughout the Mediterra- nean and beyond. Alongside and at times overlapping such networks there are others tasked with procuring foodstuffs for the dominant city, Genoa. These networks intersect others focused on the distribution of goods in the hinterland and the sale of locally produced items and materials. There are also more specialized financial networks formed around the desire to con- centrate and deploy capital in the burgeoning ventures of well-connected financiers. These systems, then, are embedded in a social reality that also lends itself to network analysis. Political allegiances, religious and cultural affiliations, family/clan structures such as the Genoese alberghi and so forth can easily be seen as networks, each with its own specific end. That does not mean, however, that they are extraneous to commercial networks; commercial bonds often form along the lines of pre-existing social networks. Trust in the pre-modern world was paramount in economic relations, so it is only natural that commercial ties should be formed along the same lines as pre- existing social ties.