Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa | Page 3

to Genoa the Proud, by the sea, lying on the bosom
of the mountains, whiter than the foam of her waves, the beautiful gate
of Italy.
II
The history of Genoa, its proud and adventurous story, is almost wholly

a tale of the sea, full of mystery, cruelty, and beauty, a legend of sea
power, a romance of ships. It is a narrative in which sailors, half
merchants, half pirates, adventurers every one, put out from the city
and return laden with all sorts of spoil,--gold from Africa, slaves from
Tunis or Morocco, the booty of the Crusades; with here the vessel of
the Holy Grail bought at a great price, there the stolen dust of a great
Saint.
This spirit of adventure, which established the power of Genoa in the
East, which crushed Pisa and almost overcame Venice, was held in
check and controlled by the spirit of gain, the dream of the merchant, so
that Columbus, the very genius of adventure almost without an
after-thought, though a Genoese, was not encouraged, was indeed
laughed at; and Genoa, splendid in adventure but working only for gain,
unable on this account to establish any permanent colony, losing
gradually all her possessions, threw to the Spaniard the dominion of the
New World, just because she was not worthy of it. Men have called her
Genoa the Proud, and indeed who, looking on her from the sea or the
sea-shore, will ever question her title?--but the truth is, that she was not
proud enough. She trusted in riches; for her, glory was of no account if
gold were not added to it. If she entered the first Crusade as a Christian,
it was really her one disinterested action; and all the world
acknowledged her valour and her contrivance which won Jerusalem.
But in the second Crusade, as in the next, she no longer thought of
glory or of the Tomb of Jesus, she was intent on money; and since in
that stony place but little booty could be hoped for, she set herself to
spoil the Christian, to provide him at a price with ships, with provender,
with the means of realising his dream, a dream at which she could
afford to laugh, secure as she was in the possession of this world's
goods. Then, when in the thirteenth century those vast multitudes of
soldiers, monks, dreamers, beggars, and adventurers came to her, the
port for Palestine, clamouring for transports, she was sceptical and even
scornful of them, but willing to give them what they demanded, not for
the love of God but for a price. Even that beautiful and mysterious
army of children which came to her from France and Germany in 1212
seeking Jesus, she could hold in contempt till, weary at last of feeding
them, she found the galleys they demanded, and in the loneliness of the

sea betrayed them and sold them for gold as slaves to the Arabs, so that
of the seven thousand boys and girls led by a lad of thirteen who came
at the bidding of a voice to Genoa, not one ever returned, nor do we
hear anything further concerning them but the rumour of their fate.
Thus Genoa appears to us of old and now, too, as a city of merchants.
She crushed Pisa lest Pisa should become richer than herself; she went
out against the Moors for Castile because of a whisper of the booty; she
sought to overthrow Venice because she competed with her trade in the
East; and to-day if she could she would fill up the harbour of Savona
with stones, as she did in the sixteenth century, because Savona takes
part of her trade from her. What Philip of Spain did for God's sake,
what Visconti did for power, what Cesare Borgia did for glory, Genoa
has done for gold. She is a merchant adventurer. Her true work was the
Bank of St. George. One of the most glorious and splendid cities of
Italy, she is, almost alone in that home of humanism, without a school
of art or a poet or even a philosopher. Her heroes are the great admirals,
and adventurers--Spinola, Doria, Grimaldi, Fieschi, men whose names
linger in many a ruined castle along the coast who of old met piracy
with piracy. Even to-day a Grimaldi spoils Europe at Monaco, as his
ancestors did of old.
One saint certainly of her own stock she may claim, St. Catherine
Adorni, born in 1447. But the Renaissance passed her by, giving her, it
is true, by the hands of an alien, the streets of splendid palaces we
know, but neither churches nor pictures; such paintings as she
possesses being the sixteenth century work of foreigners, Rubens,
Vandyck, Ribera, Sanchez Coello, and maybe Velasquez.
Yet barren though she is