Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa | Page 7

to Palestine with his men,
fighting under Godfrey at Cesarea; and again he came home in triumph,
his galleys low with spoil. And indeed, though we hear no more of
Embriaco, by the end of the first Crusade, Genoa had won possessions
in the East,--streets in Jaffa, streets in Jerusalem, whole quarters in
Antioch, Cesarea, Tyre, and Acre, not to speak of an inscription in the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, "Prepotens Genuensium Presidium,"
which Godfrey had carved there, while the Pope gave them their cross
of St. George as arms, which, as some say, we got from them.
Strangely as we may think, in the second Crusade, and even in the third,
so disastrous for the Christian arms, Genoa bore no part; no part, that is,
in the fighting, though in the matter of commissariat and shipping she
was not slow to come forward and make a fortune. And indeed, she had
enough to do at home; for Pisa, no less slow to join the Crusades,
became her enemy, jealous of her growing power and of her possession
of Corsica, so that in 1120 war broke out between them, which scarcely
ceased till Pisa was finally beaten on the sea, and the chains of Porto
Pisano were hanging on the Palazzo di S. Giorgio.
Soon, however, Genoa was engaged in a more profitable business, an
affair after her own heart, in which valour was not its own reward,--I
mean, in the expedition in 1147 against the Moors in Spain. Certainly
the Pope, Eugenius III it was, urged them to it, but so they had been

urged to fight against Saladin without arousing enthusiasm. Yet in this
new cause all Genoa was at fever heat. Wherefore? Well, Granada was
a great and wealthy city, whereas Jerusalem was a ruined village. So
they sent thirty thousand men with sixty galleys and one hundred and
sixty transports to Almeria, which after some hard fighting, for your
Moor was never a coward, they took, with a huge booty. In the next
year they took Tortosa, and returned home laden with spoil, silver
lamps for the shrine of St. John Baptist, for instance, and women and
slaves.
Still, Genoa had no peace, for we find her making a stout and
successful defence shortly after against Frederic I, the whole city, men,
women, and children, on his approach from Lombardy, building a great
wall about the city in fifty-three days, of which feat Porta S. Andrea
remains the monument. Then followed that pestilence of Guelph and
Ghibelline; out of which rose the names of the great families, robbers,
oppressors, tyrants,--Avvocato, Spinola, Doria, the Ghibellines, with
the Guelphs, Castelli, Fieschi, Grimaldi. Nor was Genoa free of them
till the great Admiral Andrea Doria crushed them for ever. Yet peace of
a sort there was, now and again, in 1189 for instance, when Saladin
won back Jerusalem, and the Guelph nobles volunteered in a body to
serve against him, leaving Genoa to the Ghibellines, who established
the foreign Podestà for the first time to rule the city. But this gave them
no peace, for still the nobles fought together, and if one family became
too powerful, confusion became worse confounded, for Guelph and
Ghibelline joined together to bring it low. Thus in the thirteenth century
you find Ghibelline Doria linked with the Guelph Grimaldi and Fieschi
to break Ghibelline Spinola. The aspect of the city at that time was
certainly very different from the city of to-day, which is mainly of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where it is not quite modern. Then
each family had its tower, from which it fought or out of which it
issued, making the streets a shambles as it followed the enemy home or
sought him out. The ordinary citizen must have had an anxious time of
it with these bands of idle cut-throats at large. But by the close of the
twelfth century the towers, at any rate, had been destroyed by order of
the Consuls, the only one left being that which we see to-day, Torre
degli Embriachi, left as a monument to a cunning valour. The thirteenth

century saw the domination of the Spinola family, or rather of one
branch of it, the Luccoli Spinola, which as opposed to the old S. Luca
branch seems to have lived nearer the country and the woods, and was
apparently most disastrous for the internal peace of the city; and indeed,
until the Luccoli were beaten and exiled, as happened in the beginning
of the fourteenth century, there could be no peace; truly the only peace
Genoa knew in those days was that of a foreign war, when the great
lords went out against Pisa or Venice.
The Venetian war, unlike that against Pisa, ended disastrously. Its
origin was a question of trade