Four Port Towns and Their Sea Empires: Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi, 1000–1797

The Genoese in the Lagoon

In August 1379 a Genoese fleet forced its way into the Venetian lagoon and took Chioggia, the fishing town at its southern end. Venice ruled Crete, Negroponte, Corfu and a string of harbours from Istria to the Aegean, and now it could not get grain into its own city. Its envoys asked for terms; the Genoese replied that they would first bridle the horses of St Mark. Ten months later the Genoese were the ones trapped inside Chioggia, and on 24 June 1380 they surrendered.

It was the climax of a rivalry between port towns that had started with little more than their ships. Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa and Venice (whose four coats of arms still share the ensign of the Italian navy) turned trading privileges into colonies from Sardinia to the Crimea. The map follows them from Doge Pietro II Orseolo's voyage down the Adriatic on Ascension Day 1000 to 1797, when Napoleon ended the last two republics five weeks apart.

Amalfi and Pisa Go First

Amalfi, a cliff town south of Naples with hardly any farmland behind it, was the leading Italian trading city of the tenth and eleventh centuries, with a merchant quarter in Constantinople and a hospice in Jerusalem that grew into the Knights Hospitaller. The Normans took it in 1073, and Pisa sacked it in 1135 and again in 1137. On the map it is the small gold duchy on the Sorrento peninsula that vanishes in 1073.

Pisa grew at the expense of the Muslim powers in the west. With Genoa it drove the emir Mujahid of Denia out of Sardinia in 1015–1016 and raided Mahdia in 1087, and in 1113–1115 it led a crusade to the Balearic Islands. The pope gave its archbishop primacy over Corsica in 1092. In Sardinia the Pisan Visconti ruled the judicate of Gallura from 1207, and when the judicate of Cagliari was destroyed in 1258 its lands were shared out between Pisan houses and the judge of Arborea: the green on both islands. Genoa ended all this on 6 August 1284, when its fleet destroyed Pisa's navy off the Meloria shoals and Corsica passed to Genoa. Aragon took Pisan Sardinia in 1323–1326, and Florence took Pisa itself in 1406.

Venice and the Fourth Crusade

Venice began as lagoon islands under Byzantine rule, and its first territory was the Dogado, the strip of lagoon and shore from Grado to Cavarzere. Its sea empire began with privileges: Alexios I's Golden Bull of 1082 gave its merchants tax-free trade across Byzantium and a quarter on the Golden Horn. In 1171 Manuel I had every Venetian in the empire arrested on a single day.

When the Fourth Crusade could not pay for the fleet Venice had built for it, Doge Enrico Dandolo had the knights work off the debt, first by taking Zadar for Venice in 1202, then by backing a pretender to the Byzantine throne, which ended in the sack of Constantinople in April 1204. Venice claimed 'a quarter and half a quarter' of the empire. It bought Crete from Boniface of Montferrat and held the whole island by about 1211, took Modon and Coron and the overlordship of Negroponte (Euboea), and Venetian families such as the Sanudo carved out island lordships, the Duchy of the Archipelago among them. The red that floods the Aegean between 1204 and 1211 is that settlement.

Genoa Turns to the Black Sea

Genoa's answer came in 1261, when Michael VIII Palaiologos gave it the Venetians' old privileges and free access to the Black Sea by the Treaty of Nymphaeum. Within a few years the Genoese had Pera, across the Golden Horn from the capital, and Caffa in the Crimea, the hub of Gazaria. The Golden Horde drove them out of Caffa in 1308; they were back in 1313 and added Soldaia (Sudak) by 1365. In 1346, during a Mongol siege of Caffa, plague broke out, and Genoese galleys carried the Black Death to Constantinople and Sicily in 1347 and to Genoa and Venice by early 1348.

In the Aegean Genoa worked through families more than through the commune. Benedetto Zaccaria took Chios in 1304, and a company of Genoese investors, the Maona, ran the island and its mastic trade from 1346 until 1566. The Gattilusi held Lesbos from 1355 to 1462, and Genoa kept Famagusta, the main port of Cyprus, from 1374 to 1464. On the map the family lordships are light blue, the commune's own colonies a stronger blue.

A Century of War Between Venice and Genoa

Venice and Genoa fought four wars between 1256 and 1381. The first started with a street fight over a monastery in Acre, and Venice won its sea battles (Acre 1258, Settepozzi 1263, Trapani 1266), but by then Genoa had Byzantium on its side. Genoa won the second at Laiazzo (1294) and Curzola (1298), and in the third it captured almost the whole Venetian fleet at Sapienza (1354). Each peace settled nothing.

The fourth war, over the island of Tenedos at the mouth of the Dardanelles, reached the lagoon. A Genoese fleet destroyed Vettor Pisani's galleys off Pola in May 1379 and took Chioggia in August. Pisani, released from prison, and Carlo Zeno, back from raiding in the east, sealed the Genoese in; their admiral Pietro Doria was killed in the siege. The Peace of Turin (1381) gave neither side a formal gain, but Genoa, torn by its own factions, never threatened Venice again, and Venice turned to the land. It bought back Dalmatia in 1409 for 100,000 ducats, and its mainland state grew from Treviso (1339) to Padua, Vicenza and Verona (1404–1405), Friuli (1420), Brescia and Bergamo (1426–1428), Crema (1449) and the Polesine of Rovigo (1484).

The Ottomans and the Atlantic

The Ottomans took the empires apart from the east. Venice held Thessalonica from 1423 until Murad II stormed it in 1430. Constantinople fell on 29 May 1453 and Genoese Pera surrendered within days; the Black Sea colonies, cut off, followed, Caffa in 1475. Lesbos fell in 1462, Negroponte in 1470, Modon and Coron in 1500, Nauplia and Monemvasia by the peace of 1540, Chios in 1566. Venice gained Cyprus in 1489, when Caterina Cornaro, the Venetian-born widow of the last Lusignan king, was made to hand it over, and lost it when Famagusta fell on 1 August 1571, two months before the Holy League's victory at Lepanto.

Crete held out longest. The Ottomans landed in June 1645; by 1648 only Candia (Heraklion) and a few island forts were left, and Candia withstood a siege of twenty-one years before Francesco Morosini surrendered it in September 1669 (the forts of Souda and Spinalonga stayed Venetian until 1715). Morosini took his revenge in the Morean War: in 1685–1687 he conquered the Peloponnese, and at the siege of Athens a Venetian shell blew up the Ottoman powder store in the Parthenon. Venice kept the Morea at Karlowitz (1699) and lost it in one summer campaign in 1715; after Passarowitz (1718) it was left with Dalmatia, the Ionian Islands, Cerigo and a few forts opposite Corfu.

The other blow came from the Atlantic. After Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, spices no longer had to pass through Alexandria and Venice, and the growth in trade went to Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp and Amsterdam. Genoa adapted best, as banker to the Spanish crown. Its last outposts were family affairs again: the Lomellini fished coral at Tabarka off Tunisia from the 1540s until the Bey of Tunis took it in 1741 (some accounts say 1742), and Corsica, in revolt from 1729 and self-governing under Pasquale Paoli from 1755, was ceded to France in 1768. Napoleon finished both republics in 1797: Venice's Great Council voted itself out of existence on 12 May, Genoa became the French-backed Ligurian Republic on 14 June, and in October the Treaty of Campo Formio gave Venice, Istria and Dalmatia to Austria and the Ionian Islands to France.

How to Read the Map

Venice is crimson: dark for the Dogado and the Terraferma, bright for the overseas Stato da Màr (Istria and Dalmatia, Albania and the Ionian Islands, Greece and the Aegean, Negroponte, Crete, Cyprus), pale salmon for vassals and family lordships such as the Duchy of the Archipelago. Genoa is blue: navy for Liguria, mid-blue for Corsica, the Aegean and Levant and the Black Sea, light blue for the lordships of the Zaccaria, Gattilusi, Doria and Lomellini. Pisa is green and Amalfi gold. Ports and fortresses such as Modon, Caffa, Pera and Famagusta are drawn as enlarged circles; the republics held the town and its hinterland, not the whole circle.

There are 75 keyframes. Many losses came in a single campaign after decades of calm, so the keyframe before them repeats the old map ('1645 · Crete still wholly Venetian') and the change takes one short step. Watch the homelands grow too: Genoa from one city in 1000 to the whole Riviera by 1258, with gaps where Noli and the Finale marquisate stayed out of its hands, and Venice's Terraferma from Treviso in 1339 to the river Adda by 1453. Pins tell the big stories, small dots the Venice–Genoa sea battles and the trading quarters in Constantinople, Acre, Tyre and Tana.

How the Map Was Made

The overseas territories follow Wikipedia (Stato da Màr, Genoese colonies, Gazaria, Republic of Pisa, Maona of Chios, Gattilusio, Triarchy of Negroponte, Venetian Dalmatia, Frankokratia), with Gullino's and Arbel's chapters in the Treccani Storia di Venezia (1996) and Roger Crowley's City of Fortune (2011); coastlines are from Natural Earth. The homelands are built from modern Italian municipalities grouped by historical district (the Dogado, the Trevigiano, Friuli without the Habsburg Val Canale, the Pisan contado without Volterra), and Sardinia from its medieval judicates: Gallura with the Baronie, and the shares into which Cagliari was split in 1258.

Borders are approximate, and dates of contested places are rounded to the nearest keyframe. The map leaves out Ragusa (under Venice 1205–1358), Ancona, Gaeta and Noli, Venice's short collapse on the mainland after the battle of Agnadello (1509–1517) and its towns in the Romagna; Capri's place in the Duchy of Amalfi is likely rather than certain.

Chronological Timeline

• 1000 — Orseolo's fleet wins the Dalmatian towns for Venice
• 1073 — The Normans take Amalfi
• 1082 — Golden Bull: Venetian privileges in Byzantium
• 1204 — The Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople; Venice buys Crete
• 1261 — Treaty of Nymphaeum opens the Black Sea to Genoa
• 1284 — Meloria: Genoa destroys Pisa's fleet
• 1326 — Pisa loses Sardinia to Aragon
• 1346 — Plague at Caffa; the Maona seizes Chios
• 1379–1380 — War of Chioggia
• 1406 — Florence conquers Pisa
• 1409 — Venice buys Dalmatia for 100,000 ducats
• 1453 — Constantinople falls; Genoese Pera surrenders
• 1475 — The Ottomans take Caffa
• 1489 — Venice annexes Cyprus
• 1566 — The Ottomans take Chios
• 1571 — Famagusta falls; battle of Lepanto
• 1645–1669 — Cretan War and siege of Candia
• 1685–1687 — Morosini conquers the Morea
• 1715 — The Ottomans retake the Morea
• 1768 — Genoa cedes Corsica to France
• 1797 — End of Venice (12 May) and of Genoa (14 June)