the early capitalists turn west: genoa, the demonic nature, and the end of christian domination over the mediterranean sea (christopher columbus targets the western region)
in early modern times, the city of genoa behaves as a materialization of the demonic nature: ruthlessly accumulating wealth, seeking new beings to subjugate, investing the profits in new conquests
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I went to Genoa thinking about the sea, but I found a city cradled by fortress-strutted mountains (all photos my own)
Walking aimlessly around Genoa at night, I relished the glimmer of streetlights on the water by the old harbor. At last, I had returned to the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. It is natural today to conceive of the Mediterranean as the graveyard for countless migrants fleeing the warfare and destitution of their countries, and Europe often seems content to use that sea as a deadly moat between itself and Africa. But it is in places like Genoa, old trading centers at the edge of an open expanse, where I often cannot help but romanticize a different era for the Mediterranean.
It was a time long before the consolidation of Christianity, hardly complete until the conversion of the Scandinavian pagans over a thousand years after Christ. Then reigned a glorious but long forgotten polytheistic superstructure, swept away not only by the relentless expansion of Christianity into the north but also by the simultaneous spread of Islam across the Middle East and North Africa. Although they each saw one another as wicked infidels, the monotheists jointly destroyed what had been an interconnected civilization centered upon the Mediterranean. Instead of the old cosmopolitan pagan religions, which had eagerly absorbed or at least respected one another’s gods, the black-and-white views of the grim monotheists had finally prevailed. The Christians and Muslims had finally exterminated or appropriated all indigenous traditions. Opposed to Islam emerged a distinct European civilization, “Christendom,” imagining itself united behind common devotion to Christ, and the poor souls who fell beyond it were bound one day to be converted or burn. Likewise, the leaders of the Muslims turned the sword against the infidel. These were mentalities that would have been utter nonsense to the old Mediterranean cultures.
Before Christendom, there was no Europe, and it is in the great days before Europe that Genoa finds its origins. There was then only a vast Mediterranean Civilization, from which the pale savages of the northern islands and forests were excluded. For me, strolling through the Genoese harbor was to look at the sea and imagine a time when the Middle East, North Africa, and Southern Europe were united in a common web of connection over which was cast an international communion between the gods of every nation, a vibrant diversity which only a few rejected. It is a reminder that our very conceptions of the most basic geographical divisions are rather flimsy social constructs. And it was the old port cities like ancient Genoa, linked not only to Greece and Lebanon but also to Tunisia and Egypt, which in my idealistic imagination epitomized an epoch of greater tolerance and understanding between divinities.
The old harbor of Genoa
Italian Genoa is only the most recent manifestation of that city, which is one of oldest inhabited places in the human world. Long before the Romans politically unified the Mediterranean basin, the settlements of modern Genoa , with origins stretching back 4,000 years, played host to Etruscan inhabitants from Italy, Phoenician traders from Lebanon and North Africa, and Greek settlers sent forth by their home city-states in Turkey (“Greek” signifying not an ethnic group or race, but people who spoke Greek). As I learned when I was there, Genoa’s origins are in fact so ancient that the meaning of its modern name is shrouded in the mystery of unrecorded history. All we know is that the Romans named it Genua some three thousand years after the area was originally settled, but why they called it this when they seized control over the place, or what this name means, is a matter of speculation.
In the era of Roman Genoa, there were no natural divisions between we like to imagine between North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe were non-existent. The sea did not divide them; it connected them, politically and economically. All had long interwoven by the impetus of seaborne trade and a tendency by most parties to engage in founding distant settlements. And yet unlike the Rome we see today, the Genoa of that time has left hardly anything visible to the naked eye. What remains from that time today is minimal; the ruins of Roman Genoa, which must have been bustling with traders from all across the Mediterranean World, are buried deep underground, exposed only in a few special locations to visitors who have the opportunity to glance at the hardly recognizable leftovers of the old amphitheater. Those ruins are exposed beneath a walkway under a roof, easy to miss and not generally a high tourist priority.
Genoa seen from a hilltop; many residents face steep climbs up to their homes
What we can see of Genoa today is far from the cosmopolitan paradise I would like to imagine when walking along the edges of its old harbor. In the aftermath of Roman Empire, during a time period when both the civilization divisions between Islam and Christianity as well as the obsessive focus on “heresy” within each of these religions would replace the relative tolerance of the ancient pagan world, Genoa fell in turn under varied domination. The Ostrogoths, the Carolingian Franks, and the Byzantines each took their turn. Eventually so would the Genoese themselves (when the city, operating as an independent oligarchical republic, rivaled Venice with its trading empire). In recent times, the Italians govern Genoa.
But however proud they are of their country, the Italians should not be overconfident. The long history of Genoa confirms that while nations, countries, languages, and religions may rise and fall, the cities who host them are often eternal, so that when the Italian people one day fade into oblivion just as their predecessors did, the city of Genoa could remain as one of the Mediterranean’s most important ports. Perhaps there is even a distant future when Genoa will regain that lost diversity, taking its place for centuries as a great facilitator of exchange and blending between cultures, or developing again into a central node of a newly born Mediterranean civilization.
The presence of a natural harbor might at least guarantee some continued role in world trade. But even now I am aware that I am simply romanticizing the past. Guided by the biases of my instinctive internationalism and desire for diversity, I am thinking too easily that all was once better in the world before the rise of nationalism and monotheism, Christendom and Islam. Christian Genoa, after all, did form a crucial node for Mediterranean trade for several centuries in the past millennium, facilitating incredible amounts of exchange between Asia, Africa, and Europe. But as will be seen below, the international connections Genoa built utterly failed to nurture any kind of genuinely intercultural exemplar. Such was neither their purpose nor outcome.
In the upper left, Genoa; in the upper right, one of Genoa’s defensive mountain fortresses
The geography of Genoa itself demonstrates the ease with which a society facing outward toward the water can simultaneously turn inward and insular, even if its leaders and citizens are relentlessly engaged in an international commerce which spreads its tentacles into the farthest reaches of the Earth. As I appreciated during our afternoon hiking outside the city, Genoa exists along a narrow strip of land nestled between the open sea to the south and the high mountains behind it to the north. And even as medieval, renaissance, and early-modern Genoa looked to expanded its commercial interests across the Mediterranean, its leaders were eager to protect against invaders and infiltrators from elsewhere in Europe, resulting in the construction of an extensive defensive system along the heights of the mountains behind it. We walked one day along the ridges of those beautiful green and rocky hills. Up there, in an area which feels somewhat wild and yet is so close to the city that it can be reached by free transport, the ruins of what was once the great wall of Genoa snake their way improbably all the way around the mountainous ridges cradling the city. Those same mountains are dotted with numerous fortresses which must have been manned constantly by the soldiers who were ready to turn away any northern invaders and protect the city from the outside. The very geography of Genoa, for which the harbor and the sea is just as crucial as the fortresses in the protective mountains, suggests the easy simultaneous influence of both openness and isolation.
The need for Genoa to defend itself against predatory European powers comes as no surprise. Yet I could not help but think metaphorically about the visible dichotomy between the open sea, a conduit of exchange and commerce with groups all across the Mediterranean and even into the Black Sea, and the fortified mountains right behind the city, which serve inevitably as a formidable insulator against unwanted influences from beyond. The castle-studded hilltops seemed to me like a symbol of what our extroverted and bubbly Greek guide told us: that in general the people of Genoa are skeptical of outsiders, that it took him seven years to make any friends there, and that the city has become progressively more conservative. The intriguing dichotomy between the mountains and the sea - the geographic simultaneity of protection from outsiders and an openness to the beyond - transposes itself into a political dichotomy as well, with the Right only slightly surpassing the Left in Genoa’s 2022 elections.
An elaborate church facade in Genoa
All things considered, the mountain fortresses, which speak symbolically to a culture closed off and uninterested in learning from outsiders, seem like a more suitable guide for understanding Genoa than the sea. For all my fantasies about the cosmopolitan and progressive atmosphere of a trade city facing the Mediterranean, Genoa is hardly a paradigm of diversity. Its population is 88% white even as African refugees drown by the thousands trying to cross the idealistically open sea and reach its vicinity. Even if Genoa plays host to workers from all over Europe, there are very few signs of any meaningful cultural influences from the other regions of the basin within which it lies, such as North Africa and the Middle East. In that sense, Genoa seems like a living representation of the gradual transformation of the Mediterranean from conduit to barrier. And yet the wealth of Genoa comes not from using the sea as a barrier, but as a conduit of a different sort. The breathtakingly beautiful Genoa we see today is ultimately a product of Genoa’s vast trading and financial empire, which reached its zenith in the 15th and 16th centuries, during which its presence was felt not only as far away as the Black Sea but also in the Americas. Even when Christian Genoa was using that sea as a bridge rather than a moat during that time, it hardly promoted much diversity or understanding between cultures. Quite the opposite.
It was during the Crusades that Genoa saw the first real growth in its power as an independent oligarchical merchant republic. The expansion of Muslim Empire during the first millennium into the formerly Christian-dominated spaces of Egypt, the Holy Land, Syria, and Turkey inspired a Byzantine emperor, eager to take back these ancient Roman territories, to appeal for help to his Christian brethren in Western Europe. Numerous interests converged to answer the call and launch the Crusades, in which countless Muslims, Jews, and Christian “heretics” were slaughtered, including eventually even those in Constantinople itself, many of whose Eastern Orthodox inhabitants were murdered and raped by the Catholic armies originally summoned to their supposed aid. Genoa was one of those powers who eagerly participated in and subsequently benefited from the general butchery, seizing control over key territories in the Holy Land which would help expand its trading interests deeper into the Middle East. It was able to supplement its holdings in the Middle East with additional settlements in North Africa and around the Black Sea. One outcome of the Crusades was that the Byzantine Empire became financially dependent upon the wealthy traders in Genoa and especially Venice, each of which found themselves controlling significant outposts and colonies across the old Roman lands. Although Genoa enjoyed substantial influence in the next few centuries over interests as far away as Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt, its real golden age would come from another one of the world’s most regrettable connectors of civilizations across seas.
The extent of Genoese power in commerce, banking, and directly controlled territories. Genoese banks and explorers helped fuel Spain’s conquest of the Americas. (Wikimedia)
Christopher Columbus was the most impactful contribution to world history from the city which I liked to romantically imagine as a vibrant link between cultures and societies. At the time of Columbus’s voyage to the Americas in the fifteenth century, the Muslim Ottomans had just finished wiping out what remained of the Christian Byzantines, who had been destroyed over time by both Catholic and Muslim armies. The Ottomans quickly seized control over access to the Black Sea, in which Genoa had possessed significant interests, and over the Silk Road land routes connecting Europe to China and India. The Christian leaders of Genoa and Venice, preying upon the sickly Byzantines, had both profited handsomely for centuries from their domination of numerous colonies and trading posts in what was now Muslim territory. As mentioned previously, each of them had commanded a substantial military and commercial presence in places as far away as Crimea, Romania, eastern Turkey, Lebanon, and Egypt. It was even a Genoese ship coming from Crimea which brought the Black Death to Europe in the fourteenth century.
But with the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the Genoese and Venetians were forced to concede one interest after another to the seemingly unstoppable Ottoman military, whose armies would eventually even reach and besiege Vienna, so that the oligarchs of Genoa and Venice found their business models in serious jeopardy. The question facing Christian Europe was how to re-establish trade with China and India that would bypass enemy Muslim territory, and whoever could accomplish this first would move forward with a serious geopolitical and economic advantage over their rivals. Christopher Columbus provided the best opportunity to the Spanish, who sponsored his voyage to the newly encountered Americas. But it was not only Columbus who proved pivotal for the construction of the Spanish Empire across the Atlantic. Genoa itself ultimately redeployed its resources to serve as Spain’s bankers, while Columbus returned hefty portions of his own private profits to his associates in his home city.
The facade of one of Genoa’s many exquisite palaces
It would be wonderful if the sea and international trade were the conduits of a free and open cosmopolitan exchange engendering tolerance and diversity in the participating seaside cities. Unfortunately, I was forced in Italy to think of Genoa and the meaning of “trade” in a different way. As I learned in the Museum of Mediterranean Civilization in Marseille, sixteenth-century Genoa played host to some of the world’s earliest banks, and they focused much of their investment on Spanish and Portuguese Empire, establishing franchises in Seville and funding the brutal expeditions which ruthlessly exterminated so many of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, not to mention the slave trade which ruined so many African lives.
The sea was then a conduit for the transportation of the stolen goods which would help build the magnificent palaces we see in Genoa today. Native Americans were worked to death mining gold and silver, or otherwise collapsed dead by the millions from the diseases brought upon them by Europeans. Africans were kidnapped and sent to replace them, steadily supplying a new labor force for the growing plantations which obliterated what had once been the rich land of American empires and cultural groups. Huge amounts of bullion, stolen from America, flowed steadily into Genoese banks. The Genoese bankers, often exempted from this story today, then reinvested the profits of colonialism all over Europe throughout the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth century, funding expansionary wars on the continent even for the Austrian Hapsburgs, all to the future profit of the Genoese and to the continued annihilation by enslavement, murder, and butchery of Africans and Native Americans. Many of the beautiful palaces, squares, monuments, and fortresses which I enjoyed looking at in Genoa were built with the revenue of this savage enterprise. And how is this reported in a nutshell by the most starry-eyed idealist about Genoese history, looking eagerly for something to admire and praise? “Genoa grew rich by trade.”
A street view in the old town of Genoa
As I walked around Genoa, I began to think about other imperial enterprises in history, particularly the Romans, the people who gave Genoa its modern name. The Roman Empire was the last and only moment when the whole of the Mediterranean was unified under one political power. Several months ago, I wrote in Essay #4 about the immense diversity of that empire, with a State that was dominated from time to time not only by Italians and Western Europeans but also by Africans, Arabs, Greeks, and Illyrians. But these political elites were by-and-large either immensely wealthy landowners or military men who ruled with the threat of violence.
The Mediterranean under the Romans certainly facilitated impressive cultural exchanges and changes. This is true whether through the spread of Christianity from the Middle East to Europe, the diffusion of Arab gods and cults from Syria to Italy, the construction of Roman arenas and temples in Africa, and the domination in early Christianity by churches in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. But the ancient majesty of Rome, showcased by the ruins seen today in Italy, was not ultimately the product of “trade” so much as it was the result of pillage on a breathtakingly vast, almost unimaginable scale. The Romans built enormous mines manned by slaves and prisoners, worked to death in Spain and the Balkans. They forced the heightened production of grain by Egyptian peasants to feed the masses of Italy. They razed defiant cities to the ground, including Carthage, Corinth, and Jerusalem. The villas of the Italian countryside profited from the mass enslavement of people in conquered lands. Roman armies ruthlessly looted the wealth of numerous cities in Judea, Syria, Turkey, and Greece. Once the Roman Empire stabilized after these brutal conquests, new opportunities emerged for elites from the subdued peoples, who eventually came to dominate the State for themselves. Nevertheless, this brutality was the fundamental foundation that created the great monuments we see in Rome today, and the same types of patterns would be repeated later by Genoa, though with less ensuing diversity.
Inside the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, nearly destroyed by an Italian-made British bomb
Why, then, should it come as any surprise that a city facing the sea would have the insular tendencies of an isolated town in the deepest depths of the mountains? Why should we wonder that the people there might show skepticism rather than hospitality to outsiders? Like the Romans before them and the British after them, the Genoese used the sea to reach foreigners not simply for trade and exchange, but for pillaged goods which they could “reinvest,” no matter how often some historians or idealists might call this “commerce.” It seems fitting that the English flag itself was first, and remains, the flag of Genoa, whose mighty navy hoisted it above their ships during their own period of military supremacy long before England had much any real navy at all. The English ultimately paid the Genoese for rights to use their flag.
In the age of Genoa’s industrialization, when the area became one of Italy’s most important centers for arms manufactures, Genoa’s passion for commerce would yield punishing effects. Genoa’s crucial industrial role in the Italian war effort made it a prime target for the Allies. According to our guide, many of the bombs the British dropped onto Genoa in World War II were actually manufactured by Genoese arms dealers themselves and sold to the British long before the outbreak of conflict. One explosive, built according to our guide by the Italians but ultimately fired at Genoa by a British ship, landed inside the Cathedral of San Lorenzo. Although it broke through the roof, it did not explode, and it is displayed in that church today, seemingly as a symbol of God’s grace toward his people, though ostensibly as a reminder of the horrors of the war. Certainly, it comes across as chilling proof that international trade connections are no guarantee of peace and understanding between nations.
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