The
Author Records This With A Smile, And Then, By A Leap Over Some Forty
Centuries, He Finds Firm Footing In The Fact That The Great Countess
Matilde, Then Much Bothering About In The Affairs Of Her Tuscan
Neighbors Everywhere, Gave The Livornese Coasts To Pisa In 1103.
This
seems to have been the signal for the Genoese, eleven years later, to
ravage and destroy the Pisan settlements; but later the Pisans,
confirmed in their possession by the Emperor of Germany, rebuilt and
embellished the port.
A century after, Charles of Anjou demolished it,
and then the Pisans fortified it some more. Then, in the last years of
the thirteenth century, the Florentines, Lucchese, and Genoese
devastated the whole territory of Pisa, and left Leghorn only one poor
little church. Well throughout the fourteenth century there were wars
between these republics, and Leghorn suffered the consequences, being,
as our author says, "according to custom, assailed, taken, wasted, and
destroyed." But before that century was out she seems to have flourished
up again, and to have received with all honor Gregory XL, returning from
Avignon to Rome and bringing the papacy back from its long exile to the
Eternal City.
The Genoese now sold Leghorn to Milan, and in 1407 she was sold to
France for twenty-six thousand florins, which seems low for a whole
city. But in less than ten years we find the Genoese back again, and
strengthening and adorning her at the greatest rate. It was quite time
now that she should be visited by a virulent pestilence, and that,
having passed to Florence in the meanwhile, she should have been ceded
without a blow to Charles VIII.
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