With A Hazy General Consciousness Of Her Modernity In
Mind, I Had Imagined Her Yet More Modern, And I Was
Somewhat surprised
to read, in a rather airy and ironical but very capable local guidebook
called _Su e Giu per
Livorno_ (or _Up and Down Leghorn),_ that the place
was settled twenty-six hundred and fifty-six years before Christ. 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. of France. But in a year she was once
more in the hold of Florence and helping that republic fight her enemies
the Pisans, and her other enemies under the Emperor Maximilian of
Germany.
More fortifying, embellishing, and pestilence followed, and in 1429
Michelangelo came to inspect the new fortifications which the Florentine
republic had built at Leghorn to repair the damages she had suffered.
The next year the republic fell, and Alessandro de' Medici, who came in
master at Florence, took Leghorn into the favor which his family
continued to show her to the end. The first Cosimo greatly improved her
harbor, dug canals, and built forts, but he let the Spaniards, for a
pleasure to Charles V., place garrisons in Florence, Pisa, and Leghorn,
and the Spaniards remained six years at Leghorn. In the last year of the
sixteenth century Ferdinand erected to himself the superb monument with
the four captive corsairs at the corners, whose noses I had failed to
get in range, and in the meanwhile many great public works had been
constructed and the city desolated by another plague.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 153 of 186
Words from 79934 to 80458
of 97259
