Battle of Meloria: Genoa Breaks Pisan Sea Power
Genoa destroyed the Pisan fleet off Meloria in August 1284 and ended Pisa as a naval power. The two republics had been fighting for two centuries over the western Mediterranean — Corsica, Sardinia, the Tyrrhenian trade, and the trading quarters in the Levant that the crusades had opened to Italian shipping. Both were maritime states of a distinctive kind: no hinterland worth the name, a fleet that was the state's main asset, and a merchant class that manned it. The battle was fought near a rocky islet off Livorno, with about seventy-two Genoese galleys against seventy-two Pisan. Genoa held some thirty ships out of the first line and brought them in on the flank when both fleets were engaged, which decided it. Pisa lost perhaps 5,000 dead and around 9,000 prisoners, in a city whose population was somewhere near 50,000. The prisoners are the point. Genoa held most of them for years and would not ransom them cheaply, and the loss of that many men of fighting age from a city of that size was not recoverable; a proverb ran that anyone wishing to see Pisa should go to Genoa. Pisa never rebuilt a serious fleet, lost Corsica and then Sardinia, and its harbour silted up as the Arno shifted. Florence bought and then conquered it in 1406. Genoa went on to fight Venice for another century, losing decisively at Chioggia in 1380 and remaining a financial power long after ceasing to be a naval one. Dante put the disaster into the Inferno by way of Count Ugolino, who had commanded a Pisan squadron at Meloria, was blamed for it and for ceding castles afterwards, and was starved to death in a tower with his sons and grandsons in 1289.
- Year: 1284 CE
- Category: Military
