Alberto Morosini

Alberto Morosini was a Venetian nobleman hired to command the Pisan fleet, and he was captured with it at Meloria in 1284, the defeat that ended Pisa as a naval power. Italian maritime cities routinely hired outsiders as podesta and as admirals, on the theory that a foreigner had no faction in the city and could therefore be obeyed by all of them, and Morosini came from one of the great Venetian houses. The war was the long Genoese-Pisan struggle for Corsica, Sardinia and the western Tyrrhenian trade. In August 1284 he took a Pisan fleet of about seventy-two galleys out to face a Genoese fleet under Oberto Doria off the islet of Meloria, near Livorno. Doria kept a reserve squadron under Benedetto Zaccaria out of sight and brought it in on the Pisan flank once the lines were locked; the Pisan formation folded. Something like a third of the fleet was sunk or taken and perhaps nine thousand Pisans were made prisoner - so many that the saying that whoever wants to see Pisa should go to Genoa came out of it, and many of them died in captivity over the following decade. Morosini went to Genoa with them and was released after some years, Venice having no interest in a war with Genoa on his account. Pisa never rebuilt a fleet on that scale, and its access to the sea silted up over the following century. Dante, writing a generation later, put the Pisan commander Ugolino della Gherardesca in the ninth circle gnawing the skull of the archbishop who starved him, a quarrel that came directly out of the recriminations over this defeat. Morosini himself returned to Venice and to public office.

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