Oberto Doria

Oberto Doria commanded the Genoese fleet that destroyed Pisa at Meloria in 1284 and was for fifteen years one of the two men who governed Genoa. The Doria were among the four families that dominated the city, and in 1270 he and Oberto Spinola seized power together and ruled as joint Captains of the People, a partnership that held for an unusually long time by Genoese standards. He is remembered for one afternoon. The war with Pisa over Corsica, Sardinia and the western sea trade had run for decades when he took a fleet of some eighty-eight galleys out in August 1284. He divided it, keeping about twenty under Benedetto Zaccaria at a distance and out of the Pisan reckoning, engaged with the rest, and brought the reserve in against the Pisan flank when both lines were fully committed. The Pisan fleet under Alberto Morosini was broken; thousands were taken prisoner and held for years. Genoa did not merely win a battle. It removed its nearest rival permanently, and the western Mediterranean was left as a contest between Genoa and Venice that ran for another century. His family produced admirals for three hundred years afterwards, the most famous of them Andrea Doria in the sixteenth century, which is worth saying because the two are often conflated. He resigned the captaincy in 1291 and died about fifteen years later. The joint rule he and Spinola built collapsed within a generation into the factional violence that made Genoa a byword for ungovernability, and the city ended up hiring foreign podesta for the same reason Pisa had hired him a Venetian.

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