Meanwhile, Prince Doria seeing that Gianettino did not return and hearing the cries and tumult among the galleys, despatched messenger after messenger to learn the occasion of the unwonted uproar. Captain Luigi Giulia at length brought him word that the Fieschi were in arms and the city ringing with their name. The old admiral fumed with vexation that his decrepitude forbade him to mingle in the fray. He was induced by the tears of Princess Peretta and the entreaties of his servants to send his wife into the adjacent convent of the Canonici Regolari di San Teodoro and the widow of Gianettino with her children into the monastery of Gesu and Maria. Then mounting on horseback, escorted by Giulia, Count Filippino and four servants, he rode to Sestri whence he went upon a small oared bark to Voltri, and thence sent information of the revolution to the duke of Florence and Gonzaga in Milan, who were the only zealous partisans of the imperial cause in Italy. He was then placed in a palanquin and carried to the castle of Masone, a feud of Adamo Centurione, fifteen miles distant from Genoa in the heights of the mountains. In this painful journey, he read upon the faces of his attendants the fate of Gianettino and wept bitter tears, over it, but his grief was partly soothed by the hope of immolating the whole Fieschi family to his terrible vengeance.
The first part of this conspiracy thus ended in a great misfortune; but it saved the Republic by Gianettino’s death. There can be no doubt that, had he survived he would have gratified his own lust of dominion and fulfilled the wishes of Cæsar, who desired to divide Italy into principalities subject to himself and founded on the ruins of the republics averse to his empire.
The body of Gianettino was buried in the subterranean chapel of San Matteo which is now adorned with the monument of Andrea, a beautiful work of Montorsoli.
A brief episode will be permitted us here on the place in the harbour where Gianluigi was drowned. It is necessary to confute the error of those who tell us it occurred in the station of Mandraccio. The mistake arose from the confusion of various arsenals whose true position has been lost in the great changes wrought by time. The first arsenal of which we shall speak was nothing more than a small basin near the piazza Molo, protected in 1276 by a strip of land covered with heavy stones and palissades. Then galleys were built there. At an earlier period ships were constructed along the Borgo di Pre, then outside the walls, particularly in front of the commandery of St. John and near the basin of St. Limbania.
It is difficult to comprehend how the Genoese, without any tolerable dockyards, were able in so short a time to put to sea the memorable fleets which sailed for Palestine, and the two sent against Pisa in 1120 and 1126. The first Pisan expedition numbered eighty galleys, four large ships, thirty-five gatti, twenty-eight calabi and other small craft manned by twenty-two thousand combatants; and the second counted eighty triremes and forty-three boats. We have credible testimony that the Genoese equipped, in seven years, six hundred and twenty-seven triremes; and in 1295, in less than a month, they put to sea two hundred galleys and other ships of which one hundred and five were entirely new, and embarked on them thirty-five thousand warriors, eight thousand of whom were dressed in silk and purple. The founder of the arsenal of which we speak was a certain Oliverio a cistercense monk of the Badia of St. Andrea in Sestri. He constructed two roads on that strip of land, of which we have made mention, leading down to the gate of the Molo, where there was already a bridge of large stones on which rose a light-house for the convenience of mariners. In the same year, Marin Boccanegra raised a high wall around the Borgo di Molo which was then outside of the piazza of that name. This wall ran from the church of Our Lady of Grace along the shore to the tower of the light-house, then, turning, it passed behind San Marco and in front of Bordigotto famous in popular legends for its fountain of blood and here Boccanegra excavated the little port which was called Mandraccio. Here was moored the galley of Fieschi, and the shallowness of the water rendered it difficult to work her out into the harbour. We find in fact that though the excavations of Boccanegra are described as very deep, yet that there was not sufficient water in any part of the Mandraccio to float heavy galleys. Some years after the attempt of Fieschi, that is in 1575, that part of the port which lies between the Ponte Cattanei and the little mole of Mandraccio then called the Goletta was dried under the direction of the Sicilian engineer Anastasio, and the rocks lying at the bottom of it were broken up and excavated for the distance of twenty palms.
To enlarge this arsenal and protect it from the fury of the waves, Boccanegra commanded, in 1283 the colossal structure of the Molo extending it one hundred and fifteen cubits into the sea. On the opposite side of the arsenal, rose the Ponte Cattanei, called by the name of the family who built it, and there was a passage by an easy stair to the Ponte di Mercanzia which led to the Portofranco and the Custom House. The latter occupied the ground floor of the bank of St. George, a palace which was adorned in 1262 with some marbles taken from the palace of the Venitians in Constantinople. To the right of the bank stood, and still stands, the Ponte Reale and next it those of Spinola, Legna and Calvi. In the vicinity of this last, the third arsenal was begun in the period of which we write, and behind it a fourth was afterwards constructed.
The third arsenal, situated between the church of S. Fede and S. Antonio, was built in 1282 and ten thousand marks of the booty taken in Pisa in 1215 were appropriated for its construction. It was afterwards doubled in size and half of it was appropriated to the wine trade and the collection of duties on the same. The other part was used as a station for galleys.
Gianluigi on the night of the 2nd of January, passed from the street of Maruffi by way of Sottoripa to that part of the arsenal which was used for the trade in wine, and the gate of that part was opened by his men. From this gate he passed into the back part of the arsenal, where the Doria galleys lay, and there he was drowned and buried in the muddy bottom of the dock. He could not have met his fate in the fourth arsenal, which is the one existing in our day, because it was then unoccupied. Though begun in 1457 the works had fallen into ruin from the want of skill in the builders, and, they were not reconstructed until 1596.
The news of Fieschi’s death was received by the liberal spirits of Italy as a national misfortune. Matteo Bandello a month after the event wrote:—“He was a young man of great heart and excellent speech; his literary studies and the instructions of the learned and virtuous Paolo Panza had given him a maturity of judgment wonderful for his years. There is no learned man of Italy or France who had not commended him for his rare virtues, his intellectual gifts and the greatness of soul which led him though so young to combine everything with admirable prudence for freeing his country from the Spanish yoke.”[46]
Nor ought we to omit that opinion which, according to the same author, was expressed by Catando d’Arimini who lived on intimate terms with the count. Catando said:—“In a conference held at Montebrano by the Fregosi, you, my masters, justly commended Gian Aloise Fieschi, for he truly deserved your praise. But I think that the most of you honoured his memory with your good opinion on the basis of the current estimate of his great virtues and singular mental accomplishments. But if you had known him as familiarly as I, the day would be too short to express your admiration. If I wished to recount to you all his merits, it would be easy to begin but impossible to finish my discourse. I shall omit then his birth which opened for him the paths to honour, his boyhood which impressed all the Genoese with boundless expectation of his future, the prematurely ripened intelligence which he used in winning the love of the people and the good will of the nobility, so that the people adored him and the nobles admired and esteemed him. I forbear to enlarge on the repute which he had among the peasants of the Eastern Riviera and in the mountains towards Parma and Piacenza; on the fact that his vassals never complained of the slightest injustice, and that he was so liberal when they were in want that they adored him as a Providence, and that his neighbours had the highest respect for his wisdom. I pass by his affection for his brothers whom he wished to be honoured as himself, that he loved and aided his friends with fraternal warmth and avenged injuries with a prompt hand.” The orator concluded by saying that the most distinguished proof of Fieschi’s greatness was that he attempted great enterprises. We shall not dwell on the people’s grief over the death of Gianluigi. It kept alive his memory in national songs and mariner’s hymns, which are so full of patriotic fervour that they deserve to be collected and preserved. To justify this opinion, we give two stanzas of a popular song preserved in a codex of Beriana the subject of which is the death of the count, the sorrow felt by the Genoese at his loss and their high estimate of his merits.