The tenth century was not far advanced when Pisa possessed an immense fleet and was already governing herself as a republic. A proof of her importance lies in the fact that when Otho the Second was at war with the South and meditated annexing to his Empire what remained of the old Greek colonies, he applied to Pisa to lend him ships wherewith to transport his troops to Calabria. His sudden death, however, put an end to the negotiations, and the seven nobles whom he had
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sent to Pisa to represent him were so much delighted with all they saw, as well as with their reception, that they asked to be made citizens themselves, were granted the privilege, and became the founders of that great Ghibelline party by which the destinies of the Pisan Republic were guided so long as she maintained her independence.
Amalfi sent out traders to the East and knights to fight for the holy sepulchre; but her knights did not fight to win land for her, nor did her traders ever become colonists. Pisa, like Venice, sought to extend her territory. At that time the daring Saracen chief named Mousa—Moses—settled himself on the eastern and southern coast of Sardinia, and carried his depredations far and wide on the Italian shore and through the Tuscan archipelago. Seizing his opportunity when the Pisan fleet had sailed southwards to help the Calabrian Greeks against the Saracens of Sicily, Mousa and his pirates entered the mouth of the Arno by night and landed in the suburbs of Pisa. The terrified citizens were waked by the yells of their assailants amidst the flames of their own dwellings, and if the corsairs had possessed any local knowledge of the city its history might have gone no further than that night. But in their ignorance they had landed on the wrong bank of the river, and had fired the suburb instead of the city itself; a woman, and some say that she was a noble lady, made her way through the confusion across the bridge to the Consul’s dwelling, the church bells were rung backwards and roused the sleeping garrison to arms, and the Saracens, surprised by the prospect of energetic resistance, withdrew hastily to their ships and dropped down the river. The peril was past.
But when the fleet came back from the South vengeance was sworn upon Mousa and his pirates, and the conquest of Sardinia was a foregone conclusion. So Pisa rose to power, and Genoa envied her and Florence too, and those long wars began which ended in her destruction and her absorption. While Venice had been distracted by internal factions, by the feuds of Candiano and Orseolo, Morosini and Caloprini, the ‘Dupes and the Flatterers,’ Pisa had at least enjoyed the honour of fighting and vanquishing a horde of unbelievers. And meanwhile Genoa had risen also to much the same degree of prosperity and strength, so that when Peter the Hermit’s cry rang through the Christian world, rousing the faithful to win back the Holy Land, the four great Italian maritime republics were almost equals in wealth and influence, and in the fleets of which they could dispose.
In what is by no means to be considered a complete history of Venice, my readers will be grateful if I spare them the too untrustworthy details with which the chroniclers fill up their accounts of the eleventh century. In addition to what I have said about the growth of the rival republics, however, it may be mentioned that before the great movement of the first crusade, the Venetians had more than once measured themselves with the Normans in the Levant, and perfectly well understood the position of affairs in the south of Italy and Sicily, where the sons of Tancred of Hauteville had carried everything before them.
Venice, Genoa, and Pisa played almost equal parts in the general European movement that followed, and the Venetians need not be greatly blamed if they derived profit from a source that should have yielded only honour to those who sought it. The Venetians
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