 My brief paper will not give a complete account of the history of Genoa in fact I will not even attempt to sketch the rise of this medieval maritime community or its countless commercial colonies and business networks scattered across the Mediterranean world and beyond. I will not have the time to accomplish this. Neither will I propose a systematic theory of private defense, its practical feasibility and its moral superiority to various forms of warfare state and to the state monopoly of violence. I will not be qualified to attempt such endeavor and anyway Professor Hoppe, Bob Murphy and Walter Block and others have already articulated such theory. Rather, my aim today is simply to offer some examples of historical episodes surrounding private wealth and private arms in Genoa which simply do not fit current historical narratives about the rise of the modern state. Here, I do not have in mind any specific historiographical school that I wish to target simply because what I have in mind is pretty much all of them. So please do not read into these an assault against the Marxists or the postmodernists because the liberals and even the monarchists are not that different. All share the broad outline of that statist teleology that has picked the renaissance, the liberal revolutions and democratization as three phases of an enlightened process that led to modern states which are supposedly rational and fair or so we are told relatively less arbitrary, more efficient and fairer than pre-modern political orders. So what I'm about to do today is simply wondering, questioning, does Genoa fit into these narratives and this teleology of the state that we are usually fed? So let us start with the first interesting episode. The Italian wars were a long and tragic series of conflicts starting in 1494, fought mainly across the Italian peninsula and having a multiplicity of objectives among which the control of cities such as Nepal, San Milan, but also the leadership of Christendom in the difficult fight against Ottoman Islam. To make a long story short, the main contestants were friends, a kingdom that since the end of the Hundred Years War had become one of the most centralized militarized of the entire continent and Spain, whose Habsburg rulers held a collection of crowns and titles including starting with just the fifth, the Holy Roman Empire. This conflict between regional powers kickstarted or hastened the demise of medieval communes and local self-government in Italy, in particular, because small states could not survive in the brave new world of large standing armies and mercenary armies raised by foreign princes. If independent Italian states survived, they had to come to their senses and modernize, tax away and build efficient bureaucracies. This in a nutshell is the story we are told. This is the triumph of Machiavellian determinism. And yet, in the late 1530s, the French king sent a request to the Genoese Doge. The Doge is the traditional title for the head of government in Genoa. The request was very straightforward. The king knew that Genoese funds were being used by his Spanish rival to finance military campaigns. Now, because Genoese merchants were trying to mend relations between their city and France in order to continue to access French markets, the king demanded as a sign of good will that the Doge order some public funds to be lent also to his court and not just to the Spanish one. The reply that the French king received from Genoa shows all the intellectual and ideological gap separating this Italian republic from its increasingly modern neighbors. The Doge and the Genoese government, baffled by the French request, explained how in Genoa, the state owned almost nothing. And its funds were very limited. The Doge went on to explain to the French court that, yes, it was true, that the Spanish monarch had received money from Genoa, but he had done so by dealing on the capital market and borrowing money from private Genoese citizens, aristocratic families and professional Monet lenders. If the French king needed funds, he was very welcome to do the same. Now, was the Doge bluffing? No, he was not. Since the 14th century, Genoa's constitutional order was embodying a medieval conception of freedom that favored the dispersion of power and limited private expenditures. And from the 15th century, the creation of the Bank of St. George had represented yet another obstacle to the centralization of power and state formation. St. George was not merely a bank, but rather a spontaneous, cross-class organization of creditors who effectively privatized tax farming and took over the administration of the colonies in the Levant. Very often, the members of the Assembly of St. George were the same businessmen who had invested in trade across the Mediterranean. They were skeptical towards the idea of empowering a specific doge or the communal government in general with a standing army or a navy. Yet they were ready to put together funds that were necessary to ensure the survival of their colonies and the rule of law. As a result of these institutional changes that I can hear only quickly mention, 16th century Genoa was still a medieval polity with a series of overlapping jurisdictions and a city of private family wealth and power, what George Gors has aptly described as the antithesis of Venice. The exchange of missives about a loan to the French court had not been the first misunderstanding to use an euphemism between the French and the Genoese. Genoa had started the Italian wars on the French side and it had even been sucked by Spanish troops in 1522. Coups and counter-coups are too many to list and will be boring and pointless, however what is significant is that during the 1520s, as Genoese-French relations deteriorated, the Genoese and the Spanish Habsburg monarchy slowly, at times painfully, but progressively understood each other, the Habsburgs had crushed the last ambitions of medieval liberties in Castile, but the rest of their empire, including parts of Spain like Aragon, was a loose patchwork of different political and institutional traditions, a composite monarchy that had to be mindful of local autonomies and tactful in dealing with issues concerning military support and financial contributions. The Habsburgs had to wave a network of different local elites, an international pool of families ready and willing to contribute funds and troops and warships for reasons as varied as prestige in their own communities, a shared religious faith and personal friendship with the emperor. This Habsburg system was comparatively flexible and, for the Genoese people, much more palatable than the French arrogant demands for military contributions, that is for extraordinary taxation. The progressive mutual understanding between Genoa and Habsburg Spain created the conditions for a change in alliances. First as a consequence of the 1522 sack of the city and then in the aftermath of an anti-French aristocratic coup, Genoa switched sides. And by 1528 the Spanish-Genoese alliance, which we lost for more than a century, was born. This alliance was based on mutual interests and on the respect shown by the Spanish emperor towards Genoa's independence and constitutional organization. I want to stress once again that it was through a process of diplomatic trial and error that the Spaniards realized just how irascible the Genoese could be when a friend overstepped and attempted to treat them like a dependency or worse, like a modern polity with public funds and public assets. In 1524, in the aftermath of the Spanish sack of Genoa and in a phase during which a forced attempt to coordinate Spanish and Genoese interests was underway, the Emperor Charles V ordered his ambassador in Genoa to demand that the Genoese contribute to the impending imperial campaign, imperial assault against the cost of southern France. The result of such a demand. I will let you be the judges. Here is the original from the reply written by the Spanish ambassador in Genoa to the Emperor. I'll give you my translation. Quote, I have put pressure on the dodgy of Genoa to get him and the people of this republic to arm as many ships as possible. However, he says that in the case it will be necessary for the expedition to Provence, he will arm as many ships as possible. But the Genoese will not do it simply to accompany the galleys of your Majesty to assault the cost of Provence because this will have damaging consequences for this community, end of quote. In other words, virtually all of the Genoese galleys warships were privately owned and the few galleys that were eventually put to sea by the dodgy did not fight for the Spanish in Provence but remained near the Italian cost to patrol the Ligurian Sea. Some Genoese galleys did take part in the naval confrontation in Provence but they were the galleys of the Doria family which at that time had been hired by the French. Just like the episode concerning loans suggests that Genoa remained the city of private wealth so the episode that I just described confirms that Genoa was laid in the so-called development of a monopoly of violence. Most arms remained in private hands. This anomaly has been occasionally noted by historians. Rodolfo Savelli has discussed the idea of late medieval and early modern Genoa as a republica disarmata, an unarmed republic. And Thomas Corkin has dedicated part of his fine book on Genoa and the Sea to the 16th and 17th century debates on the creation of a public fleet. An interesting fact is that while historians usually assume that from the early modern period every polity that wishes to survive must have a centralized and militarized state. The unarmed Genoa survived the storm of the Italian wars and represented with its private arms a pivotal piece in the military coalition that defended Christendom from the Ottoman threat in the Mediterranean. To be sure private families owning military assets that are simultaneously economic assets for commerce and as a form of capital good will not wish to risk such assets in senseless military adventures or rather will be relatively less inclined to do so than state bureaucrats and hence of state who have confiscated or built such assets using other people's money and who can externalize the cost of aggressive behavior onto others. Indeed, it is amusing to see that within Genoa the modernist, statist, Machiavellian Party was annoyed precisely by the resilience of a model of private defense that to them constricted Genoa's imperialistic potential. One of these Genoese dissidents was Huberto Foyeta who in a 1559 book on the political situation in Genoa accused the Doria family of keeping its galleys instead of giving them as a gift to the republican government. Foyeta's warmongering attitude descended into utter absurdity when in the book he claimed that the Genoese could have conquered Lombardy, Pisa and the rest of Tuscany if they had had a unified government and the will to wage war. In the writings of Foyeta and other members of this party, often called the new nobility, we read of a contraposition between private interests and public good. In writers like Giovanni Recco this contraposition is used to call for both the armament of a public fleet and higher taxes on private wealth. Again these were mostly the frustrated voices of the losers of the long debate on a state fleet. A large fleet of galleys was never financed and never built by the republic. And between the 16th and the 17th century the number of public galleys at the disposal of the dodger remained very low. Usually no more than four. In the meantime a much larger amount of galleys privately owned by the Doria, but also by the Lomellini, the Centurione and other Genoese families were hired out to Spain. What I have suggested thus far with a few examples and obviously given the short time available, scheming through a lot of complex issues is that medieval Genoa was characterized by private wealth and private self-defense. This is not to say that there were no taxes at all in Genoa nor to deny that at times the communal government had armed public fleets for a limited amount of time. But what matters is the trend, the institutional tradition and the value system emerging from a study of Genoa. This pattern continued even after the earthquake of the French invasion of Italy after the Machiavellian Revolution in political theory and after most of Genoa's neighbors embarked on what most historians see as the inevitable voyage towards progress and the modern state. Even after fiscal pressure was slightly increased in the 1560s, Genoa remained a remnant of medieval genius, private wealth and arms and limited government. With not only the local church but also the Bank of St. George guaranteeing a plurality of jurisdictions. There is one more thing to say or one more aspect that should make us wonder. The consensus among historians of Renaissance republicanism is that between the 14th and the 15th century Italian policies could survive only by taking one of two available paths. Either they became Signoriae that is the form of government linked to a dynasty or they turned into imperialistic republics that increased their territory at the expense of neighboring cities. This is a change seen as rational and teleologically oriented towards the modern state. For example, according to Fabrizio Ricciardelli, contrary to what happened in Spain, France and England where the territorial unification was achieved on a national scale, both the Signoriae that asserted themselves, thereby squashing every form of republicanism and the Italian communes that did not give in to the will of authoritative Signoriae gave life to regional states, each of which sought to expand itself. End of quote. I shall here simply point out that Genoa does not fit into this account. To make a long story short, Genoa remained both anti-Signoral and territorially small. No noble family was ever able to transform the republic into a Signoriae, not even the Doria family led by the great Enlungebus admiral Andrea. You see portrayed there. The one down here is his cousin Antonio at the Battle of Tunis. So not even Andrea who transformed the republic or wished to transform the republic into a Signoriae, even though he effectively held the destiny of the city in his hands once he ousted the French in 1528. Similarly, no military campaign was launched by Genoa to enlarge its territorial possessions, which were the narrow strip of land east and west of the city. The fortresses guarding strategic passes through the mountains and the island of Corsica. A large scale military expansion was impossible because as we have seen the Genoese state lacked both a standing army and a large public fleet. As late as 1625, the Genoese government had at its disposal a very limited number of soldiers. In that year when the Duchy of Savoy invaded the Genoese territory, Genoa defended itself by having recourse to a mix of strategies. To be sure, extraordinary funds for the payment of some mercenary troops were approved, but more interestingly in 1625 the defense of Genoa was effective also thanks to non-state means. First, diplomatic pressure on its traditional ally, Spain, whose reputation was on the line and whose finances partly depended on the private loans coming from Genoese money lenders. Secondly, the troops privately organized and paid by wealthy families, for instance by the Genoese aristocrat Francesco Serra. Finally, the militia, which were groups of able-bodied males in each town and village of the Genoese territory, with a duty to arm themselves and rally to the defense of their territory in case of invasion. These militia were neither paid nor armed by the government, but represented a sort of traditional form of self-defense. And therefore they could not be employed for political aims in times of peace nor for military adventures beyond the borders of the Republic. It is only after the War of 1625 that the medieval conception of private defense in Genoa starts to give way to what resembles state formation. Forced in 1626 when a new alliance with Spain laid out Genoa's duty to pay for an army of more than 15,000 men and then in the following years with the introduction of new or higher taxes to cover military expenditures. In conclusion, I hope that with these brief remarks and examples I have illustrated the peculiar resilience of a Republic with a weak pre-modern state and the fascinating fact that the availability of private arms rendered a conquest of the Republic by a foreign power always difficult. Its pacification and unexcession almost a mirage. This remained true even after a sack, even after putting in charge of the government a new friendly doge, because after all what could a doge in Genoa really do? Thank you.