Maritime Pisa and Its Colonial Empire

Rudolf Borchardt’s Pisa was written in 1932, first published in 1938, and trans­lated into Italian only in 1965. Borchardt (1877-1945) is a most enigmatic figure: archconservative and elitist, somewhat eccentric German poet, erudite, and translator.

Borchardt also resented the pre-eminence of the positivist school and went his own, anti-modernist way. He translated Dante into a medieval German language he partially had to invent, and believed himself to be salvaging a German tradition threatened by modernity. Like Volpe, he had frequented re­actionary milieus, eloquently advocated their politics, and contributed to what became known as the �conservative revolution', which he preferred to call �crea­tive restoration'.^{[741] [742]}

Borchardt had also become a supporter German imperialism, especially ul­tramarine colonialism.

Like Volpe's Studi sulle Istituzioni comunali a Pisa, Pisa is one of its author's least known texts. Like Volpe's book, it is an important appraisal of the origins of sovereignty that focuses on Pisa. It was written by an ardent advocate of em­pire precisely when â€?empire' itself was being in his interpretation perverted and â€?nationalised'. The Nazis never embraced a Wilhelmine type of colonialism; they advocated a model of their own and focused on the eastern European ex­panse, rather than the sea. In this context, Borchardt's Pisa upholds a universal imperial vision and tradition, a tradition that constitutes, he believes, the origi­nal template of Europe's colonial expansion. Like Volpe had seen territorial sov­ereignty being repatriated, Borchardt believed that Germany's imperial tradi­tion had originated elsewhere. Pisa was a causa victa, a vanquished cause - and he was most fond of them. It certainly had been vanquished, eventually, but there was a time when its enemies were unable to compete. As the Nazis took flight to their third â€?Reich', Borchardt was withdrawing to what he believed were the roots of the first: Pisa's sustained ability to shape the German emper­ors' Italian policy at the beginning of the millennium. 3^β It was Borchardt's personal response to a political catastrophe he had seen coming and feared. He offered in many ways a fictional reconstruction, but it was based on an un­deniable historical fact: Pisa had once an empire of its own.

For Borchardt as for Volpe, this was not an analogy. Pisa had a colonial party (which ruled the �city-empire’, not the city-state, as Borchardt points out, until the end of the thirteenth century), a colonial policy, a colonial bureaucracy, a colonial office, colonial governors, a split jurisdictional system identifying col­ony and metropole, several colonial trading houses, it governed colonial pos­sessions outside of Europe and received immigrants from the colonies (it was a veritable crucible between northern Europe and southern Italy and beyond). Through these institutions, Pisa expressed a fully-fledged colonial ideology, and early. These were twelfth-century developments, well before the �west­ward shift’ of Mediterranean traffics identified by Charles Verlinden as the pre­cursor of modern European colonialism, and before Venice and Genoa insti­tuted colonial regimes in Crete and Chios similar to the one instituted in Sardinia by Pisa.^[743] Facing diminishing returns and increasing competition in the Levant, Pisa had undertaken the westward shift by the late thirtheenth century. Catalonia was securely in its trading orbit and it is from there that the further westward shift and the colonial enterprises of the fifteenth century to­wards the Atlantic Islands, as Verlinden outlined, were eventually launched. Borchardt sees Pisa’s imperial imprint shaping both medieval German impe­rial traditions and, later, the European colonial empires. He sees a veritable laboratory of empire. He sees a westward empire.

Borchardt embraced this ideology and its propaganda. For him, Pisa’s impe­rial �solitude’ is pregnant with history, generative, ancient, and noble. Succes­sive degenerations had perverted this ancient imperial and universal matrix, a matrix that directly linked in his reconstruction medieval Germany and classi­cal antiquity through Pisa’s patient diplomacy and its advisory-educational role is shaping the German emperor’s Italian design (which in turn substanti­ated their claim to universal monarchy).

He called Pisa �Europe’s most ancient mother-city’ (i.e., a metropole - the reference is obviously to Ancient Greek empire-building)^[745] He cleaves it deci­sively from its surrounds, like Volpe had, and asserted: �Pisa turns her back to Italy with a Sidonian and Carthaginian spirit and seeks an empire on the sea’.^[746] Left alone in a high medieval world that �ignores the sea’, Pisa �remains un­changed’. It �works its marbles, and builds ships’^[747] When the rest of Italy united against the German emperor, Pisa �takes refuge under the imperial flag, under a universal vision that dissolves national ideas’^{[748] [749] Pisa established a �special relation’ with the German empire and it is through the independence and stra­tegic depth that arose from this special relation that Pisa single-handedly launched �the West’s first crusade’:}

But here is suddenly the new perturbation: the flags of what was the first crusade of the West rise on the Pisan vessels; the fleet of that unique city pounces on the school of Tyrrhenian islands, first on Saracen Sardinia, then, between Barcelona and Marseille, swoops on the Balearic kingdom.

For Borchardt, Pisa is an island; it is isolated in geographical and political terms, even its mountain was once an island. He saw Pisa expressing its �con­tempt for the Italian chaotic microcosm of the age', and emphasised its �refusal to have an origin and a destiny exclusively Italian’.^[750] And it always had made such a refusal: that it was once officially designated �ColoniaJulia Pisana Obse­quens’ likely owed to the fact that it was not all that �obedient’ to Rome in the first place, as Borchardt observes?^[751] Borchardt saw Pisa consistently expressing an antinationalist and therefore genuinely imperial drive.

Borchardt saw a recognisably colonial tradition and genealogy, even though he did not use the terms: this �heroic conception of the state’, he remarked, shall �one day exceed the enclosed circle of Mediterranean peoples and shall become European’, in order to �conclude on American soil a now global circle’^[752] It was a heliotropic vision of empire; empire was constantly moving west. There had been discontinuity, but Pisa had begun anew from where Rome had �interrupted’. From

Asia Minor in the second millennium BC to Vasco da Gama and Magel­lan, a single uninterrupted chain of peoples and dynasties develops. Rome at Zama, even though it may not seem so, had interrupted that chain, which lied for twelve hundred years submerged under the sea from where it was recovered, for half a millennium more, by the anchors of the Pisan ships heading towards the Balearic islands^[753]

Paradoxically, Rome did not belong in this history with its �rural and not mari­time’ peoples. Pisa’s world was �an arc’ that includes a small headland, the Tyr­rhenian sea, southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic islands, Provence and then, northwards, Germany (which Borchardt had to salvage from the base imperialism of the day)^[754]

His geopolitical vision and its genealogy are a flight of fancy, of course. But Pisa’s geopolitical vision was colonial: this Antirome' systematically refrained from extending its mainland dominions and pursued a �prudent’ Italian poli­cy to preserve a strategic balance in Italian matters in order to have �free rein in the world’^[755] Pisa pursued a peripheral strategy against possible continen­tal �blocs’ long before Britain faced Napoleon. To do so, it relied on colonial networks of support and dominion also before Britain did. Pisa established dependent colonies in the territories it conquered. Sometime it was formal colonies run by its magistrates, sometime informal colonies run by its mer­chants. Colonies nonetheless.

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