This chapter argues that Pisa was an early laboratory of colonial imagination and practice.
The incursions against Reggio di Calabria and Messina in 1005, and Palermo in 1064, had sanctioned Pisa's hegemony over the Tyrrhenian Sea, while in 1114-1115 Pisa had led a â€?proto-crusade' against the Balearic Islands.[707] Pisa would not enjoy its â€?century', like Genoa would in the â€?long sixteenth cenÂtury' that is the reference point of Giovanni Arrighi's reconstruction, but its experience is significant for an analysis of the historical evolution of â€?empire' in practice and in legal thought.[708] Beyond Sardinia, where Pisa's colonial doÂminion would be most protracted and noteworthy, the city established extraÂterritorial enclaves and occupied harbour facilities outside of Europe.
It was represented there by resident consuls, an early instance of European rule outÂside of Europe, an early instance of interpolity relations involving European and non-European sovereigns, and an arrangement that allowed the Republic and its trading partners to more effectively manage jurisdictional issues arising from the operation of sustained trade. Pisan sailors and traders formed local â€?colonies' in the Levant (these were semiautonomous communities of foreign residents), and established powerful quasi-sovereign commercial companiesKoninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | Doi:io.ii63/978900443i249_oi2
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resembling the Dutch and English outfits of the seventeenth century.[709] These successes and activities made Pisa an innovator in legal practices too, and as Emanuele Conte confirms in this volume, â€?Pisa became the first medieval city to lay down a municipal code and introduce many rules of Roman procedure in local trials', while â€?the codification of the customs of Pisa (“nostrum ius civÂile”) [was] quickly compiled and published in 1160'.[710]
This chapter's first and second sections focus on Gioacchino Volpe's work on Pisa's communal institutions and on Rudolf Borchardt's â€?imperial' Pisa.[711] These are very peculiar sources, but they are relevant for an inquiry on the historiogÂraphy of the origins of empire. Each author was searching for the beginnings of something that was dear to him and yet appeared by the time they were writÂing out of reach.
Whereas Italy's colonial ambitions were dashed at Adwa, and Germany lost its colonies after wwi, Volpe and Borchardt seemed to find in medieval Pisa the key to process their respective commitments and disapÂpointments. Their distinct searches can be seen as complementary and relatÂed. One was looking for a sovereignty that is constituted at sea and abroad and makes landfall, shaping the territorial sovereignties to come; the other was looking for an imperial sovereignty that is also born elsewhere, in Pisa, but then fundamentally shapes the German universal imperial polity to its north. Beyond these authors' specific concerns, recovering Pisa's role in the establishÂment of the colonial imagination is important. Attention has naturally focused on the Greek and Roman classical antecedents of European colonialism, but the medieval origins of modern colonialism and the afterlife of Pisa's colonial empire may be more influential than it is usually assumed. One example of this influence, one example of this imperial trace, can be found in Dante Alighieri's conception of political geography, the topic of this paper's concluÂsive section.[712]1