The city of Genoa is often excluded from histories of medieval and Renaissance republicanism. Similarly, Genoa is also absent from discussions on the rise of territorial states in northern Italy. This exclusion can be explained in various ways. To be sure, the Genoese have demonstrated a lack of interest in writing political philosophy and in intellectualizing their civic values. But, more importantly, Genoa represents an unwelcome contradiction for all the comprehensive theses proposed by scholars to describe the “progress” from medieval chaos to modern state building and statecraft. In other words, because statist historians do not know how to tackle Genoa, they very often ignore it. In this article, I will not give a complete account of the history of Genoa—its rise as a maritime community in response to Islamic raids, its sophisticated constitutional history, and its countless commercial colonies and business networks scattered across the Mediterranean world and beyond.1 I do not have the space to accomplish all this.

Rather, my aim here is to focus on a particular aspect of Genoese history, namely, military organization and defense. I shall not flesh out 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, because I would not be qualified to attempt such an endeavor, and anyway Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Bob Murphy, and Walter Block (among others) have already articulated such a theory.2 Instead, I will simply offer some examples of historical episodes surrounding private wealth and private arms in Genoa that do not fit current historical narratives about the rise of the modern, militarized and territorial state. I include private wealth in this discussion, because, as we shall see, private wealth was strictly linked to the ability to raise private armies, build private fleets, and develop financial/diplomatic ties akin to insurance.

In a sense, what I wish to do is simply wonder. Does the history of Genoa—and in this instance, specifically, its tradition of private defense—fit into modernist, teleological narratives about state formation? Does it exemplify, or even simply imperfectly sketch, an alternative to state-run monopolies of violence—an alternative that is more respectful of property rights and less conducive to wasteful aggression? This subject is relevant for Austro-libertarians, because if we wish to question the legitimacy of the modern state, we have to explore examples from history that show how all government “services” have at some point been offered in alternative, effective ways by private actors or privatized “governments.”

Private Wealth

The Italian Wars were a long and tragic series of conflicts starting in 1494 and fought mainly across the Italian Peninsula. They had a multiplicity of objectives, among which were the control of cities such as Milan and Naples but also the leadership of Christendom in the difficult fight against Ottoman Islam. To make a long story short, the main contestants were France—a kingdom that since the end of the Hundred Years’ War had become one of the most militarized on the entire continent—and Spain—whose Habsburg rulers held a transnational collection of crowns and titles including of the Holy Roman Empire. This conflict between regional powers kickstarted or hastened the demise of medieval communes and local self-government in Italy, because small states could not survive in the brave new world of large standing and mercenary armies raised by foreign princes. To survive, independent Italian states had to come to their senses and modernize, tax away, and build efficient bureaucracies. This, in a nutshell, is the story we are told. A triumph of Machiavellian determinism.

And yet it is interesting to consider what happened in the late 1530s, when the French king Francis I sent a request to the Genoese doge (the traditional title for the head of government in Genoa). The request was very straightforward: Francis I knew that Genoese funds were being used by his Habsburg rival, Charles V, to finance military campaigns, and because Genoese merchants were at that time trying to mend the relations between their city and France in order to continue to access the French markets, Francis demanded as a sign of goodwill that the doge order some public funds to be lent to his court as well, not just to the Habsburg Spanish one. The reply that the French king received from Genoa shows 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 moneylenders. If the French king needed funds, he was very welcome to do the same.

Was the doge bluffing? No. He was not. Since the fourteenth century, Genoa’s constitutional order had embodied a medieval conception of freedom that favored the dispersion of power and limited public expenditures. And from the fifteenth 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, crossclass 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 toward the idea of empowering a specific doge or the communal government with a standing army or a navy—yet they were ready to put together funds necessary to ensure the survival of their colonies and the rule of law. As a result of these institutional changes (which I can only mention here), sixteenth-century Genoa was still a medieval polity, with a series of overlapping jurisdictions, and a city of private family wealth and power—what George Gorse has aptly described as the “antithesis of Venice.”3

Private Arms