I think there are two broad tracks to keep in mind here: The first is that generally, Italy was very good at producing autonomous urban communities with wide-spanning trade networks. The second is that undeniably, within this landscape the Genoese do stand out (along with a few others) as particularly successful at developing said wide-spanning trade networks.

While on the one hand we could say that all of the Italian cities had their own unique histories and trajectories, we could also argue that Genoa (and its rival Venice) was not a particularly unique place. In fact, they might just be successful precisely because they tick so many boxes of what a generic "Comune" ought to have looked like.

It's worth taking a step back to consider that Italy’s nationalist history awards Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice the status of “Maritime Republics” on more or less equal footing (all four are featured on the coat of arms of the Italian Navy, at any rate) although it'd be daft to ignore that most casual readers of history (even amongst the most erudite Italians) would generally focus on Venice and Genoa out of all of the aforementioned republics which acted as principal players in Italy’s maritime heritage. But maritime communities were much more numerous than both casual reading and the country’s foundation myths would allow: All told, a whole number of Italian maritime communities saw their power and influence ebb and flow over the centuries, such that Italian mercantile history does not have a fixed roster of players interacting with any sort of predictability. So setting Genoa (and Venice) aside, in addition to the aforementioned Amalfi and Pisa, places like Gaeta and Ancona were also important autonomous players in Italian mercantile history, while the trade fleets in semi-autonomous communities like Otranto, Noli, or even Piombino also had important roles (just to name a few, without any sort of preconceived hierarchy in mind). So the emergence of Genoa as a rival (or companion) to Venice isn't really all that strange, all things considered.

And Venice need not be flanked by an exclusively maritime rival. In fact, the mercantile nature of any Italian community was not conditional on their maritime status: communities like Florence, Milan, Bologna, and Verona all developed extensive trade networks that just happened to be inland instead of maritime because, well, these were inland communities. They were no lesser than the aforementioned maritime communities though. In fact, by some metrics they were even more successful than the maritime republics. So by the late medieval period the Genoese leadership was just as weary of Milan as they were of Venice (although that relationship would eventually evolve into a complicated friendship) just like the Venetians would in turn keep a weary eye on nearby Verona (and the Venetians were much more aggressive than the Genoese when matched against overland rivals).

As a final aside, the mechanics of territorial and political expansion were also not exactly varied as far as the Italian urban communities went, and actually offered a path for Genoa to carve a fairly predictable territorial niche. The political building block was the “Comune,” which we can generally understand to mean the urban government (we can, for the sake of satisfying my autocorrect, call these polities “Commune” even though this isn’t the best translation). Conquest, as far as the Italians were concerned, involved one commune developing the means to assert its will onto another commune, however this “domination” (the term which the Italians themselves used, and both Genoa and Venice were often referred to as “La Dominante”) could be achieved via coercion (as a consequence of military defeat) but domination just as easily be achieved by developing strong social and economic ties between communities. For example, the town of Savona gradually “fell in” with “La Dominante” as local leaders and their dynasties developed close bonds with their Genoese counterparts (such that eventually Savonese people ranging from Popes to Navigators would self-identify as Genoese). All the while Savona retained its own governing council and indeed could even pursue its own power politics (most Genoese domination over the western half of Liguria was actually indirect rule through fealties sworn to Savona). This means that when the opportunity or need to exert dominance in a nearby community didn’t emerge, Italian cities seldom expended energy to pursue conquest for conquest's sake. An example of this is both Genoa and Savona largely ignoring the nearby community of Novi, which they allowed to exist in autonomy (with only the occasional encroachment). So it is important to keep in mind that never did the Italian communities actively set out to build an, “Empire.” Indeed they eschewed the language of Empire (after all, through the medieval period political thought agreed that the only Emperor was the man crowned in Rome, and that he happened to also be the German Kaiser suited everyone just fine).

So what's my point? Within this framework of strange city-based opportunistic political institutions, what made Genoa as successful as it was? Learn more after the jump! (No ads or popups, I promise)