which rose the names of the great families, robbers, oppressors,
tyrants,--Avvocato, Spinola, Doria, the Ghibellines, with the Guelphs,
Castelli, Fieschi, Grimaldi. Nor was Genoa free of them till the great
Admiral Andrea Doria crushed them for ever. Yet peace of a sort there
was, now and again, in 1189 for instance, when Saladin won back
Jerusalem, and the Guelph nobles volunteered in a body to serve against
him, leaving Genoa to the Ghibellines, who established the foreign
Podestà for the first time to rule the city. But this gave them no
peace, for still the nobles fought together, and if one family became
too powerful, confusion became worse confounded, for Guelph and
Ghibelline joined together to bring it low. Thus in the thirteenth
century you find Ghibelline Doria linked with the Guelph Grimaldi and
Fieschi to break Ghibelline Spinola. The aspect of the city at that time
was certainly very different from the city of to-day, which is mainly of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where it is not quite modern.
Then each family had its tower, from which it fought or out of which it
issued, making the streets a shambles as it followed the enemy home or
sought him out. The ordinary citizen must have had an anxious time of
it with these bands of idle cut-throats at large. But by the close of
the twelfth century the towers, at any rate, had been destroyed by order
of the Consuls, the only one left being that which we see to-day, Torre
degli Embriachi, left as a monument to a cunning valour. The thirteenth
century saw the domination of the Spinola family, or rather of one
branch of it, the Luccoli Spinola, which as opposed to the old S. Luca
branch seems to have lived nearer the country and the woods, and was
apparently most disastrous for the internal peace of the city; and
indeed, until the Luccoli were beaten and exiled, as happened in the
beginning of the fourteenth century, there could be no peace; truly the
only peace Genoa knew in those days was that of a foreign war, when the
great lords went out against Pisa or Venice.