The Genoese Mediterranean

In his mid-sixteenth-century Cosmographia , Sebastian Münster chose to illustrate Genoa with a Janus-figure brandishing a large key. 1 A more popular medieval legend derived the city’s name from the supposed Trojan founder, Ianos, but Münster’s conceit better represents the character of Genoa, as it had come to be defined in the late middle ages: a Janus facing east and west, towards the trade of the Levant, the Black Sea and the Orient, as well as towards the western Mediterranean, the Maghrib and the Iberian peninsula. From the late thirteenth century, that westward gaze was extended ever farther into the Atlantic. Though punningly thought of as the ‘door’ ( ianua in Latin) to Italy along the Ligurian coast road, Genoa never controlled access by land around or across the Alps. Her growing maritime power, however, her sketchy but far-flung ‘empire’ of merchant colonies along the Iberian and Maghribi sea routes to the Atlantic and her hugely disproportionate stake in Mediterranean-Atlantic trade gave her a privileged position in the late medieval opening of the Atlantic. The key Janus holds in Münster’s drawing should be thought of as opening the ‘door’, not of the via Francigena , the old Roman road from Gaul to Italy by the coast, but of the Pillars of Hercules.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Geography · Janus · Mediterranean climate · Middle Ages · Middle East · Peninsula · Shore · Byzantine Studies and History · Geology · History · Medieval History and Crusades · Oceanography