ABSTRACT
The Genoese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not given to defining what they meant by libertà. They did use the term, and it was obviously one of great significance for them, as it was for the citizens of other Italian republics. Princes who had or wanted to have signoria over Genoa also used it, as did their officials, although they were no more inclined to define what they meant by it than were the Genoese. Historians writing about Genoa have sometimes defined or described what they think libertà meant to, and for, the Genoese, but how one historian understands it can be quite different from how another does. For Riccardo Musso, ‘this simply meant that there was no dependence on a foreign lord’,1 but he also argues that such was the disorder in Genoa under the doges of the mid-fifteenth century that that type of regime could not be called ‘libertà’ either. For him, the Genoese finally achieved libertà only in 1528, when the political institutions of Genoa were radically remodelled to break the grip of the factions supporting the rival dogal families of Adorno and Campofregoso.2 On the other hand, Arturo Pacini, who has written a detailed study of the 1528 reforms and their genesis, states that ‘for the Genoese, “libertà” meant having a Doge at the head of a state that was constituted as a “Republic”’.3
