Most students of premodern Italy acquire a working knowledge of the four main languages used in contemporary scholarship: Italian, French, German, and English. It is an open secret that mastery of any but the first is optional. Only a few doyens are conversant with the scholarship of the field as a whole, and it seems safe to say, at least in private, that most of our bibliographies neglect one or more of these lingue franche. Michele Sampaolo’s translation of Mitterauer and Morrissey’s Pisa: Seemacht und Kulturmetropole (2007) into Italian should therefore ensure wider exposure for this valuable study of early and high medieval Pisa. Largely synthetic in nature, Pisa nel Medioevo addresses topics in the city’s political, economic, and religious history, weaving a loose narrative that runs from antiquity up through the thirteenth century.

Mitterauer and Morrissey’s text functions well as a primer for Italianists more familiar with Genoa and Venice, the Tuscan port’s competitors and eventual conquerors. Indeed, both authors specialize in Venetian history and explain their interest in Pisa as ancillary to work on the serene port. But their collaborative volume does far more than treat Pisa as Venice’s rival. In particular, it does an excellent job situating the actions of its subject on a stage crowded with small players. On a local level, for example, the authors connect the rise of Pisa with the decline of the ports at Populonia and Luni, each of which collapsed in a manner foreshadowing Pisa’s future — victims of industrial decline, malaria, and silting.

Lacking a central thesis, Mitterauer and Morrissey’s text functions more as a collection of thematically linked essays than a monograph. It is divided into three chapters, but these, like the book itself, lack proper introductions and conclusions. The chapter titles function instead as headings for their respective collections of subchapters, each of these an essay with self-contained momentum. Chapter 1, “L’ascesa di Pisa,” concerns the city’s development from antiquity to the mid-eleventh century. The authors track Pisa’s fortunes against those of Lucca, its landlocked neighbor, and trace the respective characters of these twin cities back to their function within the Lombard and imperial-ducal states. The rest of the chapter compares the Pisan experience with that of its regional and international rivals (Luni, Amalfi, Genoa) and describes the early expansion of Pisan influence in Sardinia, Corsica, and along the southern Tuscan coast.

In chapter 2, “Rete commerciale e protocolonialismo,” Mitterauer and Morrissey address Pisa’s use of diplomacy and military power from the birth of its trans-Mediterranean commercial network up to its collapse. Five subchapters look at different geographical regions, while a sixth explores the causes behind Pisa’s decline in the late thirteenth century, including but not exclusive to the disaster at Meloria. The last chapter, “Piazza dei Miracoli,” turns to dynamics internal to Pisa itself during this period of expansion: civic identity vis-à-vis a late antique heritage, local saints and Pisa’s theological tradition, and the role of the cathedral in the city’s self-image. The main weakness of Pisa nel Medioevo, as has been hinted above, is its organizational scheme. The authors’ train of thought has a tendency to meander within subchapters as well as between them, such that individual points — i.e., onomastics as a reflection of Pisan political power, “holy theft” in the construction of territorial hegemony — appear disconnected from the surrounding material. The book badly wants a conclusion, if not also an introduction, to bind these threads into a clear account.

This flaw may render the text less accessible, but it does not diminish the value of Mitterauer and Morrissey’s contributions overall. Their work demonstrates that the risk-reward calculus behind the Italian ports’ participation in the Crusades was informed by the rules of an elimination game that began well before the eleventh century. Even the embellishment of Pisa’s cathedral drew on a tradition of religiously inspired rapine originating under the Lombard dukes of Tuscany. The authors’ arguments are well sourced and thought inspiring; the reader must devote some mental effort to draw them all together, but I would argue that the payoff is worth it.