Republic of Genoa

The Republic of Genoa was a maritime republic on Italy's northwestern Ligurian coast that traced its independence to before 1100 and was formally established in 1099, lasting until 1797, with a brief revival from 1814 to 1815. Governed from the city of Genoa, and from 1339 onward headed by an elected doge under an oligarchy of merchant families, the republic controlled a network of Mediterranean and Black Sea colonies including Corsica from 1347 to 1768, Monaco, southern Crimea from 1266 to 1475, and the islands of Lesbos and Chios. A major commercial power through the late Middle Ages, Genoa became one of Europe's leading financial centers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in 1407 founded the Bank of Saint George, described as the oldest state deposit bank in the world, earning it the epithets la Superba, the Superb One, and la Dominante dei mari, the Dominant of the Seas. The republic fell to Napoleon's French forces, which replaced it with the Ligurian Republic on 14 June 1797, and after Napoleon's defeat the Congress of Vienna assigned Genoese territory to the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1815.