Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/574

 taken from them by the Saracens. They, however, assisted by the Genoese, soon after recovered these islands; but the division of the conquest, and probably the exasperation created by commercial jealousy, immediately kindled a war between the allies, in which the Genoese, with a fleet of eighty galleys and four great ships, carrying warlike engines, besieged their harbour, and obliged the Pisans to submit to their pleasure respecting Corsica. The peace that followed was again soon broken; and a sanguinary war, frequently interrupted by insincere pacifications or truces, continued to distress the two neighbouring and rival republics for almost two centuries.

The Pisans seem to have carried on their trade in a great measure by companies, half laymen, half monastic, not altogether unlike some still existing in the ports of Italy. By such means, also, the commerce with their settlements at Tyre, Tripoli, Antioch, and St. Jean d'Acre, was chiefly conducted; and when, in 1171, they gained a position at Constantinople, owing to the quarrel between the Emperor Manuel and the Venetians, they profited greatly by the working of their commercial associations. In less than a hundred years from this time, they had become so powerful that the Venetians found it prudent to enter into amicable arrangements with them, granting, among other favours to the Pisan