enoa gave a mortal wound
to Pisa, when the waters of Meloria were dyed with blood in 1284.
Venice fought a duel to the death with Genoa in the succeeding
century; and what Venice failed to accomplish was completed by Milan
and the lords of the Visconti dynasty, who crippled and enslaved the
haughty queen of the Ligurian Riviera.

The naval and commercial prosperity of Amalfi was thus put an end to
by the Pisans in the twelfth century. But it was not then that the
town assumed its present aspect. What surprises the student of
history more than anything is the total absence of fortifications,
docks, arsenals, and breakwaters, bearing witness to the ancient
grandeur of a city which numbered 50,000 inhabitants, and traded
with Alexandria, Syria, and the far East. Nothing of the sort, with
the exception of a single solitary tower upon the Monte Aureo, is
visible. Nor will he fail to remember that Amalfi and Atrani, which
are now divided by a jutting mountain buttress, were once joined by
a tract of sea-beach, where the galleys of the republic rested after
sweeping the Levant, and where the fishermen drew up their boats
upon the smooth grey sand. That also has disappeared. The violence
of man was not enough to reduce Amalfi to its present state of
insignificance. The forces of nature aided--partly by the gradual
subsidence of the land, which caused the lower quarters of the city
to be submerged, and separated Amalfi from her twin-port by covering
the beach with water--partly by a fearful tempest, accompanied by
earthquake, in 1343. Petrarch, then resident at Naples, witnessed
the destructive fury of this great convulsion, and the description
he wrote of it soon after its occurrence is so graphic that some
notice may well be taken of it here.

His letter, addressed to the noble Roman, Giovanni Colonna, begins
with a promise to tell something of a storm which deserved the title
of 'poetic,' and in a degree so superlative that no epithet but
'Homeric' would suffice to do it justice. This exordium is
singularly characteristic of Petrarch, who never forgot that he was
a literary man, and lost no opportunity of dragging the great names
of antiquity into his rhetorical compositions. The catastrophe was
hardly unexpected; for it had been prophesied by an astrological
bishop, whom Petrarch does not name, that Naples would be
overwhelmed by a terrible disaster in December 1343. The people were
therefore in a state of wild anxiety, r