Republic of Genoa

State · 1010–1795 CE · at its largest around 1314 CE

Maritime republic in Liguria that built a trading network across the Mediterranean and Black Sea; it lasted until Napoleon's armies turned it into the Ligurian Republic in 1797.

On its lands while it lasted

East–West Schism (1054 CE): Break in communion between the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople, dividing Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
Francis of Assisi (c. 1181 CE – 1226 CE): Italian friar who embraced radical poverty and founded the Franciscan Order; one of the most venerated saints of Christianity.
Sack of Constantinople (1204) (1204 CE): Armies of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople and set up a Latin Empire, permanently weakening Byzantium.
Thomas Aquinas (1225 CE – 1274 CE): Dominican friar and theologian whose Summa Theologica synthesised Aristotelian philosophy with Christian doctrine.
Dante Alighieri (1265 CE – 1321 CE): Florentine poet whose Divine Comedy, written in the Tuscan vernacular, is a masterpiece of world literature and helped establish the Italian language.
Founding of the Ottoman state (c. 1299 CE): Osman I, leader of a Turkish principality in northwestern Anatolia, founded the dynasty whose state grew into the Ottoman Empire, which lasted until 1922.
Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel frescoes (1305 CE): Giotto covered the walls of a Padua chapel with the lives of the Virgin and Christ under a starry blue vault. His solid, feeling figures broke with Byzantine stiffness and began the road to the Renaissance.
Black Death (1346–1353 CE): Bubonic plague pandemic that reached Europe through Mediterranean ports such as Messina in 1347 and killed an estimated third to half of Europe's population.
Dome of Florence Cathedral (1436 CE): Brunelleschi's dome, completed in 1436, was the largest built since antiquity and a landmark of Renaissance architecture.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452 CE – 1519 CE): Italian Renaissance polymath born in Vinci, painter of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, whose notebooks record studies in anatomy, engineering and flight.
Fall of Constantinople (1453 CE): Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire; the city became the Ottoman capital.
Michelangelo (1475 CE – 1564 CE): Florentine sculptor, painter and architect of the High Renaissance. He carved the Pietà and David, painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Last Judgement, and designed the dome of St Peter's.
Suleiman the Magnificent (1494 CE – 1566 CE): The longest-reigning Ottoman sultan (r. 1520–1566), under whom the empire reached the height of its power and its legal system was codified.
Mona Lisa (c. 1503 CE): Leonardo da Vinci began this portrait of Lisa Gherardini in Florence around 1503 and kept working on it for years. It hangs in the Louvre and is among the most famous paintings in the world.
Galileo Galilei (1564 CE – 1642 CE): Italian astronomer and physicist born in Pisa who pioneered experimental science and telescopic astronomy. Condemned by the Inquisition in 1633, he spent his last years under house arrest near Florence.