Paolo da Novi, the Doge of Genoa for a few days that spring, was beheaded on this date in 1507.
The silk dyer was borne to the apex of power in his French-dominated Mediterranean city-state by a popular anti-oligarch revolt dating to 1506, “goaded to fury by the impertinence of the young nobles, and weary of the rapacity of the French governor.” (And also backed by the Holy Roman Empire, France’s great peninsular opponent of the Italian Wars.)
Mindful of losing his precious beachhead in the north, the French king Louis XII promptly set out to chastise the rebels: in fact, that’s just what he’s on his way to do in this Jean Bourdichon miniature:
The horseman’s cocksure pose here would be fully justified by events, for he quickly brought Genoa to a total surrender. Later on in the same series by the same illustrator — all for Jean Marot‘s* history in verse La Voyage de Genes — we find the Genoese imploringly at Louis’s mercy.
Louis had little mercy for these disobedient subjects, least of all for the “Doge of the people” who had fled by sea only to be betrayed by his ship’s captain for a cash reward. He was beheaded before the Ducal Palace (present-day Piazza Matteotti) on July 10; thereafter his severed head surmounted Grimaldina tower and his quartered corpse adorned the gates of the city.
La Superba today decorates a piazza with the name of this artisan-martyr.
* This poet was eclipsed in his own field by his son, Clement Marot.
On this day..
- 1919: Henry Perry, made more vicious
- 1941: George Johnson Armstrong, under the Treachery Act
- 1835: Ruel Blake, "often seen among negroes"
- 1535: Jacob van Campen, Amsterdam Anabaptist
- 1584: Francis Throckmorton, plotter
- 1654: Gerard the conspirator, and the Portuguese envoy's brother
- 1917: "John Nelson", mystery man
- 1946: Public Execution in Debica
- 1950: American soldiers during the Korean War
- 1976: Costas Georgiou and three other mercenaries in Angola
- 2000: Dmitry Chikunov, secretly
- 2007: Zheng Xiaoyu, former Director of the State Food and Drug Administration