Due monasteri femminili liguri e la loro gestione: Sant’Andrea della Porta a Genova e Santo Stefano a Millesimo fino alla fine del Duecento

Before the end of the thirteenth century, the two Ligurian female monasteries attested in the extant documentation show, albeit in different ways, the influence that the nuns’ natal families tended to exert on the two monastic communities. This influence was absorbed in a system of apparently peaceful balance between Genoese nuns and nuns of other origins in the Cistercian monastery of Santo Stefano di Millesimo, founded in the 1210s in the hinterland of western Liguria, perhaps supervised by the Cistercian order to which it belonged. In the case of the monastery, which remained staunchly Benedictine (and increasingly intolerant of claustration) of Sant'Andrea della Porta in Genoa – which seems to have had a sound but not particularly prosperous patrimony – an interference on the part of the powerful urban families who settled their daughters in the monastery. Especially in the concluding years of the thirteenth century, one notices internal conflicts perhaps echoing on the one hand the external factional struggles among aristocratic families, and on the other a capacity for recruiting from among the emerging segments of the Popolo.